Page 4 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

A rough rope bound her wrists together and a cord ran from the rope to a longer length to which a dozen other children were bound in a similar manner on alternating sides. Livira found that somehow she had been walking as part of this line of captives. Perhaps for miles. It was hard to get your bearings in the Dust and Livira recognised nothing save for the children around her. Katrin was three places ahead, Neera two places behind.

“My wrists hurt.” Livira said it again. The rope had rubbed them raw. Perhaps she had been dragged part of the way. Her head ached too, as if a knife had been stuck through the top of her skull.

The lead end of the main rope dangled from the hand of a sabber. Maybe the one who had come first, on his own, maybe one of those in the group that had followed.

“Thirsty...” Acmar was two places ahead of her, limping.

“Where are they taking us?” The girl behind her, in a hopeless whisper. Blood had spattered her shift, leaving a tarry black pattern from shoulder to hip.

Looking left and right, Livira could see no other rope chains, not even dust clouds that might be rising from more distant captives. Where had the adults gone? The other children? Livira hoped they’d escaped but feared that their bodies were lying among the ruins of their homes. She’d heard that the sabbers ate people, but also that they didn’t.

“Are you going to eat us?” she shouted at the sabber’s back, her thoughts still loose in her skull and spilling out.

Her cry drew shocked gasps from the others.

“Ssshhh!” Acmar hissed.

“What?” Livira hissed back, feeling more like herself. “You think he’ll only eat us if I give him the idea?” She bared her teeth at Acmar. The anger was helping to stop her imagining her aunt sprawled in the dust, neck broken or throat slashed. The anger was helping her not to wonder where Alica and her babies were.

The sabber walked on as if it hadn’t heard. It had a scimitar at its hip like the one worn by the sabber that had stridden through the five men without raising a sweat or even breaking pace.

“Hey! You!” Livira shouted. “Are you going to eat us? I’d like to know.”

The sabber turned its head and found her with yellow eyes. “Are you good to eat?” it rumbled, showing canines as long as her thumb.

“I taste like dung. Stringy dung.” Livira tried to hold on to her courage under the creature’s stare. She bolstered it with rage. “Where’s my aunt?”

The sabber barked. Maybe it was a laugh. He turned his head back to face the direction of travel.

The march continued. Livira turned her attention to the rope around her wrists. She should be able to work her hands free, given time. Or chew her way through it, one strand at a time. Or... The other children’s crying nagged at her, an irritant, but more than that, it came laden with the guilt that she, seemingly alone among them, had no tears to shed. It wasn’t that she didn’t care—simply that what she had lost was, right now, too big to fit within her thinking. Livira could see Aunt Teela’s careworn face in the light of her mind’s gaze, see the faded brown of her eyes, the crow’s feet starting to show at the corners. But imagining her broken body, her blood in the dust, that was beyond Livira. Teela had been alive. She had been holding Livira’s hand with that vital strength which had kept them alive all this time, despite the worst the Dust had to offer. She could not now be dead.

Livira glanced down at her torn and dirty feet. A loose cord caught her attention, dangling from her belt. The wind-weed that Ella had given her was gone, perhaps free once more, tumbling over the plains in the wind’s grasp. Perhaps trampled flat in the ruins of the settlement. Either way it was gone, lost, lost with the lost boy trapped within it. Its absence pierced her, a cold knife thrust between her ribs, penetrating all her armour in a way that the larger tragedy could not. Her breath caught in her throat; another hitched in painfully, battling past a sob that demanded release. And over the loss of a toy the tears came in their own river.

—

The sabber led them east for an hour, then another. The children walked in silence, their weeping exhausted. Four sabbers joined the one leading the children, the last of them shorter and older, a female with her grey mane in braids. This one wore many layers of tattered cloth despite the heat and walked with a staff that ended in a short tangle of thick roots polished by touch. Half a dozen cratalac claws hung from the root twists like black sickles. Livira imagined her to be some sort of sabber priest.

She puzzled over the whereabouts of the missing sabbers—surely there had been more than five. She hoped that there were other survivors who had escaped the raid. Perhaps the missing sabbers were hunting them.

From time to time Livira chewed at the knotted rope though her jaw was already sore with the work and it was hard to do while walking.

“Where would you run?” hissed Neera from behind.

Livira spat rope fibres from her parched mouth but didn’t answer. She had no idea. But it felt good to be doing something. It helped stop her imagination filling the empty space with scenes of the dust settling on a corpse-strewn settlement. It clouded her visions of blood staining the thirsty ground and of Ella’s wind-weed sculptures set free, carried away on the breeze. Who’ll water the beans now? “Stop it,” Livira hissed at herself and returned to her self-appointed task.

The sabber leading their rope proved watchful. He steered them past two dust-bears. Livira wasn’t sure she’d have spotted the second one. It wasn’t so much that they made a depression or a hump, though occasionally they did make the slightest dent; it was more that there was a difference in the quality of the hardpan where a dust-bear had buried itself, a slight variation in the granularity of the surface. Livira hoped he’d miss the next one and that the children could escape while it ate him. Perhaps she wouldn’t even run, just stay and watch and scream her hatred. And she did hate them, Livira realised. The hate was in her belly, an unfamiliar sharp-angled lump of feeling that was at once both fire and ice, something heavy and uncomfortable and yet a thing that she wouldn’t put down even if she were able to. She had thought before that she had known hatred, but those moments had been like shadows of passing clouds. And this, this was the night.

A thin wind blew up, stirring the dust to knee height. The landscape remained unchanged by passing miles, its flatness unchallenged. Livira had heard it was an ancient lakebed. That was hard to believe. Had fish swum through sparkling waters in the space before her eyes? Had boats floated far above her, their nets hanging fathoms deep? Even as these doubts assailed her something caught her eye. At first it seemed that the fingers of two great hands jutted from the ground, as if a buried giant were holding aloft some long-vanished bowl. But the fingers were wood. Ancient, brittle timbers, eroded into talons by the wind, the ribs of some vessel that might have trailed those imagined nets. The sabbers led them almost close enough to touch, and every child with more than half a breath left in them turned their heads to watch.

“I want my mother,” Katrin croaked, her voice dried out by the wind.

Neera coughed for the hundredth time, a sharp, painful sound that seemed to stab at Livira’s back. When Neera had started coughing nobody expected her to live long. Sour-lung took a lot of children out in the Dust. But she’d been coughing for a year already and right now it was the least of her worries. Livira hadn’t any answer for Katrin. The girl wanted her mother; Livira wanted her aunt. It seemed impossible that the woman could be dead. But it was a day for impossibilities. Strangers, blood, and now a ship. They plodded on, leaving the ribs behind them, still reaching for an uncaring sky.

In the distance, low hills rose, barren rock challenging the wind to grind it into dust too. The sun sank to touch the distant ridges behind the children and still they hadn’t reached the hills ahead. Another mile and the children started to follow their shadows up the first incline most of them had ever encountered, shuffling sore-foot across dusty stone. Livira knew about slopes; the year before she had scaled the western ridges to get a glimpse of the city, but her mouth was too dry to boast about it.

The first arrow hit a child.

... was said that no lock could defeat her. In later life Myra Hayes stepped away from her performances and earned a somewhat dubious reputation as a mystic. She returned to the stage after an absence of decades, promising the greatest escape of all. Disastrously, she drowned in a locked casket. The enquiry found no evidence that she had tried to free herself.

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