Page 3 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

People never came to the settlement. Livira hadn’t ever seen a visitor, had never met a single person who hadn’t grown among the four dozen souls who sheltered in the huddled shacks. It was the sort of place that you went from, not to. Kern went from it to the dust markets. The patched waistcoat he was so proud of allegedly came from the city, purchased at great cost from a dust-market stall. What he bartered on his trips might then go on to bigger markets or to the city itself, but Livira had always had to take the existence of these places and people on faith. Now—someone was coming!

“Stranger!” Livira let the bucket fall and charged back through the bean rows, shouting her news, Katrin hard on her heels, eating dust. “Stranger!” She raced along the rows, rattling the drying beans in their pods. Only this morning she’d been watching the old men play stones and hollows, dreaming of an escape to something more, to a world that lay beyond the haze. Now that world was coming to her. “Stranger!”

“What are you saying?” Aunt Teela caught Livira’s arm in a steel grip as she emerged from the crop.

“A stranger! Someone’s coming!” Livira repeated at a lower, more comprehensible volume.

Teela’s face stiffened as if a deadwasp had stung her. Her hand fell to her side. “Tell everyone.”

Livira ran on, shouting. Something in her aunt’s expression had put a chill into her and now fear edged her cries. The summoning bell took up the alarm.

—

“What do they want?” Livira stood with the others out by the well. Everyone she knew was there, except those few too old, too sick, or too small to emerge from their huts. Aunt Teela held her hand in a painful grip. Livira waited, still sweating from her run. The sun seemed brighter, the dust sharper on her lungs.

“You stay close to me, Livy. Do as you’re told for once in your life.” Her aunt pulled Livira’s face around to hers, meeting her gaze with over-bright eyes. “I love you, child.” Aunt Teela was not a woman given to displays of affection and this one filled Livira with a fear far greater than any that Acmar’s approaching fist had instilled.

The figure was closer now, but still too far away for the shimmering heat to yield details. What the heat couldn’t hide was that behind the lone traveller a larger band followed, perhaps half a mile back, raising enough dust for a dozen men or more.

“But what do they want?” Katrin repeated Livira’s question. Neera pushed through the ranks to join them, easy for her with her too-skinny body. She coughed that dry cough which had got into her a while back and stared at the approaching stranger with fever-bright eyes.

Livira knew the answer to her own question. She just wanted an adult to give a different one. There wasn’t anything they owned in the settlement that was worth walking across the Dust for. If someone had come here then there was only one thing they were interested in taking. “Us,” she whispered. “They want us.”

“Sabber.”

Livira didn’t know who’d muttered it first but soon the word was on a dozen tongues. She could see it now. The figure wasn’t human. You could see it in their gait. And now, as it drew closer, something about the face. The sabber walked with a suppressed bounce as if holding back from some great leap at every step. Its legs bent too low down and were never fully straight; its shoulders rose as if beneath its hide armour there was a great ball of muscle at each joint. Closer still and she could make out the sharp angle of his cheekbones, and his mouth that was almost like Yaller’s dog’s: lipless, promising canines. Old Kern said the city folk called them dog-men these days and had new theories about their unclean origins.

The sabber’s stiff, swept-back mane didn’t end in a hairline but rather seemed to shorten into invisibility—as if, were she to stroke his face, Livira would feel the hairs there too, short and bristling. The seam of an old scar ran up across one brow, holding the eye beneath it wider than the other, creating a curiously unbalanced stare.

Livira’s people stood in stunned silence, broken when Alica started to scream then ran for her hut and her new babies, dragging little Keer behind her. Others cried out and began to scatter. Five of the men stepped forward, Old Kern among them. Three had spears used to test the ground for dust-bears. The youngest of them, Acmar’s older brother, carried Ma Esta’s cleaver, and Robart had his ground-fork.

As the sabber closed the last twenty yards Livira finally understood its size. The creature stood at least eight feet tall. A scimitar hung from his belt. His hands were empty though, each sporting only three fingers, short-furred and ending in black talons.

“T’loth criis’tyla loddotis!” He had a deep, throaty voice and his words chained into one long growl.

The five men stopped their advance midway between the settlers and the sabber.

“Go!” Kern gestured with his spear. “Away!”

“You are all my property now.” The sabber continued to pace towards them, empty-handed. “Resist and your lives are forfeit.”

The man beside Kern launched his spear. The sabber didn’t even flinch as the weapon sailed past him, a few feet wide of target. A second man let fly and, without breaking stride, the sabber batted the spear from the air. With ten yards between them Acmar’s brother charged forward, screaming. He sounded terrified rather than fierce. He raised Ma Esta’s cleaver above his head, flashing in the sun. The sabber backhanded him without apparent concern, connecting with a sick-making crunch. Blood sprayed, maybe teeth too, and the young man fell bonelessly into the dust.

The sabber passed by the body without a second glance and strode towards the four men still standing. The scrabble of their feet raised a dust cloud that hid the action. The sabber emerged from the drifting shroud at a walk, having taken no more time, Livira thought, than if there hadn’t been anyone in his way. Nobody followed him out.

“You are all my property now.”

This time his words were the cue for everyone to run, most of them shouting as if it might help somehow. Livira, her fear driven out by amazement, was dragged behind her aunt, choking as the dust rose around them.

It wasn’t a planned response, just a general panic, but any panic out on the Dust soon devours itself in a great, blind cloud. Within moments, all of them were tripping over each other, over ropes, over hoes, and even over themselves. The dust made strangers of everyone. Neighbour screamed and clawed at neighbour as they collided.

Someone big crashed into Livira, tearing her free of Teela’s grasp. She fell and her head hit the ground—harder than Acmar’s punch. For a time she lay dazed, drooling into the dust, seeing nothing but the occasional foot stamping down close to her face. Later a hand snagged her and picked her up without effort. The confusion inside her head, and the maelstrom of dust and bodies outside it, combined into a blur from which Livira emerged only slowly, an unknown time after the sun had returned.

—

“My wrists hurt.”

Someone had been saying that same thing over and over until it so irritated Livira that she lifted her head and realised that it had been her doing the complaining.

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