Page 42 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira began to climb slowly. “He’d have to get all the copies hidden,” she said.

Meelan rolled his eyes but corrected her without malice. “There’s only one copy of each book held in the library. That’s a lot of what we do—making copies of the books the king approves of so the house readers can spread the word.”

Livira looked at the expanse of shelving all around her with fresh wonder as she climbed. One copy. Every book unique!

Livira continued upwards, a good six feet off the ground now. She wasn’t sure how far Arpix’s sense of duty would go when it came to confining her, but the boy seemed really quite conscientious, and she’d rather not have to punch him on the nose to get past him. On the other hand, she’d welcome a punch to her own nose if it meant she could abandon the search for Lord Algar’s book.

“Livira!” Arpix realised what she was doing.

“Just getting a book.” She kept to the same pace. Speeding up would be an admission of guilt.

“Get down here!”

“I’ve seen the one we’re looking for,” Livira lied. A good lie can sow confusion and win vital moments of freedom.

“Get her!” Arpix began to run for the ladder. Clearly on this occasion her lie had been a bit rubbish.

Livira accelerated, climbing as fast as she could. She was five yards shy of the top when she felt the jolt of Arpix grabbing the ladder’s base.

“Damn.” She’d been planning to lift the ladder up behind her and use it to descend the far side.

“Come down!” Arpix called. “You’re not going anywhere.”

The certainty in his voice, hinting at smugness, convinced her to keep climbing. She passed row after row of leathered spines, all marked with numerals. Astonishingly, even up here, far above the rooftops of any normal town, the books stretching left and right weren’t library books but merely volumes concerned with the organisation of those books.

Moments later she clambered onto the shelf top and peered down into the chasm of the next aisle. Around her, shelf tops marched away in all directions. From this level the variation in heights made it look like a landscape of rolling hills with the occasional cliff face interrupting. From on high it had seemed a labyrinth.

The nearest row of shelving stood little more than six feet away, not far but a misjudged leap would spill her into the depths below amid a fluttering torrent of pages. Even as Livira considered it, vertigo reached up for her, twisting her stomach and turning the muscles of her legs to water. She fell to her hands and knees, fighting dizziness.

“Get down! Right now!” Arpix shouted up at her. Jella and Meelan added their calls to Arpix’s.

“I’m fine.” Livira tried to keep the tremble from her voice. She hoped she was fine. She considered hanging over the opposite side and descending shelf by shelf but hanging from the tops of books while questing for the tops of other books below her with the toes of her shoes seemed like a recipe for disaster.

Retreating back down the ladder to the others was more than her pride could bear though. She began to crawl doggedly along the top, keeping away from the edge so that her progress could not be tracked from below. Her speed grew along with her confidence, and she found herself rather liking this new, forbidden perspective.

If Lord Algar’s plan to have her evicted from the library was going to work, then she’d rather her last memories of the place be of exploration and adventure than of being the least useful member of a team poring over dusty indexes in a futile attempt to master the librarian’s craft in two days.

“Come back!” Already the voices sounded more distant. It might not be long before one of them thought to climb up after her though. She sped up.

She felt as if she’d crawled a mile before she spotted her first ladder, and the damn thing was leaning against the shelves on the other side of the aisle. She couldn’t hear the others anymore. They’d lost her or let her go. She stood, rubbed her sore knees, and cursed. She had four choices, and since one of them was “to go back” that left three choices. To go on, to jump for the ladder, or to climb down this side, which she could have done immediately.

Livira got ready to jump.

“It’s not far. It’s not far. It’s not far.” Somehow the repetition—even though true—did nothing to shrink her perception of the six-foot gap. The drop beneath her managed to magnify the width of the aisle into something that she’d be hard pressed to throw a rock across, let alone her whole body. The floor seemed to reach up for her with invisible fingers, seeking to haul her from her perch.

With watery muscles, a racing heart, and a despairing scream, Livira made the leap. A moment of falling and of utter terror, and she hit the ladder. She had overestimated the gap and underestimated the difficulty of holding on once she got there. She hit far harder than anticipated, smacking her face into one of the higher rungs whilst missing her footing on the lower ones.

For a few heartbeats everything was pain and dancing stars and confusion about which way was up. She wasn’t even sure that the falling had stopped. Livira’s senses returned to inform her that she was hanging at a back-breaking angle over the drop, both legs painfully threaded through the rungs. The ladder itself must have bounced around a bit and was now worryingly less vertical than it had been. Only the considerable weight of the wood and Livira’s comparative lightness had prevented a fatal sideways slide and a sharp reunion with the library floor. Gingerly Livira straightened and reached for the rungs. Her face felt twice its proper size and her nose was bleeding, spattering the blue of her robe with scarlet. Taking considerable care, she extricated her legs and began a slow descent, trusting the ladder not to tilt further to the side.

By the time she reached the ground her nosebleed had stopped but her robe looked as if she’d slaughtered a pig on her lap. She looked up at the narrow slice of ceiling far above her, gazing left along the aisle, then right. With a shrug she chose left and started to walk before pausing and pulling a book at random from the nearest shelf. She set it on the floor at the base of the ladder. Her memory was good, but a trail of books placed at key points might prove useful if she were in a hurry.

She felt a small pang of guilt at leaving the others behind, but only a small one. It was she who would suffer the consequences of failure and she who could do least to avert it. She touched her aching face delicately. There’d be a fine set of bruises along that side in due course. She shrugged again and, with a heart lighter than it had a right to be, she set off towards the seeming infinity where the left-hand and right-hand set of shelves appeared to converge.

There is a scurrilous but persistent rumour that, under pressure from King Dubya and later from his son, Oanold, a great many books written in sabbertine were removed from the shelves, leaving the catalogue free of any works by their kind. These days, the suggestion that a sabber can reason, let alone read and write, is apt to earn a beating from the king’s justices.

The Purge, by Anon

CHAPTER 18

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