Page 44 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

The library had always been timeless, at least on the scale of Evar’s existence. He and his siblings were the only clock, the only things to notice the passage of the years and give them meaning. Without Evar and his kind the library would simply step outside the domain of years, decades, and even centuries, taking the Soldier and the Assistant with it, paying only scant heed to the passage of millennia as its books fell into soft decay.

Recently though, starting before the discovery of the book, but increasing swiftly since then, there had been a sense of acceleration, some impression of rapidly building change. And with it also came a swelling fragility, a futility, as if should the demand and potential not be met then the chance would not ever come again and time would grind their lives back into the dust, unmarked.

An acceleration—that was the word for it. The Escapes, coming more often, faster, bigger, stranger. The Soldier and the Assistant, both as unchanging as the very floor, now showing flashes of some internal conflict, an awakening perhaps. The book and the woman who lay behind it. The woman whose outline had become the perimeter of the void that the Mechanism had left inside him. The woman whose name his tongue wouldn’t form but whose scent seemed to find him now in quiet moments. He found that although he knew nothing about her, remembered nothing... he needed her. Perhaps more than he needed to draw breath. The pool would decide that one.

All of it was rushing at him. All of it could so easily pass him by. And that one line. A riddle or a challenge: Find me. It was not a time for waiting.

“I don’t want to do this.”

Evar took one step forward and sank like a stone.

It was Jaspeth’s and Irad’s grandfather who invented fratricide, and at an early age the brothers resolved to use other means to settle their differences. When Irad raised the first library, a temple to the sin of knowledge, a stone house in which his great-grandmother’s original crime could shelter, Jaspeth resolved to tear it down. In previous generations a death would have followed. Instead, they found an uneasy compromise and the echoes of their bickering have rattled down eternity’s corridors.

The Library Myth, by Mayland Shelfborn

CHAPTER 19

Livira

Livira felt that her life until the sabbers came had been spent running in circles, covering great distances all while remaining within sight of Aunt Teela’s shack. The soldier, Malar, had led her on the longest journey of her life, crossing the Dust to reach the gates of the city. Within the library, though, she felt that perhaps she had travelled still more miles.

The aisles turned her back on herself countless times and it proved almost impossible to keep a sense of direction with just a slice of the distant stone sky visible above her. The square miles of the chamber had been divided into regions and, although it was clearly not a deliberate maze, finding the exit from one to another proved to be a dark art.

The scale of the place put Livira’s meagre knowledge into perspective. She’d been a trainee for just over a month and she didn’t even know the name of the mysterious head librarian yet, let alone have any handle on the many mysteries of the library itself. Back at the entrance, Jella had spoken of all manner of marvels lying deep among the untold miles of distant chambers. She had mentioned a chamber that lay permanently dark and haunted. In another she said that each “book” was in fact just a curtain of thin cords, each cord serving as a page where the knots bound into them constituted individual letters and words. Clearly, a landscape of wonder waited for Livira, and here she was, lost in the first room. Livira considered her travel plans. It seemed to her that however large the library might be there was an effective limit on it set by how far a person could get without food and with only the water they could carry. She wasn’t yet sure if she intended to test that limit or to turn back after what she guessed was a day’s travel. Part of her worried that the others might find the damn book within the two days Master Logaris had allocated, leaving her as the only impediment to success.

Livira took a swig of water and jogged on.

Finding the book herself was out of the question. Simply to examine the spines of the volumes to her left and right would require a ladder, preferably one for each side, and would slow her advance down to about a yard per hour. She was looking for something else. She didn’t know what, but something to hold on to and to remember long after Master Logaris had booted out the first and probably last duster ever to sully his classroom.

So far all she’d found, and the lasting memory that would fill her dreams next time she slept, were the endlessly stretching aisles, the deep book-lined trenches that went on and on relentlessly, each one unique but somehow the same.

The further Livira travelled into the library the stronger grew her impression that the place had not been built by or for people. The shelves might have been crafted by human hands, the ladders too. Perhaps not all of the books, but many of them, had been written by men and women. But the library itself made no concession to human architecture, or scale. Even human frailties were overlooked. There wasn’t so much as a corner for Livira to relieve herself in. The only privacy was the vast, aching solitude.

Livira had to imagine that unseen and possibly invisible servants of the library must clean the floors periodically. Or maybe it was just so large, with each part so seldom visited, that such befoulments were simply erased by the passage of time. Time itself was, perhaps, that invisible servant she had surmised. Time itself in thrall to the library. She carried on, feeling small, smaller even than when standing beneath the star-scattered arch of the sky.

In places a book bound in gleaming metal might catch her eye, or one whose lettering along the spine glowed with an unnatural sheen. On rest breaks she would pull random volumes from their place and leaf through them, marvelling at the strangeness of their alphabets and the dense packed lettering that might take days or weeks to read from cover to cover.

Shelf upon shelf, aisle upon aisle. The weight of it all, the sheer physical weight of it, felt like a burden on her soul. All these words screaming silently to be read. She hurried on with no clear destination, passing lifetimes of endeavour with each step.

She had been exploring for hours when something caught her eye. A thing rarer than a golden cover or the bejewelled spine of an ancient tome or a book too large for her to lift. It was a gap. As stark as a missing tooth in an otherwise perfect smile. A black slot, a gaping socket. It was the first time in all her travelling that she had seen a gap in the shelves that wasn’t made by her or her friends.

Livira stretched her fingers into the space as if trying to feel the ghost of the missing book. This, more than anything else she’d seen so far, was eloquent testimony to the sheer size of the library. She had needed to travel this far to find any evidence that the community of librarians she lived among and the city beyond them existed at all.

—

Livira found a claw at a T-junction in a section where the books all had red covers as if the librarians, tiring of organizing by author in alphabetical order, or by subject according to some taxonomy agreed in ancient times, had simply opted to work their way through the spectrum. The aisle looked like a trench whose walls were covered in blood.

The claw itself was a scimitar of yellowish metal that barely fit into Livira’s palm, a sharp edge on its inner curve. It had lain on top of the books on the first shelf, at shin level. She’d almost missed it entirely. She tucked it into her belt and carried on, trying not to worry about where the owner was.

Three more aisles brought her to a clearing—empty space! A wide semicircle clear of shelving and of books. And—as if empty space wasn’t shocking enough after so long with shelving pressing on both sides—the clearing ran to the base of the wall that had been looming above the tops of the towering shelves for so long.

Livira stumbled forward on weary feet. A corridor was set into the wall at ground level, fully as tall and wide as the one through which she had entered the library, and like that one it was sealed by a white door about a hundred yards in.

The guard back at the entrance hadn’t used a key, he’d worn a special white glove and the white wall had melted away before it. She pressed her lips into a flat line and stood staring at the door. The folk of the king’s city liked their doors. Right from the mighty gates that were said to keep out even the dust, to the front doors of even the humblest homes where iron locks made it clear you weren’t welcome to come in. The library though... what purpose did it serve if people weren’t allowed in to read the books?

Livira marched up to knock on the door. She didn’t have any magic glove, but she would hammer on that perfect white surface and stain it with her sweat and demand entrance.

“Let me...” Before her knuckles could register contact the whole door melted away just as it had for the guard. “...in...”

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