Page 45 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

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The corridor opened onto a second chamber of similarly titanic dimensions to the one Livira had just escaped. A semicircle of clear ground some thirty yards in diameter lay beyond the door, after which the towering shelves re-established themselves, offering a score of aisles down which she could travel.

Out in the clear area, a little off-centre, stood the first thing Livira had seen in an age that wasn’t shelf or book or ladder. A strange humanoid fashioned in dull brown metal, his articulated limbs polished as if by the touch of countless passing hands. He might once have had wings, but just a metal skeleton of them remained.

Livira went to study the man. His empty sockets gazed out at the looming shelves, head tilted slightly as if in enquiry. She grasped his arm, finding it cold to the touch, and tried to move it. It gave a fraction then locked with a grating sound.

“Hello.” Livira felt a little foolish despite having talked to herself many times in the aching solitude of her journey to this place. She’d even talked to several books. And one ladder.

The metal man made no reply. He was, she assumed, one of the helpers the others had warned her of. The work of earlier librarians—though how they’d been able to accomplish such wonders when Yute and his fellows could not she didn’t know.

“I’m looking for a book,” Livira told him, then immediately felt foolish. What else would she be looking for in the library? “You’re not going to help me, are you?”

Livira released the man’s arm and wondered how long he had stood waiting, how many people had passed by him. The mechanism must have died long ago, and this was his immutable corpse, standing down the long march of years as a marker of his demise.

“Goodbye, metal man.”

Livira didn’t waste any time choosing which aisle to take. Since she had no destination in mind, she struck out straight ahead, aiming for the door that would lie opposite hers. An hour of back and forth among the aisles brought her to her first dead end. Shortly after the dead end she discovered her first curve. It came as a relief after what seemed like a lifetime of straight lines, though why anyone had gone to the trouble of manufacturing shelves that not only snaked gently from side to side but doubled around on themselves in tight turns she couldn’t fathom.

It took another hour and a dozen dead ends for her to understand that she had exchanged a labyrinth that would lose a person by virtue of its sheer scale and repetition for a more deliberate maze. Here she was constantly returned to the same circular clearing in which eight aisles met. The junction was a clear space scarcely larger than the room the librarians had given her to sleep in. A room for whose comforts both her body and mind ached. The certainty that she would never return to this place of wonder kept her going. She could rest after they threw her out.

Livira stood and studied her choices for what seemed the hundredth time. Her gaze returned to the off-centre stain that marked the ground in the circle. It was the first blemish Livira had seen on the stone flooring in all her journeying. The stain had a vague symmetry, and her tired mind made all manner of images from the blackness of it.

“Enough.” Livira forced herself to look away, gathered energy, and set off again. She began to memorize the names on the books she left out on the floor as markers, by this means allowing herself to understand which places she had been returned to by the maze’s dead ends and turns.

Livira was already flagging when she found herself unexpectedly back at the circle for what now felt like the thousandth time.

“Not possible.” She spun around. “Someone’s putting my books back on the shelves!”

In her confusion and frustration, she nearly left the place without noticing that the stain on the floor had gone. She wondered how many adventurers in antiquity had gone mad and died in the labyrinth without understanding that there was more than one clearing in it. She took a book and set it on the floor to label this place as distinct from the other.

Much later she returned to a fork in the aisles that memory told her she had visited before. “There’s no book...” Livira crouched, touching the cold stone in the exact spot she was sure she had placed the book. She walked the shelves, trailing her fingers across the books at shoulder height, looking for the title, Tales from the Unterworld, Volume Six. “There’s no book...”

Was someone returning them to the shelves? In so vast a place several people could wander for days without ever encountering each other. The maze though, the maze concentrated people. It trapped them. It turned them in on each other and made them pass through the same spaces over and over. If she were ever to meet a fellow trainee or librarian, it would be here. If she were to find a bleached skull and neat collection of bones—this would be the place.

Livira shook her head. She was simply lost. Confused by the maze’s convolutions.

Livira had no problem remembering the lefts and rights she’d taken, but to see a way through the maze that confined her she really needed to make a map, something she could look at. She selected a large book from the shelves, one that reached her knee when set with the edge of its deep turquoise cover to the ground. The tome was written in the empire tongue, its title Great Sailing Ships of History: An Architectural Comparison stamped in black along the spine and surrounded by geometric patterns.

Livira had been hoping to find a blank flyleaf, but the closest Great Sailing Ships of History had to offer was the dedication page, blank on one side and on the other bearing only the legend “To Captain Elias with my deepest apologies for the wreck.”

With a murmured further apology to Captain Elias, and a second one to the author, A. E. Canulus, Livira tore the page free. The time-foxed sheet dangled from her fingers with all the grace of a severed limb.

There are moments in life when you know with a great and unshakeable certainty that everything will change. When Livira had stood beside the well and looked out to see the sabber approaching through the dancing heat, she had known herself at such a tipping point. Now, with the torn page trembling in her grip, she knew again that she had set her foot upon some portentous new path, though she had no notion of what it might be or what reason she might possibly have for feeling this way. But, blood to bone, she knew it.

Livira felt a weight descend upon her shoulders, the cold disapproval of librarians in untold numbers, generations of them, packing the aisle in ghostly outrage. The library’s silence, which she could have sworn could grow no deeper and no thicker, congealed about her, as if the whole chamber, and however many others lay beyond like the alveoli of some great lung, held its breath.

The moment passed. Livira would never have dreamed of such vandalism when introduced to her first book, not even when faced with those arrayed in their tens of thousands upon the shelves of the trainees’ library. For weeks each book had seemed a temple, a holy space in which the author became the priest, celebrating something greater even than the work of their own intellect or imagination, each opus a prayer to the infinite that had delivered such wonder into the realms of possibility, placing it in reach of a quill, ink, and a small collection of letters.

That had been last week, that had been yesterday, that had been this morning. Familiarity breeds contempt and Livira was quite certain that when nature next moved her, if the makers of the library still hadn’t put in place provision for her to answer its call, she would be wiping herself with another author’s heartfelt dedication.

Without the quill and bottle of ink that Arpix had given her, Livira might have had to smear her map in blood. Instead, she executed a decent attempt at capturing the labyrinth on the page. She struggled mainly when it came to cramming all the passages into the too-cramped space. But logic dictated the paths she must have travelled in order to reconnect to the aisles that eventually returned her to the two circles that stared at her like a pair of eyes at the heart of it all.

Livira sat back and considered her work. A possible exit suggested itself quite swiftly. The radical change of perspective from a burrower to a soarer who shared the gods’ view made the problem an easy one. She took a swig from her sagging water-skin and got back onto her feet, flexing first one then the other against the ache of so many unaccustomed miles.

With map in hand, Livira set off once more. She had advanced no further than a hundred yards when a distant but terrifying screech tore the silence and left it quivering. Livira clutched her map to her chest as if it might shield her. On the Dust there were many frightening sounds you could hear in the darkness: the triumph of a cratalac on making another kill; the dry scrape of a dust-bear relocating itself in the hope of a morning ambush; the clickety-click of a shell-spider column on the march. But nothing like this broken rage which set her teeth on edge.

Livira held still, listening, hearing nothing but the rapid thump of her heart. In the library’s endless quietude the shriek had struck like a hammer. Her ears still rang with it and her mind echoed with its wrongness. It felt like a crime. She was about to move on when it happened again. Several screeches this time, the gaps between them somehow judged to the length where she was almost certain there would not be another. The final one seemed the closest of all. At last, an uncertain quiet crept back and she picked up her map. The route she was following would return her to the circle clearing. Was the thing that seemed to be closing the distance between them with each passing minute tracking her through the aisles... or simply waiting for her to arrive?

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