Page 58 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

A child shot out of the stacks as if pursued by half a dozen Escapes, startling Evar despite himself. He watched her thread a path between the book towers, showing her heels in a remarkable turn of speed for such a small girl. He thought of Livira for a moment, though this girl was even younger and sported a mane of red hair where Livira’s had been a lustrous black with crimson flashes. Evar had been meaning to wander the stacks for a while longer, but something turned him around. The girl had torn past him in an instant and yet a hook had been sunk in some wordless part of his mind. He followed along the line she’d taken.

Evar found the girl a short while later. A handsome young man was carrying her on his hip and a young woman with a similar mane of red hair walked with them. The woman was laughing at something the man had said. As unfamiliar as he was with the notion of parents Evar understood what he was seeing. His own family were a blur but the scene before him struck a chord that echoed in his chest. This was love. The simple kind that fills you up and wraps you in safety, the kind that gives without demanding and is made of happiness. The sort he’d always felt was locked away behind the Assistant’s ivory breast, reaching for them as she raised Evar and his siblings but never able to break free save in a fleeting gesture or rare kind word.

Something about the child fascinated Evar. She seemed familiar in a way that none of the others did, and there was no sense to it. He watched the small family settle to eat. Two boys came running up, breathless and laughing. By the way their mother greeted them he could tell they were her sons, the girl’s brothers. Both were older than the girl but just by a few years, neither much past their father’s waist. The bigger of the two reached out to snag the last bean-cake as the girl was reaching for it. The father spoke over her wail of protest.

“Break it in half, Cannir. Share with Clovis.”

Evar sat down, hard, feeling as if he’d been punched in the stomach. The family continued their meal, oblivious to his astonishment. “It can’t be. It’s not.” Evar moved forward on hands and knees, staring into the girl’s face as she munched her cake. “Clovis?” He shook his head. His sister couldn’t be the only Clovis in the world. This was just a child who shared her name. And her hair. “Can you hear me?” It had to be coincidence. But she’d been so familiar, right from the first moment. “It’s me. Clovis, it’s me, Evar!” And there truly was something there under the child’s soft cheeks and easy smile, the bones of her face spelled out an impossible truth. “Clovis?”

A distant, explosive bang followed by a scream turned all their heads in the same direction. Another agonised cry, a scattering of bangs, and the mother and father were standing, staring at the stacks. More shouting, the sounds of running feet. The mother and the father exchanged uncomprehending looks that turned to horror at the terror and pain in those screams. Screams that instead of stopping were multiplying. The little girl glued herself to her mother’s leg. The boys looked bewildered.

“Run!” Evar shouted at them, but they just stood there stupidly. “Run!” None of them had any weapons. He hadn’t seen a single knife among the scores he’d followed so far.

“I should help,” the father said, though he sounded scared. “Take the children into the stacks.” Figures were running through the forest of book towers on all sides, most of them away from the screams and the harsh cries that sounded like attackers.

“Dung on that!” the mother bristled. “You save them. I’ll fight!” She snatched up the largest book in reach, part of their shelter, a tome bound in dull red leather and reinforced with iron hinges.

The father opened his mouth to object, but a crimson hole had appeared in his chest, gushing blood. He looked down at it, astonished. Projectiles zipped by and Evar threw himself forward, trying to shield the children even as he failed to gather the boys before him.

“Artur!” Horror fought with rage on the mother’s face. Suddenly the attackers were there, racing forward with their unnatural gait—people but not people—swords swinging. The mother swung her book and felled the first of them. A moment later she was overrun. The attackers ran through Evar like cold shadows as he tried to fight them, the violence of their thoughts infecting him. They paid him no more attention than his own people had. It seemed they had formed a perimeter around the locals, good timing or cruel chance allowing a massacre that would have taken far longer had everyone been spread out and able to hide.

Heartbeats later the bulk of them were gone, tightening the noose on those still running from them. Evar stood and stared about him in horror at the wreckage they’d left behind. He fell to his knees, retching, breathless with the hurt of it all. Blood spattered everything in broad scarlet arcs, running down the book towers, dripping from covers, pooling on the floor. One boy lay with his neck half-severed, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling. The other was curled around a fatal wound, choking out his final breaths.

One of the sabbers, an older warrior, grizzled and grey, came stalking through the stacks, driving his blade into the fallen, one after the next after the next.

“Clovis!” Evar, hunting on his hands and knees, found the girl half-hidden under her father’s corpse. “Clovis! You’ve got to move!”

The executioner came ever closer, wrenching his curved sword from yet another body.

“Clovis!” Evar screamed at her. “Get up!” But she lay there, eyes screwed tight, her whole body trembling, all her faith in her father’s protection. “He’s dead!” Evar roared. The warrior’s next thrust would skewer the father and the child beneath it. “You have to r—”

A heavy book came down in an overhead swing on the sabber’s helm, sending him sprawling over Artur’s body. The mother stood behind the fallen warrior, silent and covered in blood. She dropped onto his back, all her weight behind both knees, and brought the iron-hinged spine of the book down on the sabber’s neck with awful force.

“Get up!” An order rasped between crimson teeth as she dragged her daughter clear. “Come on!”

In the next moment they were stumbling away through the stacks, screams on all sides, attackers roaming. Evar followed, ducking pointlessly as a projectile hissed past too fast to see.

Sudden understanding stopped his advance. He stood straight, ignoring the bangs and the zip of projectiles, and stared in the direction the sabbers had attacked from. “The pool? They came from the pool...”

All boundaries are challenged by those that neighbour them. Even divides as certain as truth or fiction become fraught on close inspection. The library contains novels written in the style of a historian, leading the unwary down rabbit holes into imaginary pasts wherein sabbers built great cities and dwelt within them, aping the habits of man. Obviously, such flights of fancy are unlikely to mislead any but the most foolish reader, but other variations on the truth may be sufficiently plausible to trick even the most erudite.

Know Your Library, by Axon Bloom

CHAPTER 27

Livira

Livira didn’t know what day she’d been born on. The other trainees knew their birthdays and so Livira chose one for herself in order not to be left out. She picked the particular Wodesday when, two years previously, she had been allocated to the library. And it was on the day after her thirteenth birthday that she got to visit the city again—her first time beneath the open sky since Master Yute had escorted her inside the mountain.

As Livira walked towards the entrance she found herself thinking not about her imminent reunion with sunlight and crowds but instead about the strange young man she’d met so briefly in the forest that stood between everywhere. She hoped Evar had found his way. He’d seemed somehow more lost than she had been. She wondered if he’d found the woman he’d been looking for—questing after like a knight in the fairy tales. The love so lost that even her name had been forgotten.

Evar had been two years ago. Livira’s first month at the library had been so stuffed with excitement and danger that she’d wondered if she could survive a second one. The dull weeks that followed had at first been a relief, but that relief had turned into a slow disappointment as she began to realise that lightning had struck but would not be returning to strike again. A lord had manoeuvred to get her thrown out. And having failed, seemed to have entirely lost interest in her. Livira wasn’t sad about that—but she was puzzled.

The dust had been washed from her skin on her first day through the city gates, but the first year hadn’t taken the taste of it from her tongue, and even after a second it still lingered.

She had mastered many arts—reading came easiest, writing a little less so, and Arpix still found fault with her quill work, though he only volunteered an opinion when she asked him to. Languages she found simple enough to understand, and far more difficult to speak. Meelan said her Entragon sounded like Otroosan spoken through a mouthful of toffee, and that when she declined Sappic verbs, rather than using the familiar tone, she just sounded as if she were in pain.

A diet of one book a day on top of her assignments had improved her general knowledge and vision of the wider world beyond recognition. Master Logaris frowned on fiction, and whilst generally disinclined to follow his directions, Livira had thus far confined herself to works of history, natural science, biology, and biography, finding the ocean of them on offer too wide to cross and more than deep enough to drown in despite her unusual capacity.

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