Page 62 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Stories.” Livira had only eaten half as many of Salamonda’s butter biscuits and her overfull stomach was slowing her down too. “We never translate it and rarely get requests. But it fills more than half the shelves. A lot more than half. He said everyone should try it. He said to try reading it and writing it.”

“A librarian said that?” Arpix seemed shocked.

Livira had jumped to the end of her conversation with Yute. She’d known talk of fiction would shock Arpix and that the boy’s head would probably explode if she told him that Yute thought the library cursed. The library was a faith which made Yute’s talk of curses heresy of the highest order. She was sure of that even if she didn’t properly understand what his “seed” might grow into. And Arpix might be passionate on very few subjects but when it came to the library’s stated purpose, to bring knowledge freely to the people, he was a fanatic.

“We should read fiction?” Arpix shook his head in amazement. “To learn our languages better?”

“For pleasure.”

Arpix blinked. “And write it? What would be the point of that?”

“Yute told me a great writer once said that fiction was easy—all you have to do is sit in front of a blank page and bleed.” Livira snorted. “Yute said there was a people who took that literally. They wrote everything in blood, which he felt was trying too hard, but perhaps a good way to conserve paper and make sure you get to the point quickly. Apparently Chamber Eighteen is almost full of just their books!”

“Suffering for their art.” Arpix nodded appreciatively. “What else did he—”

“He said a story is a net. It can capture something as large as the spirit of the age or as small as the emotion of a man watching the last leaf fall from a tree, or sometimes both, and make one a reflection of the other.”

Arpix nodded and for a moment he was silent, chewing over the librarian’s words. Then with a shake of his head, as if throwing off a dream, he tried again. “He couldn’t have just wanted to talk about stories. What else did—”

“What’s that?” Livira pointed at a smudge on the horizon, grateful for something to distract Arpix from his interrogation.

“Dust storm?”

“Too small. And it doesn’t look like one.” Arpix knew much more about cities, but Livira considered herself the expert when it came to dust.

“Well...” Arpix frowned and glanced around at the nearest mountain peaks to get his bearings. “Tronath is in that direction, thirty miles maybe? It’s the nearest city. More of a town really.”

“Is it cold there?”

“No.” Arpix’s frown deepened.

“Why’d they set fire to it then?”

A man bustled past them, pushing a cart on which half a dozen large round cheeses were piled. “Stinkin’ sabbers did it.”

“Sabbers know how to use fire?” Arpix called at his back, amazed.

“Dog-soldiers.” The man nodded and hurried on down the slope, cart bumping over the flagstones. “You didn’t hear it from me.”

“Why wouldn’t they know about fire?” Livira turned to Arpix. “The ones I saw had swords. You need fire to make iron.” Over the two years since leaving the Dust Livira’s grief had hardened into a cold stone of hate that lodged somewhere between her heart and her stomach. She hoped that Malar’s comrades had hunted down every last one of the sabbers who destroyed her settlement. But that didn’t mean she would believe belittling stories about them over the truth she’d seen with her own eyes.

Arpix shook his head. “The last book I worked on was being translated from Middle Gargan for the house readers. It says the sabbers breed with dogs and are little more than animals themselves. They probably stole those swords.”

“That’s not right.” Livira stopped to adjust her satchels and turned towards Arpix as he pulled up. “I talked with one. He spoke our language. Animals don’t speak.”

“What did he say?” Arpix asked.

“ ‘Are you good to eat?’ ”

Arpix shrugged. “Sounds like what an animal would say if it could talk.” He set off again.

Livira watched him for a moment. It hadn’t been like that, had it? She thought the sabber had been exercising a rather dry sense of humour. She’d demanded to know if it was going to eat her. It unsettled her how the same words could mean such different things to different people. How it might be possible for two sets of eyes to witness the same events and later give accounts at odds with each other.

—

Livira followed Arpix through the city, shocked by the crowds and the noise after so long in the library’s calm. She scanned the sea of faces for her friends from the settlement and of course saw none of them.

“That’s where we’re heading.” Arpix pointed at the arm of the mountain rising above them. “The laboratory’s up there. So the wind carries any fumes away from the city.”

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