Page 65 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Evar knew you should never do that. The Assistant had been very clear on that point. It was something only she should do.

“Don’t go out there, Hella!” the mother called to them as they passed. “That’s where they are!”

The young woman turned towards them, wide-eyed. “There’s more space. I’d rather hide from them out there than in here.”

“But...” The mother let them go. Neither choice was good. The man left a trail of black smoke that wasn’t smoke. Evar glimpsed disturbing shapes in the shadow before it dissipated beneath the library’s relentless light.

The mother took them to the grey block of the Mechanism. The door today was a featureless white rectangle that reminded Evar of the Assistant, seemingly made of the same stuff.

“Where is she? The Assistant?” Evar turned to Clovis’s mother. “Where’s the Soldier?” The Soldier could turn the tide against any number of sabbers. The mother couldn’t hear him, of course, and even if she could she had more pressing issues than answering a ghost’s questions.

“We need to be quiet.” The mother pulled Clovis to the far side of the Mechanism, out of sight of the entrance to the reading room. She looked down and shook her head in dismay. “My blood’s going to lead them to us wherever we go...” She leaned the book against the Mechanism and inspected her wound gingerly. The same bright crimson that ran from the slot through her leather jerkin now speckled her lips and chin. The weapon had found her lung.

“We can hide,” Clovis said. She stared wide-eyed at the corridor. “Can’t we, Mama?”

A distant scream pierced her mother’s hesitation. Together, Clovis and her mother crouched and edged forward to peer around the corner of the Mechanism. At the far end of the corridor to the main hall a figure moved into view. Then another. And another.

Evar watched his sister, his sister of chance and of opportunity, hardly recognising the soft child before him. A child full of fear, and love. The Clovis he knew, the one who had crawled out of the Mechanism beside him, had been iron from the start, even though she’d worn this young girl’s flesh on that first day. She’d been iron ever since, unfaltering in her training, unfaltering in her hatred for the sabbers. With no place for it to go, that hate had washed over all her brothers, a cold thing and all the scarier for its lack of heat. She’d infected them all with her desire for revenge—her need for it—but theirs had been a shadow of what she felt. She had been here when it happened. She remembered. They had been told, but she had seen it, heard it, smelled it. Visions of this last hour must have haunted every quiet moment she’d spent since. Little wonder that she avoided quiet moments.

The only fear Evar had ever seen in his sister had been inside the boundaries of the terrifying dreams that tore her sleep. He understood now what fed those nightmares. That was where she relived these moments, filling her sleep with her father’s death, the slaughter of her true brothers, and the horror of waiting here at the Mechanism with her mother bleeding and the sabbers on their trail.

Evar understood now that the Clovis he knew was not the woman this girl would have grown into without this day. She had been forged by the events he’d witnessed, and another Clovis, one he would never know, lay dead with her brothers back among the stacks.

“We’ll hide in the Mechanism,” Clovis’s mother said.

“I thought you had to go in alone?” Clovis looked up at her mother, trembling.

“Two is fine,” her mother lied. “The important thing is to run. As soon as we get in, we both run and don’t look back. Can you do that for me? Run and not look back? I’ll be right behind you.”

“But I don’t want—”

The swing of her mother’s hand slapped the words from Clovis’s mouth. “Run and don’t look back!” A shout this time. Other shouts came from the corridor: the sabbers were running now.

With bloody hands her mother dragged Clovis to the Mechanism door. “Carry this for me.” She thrust the book into Clovis’s arms. She set a hand to the door. It should have left a crimson print but instead the white surface simply melted beneath her touch, revealing a grey tunnel.

The sabbers were in the chamber, a score of them, some with blades in hand as they ran, others carrying the metal tubes that spat death over a distance. Evar had read about guns but never thought to see one.

“Go on!” The mother shoved her daughter forward. “I’m with you! Run!”

The instant Clovis passed through the doorway the white surface re-established itself behind her.

“This won’t work,” Evar muttered, even though he knew that somehow it already had. The sabbers must have seen Clovis going in though. The only protection Clovis had now was that the sabbers might know the dangers of opening the Mechanism from the outside when it was in use. And even if they did, surely they would just wait? Clovis would emerge of her own volition once she understood she was alone.

Clovis’s mother pushed herself away from the Mechanism with a snarl, leaving the wall smeared with blood. She hobbled towards the nearest cluster of desks, trying to draw the sabbers with her.

Even as she did so the attackers split, some pursuing her, others closing on the door she’d pushed her daughter through. Evar dropped into a defensive stance before the entrance, knowing it to be useless.

Something was happening to either side of Evar. Something so unexpected that it managed to divert his attention from the sabbers now only thirty yards from him. On both sides of the door grey hands reached out of the Mechanism’s walls as if it were thick mud rather than impenetrable stone. Within the space of ten heartbeats two figures tore themselves free, leaving no mark on the wall behind them. The Assistant and the Soldier, just as Evar had always known them, except grey, and not a single uniform grey but shades in motion, darker here, lighter there, swirling like smoke behind glass. Both of them staring at themselves, inspecting their hands as if surprised to find they owned them. The Assistant’s palms bore the cut wounds Evar had always known. The Soldier’s left hand, all the left side of his body had the part-melted look that he had never explained.

“You’ve got to stop the sabbers!” Evar shouted.

The Soldier raised his head, fixing Evar with the black eyes of a stranger.

“Soldier!” Evar reached for the Soldier’s shoulder to turn him towards the sabbers’ charge. Instead, he found himself elbow-deep in the swirling grey of the Soldier’s body. In that instant such a wave of violence flooded up his arm that it threw him back to land on the floor, breathless with horror.

The sabbers hurled themselves at the Soldier and the Assistant in the next moment. The Soldier didn’t draw his blade. Instead, he disabled his foe with brutal efficiency. His punches lifted sabbers from the ground and hurled them back to land among upturned desks. His elbows broke jaws and sent teeth flying from mouths. A sweep of his leg cut sabbers down like ripe wheat.

Why hadn’t the pair emerged even an hour earlier? Why hadn’t they saved the people? Evar had never imagined their arrival in these terms. So close to the massacre that it felt now like a sin of omission. They had let so many die...

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