Page 67 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Inhale this. Quickly!” It sounded like a woman speaking but with the mask Livira couldn’t tell. She’d taken two glass vials from the pockets of her protective coat. She poured one into the other and a plume of white vapour hissed up. “Breathe it in. Hold the breath.”

Livira did as she was told then lifted Malar’s head as they got him to do the same. She didn’t feel any immediate relief but had to believe that the alchemists knew what they were doing.

“How... H-how did you... know?” Arpix gasped beside her. “A-about the wet cloth?”

“I read it in a book.” Livira had found time to read an entire book on most days since learning how reading worked. Carlotte accused her of just reading the page numbers, saying Livira flicked through the pages so fast that it was all she could possibly be doing. Livira read every word though and remembered what she read. She often wondered if some other part of her had been sacrificed to make room for the skills she had that others didn’t. It worried her, but she was what she was. That had been her Aunt Teela’s wisdom on the subject of Livira long before she even knew what books were. She was what she was.

“Fuck...” Malar rasped the word past bloody lips and tried to get up. The alchemists pushed him back down, plying him with more of their vapours.

—

Night was approaching outside before the three of them were released from the infirmary within the laboratory and taken to see Hiago Abdalla. Malar had been worst affected and still spoke in a painful rasp between fits of coughing. The alchemist in charge of the infirmary had strongly recommended Malar remain in bed while the trainees completed their delivery. To which Malar had offered the counterargument: “Fuck that.” Arpix and Livira had escaped relatively lightly, though both were amused to find that their wet hair had absorbed the gas and been bleached by the resulting solution, leaving them an unnatural shade of blonde. Livira’s was darker at the roots and with black streaks here and there where her original colour persisted.

A hefty apprentice alchemist carried all four satchels and led the way through the corridors carved into the mountainside behind the laboratory’s elaborate façade. By the time they reached Abdalla’s door at the top of a flight of steps Malar was wheezing badly and Livira was having difficulty catching her breath.

Hiago Abdalla looked as if he had once been a large man and had shrivelled through some alchemical process into a small one. He took refuge behind a desk so wide it made him seem to Livira like a wizened doll afloat on an ocean of polished oak. Like the corridors, the room was lit by incandescence trapped within glass balls cradled in copper brackets. Livira didn’t understand the workings of the illumination, which seemed quite different from the gas lamps in the streets, but she preferred the library’s gentler, more pervasive light.

“Master.” The apprentice set the four bags of books on the desk and withdrew.

Master Abdalla studied his visitors with eyes that resembled dull black stones. It seemed that the chemicals he worked with had gnawed away at him over the years, chewing him down to the bone, for he was the most skeletal of men.

“My thanks for delivering texts on the requested subjects.” He set a hand to the closest satchel, somehow giving the impression that the contents were both unknown to him and of minimal interest. “It seems you brought more than that with you, however. Accidents are not unheard-of in the laboratory but what happened in the foyer wasn’t accidental. Our doorman is dead, an apprentice missing. You delivered a war of some kind onto our doorstep. Clearly you were expecting trouble.” His eyes flicked to Malar, who chose that moment to start a lengthy bout of coughing. “To involve the laboratory is unforgivable. We have compounds here that if detonated could bring down this arm of the mountain!”

Livira’s anger took control of her tongue. “You’re missing an apprentice because he ran away after setting off the reaction that nearly killed us! And Malar here is just a friend who—” Malar’s spluttered protest dissolved into more coughing. “A friend who volunteered to escort us after we had trouble with some street thugs on the way. I will be sure to let the head librarian know that an alchemist tried to kill us when delivering books. Let us just hope that your noxious gases haven’t damaged the texts. Because if there’s one thing that upsets our librarians more than killing trainees...”

It was the alchemist’s turn to cough and a swift recalibration followed. “Well. Ah ha. Haste is never wise. Our profession teaches us that. I can count on the lost fingers of apprentices the number of times I’ve said not to add a reagent too swiftly. I will consult with Master Henta on the matter in due course.” The casual dropping of the head alchemist’s name came as the closing of a heavy cover on the final words of a long story. “But we’re all on the same side. The same... page, if you like.” He allowed himself a dry laugh at his own joke since nobody else cracked a smile. “Progress is the only way we’ll outpace these sabbers. Gods know we can’t outbreed them.” He nodded. “I’ll have the boy show you out.”

—

Exchanging the laboratory’s tainted air for a fresh evening breeze was a blessing that made Livira promise herself to step out from beneath the stone skies of the library at least once a week from now on. The cool air eased the sting that had kept her weeping all the way to and from Master Abdalla’s office. She was sure, though, that she couldn’t be as bad as Arpix and Malar, whose bloodshot eyes made them look like the monsters in Ella’s tales out on the Dust. The ones who crept about in the night in the hope of stealing unattended babies.

“Well”—Arpix stifled a cough—“that was fun.”

Livira went to the wall and looked out over the city, already deep in the mountain’s shadow. The lamps she had first seen from the Dust as Malar led in a troop of frightened children were coming to life again, more of them now, with a whiter light, picking out streets in a web that spread from many points. She looked up at the black mass of stone to the east where the library waited for their return. Goosebumps prickled across her arms. “Explosives that could bring down the mountain.”

“What?” Arpix asked.

“He said they had explosives that could bring the mountain down.”

Arpix shrugged. “Sounds like exaggeration to me. But they will do some day. The ancients had such weapons. Mind you, the ancients could fly like birds and reach the moons.”

“For a clever kid you—” Malar broke into a coughing fit but recovered himself. “You don’t half talk a lot of rubbish. Those are stories for children.”

Livira waved his words away. She didn’t care about the moons right now. “But what we’re agreed on is that there were ancients who could work miracles. I mean, we’re always hunting books of science for the alchemists or whatever it is the king wants people to believe this week. But there are plenty of histories. We know so much about the past.”

“Except how to fit it together,” Arpix said.

He was right. There were so many histories and none of them had direct lines connecting “then” to “now.” There were few that studied them in these times of feverish progress. “It’s a time to look forwards, not back!” King Oanold was fond of saying. The handful who ignored the scorn that Crath’s society had for such “time-wasters” argued about where particular civilisations had flourished. There seemed too many of them to fit around the globe, especially when they so seldom appeared to interact.

Malar started towards the steps, keeping a wary eye on the thickening shadows. “Enough flapping your lips. That’s twice Algar’s tried to have you killed, girl. Let’s not give him a third chance before you get back.”

It wasn’t what Malar said that lit the light of Livira’s understanding, it was the way he said it. One chance, two chances, three chances. “What if all those histories didn’t happen together in different places, what if they happened in the same places at different times?”

“Then they’d talk about what came before,” Arpix said, following Malar, “and it would be obvious. Besides”—he looked around, every bit as suspiciously as the soldier—“that sounds like the Wroxan heresy. You don’t want to be talking about it here. Or anywhere really.”

Livira’s experience had been that things people don’t want you to talk about are generally true. This was what Yute had been aiming her at. There were ancients who possessed marvels long ago. With the library’s help the people of Crath and of the kingdom beyond had raised themselves from the Dust to commanding incandescent lights, arrow-sticks, and alchemies that might threaten mountains, all in the space of a handful of generations. If the ancients had touched the moons themselves and yet left nothing outside the library but rubble to mark their whole existence, then it made little sense to assume that the people of Crath under the auspices of King Oanold’s dynasty were only the second to tread this path.

“It’s a cycle.” Livira jolted down the first step. “From dust to dust visiting the heights in between.” She followed the other two down towards the glowing city. In any good story mankind’s hubris would lay him low through the waking of some sleeping evil, some vengeful god jealous of their growing reach. Livira glanced back at the gently smoking vents above the laboratory, lit from below by unseen fires. She thought of Master Abdalla, the little man behind his big desk, feeding on the wisdom the librarians mined from endless shelves. Master Abdalla and his kind, their lives and cleverness given over to the making of ever more deadly weapons with which to fight the foe. Would it really take a vengeful god to bring them all to ruin, or was it simply a case of handing sharp knives to toddlers and waiting for the bleeding to start?

---