Page 69 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Still alive!” Livira checked both ways for the librarian then turned to the left and began to run again.

She wasn’t silent, of course, and it would be possible that her quarry sighted her before she sighted him, but “up” wasn’t a direction many chose to look in the library. Anyone on the hunt for books might be perturbed by the sound of running feet but it wasn’t unheard-of, especially in the first chamber, and it was a noise that tended to be associated with the ground.

Livira ran on until she came to the spot she wanted. She turned to look out across the tops of perhaps fifty aisles all running parallel to each other. By jumping from one to the next she would be able to check several hundred thousand square yards of floor space. All it required was fifty eight-foot jumps in a row with a four-foot run up and four feet to land in. Long study of the map—the very map Ellis had worked on for most of his life and which trainees were forbidden from seeing—had shown her that all the quickest routes from the entrance steps to any of the three exits ran through this section she was about to expose.

Livira took a deep breath. “No more falling. No more falling.” She repeated it once more for luck. “No more falling.” Took two swift paces and leapt.

Ten jumps and one near miss later she spotted him and immediately threw herself flat on the shelf top to ensure it was a one-way transaction. She lay, trembling and breathless with the effort, glad that the search was over since she doubted her ability to make many more successful leaps without a rest.

She waited in silence, listening for Master Ellis’s footsteps as he passed beneath her position. She trailed him from on high until she found a ladder, then followed at ground level. She reached the far end of a long aisle and was rewarded by a glimpse of the man turning a corner.

“Got you!” She knew now which door he was headed to. Rather than risk trailing the librarian the whole way, she took off, planning to take an alternative route at speed and wait for him at the exit to the next chamber.

It should have been a simple enough undertaking. The prison of Livira’s memory had long ago taken possession of the first chamber’s layout, and despite taking her time to find a ladder she was fleet of foot once on the ground.

The problem came at one of the chokes—aisles that if not taken required considerable backtracking to circumvent. Livira was already worried that the delay with the ladder and the longer route she was taking might make the timing tight, so when she skidded around the corner into the choke aisle and saw at the far end a grey-robed figure with long red hair, her heart fell.

Master Jost was one of eight senior librarians in the circle below Yute, Ellis, and the other two deputies. For reasons unknown, but possibly associated with Livira’s multiple, unproven break-ins to the sanctum, Jost maintained a very low opinion of her. The sanctum was where Jost and her colleagues carried out research into the fundamentals of the library itself. Naturally it had become the focus for Livira’s recently acquired skills in espionage. Jost made trouble for her at every opportunity.

The forged library pass would not withstand Jost’s scrutiny. Livira ducked back hurriedly as the librarian turned. “Shit on a stick.” Livira liked to blame her brief associations with Malar for her language, but this one was entirely her own. Jost had clearly heard her approach and would be watching to see who it was.

“Can’t stop now.” Livira fished the small black book from the pocket of her robes. She opened it at a random page and darkness swallowed her.

With the black book open, wrapping her in a lightless bubble, Livira hurried into the aisle. A squeal of fear rewarded Livira’s efforts. The rapidly advancing wall of darkness must have looked pretty frightening.

A moment later Livira was past the librarian with the added bonus of having caught her a solid whack with her raised elbow. She ran on but tamed her pace, resolving to maintain the darkness until she reached the distant corner, and not wanting to crash into it at full tilt. Let Master Jost report a mysterious ball of darkness and not include a blue-robed trainee in her account.

—

Livira reached the chamber’s left door and waited on the far side. Ellis arrived so late that she was sure he’d outwitted her and turned towards another door. Livira watched from the cover of an aisle, lying with her head at floor level. She was ready to retreat should he come her way, but he chose to head in almost the opposite direction. This was her first good look at him since spotting him from the leather stores back with Jella. She saw now that he had a large travel pack on his shoulder and a good-sized water-skin slung around his chest.

“Sneaky...” He must have collected both along the way so that nobody would know he was heading to the library and planning a long trip.

The deputy had a pinched look to his face, which suggested a man who found the world rather unsatisfactory in several departments and expected it to try harder in future.

Livira watched him go, a short figure in his charcoal robes; then, after a suitable delay, she set off in pursuit.

A straight walk from one door to the door opposite it was around two miles. With all the back and forth it was rarely less than four. Something like the labyrinth in Chamber 2 could turn it into a twenty-mile epic. Trailing someone and keeping out of sight just added to the work.

Now that Livira knew about the sustenance circles at the centre of each chamber she could travel endlessly, though after a few days the body began to crave actual food and water even if it didn’t appear to need those things to avoid dying. Librarians carried water-skins to satisfy that thirst.

Livira’s discovery of the corner circles had been somewhat embarrassing. In each corner was an area about ten yards across where organic matter just disappeared. A process rather like when the assistant had turned Livira’s apple to nothing but dust and pips, but significantly slower and more thorough. Standing in the area made your skin prickle but would take some hours to actually evaporate it. With nonliving matter, it was a swifter process. In most corners you would find privies of various designs, built in stone by long-vanished librarians. Anything organic you left there, including wood and bone, would be gone by the time you returned. Books were the sole exception, though with remarkable discrimination the corner would destroy loose pages. Librarians left piles of rags outside the circle. You took a rag in with you and left it there when finished with it.

Allegedly, in the more distant chambers, where restocking the rags proved difficult, a former head librarian had had the works of Enanald Byten stacked close by as a handy alternative. Amazingly, Enanald Byten managed to write 3,210 books in his lifetime, possibly more, but that was the number found so far in the library. Former head librarian Thomas Kensan described them as the most execrable fiction, period, and also as the best argument against learning to read Middle Grethian—a remarkable claim given that the language boasted fourteen tenses and a flexible approach to spelling.

For Livira, though, the most embarrassing part of discovering all this came after having spent nearly two days in the library on her first venture. She had been at lunch the next day with her tablemates when Jella remarked that it was fortunate she’d found out how the corners worked given that she ran off before they’d had a chance to tell her about them.

“There’s something special in the corners?” Livira had asked.

“Then how did you...” Carlotte’s eyes had widened.

“Oh,” Jella had said.

In any event, Livira hoped that the journey wouldn’t be that long. She didn’t relish the prospect of using a corner privy in a great hurry almost immediately after Master Ellis had finished with it.

—

The journey proved to be a long one. Master Ellis crossed many chambers, the only saving grace being that he knew reasonably direct routes from one door to the next. Time in the library was a rather personal concept. The place itself hardly acknowledged passing centuries, so the passage of days had nothing to do with the library, and only concerned whoever might be within it. When Master Ellis took a pillow from his backpack along with a blanket to lie on and made camp near the corner of Chamber 36, Livira knew they’d been walking for a whole day. She hoped the others would be both creative and convincing at explaining her absence. Something contagious, explosive, and involving both ends would be best.

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