Page 75 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira

Livira studied the sky through the upraised branches of the tapwoods. That lone tapwood out on the Dust was the only tree she had ever seen before coming to the Exchange. She should have been suspicious to find them growing here when it might have been any other kind of tree, or a mix of many sorts. The Mechanism had painted her a blind world using the brush of the author’s imagination, laced around facts to bind them into a historical narrative. Perhaps the Exchange had in turn painted her a world using her own imagination, a stolen dream of sorts. Even so it was a good dream. There was a healing peace that shrouded the place. A timelessness that warned should you fall asleep on this grass you might wake in a different century, or perhaps a different life.

“Between us we’ve visited three of your pools on the same line.” Livira spoke into the lazy air above her. “And two of them were your home in different times. And one was my home. If we want to experiment, we should visit a pool that’s not on the same line as those three.” Reluctantly, she sat up and studied the grid of portals. No pools for her—her portals all still looked the same as the one the grey assistant had been touching as she lay beside it on the floor of the locked chamber.

When the Raven had, at Livira’s request, led her back to the portal, it hadn’t taken Master Ellis’s path. Instead, it had taken her through different chambers, three of which were forbidden, unseen by any librarian or trainee in Crath’s history. Livira could only imagine the outrage and scorn she’d meet with if she tried to tell the deputies about it on her return. Once the Raven had taken a longer path through three chambers to bypass one other. Whether that meant there were doors it too couldn’t open, or whether it meant that the chamber it had avoided was simply too dangerous, Livira didn’t know.

The first of these forbidden chambers, number 94 by the librarians’ reckoning, was a literal sea of books. Crossing it Livira hadn’t seen a single shelf, just an undulating ocean of books, as if they had rained from the sky and been swept up by unknown weather into drifts higher than houses. Livira had to walk over the covers, constantly hectored by the Raven if she was insufficiently careful.

She’d had to do all this barefoot since the Mechanism, in addition to somehow staining her robe black during her time on the insectoids’ battlefield, had also neglected to return the shoe that she had thrown into it. Of the other shoe, the one she’d used to prop the door open, only half remained, lying beside the entrance, as if severed by a sharp blade.

Livira soon discovered that two and a half years of wearing shoes had left her soft. Her feet were starting to get sore by the time she’d crossed the first chamber with eight more to go. And it didn’t help that every time a book slid underfoot, sending her tumbling, the Raven treated her to the full force of its ear- and head-splitting condemnation, as if the whole mess were her fault along with the decision to come this way.

The next forbidden chamber, number 67, was the first she’d seen with iron shelves, a planning decision that time had shown to be unwise. The books on the lower four-fifths of every set of shelves had turned orange in the slow but constant rain of rust. Rust also covered the floor to a depth of half an inch and more, crunching unpleasantly beneath her aching feet.

Chamber 46, also forbidden, would have given a heart attack to Master Lapla, who oversaw the team of bookbinders that Jella apprenticed with. It was any librarian’s nightmare. In class, Master Logaris had suggested many times that just as the centre of every chamber was an area of sustenance for any human, erasing tiredness, easing hunger and thirst, at least in the short term, the whole of every chamber was an area of sustenance for books. He remarked that under the close attention of Crath’s librarians, the books in the trainee library had fared notably less well over the past century and a half than the books in the library proper, despite the rats, cats, spiders, moulds, fungi, lichens, and such that somehow eked out a living among them. In fact, those conditions appeared to have sustained books that were referenced in other books as having been written several thousand years before.

How, then, Chamber 46 contained more book dust than books, Livira couldn’t say. It reminded her of an etching of Tneerast after the earthquake, its towers fallen into ruin, its wall toppled, their stones spread before the city. In Chamber 46 most of the shelving had collapsed, leaving a sparse forest of spires from which ancient planks slanted to the floor. The books lay in ruin too, as if the earlier chamber where Livira had crossed book-drifts had been marched over repeatedly by a series of armies in hobnailed boots. Pages were scattered, crumpled, torn. Ancient tomes lay open with only the smallest fraction of their contents still connected to broken spines. And these were the survivors. The greater part of the chamber’s contents had long ago been ground to a fine dust, almost evenly distributed across the floor, ranging from ankle-deep to calf-deep. Livira raised a cloud behind her such as she hadn’t since she quit her home and entered Crath City’s gates. The dreams and wisdom, prejudice and pride of untold millions of authors from many nations and many centuries were now just dust and ruin, making her sneeze and sticking to her feet.

Livira had arrived at the portal in Chamber 7 tired, hungry, and thirsty, despite the boosts from each chamber’s healing centre. She was also beginning to worry about the length of her absence. Master Logaris had been known to send junior librarians to check up on sick trainees. Meelan said Logaris only did it because the rooms were hard to clean if you left a corpse in one for too long. But whatever the motivation, the threat was real. Hopefully Carlotte would tell Logaris it was women’s problems this time. They’d observed the excuse close down their schoolmaster with startling speed on several occasions, and both of them were of an age now where they could appeal to it.

Livira studied the portal and the fallen assistant. She’d dreamed of this place so often in the years since she’d last been here that the reality of it now seemed fragile. As if at any moment the clanging of the morning bell might shatter the scene before her and replace it with a yawning view of her bedroom ceiling.

The Raven had found a perch and watched with interest as Livira tried to push through the portal. Just as before, it refused her. The assistant lay unmoving, grey and lifeless, her fingers vanishing into the shimmer of light that filled the circle. She’d told Livira on the last occasion that the Exchange was forbidden. Livira had decided that she wasn’t satisfied with that state of affairs and always travelled prepared for the eventuality that she might regain access to the chamber.

Livira took the long, thin rope from her pack and knotted one end around the assistant’s ankle. It had been hard to acquire all the cords that she threaded and twisted to make it. It had been hard to carry it so far, back and forth across the library. She also had two blankets sewn together. Arpix might have suspected she’d taken his, but he’d never guessed why.

Livira found a ladder in a nearby aisle and hefted it a couple of feet at a time, moving it around a corner and down the long straight stretch until it leaned against the side opposite the assistant. The effort turned her arms to jelly and, she was sure, added several inches in length to both. With her muscles still trembling, she climbed the rungs to the top of the shelves, taking the other end of the rope and the double blanket with her.

Once at the top she laid the blanket flat on the dusty wood and began to pile books from the shelf below onto it. It took a while and she nearly dropped one large tome with what felt like a stone cover. She could only imagine the scolding the Raven would have given her and doubted that her hearing would have escaped without permanent damage.

Eventually, satisfied, she folded the blanket carefully around her collection and gathered the corners together, putting a knot in each. She made a noose of the rope and tightened it around all four knotted corners. Next, she lugged the ladder two yards to the left. Then, gripping the shelf-top’s edge, she used both feet to inch the bundle towards the drop on the other side.

Gravity seized the blanket-sack without warning. It fell about ten feet before the rope went taut. Down below the assistant tilted without flexing, as if she really were the statue she appeared to be. She scraped across the floor with the sound of nails being raked down a chalkboard, a sound that Master Logaris occasionally employed to gain the class’s attention. Where the assistant’s head had lain a silvery sheen caught Livira’s eye, as if a puddle of silver blood had pooled there from the injury on her brow. The assistant hit the shelves with a bang and at a leisurely but increasing pace she began to rise, drawn upwards on the rope by the books’ descent.

Livira had practically slid down the ladder and was through the circle of light a moment later. Her theory that it was the assistant’s touch which kept the portal sealed now confirmed.

—

“How about that one?” Livira sat up, stood, and pointed to the portal beside the one she’d emerged from earlier. “It’s not on the same column as the other three and it’s in the same row as mine.”

Evar chewed the inside of his cheek and it reminded her of Arpix. Both of them shared a certain studious reluctance to just jump into things. A quality that Livira had to admit was probably in short supply where she was concerned. Even so, after several long moments of thought, Evar nodded.

“I can’t think of another way to learn anything here, save for waiting for an assistant to show up.”

“I’m not sure waiting works very well here,” Livira said. “And they might be called assistants but I’m thinking ‘impediments’ would be a better name.”

Evar seemed to ponder that one. “My Assistant, she... well, I think she’s constrained by a lot of rules. I think she does what she can.” He shrugged. “And what you said about waiting not working. Well, I’ve wondered about that. I mean. You said you were away for two years?”

“Two and a half.”

“Two years, and I’m out of that pool for a few minutes before you turn up. What are the odds of that? And then there’s the pool itself. I mean, all right, it took me to Clovis’s childhood. That’s odd, but let’s put it to one side for now. It took me to the day the sabbers came. It took me to within hours of that attack. The most important day of her life. Again, what are the odds?”

“Long?”

Evar nodded. “So, time’s more than just odd here. It seems to work to bring us what we want, maybe? Or need? Or what’s important to us? I don’t know. But whatever it is it’s not straightforward.” He came to join her beside the portal. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

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