Page 81 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

A stumble sent her to her knees. She grabbed the ladder, spilling the Raven out into space. A frantic lunge caught the edge of his outspread wing and she pulled him back. “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!”

From then on until the door to the second chamber came in sight Livira kept her mind on the business of escaping. The ladder that had served her so well performed one final duty, returning her to floor level. The exit invited her, but the semicircle of clear ground before it gave her a moment’s pause. Shaking off her fear, she hurried out from the aisle.

The moment she exposed herself the corrupted assistant broke from the mouth of one of the other aisles forming the perimeter. Livira had no time to question its presence, prescience, or newfound stealth. She ran for all she was worth, barely keeping hold of the Raven. The assistant accelerated, its footfalls once again a clanking thunder.

In a wild flurry of robes and racing legs Livira threw herself at the white expanse of the door. At the Raven’s touch the whiteness became mist. Livira kept running, and only at the mouth of the corridor to the next chamber with nothing but silence behind her did she come to a gasping halt. She bent double, panting, watching the door. The portal had refused her, opening only for the mysterious bird in her hands. It seemed that it had refused the assistant too, sensing the corruption within it.

Livira regained her breath and, still trembling, set the Raven on the floor. “Thank you for coming to help me when I was afraid in the Mechanism.”

The Raven gave a muted squawk.

“And thank you for letting me get back to the Exchange.”

The Raven preened, removing some imaginary speck from the tattered blackness of its wings, possibly from the feather she had returned to it.

“And... for just now.”

The Raven ignored her.

“I need to go back there. But I think maybe the when isn’t as important as it would normally be.” Another image of Evar faced by many enemies crossed her mind. “Time works differently there. If he needs my help, maybe that’s the time it will be when I arrive.” She hoped so. She hoped he was safe.

The Raven looked up, regarding her with the midnight beads of its eyes.

“You don’t really care about any of this, do you?”

The Raven gave a non-committal croak.

“I’m going to leave you here,” Livira said. “I don’t think giving you to the librarians would be a very good way to say thank you. They’d never let you go. And if you didn’t do what they wanted they’d start taking you apart to see how you work.”

The Raven watched her silently.

“You be careful, bird.” Livira backed away. “Don’t go near that assistant!” She waved and turned to go. She thought the Raven might offer some form of goodbye, but when she glanced back it was gone, the black dot it had made against the grey floor now erased as if it had never been there.

—

Livira made her way across Chamber 2 via the labyrinth. Most librarians avoided the labyrinth because it was easy to become lost in it, even with a map, and because most of the books there were works of fiction. The librarians’ top interests were the sciences. Crath and all the cities beyond were hungry for progress, not for stories. Fiction ranked below even history which, except where it could be used to back up King Oanold’s pronouncements, was a subject of very little interest to a populace with its eyes on the future. What they cared about was the next in the series of developments that was making the staircase they would climb to the heights of the ancients. And, even more importantly, might maintain their edge over the sabber threat, providing ever more deadly weapons to see off the ever greater numbers coming from the east.

Livira had come to like the labyrinth though, not least for the privacy it offered so close to the entrance. Despite her eagerness to get home, Livira’s sore feet and general exhaustion prompted her to stop near the heart of the labyrinth and climb a ladder.

Thirty yards up, Livira clambered onto the shelf top and lay on her front, watching the aisle. Stillness was bliss. She lay without motion, letting her heart slow and her muscles relax. She often came to the labyrinth to read. Both fiction, as Master Yute had suggested, and history as well, the latter more out of a sense of duty. The histories were dry, the fiction as if someone had pulled a still-beating heart from its cage of ribs and left it pulsing crimson on the page. Somehow the stories that never happened, ones that merely sprang from the dreaming of some long-dead author, were more true than the histories that might be found on the opposite shelf. The stories, though set free on imagination’s wings, had to make some kind of sense to prevent the readers’ scoffs. Truth, though, didn’t care a whit for making sense and could ride roughshod over people’s expectations. Truth, it was often said in the library, was stranger than fiction. Livira also considered it uglier, crueller, and ultimately less satisfying.

For a long time she lay there, picturing Evar as she had last seen him, and wondering how she might save him.

Sometime later she reached out and plucked a book from just beneath her.

Master Yute had said that writing is an exercise in letting your mind wander but making sure that it keeps what it picks up on the way. Livira had decided to follow his advice.

Yute, it had turned out, was something of a rogue librarian, at odds with his three fellow deputies and the head librarian. Quite how he had secured and kept his current rank was a matter of fierce speculation among the trainees. Almost everything about Yute was. His name was pretty much the only thing agreed to be a reliably known fact about him.

In any event, fiction was heavily frowned upon and illegally securing parchment for her own project would have been a risky prospect. If it were discovered that she had stolen supplies from the parchment stores and then adulterated it with mere fiction... Livira doubted her feet would have touched the ground on her way out of the library—permanently.

Livira had decided on a different approach rather than adding this particular infraction to the already long list of crimes that the librarians were trying to hang her with.

She understood that the library picked its own books. Unauthorised books were reduced to dust. People like King Oanold had to console themselves with the fact that in the endless aisles of the library there was almost certainly a book that agreed with any ridiculous idea that sprang into their head. Similarly, there would be a text to back up any convenient lie that might allow them to slide past an inconvenient truth in the wider world. All they needed to do was to have the librarians search it out.

Livira had, on many occasions, announced her dissatisfaction with the fact that she couldn’t add a book to the shelves. Arpix had laughed and said that it was just the rule. As if that were an end to the discussion. Livira had often felt that the saving grace of rules was how much fun they were to break.

She turned to the front of the book and the blank flyleaf. From her pocket she took one of the new iron quills the trainees had been issued with and a small bottle of ink. She had been writing her thoughts and experiences on the flyleaves of books scattered throughout the labyrinth, ending each page with a cryptic reference to the next book where her tale continued. She made sure to choose works of non-fiction, and boring ones at that, books whose authors she felt would be scandalised and outraged at her vandalism rather than wounded by it. The sheet from Great Sailing Ships of History on which she had once scrawled a map of the labyrinth had been the start of it: page one.

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