Page 82 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira wanted to get the events of the last few days down on paper while the emotions were still fresh. Her memory was essentially infallible as far as facts were concerned, but emotion had a tendency to dry like ink and cease to glisten. It needed to be captured as close to the moment as possible. She started to write in the flowing script that Master Logaris criticised as too flamboyant and wasteful of space. His own crabbed handwriting reminded Livira of puzzles where the object is to fit a great number of irregular shapes into a space that seems impossibly small.

Starting at the beginning was another rule Livira liked to break. She began with a statement, a statement of truth or intent:

All of us steal our lives. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. We wear ourselves like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.

She inked the full stop again, more definitely. This was her life, too large and too complicated to be contained wholly within her head, spilling out onto the page. Any book worth its ink must, she thought, have something of the author held between the lines. There were, she believed, enough parts of enough people on the library’s shelves to repopulate a world many times over, if only they could be correctly assembled.

It wasn’t, she decided, enough to dangle only herself from the scrolling loops of her handwriting. Evar should be there too. And eventually, perhaps, everyone she knew. But she began with Evar, who, despite his peerless combat skill, felt to her vulnerable in many ways that she was not. A life lived with only one girl and three—now two—boys wasn’t going to equip anyone for the casual cruelty of the world or the intricacies of navigating a society composed of many thousands. Livira herself was still studying the necessary interactions and trying to understand oddities like Serra Leetar and Malar. She’d found Evar just as he broke out of his cage for the first time. In a very real way, he was her—as she was the day after the destruction of the settlement. He was her as she crossed the Dust towards the city. Only his Dust was the Exchange and his city lay in one of those pools he saw.

Livira wrote until she approached the end of the page and realised that she had hardly any room to talk about the Mechanism—that wonder which Master Ellis and the other deputies kept to themselves. She crammed in what she could and admitted to herself that perhaps there was some benefit to Logaris’s economical hand over her own sprawling prose. At the end of the page, she wrote a clue to the name of the book which she had already scouted out for the next installment.

The fiction would start later. Right now, Evar was a character ready to be set loose on pages to come. Perhaps she would put herself in there and they could share the adventures that the closing of the portal had denied to them.

She wiped her inky hand on her newly black robe and made her way wearily down the ladder, ready to eat some real food and to sleep in her own bed.

War is often described as long periods of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror. A description that is functionally identical to many people’s lives.

The Pursuit of Happiness, by Alfred J. Prooffrock

CHAPTER 37

Livira

Three years passed and although Livira bent all her cleverness, and all of what many among the librarians might term her wickedness, to the problem of finding Evar Eventari once more, the library continued to defeat her. She applied herself ferociously to the pursuits of learning and research, hoping by such interrogation to force the library to reveal its secrets.

One matter she gave less thought to, and indeed actively avoided, was the “why” of it. Evar, if he had survived the battle she’d left him in, had undoubtedly found this mystery woman he obsessed over. By now they were probably living in a small house on the edge of a forest and had two babies. He would have forgotten the ink-stained girl with her annoying questions. And the truth of that put an ache in her chest that she didn’t understand.

Livira told herself that although Evar was her target, her goal was the knowledge that would let her reach him again. However, none of that explained why his face, dappled by the sun and shade of a hidden forest, appeared in quite so many of her dreams. Or why his hesitant smile, unguarded grins, and the fluid way he moved in battle, kept her from sleeping so many nights in the narrow confines of the bed within her trainee cell.

Three years had wrought many changes in Livira and her tablemates, but to the library the time was less than the turning of a single page. Even the librarians remained much the same. Master Logaris sat at the front of the classroom, craggy as a rock, no different from the day Livira arrived, expressing no astonishment as his charges matured at a startling rate.

The city at their gates, however, remained in constant flux. Every year the fruits of the librarians’ research rippled down through the streets, placing new wonders in the hands of its citizens and soldiers alike. New colours entered the seamstresses’ palettes, new tastes infiltrated the cake-shop shelves, new mechanisms in the toymakers’ inventions. Previously unknown chemicals emerged in secure vats from the gates beneath the laboratory’s fumaroles.

And across the Dust more sabbers came, one band joining to another. Raids on outlying towns increased. Sightings from the city walls. Seemingly greater numbers every month despite the denials from official proclamations, each war party bolder, or perhaps more desperate, than the last. The stories grew too, stories of a threat in the east, driving the sabbers from their homelands. And though the tales had yet to settle on a single description of this threat, at least they had converged upon a single name. The skeer.

Much of the librarians’ efforts were steered towards the search for knowledge that would place in the hands of the king’s troops weapons of ever greater deadliness. To compensate for the sabbers’ swiftness and strength, arrow-sticks, or in the vernacular just plain ’sticks, were issued to the soldiers. To balance out the unequal numbers, grenades were manufactured. Yet still the sabbers came, lean and hungry, to gaze upon the city walls.

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Livira didn’t move to the penultimate of Heeth Logaris’s tables until her sixteenth birthday. Arpix joined her there just after her seventeenth. Both of them were the youngest trainees at the table by several years. Deputy Ellis had spoken against Livira’s advancement. In addition to what amounted to two handfuls of suspicion, he argued that it would create unnecessary friction with the policies being enacted in the city to deal with the “wilds problem.” Namely the influx of displaced populations from the Dust and beyond the mountains.

Deputy Ellis had swung the vote of Deputy Acconite against Livira in a meeting of the four deputy head librarians. Livira of course had not been invited, or even told, but librarians like to take notes and Livira took the notes... from Master Jost, who had been the one writing them down during the meeting. The deadlock hadn’t needed to be broken, since the lack of a majority left the decision in Master Logaris’s lap, and he for reasons of his own had decided to keep her. This time.

Smarting from his defeat, Deputy Ellis had set Master Jost to a near-constant watch of Livira’s activities outside the classroom. Despite her dogged attention the woman hadn’t been able to keep up with Livira in the library chambers. Her watchful eye had, however, slowed down Livira’s copying of the Kensan Index, which lay behind only the Helfac Index and the head librarian’s own personal index in terms of being both contemporary and comprehensive.

Outside the library, politics and war swept around the roots of the mountain, washing against Crath’s walls from opposite sides. Only ripples and echoes of this chaos reached into the complex where Livira laboured over her studies though, the muted cries of a nation in the grip of breakneck progress.

Master Logaris largely left the youngest trainees to sink or swim, placing books in their hands and demands on their shoulders. Those that sank were found other employment, the prizes being either placement within the complex, such as Jella’s appointment with the bookbinders, or as house readers out in the city, like Carlotte. Whilst the city exerted a constant pressure for more librarians to meet their need for neatly packaged knowledge, the head librarian resisted and allowed only the very best to take the white robe of a junior librarian. Livira felt that the head librarian appreciated the importance of supply and demand, and in consequence refused the pressure to grow her empire as fast as the king insisted.

With Jella and Carlotte no longer trainees, Arpix, Livira, and Meelan were the only survivors from the first table. Meelan had joined the fifth table, which lay behind Livira’s, just after Arpix moved on from it. He was no longer shorter than Livira even though she’d grown like the eponymous weed, and at nearly nineteen he had filled out his skinny frame into that of quite a solid young man. He still looked angry all the time, staring from dark eyes under a wave of black hair, and everything he said still sounded like a death threat. But he’d always been there to help cover up Livira’s misdeeds, and where Arpix would tell her off, and Carlotte would encourage her, and Jella would be scandalised, Meelan never offered judgement of any sort.

Lately Livira had been pushing herself hard to discover as much about the library as she could. Visits to the Mechanism with the works of past library scholars had helped—though books about the library itself were fantastically hard to find. Either the library did not like to stock books about itself, or the head librarian had moved all such volumes and only her private index would identify their location. Livira wanted to find another door into the Exchange but even hints of the place’s existence were nearly impossible to discover.

But the clock was ticking—literally, since Deputy Ellis had received one of the new mechanical devices from an “inventor” in the city and had it looming in the corner of his office, its pendulum forever swinging. Livira’s visit to the Mechanism with a book on lock-picking had paid dividends and the fruits of her spying were a clear picture of the work Ellis was putting in to having her removed. Letters were exchanged between him and Lord Algar with increasing frequency. As a child she had considered Lord Algar’s motivation to be personal spite. From her current perspective, and with the correspondence in hand, she saw it to be a matter of policy and politics—though probably with a considerable amount of spite thrown in for good measure.

Livira had even researched Lord Algar himself, an investigation that had required resources outside the library. It seemed that although he was, as Meelan had told her, “old money,” Algar’s ancestral wealth and standing had been on the decline since his grandfather’s time. With this insight, his slavish championing of even the king’s most offhand declarations looked more desperate than evil. His co-opting of Serra Leetar from her intended studies to his own department was perhaps an attempt to stamp his authority over the “new money” that she represented, free of aristocratic roots but with growing influence. Livira still didn’t like the man, even a little bit, but she found that understanding him at least made him human, replacing the inexplicable villain that her child-self had painted as her nemesis with someone who was in their turn just another cog in the mechanism that was Crath City, subject to their own pressures and goals.

The sabbers’ advance had caused unheard-of upheaval and migration of displaced populations. The harshness of King Oanold’s response to that crisis rested on the idea that those coming in from the Dust were less than human. Livira’s placement in the library might become a rallying cry for those disputing the policy. In any event, it seemed that outside pressure was being exerted to make Deputy Synoth abstain from the next vote, leaving Yute in the minority.

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