Page 87 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“You haven’t got an arrow-stick yet?” Livira resolved to tease the soldier in defiance of her grim mood. Whatever the deputies did to her tonight she was damned if she was going to let them see that it hurt her.

“No good in close quarters on a dark night.”

“I heard they use chemical explosives to throw the lead balls these days.” Meelan spoke up. “Over great distances.” He seemed keen to earn Malar’s approval—which surprised Livira more than his up-to-date knowledge of arrow-sticks.

Malar shrugged. “The longer the distance over which you conduct your murders the more likely they are to happen. Not sure that’s a good thing. But when it comes to blasting sabbers from the ramparts of the city wall anything that works is fine by me.”

“You don’t swear as much,” Livira said. “You used to swear all the time.”

Malar nodded at Yute’s back. “Don’t want to make an albino blush. Certainly not one who pays a fair wage.”

“As long as you’re not going soft,” Livira teased.

Malar narrowed his eyes at her and for a heartbeat she thought he might actually attack her. “When a dog stops barking, that’s when you should be most afraid of its bite.”

—

Yute led them down the stairs cut into the rock slopes that rose behind the great square. He pointed to some dark entrances in the steepest parts.

“People used to live there. The first homes here weren’t built from stones or bricks or sticks, they were caves that just happened to be here. Later people made them bigger. Made more of them.” He paused to look at one of them, a doorway or a window, Livira couldn’t tell. Yute sighed and led on. “I need new streets to be old on. Walking the same places I walked when things were so different—it makes me forget who I am, when I am.”

“Careful there, Master Yute.” Malar spoke up unexpectedly. “Nostalgia’s a dangerous thing. Especially on steps like these.”

Meelan, still more unexpectedly, joined in, quoting from a text Livira had helped him translate from Relquian the week before. “ ‘Nostalgia is the best and the worst feeling—complex—nothing has the ability to so delight and wound us simultaneously, except perhaps for love.’ ”

Livira watched the three men in the starlight. She expected philosophy from Yute, but the other two? It really did seem that they were descending towards her execution, drawing out each yard as if to wrestle meaning from the grasp of each remaining moment.

Yute, ignoring Malar’s warning about the steps, turned to look at Meelan with a mixture of appreciation and amusement. “What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts—and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.” His voice carried a measure of pain, as if he felt that edge himself. He stumbled on the next step and both trainees caught him in an awkward clinch that might have seen the three of them pitch to their destruction. Malar said nothing.

They descended in silence after that. Livira turned her gaze towards the rest of the city. Many hundreds of lights burned within the windows of the grand buildings around the great square, and lanterns dotted the plaza itself. Ground-based constellations aping the night’s glory.

Yute steered a path around the outer walls of the lesser palace gardens and into the square. It surprised Livira that the library was conducting its business outside the complex. Her reading had led her to believe that nothing undermines a faith so much as exposing the inner workings, and whilst the citizens of Crath might swear allegiance to a hundred different gods, they put their faith in the library.

When they reached the square Livira could immediately tell that the well-dressed crowd was in the grip of a current and that the flow was taking them to the steps of the lesser palace. Yute allowed himself to be carried along.

Livira started to drag her heels and would have fallen back but for Malar taking her elbow.

“People say that murders happen in dark alleys. Really, it’s easier in a crowd. A quick stab, and leave before anyone understands what’s happened.” The way Malar said it made Livira wonder if he’d had personal experience and on which side of the blade.

Yute glanced back and seemed to misunderstand Livira’s reluctance as being concern about her attire rather than her fate. He tried to jolly her along, though the tension in his face and in his voice rather undermined the effort. “If anyone asks why Livira’s in black we can say she’s the new head librarian and has come to assess my performance.”

Drawn along in Yute’s wake, Livira found herself walking through the palace gates. Malar set a hand briefly to her shoulder and fell back, remaining outside. A score of guards watched on, arrayed around the gateposts in gleaming armour, the scarlet plumes above their helms bobbing in the breeze. Livira doubted their steel breastplates would stop one of the lead balls from the latest arrow-sticks, but they looked impressive.

To her amazement Livira was allowed to follow Yute into the palace itself, climbing marble steps and passing through a doorway as large as a chamber door in the library. Tiers of seating wrapped the huge hall that the doorway gave onto. The gas lamps that had lit the courtyard marched on into the hall, bathing it in a steady light that was kinder than the library’s merciless illumination, and had the decency to cast shadows.

Almost all the benches were already crammed with the high and mighty, glittering in diamonds, cloth-of-gold, silks and lace, ornamentation of all manner, a dazzling array that made even Meelan’s finest look merely commonplace and rather restrained. There were hundreds of them, some more lordly than others, many merely richly attired but lacking gravitas. Livira struggled to understand what was going on.

“Over here.” Yute swerved to the left, aiming towards an empty space in the front and lowest tier.

Livira sat, sandwiched between Meelan and Yute, the former scowling as if he’d rather be translating a page on Galathain economics, the latter as serious as Livira had ever seen him. All around the hall the last few empty places were being filled.

Livira could restrain herself no longer. “What’s going on?”

But even as she asked, the hubbub of conversation all around her died away, leaving an expectant silence. Trumpets sounded, a sudden blare that made Livira jolt. People entered at the rear of the hall. More gas lamps ignited, pushing back the shadows there and revealing a throne that Livira had failed to notice while busy gawking at the lords and their families.

A puffy-faced man in long purple robes trimmed with gold came forward, surrounded by attendants. He looked old, though the application of thick paints and a heavy wig full of tightly curled grey hair sought to disguise the path the years had trampled across him. He was overweight but sagging, as if he had once been decidedly heavier and the skin that had stretched to accommodate that bulk now had no purpose but to hang in folds.

The man seated himself on the throne. An attendant in black lowered a heavy golden crown onto the wig. It wasn’t until that point that Livira finally realised she was looking at King Oanold. Two guards stepped up to flank the throne. Two large men carrying a new design of arrow-stick. Ceremonial swords be damned when it came to the serious business of protecting the monarch.

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