Page 89 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Evar let himself be carried by the flow of people, exploring the night-time city at random, driftwood spinning in the current. Away from the heights of the grand square and the privilege displayed there, he saw tension in the people around him. Here, people walked with swift purpose. Many of the windows were boarded up. The streets were clear of vendors. Men and women shot each other serious looks. He came down through narrowing streets, hemmed in on all sides by tall buildings, every one of them home to families, sleeping children, pets perhaps. From time to time he would think that he’d seen one of his brothers among the sea of worried faces, or Clovis, but it was just that he’d spent so long with only those faces around him, and his mind tried to pattern anything even vaguely similar into the same person.

He saw Starval as a father, leading two small boys by the hands; Clovis as a merchant, selling her wares with a smile for every stranger; Kerrol in a passing carriage, dressed in a jacket with golden buttons, a young beauty by his side; Mayland watching him curiously from a high balcony. He even saw Livira’s face for a moment, on a girl passing by as she bit into an apple. He turned to follow her, only to see that it wasn’t her after all but someone older, lacking Livira’s sharp vitality. Ghosts. Nothing but ghosts of what could have been, seen only by a ghost of what was.

He wandered darker streets, passed the lights and music of taverns, heard laughter spill from the windows. Was she here? The author of his book? If that woman in the doorway were to turn, would he see her face and know her in that instant? Perhaps the pool had brought him here not for the death of a city but to seek her out. If she were here amid so many, would he find her, and would she see him where so many others could not?

Part of him felt foolish, mooning over a lover he couldn’t name, whose face still hid among the shadows of his mind. It was foolish. And yet... and yet... and yet she ran through his veins, and he would know no rest until the world finally returned them to each other. That was the simple truth of it, foolish or not.

Evar came to the city wall without really intending to. Up on the battlements he could see soldiers by the hundreds, their weapons bristling—some sort of projectile device he judged, driven by chemistry rather than tension. It seemed impossible that having just discovered the city it might be taken away within days by the enemy at its gates. The walls were so high, the populace so numerous in their houses of stone. From down among them their numbers and defences felt undefeatable. But the mountain’s elevation had offered Evar a different truth. And without guidance it seemed that the pools were likely to deliver travellers to—Evar struggled to put his thoughts into words—times of consequence. Tonight would be a test of that theory.

Evar climbed the steps to stand upon the ramparts. It wasn’t until he was up there that he thought to wonder how the steps bore him up when the wall would offer him no resistance if he were to walk into it. He decided to ignore the matter in case the world chose to agree with his logic and the ground swallowed him up.

For some while Evar stood with the soldiers gazing out over the ocean of campfires spread before them. He listened in on their conversation, most of it boasts and jokes. One trooper pointed the barrel of her weapon at the distant enemy.

“I’m not worried. Once they’re in range I can take down six of the bastards a minute with this beauty. No problem.”

One of her fellows snorted. “I could take more out in less time with my bare hands.”

“You’re going to have to,” said an older man, grizzled and hunched in his uniform. “There’s even more coming in from the west. Once that army arrives... then we’ll see.”

The soldiers spoke their words very strangely, drawing on the wrong parts, and sometimes seeming to make up entirely new ones. Evar had never heard an accent before and struggled to make sense of it all at times. He realised that this, as much as his personal lack of substance, might be an indicator of the passage of time between his imprisonment in the library and this city at the foot of the mountain. Just as the language within the library’s books drifted from century to century, so did the words spilling from the soldiers’ mouths. He was surprised, in fact, to find it so intelligible.

Evar spent most of the night walking among the soldiers on the wall. As much as the city fascinated him, he’d soon felt crowded by it, and preferred to be up where he had more space around him and fewer people at the same time. He sat listening to their bragging, complaints, and worries. The detail of their lives, passed between them in idle conversation, drew him in immediately, although it was of no consequence. It made him feel connected to the vast organism of the city by innumerable invisible lines of strangers’ narrative. As if he were back in the Exchange and had started to grow roots that would bind him into the network by which that great forest of trees was joined into one interlinked being of wood and sap.

Evar had never seen a dawn, but he’d read enough about them to understand that the paling stars and the shading towards grey in the eastern sky were heralding its arrival.

“Fire!”

“Where?”

“I see a million of them.” Staring at the enemy’s camp.

“Fire!” the man repeated, dragging another soldier around to face back into the city.

High on the northern slope, where the city lights stopped and the blackness of the mountain took over, there were fires. Three at least. Large ones.

“The bastards must have come over the ridge.”

“But the pass is guarded!”

“Over the ridge. Climbed the cliffs.”

“You can’t bring an army...” But it seemed that they could. Another building began to vomit flame from its roof.

Evar’s newfound love of fire started to wane. Even at this distance it looked to be a hungry thing when set loose and allowed to grow. Along the wall, officers began assembling squads to dispatch in order to mount a defence against whatever the dark slopes held.

Evar watched the bands of a dozen soldiers group into larger units and hasten away through the streets. The wind carried the faint strains of distant screaming now.

“Are you mad?” Evar said it to the nearest captain’s face and got no acknowledgement whatsoever. “It’s a diversion. A large force wouldn’t set fires at this stage!” Clovis would have had more to say, but the fraction of her knowledge that had passed to Evar seemingly exceeded that of the officers at the wall. Or perhaps it was just harder to make decisions when it was your people at risk, your soldiers who would live and die by the orders you gave.

The enemy timed their advance almost perfectly. Just as the first reports were coming back from the northern district citing small, swiftly moving bands of arsonists, the huge army beyond the walls surged forwards. The officers screamed for reinforcements. It seemed that the belief the enemy would wait for their second, support army had lulled the city forces into a false sense of security.

Evar stood and looked out at the advance from the parapets. All around him soldiers levelled their projectile weapons.

“Sabbers.” Evar said it in a flat voice. The enemy were not people of a different nation—they were a different breed entirely, the same that had wreaked such slaughter among Clovis’s family and friends. From the walls they looked tiny, as if he could wade among them laying waste, but Evar knew just how dangerous they were up close.

They came in a horde, running for all they were worth, knowing that they crossed a killing ground. Among them they bore a great number of ladders capable of overreaching the walls. Some carried projectile weapons not unlike those held by the soldiers on the ramparts. As they came closer, and the howl of their battle cries rose above the dusty thunder of their feet, Evar could see that their weapons looked more primitive than those around him, older designs perhaps, and that for every one of them armed in such a manner there were twenty with only spears and bows. Still, their intent was clear. To absorb the soldiers’ wrath with their flesh. To run over the bodies of the fallen. To scale the walls. To let their sheer numbers and the tide of their anger carry them into the city and overwhelm everything before them.

Evar looked away, along the line of defenders. He had watched one sabber slaughter already and stood helpless as people died around him. He hadn’t the stomach to do it again.

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