Page 94 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“I don’t know.” It pained her to admit it with the vastness of the library open to her. “We did. But a long time ago. It wasn’t any ancestor of Oanold’s. At least not any he can name.”

“Why are we where we are?” Yute asked. “If it was so long ago and the library has been here all that time too? Why didn’t we take flight to the moons long ago?”

Livira had an answer to this one. “Wars. We keep having wars.”

“Wars so devastating that we forget how to make a gas lamp or a clock?”

“I... guess so.” She tried to imagine what the last one must have been like.

Yute looked grim. “We have wars so devastating that history stops being recorded.” He took a small glass jar from his robes and held it before the light. Livira, being from the Dust, could hardly fail to see that the jar’s contents had once been all she knew beyond the immediate circle of huts that were her world. “Dust?”

“Cities. Bones. Iron. Cement.” Yute turned it over in his white hands. “Wars so devastating that they turned everything people had built into this, and let the wind take it.”

“I don’t understand...” Though maybe she did.

“The library teaches us how to do this. Over and over again it has taught us enough to know how to burn our world to the bedrock, but not enough to stop us from doing so. There’s a point that all societies reach. I call it the fire-limit, though whether by ‘fire’ we mean actual fire or something more deadly depends on the circumstances. Anyway, the fire-limit is when a people become advanced enough to start a fire but lack the resources to put it out when it spreads.”

“What happens to them?” Livira asked.

“They burn.” Yute replaced the jar. “That is one of the library’s curses.”

“It sounds like our curse,” Livira said.

“The library is our memory. It’s all that survives.” Yute made a grim smile. “Perhaps it’s part of us.”

“What are the other curses?” Livira wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“One’s enough for tonight,” Yute said. “It’s been an eventful day.”

“What can we do about it?” Livira shook her head. “I mean—it’s going to happen again?”

“Slow things down.”

“Slow things down? That’s it? How will that help?”

“I’m not sure it will.” Yute leaned forward, his face illuminated again. “There was a time before the library when these advances must have been made without help. A time when the world was so new and green and full of resource that our population grew so vast it threw up the geniuses needed to unlock one secret after another using nothing but their cleverness. I don’t know how long that took, and clearly it ended badly at some point. But without the library and with the numbers we have now it might take ten thousand years to accomplish what has been achieved in the less than two centuries since we started making records again. But you can count these cycles like layers in the rock. Literally as strata in the ground.”

Livira thought of the well, cutting down through all those layers. She’d seen it with her own eyes back at the settlement. She’d seen it all before she knew anything at all. “You’re slowing things down? Just you?”

Yute shrugged. “I’ve been recruiting.”

Time can stutter, it can drag, crawl, run, race, and, on occasion, fly. But its favourite form of locomotion has always been to skip. Few lives are lived without the punctuation of moments when we realise with sudden shock that a year, two years, maybe two dozen, have got behind us, sneaking by without permission and propelling us into a future we hardly imagined.

From the River to the Sea, by Mercury Wells

CHAPTER 41

Livira

The boom of an arrow-stick shook Livira from her walking daydream. She looked up and found herself halfway across the grand plaza, facing the lesser palace where three years earlier she’d been appointed to the rank of full librarian.

All across the great, paved square, Crath City’s best-heeled citizens paused in the midst of their distractions and looked up, seeking the source of the blast—not close, but not comfortably distant either.

“Chemical ’stick.” Meelan—still a trainee—set down the book satchels burdening him. Nobody called them arrow-sticks anymore, just ’sticks. The newest ones used a chemical explosion to shoot forth a spinning lead cone amid a puff of stinking smoke. The small projectiles looked far less worrying than a long, sharp arrow, but they could put a hole through an inch of oak at a hundred yards.

“You think it’s a sabber?” Livira might be pushing twenty but somehow even the mention of sabbers put her back in the middle of the Dust and made her feel ten again. And over the past couple of years their raids had reached over the city walls on a growing number of occasions.

The screams turned her around. A lone sabber tore from the gap between the Allocation Hall and the Palace of Justice. It raced out into the square, long limbed, overtopping even the tallest man by a head. Shouts of pursuit to the rear, terrified men and women scattering before it. The creature’s long dark mane streamed behind it. The curved length of a thin sword cut flashes from the sunlight.

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