Page 96 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira didn’t want to be safe. She wanted to be there, with Evar, right at the heart of the library’s mystery, fighting beside him, if that was what it took. She wondered about him often, about whether he remained frozen in that moment or if his life had moved on. Whether he had found the woman he’d spent so long dreaming about, or perhaps had realised that she stood as a cipher for something unobtainable, and had settled on choices closer to hand. Most of all, though, she wondered how to get back to him. He’d become her unobtainable, and until she found him again she didn’t think she would be able to untangle the real person from the myth she’d made of him, or her own emotions from the desire for resolution.

Her rude ejection from the Exchange had never been something that she’d come to terms with. In a strange and unreasonable way, she felt almost as if she were trapped in her current life—despite the privilege and abounding opportunity—much as a dirty child had once felt trapped in a life anchored by a single well within the dryness of the Dust. Only, this time, it was the Exchange and its many pathways that she wanted to escape to, rather than the city and its marvels.

She had tried to live every day, squeeze out of the hours as much progress as she could. And yet, somehow, three years had conspired to get past her and leave her, looking back, amazed to find so many days stacked behind her. She was striding towards her twentieth year, and yet the Exchange and Evar seemed no closer.

—

Livira’s elevation to librarian brought with it a surprising number of privileges. She had managed to secure work for both Neera and Katrin within the library, Neera with her quick mind fitted in well among the bookbinders and Jella had taken her under her wing. Katrin, who now had a husband in the city, helped in the kitchens and proved popular with everyone, particularly the young men.

Livira’s main official duty was to return books to the shelves, something that rewarded her with ample opportunity for exploration. There were other librarians tasked with recovering books that had not been brought back to the library. Sometimes they went out into the streets flanked by library guards in their owl helms. The borrowing terms were generous, and loans could be renewed repeatedly, stretched out across decades in some cases, but eventually all books had to be returned first to the library and then to the shelves.

Livira enjoyed bringing back the books that had spent longest journeying out in the world. Perhaps a rogue volume passed from friend to friend, home to home, across the city. One story finding root in scores of brains, its characters becoming friends to dozens of readers, discussed in their drawing rooms, thrown into new adventures in the minds of strangers. Or maybe a tome that had waited in one small office all those years, bathed in the same pipe smoke, polished by the same hands, too precious to be returned, simply waiting for its temporary new owner to lose interest or more likely to age and die. Or a journal that had travelled far beyond the walls, sailed seas she would never lay eyes upon, and come to rest in a distant city of spires and spice, or log roofs and relentless snows. They all came back in time.

Returning books to the shelves sometimes took her out to the very extremes of the catalogued space, deep into the loneliness of the library. At such times her mind was wont to return to the assistant in Chamber 7 whose grey flesh had been further corrupted by the Escape that had sought to kill Livira. The idea that it had found its way past the doors that confined it and now haunted the larger library had never left her. When she ventured out to the most distant shelves, the ever-present whisper of fear became an audible mutter, and on occasion, as she turned a blind corner, a shout.

Livira, though, had never been one to let fear confine her. She enjoyed her job and met its challenges with determination. Although she would never admit it to any fellow librarians, Livira liked to sniff the books she carried back into the vastness of the library. Each told a story. It was at such times—despite Yute’s talk of how much harm the flow of books might do along with the good—that she felt happiest about her task and about the fact that the library existed.

Returning books was, however, very much an afterthought for Livira, no matter that Master Jost might consider it her sole duty. In truth, Livira’s primary occupation was the search for a way back to the Exchange. And day after week after month after year, her failure to make progress ate at her until it poisoned her joy and stole her sleep. She had done it twice, albeit with the Raven’s help. And what was the Raven, save for something made by men? Livira had, for her entire life, been built around the asking of questions and the finding of answers. The white doors of the library that would not open for her were questions, the Exchange and every one of its portals were questions, and the need for answers was a hunger, always growing, never fed.

Livira had known hunger of many types. What united them was the lengths to which they would push a person in order that they be satisfied. There were other doors—doors that she shouldn’t go through uninvited, but doors that she could go through. Doors behind which she suspected answers lay. Each page she turned without solution was a step towards those doors. And the door which loomed largest in her imagination as her third year in the white crawled by was that of the head librarian.

Livira still hadn’t seen the head librarian’s index, but she did at least now have unfettered access to both the Kensan and Helfac Indexes, Kensan and Helfac being the two most recent head librarians prior to the start of the current incumbent’s tenure. A tenure that had seemingly begun long before Livira was even born.

The Kensan Index had led Livira to a fascinating book on library guides, one that even talked about the Raven. It seemed that despite his erratic nature the Raven was held to be one of the most capable of all the known guides, able to open a great number—though far from all—of the otherwise inaccessible chambers. The book had advice on tempting the Raven to show himself and on securing his cooperation but advised that attempts to capture him had ended poorly in the past. The author had dedicated his final chapter to discussion of the library’s most powerful guide, one that could allegedly enter any chamber, and which knew the location of so many books that its knowledge rivalled even that of an assistant.

Unfortunately, someone—and Livira suspected the current head librarian—had meticulously blacked out all the lines that might help the reader locate this ultimate guide and persuade it to help. Careful study showed that in one place the censor’s pen had failed to entirely black out the guide’s name and Livira’s best guess was that it started with a “V” or maybe “W.” The only other useful piece of information was a final line cautioning against enraging the guide, describing it as what Livira translated from the Arctilan as “red in tooth and claw.”

Reading that particular line had put Livira in mind of the claw she had once found among the aisles and that years ago she had given to Evar. She thought of him often now, seeing him as she had left him: tall, lean, athletic, battling a host of nightmare foes, the claw jutting from his fist. The years had frayed her belief that she would find him again. She knew in her heart that he had moved on, found the object of his search, explored a multitude of strange worlds with her. They probably had children. Even so, Livira still dreamed of him sometimes, dreamed that she could find a way back to him, in that same place and time, and somehow save him as he had saved her.

—

As a fully fledged librarian Livira had expected to meet the head librarian soon after donning the white. The woman had, after all, approved her appointment in defiance of the king’s wishes. In reality it took three years even to catch sight of her, and it would have taken longer but for the fact that Livira decided to break into her private quarters to steal a book.

All that Livira’s new status earned her was the right to know the head librarian’s name—Yamala. Requests to see her were politely declined. Written questions pressed into the hands of more senior librarians, even the one Livira entrusted to the gnarled hands of the ancient deputy, Synoth, who had once voted against expelling her, went unanswered. Yute declined to make an introduction. “Yamala is very... focused. You need to earn her attention. It’s not something I can give to you.”

As a librarian, Livira also learned that the politics of the upper echelons, while not literally as cutthroat as the trainees imagined, were complex and often ruthless. Despite the learned nature of all the participants, it was a matter of record that not all transitions from deputy to head librarian were bloodless. Not all head librarians had gracefully retired or died peacefully in post. And even some of those who had died peacefully were thought to have had a little help. In turn, head librarians in the past had been known to wield the Library Guard as a personal weapon, excising any threat they perceived to their position. A year before Livira’s arrival a deputy head librarian named Abercroth had failed to return from a trip among the aisles. Abercroth, it was said, had been a particular thorn in Yamala’s side, and nobody was saying she didn’t have a hand in his demise.

She also had a fearsome reputation for disciplining the junior librarians. Yute said that her logic was that librarians who came up through the ranks knowing they could be tied to a post and beaten for minor infringements of the rules, and summarily dismissed for more serious misdemeanours, were likely to be too scared to plot against her when they rose in station. He didn’t sound as if he approved of that particular state of affairs.

In his classroom, Master Logaris, despite being built like an ogre, had doled out only the occasional cuff around the head for inattention. Livira had imagined she was leaving all that behind her on reaching the dignity of higher office. It had alarmed her to learn that she was instead entering a harsher regime. When she had returned to the classroom for the last time to collect her stuff, she had mentioned the matter to her old teacher. Master Logaris had told her with a wan smile that he hoped he’d taught her to follow the rules, and that no librarian deserving of their robes would put themselves in a position where a beating would be necessary. The class had laughed at that, several of the younger ones miming the anticipated thrashings. Livira had left, head held high, followed by sniggering and the image of Arpix’s frown.

Yute’s advice remained simple and unambiguous. “Don’t get caught,” he’d cautioned her, without accusing her of any misdemeanour.

Returns might be Livira’s official business, but her focus for the three years she’d worn the white had been a very different sort of return: one that brought her back to the Exchange. She saw the place as the key to the whole library. Also, Evar was there.

For the first two years she worked alone, spending all her spare time, and much of the time she was supposed to spend on other missions, on this one quest. In the third year Arpix gained his white robe and she had recruited him to help. Finally, officially allowed to follow his own whims within the library, Arpix also visited the Mechanism, accelerating the pace of his studies considerably. Livira was unsure how many other librarians knew it existed but was certain only a few of the highest ranked shared the secret. Nothing blocked access to the Mechanism save for tight lips and the length of the trek required to find it.

Livira did little to aid Yute in his efforts to slow down the breakneck speed of progress that the library fuelled in the city below and the kingdoms beyond. His arguments had been compelling: there was plenty of evidence of cyclic disaster visited upon mankind by its own hand. However, the current evidence pointed strongly at a different and more immediate doom. The mounting armies of sabbers, drifting in from the east, posed a clear and present threat.

Of late the sabbers had been combining their natural physical advantages with technology stolen from those they’d conquered or had traded for with the foolish nations of the south. Sabbers with arrow-sticks and steam-powered engines of war had even been seen from the walls of Crath.

In the face of such immediate danger Livira couldn’t bring herself to deny the people anything that might save them. Her hatred of the sabbers wouldn’t let her. If her people had carried arrow-sticks of their own that day the sabbers came to the settlement, then the lone sabber’s arrogant advance would have ended very differently!

Yute accepted her decision without rebuke—which had weighed far more heavily on Livira than any rebuke would have. Even so, she kept her resolve. The idea that she might inform on Yute was not one she considered for longer than it took the darkest corner of her mind to whisper it. Each of them, she decided, would have to tread the path dictated by their own conscience.

Yute had been recruiting outside the Allocation Hall for years, ignoring the system in favour of fresh blood, new ideas, and outside perspectives. He’d said he wanted Livira to find her own path, and had the wisdom not to gripe when she chose not to follow the one he’d chosen for himself. For Yute there was a bigger war than any that the sabbers might bring to Crath’s door. A war involving the library and how it bound humanity to a seemingly endless cycle of destruction. The deputy sought to join the battle between abstract figures like the library’s mythical founder, Irad, and his brother Jaspeth, both of whom went by many names. But Livira’s extended family laboured in the city streets and she cared more about their immediate future than the destiny of races.

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