Page 105 of The Book that Broke the World

“You did that? You killed all those people?” Even with Evar dying in her lap and a vast killing machine looming over her, Livira shuddered with the chill of that memory. The image of so many bodies lying silent and dead in their homes had never left her.

Hellet inclined his head and turned to focus on opposing the construct’s efforts to reach them. A true assistant could have reduced it to dust with a wave of its hand, but Hellet’s doubts were visibly corrupting the white flesh he wore.

“Dancing?” Livira remembered it. That first kiss. She’d drawn Evar into it. Her hand tightened in his mane and, weak as he was, Evar raised his own to cover hers.

Before the kiss they had danced into the sky, not knowing that a city of humans and canith lay poisoned beneath their feet. Livira lifted her face to meet the hot copper stare of the creature trying to reach them. “But... we didn’t know about the dead. We’d just arrived. We didn’t mean to disrespect anyone.”

**

“Even now, even here at the end she lies!” Celcha had no control over her avatar: its purpose lay encoded in the lore that had been written through it. But if she had, she would have stamped the liar underfoot and silenced her falsehoods in one violent moment.

**

Hellet’s words came strained with effort, spoken to the monster before him. “She believed you were the ghosts who had paved my way to the library and schooled me in the arts of alchemy with a flawed book insufficient to the task.”

“Tell her we’re not!” Livira said, shocked.

Hellet slid back several inches before strengthening his defence and bringing the ganar to a halt once more. “This is not Celcha. She learned the ways of the Exchange better than you have and furnished herself with both education and influence.” Hints of pride and sorrow underwrote his voice. “She seeded this part of the library with these agents of her revenge, skipping through the years in her hunt. She lies ahead of us now, unable to interfere in these events. All we have is the anger she left behind—the hurt she imbued in this metal hulk. She is the unintended consequence of Mayland’s manipulations. I”—he touched his chest—“am the intended consequence. A fractured being so deeply wounded by the library that even when taken in as part of it I have worked for its destruction. I am the poisoned seed that he has sown.”

**

Mayland? Celcha tore one hand slowly down across her face, careless of the furrows her nails carved. Mayland? Maybe... She looked once more towards the canith at the Mechanism’s door. One tall, one short. She had never seen Starve clearly. Never more than glimmers. An arm, a leg...

**

With a grunt, Hellet thrust forward and the construct went staggering back a dozen yards. He half turned from it, staring not at Livira but at something unseen, standing between them. “Even understanding the wrong done to me by Mayland, I had to appreciate the elegance of the lesson, and the truth of it. The library places the power to commit vast crimes into the hands of those wholly unready for such responsibility. To fight it I took the white, and stepped out of time, losing who I was, losing everything save my intent.”

And although Livira was no longer sure the assistant was speaking to her she understood his meaning. She too had lost herself in the timeless white, rarely surfacing, and even then unable to explain herself to the mayfly lives flowering and dying around her.

Veins of ivory, old and almost yellow, were spreading across Hellet as he spoke. Grey fault lines showed themselves across his back. Livira knew the marks for what they were: the weakness and corruption that marred the assistant’s perfection when the spirit within stepped out of the timeless clarity of its view and muddied itself with the now—with real emotions and desires.

**

“Hellet? Why did you let me...” But it wasn’t true. He had asked her not to, and who knew how much effort those words had cost him? Words that Celcha had ignored. “Those two?” She looked at the pair of canith beside the Mechanism. “Maybe and Starve?” A cold horror enfolded her, prickling every hair she owned. All her labours culminated here. A vast tonnage of steel-wrapped vengeance. Now poised to snuff out innocent lives, this Livira and this Evar, within view of the true culprits. “No...”

**

The automaton lunged again and this time Hellet slid back several yards, throwing Clovis clear. Kerrol rushed to his aid, holding the orb ahead of him in both hands. He’d wrapped cloth about his palms, anticipating the heat that had come when Evar used it to ward off the smaller automaton. Already the orb was shaking, its edges blurring.

Clovis rolled to her feet and scrambled to guard Evar and Livira. She snarled up at the construct, showing bloody teeth as she crouched beside Evar, blade raised, her other hand on his shoulder. “There was no time. I couldn’t leave you to this thing, brother.”

“Wait!” Despite Evar lying at her feet so close to death that it chilled his flesh, despite the imminence of her own demise beneath the ganar’s fists, Livira wasn’t ready to concede the library’s guilt. It seemed to her that this wasn’t something random happening to them as they escaped Irad and Jaspeth’s audience. This was the same argument, made flesh. “Wait! If Celcha had known more, she wouldn’t have set this thing loose on us. If you had known more, you wouldn’t have killed a city. Shouldn’t you have known more, not less?” Livira turned to Yute’s daughter, the white child, for support. “That’s why you never came back to your parents? They’d given up immortality for a dream you didn’t share. You were truer to Irad’s vision than his own angels were. They were part of the compromise, feeding knowledge out in dribs and drabs, through a filter. You left because you hated what they stood for but loved who they were—you thought opposing them would hurt them more than losing you?”

“She was wrong.” Yute’s quiet voice reached her.

“Will it go?” Livira asked Hellet. “If I let it have me?”

“There’s Evar too.” Hellet’s whole body shook with the effort it took to hold back his sister’s vengeance. Small shards of him fell away, tinkling as they hit the ground. Behind him Kerrol leaned into the effort, pushing the orb’s aura at the ganar while the cloth about his hands smoked and charred.

“Evar too? Can’t she see he’s dying!” Livira’s breath hitched in her chest and a painful sob broke from her. “Can’t she leave him be?”

**

“Stop!” Celcha shouted it at her own creation with the same force she had screamed into Livira’s face just a short while before. And it ignored her as completely as the girl had. Celcha threw herself at the metal leg and rebounded. The thing had been designed to see and track ghosts. Even to touch them. Celcha fell back, feeling the hatred that had leaked out in the brief contact now crawling across her skin. “Stop!”

**

Livira set Evar’s head gently from her lap and stood up, knowing that even if the chance that her death would satisfy the construct was slim, she would put it to the test and take that gamble. She walked steadily towards the huge automaton, not looking back even once since she knew the sight of Evar’s face might halt her in her tracks.

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