Page 22 of The Book that Broke the World

What the skeer had built over the city was larger than the city had been and far taller than any of its towers. The structure climbed the slopes, encompassing the library entrance, clinging to the rock like a wasps’ nest or a strange organic growth. Its vast, segmented walls even looked like skeer armour, as if the whole thing might be one gigantic insect capable of biting the peak off a mountain. The entire structure, surely large enough to house a million skeer, was the curious, semi-translucent white of skeer plates, veined with deep blue that bled into lighter shades before rapidly succumbing to the white. Thick veins here, thin there, spreading into ever thinner traceries that escaped the eye.

“We need to leave,” Clovis hissed.

Evar was still marvelling at the size of the nest. “What do they all eat?”

“Us, if we’re not careful.” Her stomach rumbled as if to remind them that they needed to eat too.

It seemed impossible that her stomach had given them away, but coincidence was hard to credit as a skeer chose that moment to send its alarm throbbing through the gorge whilst the shriek of its spiracle exhalation ricocheted off the cliff faces high above them.

“Run!” Evar shouted, and they ran.

When planning a reunion with an old friend it is important to choose a venue with many exits. Who knows what the missing years will have wrought with the clay of memory?

Hello, Darkness, by Erasmus Young

CHAPTER 11

Arpix

Livira had dropped into Arpix’s life unexpectedly and, like a stone hitting the surface of a pool, she had disturbed the order of things. His order. Sending ripples to his farthest shores. She had been an unwelcome intrusion, a small, dark child, awkward in clothes that seemed to have been imposed upon her wildness much as she had been imposed upon his serenity.

It hadn’t taken long for Arpix to admit that, although many had praised his intelligence and even whispered of genius, this girl from the Dust with her bruised face and cut hands was of a different order. A higher shelf. Livira hadn’t so much disdained the library’s rules as wholly failed to acknowledge their existence. She had spied, stolen, trespassed, and run wild. And, in the end, Arpix had come to the conclusion that she was the breath that he hadn’t understood was required to keep him from suffocating.

All of them at that table had needed Livira, except perhaps Carlotte, who was her own brand of chaos. All of them had agreed on little concerning Livira save that you could never tell where she would lead you. It had astonished them that such a creature could have walked out of the Dust from a life spent within sight of a single well and a few acres of jarra beans and dry wheat. None of them, not Arpix, nor Meelan, nor Jella, could ever have predicted that Livira’s adventures would ultimately abandon them to a life lived within sight of a well out on the Dust and supported by a few acres of jarra beans.

A fiery death had been closing in on them from all sides. In Arpix’s nightmares, which were many and often, the library still burned, and he burned with it. In reality, they had escaped at the last moment after two assistants reached them through the flames and smoke. What had provoked the assistants to such compassion Arpix still didn’t know, but none of them had questioned it at the time. With the fire at their backs, they’d escaped the library and found themselves here, in the grip of another kind of heat, also pressing on all sides, and with the threat of a horrific but swift death replaced by that of starvation.

Arpix had expected to emerge in the Exchange, but perhaps the assistant who had used her blood to draw the portal had been tainted in some way—certainly she had been discoloured like her companion, but others had blamed that on their passage through the inferno. In any event, the portal had brought them directly to this place without the luxury of any of the Exchange’s choices. The portal had smoked away within the hour, presumably as the assistant’s blood was burned from the library floor.

“Someone’s coming.” Meelan saw it now.

Arpix’s considerable height advantage had enabled him to watch the dust trail for some moments already. It wasn’t a good sign, but on the other hand there wasn’t much they could do about it. It wasn’t as if running was an option.

“More than one?” Meelan’s habitual growl had become a rasp since living on the Dust. The dry air had put an edge on it. The sun had darkened him almost to Livira’s hue and bleached the blackness from the top layers of his hair, leaving a deep reddish tinge. The mere notion that one of the city’s richest families shared blood with the “dusters” would have given the king and Lord Algar apoplexy. Arpix was sad they would never be slapped in the face with that particular truth.

“Arpix?”

“Sorry. Just thinking.” Arpix adjusted his broad-brimmed hat. He’d woven it himself from dried bean leaves and was rather proud of it. “Yes, more than one. Three or four maybe.”

The strangers—sabbers of one kind or another—were approaching at speed from the direction of the mountains. The crimson glow that had touched on their dust cloud had faded to nothing as the sun set. Soon dusk would erase them completely.

“Should we set a light?” Jella came up beside them, precious hoe in hand.

When they’d first arrived none of them had known where they were. Or when. None of the librarians, not even Master Jost, had ever left Crath City and they had no way of knowing if the mountains to the west were “their” mountains or just... mountains. Fortunately, Salamonda had travelled in her youth and recognised, even from this angle, the peak that rose above their old home. With that information it fell to Jella, and her unsung fascination with maps, to deduce from memory that they had been deposited on a gods-forsaken plateau out in the Dust. Specifically, Arthran Plateau, the site of a ruined city of unknown age that had at several times in past millennia been excavated with varying degrees of success. Jella wasn’t sure but suspected that the city might have been named Arthran. That “might be” meant that they knew where they were with far more certainty than when they were.

“I say no to the light.” Meelan stepped into Arpix’s silence with his own opinion. “It’s not like we’ve ever had any luck with strangers.”

That was certainly true. Over the four years they’d spent in the hollows of ancient excavations wanderers had called in on them several times. Stealing hadn’t been the worst of it. Giles, one of the bookbinders, had been murdered in the night. Even the best of them had brought no food and had been an extra mouth to feed when they could hardly feed themselves. In fact, in the first year they had all nearly starved. Jella and Salamonda had fared best, and their labour had kept the rest alive, sowing a crop that came to harvest swiftly. Still, by the end of it, nourished by little but rats, Jella and Salamonda had been as slim as Meelan had been at the start, and Arpix a skeleton on the cusp of death. All of them had inhabited their clothes like strangers lost in billowing space. All except Radmelk, another of the bookbinders, who had been eaten by a horror that hid itself under the dust.

“They’re running,” Arpix said. “You don’t raise that much dust walking.” He had never expected to be an expert on dust clouds. “Coming from the mountains.”

“You don’t run unless you’re being chased.” Meelan rubbed his chin, staring at the shadowed mountains.

“And we know what’s chasing them,” Jella said. “I’ll get the fire bowl.”

—

By the time Jella returned with the perforated clay fire bowl and a sack of bean husks to burn in it, Jost had caught wind of the situation. She circled Jella, hound to prey, peppering the air with her objections. The lethargy that normally wrapped her fell away. Arpix had long noticed that whenever she had something to complain about Jost found new energy from somewhere. The rest of the time she had a tendency to survive on the labour of others. The authority that came with being a senior librarian had all but eroded to nothing over the years they’d spent scraping a living from the Dust, but Arpix still sometimes found himself following her orders out of habit.

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