Page 56 of The Book that Broke the World

Livira set aside her sword and sent Amble ambling away with an iron-gloved slap to his haunches. She focused on her guest’s advance, setting her mind to the task of resisting the attack she constituted. Where the story thinned, Livira shored it up with detail, explanations, and justifications. Whatever the challenge, she met it. This was her world. She could marshal the forces of history and of magic to her cause. Chance itself would dance to her tune. Coincidence was her messenger boy.

The white child’s progress slowed. For the first time she seemed to feel the slope and to have to fight the tug of the heather, and the soft sucking of the peaty ground. The bleached area around her shrank and shrank again. Her wake narrowed from broad swathe to thin trail.

When the child was no more than twenty yards away, leaning into the brisk wind that now plucked at her white wrappings, Livira hailed her unwanted visitor.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

“For the library.” The girl’s voice reached her through the wind’s complaints, thin but clear.

“You’re wrong,” Livira protested. “Taking the book back will save the library. The assistant said so.”

“The... assistant... lied.” The girl struggled closer.

“They don’t lie,” Livira called out, though even as she said it she realised that she had no proof either way. She wanted the book so she could exist in the same time and space as Evar once more. The rest was conjecture. She didn’t even know where she stood in the library’s great war. She loved the library, or at least she loved books. She valued the knowledge and the passion they held. The memory of races and species beyond knowing. The culture and achievements of untold millennia. And yet she had seen how access to such riches could accelerate the seemingly never-ending cycle of destruction, the race from pointed rocks to nuclear fires in which worlds burned. Yute championed the current compromise, and even that carried a sharp edge with which one civilisation after the next seemed determined to slice its own throat. Yamala had wanted freer access. Perhaps something like Yute’s ring that held within it every book ever written and would not only translate the contents for you but find, within that endless forest of pages, the information you sought. If Yute’s compromise was handing toddlers a sharp knife, then Yamala wanted to place a brimming cauldron of burning oil into their arms and advise them to run downstairs. These were the solutions offered by the children of Irad, the founder. And his brother Jaspeth? He seemed to want the library erased and for the survivors of each apocalypse to start from scratch without even history to remind them of their ancestors’ mistakes.

Whoever was lying, the child or the assistant, it made little difference. Livira couldn’t choose between the options. She just wanted her life back, or, failing that, some new life where she could speak to Evar and be heard. Take his hand and be held.

“I just want to go home,” Livira said. The girl was close now, mere yards off, pulling herself forward using the gorse bushes, her hands bloody.

“You don’t know me?” The girl looked up, pink eyes pinning Livira with the coldness of their regard. “They say to know a person you need only walk a mile in their shoes...”

“They do say that,” Livira agreed through clenched teeth.

“And still you don’t know me? I’d heard that you were clever.”

“I don’t understand.” Livira’s head ached from trying to keep everything together. The child’s influence was undermining everything, chewing away at it, sucking out the colour. Livira’s grasp on the story had almost been sufficient, but now it was as if, one by one, her fingers were being peeled back from the prize that she had so nearly wrestled into her possession.

Something tickled at the back of her mind even as everything she wanted was being taken from her control. Another story. A fable like this one. A tale that wormed through the foundations of an unexpectedly large and diverse collection of literary traditions.

“Rumpelstiltskin!”

“That’s not me.” The white child’s smile revealed white teeth in pale gums, the smear of blood across them shockingly crimson. She was closer now, almost close enough to touch.

Her shoes? The blood’s crimson flowed briefly into a vision of ruby slippers. No, not those. The answer came in a moment of epiphany just as the small white hand reached for her. Two ordinary-looking leather shoes. The middle pair of three. Arranged in a neat row at the bottom of a cupboard in an attic room where the dust lay like sorrow.

“Those shoes felt so strange on my feet.” Livira’s paralysis released her, and she took a step backwards, avoiding the girl’s clutching fingers. “You’re Yute’s lost daughter.”

The child stopped as if she’d walked into an invisible wall.

“Your name is...” Livira hunted the vaults of her memory. Yute must have mentioned it once, surely. Or if not him it must have tumbled past Salamonda’s lips on the ceaseless flow of chatter, even if just once over all the years.

The girl narrowed her eyes and pressed on through whatever barrier had stopped her.

“Yolanda,” Livira said. “Your name is Yolanda.”

And Livira was back in the reading room—holding the book—watching as a huge insectoid Escape scattered reading desks in its hunt for Evar and Starval. Livira didn’t remember the scene, but she knew both brothers survived it. She turned and saw herself, or rather the assistant she’d been trapped within for so long. The Assistant watched her, its expression neutral, eyes glowing a soft blue. For some reason Livira’s shoulder ached.

“You got it!” Malar stepped in between the assistant and Livira. “We should go.”

Behind him the Escape swept the assistant up in its huge beetle jaws and began to pound her into the ground. Livira looked away and saw Evar emerging from his hiding place, his brother Starval trying to stop him. Even here when Livira was buried inside the assistant he couldn’t abandon her, or perhaps he just couldn’t abandon anyone.

“Come on!” Malar grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly away. “This has all happened. He’s fine. We need to go.”

Livira didn’t fight him. She let herself be drawn away. Her last glimpse of Evar was as the Escape abandoned its prize and began to chase him instead.

—

Malar brought her back to the pool. The book seemed to burn in her hands, radiating some fraction of the heat of the fire that had failed to consume it.

---