Page 59 of The Book that Broke the World

Celcha started back the way she’d come. What she’d done could not be put right. That left only vengeance.

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She reached the wolf’s head entrance still fuelled by anger, hot with the rage that kept the aches and exhaustion of the day from claiming her. The platform where the assistants had gathered was deserted. Hellet had vanished. The yellow fog trickled from the stone jaws now, reaching no higher than her knees, and swirled away along the cliff faces to the west.

She climbed the steps and stood between the two puddles of blood that the assistants had left behind during their transformation. Celcha could only guess that one of them had been Yute, and that in the face of the slaughter below, the end of the first peace between human and canith, neither could keep to whatever vows had bound them to their service. The emotion that she’d sensed running through Yute, his talk of timeliness and influence, must have driven him to regain a mortal form and step back into the flow of time to see if he could do a better job of guiding the species from inside it than he had from the outside. His partner must have shared the sentiment.

The shimmer of light across the blood’s surface hypnotised Celcha’s eyes. Despite her resolve to search the poisoned halls for her brother, something kept her there on the windy platform. Surely Hellet wouldn’t have waded through the toxic gas. If he’d wanted to make an end of himself there were plenty of cliffs offering a cleaner exit.

She turned, meaning to go and look over the nearest one. She might stand there awhile, considering her choices with a view of the city before her and a precipice at her toes. She took one step before something seized hold of her ankle and pulled her back. A moment later she tumbled into a fall that felt further than anything the local cliffs had to offer.

Celcha hit the ground hard, face forward, and lay there, winded.

Grass tickled her cheek. A warm sun pressed against her back, the light dappled around her, lacking the sharpness that had illuminated the mountainside. She knew she wasn’t there anymore. She had never touched grass. She knew it only from glimpses of the palace grounds. The earth beneath her fingers was soft, alive, dependable.

Slowly, she raised her head. Trees surrounded her. Ancient, gnarled trees, the relief of their bark a hundred times craggier than the oldest human. She’d yet to see a truly old ganar. Trees and more trees, marching away in vaguely ordered lines, interspersed by pools of light, just like the one she’d fallen into, only smooth-edged circles rather than the puddled gore of a slaughter.

She sat with a groan, aware that the memory of recent horrors wanted to press its way back into her mind. To hold them off, she tried to keep as still as possible and continue to soak up the strangeness of the place, not the least of which was that she had reached it just by falling over. No, she hadn’t fallen. Someone had pulled her. She turned sharply and standing just to her left was an assistant.

“Where are we?”

“This is the Exchange.”

Celcha looked around again, checking that it was all still there, still real. “You pulled me through this...” She waved her hand at the pool. “Door? Are they all doors?”

The assistant nodded.

“Why?” The question felt too big to expect an answer to. She narrowed it. “Why did you pull me through?”

Instead of answering, the assistant opened his hand to reveal a small black circle against the whiteness of his palm. A hole almost, though one that revealed only darkness. Celcha moved closer and as she did so she saw that it was a black ball, not a circle, just so black that it offered only two dimensions to the eye.

“What is it?”

“Something that escaped,” the assistant said. As he spoke the sphere moulded its shape into that of a miniature black stallion which galloped around the perimeter of his hand, then to a black fire which raged in his palm before changing again, into a butterfly, like a piece of the night sky. It fluttered away among the trees. “Like this place, it is built of expectation and imagination. If you had had more fear in you, it would have reflected your nightmare back at you. But you are not scared anymore. You have lost too much for that.”

Celcha’s loss settled onto her, sinking into her bones. The day’s events couldn’t be held back any longer. If the blackness had still been in the assistant’s palm it would have become a scattering of corpses. “I’m looking for two ghosts.”

“They have already gone.”

“Where?”

The assistant indicated half the forest and its pools with a single sweep of his arm. “Into the future. They will be hard to find, Celcha, but there is no better place to start than right here. You should not chase them, though. It will hurt you.”

Celcha looked up sharply at his use of her name. She stared at the blank white eyes regarding her. “Who are you?”

“I... I am starting to forget that already. Yute was right. In the end I recognised myself as more than broken. I saw that I was a fracture in the world itself and, as he predicted, I asked for the cure.”

“Hellet...” Celcha’s voice broke around her brother’s name.

Hellet inclined his white head. His voice continued without inflection, though it faltered as if he were struggling to speak. “It is hard to follow... this conversation... to follow your life. Time is a river to you. A pond to me.”

“Why, Hellet? Why didn’t you wait for me?” Celcha took his hands in hers. They felt hard, smooth, cool, as if carved from the stuff of the library itself. “Those ghosts did this to you. We could have found them together. We could have—”

“Leave them be. The library did this.” Hellet fell silent and still; then he spoke again. “The library. And it is a thing that cannot be broken from the outside. That is why.”

The rules of the ballroom may be unwritten and the laws of physics deeply graven, but a library book demanding to be read would cause less scandal than the lady who took a man’s hand unasked.

Debutante or Bust, by Lady Ellinoor FitzGerald

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