Page 93 of The Book that Broke the World

Evar found the human’s speech easier to understand when Livira spoke it, and the effect also cast a new light of understanding on what the others were saying. The news that Malar had been killed hit Evar like a blow to the chest, taking the air from his lungs just as effectively as seeing the Soldier’s body lying broken amid the drifts of skeer corpses. The Soldier was truly gone now. The human that Evar had carried to the healing circle and watched being returned from the brink of death had been the Soldier’s inner spirit. That spirit was now extinguished.

Clovis made to advance on those that had killed Malar, and Evar was ready to go with her. She hid her full anger, but it still found an echo in his chest. Yute’s intervention took the wind from both their sails. Evar’s brother had killed the man’s wife, and it seemed that Yute had known Malar better than any of the siblings.

Though it wasn’t until Livira addressed Clovis that Evar realised what he might lose if they went seeking vengeance. He needed to stop thinking of the humans as weak just because they were smaller and slower than him. Arpix had taken down a cratalac. This king’s soldiers apparently had weapons that compensated for their lack of martial skills. Clovis could die. Evar could die, with just a brief hug as the totality of his reunion with Livira.

The white child had arrived with the enemy at her heels, and Evar had been happy to follow her path away from the advancing foe. However cryptic her talk of being summoned, Evar would choose it every time over the alternative, which seemed to be at worst the chance to be killed by an exotic weapon, and at best to show how well he could slaughter humans, all the while with his human girl and her human friends watching him become the gore-soaked animal he feared they might secretly already believe him to be.

—

The girl, Yolanda, led them to the chamber’s north door and the sounds of pursuit faded behind them. She walked as if she knew where she was going. Livira pulled Evar down to her level and whispered to him that Yute was the girl’s father and had not seen her in nearly twenty years after she had become lost in the library.

This seemed unlikely: the child didn’t look much older than ten years, and surely wouldn’t have been allowed to wander the aisles as an infant. He kept the observation to himself, however, not being confident about the human lifespan or the time taken for them to grow. He had assumed they were similar to canith, but some of the things Yute had said made it seem as if he was extremely long-lived. Evar found himself worrying about whether his whole life would seem like a season to Livira, and he would grow old and fail while she was still green in her youth. He caught himself in the midst of his anxiety and snorted at his own foolishness. There were enemies behind him, skeer ahead, and likely more horrors beyond them. They might all be killed in the next hour or day, and here he was worrying about a future decades away.

Clovis gave him a sharp look. “Stay focused.”

He looked towards Livira. She was back in the midst of her friends, catching up with the missing years. Evar found himself eyeing the males and wondering if any of them had designs on her, or had shared past intimacies. He pushed the thoughts away, ashamed of himself. He showed his teeth and looked ahead, focused. Clovis was right. She normally was when danger threatened.

The door required the touch of a human. It melted before Arpix’s hand. The skeer warrior that had been guarding the way now watched them from a distance, having been driven back by the orb in Clovis’s keeping. It stood some way off, almost lost among a forest of what at first seemed to be book stacks of unprecedented height.

As Yolanda led them into the forest, Evar understood that each stack was in fact a metal pole reaching from the floor to the distant ceiling. Each pole braced against its neighbours with struts about ten yards above the ground and again at the very top. The poles supported circular shelves every couple of feet, from which tomes of various sizes offered their spines to all points of the compass. Clearly, the chamber had been fashioned for those with the power of flight. So, unless canith had sported wings in their past, whoever built and stocked the shelves had been of no race Evar knew.

The lone skeer shadowed the group for a while at the limits of the orb’s protection before retreating from sight, presumably to summon reinforcements.

The forest of shelf-towers reminded Evar of the Exchange and he wondered if the architect had known of that place. The ordered array of towers meant that every few paces brought into view a new set of seemingly endless corridors between them, narrowing to invisibility as they reached for the distant walls. Evar had read that the effect was seen in orchards, though he had yet to taste the fruit of any tree and the trees in the Exchange remained the only ones he had seen in the flesh. And even those had proved to be a kind of illusion.

Yute walked just behind his daughter, hunched around some unknowable pain. He made no attempt to speak to her. Evar guessed that he had somehow understood on first seeing Yolanda that, whilst she might have been lost at some point, she had found herself and could have returned to him—even if only as a ghost. But she had not.

The Soldier had very rarely been the one to offer comfort during Evar’s early years. What little of that had come his way had been from the Assistant. But Evar did remember one thing the Soldier had told him not long after he and the other children had stumbled out of the Mechanism that first time. Evar had been asking about his parents, distressed as much by the loss of his memories of them as by their physical loss. The Soldier had looked away into the chamber and said, as if to nobody in particular, that Evar would never meet two people more capable of wounding him, or people he was more capable of wounding. The bonds between parent and child were, he said, as dangerous as they were wonderful, as full of darkness and terror as they were of joy and light. Evar had never spoken of it again, but he felt now that if he had repeated the Soldier’s words to Kerrol, his brother might know the whole cloth of Malar’s story.

Yolanda’s path through the chamber did not seem to be angled at any of the doors, a fact that intrigued Evar. Livira didn’t appear to have noticed, engaged as she was with her fellow survivors from the fall of her city. She did, however, seem distracted even from them, often glancing back towards the door they’d entered by. Evar wondered if thoughts of Malar might be turning her head in that direction, but the look he saw on her face held more fear in it than grief, and there was an anger there too, struggling to assert itself.

If they had been alone, Evar would have asked her why. But the presence of the others around him was a pressure, an audience that sealed his mouth rather than prompting a performance. Evar had been in the company of just three people for so very long that being part of what seemed a throng weighed on him in ways he didn’t properly understand. What he did understand was what a blessing the time he had spent alone with Livira in the Exchange had been. Without that privacy, and the solitude they’d found in being ghosts, nothing could have grown between them. He was sure of that.

“We’re going to a reading room!” Evar said it out loud as he realised.

That caught Livira’s interest. She hurried to join him near the front of the column and called to Yolanda, “You’re taking us to a Mechanism?”

Evar missed a step. The greyness of the Mechanism filled his mind. The stuff it was built from felt like a physical representation of what it had done to his memories. It had taken Livira’s presence to slowly restore to him the time he’d spent lost inside her stories. Those memories of shared adventure, discovery, and heartache, although not shared directly with Livira, had made it feel as though they’d spent a lifetime together. They had put flesh on the bones of a relationship built on brief encounters and hectic escapes. But he had come to realise, perhaps only truly since releasing her from his arms and into those of her friends, that although he had clothed himself in part of her soul, Livira had not been there with him. She had only the bones of that experience. And what frightened him more than anything that might lie in the chamber behind them, or in the place to which the white child was leading them, was that Livira’s affection for him might be just that, affection rather than love, a mixture of pity and curiosity, founded on little more than a shared kiss. A puddle beside his ocean.

“Are you all right?” Livira reached for Evar’s hand. “You don’t have to come in.” She looked worried herself and he remembered that her first experience in the Mechanism had been in the blindness of a subterranean world on the battlefield of species that shared more in common with skeer and cratalacs than with humans.

“There are two people I would go into the Mechanism for,” Evar said. “And both are you.”

—

The group had nearly reached the reading room when Evar caught the ominous sound of distant crashing.

“It’s another of those fucking metal monsters!” Clovis snarled, gazing to the east. The construct would have to fight its way through the forest of shelf-towers and would in theory be visible from the correct angle, but the distance would probably swallow too much detail to be sure of much, other than that something big was coming.

“We were chased by this enormous—”

“I know,” Livira said. “Malar and I watched you. We were ghosts after the skeer destroyed our assistant bodies. We followed you until that assistant you met dragged us away.”

“You were there? Watching?” Evar was amazed, horrified, and comforted in equal measures.

“I thought maybe that thing was chasing me.” Livira shivered. “It felt as though it was. It could touch us. It kicked Malar across the corridor.”

“It was a ganar.” Arpix joined the conversation. “I mean, shaped like one. There was another smaller one that nearly killed Evar.”

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