Page 103 of The Book that Broke the World

“You said you weren’t strong enough to watch me die. Well, I’m not watching you die either, and I’m not looking away. So, that leaves you only one choice.” Her voice cracked. “Don’t die.” A tear fell. “Please don’t.”

Evar, surprised to find that he was now on his back, reached up and pulled Livira down, holding her to his good side. He felt curiously numb, slightly weightless. He decided that if he had to die this would be the way he chose, lying peacefully with the person he loved tight against him. If it wasn’t for how much he knew it would hurt Livira he would close his eyes right now, squeeze her to him, and sleep that sleep he needed so badly, a soft oblivion without dreams.

“Wake up!” Livira shook him.

Evar opened his eyes to see Mayland nodding slowly as Starval continued to remonstrate with him. Mayland stepped to the Mechanism’s door and reached above it, placing his hand flat on the grey stuff of the structure. He bent his head as if in deep thought.

“Evar, what are you—” Livira broke off, following his gaze.

Mayland completed whatever he’d been doing and backed away. Heartbeats later the door melted into mist and an assistant stepped out from the blackness within. Maybe the same Hellet who had watched their arrival from beside the Mechanism.

From behind Evar came an awful ringing, the sound of metal columns hundreds of yards long being torn free, twisted, and sent flying to bounce against the chamber wall. The automaton had broken out of the shelf-towers. Evar caught sight of its gleaming bulk filling the corridor, coming forward, slowly now, trailing ringing steel. Before it, made tiny by its size, Clovis came running, blade in hand.

The assistant walked past Evar, past Clovis, past them all, heading towards the entrance. Up close, its white enamel had a faint ivory mottling hinting at what the library might consider impurities. The Soldier and the Assistant had shown similar signs, though Evar would never consider Livira’s presence in the Assistant as something impure.

The newly arrived assistant and the huge ganar confronted each other at the entrance, the automaton hunched to fit within the corridor walls. Its metal body was dented and cut with bright scratches where jagged steel must have scraped across it. Breaking a path across the chamber had taken a toll on it where the years had failed to register.

“No.” The assistant held out a white hand, palm forward.

The mechanical ganar lunged forward with an awful silent fury. It hit an invisible wall and came to a dead halt, though Evar saw that the assistant was jolted back some fraction of an inch. Clovis came to a skidding halt behind him and lent her strength to keep his place.

The ganar recovered itself and pointed with one stubby finger. There was no ambiguity this time. The digit was aimed squarely at Evar.

His “Why?” escaped him as a gasp.

Grace had always felt like a bystander in her own life. She memorised names, and faces, and numberplates in case she should ever be called on to give evidence. She died peacefully, never regretting her decision not to take part.

Tanylorn Daily Press, Obituaries

CHAPTER 44

Celcha

To those who come and go by the doorways of the Exchange time becomes a fractured thing, best remembered as a collection of events that happened rather than something enumerated. Even so, Celcha had done her best to count the days she’d spent, some frittered away, some laid down to purchase things she had thought she needed. A hundred years was her best guess. A hundred years since the poisoning of Krath. A century of her own time, and, in the way of ganar, she was in her prime, the extremes of old age still the best part of two centuries ahead.

In the world’s timeline, however, the years had raced by far more swiftly. Celcha’s present lay a thousand years from the day of her birth. She had needed to let that millennium slide by, a century here, a century there, to allow her plans space to develop, allow the seeds she’d planted time to blossom.

As many had already discovered, knowledge is the most valuable and easily transported of all commodities. Pound for pound neither gold nor diamonds come anywhere close. Celcha became a trader, taking information from place to place, investing her profits.

She travelled widely, leaping decades in a single bound when required to outrun trouble or to wait for machinations to mature into materiel. In her time Celcha had been to both moons, seen her people rise and fall, rise again and fall again. She had wandered the habitable band of Attamast, commissioned wonders from the ganar at their heights, and commiserated with survivors at their lows.

On Attamast she finally found a place to set the nootki that had been pressed upon her as she left the Arthran dig. The tiny figurines sat within crystal in the palace of a great king and watched five centuries pass before war came and made new dust of all that had been built there.

Celcha never, in all those years, settled. She had been unsettled by the tragedy of her youth, and roots felt too similar to chains for her to want to sink any. She could have abandoned the Exchange, spent her years on Attamast, raised a family perhaps, and become a link in a different sort of chain. She did not.

Instead, she roamed. No matter how far she wandered, her old hurts drew her back, anchoring her to the darkest day she’d yet seen. Her understanding of the Exchange and its ways grew, but still she could never find Hellet and knew that he must be avoiding her for reasons of his own. Over the years she toyed with the idea of going back to the dig at the time when they had both laboured for Myles Carstar. She should, by rights, be able to speak to Hellet there. She could warn him about the other ghosts, and guide them both to a better future. But even before the rarest and best-hidden of the library’s own books cautioned her against such madness, her own instinct saved her from that path. The library had been built to last, but obdurate as it was, even the stuff of the athenaeum could be undone by paradox.

Guilt pursued Celcha, a vast, unrelenting guilt. And although the facts bound little or none of it to her actions, the crime still owned her. She could have checked deeper, worried more, trusted less. Even the smallest sliver of responsibility for one hundred thousand lives places corpses at your feet, and lost lives could not be shrugged away, at least not by Celcha. The child, Lutna, the princess who had shown her kindness, walked with Celcha every day of her life through a hundred years and more, undaunted by distance, even to the moons themselves.

Celcha diverted what portion of that guilt she could into anger and revenge. Had she not she would have drowned in it. She spent her resources hunting the two ghosts who had picked out her brother from the obscurity of the tunnels, wound him up like a clockwork toy, and loosed him on the world. She knew, in her secret heart, that Hellet hid from her because she would ask him to show these two ghosts to her, and that he for his part had forgiven their crimes in the greater cause of bringing down the structure that had allowed such crimes and allowed their repetition in many ways and many places.

Celcha reasoned that in time her quarry would return to the library. To find someone in a place so large it pays to have many pairs of eyes watching for them. She commissioned hunters, great and small, fashioned in her image so that her enemies might know the source of their demise. She had her memory of that last day imprinted upon each of her avatars. The image of the canith male and human female dancing out their victory, kissing above the corpses of a multitude of ganar who had choked out their last breaths alongside those who had enslaved them.

The application of decades will blunt most sharp edges. The wounds that Celcha’s guilt inflicted upon her grew less grievous; the flames of her rage guttered and died, though the coals remained hot as is the way of the ganar. Celcha’s kind were slow to anger but slow to forgive. Hellet had been an anomaly in many ways where Celcha remained truer to the archetype.

The alarm, when it finally came, long after she had abandoned hope, reached her in the Exchange. It was carried in the person of a small messenger construct in her own likeness and borne on the currents of coincidence. She picked the head-sized metal creature out of the grass. It had been so very many years since she set the things loose in their thousands that for several moments she had no idea what it might be.

“Oh.” Memory returned. She pressed the construct to her forehead. “They’ve been found!”

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