Page 12 of The Book that Broke the World

“—is just—

“—going to—

“—keep on—

“—coming.”

Clovis didn’t answer. The monster answered for her, smashing into the first set of shelves by the entrance behind them, pulverising more timber, more books.

They bounded on, out into the thousands of acres before them, with no better plan than skimming over the surface until their stamina failed and fatigue sent them tumbling. For a time, they were able to slowly extend their lead, but it wouldn’t last, not unless the construct ran out of whatever energy drove it. Twice Evar glimpsed skeer in the canyons beneath them, the creatures skittering towards the monster that they should be running away from. Perhaps they thought they could clog its mechanisms with their corpses...

Running along a lengthy stretch of shelf top that happened to head in the direction they were going—towards the opposite entrance—Evar skidded to a halt. Despite the ever-present crash of their pursuer Clovis somehow sensed her brother had ceased following and brought herself to a stop.

She hauled in a breath. “What?”

“It’s after...” Evar paused, panting. “It’s after me. Split up. I’ll prove it.”

Clovis eyed him, her face inscrutable. “OK.”

Evar had expected more of a fight—some token objection at least—but it was the answer he’d wanted. “You head that way.” He pointed left, raising his voice over the approaching din. “If it follows you then go back to the original course.”

Clovis sprang away and Evar, still struggling for a breath, stumbled back into a run.

By the time that Evar dropped from the last shelf into the clearing before the opposite corridor the gap had closed to what it had been at the start of his run, and narrowed past that. Evar didn’t know if the door ahead of him was one that opened for canith, or for humans, or for skeer, or for some other species. What he did know was that, whether it opened for him or not, he wouldn’t make it across the next chamber without the metal monster catching him.

He ran on, his rhythm starting to fail, limbs heavy with fatigue. When he bounced off the white plane of the door it was almost a relief. There was no reason to run anymore. He’d forgotten why he was running in any case. He’d lost Livira. It felt melodramatic to say life felt hollow without her—they’d spent so little time knowingly in each other’s company—but slumped against a door that wholly blocked the only way out, and with an implacable giant of steel, brass, and gold bearing down on him, it seemed like the best time for drama.

The skeer, Evar noted over his heaving chest, were less given to fatalism, or at least to the sort that involves giving up. The number of them clinging to the construct had doubled and their ichor ran down its armour plates. They’d done no noticeable damage, but the eight or nine of them clinging to the giant’s legs were causing it to adopt a wading gait.

At the back of the advancing mass of metal and insectoid, glimpsed past the bodies hanging on to the construct’s ankles, Evar saw Clovis, white sword in hand. The distance was too great to divine her expression, but her intent was clear enough. She was going to attack.

“Run! Leave me!” Evar’s shout lost itself in the grinding approach. He stood, ready to fight. If he died sooner rather than later then Clovis would have no reason to throw herself into the fray.

The monster loomed over Evar, posture stooped, shoulders scraping the ceiling. Its face was neither savage nor bestial, closer to human than to canith, no teeth bared, its expression one of focused determination, eyes glowing hot and angry.

It reached for him, the blade on the back of its hand as thick as his arm and longer than his body. Evar readied himself, fear replaced by a sense of loss. He hoped Livira was waiting for him... somewhere.

The vast hand stopped. The whole construct froze. Even the crash of skeer hammering at its sides stopped. Evar gazed up at it in amazement. For a heartbeat he imagined that something he had done had halted the thing in its tracks—though beyond manifesting a fervent desire not to die he’d done nothing.

A glance to his side disabused Evar of the notion that he had suddenly acquired mind powers. The door had vanished and standing just behind and to the right of him was an assistant. An assistant in gleaming white enamel, not the ivory of the Assistant and the Soldier, both compromised by Livira and Malar’s humanity respectively, not the grey or black of an assistant polluted by Escapes, but an assistant purely as Irad had presumably fashioned it millennia ago.

Why the construct and skeer should choose to stop in the midst of their attempted murdering just because an assistant had arrived, Evar was uncertain. The construct extended one finger towards Evar. A finger that was stubby in the context of its hands, though at the same time longer than Evar’s arm. It said nothing but the implication was clear: mine.

“No.” The assistant seemed to speak in Evar’s mother tongue but perhaps, as in the Exchange, words from an assistant’s mouth could be universally understood.

A tremor ran through the huge construct, a vibration that grew until it could be heard as a buzzing of metal on metal. A skeer fell, landing badly. Another dropped closer to hand, untroubled by the impact. On seeing Evar, it advanced on him.

“No.” The assistant pointed back towards the chamber they’d so recently crossed. The skeer bathed Evar and the assistant in the black regard of its many eyes. It turned towards the construct and its fellow skeer, most of them climbing down now, one trapped against the knee joint by a mangled limb.

Four of them came forward to join the closest one that appeared to have staked a claim on Evar. A faint but varied hissing passed between them, and complex chemical taints filled the air. After a long pause the five of them backed away, turned, and began to retreat, taking the rest of their kind with them, including the trapped one who dropped down as they passed below, having chewed off its own leg.

Clovis and Kerrol slipped into the corridor as the skeer exited, keeping well clear of the insectoids. The construct, still trembling with what Evar took to be wrath, backed slowly away, metal squealing against stone or whatever it was that the library had been cut from. Clovis and Kerrol flattened themselves against the wall as it passed.

“Uh...” Evar turned away from the glower of the retreating construct and faced the assistant. “...thank you.”

The assistant made no reply. It watched him with entirely white eyes in an entirely white face. Evar’s fatigue had caught up with him and continuing to stand had become difficult, but the shock and strangeness of the chase had run a strange trembling fire through his veins that wouldn’t let him be still. He hugged himself, hands clasped to his upper arms. “That thing—it hated me. It didn’t care about the others...”

The assistant simply watched him.

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