Page 13 of The Book that Broke the World

Kerrol strode up, barging into the silence. “Assistance from an assistant! I wouldn’t have believed it this morning.” He looked Evar up and down, checking for injury. Evar was glad his brother had managed to escape from the previous chamber. A skeer must have been involved, since the door wouldn’t open for canith.

Clovis arrived, sword in hand, still glancing back down the ichor-spattered corridor.

Kerrol turned from his inspection of Evar to the assistant. “Let’s push our luck, shall we? What’s the way out of here? We want to reach the world. Somewhere with more people and fewer books.”

Without looking at Kerrol, the assistant pointed, his arm angled towards the corridor wall but in the general direction of the next chamber. It was a direction that a ghost could follow, and a bearing that Evar could use to navigate if he was careful.

“Are there many skeer out there?” Kerrol asked.

The assistant kept his gaze on Evar and said nothing.

“Why did you save me?” Evar asked.

The assistant said nothing.

“Come on.” Clovis took Evar’s arm and bumped him into motion. “If it wanted to tell us anything it would have.”

Evar let himself be led for a few paces then turned back towards the assistant, which had already started following the departed skeer. “Wait. Are there any ghosts here? Do you see any ghosts?”

The assistant stopped and turned. “Seeing ghosts is never a good thing, Evar Eventari. Hope that you never do. And under no circumstances speak to one.”

And with that he walked away, the questions Evar shouted after him echoing unanswered.

It’s curious that ghosts, spectres, and spirits are so often depicted as transparent when no one is more opaque to the living than are the dead. Biographers offer keyholes through which the most famous may be viewed. Historians poke peepholes through the veil of years. For most though, we have nothing but what dust might sift down from the attic of memory.

All Our Yesterdays: An Undertaker’s Guide, by C. Haron

CHAPTER 7

Livira

Livira and Malar followed Evar and his two siblings through the library. Livira hadn’t any idea as to how she and Malar could regain their bodies, and lonely as it was wandering unseen and unheard by everyone but the soldier, she would rather do it close to Evar than in the wider solitude of the library. The aisles were generally so sparsely populated that most of the time you’d have to push through something solid to prove you were a ghost.

“So, we’re just going to trudge after these three?” Malar scowled.

“We’ll never find them again if we lose sight of them,” Livira said. “They’re not even headed in the right direction to get out.”

“They can’t get out without a human helping them anyway, can they?”

Livira had forgotten that. She hoped Evar hadn’t. Already she thought of him as the same as her, but the library didn’t. “There’s a canith door to the outside not so far from here... Well, a few days. But they’re not going the right way for that either...”

Malar spat. Or ghost-spat. She wondered briefly about the mechanics of ghost-spit before he pulled her from her thoughts. “Better follow them. After all, this bitch has got my sword.”

“It’s not your sword.” Livira gave him a hard stare.

“I had it for two hundred years and made better use of it than the previous owner.”

Livira huffed. “My assistant made it. Yours just played with it. And she’s not ‘this bitch’—you watched her grow and taught her to fight.”

“Clovis, then.” Malar grunted and scowled and looked as close to apologising as she’d ever seen him. “Still my sword.”

Livira walked on after Evar, steering clear of his sister. Livira was pretty confident of passing through most things and having them pass through her. The white blade, on the other hand, she didn’t want to put to the test.

—

When Evar climbed the ladder Livira flew up alongside him. She saw the construct while Evar was still climbing. And it seemed to Livira that a faint tremble ran through the thing even before Evar showed himself above the shelf top.

When Evar ran, Livira ran with him, astonished by the single-minded violence of the chase. And when Evar slumped against the final door and faced his destruction, Livira faced it beside him, her hand running through his, sharing the depth of his emotion, an echoing sense of waste and loss.

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