Page 23 of The Book that Broke the World

“Why in the world would you want to guide more vagrants here?” Jost raised both arms along with her voice. Her robes hung in tatters, played by the breeze. The material was dust-grey, the library’s shade-coded hierarchy erased. All of Arthran’s ten inhabitants had now been given equal rank by the pervasive dirt. “You’re inviting murderers and thieves over our doorstep! Again!”

Behind Jost, one of the younger bookbinders, Sheetra, rolled her eyes, but the four older ones looked worried. Meelan’s brow had also furrowed, though perhaps for different reasons. He detested Jost and finding his opinion aligned with hers would weaken his conviction.

Arpix had never liked the leadership role that had first been thrust upon him by dint of age and height and cleverness at the trainee table. He’d accepted it because he liked sense and order, and the best way to maintain those things was from the top. But he hadn’t enjoyed it and still didn’t. Most of the time he let Jost think she was running the show. Looking out across the darkening plain though, he knew he had to win over unwilling hearts once again. He drew a deep breath and turned slowly to face them.

“I could appeal to your goodness, charity, and better nature,” he said. “And I know you have those still, despite the dry grind our lives have become. But let me put it to you a different way.

“We’ve lived here four years. We scrape and water the ground. We grow beans, eat beans, return beans to the soil, grow more beans. This is our life. We haven’t the strength to do more. We’ve seen the skeer nest. We’ve learned from our visitors that there’s nothing better for us within a five-day march, and perhaps not beyond that either. If someone were going to open a magic door for us to escape through they would surely have done it by now.”

Arpix looked at his companions’ downcast faces. Even Salamonda’s habitual good humour had evaporated. They came to him for encouragement. To hear him call their one-tenth-full cup a good start. And here he was rubbing the varnish off the truth.

“If there is any hope to be had, any hope at all, how do you think it will reach us? Because I tell you it won’t blow in on the wind or fall from the sky. It’s going to be carried here by a stranger. Maybe not one of the ones running in our direction tonight, needing our help. But maybe. And if not with them, maybe with the next. All I can tell you is that if hope is to come our way it will be in a stranger’s hands, and if we turn our backs on them, we will never know what we missed.”

Jella set the bowl on the blocks of a wall that the diggers had missed and the wind had found. “I’ll light it when they’ve had time to get a bit closer, so we know they’ll see it.”

Meelan found his voice. “Arpix is right, of course.” He leaned in close and muttered in a low voice, “You’re always right, dammit. Sorry.”

Arpix clapped a hand to his friend’s shoulder. “I’m often wrong, and you know it.”

They stood side by side, looking out into the dark, ignoring Jost’s continuing objections. Meelan and Jost had lost the most when the library had burned and they’d been exiled to the wild. Meelan, his family’s vast wealth and considerable influence; Jost, her authority and the role she’d played for a lifetime. She’d been a librarian ten times longer than Arpix, who had only recently qualified when disaster struck. But where Jost seemed undone by the fire, clinging to the remnants of her old station, Meelan had found the loss of his money and responsibility as his family’s heir to be a new kind of freedom, though the options for exercising that freedom were now very limited. He missed his family. Sometimes he called his sister’s name in the night. But the privilege and wealth had slipped from his broad shoulders very easily.

Attamast rose first, from behind them, near full and casting its faintly green light across the plain. Chenga, smaller and only half-full, crested the shoulder of a mountain an hour later, throwing its whiter light in opposition to Attamast’s. The dust cloud revealed itself once more, much closer, illuminated by the two moons, throwing one shadow towards them and a second back the way the strangers had come. Jella lit the fire bowl and the light of twin moons soon gilded its plume of smoke too while the orange glow from within shone out through the earthenware’s perforations.

“Damn, they’re fast,” Meelan said.

“They’re going to need to be.” Behind them, back where the roots of the mountain range sank beneath the plain, a wall of dust glowed in the moonlight. Scores in pursuit. Hundreds maybe. Nobody was faster than a skeer runner. Maybe on a horse a man would be faster, but even then Arpix had been told that a skeer runner could wear a horse down. Their endurance was a thing of legend. Or so Arpix had been told. Back in his old life nobody except a few academics had even heard of the skeer until rumours had started to circulate that they had been behind the canith migration, the thing from which the canith had run and that had resulted in their armies piling up against the walls of Crath.

The strangers got to within a mile of the plateau’s edge before Jella spotted the first flier. “They’re never going to make it.” She pointed.

Within a short while they could make out five fliers in tight formation, closing rapidly on their prey. Skeer fliers were less robust than skeer runners, who in turn were less robust than skeer soldiers, but even so Arpix had little doubt that a single one of the creatures could slaughter him and all his companions without effort. They were fast, armoured, all spikes and cutting edges, bigger than a man, and of course they could descend upon you at great speed from any angle. Meelan said they looked like winged spiders made of bone. It wasn’t accurate but it did them some justice.

“They might make it...” Arpix had climbed the slopes from the plain to the plateau on two occasions and it had been a real struggle. The gap between the strangers’ dust vanishing from view and their tiny figures reappearing as they crested the top of the tumbled cliffs was remarkably short. So short, in fact, that Arpix lost all confidence that the strangers were human.

“Canith?” Meelan muttered.

If it wasn’t too late to douse the fire bowl Arpix might have done so. A cold hand closed around his heart as he realised that Jost might have been right all along. He could have invited their deaths among them. But, instead of taking action, he stood rooted to the spot watching the chase unfold.

The fliers were close too. Close enough to see the hanging clusters of their legs rather than just the flashing of their wings catching the light.

“Canith!” Jella’s exclamation started as a yelp before she brought it under control. Years in the Dust had replaced her girth with a grim kind of fortitude.

There were three of them, running hard. Arpix would be stumbling after two hundred yards if he tried to run that fast, but this trio had been at it for ten miles and more. The one at the rear seemed to be hurting and the other two were holding back, not ready to abandon him.

“Come on!” Meelan shouted. “Run!”

But with little more than a hundred yards to go before the canith reached the humans, the skeer dived upon them.

The smallest of the canith seemed to sense the attack and turned, drawing a sword that stole the colours of the moonlight and burned with it. The other two stopped running, one brandishing a weapon too small to see, the other picking up a rock.

“A rock?” Arpix snorted. He hadn’t intended to speak but the contest seemed so unequal.

What followed happened too quickly for Arpix to follow the detail. It seemed that the first flier to attack the sword-wielder fell apart into pieces, as if it had hit a pane of very thick glass hard enough to shatter itself. The other two canith dived and rolled and twisted and ran. The sword-wielder appeared to slice entirely through the thickness of a flier’s body, and a heartbeat later to swing up through the lattice of skeer legs seeking to skewer her and momentarily ride the largest of the fliers before decapitating it.

In the space of thirty heartbeats the fliers were reduced to a heap of twitching limbs and scintillating wings. The larger two canith took the lead, the shorter of these two supporting the tallest, who appeared to have been injured. The sword-wielder followed, facing back the way they’d come, challenging the night.

“Damn...” Meelan shook his head in disbelief.

The friend of a friend can be the most complicated of beasts. Best approached with caution, and a net. Still less dangerous than a friend in need, however.

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