Page 42 of The Book that Broke the World

“Too long?”

“Until I get bored.”

Livira stopped chasing Evar and gave Malar a hard, narrow-eyed stare. “Just let me do my thing.”

Malar eyed her doubtfully but, after a long pause, nodded.

“Come on then!” And Livira flew down the corridor, not bothering with legs.

She caught up with Evar at the entrance to the reading room. A confusion of broken desks stretched out before them, heaped up into mounds in places, and at the centre of it all, the grey lump of the Mechanism.

“Stay out of trouble,” Livira instructed Malar as he came up to join them. With that, she touched the book and fell into a story.

—

“This isn’t right!” Livira found herself near-blind, closely surrounded by clanking metal, and being jolted violently up and down by whatever large object she was suddenly astride. It wasn’t right at all, but before she had an opportunity to expand on the subject she was falling: not in the way that she’d fallen into the story, more in the way you’d fall off a horse—which turned out to be exactly what she was doing.

Falling off a horse turned out to be really painful, and the armour she’d found herself encased in seemed to make things worse rather than better. She lay where the fall left her, flat on her back, with the air driven from her lungs. Livira listened to the diminishing hoofbeats of her treacherous steed. Her helmet offered only a thin bar of sky through its visor and, since the thing had twisted some way around her head, she wasn’t even getting the full benefit of even that narrow view.

Eventually air began to leak painfully back into her chest, and she was able to sit up, accompanied by a sound like half a dozen pots and pans being rubbed across each other. She worked the helmet off her head—a tricky task involving straps and buckles which necessitated the removal of iron gauntlets, then leather gloves.

A rolling green landscape surrounded her, countryside of the sort she had read about only in books, and later been shown in the Mechanism. A rain-laced wind blew, and the tree branches danced to please it. In the fields sheep gathered in corners, seeking the shelter of dry-stone walls from the coming storm.

Wincing, and muttering curses that Malar would be proud of, Livira got unsteadily to her feet. Her armour was still shining where it wasn’t mud-spattered. She looked at the crested helm in her hand.

“I’m a knight.”

Suspicion grabbed her and she turned, looking for the sea and finding it, a murky grey line beyond the slopes to the west. “That means...” She steered her gaze and fixed on a short, dark, vertical line against the far side of the valley ahead. A lonely tower.

Livira knew this story. She even remembered writing it. It had been a shameless reworking of a very old tale that had bubbled around in the folklore of several civilisations that had become dust on the wind long ago. She was the knight in shining armour, riding a valiant—though apparently treacherous—steed. Her lover waited for her, imprisoned in the topmost room of the witch’s tower. The story was the last one that she and Evar had explored together. The one that had tried to teach him that some things could not be saved—that the knight sometimes arrived too late. She had meant to add that a tragic ending didn’t erase what had gone before. The shared kisses, the love beneath satin sheets, none of it was a waste, none of it was rendered meaningless, any more than a well-lived life was undone by the inevitable death waiting at the end. Little could remain of Livira’s time within the Assistant. Timeless thoughts were quickly washed from minds caught in the flow once more. But she had kept within her the shadow of a glimpse at that perfect crystal eternity in which all things are held in an omnipresent now. Everything counted. No one thing eclipsed or deleted another.

Livira felt the knight’s story invading her, his needs, wants, and desires, images of the princess in the tower, the flood of her hair, the heat of their passion. The knight had been Evar, and now was her. Both of them in a single body. Evar’s arms encircled her, strong, warm, encompassing, lifting her into his story. She gasped, suddenly afloat on the overwhelming physicality of him, half drowned in his mane and the animal scent of his strangeness.

“I want you, need you, love you.” The growl of him in her ear, shivering through her spine to clench her toes in mixed delight and fright. “Stay...” Gentle now. A prayer.

“I want to.” Fingers knotting his hair. Want to, need to, would love to. “But...” And slowly, painfully, reluctantly, she disentangled herself, piece by piece by piece, then all at once.

It would be easy to surrender to the narrative, or she could refuse it entirely and be ejected from the book once more. She chose a third path. Setting her steel-plated back to the tower she tossed aside her helmet and began to trudge towards the bleak horizon, still with the memory of his arms wrapping her and with regret aching in every step.

—

The storm broke. Icy torrents of rainwater poured past Livira’s metal collar and found every chink in her armour. The wind howled. The sky darkened to the point at which it became hard to continue believing that above the clouds the sun still burned. And in time a grey mist swallowed everything so that Livira could no longer see even the ground she walked upon.

In this grey void Livira closed her eyes and sought the story she’d come for.

—

“Serra Leetar!” A servant ushered her inside while one of her father’s house guards lost the tug-of-war he’d been having with the wind over the ownership of an inside-out umbrella. “Whoever thought we’d see such rain in Crath City?”

Livira glanced back over her shoulder to see Meelan following her in, and beyond him in the street, a gleaming carriage with the rain bouncing off its roof.

She thought she caught a glimpse of a child behind one of the carriage’s large, spoked wheels, a curiously white child, not only pale as milk but wearing white too. The door closed too soon for her to be sure, taking the scene with it.

Leetar and Meelan allowed the servants to take their dripping coats. They’d been visiting cousins, but Heflin Hosten had summoned both his children back to the family home for tonight’s grand dinner. Leetar’s intended, or rather the old man her father intended for her—Dantal Creyan—would be an honoured guest, as would Lord Algar, who offered her only escape from matrimony, in the shape of a position among ranks of the king’s diplomats. Such a position wouldn’t by itself satisfy her father’s ambition, but Lord Algar’s offer came with promises of influence at court. The man’s unhealthy interest in Leetar, an interest that lay behind the sweetened offer, was undisguised, as naked as the greed that her father allowed to blind him to it. Meelan had called it the choice between the frying pan and the fire. He’d offered to murder either or both of the men involved, though when Leetar had pointed out that there were three of them, he had balked at patricide.

Absorbing all this, Livira felt that there were more than three men involved, thousands more, in fact. Still shivering, even though she’d left the weather outside, Livira allowed herself, or more accurately Leetar, to be led into the drawing room and plied with hot chai. She sat and sipped, eyeing the first guests of the evening over her cup, resolving to play along. Malar had already demonstrated the consequences of sudden departures from the narrative. But perhaps it could be steered. Hopefully, since Livira had written it, the story was already aimed at a more satisfactory destination than currently implied. Either way, Livira resolved not to rock the boat just yet and to make it to the dining table.

An hour of small talk passed, with the guests circulating like the slow swirl of leaves fastened to the surface of a millpond. A maiden aunt hovered behind Leetar and Meelan, an ever-present spectre both to guard their honour and to warn, by grim example, of the dangers inherent in holding on to it too long. In small talk, Livira discovered, one probed for weaknesses, any useful kind of fault line was hunted out, whether it be social or financial, or simply a defect in one’s look or sense of style. Small talk resembled a battle of the open sort where combatants crossed blades in pairs or fours before carrying their wounds and their victories into some new fray.

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