Page 55 of The Book that Broke the World

“Mayland would call it a lesson learned from history. I’d call it a natural consequence of allowing crowds to decide how some complex problem is to be tackled.” Kerrol licked his teeth. “In any event, neither of you is going to pick a side based on the issues. Almost nobody ever does.” Evar opened his mouth to challenge Kerrol to tell him what he would decide when his brother hadn’t even made up his own mind. Kerrol pre-empted him. “It’s obvious what you two are going to do. Evar’s going to take whatever side his human girl picks. And Clovis is going to choose the opposite.”

Arpix looked up from his stitching. “Rather than jumping into somebody else’s war, perhaps we could work out what we’re here for and what we’re going to do about it.”

“He’s not wrong,” Clovis growled. She put her hand over the hand in which Arpix held the needle. “Tell us about this Wentworth. It seems a formidable weapon.”

Arpix absently removed her hand from his and continued to stitch. “Wentworth is Yute’s cat. But Livira once stole a book that described the library’s greatest guide to be a creature red in tooth and claw, and whose name began with ‘V’ or possibly ‘W.’ At the time we thought it was the head librarian’s dog, Volente. It seems we were wrong and that it was Wentworth.”

Evar tried to imagine the creature that could destroy five cratalacs at once. “If Yute sent it to you then why hasn’t it helped? I mean, apart from today. If you were dispatched here for a reason, shouldn’t this Wentworth be telling you what it is?”

Arpix looked over to the other humans and asked a question. Salamonda replied.

“She says he was always lazy. More interested in sleeping in the sun than anything else.” Arpix shrugged. “To be honest, I never saw him move. He’d just lie there like he was dead. Volente never spoke either. I think they’re more like guides. You ask for something and they take you to it. Wentworth must have built up some affection for Salamonda over the decades she fed him and let him sleep in her kitchen. Even then, the most he’s done over the past four years is stop her dying.” Arpix leaned down to bite off the thread he’d been using. “Done. Don’t tear them.” He stood and looked around at the night, at the stars shining frosty in the black vaults of heaven, at the walls of the hollow they sat in, catching glimmers of the firepot’s glow as they curved away.

“Wentworth!” He called to the night, following the name with human chatter. “Wentworth!” He looked around, shrugged, and sat back down beside Clovis.

“What did you say?” Evar asked.

“I told him I had something for him,” Arpix growled. “Or more accurately I asked, ‘What’s this?’ Cats seem to like a mystery more than a straightforward offer.”

Clovis sat up slowly, wincing. “What’s that?”

“No, what’s this? You’ve got to make it sound tempting.” Arpix held out his hand as if concealing some tempting morsel.

Clovis shoved his arm aside. “I said, what’s that?” And she pointed.

Sitting in the shadows behind Evar was a cat. It didn’t seem particularly big to him but it was the first one he’d seen, and he hadn’t much idea how large they should be. It was certainly quite fat.

“Wentworth!” Salamonda was on her feet, crossing the hollow with surprising speed. The cat allowed himself to be fussed while giving the impression that this was a special one-time favour to the old woman.

Arpix slumped and muttered something to the night.

Evar didn’t speak the language, but he knew what the man had said. “All we had to do was call him...”

A story is how you tell yourself truths you’re not brave enough to hear.

Carved into a desk by Livira Page

CHAPTER 23

Livira

Livira found herself once more encased in iron, jolting along on the back of a white stallion. She narrowly avoided a tumble into the heather this time by dint of leaning forward and embracing the horse’s neck. Fortunately, it seemed a patient animal, quite unlike the skittish warhorses she’d read about in other stories. In her version of the tale the knight’s steed was named Amble, and was fond of apples, sunshine, and standing still.

In the end Livira did fall off, but during the act of dismounting, and it was a less violent affair than toppling from the saddle of a moving horse. She fell backwards into the springy arms of a gorse bush, one spur caught in the left-hand stirrup. After untangling herself and stretching out the kinks in her back, Livira struggled to remove her helm. She tossed it aside, wondering what Malar would have made of all this armour. She could imagine him as a particularly foul-mouthed knight in battered old mail, leaving a trail of shiny-armoured corpses behind him.

On a nearby ridge Livira sat down and watched the tower, still half a mile off. This was her take on the princess in the tower, a story that rattled through the millennia, told in a near infinity of tongues, told by species that you wouldn’t mistake for human on even the darkest and foggiest of nights. Livira had wanted to explore what it really meant to be trapped and what it really meant to be rescued. The prison could be anything: a library chamber, a well in the Dust from which you couldn’t stray, or just a life that—however luxurious—had made you its captive, struck away the legs of your independence one after the other. She had wanted to examine the role of the rescuer and the rescuee. Neither was easy. Sometimes one was hard to tell from the other. Sometimes the knight’s armour was their own iron tower from which a rescue was also required.

In the end she had just written a story and hoped that it would prompt the reader to do the hard work. She’d spent most of her time on the witch, truth be told. The witch tended to get overlooked in these tales.

Livira sat with her iron-clad knees drawn up to support her iron-clad arms. The tower stood like a dark finger of stone raised against a slate sky. She watched the white-capped waves applaud the cliffs to the west. To the east, the green patchwork of agriculture began to assert itself over the wilds.

Livira ignored the tug of the wind, sinking her roots into the story, claiming it page by page without so much as taking a step towards the tower. She thought about going down and knocking on the door. Asking the witch what she thought about the whole business. But it seemed that wouldn’t be necessary. She’d come to claim her book and as the author she didn’t need to follow the plotline down the hill. She already knew where it led. The assistant had said she just needed to take hold of the book, and that was what she was doing, as surely as a tree took hold of the earth whilst a seed became a sapling, and the sapling stretched up to reach for the heavens.

The white child came as Livira had known she must if she were to foil this attempt as she had foiled the five before that. Whatever story Livira had tried to follow, the white child had appeared when she got close to her goal, emerging unexpectedly from a shadowed doorway, or from behind a mask, or rising from an ancient lake, or clambering over a high wall. Every time, she had broken Livira’s grasp just as success threatened. Fear wasn’t her only weapon. The story thinned around her, tore like a dream when the light of waking shines out through all the holes in its logic.

This time Livira wouldn’t move. She wouldn’t be surprised. Not even if the white child clawed her way out of the peaty soil or tumbled from the horse’s belly in a gory tide of blood, bile, and half-digested grass.

As it happened, this time the white child approached out in the open. Livira saw her coming up the valley. Where she walked, the countryside paled before her, and in her wake she left only bedrock, bleached to the whiteness of paper, as if her mere presence had erased the story, exposing the blank page beneath.

---