Page 71 of The Book that Broke the World

The shelf shook beneath Evar’s feet. The automaton pounded on the wall of books and planks and once more everything began to fall. Evar saved himself with a twisting leap across the aisle behind him, hitting the next set of shelves high enough for the shelf top to fold him around it, knocking the air from his lungs. He clung on, straining for breath, while black spots swarmed his vision, and behind him the ruins of the opposite shelves surrendered to the automaton’s advance.

Evar hauled himself up and lay gasping, hoping he was hidden from below. The thing should never have spotted him on his high perch and yet it had somehow felt his eyes upon its back and looked up. Evar’s hope didn’t last longer than it took the automaton to shake off the avalanche of books and broken timber then crash into the base of the shelves supporting him.

He tried to rise and leap for the next shelf top, but the surface beneath his feet fell away and he fell with it. Had he dropped the distance through clear air he would have broken both legs and quite possibly the rest of his bones too. As it was, repeated impacts with shelves in the act of breaking, combined with what might be called a cushion of books if books were in any way soft, left him groaning on a mound of literature with a shard of shattered shelving impaling his upper left thigh.

The mechanoid came at him, gears groaning, eyes burning with a hot red light. It looked to be in far less good repair than the giant one he’d encountered before, but still, it was in much better shape than he was.

Evar tried to roll to his feet but the length of timber sticking through his leg brought the effort to an agonised halt. It hurt worse than any injury he’d had before, but the real hurting would come later. For now, shock wrapped him in a numbing blanket and the pain was a kind of nausea, flaring at every twist.

The automaton came on, wading through book drifts over a yard deep, piling volumes before it in an ever-shifting bow wave. It was the thought of Clovis bellowing instructions at him that finally got Evar moving. His sister would be disgusted with him. He hadn’t even drawn the sword he’d taken from her. He shuffled away on his backside, propelling himself with his one good leg.

The automaton started to run, filling the air with flying books. Clovis would have wanted Evar to meet his end on his feet, even if it was just one foot, but Clovis wasn’t there to watch. Evar drew the white sword and levelled it at the onrushing metal bulk. Either one of the automaton’s great feet might stamp the life out of him, and even if his weapon could pierce its hide, he doubted he’d be able to do enough damage to stop the thing before it reached him. His last thoughts weren’t of the automaton or of Clovis. They were of Livira and how much he regretted being too late to save her or even to say goodbye.

He thrust his sword at the brass belly that threatened to crush him as the mechanoid lunged for his head. The point of the thing’s hand-blade struck the library floor where his head had been and skittered across the stone. Fingers as fat as his wrist followed, reaching to close around his face. The crushing embrace never quite happened. The hand obscuring his vision shuddered to a halt; the fingers trembled as if wrestling with some invisible helm around his head. And at his side Evar’s forgotten book satchel jumped and rattled and buzzed with such vigour that it threatened to pop every seam at once.

A complicated, rasping crack tore the air. The sound of something important breaking. The noise stopped abruptly and so did every other noise. The library’s silence swept in like a wave, swallowing everything. No books fell, no timbers creaked, and until Evar inhaled implosively, he wondered if perhaps he had gone deaf.

It took him several minutes to extricate himself from beneath the metal hand. He had to surrender Clovis’s sword, a foot of which was embedded in the frozen automaton’s stomach, and to take great care to avoid snagging the bloody shard of wood emerging from his thigh. Terrifyingly, while trying to wriggle clear, Evar caught a whiff of something burning. The fear stirred him to greater efforts and proved to be something of an anaesthetic, allowing him to effect the last half of his escape in a quarter of the time. All the while the stink of burning grew stronger, so that Evar expected to see flames curling up around his head at any moment.

Finally, he was clear, dragging his satchel with him. He looked around wildly, too spooked by the threat of fire to let his gaze rest on anything long enough to understand it. Nothing... just the hulking automaton towering over him, frozen in place, stooped with one hand still clawed around the space where he had been.

Evar drew in several deep breaths and let his nose lead him. Gingerly, he opened his book satchel and a faint smoke wafted out. The iron ball warned back inquisitive fingers with waves of heat. It did seem to be cooling though, for which Evar was very thankful. Quite what had happened he wasn’t sure, but it seemed clear that in some manner the orb had stopped the automaton, and that the action might have broken the device along with the internal workings of Evar’s assailant.

“Shit.” He sat back with a snarl. He was certain of very little, but one thing he did know for sure was that it was going to be a very long hobble back to the centre circle.

Some things are built to thwart those that try to break them. The better they are at that job, the more vulnerable they may be to being broken accidentally.

A Century of Main Battle Tanks, by Commander Ian Wrigglesworth

CHAPTER 31

Livira

The assistant that Mayland had called Hellet held his hand out for the book. He’d sent Livira back for it and had called it a danger. His exact words echoed in Livira’s memory though she would like to have forgotten them:

You have written a wound into the world, broken laws whose age it would be meaningless to describe. There is a book that is also a loop. A book that has swallowed its own tale. It is a ring, a cycle, burning through the years, spreading cracks through time, fissures that reach into its past and future. And through those cracks things that have no business in the world of flesh can escape.

More importantly, at least in Livira’s estimation, Hellet had said that without bringing the book forward she would remain a ghost in any time that Evar was flesh, and he would be unable to be anything but a ghost where she had form. Hellet had said nothing, however, about giving the book to him when she returned with it.

“I never agreed to give you my book.” Livira held it to her chest.

“It’s not safe,” Hellet said without expression. “Neither now nor then, neither here nor there. You should let me destroy it.”

“Destroy it?” Livira echoed. She might have guessed that something like this was coming but she hadn’t allowed herself to, heading off each stray thought that wandered in that direction. Malar had said that she wouldn’t take the side of the book-burners, no matter what the larger argument might be. And now this assistant expected her to let not just any old book be destroyed, but the one and only one that she had written herself. If she had bled upon the pages and written every word in crimson the bundle she held to her breastbone could not be more part of her. To erase her stories, the thoughts and passions, the tears that had fallen, and take them utterly from the world... She tried to loosen her grip on the covers. She felt foolish, but also unable to let it go. Despite the vastness of the library and its unmissable message that books were as common and as numerous as grains of sand on a beach, still she had always felt that the combination of ink, quill, and hand had given her thoughts a kind of immortality, that they would outlast her flesh and wait out the millennia on library shelves, occasionally being discovered and rediscovered by intrepid explorers. Maybe her ideas would even find another mind in which they echoed and took on weight as the reader wrapped pieces of his own soul around the pieces of hers that rested on the page, as they had with Evar.

Livira snorted with bitter laughter at her own ego, her hubris, her arrogance. And still she couldn’t force her arms to set her little book in that white hand.

“You don’t have to.” It was Malar. “Fuck him. It’s your book. It’s not even that bad. I liked the bit...” He frowned. “...the bit with the thing. That was pretty good.” He turned his pale glower towards the assistant. “She’s keeping it.”

The assistant looked at his outstretched hand and lowered his arm. Livira had been tensed for coercion of some sort, or perhaps just argument. Having been on the other side of a pair of white eyes like those watching her, she should perhaps have known better. Coercion and argument were not the tools of the timeless.

The assistant indicated the portal through which they’d emerged.

“That’s it?” Malar seemed disappointed that there was to be no fight. “You dragged us behind you like a child’s toy before, and now you’re just letting us walk off?”

“You were time-echoes,” the assistant answered. “It’s our duty to correct anomalies that won’t correct themselves. The Exchange is not your place. You should leave and not return.”

“Where will this portal take us?” Livira didn’t want to return to the pool in Evar’s chamber and find herself having to dodge skeer whilst following Evar’s trail that might lead through doors that wouldn’t open for her. In the past she’d felt that her exits from the Exchange had been portals of opportunity. Now she just wanted a portal to open for her and Malar, exactly where and when she needed it.

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