Page 76 of The Book that Broke the World

“And how,” said Lord Algar in a coldly measured tone, “would you climb down thirty feet of shelving within sight of the centre circle, and not see His Majesty sleeping below you?”

“How would she?” King Oanold asked. “Why would she? Without so much as a knife?” The king and his lord might both be hollow men with ugly appetites and no concern for others, but Algar was known as an intellectual and the king for possessing a shrewd intelligence that had sustained his rule for three decades. Oanold knuckled his forehead with both hands. “There was a light. I thought I dreamed it. But there was a light.” He lowered his arms and narrowed his gaze. “A light like the ones in that bewitched forest!”

“There’s never much meat on a duster,” Algar said, provoking a puzzling bark of laughter from the soldier who’d slapped her. “But she looks decently fed, wouldn’t you say?”

The king came forward, reaching for Livira. She backed away but the man behind her grabbed her elbows. Oanold pinched her upper arm through her robe, as if she were livestock. “You’re right...”

“Where did you come from, girl?” Lord Algar seemed to have taken over as the inquisitor. “Clean, well fed, magical lights...” His single eye flicked to hers. “You can open those doors of light!”

King Oanold stepped back. “I’ll give you a count of ten to open a magic door for us. Defy me and I’ll have Jons cut your legs off.”

“Jons!” Livira swung around to find that the grizzled soldier behind her, the man who had broken her arm without a moment’s hesitation, was indeed the Jons who had brought her out of the Dust with Malar.

“Hello, Livira.” Grim-faced, no kindness in his eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“Obeying my king.” Jons shrugged. “Surviving. I was always a survivor.”

“One!” King Oanold brought Livira’s attention back to the matter at hand. “Two!”

“I can’t open doors. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Three!”

“You’d be mad to kill me.”

“Four!”

“I know the library better than Acconite. I can guide—”

“Five!”

“—you out of here!”

“Six!” Something in the wet quiver of Oanold’s lips said that this was no more a bluff than the broken arm had been. The circle’s healing might stop her bleeding to death if they chopped off her legs, but it wouldn’t grow them back.

“Seven.” Oanold counted on into the pause her shock had made. These maniacs were actually going to do it. From the blood spatters most of them wore they’d already done something similar since arriving in the chamber.

“All right, all right! I’ll do it.” Livira slid a hand into her robes. “I need my book.” She pulled the small black book from her inner pocket and thumbed it open with one hand. Instantly, darkness swallowed the light.

Livira had a choice to make and no time to weigh her options. She dropped the book, ducked, and ran. She could have chosen to run with it, but then she would have become a fleeing bubble of darkness, something easy to chase. This way the worst of her antagonists might stumble around for some while in the static darkness she left behind.

Livira emerged from the dark and immediately ran into a chest-high book wall. Winded and hurt, she straddled it even as the top sections began to fall, and rolled over into the enclosure beyond, which was empty save for a pile of dirty cloth and a spare boot.

Driven by the animating effects of terror, Livira vaulted the next wall into another small enclosure. She stomped her way over a much-deflated formerly fat man who had managed to sleep through her earlier screams but not through her booted foot’s arrival on his belly. The encounter left Livira sprawling forward, her feet tangled in the man on the floor. She hit the next wall hard enough to topple the central section. As she crawled forward over the tumble of books, the merciless light showed her a nightmare she’d been wholly unprepared for.

A glistening skeleton lay partly covered by fallen books, the bones picked clean but still fresh enough to gleam, save where the flensing knife had scored them. Keeping close company with fresh bones was never going to be pleasant but two things tore the scream from Livira’s lips. The first was that the right forearm and hand were still covered in flesh, the skin not even bloody. The second was the shock of black hair still attached to the scalp of the grinning skull. Very black hair with a reddish tint brought out by the light. The kind of hair the people from her settlement had, and that was common all across the Dust.

Livira ploughed on into the next wall, no longer sure of her direction or whether she’d stopped screaming or not. It shook but resisted her. She threw her whole weight against it and again it shook, and then wobbled and came down, spilling most of its books on top of her.

She emerged from the heavy rain of paper and leather into a reeking enclosure with no exit. A figure lay there, hunched in a corner, naked and smeared with grime. A black-haired young man with both his legs absent at the knee, the amputations healed over. Livira didn’t want to recognise the face peering at her through those filthy locks. She wanted her memory for faces—already the weakest part of her memory cage—to let go of everything it had hold of. Then she wouldn’t have to understand that this was Gevin. Gevin who had been a small child when Acmar had carried him from the Dust as they followed Malar.

Glancing back through the walls she’d crashed through, Livira could see the man she’d woken scrabbling as if worried she’d stolen something precious from him. He grabbed an object from the floor and held it jealously to his chest. A leg bone, scraps of flesh still adhering to it here and there.

“Run, Livira,” Gevin said behind her in a hollow voice. “Run. This is hell.”

Any doctor soon comes to understand the burden of hope. While suspicion might be inconvenient when it comes to the business of dispensing medicine, it’s the chains with which trust binds a physician that make escape so hard.

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