Page 78 of The Book that Broke the World

“And you are not well!”

“This is great.” Kerrol loomed over both of them, setting a hand on Clovis’s left shoulder and Arpix’s right. “A domestic dispute, and you’re using your words. I really should be taking notes.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Clovis said. “He’s manipulating us.”

“Give me the sword,” Kerrol said, “And I’ll go slice this bug up.”

“You?” Clovis snorted then spat. “You’d end up tripping and falling on the sharp end. You wouldn’t last half a minute against a skeer, and even Evar could take a skeer down if it’s just one on one.”

Kerrol stepped aside. “You heard the lady.” He waved Evar forward.

“He’s got you there, Clo.” Evar held his hand out for the sword. Against another swordsman there was no argument that Clovis’s skills would prove far more useful than Evar’s. But to fight a skeer involved running and jumping and dodging and skidding and turning, a lot of it. The strength and bulk of the things meant sword skills were far less important than athletics, gymnastics, and waiting for your moment. Clovis’s illness had made little impact on the lessons her wrist had learned over the years, but her strength was still a shadow of its normal self.

“Don’t die.” She handed him the sword with a snarl. “I want that sword back.” She rounded on Kerrol as Evar took the hilt. “And you! Don’t think I didn’t see what you did there. You got exactly what you wanted. Again.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s only going to work up until the point it doesn’t.”

Kerrol ignored her and spoke to Evar instead. “You need to be in the doorway when the skeer dies, otherwise you might as well have just pushed it back with the orb.”

—

For all the confidence he’d shown in rising to Kerrol’s challenge and taking Clovis’s sword, Evar felt far from sure he knew how to defeat a skeer warrior. His first attempt had not gone well, though he had only been armed with a crude, homemade knife.

As he left the cover of the shelves and closed on the skeer, his sword began to look progressively smaller, while the skeer’s bulk seemed more daunting by the yard.

The insectoid was facing away from him, standing its duty statue-still. Evar set his feet carefully, making no noise, but maintained a good pace, knowing that his scent would likely give him away and the slower he went, the more warning he’d give his foe.

“It’s asleep,” Evar breathed to himself. Part hope, part growing certainty. The skeer outside his home chamber had presumably waited anything from weeks to decades for the door to open. It had been in some sort of hibernation from which it took several long moments to emerge.

Evar increased his speed. “It’s asleep.”

He could be very wrong. Foolishly, embarrassingly, fatally wrong. An incautious attack could find the skeer snapping around to impale him on its arm spike. But similarly, if its hibernation were of a shallower sort, he would need to be quick to take advantage of it.

Evar gambled with his life. He started to sprint. At the last moment he used one of the skeer’s hindmost legs to vault onto the segmented whiteness of its back. With the armour slick beneath his feet and the first tremor of waking running through the warrior’s body, Evar thrust his blade at the back of the creature’s head.

Common steel might easily have failed to pierce the thick, blue-veined armour plate that served as an external skull. The Soldier’s weapon, however, was of a different order, and its point emerged amid the skeer’s eye cluster.

Taking a leaf from Clovis’s book, Evar used his whole body weight to twist the blade, cracking the armour and amplifying the damage inside the skeer’s head. The insectoid bucked, writhed—throwing Evar clear—then sagged to the floor, twitching.

Evar made sure to keep position so that the door couldn’t re-form.

Kerrol would be watching from the ladder top. He’d bring the others.

—

Evar felt no sense of victory, and it was shame rather than pride that filled his chest as the others came up. He was far from sure that he would feel any different had he defeated the creature in face-to-face combat rather than assassinating it while it slept. He was discovering that killing didn’t sit well with him. Escapes felt different, as if they were neither properly alive in the first place, nor truly dead when he put a weapon through them. The skeer, though the nature of its intelligence remained mysterious, was clearly alive and recognised by the library.

Evar left it to Clovis to recover her sword. She gave him a grim nod.

“The orb’s working.” Arpix pointed at the ichor that had run down the corridor as if there were a gradient. It pointed away from the direction of their approach.

“Good to know.” Kerrol sighed out his relief.

“I should stay.” Evar watched the last human, Sheetra, pass through. “If I don’t stay here, we could all be trapped forever...”

“That logic’s going to leave a trail of us standing like idiots every two miles,” Clovis growled.

“Yute might be in the next chamber,” Arpix suggested, though he didn’t look particularly confident. “We need to make a choice.” One option left individuals isolated and at the mercy of any skeer patrol that might happen by. The other option could see them trapped, potentially for another two centuries, only this time without seeds to grow food from and without a pool to water them.

Evar, who had spent his whole life trying to escape one chamber, felt the decision crushing him as if a real, physical door were trying to slide back into the space he occupied.

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