Page 79 of The Book that Broke the World

Kerrol returned to where Evar stood in the doorway.

“I don’t think I can do it. I just can’t let it close.” Evar looked up at the area the door would fill if he were to step forward.

Kerrol shrugged. “It’s a scary thing.” He held his hand out.

“You’re going to try psychology on me.” Evar could feel it coming.

“No, you’ve already decided you’re staying. I just wanted to shake your hand in case we don’t get to come back to you.” He looked at his open palm.

Evar nodded grimly and took his brother’s hand in the warrior’s grip. Kerrol yanked him forward, hard enough that they both fell over.

“What have you done?” Evar gazed up at the white wall where he’d been standing. “You idiot!”

Sheetra turned and hurried back to the door, setting both hands against it. “It won’t open.” Evar didn’t need that translated even if he hadn’t caught the gist of it anyhow.

Evar untangled himself from Kerrol and, not even bothering to stand, lunged at the door. The sight of it melting away before his outstretched fingers was more beautiful than any of the dawns he’d seen since his escape.

“Bastard!” He got to his feet and rounded on Kerrol.

Kerrol was already walking away. “I think you mean, lucky bastard.”

Advancing from finger paints to the quill pen enabled writers to whisper more prettily. The printing press allowed them to shout.

The Empty Page, by Tess Eliot

CHAPTER 35

Arpix

Arpix had always counted himself as a cautious man. He admitted to being studious, and acknowledged that he lacked Livira’s chaotic genius, Jella’s fortitude, Carlotte’s vivaciousness, or Meelan’s determination. War had come and set him running through a burning library. A strange escape had dumped him on an island of relative safety, and there he’d stayed, seeing no direction to take and lacking the courage or foolhardiness to strike out into the unknown.

Once again it had taken outside pressure to make him move, and now here he was, following a magical cat through the library, looking for a new direction. His horizons had been broadened to such a degree that his old life looked small and blinkered. Still, he wanted it back. He wanted his quiet, ordered days back, growing old among the towering shelves, exploring the space between two covers while sitting in a comfortable chair, with a hot cup of chai within arm’s reach.

Doors closed behind him one after the next. Doors that could be opened only by the touch of a willing canith. And still Wentworth led them on, stepping from shelf top to shelf top via some distant intermediate space, never needing to jump.

Clovis walked at Arpix’s side, further complicating his life. He’d sometimes felt that women were a different species—a stupid conceit, he acknowledged, but one that stood as effective shorthand for his awkwardness and inability to move any conversation or relationship away from the comfortable ground of academia into spaces that seemed dark and uncertain. Spaces where the floor itself might vanish beneath you and injury seemed a certainty. Even with a friend as bold and salacious as Carlotte he’d always felt happier, calmer, steering back towards safe ground, telling himself there would always be another day, better timing, more auspicious omens—any excuse would do. Women weren’t a different species, but Clovis definitely was. Textbook fact. And she was female on top of that. Carlotte had been forthright and as suggestive as it was possible to be without actually unbuttoning his clothes. But there had always been escape routes, and Arpix had taken them, while all the time part of his mind was screaming at him that he was an idiot, and another part that he was a coward.

Meelan had even asked him one day if he liked boys. To which Arpix had sighed and said that he wished it were anything so simple and reasonable as that. “I think I just hate myself, Mee,” he’d said. “I can’t see any other logical explanation for constantly getting in my own way, for pushing aside things that would be good for me. But”—and he had held up a hand to forestall his friend’s inevitable repetition of old offers to help—“it is in my nature, mine to bear, and I think if I were to change... it might break me. So, please, let’s not speak of it again.” And, with his eyes prickling and his hands trembling, he had walked away from Meelan, and still to this day his imagination could not tell him what might have been on the boy’s face as he watched him go.

All of which had made Clovis both a revelation and an existential crisis. She was a force of nature, like a flood, or a forest fire. Social niceties were nothing to her. The body language with which he’d so often deflected that sort of attention was as meaningless to her as his own tongue. It was one thing when Carlotte had suddenly started to find his slightest attempt at humour to be hilarious, or his library tales fascinating. He’d been able to ignore her playful touches. But when a seven-foot canith puts her face an inch from your neck and breathes you in, it’s hard to pretend there’s nothing going on.

Even so, if Clovis’s attentions had sparked nothing in him he would have been able to answer her in kind, even if it meant simply turning his back. But they hadn’t. Something about her lit a fire under his skin, and it turned out that there was no lying to a canith about such things. Whatever his mouth told her, her nose told her something else.

And even then, if it had just been his traitor body walking away from the script he’d played his life by, he could have, with difficulty, reined it in using the power of his will. Probably. But it wasn’t just his body, or her body. Something in her directness, her lack of concern for almost everything that concerned him, her total honesty, something in that mix called to him. The strangest thing of all was that although she was clearly capable of taking on an army of Arpixes and had thrown herself at an enraged cratalac armed only with a sword... the strange thing was that he worried for her and wanted to protect her.

“What are you thinking about, human boy?” Clovis growled at his side.

“What we’ll find when we reach Yute.”

“Liar.” She gave a lazy smile. “You were thinking of me.”

—

The next door Wentworth led them to was closed, but Evar went ahead to scout it and came back to report that three skeer warriors were waiting before it, facing the door. Possibly in the same sort of hibernation that the previous one had been.

“Use the orb to squash them against the door,” Clovis said.

It was the sensible suggestion, and not dissimilar to Evar going forward and stabbing his blade through the last one’s head. Even so, the idea of casually murdering three skeer didn’t sit well with Arpix and he said so.

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