Page 84 of The Book that Broke the World

“But the fire...” Livira shook her head. “You ran away. That’s why you’re h—”

A solid kick to the ribs shut her up.

“A tactical retreat to draw the enemy away from the palace and expose their flanks to Charant’s arrow-sticks. The general had cannons too, thicker than a man. Fresh from the laboratory forges.”

“You lost,” Livira wheezed, unable to deny the truth despite the likelihood of another kick.

The king shook his head, laughing. “Lost?” His laugh became a theatrical booming. “Lost to dog-soldiers? No, child, we’re going back. My throne’s secure. You’ve fallen for the big lie. People like Yute will say anything to get the crown off my head. Sabbers overrunning Crath City, who can believe that? I’ve soldiers here who saw what was happening. The canith were just in the low town, and that’s always been full of traitors.

“My kingdom will rise to the call. We’ll harry these hounds out into the Dust and drag their bodies back to decorate the walls. If it hadn’t been for them setting that damn fire... blind luck they separated us, and we ended up here. Those white monsters could eat ten canith each for breakfast. Even my troopers have difficulty putting them down.”

“White monsters?” Livira tried standing up, wincing in pain and expecting to be thrown down again any moment. “You mean skeer? Six legs, more eyes?”

“Demons.” Lord Algar’s eyes slid to the side to measure the king’s approval. “Unholy creatures from the deepest hells, loosed by the foolish experiments of librarians like Yute.” It seemed he wasn’t going to include Livira among the librarians’ ranks even when levelling allegations of atrocities against them. “Dark magics like this.” He held out the little black book with which Livira had summoned a bubble of night.

“It’s not magic,” Livira said, “just something you don’t understand. You think the light here is magic too?” She regretted the words as soon as they left her lips, but the man’s stupidity had pulled them out of her. A guard stepped forward and slapped her across the face, a stinging blow. For a moment it put an image of Malar in her mind. He’d slapped her on the steps of the Allocation Hall, and it had been wrong despite the good intentions buried beneath it. Right now, though, she would welcome some of his violent shortcuts to good goals, like freeing her from the hell she’d dropped herself into.

At a nod from Algar, Jons took hold of Livira’s arm once more and twisted it behind her.

“I believe you were counting to ten, Your Majesty,” Algar said, his single eye boring into Livira.

“So I was.” King Oanold nodded with practised gravitas. “And despite your treacherous attempt to flee, girl, I will show you how decent humans behave, and begin at one rather than carry on from where we left off. I believe you were going to open a magic door for us.” He coughed importantly and swelled his chest. “One!”

“Wait!” Livira’s panic rose through her, threatening to overwhelm her intelligence. “I can open a door for you but—”

“Two!”

“—it takes a lot longer than you’re giving me.”

“Three!

“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” the king interrupted his own count. “But you can still do it without your feet, certainly without your toes. And losing them will be both an incentive for your efforts, and a punishment for your escape attempt. Four!”

“I can’t! I just can’t. Please!” Livira hated herself for begging. She hated how this crude, stupid man had reduced her to a blubbering mess simply with his boundless cruelty. His methods took no cleverness, no wit, no skill, and yet were as effective as a hammer to the head. “Please don’t!”

“Seven!”

Livira had missed five and six in her distress.

Dozens were watching her now, expressions ranging from stony to empty to hungry. Only a handful bore traces of sympathy and none of those showed any signs of objecting. The alleged head librarian, Acconite, studied his hands with dedicated intensity.

Livira had imagined Malar coming to her rescue. She wanted it so badly that the images her imagination painted of his bloody arrival were sufficiently vivid to fool the eye—nearly. But however much she demanded that he step into the circle from one of the nearest aisles, he remained sealed away behind distance or time or both.

When something did emerge from one of the aisles Livira had been staring at wildly over the shoulders of the king and his guards, only she saw it, and when the others finally noticed the thing, Livira was the only one to understand what it was.

Oanold had decreed that the skeer were demons, but alien as they were, the creation that emerged behind him was closer to a product of the hells described in Crath City’s many temples. A pitch-black skeleton, taller than any man, bleeding drops of smoking tar from its bones, the only deviation from the remains of a regular human, apart from the colour and the fact they moved without the need for flesh, were the talons at the end of each finger, and the distended jaw full of shearing teeth and dagger fangs.

“Nine!” Oanold’s count held everyone’s attention. The man beside him only turned as the skeleton dipped its head to chomp into his neck. The black skull lifted sharply, tearing large chunks of meat free in a crimson shower. And the screaming started.

—

Livira knew an Escape when she saw one. She found it less terrifying than being mutilated in cold blood by people who hated her and would eat what they cut from her. But it was still terrifying, and she ran just like everyone else did.

Livira sidestepped a pale-eyed soldier, twisted from the clutching grasp of an old woman in soiled finery, and sped down the nearest aisle that led away from the Escape. She ran like a wild thing for a hundred yards, taking one turn after another, putting distance and barriers between herself and all horrors, both alien and human.

She began to slow, gasping for breath, trying to tame her panting so she could hear any pursuit. Her thoughts caught up with her soon enough. She’d seen Escapes in all manner of scary forms before, but they’d always looked as if somewhere in the world, or on some other, there might be real creatures built along the same lines. The skeleton, however, with its devouring maw and fleshless frame, seemed built of fear, a creature out of the pages of some horror novel. Moreover, it seemed curiously suited to its victims, a group of starving cannibals, of whom many—surely most—would have had misgivings about the nature of their meals.

Over her still-pounding heart and the scattered screams—none as distant as she would have liked—Livira could hear no sign of any chase. The boom of several ’sticks brought an end to the screaming and prompted Livira to carry on. She walked as quietly as she could, avoiding the books which even this far from Oanold’s camp had been scattered from the lower shelves in large numbers. She wondered if it was an act of vandalism or if they’d been looking for something...

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