Page 95 of The Book that Broke the World

Meelan, still holding his sister’s hand, called out, “Yute told us how many of them there are. Soldiers armed with ’sticks. They’ll just kill us all, Livira!”

Livira looked towards him, her face tragic but determined. “I’m scared too. I didn’t say what I should have said. I was too scared to lose you all. Too selfish. But we can’t not go back. We just can’t. Or at least I can’t. I wouldn’t be able to look any of you in the eye. If I saved myself like that, I wouldn’t be worth saving.”

“Livira!” Evar caught her arm. He wanted to tell her she shouldn’t go, or couldn’t go, that it was madness, that the monsters would kill her. The ones of her own kind. But he understood the look on her face now. Guilt. And he knew that anything he said to stop her would only erode whatever esteem she had for him. So, all he found to say was, “I’ll come with you.”

“No!” Yolanda’s voice became a cold wind. “By your own admission, you’ve given the greatest weapon into the hands of the greatest evil. That book is a flame of its own making and the fire that spreads from it may consume the library itself. Now you will stand before the powers that be and make an account of yourself. You will not throw away the lives of the only people who might yet undo the damage you have wrought!”

“Which people?” Evar asked, still holding on to Livira’s arm, though whether he was her anchor in this storm, or she his, he couldn’t tell.

“You two, of course!” And with that Yute’s daughter strode towards the grey door of the Mechanism. The door became fog before her, and she passed through it, both arms clasped around the book she held over her chest. Nothing but the swirling of the mist marked her passage.

“Only one person can go in at a time?” Livira said weakly, looking at Evar for confirmation.

Evar nodded. “That’s what we were always told.”

“But today,” said Yute, going into the Mechanism after his daughter, “we’ve been summoned by the ones that made the rules.”

A library may grow big enough to hold every fact concerning the mechanics of the universe, but truth itself is larger than any page.

The First Book of Irad

CHAPTER 41

Arpix

Arpix followed Yute through the mist of the grey door. He had heard Livira’s many tales of the one Mechanism she knew about, but he had never visited. He put that reticence down to the fact that while nobody had told him not to enter it, the Mechanism was clearly a secret held close by the deputies and head librarian. When they wanted him to know about it, Arpix reasoned, they would tell him.

Another part of him whispered that this law-abiding excuse was just something he’d reached for gratefully, and that the truth was that it was fear which had held him back. Livira had told him how Evar and his siblings had been trapped within the device for whole lifetimes and more. Arpix had been wary of exposing himself to such risk and had ungenerously characterised the transportation Livira described as “cheating.” He would, he said, rather absorb books through his eyeballs, and leave the rest of his anatomy out of the experience.

Even now as the grey mist swallowed Yute from sight, Arpix hesitated. Behind him, Jella paused too. “You don’t have to.”

Arpix nodded to himself. He didn’t have to. But Clovis would. Jella would. All the people he loved would. All the people he had left in the world. He made fists of his hands, telling himself that he was tired of his dried-up, tight-wrapped existence, tired of himself, and ready for change. And with that, he stepped into the mist.

—

From the stories Livira had told him, Arpix was expecting to step into another world of light and colour and fascination. Instead, a darkness enfolded him, a darkness so profound that it devoured ideas as small as up and down, and took with them any notion of a floor beneath his feet. It consumed even time itself. This was the void that had held Evar Eventari until the bones of his parents had become dust along with those of generations to follow.

Two points of light hung in the Mechanism’s night, and Arpix wondered if they had always been there, and he had somehow failed to see them until now. They became closer, brighter, larger, resolved by his attention into two thrones, each in its own pool of light, a great space between them as if at opposite extremes of some vast dais.

In the same way that the lights had entered Arpix’s mind, each throne now held an occupant who might have been there all along. A man on each throne, somehow conveying an impression of great size despite the fact that there was nothing here to offer scale.

The man on the left sat upright, a regal gravitas to the planes and angles of his face that was never present in King Oanold’s, not even in the flattery stamped upon the realm’s coins. Dark hair curled from beneath a silver circlet to frame his features. The blade of his nose reminded Arpix strangely of Carlotte. A librarian’s robe wrapped him, the same grey as the Mechanism, and across his lap lay a large black book.

The man occupying the other throne lounged in his seat. He shared sufficient similarities with the librarian that he might be a younger brother. The same dark curls, though longer and unkempt. The same prominent nose and dark, watchful eyes, though with a glint of humour. The stubble on chin and cheeks might, with another week, constitute a beard. In place of the other’s robes he wore a motley of browns with flashes of crimson. The garb of a traveller, perhaps. The staff leaning against his throne looked more suited to walking than to ceremony.

Arpix looked for the others, Livira, Clovis, Yute, Evar... but if the void held them, it did not reveal them. The men on the thrones seemed to be focused on the far distance and neither deigned to acknowledge his presence.

“Hello?” Arpix’s voice came out more timidly than he would have liked. It seemed almost a crime to break the silence.

“Ah,” the older man rumbled. “It has come to this now?”

The younger man looked at Arpix with mild interest. “Arpix Reed. A true son of the library if ever there was one.”

“Might I enquire...” Arpix started again. “You have me at a disadvantage. Your names?”

The older man cleared his throat. “I have read enough books to know that saying I have many names would be an awful cliché. Call me Irad. My brother is Jaspeth.”

Arpix made an awkward bow. “And I am here... because?”

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