Page 96 of The Book that Broke the World

“We asked for you and you came,” Jaspeth said.

“You’re here to decide the library’s fate.” Irad bowed his head.

“You’re here to settle a bet.” Jaspeth grinned, white teeth in the darkness of his face.

“Just me?” Arpix stammered a little.

“All of you.” Irad waved a hand as if Arpix were part of a sizeable audience. “All of you who have become part of this tangle.”

Arpix gathered his courage. “Forgive me, but the library spans worlds and time. Surely its fate can’t depend on my friends and me?”

Jaspeth sat forward in his throne, reaching for his staff. He eyed Arpix as if he might agree with his assessment of his lack of consequence, then shrugged. “Every crack has to begin as the smallest of things, even if it grows to split away some vast tonnage of ice, or to divide a planet. Even the shattering of reality must begin with a hairline fracture.” He looked over at Irad. “My family has a poor history with fratricide. We invented it. This gathering—this delegation—is our answer to the irreconcilable views we’ve been gifted. We will abide by the outcome of your efforts and thereby avoid violence between us. Whether you can do the same is a question for you.”

Irad folded the fingers of one hand through those of the other. “There will be a time of choosing. Sooner than you think. Sides must be picked and taken. The decisions made here matter. They will echo through time. I invite you to choose the vision I have laid out. The library as it would have been had my brother not opposed me. Every work that has ever been committed to record by any species made available to all, without the barriers of language or distance. A library with so many doors that it will never be out of reach. A place where all opinion, discovery, and imagination can be summoned in a comprehensible form without delay. Immortal memory to counter the fragility of flesh. A ladder by which intelligence may ascend. With such a gift any species could hardly fail to reach nirvana.”

Jaspeth, who had been shaking his head slowly, now focused on Arpix and the intensity of his stare felt as if the noonday sun were blazing upon him.

“Many poisons taste sweet. Much that is deadly proves pleasing to the eye. My brother’s gift is such a thing. Wisdom is difficult to write down, harder to find amid the ocean of the unwise, and, when found, next to impossible to learn from a page. The wisdom to use knowledge must be earned rather than given. That takes time. Lifetimes. Millennia. Knowledge without wisdom is fire in the hands of children. You know this.

“There is a ladder to the heavens, but there are no shortcuts when it comes to scaling it. When you fall you must start afresh, without the fear of falling that memory will bring, without the fatal distance that memory will place beneath you as it lifts you back to the highest point that any have reached so far. My brother’s library presents itself as wings with which you might fly, but in truth it shackles you in ways that are difficult to see. A clean slate is the real freedom. Fresh innocence. Tabula rasa.”

“And the third way?” Arpix dared to speak into the pause after Jaspeth fell silent. They had, after all, summoned him and spoken of choices.

The mouths of both brothers quirked in disapproval but in that same moment a third figure appeared, standing between the thrones, dwarfed by them, confirming Arpix’s previously unfounded belief that Irad and Jaspeth were as tall as houses.

Yute stood there, tiny and pale. “There are many other paths.”

Irad looked down at him, frowning. “I fashioned you from nothing. Just as the creator made his angels from light and void.”

“And some of them still fell.” Yute studied his hands. “Some fell as far as I have. Perhaps lower still.” He looked up, staring in Arpix’s direction, though Arpix now understood that he was more than a hundred yards away and if Yute could also see a hidden audience then maybe his gaze had found another to settle on. “I offer compromise. The library has, for many cycles of men, canith, and countless others, existed under this compromise—”

“And it has failed to prevent disaster a thousand times,” Jaspeth interrupted without heat.

“It has.” Yute bowed his head. “But unlike your solution, Lord Jaspeth, or Lord Irad’s, compromise has many forms. It can change, adjust, seek new solutions. That is my only defence of it. That is my plea to any who will join me and avoid absolutes.

“Believe me when I say that whatever choices you make in this matter, you will not be my enemy. Irad and Jaspeth are—forgive me, my lords—archetypes. Neither is inherently wrong, neither is evil, and those who follow them deserve neither credit nor censure for that choice.

“Evil, such as it is, is found far closer to home. It is found among humans, among canith, and in every other form of intelligence. What follows us in the library is as close to evil as I’ve seen.

“King Oanold has in his possession, though he doesn’t yet know it, a weapon to put all others to shame. A weapon forged by the unwitting trespass of a human and a canith. Some of you will have heard me speak of the fire-limit. The level of technology a people are able to reach before they burn their world down with it. Sometimes the fire is the hot flicker that consumes cities and eats through library shelves. Sometimes the fire is of a more advanced kind that can scour bedrock and poison the skies. Sometimes it will even shatter worlds. But with the book that Livira and Evar have created, King Oanold has reached a fire-limit where the flames are of the sort that can reduce the laws of nature to ash and burn the very substance of the library rather than merely the books within it.”

Jaspeth stood from his throne. “Compromise is a cancer, a rot that destroys what it touches. At least my brother’s vision is clear. It has purity to it. It’s wrong, but there is nothing soft or corrupt to it, nothing hidden to be revealed later.” His dark gaze swept the void and Arpix felt the tingle of it on his skin. “Let us see the place where compromise took my brother’s fallen angel.” He stamped the heel of his staff on whatever invisible ground he stood upon.

Where Yute had been, Arpix saw another Yute. Blood and panic covered the face of this new man. The vision showed only him and his immediate surroundings, a place that burned with the library’s light. Stacks of books taller than Yute moved in and out of the vision, fading away at the edges as he hurried through a forest of the things.

Sounds reached out from the scene, distant shouts, muffled cries of pain, screaming.

The scene widened. Behind Yute and to the left dozens of the stacks had been toppled and books carpeted the floor. In one place a hand reached out, the fingers unmoving and stained with crimson. Yute hurried on, stepping around the bloody corpse of a child. A canith child. He avoided the body of an old female, grey-maned, no mark of violence visible upon her.

The scene widened again to show the trail of Yute’s red footprints leading back through the book stacks to a circle of crops where Livira’s old friends, Gevin, Katrin, Neera, and a score of others from the city milled about in confusion, shock on their faces, the greenery trampled around them. At their backs stood a pool of dark water, its surface rippled and unquiet.

Another two canith bodies lay among the plants. The humans steered clear of them.

The focus returned to Yute. He reached a soldier, one of Oanold’s veterans who had skirmished with canith out on the Dust for years before they rolled over Crath City’s walls in a grey wave. Her uniform was marked with soot in places and with blood spatters.

“No! Stop!” Yute caught her sword arm as she made to skewer a canith on the ground who might or might not be dead.

The woman shook Yute off with minimal effort. An elbow to the stomach sent him staggering back, gasping for breath. She ran the length of her steel through the body at her feet, then looked back at Yute, frowning, shook her head, and moved on, hunting for survivors.

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