Page 97 of The Book that Broke the World

Yute’s voice returned as a whisper, then a croak. “Come back. You have to stop this...”

Arpix knew that Yute had come through the portal last, to ensure that nobody who left the library with him used any of the other portals. It seemed clear, though, that he hadn’t known what would be waiting for them on the other side of the doorway. He arrived last, and the soldiers were already exacting what they considered vengeance upon what looked to be a largely unarmed community of canith living in the library.

Arpix, who was already sickened by the cruel aftermath of the slaughter, suddenly had a bad feeling about who these canith might be. It was the way of the Exchange, when left without instruction, to link things, to bring together causes and effects, wants and desires, to fit one piece to another.

The void in which he hung allowed no sounds other than those from the vision Jaspeth was sharing, but somehow, rippling under the quiet between the fading sounds of murder among the stacks, Arpix could feel the silence shaking with Clovis’s howling.

Yute moved on, one arm across his stomach, half a run, half a stagger. His path took him past the bodies of a score of canith, most cut down from behind. Two soldiers lay dead, one with a missing throat, the other’s head smashed against the floor. Their weapons had already been salvaged. He passed the entrance to one of the reading rooms. A tall figure stood beside a shorter, fatter man who was in the process of placing a grey wig upon his bald head. A dozen soldiers flanked the pair, most staring where the tall man’s singular gaze was directed: down the corridor.

“Algar! Stop this madness! These aren’t—”

“When you find cockroaches in the kitchen of your new home you stamp on them.” The fat man turned around as a soldier helped him into a robe of purple velvet lined with ermine. “You don’t say, ‘These are different cockroaches, let us give them a chance to prove themselves.’ ” King Oanold faced Yute, the remnants of his disguise—the dress and shawl of some older noblewoman—on the floor beside him.

Yute saw soldiers at the far end of the corridor running as if in pursuit of someone. “We have to leave. Now! We need to go back and try another door.”

Algar exchanged a look with the king. “Our soldiers seem to like it here. They’re doing an excellent job of driving back the sabbers.”

“Driving them back?” Yute’s outrage loaned rare colour to his words. “They’re slaughter—”

“Did we not just leave my city in flames? My library?” Oanold roared. “This is justice! It’s mercy compared to the retribution that the law demands.”

Yute stared from the lord to the king. He straightened and drew his untidy robes around him. “In the chambers beyond this one these people maintain armies that dwarf the one which invaded our city. Consider this a peaceful village surrounded by fortresses. I have unwittingly helped you to bypass their defences, but if we don’t leave now, by the same route that brought us here, their kin will come in numbers so great...”

Distant cries of pain and fear rattled down the corridor from the reading room. Human voices. The sounds of a tide turning, of an advance becoming a retreat.

“...perhaps it has already started,” Yute said.

Knowledge is a deadly weapon, but for those too lazy to wield such a blade, simply hand it to your foe and let them destroy themselves.

Attributed to Jaspeth

CHAPTER 42

Livira

Livira hung in the void and watched as Irad and Jaspeth spoke to an audience that might be millions strong or might just be her. Somewhere deep inside her she knew that, like the Exchange, what this place was showing her was coloured by her expectation. It had patterned itself to fit with a mythology she knew. The library and its creators were both larger than any one mythos, and what Irad and his brother truly were she could not imagine. If they owned singular selves and revealed that truth to her, perhaps she would be unable to comprehend it, or she might burn up in the light of their divinity.

They spoke of her as the author of a crack that had been written into the world. Something that could spread and destroy. She had never meant to do harm. Maybe that was the only way in which the indestructible could fail and the immortal come to their ends: through the work of the ignorant. Structures that could withstand any assault might, in the end, fall to mistakes and to the random actions of those not seeking to bring them down.

Yute was summoned from the void to stand between the two gods, one a deity of memory, the other of oblivion, and Livira’s heart went out to him. He looked too small to bear the weight of everything that lay between the two brothers.

Even as Yute spoke, Livira saw the battle he had to fight. The brothers each offered a pure vision, something grand, a statement easily made and easy to line up behind. Yute’s stained compromise came fraught with grey edges, too much choice, too little clarity, every boundary open to endless discussion and debate.

Even so, Jaspeth seemed threatened by him, enough to stand from his throne and replace Yute with a vision of a past Yute whose actions might speak louder than his words and might linger in memory long after his arguments were forgotten.

It took Livira longer to understand what she was seeing than she felt it should have. The realisation that she was looking at the sabber raid that had slaughtered Evar’s people hit her like a blow to the stomach. Her people, Jons—the soldier who had, with Malar, brought her from the Dust—were part of that massacre. Even those from the Dust merely stood and watched, not seeking to intervene.

Lord Algar, whose enmity had plagued her ever since childhood, had broadened his wickedness to genocide. King Oanold at last had the canith he had always wanted, a people untutored in war, ripe to fall before the scythe of his bitter veterans.

But Yute—Yute had been the key to it. How had he forgotten so much of his past power? He had been an assistant and the library had been an open book to him. But a millennium of city life had left him little more equipped to navigate the Exchange than she’d been on her first visit.

It hadn’t been his fault. Not exactly. He’d balanced the harm that might be done by loose humans in the Exchange against the seemingly small chance of trouble occurring in the brief gap between the first refugees passing through the portal and his own arrival. It seemed as if that delay had been longer than it should have been, though. Even given the size of the party. Had something kept him in the Exchange longer than he had planned? Or was it perhaps an artefact of the way time flowed at different speeds inside and outside the wood?

Either way, Jaspeth had made a shrewd play. However guiltless Yute might be, the canith would now hear the screams of their ancestors behind all of his arguments. And the rest of them would see that his attempt to navigate unknown waters had caused great harm. How could such a man sail the far more hostile seas that lay between Irad and Jaspeth’s shores?

As the vision of Yute’s past deeds began to fade, Livira felt a pull and recognised its source. Yute’s recollection of his time as an assistant might have been wiped clean by the passage of centuries and the difficulty of any timeless knowledge finding space in a mind caught within the flow. But Livira’s experience lay little more than a day behind her, and her memory had been a thing of legend among the librarians. The pull was the Mechanism at work. They were being ejected. They would stumble from its doors, over a score of them, back into the dangers that had chased them into the reading room, and straight into the fire of the argument that Irad and Jaspeth had lit beneath them.

“Evar.” Livira spoke the word into the void. “Evar Eventari!” She wanted time with him and him alone. She wanted to speak without an audience. She wanted his attention without the competition of friends and enemies. “Evar.” And drawing on faint echoes of the Assistant’s power, she made a space in which they both stood. A room of shadows and flame flickers.

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