Chapter 6
Every notable toymaker puts a piece of her soul into each creation. The love with which it was crafted can be seen in every line. But even the cheapest toy, die-stamped and disgorged from mechanical bowels on conveyor belts, has a place where a child might hang their heart. The power of a fresh imagination is such that the meanest vessel can hold miracles.
Clockwork Dreams , by P. K. Richard
CHAPTER 6
Evar
Evar ran, chased by his brother and sister. There hadn’t been time to explain to Clovis or Kerrol what it was exactly that was ploughing towards them. The sound of ancient shelves exploding into splintered wood and of books falling by the ton was sufficient motivation for both of them to follow him.
They had crept into the chamber hoping to avoid any encounter with the deadly skeer who held sway over this part of the library, never imagining they would leave it pursued by a mechanical beast that could squash a skeer warrior flat beneath a single foot. The thing had clearly not moved in an age—the very shelves themselves had been built around it as if it were an immobile fixture.
“What is it?” Clovis caught up with Evar as he skidded around a corner into an aisle heading roughly in the direction of the nearest chamber exit. Apparently, she still had enough breath for questions.
The broken body of a skeer hit the top of the shelves just ahead of them, making the whole structure shudder, and ricocheted down to the floor a few dozen yards away.
“It does that,” Evar managed, sprinting on. He vaulted the skeer’s twitching carcass ahead of Clovis.
For now, it seemed sufficient answer for Clovis. They ran with purpose. The thunderous destruction behind them seemed to be gaining, but slowly. They might make it to the tunnel that joined the chamber to the next one. Evar’s main hope—apart from getting there first—was that the construct either couldn’t open the door or would be too large to fit through it.
The chamber wall loomed ever closer but there seemed no end to the shelving lined up in their way at increasingly unhelpful angles. Behind them the thunder of destruction swelled, and Evar could imagine the construct just one fragile wall of books and wood away.
“Up!” Clovis elbowed past him and scrambled up a ladder.
By the time Evar reached the top his sister was already away, leaping from shelf top to shelf top. A backward glance as he reached down the ladder for Kerrol’s hand showed the metal beast barrelling through shelves that reached to its shoulders, destroying one after another with swings of its arms, leaving clouds of loose pages swirling in its wake.
At least a dozen skeer were clinging to the thing, anchoring themselves on the armour plates that made its body, and pounding away at it, their efforts lost in the general din. Evar didn’t fancy their chances, but he had to admire their bravery.
“Come on.” He hauled Kerrol up and started after Clovis.
Evar crossed the next twenty aisles in twenty leaping strides, all of them on the edge of control, with a potentially fatal plunge waiting for him if he missed his footing. Ahead, just shy of the wall, Clovis had stopped and turned. Evar barely kept himself from falling in his effort to halt beside her.
He looked back and his heart went cold. “Where’s Kerrol?” The mechanical giant was barely fifty yards away, ignoring the skeer still clinging to it, hammering its way through the shelves in an orgy of destruction.
Kerrol’s absence explained itself. He’d missed his footing and fallen. Evar gathered himself to start leaping back. Clovis grabbed his arm. “It already passed him by. It’s not after Kerrol.”
“The skeer will be!” Evar shouted above the crashing, but Clovis had already gone, aimed towards the exit.
Evar reached the last set of shelves and scrambled down before dropping the remaining twenty feet. He could see Clovis running down the corridor that stretched two hundred yards to the next chamber. The white door that sealed it halfway along was sixty feet high and as wide as the corridor. If it didn’t open for them, they’d be stuck in the corridor, and if the beast chasing them could follow on in then it would pound them both to mush. The thing was big, but so was the corridor. Evar’s best guess was that it would be able to squeeze through.
“Shit...” He sprinted after Clovis.
Evar got about halfway to the door before Clovis bounced off it. “Shit.”
He turned in time to see the last wall of shelving explode. “Shit!”
Another swing of the construct’s arm cleared the remnants, and without warning a large object came flying out of the swirling cloud of pages. Evar barely threw himself aside in time as the bleached white body of a skeer sailed past him. It tumbled in a rough ball shape, wedge of a head over six sets of heels, still travelling at speed as it reached Clovis. It rolled on without interruption, the great expanse of the door not even managing to dissolve completely before the creature was through.
“Come on!” Clovis stepped smartly into the newly emptied space and beckoned Evar urgently, holding back the door that the skeer had opened.
“Kerrol?” Evar looked towards the chamber. The metal beast filled the corridor’s entrance, hunching to follow them, its armour scraping the ceiling, another skeer falling from its back.
“He’ll find us!” Clovis shouted. “Run!”
Evar ran. He sprinted after Clovis with the clatter and clang of their pursuer echoing all around them. The skeer that had rolled past Clovis found its feet and began to race away with a speed that, had it been turned in their direction, would have been frightening.
Evar was glad to see the skeer ahead of them running, glad that these insectoids could feel fear. The manner in which they had sacrificed themselves en masse to take down the Soldier had been unnerving. Somehow an enemy that knew terror in the face of overwhelming odds felt—
“What’s it doing?” He managed to gasp the words as the skeer warrior came to a halt immediately upon entering the next chamber.
Clovis didn’t manage a reply before the skeer answered for her. The insectoid released an extraordinary wail that emanated from its whole body, a shrill whistle riding over a deep penetrating throb. The skeer had run but only far enough to summon more reserves. Evar had to wonder if there was a limit to the number of lives skeer would throw at an enemy or if a sufficiently powerful foe could slaughter their whole nation simply by standing where it was and taking them on as they arrived.
Evar and Clovis sprinted past the howling skeer and on into a new chamber not dissimilar to the previous one. They climbed the first set of shelves, swarming up across the book-face, careless of damage, and started to bound across the tops, inches from a fall at every step.
They’d gone about a hundred yards when the skeer’s howl stopped suddenly mid-flow. The creature had probably been squashed by the emerging construct.
“This thing—” Evar spoke each time he and Clovis made contact with a shelf top.
“—is just—
“—going to—
“—keep on—
“—coming.”
Clovis didn’t answer. The monster answered for her, smashing into the first set of shelves by the entrance behind them, pulverising more timber, more books.
They bounded on, out into the thousands of acres before them, with no better plan than skimming over the surface until their stamina failed and fatigue sent them tumbling. For a time, they were able to slowly extend their lead, but it wouldn’t last, not unless the construct ran out of whatever energy drove it. Twice Evar glimpsed skeer in the canyons beneath them, the creatures skittering towards the monster that they should be running away from. Perhaps they thought they could clog its mechanisms with their corpses...
Running along a lengthy stretch of shelf top that happened to head in the direction they were going—towards the opposite entrance—Evar skidded to a halt. Despite the ever-present crash of their pursuer Clovis somehow sensed her brother had ceased following and brought herself to a stop.
She hauled in a breath. “What?”
“It’s after...” Evar paused, panting. “It’s after me. Split up. I’ll prove it.”
Clovis eyed him, her face inscrutable. “OK.”
Evar had expected more of a fight—some token objection at least—but it was the answer he’d wanted. “You head that way.” He pointed left, raising his voice over the approaching din. “If it follows you then go back to the original course.”
Clovis sprang away and Evar, still struggling for a breath, stumbled back into a run.
By the time that Evar dropped from the last shelf into the clearing before the opposite corridor the gap had closed to what it had been at the start of his run, and narrowed past that. Evar didn’t know if the door ahead of him was one that opened for canith, or for humans, or for skeer, or for some other species. What he did know was that, whether it opened for him or not, he wouldn’t make it across the next chamber without the metal monster catching him.
He ran on, his rhythm starting to fail, limbs heavy with fatigue. When he bounced off the white plane of the door it was almost a relief. There was no reason to run anymore. He’d forgotten why he was running in any case. He’d lost Livira. It felt melodramatic to say life felt hollow without her—they’d spent so little time knowingly in each other’s company—but slumped against a door that wholly blocked the only way out, and with an implacable giant of steel, brass, and gold bearing down on him, it seemed like the best time for drama.
The skeer, Evar noted over his heaving chest, were less given to fatalism, or at least to the sort that involves giving up. The number of them clinging to the construct had doubled and their ichor ran down its armour plates. They’d done no noticeable damage, but the eight or nine of them clinging to the giant’s legs were causing it to adopt a wading gait.
At the back of the advancing mass of metal and insectoid, glimpsed past the bodies hanging on to the construct’s ankles, Evar saw Clovis, white sword in hand. The distance was too great to divine her expression, but her intent was clear enough. She was going to attack.
“Run! Leave me!” Evar’s shout lost itself in the grinding approach. He stood, ready to fight. If he died sooner rather than later then Clovis would have no reason to throw herself into the fray.
The monster loomed over Evar, posture stooped, shoulders scraping the ceiling. Its face was neither savage nor bestial, closer to human than to canith, no teeth bared, its expression one of focused determination, eyes glowing hot and angry.
It reached for him, the blade on the back of its hand as thick as his arm and longer than his body. Evar readied himself, fear replaced by a sense of loss. He hoped Livira was waiting for him... somewhere.
The vast hand stopped. The whole construct froze. Even the crash of skeer hammering at its sides stopped. Evar gazed up at it in amazement. For a heartbeat he imagined that something he had done had halted the thing in its tracks—though beyond manifesting a fervent desire not to die he’d done nothing.
A glance to his side disabused Evar of the notion that he had suddenly acquired mind powers. The door had vanished and standing just behind and to the right of him was an assistant. An assistant in gleaming white enamel, not the ivory of the Assistant and the Soldier, both compromised by Livira and Malar’s humanity respectively, not the grey or black of an assistant polluted by Escapes, but an assistant purely as Irad had presumably fashioned it millennia ago.
Why the construct and skeer should choose to stop in the midst of their attempted murdering just because an assistant had arrived, Evar was uncertain. The construct extended one finger towards Evar. A finger that was stubby in the context of its hands, though at the same time longer than Evar’s arm. It said nothing but the implication was clear: mine .
“No.” The assistant seemed to speak in Evar’s mother tongue but perhaps, as in the Exchange, words from an assistant’s mouth could be universally understood.
A tremor ran through the huge construct, a vibration that grew until it could be heard as a buzzing of metal on metal. A skeer fell, landing badly. Another dropped closer to hand, untroubled by the impact. On seeing Evar, it advanced on him.
“No.” The assistant pointed back towards the chamber they’d so recently crossed. The skeer bathed Evar and the assistant in the black regard of its many eyes. It turned towards the construct and its fellow skeer, most of them climbing down now, one trapped against the knee joint by a mangled limb.
Four of them came forward to join the closest one that appeared to have staked a claim on Evar. A faint but varied hissing passed between them, and complex chemical taints filled the air. After a long pause the five of them backed away, turned, and began to retreat, taking the rest of their kind with them, including the trapped one who dropped down as they passed below, having chewed off its own leg.
Clovis and Kerrol slipped into the corridor as the skeer exited, keeping well clear of the insectoids. The construct, still trembling with what Evar took to be wrath, backed slowly away, metal squealing against stone or whatever it was that the library had been cut from. Clovis and Kerrol flattened themselves against the wall as it passed.
“Uh...” Evar turned away from the glower of the retreating construct and faced the assistant. “...thank you.”
The assistant made no reply. It watched him with entirely white eyes in an entirely white face. Evar’s fatigue had caught up with him and continuing to stand had become difficult, but the shock and strangeness of the chase had run a strange trembling fire through his veins that wouldn’t let him be still. He hugged himself, hands clasped to his upper arms. “That thing—it hated me. It didn’t care about the others...”
The assistant simply watched him.
Kerrol strode up, barging into the silence. “Assistance from an assistant! I wouldn’t have believed it this morning.” He looked Evar up and down, checking for injury. Evar was glad his brother had managed to escape from the previous chamber. A skeer must have been involved, since the door wouldn’t open for canith.
Clovis arrived, sword in hand, still glancing back down the ichor-spattered corridor.
Kerrol turned from his inspection of Evar to the assistant. “Let’s push our luck, shall we? What’s the way out of here? We want to reach the world. Somewhere with more people and fewer books.”
Without looking at Kerrol, the assistant pointed, his arm angled towards the corridor wall but in the general direction of the next chamber. It was a direction that a ghost could follow, and a bearing that Evar could use to navigate if he was careful.
“Are there many skeer out there?” Kerrol asked.
The assistant kept his gaze on Evar and said nothing.
“Why did you save me?” Evar asked.
The assistant said nothing.
“Come on.” Clovis took Evar’s arm and bumped him into motion. “If it wanted to tell us anything it would have.”
Evar let himself be led for a few paces then turned back towards the assistant, which had already started following the departed skeer. “Wait. Are there any ghosts here? Do you see any ghosts?”
The assistant stopped and turned. “Seeing ghosts is never a good thing, Evar Eventari. Hope that you never do. And under no circumstances speak to one.”
And with that he walked away, the questions Evar shouted after him echoing unanswered.