Chapter 13
Often it is more important that someone leads than that they are a good leader or possess even a basic sense of direction.
The Immoral Compass , by Marquee D. Sad
CHAPTER 13
Livira
You left without me!” Livira aimed her accusation at Malar’s back. The soldier stood with one hand on the trunk of the nearest tree and the other on his sword hilt, staring down the row of portals.
“I did.” Malar didn’t look her way. “I was sick of being a ghost. At least now I can touch something.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it was time to act. Too much talking just tangles everything up.”
“It’s very dangerous if we don’t go through the portals together. Holding on to each other. We could both end up here but in different times. Or be ghosts, but just to each other, or something... Anyway: don’t do it.”
“I thought I saw something.” Malar didn’t sound apologetic.
“An Escape?” Livira spun around. The Escapes scared her, even with Malar and his sword close at hand. They felt both horribly alien but at the same time tied to the library in some intimate manner. Her schoolmaster, Heeth Logaris, used to say that she was 60 per cent water by mass, 40 per cent minerals, and 100 per cent questions. But when it came to the Escapes her desire to avoid them trumped her desire for answers. “What did it look like?”
“A woman.” Malar frowned. “In a blue dress. I only caught a glimpse. Vanished way down there.”
Livira bit her lip, considering a host of possibilities. Gradually the living silence of the forest and the slow warmth of sunlight filtering down through the branches eroded her worries to the point at which her natural confidence could reassert itself. “We should go find the book like the assistant said.”
“And be ghosts again.” Malar slapped the tree hard enough to leave the pattern of its bark across his palm.
“If we believe that assistant, we’re going to be ghosts everywhere but here, forever, unless I bring this book back.” She understood his reluctance. She found it hard too, but Malar had defined himself, or been defined, by his physical talents, none of which he could exercise if he passed through everything, and everything passed through him.
Malar grunted. “Which one? Which portal do we take?”
Livira took a few steps back, considering the problem. “This one.”
Malar, still sulky, rolled his eyes, and then scowled as if angry at himself. “We just fucking came out of this one.”
“This is a timeline.” Livira spread her arms, her pointing fingers sweeping across the portals that stepped away left and right to unknown distances. “But it’s discrete—each door is a step—back or forward in time. I’m not sure how much, maybe a decade, probably several. The point is that Evar found the book less than a year before the time we just left him at, the time when that assistant towed us away from him like we were naughty children.
“If we take the next portal that way”—she nodded to the right—“well, we’ll end up a decade or more too early. He’ll be a little boy without the book, or won’t even be there yet.”
Malar knuckled his forehead. “If we go back... won’t we just go back ? We’ll probably find that git of an assistant still waiting there.”
Livira held her hand out to him. “I think I can find a way to the when and the where we want to go to.” When Malar hesitated, furrowing his brow, Livira stared at him and then looked pointedly at her outstretched palm.
“Fuck my life.” A growl. Malar folded his large, calloused hand around her smaller, narrower one, and followed her back into the sparkling light.
—
Livira knew the place she wanted to go. She could picture it. The time, she had less of a feeling for, but the portals had brought her to the Exchange at just the right moment on basically every use. She felt that this was an integral part of their design and hoped that by simply opening herself up to the process, and wanting what she wanted, the library’s magic—or technology as Arpix had dully insisted—would do its job.
The dazzle of the light faded to the image of hands in earth. Her hands. Her hands pulling her forward through green things growing. It reminded her for a moment of the bean rows at the settlement, in the first weeks when they were watered five times a day and the dust hadn’t yet layered their leaves. A vivid, vulnerable green that it had always seemed cruel to coax out into her harsh world.
She stood up to find herself beside Evar’s pool with Malar getting to his feet beside her. The three canith she’d left behind so recently were all in front of her, wholly ignorant of her presence.
Evar and Clovis were approaching from the book stacks. Livira had to admit that Clovis was a magnificent creature, with her flame-red mane and dark eyes flashing, the points of her canines aiming for her chin. Livira still bore the scar where Clovis had clawed her—a reminder, if she ever needed one, of just how terrifying it had been to have the warrior giving chase at her heels. Clovis seemed a far better match for Evar. Livira thought she herself must seem very frail to Evar in comparison. She’d been worrying about other things too, physical things, and seeing the pair of canith striding towards her suddenly brought those issues into sharp focus. After meeting Yute’s cat, Wentworth, Livira had done some research on the animals. She’d read some very uncomfortable things about their mating habits. Things involving spines and tearing. Sometimes Livira wished her memory was less steel trap and more sieve.
The assistant in which Malar had been trapped—the Soldier—was walking through the greenery, careful to trample nothing, patrolling for rats perhaps, or weeds. He glanced Livira’s way, registering her but saying nothing. Malar, drawn to his old prison and his old self, advanced on the Soldier, slowly, head tilted, studying him intensely. Livira left him to it and returned her attention to the approaching siblings.
The tall canith, Kerrol, rose from where he’d been sitting and put down a large scroll he’d been studying. “What’s the excitement?”
Clovis exchanged a glance with Evar before responding, “There’s no hiding anything from our brother, always so perceptive!”
Evar offered an uneasy grin and said nothing.
“The plan worked. I killed the Escape.” Clovis looked as if she’d enjoyed it.
“And the other thing?” Kerrol asked.
Evar answered this time. “We found the tallest tower ever. A giant! I knocked it down with my face.”
“Remarkable.” Kerrol frowned. “What’s the book about?”
Livira hadn’t seen the book until Kerrol mentioned it. But there, clutched tight at Evar’s side, was her book, the book she’d made from repurposed covers and stolen flyleaves. The volume was a cuckoo that could sit within the library without being ejected by assistants as unchosen—the whole thing was merely books that were already chosen, but now redistributed and with added notes.
Livira wondered whether it had been her who had hidden it in the book tower. Her fabled memory didn’t reach far into the period she’d spent trapped in that timeless space within the assistant’s body. She hadn’t been entirely imprisoned though—some aspects of her had leaked to the surface. Had she also completed her book? Written the final chapter with a white hand? Had she found some set of narrative and thematic threads to bind the disparate stories into a cohesive whole?
She advanced on Evar, the crop not so much as rustling as she passed through it.
Evar turned away from his brother without answering his question and walked off towards the Soldier, who had found Malar in his path and stopped.
“Did you find it in this tower of yours?” Kerrol called after him, still talking about the book.
Livira took her chance, hurrying to walk alongside Evar. She glanced up at him, wondering what he would think now, knowing she was with him back before he had ever met her. The thought made her dizzy, turning wheels within wheels as she considered how many ghosts might have watched her through her life, might even be watching her now, and how all those moments were threaded through time.
The assistant was right—too much of this would cause problems—reality had indeed begun to feel very delicate. She reached for the book, hoping that bringing it forward, out of the loop that wrapped it around two centuries, might be as simple a matter as just taking hold of it. Her fingers brushed the cover and she felt a buzz in her fingertips, as if they might actually be able to touch something in this place. Hope swelled. She tried to take a grip of the book and, much like turning a page, she was gone.
—
A high-ceilinged drawing room painted itself into being around Livira. A room large enough to contain all the trainees’ sleeping chambers but decorated with the detailed intricacy that a master craftsman might spend on a jewellery box. A table stretched nearly the length of the chamber, covered with white lace, painted porcelain, crystal goblets and flutes, with scrolled silver tureens and wide silver platters whose edges frilled and cavorted in the ecstasies of design. In the gaps, candlelight reflected from the depths of the darkest and most polished mahogany.
Ornamentation reached the rafters, or would have if they could be seen behind a flat plaster sky whose whiteness had been moulded into an upside-down landscape of raised patterns, a deep relief whose architecture radiated outwards from a central boss in ever more extravagantly complex circles. Livira’s experience of interiors ranged from the mud-walled huts of her infancy to the rectilinear utilitarianism of the librarians’ complex. None of the great and good had ever invited her into their homes. The closest she’d got to genteel living was the comfortable chaos of Yute’s five-storey home. But she had, once, been beneath the roof of the king’s lesser palace and this dining hall that she had written herself into must be, she surmised, based on that experience and on her imagination of what such places looked like—augmented by her own voracious reading.
The other diners, who had up to this point been blurs upon the scrolling excess of their high-backed chairs, began to solidify into real people who could have been plucked from the glittering crowd that had stood at the steps before the fifth door of the Allocation Hall on the day Livira had so rudely pushed in among the darling children of Crath City’s aristocracy. That act had been impulsive rather than considered. She’d had no specific goal in mind, simply the desire—or perhaps it had been closer to a need—to rebel against the judgements that had been placed upon her merely because of her appearance.
Ten years later, many of those same people had sat beneath the king’s roof and watched as Yute presented Livira before the throne to mark her elevation to librarian. Now they sat at her right and at her left, reaching for dessert wine in sparkling crystal flutes.
With a shock Livira recognised Lord Algar, one seat down from the head of the table, a most honoured guest. He still wore his customary crimson eyepatch, but his diplomat’s robes had been replaced with a dark velvet dinner jacket whose cuffs and lapels were edged with piping the colour of dried blood.
“Gods of death. I’m so bored.”
The mutter came from the seat beside hers and Livira glanced round to discover Meelan lowering an empty glass.
“Meelan!” For a moment all Livira could think about was the small group of her friends huddled at the centre circle as flames and smoke surrounded them. That frantic ever-changing mix of fear and bravery, hope, resignation, worry for each other, disbelief. At the time she had been armoured in the numbness of the assistant that had almost sealed her in, all her focus upon drawing that last circle to save them. The memory hadn’t had the opportunity to resurface since, but it did now, a leviathan cruising from the darkness that lies beneath imagination towards a distant glimmering light, bursting through the mountainous tide of its own arrival, making every other wave no more than a ripple. “Meelan!” A shout, a sob, a desperate gasp as she threw her arms around him and squeezed with a passion that was two hundred years in the making.
Genteel conversation stopped, sliced through and unsustainable in the face of such drama. Livira felt Meelan struggle for a moment, then stop, and finally return her squeeze in an embrace that while a pale shadow of her own was at least not a rejection.
“Sister?” Meelan extracted himself with gentle strength. “Are you unwell?” Compassion softened his habitual growl.
“Sister?” And for a moment Livira was distracted by the discovery that she wore a gown that would put any of Carlotte’s to shame, a confection of ivory silks, lace, silver wire, and river pearls. “Sister?” The hair that hung around her face in coils was the deep auburn of season’s change, rather than her own black shock, which stood rather than hung. She grabbed a handful and pulled, wincing at the immediate pain in her scalp.
“Madam! Calm yourself!” An older man of considerable girth sat on the opposite side of the table, his own grey hair poked beneath the grey coils of his wig.
Livira set her hands to the polished wood of the table to steady herself. Her hands? Serra Leetar’s hands. In this tale she’d taken Leetar’s role, sister to Meelan Hosten. The chatter re-established itself like a fire returning to an insufficiently doused blaze, a wisp of smoke here, a glow there, a chuckle of flame igniting some far corner, kindling others to life. The library is always burning. Had Yute said that? It felt like a metaphor for... everything, really.
She’d fallen into a story that she didn’t remember writing. How much of it was invention, how much based on her own truth, and how much might have flowed from the timeless knowing of the assistant, Livira couldn’t say. But she felt the tale seeping into her, regardless of whether it was fact or fiction, filling her with understanding.
Livira looked up. The man opposite, the fat, greying man who’d called her madam, was Dantal Creyan, and it was to him that her father would marry her off in order to cement his long-sought alliances. Unless she took the only position offered to her following her showing at the Allocation Hall. She had wanted a position at the university and, having met Lord Algar and seen how his singular eye studied her with unhealthy appetite, she would even accept a place within the laboratory before taking up a commission among the diplomats. But no such offers had been forthcoming, and Leetar strongly suspected the long reach of Lord Algar had closed those doors to her.
Everyone had the right to be allocated even without the blessing of their family, but in this instance her father would accept the alternative to Dantal Creyan without raising a storm. Lord Algar lacked the man’s wealth, and indeed had a fortune that paled in comparison to her own father’s, but Algar’s was old money. Lord Algar’s aristocratic roots reached back at least as far as the king’s and quite possibly further—though no one would ever say that out loud. If he put his long reach into her father’s service, as he seemed to have intimated that he was willing to, that would compensate the loss of a marriage alliance.
Livira shot a scowl at Meelan and stood sharply from her chair. “How could you have let them do this to your sister?”
Meelan, looking confused and worried, was saved from having to reply by a muffled commotion out in a nearby hallway that ended suddenly with the leftmost door bursting open. The newcomer, who strode in with a slight sway to his walk, as if on the deck of some modestly sized boat, was another grey-wigged man somewhat past his prime, red-faced and moustached. He seemed to be a guest, likely the owner of the empty place at the elbow of Leetar’s prospective husband. The cut of his dinner jacket and the large gold-rayed medal pinned to his breast marked him out as a military man.
“What the fuck is going on?”
However many social niceties Leetar, under Livira’s control, had trampled upon with her own outburst, the sudden appearance of a grey-whiskered general, apparently the worse for wear, was more worthy of attention.
Heflin Hosten stood up at the head of the table, shot a narrow glance in his daughter’s direction, then approached the general with outstretched arms. “General Charant! Allow me—”
“You!” The general, who Livira suddenly understood to be the man who had organised the city’s defences against the canith invasion, pointed at Leetar’s father with outstretched arm and accusing finger.
“My dear Rodcar.” Heflin continued his approach, seemingly blind to the other man’s anger. “Let me show you this new weed I’ve got in from Tronath. Your pipe’s going to thank you!” He reached a calming hand towards the general’s shoulder.
For an older man the general’s speed proved remarkable. Livira barely followed the fluid motion with which he seized the ornate hilt of the sword at his side and swung it with sufficient force to embed the blade in Heflin’s neck.
Both of them looked surprised, but only one of them spoke. The general frowned in disgust and uttered a single word. “Blunt!” He yanked the sword clear in a shower of crimson.
It was as if the blood had got into Livira’s eyes. She screwed them up, and when she rubbed them clear found herself still standing but once more in the library chamber just on the edge of the crop circle. Malar stood facing her, looking as amazed as she felt. Evar was striding away from them, aimed at the Soldier out amongst the greenery.
“Blunt...” Malar muttered, and looked at his hands.
“You were there?” Livira looked at him sharply. “In the dining hall?”
“That was real?” Malar’s eyes widened still further, reminding her of the library guards and their owl-helms.
“Wait!” Livira tilted her head. “That was you? You were the general? How did you even get into my story?”
His eyes narrowed. “What? I’m not good enough to write about now?”
“That particular story. Killing people.”
Malar scowled. “I glanced over just as you vanished. It looked like you touched the book and... bang... you were gone. Only without the bang. So, I came over and touched it too. I’m supposed to be guarding you, after all.”
Livira wasn’t sure who had given him that job, but she let it slide. “We were both in the story.”
“Not that I’m agreeing that makes even a jot of sense, but how are you supposed to grab the book and bring it back with us if you vanish inside it the moment you touch it?”
Livira thought about that for a moment. “You know,” she said, “I don’t have the slightest idea.”