Chapter 18
Reading is a dangerous sport, never more so than when we turn the page and find ourselves there among the lines.
Blunt Instruments , by Joshua Semple
CHAPTER 18
Livira
Livira and Malar stood watching events that had happened perhaps only weeks before the time they’d travelled from. Evar was by the pool, talking to the Soldier among the crops. In one hand he held the book that Livira had started writing hundreds of years before. For a brief period after touching the book Livira, and then Malar, were very surprised to find themselves participants in what seemed to be one of the stories lying between its covers.
“Why did you kill him?” Livira asked.
“Who?”
Most people didn’t have so many deaths on their hands that a question like that would cause confusion. “Leetar and Meelan’s father. In the story. You were the general and he was supposed to be your friend, but you did your best to decapitate him.”
“If that means chop his head off, yes I did,” Malar replied with some heat. “I would have done it too if that sword hadn’t been so fucking blunt.”
“But why?”
“Because he deserved to die. Both of them did. Heflin Hosten and General Rodcar Charant were scum of the worst kind. Hosten pays Charant to take rich idiots on as colonels and majors.”
“Paid,” Livira corrected. “They’re all dead now, I expect. The canith overran the walls.”
“Well, they might not have if Heflin fucking Hosten hadn’t replaced good officers with morons. And that’s not the half of it. Both of them were elbow-deep in keeping the settlers outside the walls as a buffer zone, and squandering soldiers’ lives in a dozen ways to line their own pockets.” Malar drew his lips back in a snarl, looking every bit as dangerous as the day Livira met him. “There I was, in a place I’d never been before, with this human turd Hosten telling me I was his friend, and all this stuff—all the details about what he’d been doing to our soldiers—flooding into my head. So, I killed him. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
“Yes, but...” Livira squeezed the bridge of her nose between finger and thumb, trying to trap the understanding that was drifting through her brain like a cobweb. “When you killed him, that’s when the story kicked us out. You went too far... stepped away from what the story was doing. The general wouldn’t have killed Heflin, at least not like that, not without there being something in it for him.”
“You’re saying I should have played along?” Malar frowned. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Because...” Livira screwed her eyes shut, visualising the table scene. She had felt something—something other than confusion—when she sat there wearing Serra Leetar’s finery. “Because maybe that’s how to take hold of the story. And taking hold of the story could mean we’re taking hold of the book. And that’s what we’re here for—to take the book forward to when we came from.” She looked up, coming to a decision. “I’m going to try again.”
“I’ll come too.”
“You don’t have—”
“I’m coming too,” Malar said.
Livira sidled up to Evar, watching him with fascination. She’d watched him unobserved back in the library of course, but that was when he’d been burdened with the grief of her “death.” This was Evar before even their first meeting when she’d been a child, still with dust behind her ears.
“He can’t see you, you know.” Malar strode up boldly and touched the book. The way he vanished wasn’t something she could describe visually. It was closer to forgetting.
Livira darted after him and set her hand to the book.
A moment’s confusion followed, a moment of lights and colours coalescing into the dining-room scene that had so amazed Livira the first time. She was surprised—both to see Serra Leetar sitting to her left, and to see that the look of astonishment on the girl’s face matched her own. It was the looming presence on her right that commanded her attention though. The first thing she saw when she turned her head was that her neighbour wore a fine double-breasted jacket with a napkin strategically draped over the most vulnerable bits of the elaborate gold piping decorating it. She had to look up to see his face.
“Evar!” She set her hand to his shoulder, unable to resist seeing if she could touch him. Her hand was broader and larger knuckled than the ones she was used to owning, but none of that mattered once she discovered he was as solid as the chair she was sitting on. “Evar!”
Evar turned his head, frowning. “Sirrar Meelan?”
“I—”
“Oh, fuck no. I’m not having this shit.” This low-voiced, slightly horrified announcement from Leetar cut off Livira’s reply to Evar.
Reluctantly, Livira turned around just in time to see Leetar take one of the sharper knives from beside her plate and hold it in her fist, base against the table, point upwards.
“What are you doing?”
“No, no, and fucking no!” Leetar slammed her face down onto the knife point and a moment later the dining room and everyone in it melted away.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Malar was bent double beside her in the crop circle, holding his eye and dancing from foot to foot.
“It wasn’t real.” Livira put her hand on his shoulder.
“Bloody felt real...” Malar straightened slowly, taking his hand from his eye and examining it for blood. “Damn, that was unpleasant.”
“You couldn’t just have been Serra Leetar so we could get on with this?”
Malar scowled at her. “Like you weren’t just going to have Meelan drape himself all over your boyfriend?”
Livira bit her lip. “I wouldn’t have gone that far.” She studied the book stacks rather than witness Malar’s reaction. “Look, he’s going.”
Evar had finished speaking with the Soldier and was already halfway to the corridor that led to the reading room and the Mechanism. Livira hurried after him.
“Look,” she said to Malar as he caught up, “it’s not dangerous in the story. You just killed yourself and you’re fine. The worst that can happen is you get kicked out of the book. I should go in by myself. I’m better cut out for playing along than you are. You’ll just end up drowning a guest in the soup tureen or something. And every time we veer too far out of character we’re back here again.”
Malar scowled. “I’ll follow Evar. If you take too long, I’m coming in after you.”
“Too long?”
“Until I get bored.”
Livira stopped chasing Evar and gave Malar a hard, narrow-eyed stare. “Just let me do my thing.”
Malar eyed her doubtfully but, after a long pause, nodded.
“Come on then!” And Livira flew down the corridor, not bothering with legs.
She caught up with Evar at the entrance to the reading room. A confusion of broken desks stretched out before them, heaped up into mounds in places, and at the centre of it all, the grey lump of the Mechanism.
“Stay out of trouble,” Livira instructed Malar as he came up to join them. With that, she touched the book and fell into a story.
—
“This isn’t right!” Livira found herself near-blind, closely surrounded by clanking metal, and being jolted violently up and down by whatever large object she was suddenly astride. It wasn’t right at all, but before she had an opportunity to expand on the subject she was falling: not in the way that she’d fallen into the story, more in the way you’d fall off a horse—which turned out to be exactly what she was doing.
Falling off a horse turned out to be really painful, and the armour she’d found herself encased in seemed to make things worse rather than better. She lay where the fall left her, flat on her back, with the air driven from her lungs. Livira listened to the diminishing hoofbeats of her treacherous steed. Her helmet offered only a thin bar of sky through its visor and, since the thing had twisted some way around her head, she wasn’t even getting the full benefit of even that narrow view.
Eventually air began to leak painfully back into her chest, and she was able to sit up, accompanied by a sound like half a dozen pots and pans being rubbed across each other. She worked the helmet off her head—a tricky task involving straps and buckles which necessitated the removal of iron gauntlets, then leather gloves.
A rolling green landscape surrounded her, countryside of the sort she had read about only in books, and later been shown in the Mechanism. A rain-laced wind blew, and the tree branches danced to please it. In the fields sheep gathered in corners, seeking the shelter of dry-stone walls from the coming storm.
Wincing, and muttering curses that Malar would be proud of, Livira got unsteadily to her feet. Her armour was still shining where it wasn’t mud-spattered. She looked at the crested helm in her hand.
“I’m a knight.”
Suspicion grabbed her and she turned, looking for the sea and finding it, a murky grey line beyond the slopes to the west. “That means...” She steered her gaze and fixed on a short, dark, vertical line against the far side of the valley ahead. A lonely tower.
Livira knew this story. She even remembered writing it. It had been a shameless reworking of a very old tale that had bubbled around in the folklore of several civilisations that had become dust on the wind long ago. She was the knight in shining armour, riding a valiant—though apparently treacherous—steed. Her lover waited for her, imprisoned in the topmost room of the witch’s tower. The story was the last one that she and Evar had explored together. The one that had tried to teach him that some things could not be saved—that the knight sometimes arrived too late. She had meant to add that a tragic ending didn’t erase what had gone before. The shared kisses, the love beneath satin sheets, none of it was a waste, none of it was rendered meaningless, any more than a well-lived life was undone by the inevitable death waiting at the end. Little could remain of Livira’s time within the Assistant. Timeless thoughts were quickly washed from minds caught in the flow once more. But she had kept within her the shadow of a glimpse at that perfect crystal eternity in which all things are held in an omnipresent now. Everything counted. No one thing eclipsed or deleted another.
Livira felt the knight’s story invading her, his needs, wants, and desires, images of the princess in the tower, the flood of her hair, the heat of their passion. The knight had been Evar, and now was her. Both of them in a single body. Evar’s arms encircled her, strong, warm, encompassing, lifting her into his story. She gasped, suddenly afloat on the overwhelming physicality of him, half drowned in his mane and the animal scent of his strangeness.
“I want you, need you, love you.” The growl of him in her ear, shivering through her spine to clench her toes in mixed delight and fright. “Stay...” Gentle now. A prayer.
“I want to.” Fingers knotting his hair. Want to, need to, would love to. “But...” And slowly, painfully, reluctantly, she disentangled herself, piece by piece by piece, then all at once.
It would be easy to surrender to the narrative, or she could refuse it entirely and be ejected from the book once more. She chose a third path. Setting her steel-plated back to the tower she tossed aside her helmet and began to trudge towards the bleak horizon, still with the memory of his arms wrapping her and with regret aching in every step.
—
The storm broke. Icy torrents of rainwater poured past Livira’s metal collar and found every chink in her armour. The wind howled. The sky darkened to the point at which it became hard to continue believing that above the clouds the sun still burned. And in time a grey mist swallowed everything so that Livira could no longer see even the ground she walked upon.
In this grey void Livira closed her eyes and sought the story she’d come for.
—
“Serra Leetar!” A servant ushered her inside while one of her father’s house guards lost the tug-of-war he’d been having with the wind over the ownership of an inside-out umbrella. “Whoever thought we’d see such rain in Crath City?”
Livira glanced back over her shoulder to see Meelan following her in, and beyond him in the street, a gleaming carriage with the rain bouncing off its roof.
She thought she caught a glimpse of a child behind one of the carriage’s large, spoked wheels, a curiously white child, not only pale as milk but wearing white too. The door closed too soon for her to be sure, taking the scene with it.
Leetar and Meelan allowed the servants to take their dripping coats. They’d been visiting cousins, but Heflin Hosten had summoned both his children back to the family home for tonight’s grand dinner. Leetar’s intended, or rather the old man her father intended for her—Dantal Creyan—would be an honoured guest, as would Lord Algar, who offered her only escape from matrimony, in the shape of a position among ranks of the king’s diplomats. Such a position wouldn’t by itself satisfy her father’s ambition, but Lord Algar’s offer came with promises of influence at court. The man’s unhealthy interest in Leetar, an interest that lay behind the sweetened offer, was undisguised, as naked as the greed that her father allowed to blind him to it. Meelan had called it the choice between the frying pan and the fire. He’d offered to murder either or both of the men involved, though when Leetar had pointed out that there were three of them, he had balked at patricide.
Absorbing all this, Livira felt that there were more than three men involved, thousands more, in fact. Still shivering, even though she’d left the weather outside, Livira allowed herself, or more accurately Leetar, to be led into the drawing room and plied with hot chai. She sat and sipped, eyeing the first guests of the evening over her cup, resolving to play along. Malar had already demonstrated the consequences of sudden departures from the narrative. But perhaps it could be steered. Hopefully, since Livira had written it, the story was already aimed at a more satisfactory destination than currently implied. Either way, Livira resolved not to rock the boat just yet and to make it to the dining table.
An hour of small talk passed, with the guests circulating like the slow swirl of leaves fastened to the surface of a millpond. A maiden aunt hovered behind Leetar and Meelan, an ever-present spectre both to guard their honour and to warn, by grim example, of the dangers inherent in holding on to it too long. In small talk, Livira discovered, one probed for weaknesses, any useful kind of fault line was hunted out, whether it be social or financial, or simply a defect in one’s look or sense of style. Small talk resembled a battle of the open sort where combatants crossed blades in pairs or fours before carrying their wounds and their victories into some new fray.
Livira presented an elusive target by refusing to engage and instead answering each enquiry with obscure quotations she’d been forced to translate in Master Logaris’s classroom. She felt the story ripple uneasily around these interactions, but at least she wasn’t attempting to behead the host with a ceremonial sword, and she kept her place.
Evar Eventari arrived so fashionably late that he was the last through the doors and would have missed the entrées but for the fact that for so eligible a bachelor Heflin Hosten delayed proceedings with another round of aperitifs. Evar’s main qualification for being the city’s most eligible bachelor was his eye-wateringly large fortune. The fact that he was roguishly handsome added even more weight to this claim among the aristocrats’ daughters. His apparent lack of interest in marriage made little impact on the river of invitations that flowed to the doors of his mansion.
The late arrival barely had time to stamp the rain from his boots before servants began to usher the guests into dinner with a series of gentle coughs and discreet nods, like the world’s most polite beaters urging grouse into the sky for the hunters. Livira watched him go, not allowing herself to get too close for fear of forgetting his fictional status and seeking the reunion so long denied to her. She noted as he went that within the bounds of this particular story, the fact that he was a full-grown canith, dressed to the nines and in one of the richest drawing rooms in King Oanold’s city, didn’t raise a single eyebrow.
Livira’s resolve lasted until the table, at which point she elbowed Meelan into the chair indicated for her, and took his place beside Evar. For now, proximity was enough. Livira focused on the flatware arrayed before her and forced herself to remember that she was here to claim not just this story but the whole book. She could discern the threads of the tale wrapping themselves around her and felt that if she allowed the process to continue long enough, embedding her throughout the story from first line to last, then possibly when she left, she and the book would have so tight a hold upon each other that she would be able to take it with her.
But as she took a firmer and firmer grip upon the story, the issue of who led who became less clear. It seemed that the story would no longer guide her to its proper destination, and that to claim ownership of it she would have to navigate to the same conclusion she’d reached when writing it from within the strangeness of the assistant. An unknown and possibly unguessable conclusion.
Conversation flowed across the gleaming table; courses came, were devoured, and removed. Livira kept her head down, picking at the meal, considering her options.
“Don’t you like crab?” These were the first words Evar had addressed to her. He’d been far from silent before that, however, playing his part in the expected verbal fencing. Perhaps her silence had provoked him, since his conversations with the other young daughters around the table had all been initiated by the other party.
“I like this crab,” Livira said. “And I’m sorry that he found his way to my plate after so many years scuttling beneath the waves.” She lifted one of the crab’s large claws with her fork. The wrong fork for crabs. “Did you know that they come from the Grey Sea? Three hundred miles overland. They can live to be fifty.”
“You don’t approve of eating animals?” The idea seemed to interest Evar. He picked at the last of the meat from one of the claws he’d cracked earlier with a silver device that might have been modelled on something from the torturer’s bench.
“I’m not sure anyone cares about my approval. Certainly not the crab.” She smiled. “I have the luxury of being sentimental about animals and sometimes I choose to exercise it. If I were starving, the crabs would have to watch out just the same as any passing piglet, rat, or crow would have to.”
Evar showed his teeth and huffed his amusement in the way that so amused her. She eyed her right hand and threatened silently to stab it with a crab fork if it wandered towards the canith’s.
“Need,” Evar said, “makes many strange bedfellows. But it can also narrow one’s view until bad choices are all there is to be seen.”
“You don’t like your choices?” Livira swept her gaze across the young women adorning the table, each chafing against a chaperone.
“I wasn’t talking about me.” Evar pushed his plate back.
They continued to talk as the courses marched on into dessert. The Evar that she’d written was more worldly than her own, and came with a sharper edge, but he preserved the original’s other qualities that had so drawn her to him, and it pleased her to know that the attraction he held for her didn’t rest on just the circumstances of his upbringing. She still wanted him as a rich lordling.
At last, the final silver platters were removed and Heflin Hosten stood up to announce that they should retire to the ballroom, where a musical entertainment awaited. Later, once the meal had time to settle, there would be dancing.
Livira accepted the unnecessary offer of Evar’s hand to help her rise from her chair. Several of the unmarried girls around the table stared daggers at her, but these were mild when compared to the looks thrown her way by Dantal Creyan, whose fleshy face had gone so red she wondered if he might be about to sweat blood. Lord Algar’s singular stare was a cold thing and more chilling.
Slowly, amid rustling taffeta, the hiss of silk, and the soft silence of velvet, the guests flowed towards the ballroom. Evar’s hand burned in Livira’s. She knew he wasn’t real, just memories brought to life and embroidered with fiction, but even so, the urge to wrap her arms around him and bury her face in his mane was overwhelming. Though to do so would require a chair to stand on.
Livira’s grip on the story had been growing the whole time, spreading, though to take the book with her, as she hoped, would require the deepest bond. She needed to be woven into the tale, to know it as she had known it when the ink still glistened on the page. The path of the tale seemed obvious. She would, over the course of an evening’s dance, win Evar’s heart anew. He would divine her sadness, cut her suitors with harsh words, or perhaps the back of his hand whilst offering the chance to satisfy their honour on the duelling square like gentlemen. They would marry and in doing so he would save her from the trap of her birth and her father’s wishes. It would be perfect.
Around them the story shivered.
Almost perfect. Livira brought Leetar to a halt before the ballroom doors. Evar walked another pace, their arms stretching between them, hands still holding.
“Serra Leetar?” Evar smiled enquiringly. “Is something amiss?”
“Not perfect at all, really...” Livira frowned, and an echoing frown crossed Evar’s brow.
“Can I help?” Evar stepped back towards her.
“I shouldn’t need you to save me,” Livira said. “She shouldn’t either.”
The story shivered again, colour leaking from the vibrant gowns, the light of many candles growing thinner, somehow brittle.
“Your pardon?” Evar cocked his head. “I don’t follow you, serra, but no, I don’t think you need me to save you, much as I would be honoured by the opportunity.”
Tears prickled at the corners of Livira’s eyes. She squeezed Evar’s large, warm hand with Leetar’s narrow, white one. “Thank you.”
And, so saying, she let his fingers slide from hers, and turned to walk away against the flow of guests. As she let go of Evar’s hand, Livira’s grip on the story re-established itself.
A single servant pursued her: Twila, a young maid Leetar had known and liked since childhood. Twila caught up with her in the entrance hall.
“Ma’am! Ma’am, where are you going? It’s dark out, and raining!”
The story thickened around them, everything crystal clear, every colour stolen from a rainbow. Livira felt her hold on the story deeper than at any point before. She could almost sense the smooth leather of the covers beneath her fingertips.
“I’m going my own way. I’d forgotten that I had other choices.”
Livira had thought that the servant might argue with her, but Twila simply turned on a heel. “Wait there. I’ll get your coat.”
Livira watched her go. The world waited for her outside and she’d have to negotiate it while balancing between her privilege and her ignorance. Perhaps she would call in at the library and see if they had any vacancies. And once she’d found her place, she might even invite the handsome canith to pay her a call.
A sudden flush of cold made Livira shiver and she turned, thinking that the doors had been thrown open. They remained closed. But in front of them, where there had been nobody, there now stood a white child. For a heartbeat Livira imagined it was Yute as she’d glimpsed him in the city back in the time when everyone in it had died in a day, victims of some unknown poison.
“You’re not him...”
This child was a girl. Painfully thin, her white robes, thin as a nightdress, plastered to her by the freezing rain.
“Yamala?” But Yute’s wife was dead, killed by Evar’s brother, Mayland. And Yamala had never had the haunted look of this child: a stare that seemed to reach into Livira and start to freeze the marrow of her bones.
“No.” A small word from a small girl, but it sent a faint tremor through the foundations of the house. Every shadow stretched, reaching towards her.
“No what?” No, she wasn’t Yamala? Livira desperately wanted to run as the child walked towards her but that would have been silly, and it wasn’t in the story. The girl wasn’t in the story either. With each step that brought the white child closer, Livira felt her grip on the story loosen. “Wait, stop, don’t—”
Don’t touch me was what she’d been going to say, but the white child touched her and the world vanished.