Chapter 28
Overdependence on epigraphs reveals not only the pretensions of the text but a fundamental character flaw in the author. The only writing crime worse than this is when the epigraph doesn’t come to
The Seventeen Critical Elements of the Modern Novel , by Edna Average
CHAPTER 28
Livira
Livira, still clutching her newly reclaimed book, staggered out of the portal and immediately turned to berate Malar, who followed her.
“Stop pushing me!”
“Everyone needs a little push now and then.” Malar drew his sword with the same fluid motion he always used to greet trouble.
Livira backed away, hands raised. “We don’t all need a little stabbing too.”
“Get behind me,” Malar snapped, advancing past her.
Two canith were watching them, a tall one leaning against a tree not far from their portal, and one that looked to be considerably shorter crouching close by. This second one looked up from whatever he’d been poking with his knife on the ground and showed his teeth in a grin. The tall one had a golden mane, the short one a mane so dark black that in places it looked a midnight shade of blue.
“Mayland. Starval.” Livira knew them both. As an assistant memory had no meaning. A timeless being has no memory. But now she remembered them, though in the wisps of a waking dream. Starval hid from everyone, himself most of all. He studied endings, and how to bring them about. Mayland studied change and had never believed in either endings or beginnings. Both were, in their own ways, more dangerous than Clovis with all her razor edges.
“Correct.” Mayland pushed himself off the tree trunk and bowed politely. “What has Evar been telling you about us?” Neither he nor his brother paid Malar any regard at all.
Livira found the question a little strange. “Well, for one thing, he told me you were dead, Mayland.”
“Not dead. Gone.”
“And you left the others behind? Evar always wanted to escape that chamber. How could you leave him there?”
Mayland shrugged. “You know how it is with the Exchange. Time gets away from you.”
Seeing Malar still bristling in the corner of her eye, Livira reached out and set her hand on his sword arm. “These are Evar’s brothers. They won’t hurt us.”
“His fucking sister put a hole right through me,” Malar snarled, keeping his blade ready.
Starval stood, his grin a little wider. “Clovis has quite the temper. We’re both more reasonable. No stabbing.” He held up an open hand as he returned his knife to his belt with the other. “Promise.”
“They weren’t with Evar and the tall one when we met them here that first time.” Malar kept his sword raised, eyes flitting from one canith to the other.
“I was there,” Starval said. “I just tend to keep to the edges of things.”
“I came along a bit later,” Mayland said. He watched both Livira and Malar closely, as if calculating something. “I see you have the book that Hellet asked for.”
“Hellet?” Livira shook her head, holding the book tightly to her chest. “An assistant sent us.”
“They have names, you know.” Mayland came to stand at his brother’s shoulder. He looked to be nearly as tall as Kerrol, while Starval was more like Arpix’s height. Very tall for a man, very short for a canith. “Just because they forget them doesn’t mean that we should. Sometimes they reclaim them, like your friend Yute did.”
“And Yamala,” Starval said, no longer grinning.
A flicker of annoyance crossed Mayland’s brow. He glanced left and right along the world’s timeline, the row of portals stretching into the past and future. The portal he’d been standing closest to was off the worldline. Livira wondered where it might lead and remembered her own brief venture onto another world. The air had savaged her lungs and driven her back in moments. But Evar, who as a ghost had been able to stay, reported short, broad humanoids covered in golden fur, gathered at the entrance to a library of their own.
“Time is always short in this place,” Mayland said. “Which is odd, since in another very real sense there’s no time at all here. But the fact is that people, both welcome and unwelcome, are apt to turn up if you linger. So, forgive my forwardness, but have you decided which side you’re on?”
“My own,” Malar growled, sounding angrier at being ignored than he would have been at insults or even an attack.
“He means in the library’s war,” Livira said.
“And I meant what I said.”
Livira added herself to the list of people ignoring Malar. Mayland’s question was a big one, very big, and he seemed curiously invested in the answer. Livira had assumed that her association with Evar would ensure their safety where the brothers were concerned, but the glint in Mayland’s eye had started to fray that certainty. As the Assistant, Livira had known that, while personable enough, Mayland had committed himself to learning the lessons of the past, and to applying them without fear or favour. The present, he said, was the gateway to the future and what was learned from history had to be carved upon it, even if that meant it bled.
“I’ve yet to pin my colours to the mast.” Livira chose a nautical reference, thinking of the tome she’d taken the first page of her own book from: Great Sailing Ships of History . She hoped Captain Elias would approve. “Yute says compromise—”
Starval moved so fast that it didn’t seem real. In the space of a finger-snap he’d twisted in past Malar’s extended sword, drawn his knife, and set it to Malar’s throat while holding the wrist of the soldier’s sword arm with his other hand.
“You got me!” Starval looked down with amazed delight at the thin cut across his ribs where Malar’s blade had caught him as he twisted out of its way.
“My weapon’s nearly three feet longer than yours,” Malar muttered with Starval’s iron at his neck. “I should have run you through.”
“I’m fast.” Starval grinned, then frowned. “But not as fast as I thought.” He shook Malar’s sword arm gently. “Anyway, I’ve made my point. Put the sword down. We’re not here to kill Evar’s girl. You’re her friend, so we’re not here to kill you either, unless you make us.”
Malar probably retained vague memories of training Starval to use knives in the first place, adding practical knowledge to what the book had given the young canith. Livira doubted he intended the young assassin any harm either. Even so, both of them held the other’s gaze for a few heartbeats more before Malar returned his sword to its sheath and Starval rehomed his knife.
“I know all about Yute and his compromises.” Mayland came in closer now the naked blades had been clothed. “This is where they’ve brought us all. Each city built on the dust and ruin of the last. A world that’s little more than a cinder, subjected to repeated flashfires as one species burns itself down to make room for the next to have a try.”
“But you’re a historian; Evar said so. You’re really telling us that what we need is to burn the history books?”
“It turns out that the most important lesson that history teaches us is that history should not teach us. Lessons should be learned, not taught. Wisdom has to be earned, and no number of words can wrap the gift of knowledge sufficiently to keep it safe from misuse. The definition of madness is repeating the same action and expecting a different result.”
“Tell that to the man digging for water.” Livira knuckled her forehead, trying to muster a less glib reply. She couldn’t argue against the facts. Yute had been the one to bring to her attention the burn layers that stratified their geology. The histories recorded the reasons for them, but the fact of them was written in char in the sides of any hole you dug, and before you reached any water you would have cut yourself a path through millennia of rise and fall, rise and fall. “I understand what you’re saying, Mayland, but didn’t the first people to raise a city here also fail, only without the benefit of a library of past learning to blame for the disaster? Can burning the books really be the right answer?” Burning books felt as if it could never be the right answer, any more than throwing children off a cliff could be. But the words to turn that emotion-based answer into a logical truth evaded her tongue.
Mayland shook his head. “We tried once without the library and a thousand times with it. I’m not talking about burning books—books burn all the time: you still have the stink of their smoke on you, and I was raised beside the char wall. I’m talking about the library. Close its doors. Hide them. Bury it. Collapse the chambers if you must, but that’s mere drama. Simply put it beyond use and the job is done. The curse of memory is lifted from our peoples, and they can live in the freedom that brings. Maybe they will find new paths. Maybe they will walk the same ones, though without the burden of knowing it.”
“Ignorance is bliss?” Livira looked at him doubtfully. Her own mind’s refusal to release any iota of the past had defined her, made her, elevated her over others. And yet its blade cut in more than one direction. Yute had spoken of nostalgia as a poison, a knife that, as they grew old, men applied to their own flesh with increasing vigour. Memory should perhaps be an art, not the blunt refusal to surrender a single moment of experience, but a curation in which consideration is given to what has space on the shelves and what is consigned to the midden.
“Did you ever meet someone clever who was truly happy?” Mayland looked out across the Exchange, something leonine in the angles of his face where the dappled sunlight slid over his skin. “I don’t say this place is easy to let go of. I don’t say the library isn’t precious. It’s all we have of a countless multitude of cultures, vanished people, dead languages, all their works, their dreams, their faith.” He swung his amber gaze back to Livira—he had Evar’s eyes. “Imagine a path across a desert. Halfway along its length a brick of gold rests. You watch as one traveller after another reaches the spot and with great delight sees the gold. They pick it up and labour on under its weight. They die among the dunes, unable to leave their treasure behind, unable to walk the distance with such a load to carry. Their skeletons punctuate the road. Whatever it might be that they can purchase with this wealth, should we not bury the brick before the next traveller happens along?”
Livira felt as if the canith were drowning her in words. She considered herself a talker, but Mayland spoke like a prophet, somehow weighting his pronouncements with a gravitas that drew the listener on almost regardless of the content. “I...”
Starval moved swiftly to his brother’s side. “We should go.”
Mayland showed his teeth, running a long tongue across their serrated length. A sigh left him. “We should. Thank you, brother. My enthusiasm carried me away.” He made a short bow towards Livira and Malar. “Another time.” And with that he strode briskly to the next nearest portal and was gone, Starval following in his wake.
Livira blinked. “What was that about?”
“Someone they want to avoid is about to arrive.” Malar shrugged. “He’d said enough in any case. Always had a mouth on him, that one.”
Livira frowned, still staring at the off-world portal Mayland had taken. “What did you think about what he said?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What?”
“I already told you: we choose sides with our gut. The words are to make us feel better afterwards.”
“And which side are you—” Livira remembered what he’d said. Malar was on his own side.
“Yours.” The soldier didn’t look particularly pleased about it. “I’m always on your side, Livira. Even if you can be pretty stupid for someone so clever. We’re family. I don’t know how that happened. I certainly didn’t want it to happen. But you don’t choose family. So, all his words don’t matter shit. I’ll take the side you take.”
“And which side am I going to take?” Livira had no idea. Mayland’s arguments still wrapped her.
“It would be easier if they were strangers, not boys we raised,” Malar said. “It would be easier if the black was bad, and the white was good. If the Escapes were demons and the assistants were angels. Then you could persuade yourself there wasn’t any choice. But you never had a choice, Livira Page. That’s what Yute called you, wasn’t it? Page.”
“I never had a choice?”
“You brought one thing out of the Dust. Just one thing that didn’t wash off or get burned with the rest of your rags. The corner of a page of a book. You’re not going to destroy the library or let it be destroyed. Right or wrong—and fuck knows which it is—it’s not going to happen. So, best just admit it, and start working out how to sell the decision to your brain.”
Livira opened her mouth to say something about two centuries in a library chamber having made quite the philosopher of Malar, but an assistant stepped from the portal beside her and put the words out of her mind.
“You have the book. Please give it to me.” He held out a white hand.