Chapter 30
The majority of each breath we take is gas of types that will not sustain us. The truth, like oxygen, is necessary if we are to live. And, like oxygen, if it is all we get, it will kill us.
The Good Lie , by Emily Mendicant
CHAPTER 30
Evar
The orb!” Arpix started back towards the daylight in a moment of panic. “I dropped it.”
“You did.” Evar revealed the iron ball. It filled his hand and seemed to shiver with a distant excitement. “I picked it up.” He offered it to the man.
“Keep it,” Arpix said. “Maybe you’ll hold on to it better than I did.”
Evar shrugged and stowed the ball in his book satchel.
The humans had lost two of their number but at least they were out of the rock storm now. Within the fissure the outer edges of the pervasive library glow replaced the slanting shadows of late afternoon. The small band of survivors navigated the chaos of the ruined pre-library complex and reached the large cavern separating the living quarters from the library proper. Here Evar ceded his place supporting Clovis to Arpix and led the way, although he had only crossed the cave once before. The humans strung out behind him, bloodied and battered, negotiating the convolutions of the cavern floor as best they could. Ahead the white rectangle of the canith door into the library shone like a beacon.
Wentworth had been waiting for them at the entrance to the main cavern. Now he was content to follow at Salamonda’s heels, occasionally straying to investigate an interesting-looking hollow or some forgotten fragment of an old page.
Evar approached the door and reached for it slowly, only half believing it would respond. Having library doors open for him was still a moment of great significance. He’d spent his whole life beating against their obdurate refusal and only seeing them open in his dreams. He still struggled with the reality. He had never imagined that they would melt away before his touch like mist. Even now, it felt as if they had lied to him with their permanence and with their white surfaces so hard that even iron couldn’t make a scratch.
“Come on.” He beckoned the humans through. It was strange to think that without him they would be trapped in the chamber just as his people had been trapped in a different chamber until Livira set her hand to their door and freed them.
The room beyond already looked too big to easily fit within the mountain, and that was without considering the others beyond it, hundreds of them at the least, possibly thousands. Evar hadn’t paid it much attention during their escape but now he stood in the entrance, drinking it in. The first canith chamber. The gateway to the knowledge that his species had accumulated over untold generations and to which they returned time and again after each cataclysm visited upon them, be it by their own hands or those of some other.
From the top of the steps, he could see across the whole span of the chamber, across a patchwork landscape of shelving from different eras, much as Livira had described in the first human room. He knew that out past other doors there were books written not just in ink on paper but in knots in string, notches on sticks, collections of different shells threaded on cords, bumps and holes set onto thin sheets of leather, stories and wisdom recorded on whatever medium presented itself to the people of the time. Perhaps the skeer wrote theirs on sheets of the same exudate that made their armour and their city, forming the letters from scent rather than ink. The urge to record was nearly as old as memory itself. What was life if not a song sung to the music of the past for the future to hear?
“We need to find the centre circle,” Arpix said, coming up behind him with Kerrol and Clovis.
“The healing only works for recent injuries,” Evar said.
“And we have recently injured among us.”
Evar felt immediately ashamed. He’d been too focused on Clovis. From the top of the stairs that led down the wall to the chamber floor Evar could see the whole four square miles of it. It took a moment to spot the clear circle in the midst of thousands of acres of shelving. “Come on. I’ll lead you from the shelf tops.”
Evar was far from comfortable walking along the narrow planking atop shelves that reached many times his height, but he’d sprinted across them when the automaton had given chase, and he’d leapt every gap that presented itself, so he had no excuse not to repeat the feat at a more leisurely pace without the pressure of imminent death. The others followed along in the book canyons below while he steered the straightest path he could towards the spot that memory marked as the centre circle.
It took them the best part of an hour but at last the humans stumbled into the circle. Immediately the one called Sheetra gasped in relief as the circle’s healing effect started to repair the shoulder a skeer’s rock had smashed.
Evar felt his thirst ease and the tiredness drain from his limbs. Their leaky bucket of water had not lasted long on the crossing from the plateau, and the water-skins that Jost and Arpix retained didn’t go far when shared between almost a dozen. The only water he knew of in the library was the pool in his home chamber. The circle’s impact on his thirst was welcome but not sufficient to erase it entirely and he sucked his tongue speculatively, imagining a life sustained only by the circles’ illusion of water.
Kerrol and Arpix came in last. Clovis hung between them, seemingly lifeless. Her impression of a corpse was sufficient to set Evar running to check her for a pulse. He reached her as the other two laid her on the floor. Salamonda fashioned a pillow of books. Arpix drew out a small, dried gourd and held it to Clovis’s lips, giving her the last of the water he’d somehow hoarded since departing the plateau.
She coughed and opened her eyes. “I dreamt... that we escaped...” A whisper, her gaze unfocused.
“We did escape.” Kerrol’s voice cracked slightly, the first time that Evar had ever heard any emotion other than gentle amusement from his brother.
“Humans!” Clovis grabbed Arpix’s arm, coughing and spluttering on the water, spilling some. “We found humans.”
“You did.” He stroked her mane absently, eyes bright. “You found humans.”
“I... I wanted to...” Clovis closed her eyes, drifting off.
“She’s too hot,” Kerrol said. “Her breathing’s not right. This place can’t help her. The damage was done days ago.”
Arpix spoke without looking up from Clovis. “It might help. It can undo the damage that’s been done in the last few hours. It can undo the new poisons being made in her blood hour by hour. It can keep her here.”
“She would want more than that.” Evar knew that Clovis would never agree to being held on the threshold of death, helpless but forbidden release.
“It’s a chance to rest,” Arpix said. “Marshal her forces. Regroup and counterattack.” It sounded as if he were trying to get orders to Clovis past her unconsciousness.
“So, we just stay here and wait?” Kerrol asked.
The distant sound of crashing shelves forestalled any answer. Evar exchanged looks with his brother. “It can’t be?”
“It might be,” Kerrol said.
“What?” Arpix growled. The other humans were looking around as if expecting something to burst into the circle any moment.
“I don’t know,” Evar said. “Watch her.” And with that he was scaling the nearest shelves, aiming for the heights.
Gaining the shelf top, Evar couldn’t see the automaton bearing down on them. The shelves in this canith chamber were higher than those in the one they’d first escaped into though. It might be that they were tall enough to hide even something as large as the metal beast that had pursued them for so many miles.
The distant sound of more wood splintering brought Evar’s gaze to the western door. With a sigh he set off towards the destruction’s source. He made steady progress and found himself almost welcoming the distraction. Without it he would still be responsible for around half a dozen fragile humans while watching his sister die a slow death. He made a leap of three yards and pinwheeled his arms with a cry of alarm as sixty feet of age-weakened shelving undulated beneath his feet, spilling books onto the floor far below.
Evar fell to his knees and then to his belly, clutching the shelf top, waiting for it to fall or stop trying to fall. In the end it decided to stay standing, and Evar edged away, promising to be more conservative in his future leaps.
The crashing that drew him on was not the continuous thunder that the automaton had made as it barrelled through shelf after shelf. Rather it was an intermittent thing, with gaps that might stretch minutes between short periods of splintering and crashing.
Evar closed in cautiously. In the boredom of his days on the plateau he’d had plenty of time to consider why some huge mechanical monster had given chase with such dedication. He’d come up with nothing. His best guess for why it had arrowed after him, ignoring his siblings, was either that it had seen him first, or that its random choices had just panned out that way. Nothing else made sense.
When at last Evar got his first sight of the source of the din, he was amazed to find himself looking at a smaller, though still much larger than him, version of the original automaton. It was working its broad-shouldered, almost round body along one of the wider aisles, its elbows stripping books from the shelves about eight feet off the ground, spilling them onto the floor behind it in untidy mounds with loose pages fluttering.
This one was perhaps twice Evar’s height and if it had been made of flesh and bone rather than copper and brass it might have weighed twenty times what he did. A relief of fur picked out in gold covered its body and arms, and on the backs of both hands a single blade jutted forward, looking large and sharp enough to slice a skeer in two.
Evar’s elevated perspective offered a new viewing angle that tickled his memory. “I’ve seen you before...” He tried to remember where. It wasn’t as if he had done much travelling in his life or met many strangers. So how did he know this creature, or at least the creature on which the metal creation below him had been modelled? The most likely answer was that he had seen a picture in a book—but that wasn’t what his memory was telling him. The recollection was fresher and more vivid than that of something flipped past in some ancient bestiary years ago. “Livira...” It hit him as the automaton below twisted its short, thick neck to look up at him. He’d been with Livira in the Exchange. They’d chosen an off-world pool and he’d found himself among these creatures, yellow-furred, barely half his height, within a library not dissimilar to this one. Only Livira hadn’t been there when he turned round, and he’d returned to find her still choking out the noxious air of the creatures’ home.
The shelf shook beneath Evar’s feet. The automaton pounded on the wall of books and planks and once more everything began to fall. Evar saved himself with a twisting leap across the aisle behind him, hitting the next set of shelves high enough for the shelf top to fold him around it, knocking the air from his lungs. He clung on, straining for breath, while black spots swarmed his vision, and behind him the ruins of the opposite shelves surrendered to the automaton’s advance.
Evar hauled himself up and lay gasping, hoping he was hidden from below. The thing should never have spotted him on his high perch and yet it had somehow felt his eyes upon its back and looked up. Evar’s hope didn’t last longer than it took the automaton to shake off the avalanche of books and broken timber then crash into the base of the shelves supporting him.
He tried to rise and leap for the next shelf top, but the surface beneath his feet fell away and he fell with it. Had he dropped the distance through clear air he would have broken both legs and quite possibly the rest of his bones too. As it was, repeated impacts with shelves in the act of breaking, combined with what might be called a cushion of books if books were in any way soft, left him groaning on a mound of literature with a shard of shattered shelving impaling his upper left thigh.
The mechanoid came at him, gears groaning, eyes burning with a hot red light. It looked to be in far less good repair than the giant one he’d encountered before, but still, it was in much better shape than he was.
Evar tried to roll to his feet but the length of timber sticking through his leg brought the effort to an agonised halt. It hurt worse than any injury he’d had before, but the real hurting would come later. For now, shock wrapped him in a numbing blanket and the pain was a kind of nausea, flaring at every twist.
The automaton came on, wading through book drifts over a yard deep, piling volumes before it in an ever-shifting bow wave. It was the thought of Clovis bellowing instructions at him that finally got Evar moving. His sister would be disgusted with him. He hadn’t even drawn the sword he’d taken from her. He shuffled away on his backside, propelling himself with his one good leg.
The automaton started to run, filling the air with flying books. Clovis would have wanted Evar to meet his end on his feet, even if it was just one foot, but Clovis wasn’t there to watch. Evar drew the white sword and levelled it at the onrushing metal bulk. Either one of the automaton’s great feet might stamp the life out of him, and even if his weapon could pierce its hide, he doubted he’d be able to do enough damage to stop the thing before it reached him. His last thoughts weren’t of the automaton or of Clovis. They were of Livira and how much he regretted being too late to save her or even to say goodbye.
He thrust his sword at the brass belly that threatened to crush him as the mechanoid lunged for his head. The point of the thing’s hand-blade struck the library floor where his head had been and skittered across the stone. Fingers as fat as his wrist followed, reaching to close around his face. The crushing embrace never quite happened. The hand obscuring his vision shuddered to a halt; the fingers trembled as if wrestling with some invisible helm around his head. And at his side Evar’s forgotten book satchel jumped and rattled and buzzed with such vigour that it threatened to pop every seam at once.
A complicated, rasping crack tore the air. The sound of something important breaking. The noise stopped abruptly and so did every other noise. The library’s silence swept in like a wave, swallowing everything. No books fell, no timbers creaked, and until Evar inhaled implosively, he wondered if perhaps he had gone deaf.
It took him several minutes to extricate himself from beneath the metal hand. He had to surrender Clovis’s sword, a foot of which was embedded in the frozen automaton’s stomach, and to take great care to avoid snagging the bloody shard of wood emerging from his thigh. Terrifyingly, while trying to wriggle clear, Evar caught a whiff of something burning. The fear stirred him to greater efforts and proved to be something of an anaesthetic, allowing him to effect the last half of his escape in a quarter of the time. All the while the stink of burning grew stronger, so that Evar expected to see flames curling up around his head at any moment.
Finally, he was clear, dragging his satchel with him. He looked around wildly, too spooked by the threat of fire to let his gaze rest on anything long enough to understand it. Nothing... just the hulking automaton towering over him, frozen in place, stooped with one hand still clawed around the space where he had been.
Evar drew in several deep breaths and let his nose lead him. Gingerly, he opened his book satchel and a faint smoke wafted out. The iron ball warned back inquisitive fingers with waves of heat. It did seem to be cooling though, for which Evar was very thankful. Quite what had happened he wasn’t sure, but it seemed clear that in some manner the orb had stopped the automaton, and that the action might have broken the device along with the internal workings of Evar’s assailant.
“Shit.” He sat back with a snarl. He was certain of very little, but one thing he did know for sure was that it was going to be a very long hobble back to the centre circle.