Chapter 31
Some things are built to thwart those that try to break them. The better they are at that job, the more vulnerable they may be to being broken accidentally.
A Century of Main Battle Tanks , by Commander Ian Wrigglesworth
CHAPTER 31
Livira
The assistant that Mayland had called Hellet held his hand out for the book. He’d sent Livira back for it and had called it a danger. His exact words echoed in Livira’s memory though she would like to have forgotten them:
You have written a wound into the world, broken laws whose age it would be meaningless to describe. There is a book that is also a loop. A book that has swallowed its own tale. It is a ring, a cycle, burning through the years, spreading cracks through time, fissures that reach into its past and future. And through those cracks things that have no business in the world of flesh can escape.
More importantly, at least in Livira’s estimation, Hellet had said that without bringing the book forward she would remain a ghost in any time that Evar was flesh, and he would be unable to be anything but a ghost where she had form. Hellet had said nothing, however, about giving the book to him when she returned with it.
“I never agreed to give you my book.” Livira held it to her chest.
“It’s not safe,” Hellet said without expression. “Neither now nor then, neither here nor there. You should let me destroy it.”
“Destroy it?” Livira echoed. She might have guessed that something like this was coming but she hadn’t allowed herself to, heading off each stray thought that wandered in that direction. Malar had said that she wouldn’t take the side of the book-burners, no matter what the larger argument might be. And now this assistant expected her to let not just any old book be destroyed, but the one and only one that she had written herself. If she had bled upon the pages and written every word in crimson the bundle she held to her breastbone could not be more part of her. To erase her stories, the thoughts and passions, the tears that had fallen, and take them utterly from the world... She tried to loosen her grip on the covers. She felt foolish, but also unable to let it go. Despite the vastness of the library and its unmissable message that books were as common and as numerous as grains of sand on a beach, still she had always felt that the combination of ink, quill, and hand had given her thoughts a kind of immortality, that they would outlast her flesh and wait out the millennia on library shelves, occasionally being discovered and rediscovered by intrepid explorers. Maybe her ideas would even find another mind in which they echoed and took on weight as the reader wrapped pieces of his own soul around the pieces of hers that rested on the page, as they had with Evar.
Livira snorted with bitter laughter at her own ego, her hubris, her arrogance. And still she couldn’t force her arms to set her little book in that white hand.
“You don’t have to.” It was Malar. “Fuck him. It’s your book. It’s not even that bad. I liked the bit...” He frowned. “...the bit with the thing. That was pretty good.” He turned his pale glower towards the assistant. “She’s keeping it.”
The assistant looked at his outstretched hand and lowered his arm. Livira had been tensed for coercion of some sort, or perhaps just argument. Having been on the other side of a pair of white eyes like those watching her, she should perhaps have known better. Coercion and argument were not the tools of the timeless.
The assistant indicated the portal through which they’d emerged.
“That’s it?” Malar seemed disappointed that there was to be no fight. “You dragged us behind you like a child’s toy before, and now you’re just letting us walk off?”
“You were time-echoes,” the assistant answered. “It’s our duty to correct anomalies that won’t correct themselves. The Exchange is not your place. You should leave and not return.”
“Where will this portal take us?” Livira didn’t want to return to the pool in Evar’s chamber and find herself having to dodge skeer whilst following Evar’s trail that might lead through doors that wouldn’t open for her. In the past she’d felt that her exits from the Exchange had been portals of opportunity. Now she just wanted a portal to open for her and Malar, exactly where and when she needed it.
“She said: Where will it take us?” Malar still sounded ready for a fight.
“To the library.” The assistant answered as if “the library” was all the detail anyone could ever want. As if it were a single thing, one point, not endlessly spread out across time and space.
“We’ll work it out.” Livira took Malar’s arm. “Come on.” She was sure of one truth where assistants were concerned. Persistence would not wear them down. Even the geological persistence that would eventually wear down the mountain ranges where the library pretended to conceal itself would not change an assistant’s mind. “Hold on to my arm. If my aim’s off, I might well need you to kill something.”
Livira thought it more likely that they would end up lost in the library a thousand chambers deep than face to face with a skeer, but talking about the danger was a good way to get Malar’s attention. She led the way into the portal, focusing her thoughts on Evar, but not just Evar. She had lost others too: Arpix, Jella, Meelan, and Carlotte, and others. Yute had taken her childhood friends from the Dust into the Exchange; Neera and Katrin would be rubbing elbows with the head librarian and Lord Algar. If the portal could deliver her to them all, without splitting her into separate chunks or arriving decades late, she’d be very grateful. She tried to beam that gratitude into the mix of images that she followed through the spinning chaos within the portal.
“Where the hell are we?” Malar looked round, startled and suspicious.
A warm room, dimly lit, low rafters hung with garlic, onions, bags of spices, a pot bubbling on the stove. “It’s...” Livira wanted to say it was Salamonda’s kitchen but, before she could finish speaking, a portal smaller than the one at her back opened just above the main table and sprouted a grey-sleeved arm. A white hand patted around, fastening on half a loaf of bread.
“Yute?” Livira crossed rapidly to the table and caught the disembodied arm around the wrist. Instantly she was jerked forward by something far stronger than the arm she had hold of. “Malar!” She shouted the soldier’s name and reached for him with her spare hand. Their fingers locked together as the kitchen spun away, tumbling into the distant recesses of whatever grey void it was that had swallowed them.
For a moment Livira could see Yute, standing startled before a towering shelf of emerald-green books. She felt her grip on both the hands she held slipping. Yute filled her vision for a heartbeat, and in the next her grip broke, and she fell, rolling head over heels, flipping through space, hitting the floor, bouncing, hitting it again, and each time with an awful cracking sound as if her bones were breaking.
She staggered from a portal almost too dizzy to stand, feeling sick and bruised, though other parts of her brain were telling her with great certainty that she had simply lifted her foot in the Exchange and set it down in this new place.
Livira found herself facing a curving, book-lined aisle in what could be one of ten thousand parts of the library. Two things struck her immediately. The first was the awful stink of the place, a mix of sewage and decay. The second was that many of the books had been torn from the shelves and that a few yards ahead of her a half-naked old man appeared to be sleeping on an irregular bed of them. He lifted his head, bleary-eyed, as the twists and turns of Livira’s journey suddenly caught up with her and set her reaching for the nearest shelves to keep herself upright.
“Who the hell are you?” The old man struggled into a sitting position, pulling a stained purple robe over his sagging belly. He peered at her with deep-set eyes that were black and hard with suspicion. Comical wisps of grey hair formed a border for the bald dome of his head. “Guards! Guards!” He looked around. “Damn their eyes. Where are they?”
Despite the terrifying completeness with which Livira’s memory imprisoned the past, it wasn’t until the man started calling for guards that she recognised him. “Recognised” was too strong a word. She deduced his identity with considerable certainty from a collection of scattered visual clues.
“You’re him,” she said. And felt instantly foolish. “You’re the king.”