Chapter 32
Hate and Love run a race in which Love is both the tortoise and the hare. Hate shoots the hare with the starting pistol and reloads without undue haste before setting off after the tortoise.
Cabbages and Kings , by Wally Russ
CHAPTER 32
Arpix
He’s taking too long.” Clovis, who had seemed to be knocking on death’s door only a few hours earlier, made it to her feet against all expectations and all of Arpix’s advice.
“Do I have to push you over to get you to rest?” Arpix had run out of sensible threats.
“I’d like to see you try,” she growled, licking her teeth with a long tongue. Despite the challenge in her voice, her eyes held an invitation that made him look away.
“Kerrol. You’re supposed to be good at persuasion. Can’t you get her to be sensible?”
The tall canith shrugged and leaned back against the stack of books he’d fashioned into a chair. “I’m not a medical expert but I feel that my sister is at her best in a fight. Lying down might work for most patients but Clovis is—”
“Shut up and help me look for him.” Clovis aimed a kick at Kerrol.
“I have to draw the line there.” Arpix put himself in Clovis’s way. “If you leave this circle, you lose all of its support.” He reached for some military analogy. “It would be like sending your reserves away at the height of a battle.”
“Sometimes you have to toss the strategy book aside.” Clovis advanced.
“Kerrol! Help me!” Arpix found himself grappling with Clovis, both his hands locked in hers.
Kerrol lay back. “No, this is good bonding. It’s all very healthy.”
“What are you talking about, you idiot?” Arpix realised he’d said it in his own tongue and growled his next words in canith as he struggled to hold Clovis back. “You can see how sick you are. I’d never be able to stop you otherwise.” Even fresh from her deathbed the canith was ridiculously strong. Arpix had never been athletic, but you couldn’t help but build some muscle when you spent so much of your day carrying stacks of books about, hiking across library chambers, and climbing endless ladders. Years on the plateau had worn much of that fitness away but had replaced it with the products of a different kind of labour.
Clovis leaned into him, confusingly close, her hot breath on his neck. She seemed to be enjoying the contest far too much. She sniffed at his ear.
“I thought you were sick!” Arpix found his arms being pressed down to his sides. Clovis might be only a hand taller than him but close up that made a world of difference and made him wonder how his friends must see him as he towered above them. Meelan didn’t even reach his shoulder.
“Maybe it was you who gave me a fever.” Clovis grinned and licked the side of his face. A heartbeat later he was falling, legs swept from under him. “But my brother needs me.” She walked on towards the opening of the nearest aisle. “He’s an idiot. They’re all idiots. But he’s the one most likely to get himself killed without my help.”
By the time Arpix got to his feet, Clovis had reached the edge of the centre circle. Her step faltered as she left the rejuvenating aura and entered the aisle. She shook herself, snarled, and pressed on. Kerrol walked past Arpix, following his sister.
“Where are you going?” Arpix understood Kerrol to be of little use in a fight even when his shoulder wasn’t injured.
“Ours is what the textbooks call a highly dysfunctional family, but someone has to keep it together.” Kerrol shrugged, muttered a pained curse at having flexed his shoulder, and followed his sister.
Arpix turned towards his friends, who’d all been watching the canith with fascination. “None of you leave this circle. For any reason. I’ll be back!” And before any of them could offer to come with him or try to keep him there, he hurried after Kerrol.
He caught up with them fairly swiftly. Clovis walked as if she were fifty years older, leaving Arpix to wonder how she’d put him on the ground quite so easily.
“We’re never going to find him, you understand that?” Arpix asked. He didn’t like to nag but nobody could find anyone else in a library chamber unless they’d agreed on a meeting place they both knew.
“You understand that he was carrying the weapon?” Clovis replied.
“Oh.” That particular fact had escaped Arpix’s attention. It didn’t help in finding him, and it didn’t make finding him more urgent, but it did mean that his loss would have even larger consequences if they didn’t locate him.
“We’ll have a bit of a walk around and by the time we go back, hopefully Evar will be there.” Kerrol nodded to himself.
“It’s fine,” Clovis said. “I have a plan.”
“Which is?” Arpix asked.
Clovis took his hand and pulled him closer, before slinging her arm over his shoulders and using him as a crutch. “I brought my favourite human with me, and he’s very clever.”
Arpix sighed. He considered sliding out from under her arm and leaving her to it, but worried that she might genuinely need him in order to stand. He furrowed his brow, thinking furiously. It just wasn’t possible to find one person amid thousands of acres of shelving.
“There was a lot of crashing.”
“Yes.” Clovis leaned on him and nodded.
“So, whatever was doing this was leaving a trail of destruction. It might be too large for the aisles.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Clovis said.
Arpix ignored her. “And it came from the west. But we didn’t see any damage when we came to the centre circle from the main door. So, it seems unlikely whatever it was has been crashing around in here for weeks or longer. Plus, we didn’t hear it at all until after we were settled. All of which tells us...”
“Something good.” Clovis sagged against him.
“That we should go to the west door and follow the trail of the thing that Evar went to investigate.”
Clovis straightened up, took her arm off Arpix, and slapped him on the back. “Told you I had a plan!”
Clovis proceeded to lead the way, first to the wall and then to the door, setting a pace that whilst no challenge for Arpix must have taken a toll on anyone as sick as she’d been and still was.
At the west door the trail they were looking for was one a blind man could follow. Even in the wider aisles books had been knocked from shelves with abandon, often splintering the wood on which they rested. Where the gap narrowed, something wider than three canith together, and stronger than ten, had pushed over whole units of shelving, some fifty yards long. In three places whatever they were following had battered its way through the shelves and into another aisle, pulverising books by the score and bringing down others in sufficient number to bury the floor a yard deep.
When they finally rounded a corner to discover the author of all the destruction it was the canith who gave gasps of recognition, but it was Arpix who was finally able to name what they were looking at.
“It’s the same damn thing that chased us before. Only a lot smaller!” Clovis started a wary advance but Arpix grabbed her arm.
“First: Stop! It might start moving again. Second: Smaller? This thing is a lot smaller than something else?” The metal guardian was larger than anything Arpix had seen in the library. Larger than the winged man in Chamber 2 whose hand the trainees would shake for luck. Larger than Volente. Certainly larger than Wentworth or the Raven.
“The other one could barely get through chamber doors,” Kerrol said.
Clovis put her hand on Arpix’s where it held her arm. “Do I have to knock you down again?”
Arpix released her with a frown. “At least let’s try to approach it from the other side. It will be easier to escape along a narrow aisle than down one it’s already widened.”
“Tactical thinking.” Clovis nodded. “You know the way to a girl’s heart.”
Arpix deepened his frown, drawing out a barking laugh from his tormentor. “Come on.” He led away in search of an alternate route. “Why would a giant mechanical ganar be chasing you anyway?”
“A g-what-now?”
“Ganar. They’re small herbivores, about this big.” Arpix held his hand about four feet off the ground. “I’ve never seen one, but they used to be quite common. The histories say they were brought down from one of the moons. Attamast, if I remember correctly. That seems unlikely but—”
“That small?” Clovis bared her teeth. “I look forward to meeting some in person. I have some questions for them about why these metal bastards keep coming after us.”
“I read that the ganar are clever. Cunning too. They won’t come at you from the front.” Arpix glanced back at the giant metal ball of the automaton’s body. “Unless, I guess, they’re big enough to punch through shelving.” Another memory niggled at him, just out of reach. Not a good memory. A record he’d read of... some kind of bad treatment meted out to the ganar? He shook his head, but the memory remained stuck somewhere back behind his conscious thoughts. Livira would know. She never forgot anything.
They found the blood trail before regaining sight of the automaton from the other side. Clovis smelled it first then Arpix caught sight of a lone crimson spot darkening on the library floor.
“Still wet.” Kerrol straightened back up and pointed to another further along the aisle.
It took only a few minutes to catch up with Evar. They found him hobbling along, lost in his own small world of hurt, gasping each time he put any weight on his injured leg.
“Little brother!” Clovis got his attention.
Kerrol caught one of Evar’s arms while Arpix pushed Clovis out of the way to take the other side. “We’ll be carrying you too by the time we get back if I let you take his weight.”
This time Clovis let him have his way.