Chapter 33
The slowly increasing application of pressure can move mountains. Hunger is such a pressure. Most of our morals are molehills.
Eat Prey Eat , by Gilbert Sullivan
CHAPTER 33
Livira
Livira had come face to face with King Oanold on one other, very different occasion and she had never expected to see the man again, even from a distance, especially not two centuries after his city was burned down.
“You!” The king’s face convulsed with disgust. “You’re that damnable duster girl Yute gave a librarianship to.”
Livira hadn’t expected to be recognised, but she was wearing a librarian’s robe, and the day of her appointment had clearly left a deep impression on the king. Not a good one. “Where is Yute?”
“Questioning me? Me!” King Oanold looked around in outrage. “Guards! Guards! Where the hell are you?”
Two soldiers came hurrying around the aisle’s curve, both clutching arrow-sticks. They were unshaven and the larger of the two barely fitted into his blood-stained jacket, leaving Livira with the distinct impression that he’d stolen it off a corpse.
“Arrest that woman!” Oanold pointed at her unnecessarily.
Livira knew the ’sticks could throw their projectiles hundreds of yards, but the aisle’s curve offered the hope that she could take herself out of their line of sight before they could aim and fire. She turned to run.
A man behind her captured her arms as she rotated towards him. Bony fingers encircled her wrists. Livira looked up and met her captor’s one-eyed stare. An ugly smile twisted thin lips.
“Algar.” She spat the name and broke free of his grip. Why an idle, skinny lord thought he could overpower a hard-working young librarian she had no idea. She didn’t have to plant her knee in his groin to escape, but she did it anyway.
Unfortunately, the man behind Algar was bigger, stronger, and more accomplished in the arts of capture. Livira found her left wrist seized with merciless strength, then twisted so painfully that she had to drop to her knees to escape the agonising angle.
While Algar leaned against the nearest shelves, moaning, the king set a soiled grey wig on his baldness and, flanked by his two soldiers, approached her with a smirk.
“See there, gentlemen? The duster shows her true nature, a creature of violence, lashing out at her betters.”
Livira glared at him but decided to give the soldier holding her wrist no further excuse to see whether he could break it. “Where are we? How are you here?”
The king nodded at her captor. “If she speaks again without being spoken to, break her arm.” He came close, but not close enough to kick, and ran his eyes up and down the length of her before turning away. “Follow me.” He leaned towards the larger of his guards. “Jakmo, help Lord Algar. He seems to be indisposed.”
The soldier holding Livira twisted her arm up behind her and pushed her on. She walked awkwardly across the fallen books, unable to adjust her path. Even fractional movements filled her shoulder joint with pain. Whoever the man holding her was, he seemed to know a lot about hurting people.
For those first few steps, bowed over to relieve the pressure on her arm, Livira’s head was too full of pain, fear, and confusion for any speculation. Even so, despite all these distractions she somehow noticed something that seemed to escape the notice of everyone around her. Right in front of her, seemingly in the place where she had come to rest on the library floor, a web of thin cracks ran out in all directions like those on a pane of glass where a stone had struck. They became lost beneath the shelves and fallen books, and Livira was propelled onwards before she could focus on them. Even so, it amazed her. A lifetime in the library had schooled her in its impervious nature. In all that time she had seen one possible scorch mark and no cracks or damage whatsoever. And yet, just behind her, dozens of black cracks ran through the stuff of the library where part of her felt she’d merely stepped out from a portal, and part of her felt she’d hit the floor with considerable force, but not sufficient to break herself, let alone the ground beneath her.
The stink of the place still managed to register through Livira’s discomfort. It was as if these people had never discovered that the chamber corners slowly made organic matter vanish and had instead been befouling the area in which they’d chosen to live. Her stomach threatened rebellion and she was saved from vomiting over herself perhaps only by the fact that technically she hadn’t eaten anything for over two hundred years.
The king led on, passing a couple of junctions at which a single soldier had been positioned. Another corner and without warning they were in the centre circle. Livira felt the healing aura flowing through her.
The smell here proved worse, if anything. The floor space had been divided into dozens of areas by book walls, most of them chest high, some taller. Livira could see at least two dozen people, though many scores more could be hidden from sight. All were men and women from Crath, mostly soldiers, one woman in torn finery. Another man Livira felt she recognised from those gathered outside Yute’s house on the day the canith came, but even her memory had limits and she was less good with faces than with facts.
“Where’s Yute?”
The crack of her arm being brutally broken reminded Livira of the king’s instruction. She fell to the ground screaming, all control swept away by the tide of pain. She lay on the grimy stone for what seemed an age, breathless and hurting, before lifting her eyes to the circle of men around her. The king wore a broad smile and a chain of office that some attendant must have put around his shoulders. The soldiers looked bored. Lord Algar seemed much recovered and regarded her with cold interest. She noted that the front of his expensively lace-frilled white shirt was blood-stained, mostly around the chest. She didn’t think he’d looked like that when he escaped into the Exchange.
“Get up.” King Oanold’s smile vanished.
Livira was about to protest when she realised that her arm, though still painful, was no longer agonising. The centre circle was in the process of healing her, just as it had unwound her insult to Lord Algar’s nether regions. Awkwardly, she got to her feet and straightened up, half expecting a blow at any moment. She wondered where Malar was and whether he’d be able to save her without killing anyone. It seemed unlikely.
“How the hell did you get past my guards?” The king was about her height and despite the pervasive stench of sewage and rot she could smell both his lavender perfume and the stale sweat it sought to hide. Oanold moved his head from side to side as he studied her, as if trying to peer through her eyes at some truth lying behind them. “You were going to kill me in my sleep, weren’t you? You’re Yute’s assassin.”
Livira realised that Oanold hadn’t seen her arrival. He’d been sleeping. It must seem to him that she had leapt the shelf tops, evaded his guards, and climbed down to where he lay.
“Answer me!”
The soldier behind her sank his fist into the region of her left kidney. The rule of law appeared to be one of the things they’d left behind when abandoning the city.
Livira groaned. “I’m a librarian. I answer to the head librarian.” Technically Oanold had no authority over her. They were in the library, after all.
It was Algar who answered. “Since your canith friends killed the head librarian it’s Acconite who now holds that position.” He raised a hand and snapped his fingers. “Acconite!”
Deputy Acconite had always kept a low profile in the library. He’d specialised in recovering technical books, primarily on warfare, from the far reaches of catalogued library space. He had been the driving force behind the rapid development of the ’sticks the king’s soldiers now held. Without Yute working to thwart him, Acconite might have armed the military with beams of fire that would have turned the canith army to ash. Livira wasn’t sure where she stood on that issue. She had rather liked her old life...
The man who shambled into view, answering Lord Algar’s summons, bore little resemblance to the Deputy Acconite that Livira knew. The man had voted in favour of her dismissal, more than once, but even so her heart went out to him. His dark robe hid the grime but not well enough, the neat black triangle of his beard had become a greying straggle, but it was his eyes that spoke most eloquently of unknown horrors, all his old surety and arrogance gone, replaced by an unfocused emptiness that even the hardships of the Dust had never written on the faces of Livira’s people.
“Yute—” Livira remembered the crack as her arm had broken and bit off her objection, though it sickened her to be trained by such crude tactics and so swiftly.
“Yute is a traitor, and we shall have him soon,” the king snapped. “He and his rabble can’t hide forever. It’s just one room!” He beckoned the husk that had once been Deputy Acconite closer. “So, tell your head librarian who sent you and where he’s hiding!”
“Nobody sent me. I came by myself.”
The slap came from her left, as violent as it was unexpected, rattling her teeth, setting half her face ablaze and filling her ear with a sharp ringing tone.
“Yute sent you,” the king said, his good humour seemingly restored by the blood dripping from her nose.
Lord Algar’s brow furrowed. “I wonder about that, Your Highness. The girl is Yute’s special project. It seems odd that he would send her rather than one of the other dusters or someone among the no-accounts he brought up from the city. This one’s always been headstrong. She may have come on her own initiative.”
The king echoed Algar’s frown. “So, she’s a lone wolf assassin?”
“I didn’t even know you were there,” Livira protested, ducking her head against an anticipated slap. “What was I going to kill you with? I don’t have a weapon.”
“Check her.” Algar nodded to one of the guards.
The man rummaged in her book satchel. Other members of the group were beginning to gather, emerging from their book huts. “One book, string, ink. It’s just junk.” He tossed the satchel aside. Livira’s eyes followed it despite her trying to feign disinterest.
“No food?” A new light entered the king’s eyes.
The soldier patted down her robes. “Another book.” He moved on down her legs. “No food.”
A sigh went through the onlookers. Most of the men and women joining Livira’s audience were thin, hollow-cheeked, but not skin and bone. They were like Livira’s people in the settlement after a hard season, but not like they’d been that one time when there had been two hard seasons in a row; they were hungry rather than brought to the brink of death by starvation.
“And how,” said Lord Algar in a coldly measured tone, “would you climb down thirty feet of shelving within sight of the centre circle, and not see His Majesty sleeping below you?”
“How would she?” King Oanold asked. “Why would she? Without so much as a knife?” The king and his lord might both be hollow men with ugly appetites and no concern for others, but Algar was known as an intellectual and the king for possessing a shrewd intelligence that had sustained his rule for three decades. Oanold knuckled his forehead with both hands. “There was a light. I thought I dreamed it. But there was a light.” He lowered his arms and narrowed his gaze. “A light like the ones in that bewitched forest!”
“There’s never much meat on a duster,” Algar said, provoking a puzzling bark of laughter from the soldier who’d slapped her. “But she looks decently fed, wouldn’t you say?”
The king came forward, reaching for Livira. She backed away but the man behind her grabbed her elbows. Oanold pinched her upper arm through her robe, as if she were livestock. “You’re right...”
“Where did you come from, girl?” Lord Algar seemed to have taken over as the inquisitor. “Clean, well fed, magical lights...” His single eye flicked to hers. “You can open those doors of light!”
King Oanold stepped back. “I’ll give you a count of ten to open a magic door for us. Defy me and I’ll have Jons cut your legs off.”
“Jons!” Livira swung around to find that the grizzled soldier behind her, the man who had broken her arm without a moment’s hesitation, was indeed the Jons who had brought her out of the Dust with Malar.
“Hello, Livira.” Grim-faced, no kindness in his eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Obeying my king.” Jons shrugged. “Surviving. I was always a survivor.”
“One!” King Oanold brought Livira’s attention back to the matter at hand. “Two!”
“I can’t open doors. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Three!”
“You’d be mad to kill me.”
“Four!”
“I know the library better than Acconite. I can guide—”
“Five!”
“—you out of here!”
“Six!” Something in the wet quiver of Oanold’s lips said that this was no more a bluff than the broken arm had been. The circle’s healing might stop her bleeding to death if they chopped off her legs, but it wouldn’t grow them back.
“Seven.” Oanold counted on into the pause her shock had made. These maniacs were actually going to do it. From the blood spatters most of them wore they’d already done something similar since arriving in the chamber.
“All right, all right! I’ll do it.” Livira slid a hand into her robes. “I need my book.” She pulled the small black book from her inner pocket and thumbed it open with one hand. Instantly, darkness swallowed the light.
Livira had a choice to make and no time to weigh her options. She dropped the book, ducked, and ran. She could have chosen to run with it, but then she would have become a fleeing bubble of darkness, something easy to chase. This way the worst of her antagonists might stumble around for some while in the static darkness she left behind.
Livira emerged from the dark and immediately ran into a chest-high book wall. Winded and hurt, she straddled it even as the top sections began to fall, and rolled over into the enclosure beyond, which was empty save for a pile of dirty cloth and a spare boot.
Driven by the animating effects of terror, Livira vaulted the next wall into another small enclosure. She stomped her way over a much-deflated formerly fat man who had managed to sleep through her earlier screams but not through her booted foot’s arrival on his belly. The encounter left Livira sprawling forward, her feet tangled in the man on the floor. She hit the next wall hard enough to topple the central section. As she crawled forward over the tumble of books, the merciless light showed her a nightmare she’d been wholly unprepared for.
A glistening skeleton lay partly covered by fallen books, the bones picked clean but still fresh enough to gleam, save where the flensing knife had scored them. Keeping close company with fresh bones was never going to be pleasant but two things tore the scream from Livira’s lips. The first was that the right forearm and hand were still covered in flesh, the skin not even bloody. The second was the shock of black hair still attached to the scalp of the grinning skull. Very black hair with a reddish tint brought out by the light. The kind of hair the people from her settlement had, and that was common all across the Dust.
Livira ploughed on into the next wall, no longer sure of her direction or whether she’d stopped screaming or not. It shook but resisted her. She threw her whole weight against it and again it shook, and then wobbled and came down, spilling most of its books on top of her.
She emerged from the heavy rain of paper and leather into a reeking enclosure with no exit. A figure lay there, hunched in a corner, naked and smeared with grime. A black-haired young man with both his legs absent at the knee, the amputations healed over. Livira didn’t want to recognise the face peering at her through those filthy locks. She wanted her memory for faces—already the weakest part of her memory cage—to let go of everything it had hold of. Then she wouldn’t have to understand that this was Gevin. Gevin who had been a small child when Acmar had carried him from the Dust as they followed Malar.
Glancing back through the walls she’d crashed through, Livira could see the man she’d woken scrabbling as if worried she’d stolen something precious from him. He grabbed an object from the floor and held it jealously to his chest. A leg bone, scraps of flesh still adhering to it here and there.
“Run, Livira,” Gevin said behind her in a hollow voice. “Run. This is hell.”