Chapter 39
You need not look for sorrow, it will always find you.
Zen and the Art of Skateboarding , by Tommy Hanks
CHAPTER 39
Livira
I can’t leave him here.” Livira knelt beside Malar’s body. His blood pooled around her knees. “They’ll eat his body.”
“Won’t they kill someone else to eat if they don’t get this?” The white child—Yolanda—gazed down at Malar with dispassion.
Livira didn’t answer. She was too numb, too lost to find a counterargument. Dragging Malar away, saving him from the indignity of being devoured by filth like the king and Lord Algar, would condemn another to death. Maybe Katrin or Neera or Leetar had been hidden in one of those cells, waiting to have parts of their bodies carved off.
She nodded and stumbled away, blinded by tears, her chest emptied of air by a long-hissed-out breath of anguish and yet too paralysed by hurt to draw in any replacement. Yolanda passed her and led on. Livira followed, hitching in her breath at last. She had had three fathers—one out on the Dust that she barely remembered, and two from the city. A good one and a bad one, though they were both good to her. Yute had been the voice of reason, and Malar had been her lesson in heart.
Shouts and the sound of pounding feet came from behind. Yolanda started to sprint, her bare feet making no sound. Livira stumbled after her then broke into her own run and found that running was all she wanted to do. With her librarian robes fluttering in protest Livira overtook Yolanda and tried to outpace her own grief, tried to leave the sorrow and the nightmare behind her, veering this way and that, ricocheting from the shelves on one side then the other.
A figure loomed in her path, strong arms caught her, lifting her from her feet. She screamed and fought, ready to die rather than be taken by Oanold’s men once more.
“Livira!” The arms held her without violence. Her kicks and punches were not returned. “Livira!”
And there he was. Evar. Holding her close. His mane in her face. He squeezed her hard enough to make her ribs creak, and pressed his mouth to her neck, breathing her in. He had thought her dead and his relief trembled through him. The sheer physical reality of him overwhelmed her. They had parted hundreds of years ago, though it only felt like days. And from within the prison of the Assistant she had watched him grow, watched his whole life from behind the bars of her timeless cage. That had seemed like an eye-blink until he wrapped his arms about her, and now it felt like the lifetime it was.
Others surged around them, and Evar was setting her to her feet. She held him a moment longer. “I missed you.”
She was standing once more and old friends surrounded her, joy and tears on lean, dirty faces. Meelan, Jella, Salamonda!
“Arpix!” Livira released the others to throw herself at the over-tall librarian. She clung to him as if he were a tree and a flood raged around them. Amazingly, she felt his arms enclose her and return the embrace with a fierceness she’d never thought he had in him.
“It’s good to see you.” Arpix sounded un-Arpix-like too, his voice choked by emotion.
She looked up at him, blinking away tears. The face that peered down at her across the length of his chest was gaunt, and somehow older than the one she remembered. Even so, it was him: her unwilling partner in crime, her moral compass. Her Arpix.
Two more canith approached. Dark-maned Kerrol, who made Arpix look short, and Clovis with dust taming the redness of her mane. Livira saw them with a kind of double vision: through her own eyes as Evar’s siblings—the enigmatic brother, the fierce and dangerous sister; and more dimly, through timeless eyes, she saw the children who had grown in her care and felt an echo of the love for them that had taken root even past the impervious skin of an assistant.
“The Soldier saved me,” she said. “Malar died fighting. Twice.”
And even though she didn’t explain herself, and despite the foolishness of it when the enemy might be close at hand, all three canith put back their heads and howled to the unseen moons.
Livira added her own cry of sorrow to the canith’s howls, her heartache lost in the resonant depths of their howl, then carried on its rising note. Others in the party exchanged worried glances, fearing the sound might draw the king’s soldiers. Arpix and Meelan, who among Livira’s friends had known Malar best, both looked stricken.
As the howl fell to silence Livira saw Yute, though he must have been there all the time, his whiteness hard to miss. The grief on his face was underwritten by older lines of sorrow that had not been there when Livira had last seen him. Malar had never spoken of it directly, but Livira had come to know that he did other jobs for Yute, not just shepherding trainees across the city. There were probably senior librarians who had spent less time in Yute’s company than the soldier had. The nature of their relationship remained a mystery to Livira, but she thought that they were each, perhaps, the closest thing that the other had to a friend.
Yute set a hand to Salamonda’s shoulder. The woman had not known Malar well, but she knew him as one of Livira’s protectors and had tears in her eyes for him.
“The Soldier died well.” Clovis raised her sword. “But those who killed him will not. They will fall before me like wheat before the scythe.”
“The man who killed him is dead. By Malar’s hand,” Livira said.
“And the others?” Clovis’s gaze snapped round to fix on Livira.
“There were no others.”
“One?” Clovis asked, disbelieving. “Only one?”
“He had a ’stick. A projectile weapon. The Soldier refused to run. He stayed to save me.”
Clovis spat. And the fury on her face was something terrible to behold. All the worse for Livira understanding the grief it was trying to keep at bay. The Soldier had cared for all the children in his way. He had trained them. Tolerated them. Taught them more than they knew he was teaching them. But it had been Clovis with whom that bond ran deepest. They shared warrior souls, and like reaches to like.
“I will see his body and say my farewells.” Clovis slammed her sword back through the loop on her belt.
Evar, who had stood back to let Livira’s friends crowd about her, came closer now and she took his hand, a lifeline to keep her from drowning in misery. She had fought so hard to reach him, but Malar’s life had never been some coin that she was willing to pay for passage.
Yute stepped into Clovis’s path, dwarfed by the canith. As one, the humans sucked in a sharp breath. Livira had seen Malar nearly killed when doing something similar, but surely Clovis was more trusted now, though she still had her hand on the hilt of her sword. She and her siblings seemed to be travelling with Yute and his party. Suddenly Algar’s words played through her mind: Since your canith friends killed the head librarian . That couldn’t be true? The words escaped her mouth: “Where’s Yamala?”
The question seemed to undercut Clovis’s rapidly building anger. Unexpectedly, Arpix reached the canith’s side and set his hand to her sword arm. The fierceness left Clovis’s eyes, and she lowered her gaze.
“Mayland killed Yamala.” The words came from beside her. Evar’s voice.
“No!” She looked up at him, astonished. And then, “I met him just recently. In the Exchange.”
Livira left Evar’s side and went to stand before Yute. She wasn’t sure if it had been days since she last saw him or centuries. It felt like a lifetime, and although theirs had never been a relationship that hugs or touching was a part of, she took both his hands in hers, finding them strangely cool. “I’m sorry about your wife.”
Yute met her gaze, the old kindness in his eyes along with an older sorrow. “I’m sorry we’ve lost Malar.”
It was enough to start Livira’s tears flowing again. She tried to choke them off with anger. She looked over Yute’s shoulder to Clovis, who stood conflicted, twitching as instinct vied with unfamiliar emotions, pulling her this way and that. Evar must have told his sister that Livira had lain trapped at the heart of the Assistant. It was written in her eyes and the way they could no longer meet Livira’s.
Livira opened her mouth to say that Yute should stand aside, that he should clear Clovis’s path and unleash her on King Oanold’s soldiers. But the words wouldn’t leave her tongue. She had seen Clovis as a small girl, fierce around her hurts, seen her grow, seen her show Evar the first flesh-and-blood affection of his new life. “There are too many of them, Clovis. You can’t dodge bullets.” Part of her desperately wanted to loose the warrior on the king, Algar, and the monsters who served them. The soldiers might be battle-hardened and carrying the most advanced arrow-sticks, but even so Livira thought Clovis would put a large hole in their ranks. Perhaps even win. But “perhaps” was not enough. And Evar would not stay back while his sister fought.
Livira looked away from Clovis and Yute, studying the familiar faces all around her. People she had known most or all of her life. Neera coughed, and for the first time Livira noticed her among those crowded into the aisle. All of them so precious to her and so vulnerable. She wanted to tell them that they had to attack, that what Oanold’s people were doing was so heinous it couldn’t be allowed to stand. She wanted to tell her people from the settlement that little Gevin was being eaten alive. To tell Clovis that the body she wanted to honour was being dragged away to be feasted on. But there were children here, a baby, friends. All her mind would show her was the aftermath: Neera, Yute, Arpix, Evar, all of them shot through like Malar had been, gasping out their final breaths in a welter of their own blood, more meat for Oanold’s kitchen.
Livira fell to her knees beneath the weight of it. Evar and others crowded forward with cries of alarm. She felt their presence pushing on her from all sides, adding to the pressure. A scream built inside her in the space where the two halves of her were being torn one from the other by opposing forces, by impossible choice.
The scream, which felt as though it might physically tear her apart so her body could match her mind, never came. Yolanda came instead, stepping quietly around the corner.
At first only Livira saw the girl, past the legs of those surrounding her as she remained on her knees. Yolanda stood, watching, so white, so lacking colour that she seemed not to be a part of the world. Then Yute turned, drawn by an invisible thread, and saw his daughter. With the muted gasp of a gut-shot man, he joined Livira on his knees.
“You should not be here.” Yolanda’s voice felt like a chill wind, as if she really were the ghost her paleness painted her to be. “Have you not heard the summons, Father? The cracks are spreading. We need to go.”
“My child... Yolanda... We thought you were—”
Yolanda silenced the aching rasp of Yute’s voice with a raised hand. “Can you not hear it?”
“I hear something.” Yute got slowly to his feet, struggling, as if the weight of all his centuries had suddenly fallen upon him. “But I didn’t understand what I heard. I’ve forgotten so much. Made so many mistakes.” Yute winced as if stung by a memory. “Your mother—”
“My mother might have taken my side, but the others have slain her, and still you won’t commit, Father.” She turned and walked away. “Hurry. They’re nearly here.”
A heartbeat after she disappeared from view into another aisle the percussive explosion of a ’stick being fired rent the air. Muffled shouts rang out. Not close, but not far either.
“Come on!” Livira set off after Yolanda, breaking the indecision that had paralysed the group.