Chapter 40
Any experienced librarian will tell you that much of what is found among their shelves defies classification. Most often by virtue of being many things at once. Sometimes those categories show only minimal overlap, and sometimes, as with “hero” and “villain,” they are almost entirely the same thing.
Who Indexes the Indexers? , by M. L. K. Dewey
CHAPTER 40
Evar
Livira!” Evar intercepted the racing girl, sweeping her into his arms, lifting her from the ground, and spinning to absorb her momentum. For several heartbeats she fought him in her panic, and Evar took the blows until with a sudden stillness she understood who had hold of her. In that moment she collapsed against him, burying her face in his mane as he pressed his own to her neck, inhaling her. He hadn’t truly believed it until that moment when her scent filled him. He squeezed her, trying to tame his strength in case she might break. He had thought her dead. He had hoped against hope that she wasn’t. That the spirit which had entered the Assistant had escaped her white prison when the skeer destroyed it. But he hadn’t known, he hadn’t believed, and he had lived with the ache of her absence for what might only be days but felt like a thousand years, all the time trying to deny the hurt and the loss and the hope.
“Livira.” A whisper now as her friends erupted all around them with cries of joy. Feeling the others start to tug at her, Evar reluctantly set her down. Before he released her though, Livira tightened her arms about his neck and her lips found his ear.
“I missed you.”
Evar stepped back as Livira’s friends surged around. Her unexpected arrival had been the sudden intake of a breath he’d been short of ever since he found the Assistant’s broken body. For the long, glorious moments during which they had been alone in each other’s arms, held in the privacy of a fictional forever, Evar had felt himself mended.
For Evar, who had so seldom been hugged, it was a state he could happily have drawn out for an age, but the world had too quickly reimposed itself. Livira’s fear and grief demanded an accounting, and the friends who crowded round were people she had known far longer than she had known Evar, and from whom she had been parted for far longer—at least on their side of the equation.
Evar found the human’s speech easier to understand when Livira spoke it, and the effect also cast a new light of understanding on what the others were saying. The news that Malar had been killed hit Evar like a blow to the chest, taking the air from his lungs just as effectively as seeing the Soldier’s body lying broken amid the drifts of skeer corpses. The Soldier was truly gone now. The human that Evar had carried to the healing circle and watched being returned from the brink of death had been the Soldier’s inner spirit. That spirit was now extinguished.
Clovis made to advance on those that had killed Malar, and Evar was ready to go with her. She hid her full anger, but it still found an echo in his chest. Yute’s intervention took the wind from both their sails. Evar’s brother had killed the man’s wife, and it seemed that Yute had known Malar better than any of the siblings.
Though it wasn’t until Livira addressed Clovis that Evar realised what he might lose if they went seeking vengeance. He needed to stop thinking of the humans as weak just because they were smaller and slower than him. Arpix had taken down a cratalac. This king’s soldiers apparently had weapons that compensated for their lack of martial skills. Clovis could die. Evar could die, with just a brief hug as the totality of his reunion with Livira.
The white child had arrived with the enemy at her heels, and Evar had been happy to follow her path away from the advancing foe. However cryptic her talk of being summoned, Evar would choose it every time over the alternative, which seemed to be at worst the chance to be killed by an exotic weapon, and at best to show how well he could slaughter humans, all the while with his human girl and her human friends watching him become the gore-soaked animal he feared they might secretly already believe him to be.
—
The girl, Yolanda, led them to the chamber’s north door and the sounds of pursuit faded behind them. She walked as if she knew where she was going. Livira pulled Evar down to her level and whispered to him that Yute was the girl’s father and had not seen her in nearly twenty years after she had become lost in the library.
This seemed unlikely: the child didn’t look much older than ten years, and surely wouldn’t have been allowed to wander the aisles as an infant. He kept the observation to himself, however, not being confident about the human lifespan or the time taken for them to grow. He had assumed they were similar to canith, but some of the things Yute had said made it seem as if he was extremely long-lived. Evar found himself worrying about whether his whole life would seem like a season to Livira, and he would grow old and fail while she was still green in her youth. He caught himself in the midst of his anxiety and snorted at his own foolishness. There were enemies behind him, skeer ahead, and likely more horrors beyond them. They might all be killed in the next hour or day, and here he was worrying about a future decades away.
Clovis gave him a sharp look. “Stay focused.”
He looked towards Livira. She was back in the midst of her friends, catching up with the missing years. Evar found himself eyeing the males and wondering if any of them had designs on her, or had shared past intimacies. He pushed the thoughts away, ashamed of himself. He showed his teeth and looked ahead, focused. Clovis was right. She normally was when danger threatened.
The door required the touch of a human. It melted before Arpix’s hand. The skeer warrior that had been guarding the way now watched them from a distance, having been driven back by the orb in Clovis’s keeping. It stood some way off, almost lost among a forest of what at first seemed to be book stacks of unprecedented height.
As Yolanda led them into the forest, Evar understood that each stack was in fact a metal pole reaching from the floor to the distant ceiling. Each pole braced against its neighbours with struts about ten yards above the ground and again at the very top. The poles supported circular shelves every couple of feet, from which tomes of various sizes offered their spines to all points of the compass. Clearly, the chamber had been fashioned for those with the power of flight. So, unless canith had sported wings in their past, whoever built and stocked the shelves had been of no race Evar knew.
The lone skeer shadowed the group for a while at the limits of the orb’s protection before retreating from sight, presumably to summon reinforcements.
The forest of shelf-towers reminded Evar of the Exchange and he wondered if the architect had known of that place. The ordered array of towers meant that every few paces brought into view a new set of seemingly endless corridors between them, narrowing to invisibility as they reached for the distant walls. Evar had read that the effect was seen in orchards, though he had yet to taste the fruit of any tree and the trees in the Exchange remained the only ones he had seen in the flesh. And even those had proved to be a kind of illusion.
Yute walked just behind his daughter, hunched around some unknowable pain. He made no attempt to speak to her. Evar guessed that he had somehow understood on first seeing Yolanda that, whilst she might have been lost at some point, she had found herself and could have returned to him—even if only as a ghost. But she had not.
The Soldier had very rarely been the one to offer comfort during Evar’s early years. What little of that had come his way had been from the Assistant. But Evar did remember one thing the Soldier had told him not long after he and the other children had stumbled out of the Mechanism that first time. Evar had been asking about his parents, distressed as much by the loss of his memories of them as by their physical loss. The Soldier had looked away into the chamber and said, as if to nobody in particular, that Evar would never meet two people more capable of wounding him, or people he was more capable of wounding. The bonds between parent and child were, he said, as dangerous as they were wonderful, as full of darkness and terror as they were of joy and light. Evar had never spoken of it again, but he felt now that if he had repeated the Soldier’s words to Kerrol, his brother might know the whole cloth of Malar’s story.
Yolanda’s path through the chamber did not seem to be angled at any of the doors, a fact that intrigued Evar. Livira didn’t appear to have noticed, engaged as she was with her fellow survivors from the fall of her city. She did, however, seem distracted even from them, often glancing back towards the door they’d entered by. Evar wondered if thoughts of Malar might be turning her head in that direction, but the look he saw on her face held more fear in it than grief, and there was an anger there too, struggling to assert itself.
If they had been alone, Evar would have asked her why. But the presence of the others around him was a pressure, an audience that sealed his mouth rather than prompting a performance. Evar had been in the company of just three people for so very long that being part of what seemed a throng weighed on him in ways he didn’t properly understand. What he did understand was what a blessing the time he had spent alone with Livira in the Exchange had been. Without that privacy, and the solitude they’d found in being ghosts, nothing could have grown between them. He was sure of that.
“We’re going to a reading room!” Evar said it out loud as he realised.
That caught Livira’s interest. She hurried to join him near the front of the column and called to Yolanda, “You’re taking us to a Mechanism?”
Evar missed a step. The greyness of the Mechanism filled his mind. The stuff it was built from felt like a physical representation of what it had done to his memories. It had taken Livira’s presence to slowly restore to him the time he’d spent lost inside her stories. Those memories of shared adventure, discovery, and heartache, although not shared directly with Livira, had made it feel as though they’d spent a lifetime together. They had put flesh on the bones of a relationship built on brief encounters and hectic escapes. But he had come to realise, perhaps only truly since releasing her from his arms and into those of her friends, that although he had clothed himself in part of her soul, Livira had not been there with him. She had only the bones of that experience. And what frightened him more than anything that might lie in the chamber behind them, or in the place to which the white child was leading them, was that Livira’s affection for him might be just that, affection rather than love, a mixture of pity and curiosity, founded on little more than a shared kiss. A puddle beside his ocean.
“Are you all right?” Livira reached for Evar’s hand. “You don’t have to come in.” She looked worried herself and he remembered that her first experience in the Mechanism had been in the blindness of a subterranean world on the battlefield of species that shared more in common with skeer and cratalacs than with humans.
“There are two people I would go into the Mechanism for,” Evar said. “And both are you.”
—
The group had nearly reached the reading room when Evar caught the ominous sound of distant crashing.
“It’s another of those fucking metal monsters!” Clovis snarled, gazing to the east. The construct would have to fight its way through the forest of shelf-towers and would in theory be visible from the correct angle, but the distance would probably swallow too much detail to be sure of much, other than that something big was coming.
“We were chased by this enormous—”
“I know,” Livira said. “Malar and I watched you. We were ghosts after the skeer destroyed our assistant bodies. We followed you until that assistant you met dragged us away.”
“You were there? Watching?” Evar was amazed, horrified, and comforted in equal measures.
“I thought maybe that thing was chasing me.” Livira shivered. “It felt as though it was. It could touch us. It kicked Malar across the corridor.”
“It was a ganar.” Arpix joined the conversation. “I mean, shaped like one. There was another smaller one that nearly killed Evar.”
The white child stopped and rounded on them. “It was made in the likeness of a particular ganar. Both of them were. All of them were. The same ganar. Though ganar may all look the same to you...”
“What?” Evar looked at the child in astonishment. “How many of these monsters are there? And which ganar? And why? And how?”
Yute answered the first question. “There are many, though the vastness of the library makes them seem few. The first kings of Crath City spent many lives and resources aiding the librarians to clear those few found close to the entrance. They were all hostile to humans, though not given to lengthy pursuits.”
Yolanda answered the second question. “They are made in the likeness of Celcha. A ganar who mastered many of the mysteries of the Exchange, all while causing far less harm than you two have.” Her pink eyes took in Evar and Livira with disdain.
Livira, perhaps stung by the accusation, pointed at Yolanda. “You tried to stop me taking my own book, so don’t talk to me about doing damage! I was sent there by an assistant to prevent it harming the library, and you tried to stop me. Many times.”
Yolanda ignored her. “Your last question, Evar Eventari, was ‘how?’ The how of it is that this ganar, Celcha, applied the power and the influence she gained from her use of the Exchange to have these automata built as agents of her revenge. They were built to hunt and kill you and Livira Page.”
Evar shook his head. “That’s nonsense. I’ve never even met a ganar. None of them is going to devote themselves to killing me.” Though as he said it a cold tingle ran the length of his spine. What the child had said made no sense, but it also had a strange kind of truth to it.
“I’ve never seen a ganar either,” Livira protested. In the distance the crashing came again as more shelf-towers surrendered to overwhelming force.
“Well, a ganar has seen you and she was not well pleased.” Yolanda turned and led on towards the corridor to the reading room, now just a hundred yards or so away. “Using the Exchange comes with a price. Any assistant worth their keep should have prevented you from doing so. As to your book—it should have stayed in the past where its damage was limited. The assistant who sent you to retrieve it has been corrupted and intended only harm.”
“You found your book?” Evar asked Livira. He nearly called it his book. He felt that he had lived among the pages as long as she had, maybe longer.
The worry lines scoring Livira’s face deepened, the carefree nature that defined her banished. Evar found himself hating whoever had done that to her.
“I found it. But they took it.” She looked in the direction they’d come. “Back there...” She paused. “Those cracks... I think they all spread from where I hit the ground when the Exchange spat me out.”
Evar reached out a hand and set it on her far shoulder, guiding her closer to him. “Can one book really cause that much trouble?” Whether it could or not, the fact seemed to be that metal monsters created solely for the purpose of hunting and killing Livira were on the march, and Evar, while having no idea how to stop them, had no intention of letting it happen.
Livira shrugged his hand away and advanced on Yolanda. “You couldn’t have told me any of this while you were trying to stop me?” Anger in her voice.
“Would you have believed me? Do you believe me now?”
“I don’t know... maybe. But it would have been nice to have had the chance to decide.”
“There are rules.” Yolanda glanced at Yute. “Though my father seems to have forgotten them. Rules about what can be said and done in given places and given times. Which lines can cross, which must stay apart. And you ran headlong through all of them. I tried not to repeat your crime.”
They walked on without speaking.
—
They reached the passage to the reading room well ahead of the automaton, and entered it, leaving the distant sounds of rending metal and crashing books behind them. Evar noticed that Yolanda had picked up a fairly big tome along the way. A volume whose cover displayed a large circle in which a black half swirled symmetrically into a white half.
The chamber Yute’s daughter led them to contained nothing but the Mechanism at its centre. If there had ever been reading desks here, not even their dust remained. An assistant waited in front of the Mechanism’s door.
“Is that...?” Livira squinted as if there might be some detail that would tell one assistant from the next. “Is he the one who—”
“He who was Hellet,” Yolanda said. “Brother to Celcha of the ganar. The enemy’s willing tool, shaped by the plans of Mayland of the canith. He managed to covertly corrupt an assistant, by sowing the seed before the initial conversion.”
“I still don’t understand what these ganar have against me and Evar,” Livira protested.
“The Exchange breeds and multiplies coincidence. It is part of its engine. The way it functions.” Yolanda shook her head. “Surely you know this? Did you think such things end at the portals it delivers you through, or, like the illusions and translations, might also not follow you, entangling you with others to whom you are already connected?”
“I...” Livira let her silence answer.
Yolanda shook her head. “The library’s founder waits for us within. The enemy is with him. It is a time for choosing sides.”
“Irad and Jaspeth are in there?” Evar’s eyes widened and he stared at the uninspiring grey lump of the Mechanism.
Yolanda shrugged. “If you like.”
Stick-shot in the distance broke through the irregular crashes of the automaton’s approach. Livira spun around in alarm, her expression fading from shock to something unreadable. “I can’t!” She started back towards the exit and the sound of their enemies. “Oanold and the others... they’re eating people. Our people! Gevin—they’re eating Gevin! That’s the evil here. Not Irad or Jaspeth. The library’s not the problem. It’s us. We’re the evil, humans, it’s us.”
Meelan, still holding his sister’s hand, called out, “Yute told us how many of them there are. Soldiers armed with ’sticks. They’ll just kill us all, Livira!”
Livira looked towards him, her face tragic but determined. “I’m scared too. I didn’t say what I should have said. I was too scared to lose you all. Too selfish. But we can’t not go back. We just can’t. Or at least I can’t. I wouldn’t be able to look any of you in the eye. If I saved myself like that, I wouldn’t be worth saving.”
“Livira!” Evar caught her arm. He wanted to tell her she shouldn’t go, or couldn’t go, that it was madness, that the monsters would kill her. The ones of her own kind. But he understood the look on her face now. Guilt. And he knew that anything he said to stop her would only erode whatever esteem she had for him. So, all he found to say was, “I’ll come with you.”
“No!” Yolanda’s voice became a cold wind. “By your own admission, you’ve given the greatest weapon into the hands of the greatest evil. That book is a flame of its own making and the fire that spreads from it may consume the library itself. Now you will stand before the powers that be and make an account of yourself. You will not throw away the lives of the only people who might yet undo the damage you have wrought!”
“Which people?” Evar asked, still holding on to Livira’s arm, though whether he was her anchor in this storm, or she his, he couldn’t tell.
“You two, of course!” And with that Yute’s daughter strode towards the grey door of the Mechanism. The door became fog before her, and she passed through it, both arms clasped around the book she held over her chest. Nothing but the swirling of the mist marked her passage.
“Only one person can go in at a time?” Livira said weakly, looking at Evar for confirmation.
Evar nodded. “That’s what we were always told.”
“But today,” said Yute, going into the Mechanism after his daughter, “we’ve been summoned by the ones that made the rules.”