Chapter 42
Knowledge is a deadly weapon, but for those too lazy to wield such a blade, simply hand it to your foe and let them destroy themselves.
Attributed to Jaspeth
CHAPTER 42
Livira
Livira hung in the void and watched as Irad and Jaspeth spoke to an audience that might be millions strong or might just be her. Somewhere deep inside her she knew that, like the Exchange, what this place was showing her was coloured by her expectation. It had patterned itself to fit with a mythology she knew. The library and its creators were both larger than any one mythos, and what Irad and his brother truly were she could not imagine. If they owned singular selves and revealed that truth to her, perhaps she would be unable to comprehend it, or she might burn up in the light of their divinity.
They spoke of her as the author of a crack that had been written into the world. Something that could spread and destroy. She had never meant to do harm. Maybe that was the only way in which the indestructible could fail and the immortal come to their ends: through the work of the ignorant. Structures that could withstand any assault might, in the end, fall to mistakes and to the random actions of those not seeking to bring them down.
Yute was summoned from the void to stand between the two gods, one a deity of memory, the other of oblivion, and Livira’s heart went out to him. He looked too small to bear the weight of everything that lay between the two brothers.
Even as Yute spoke, Livira saw the battle he had to fight. The brothers each offered a pure vision, something grand, a statement easily made and easy to line up behind. Yute’s stained compromise came fraught with grey edges, too much choice, too little clarity, every boundary open to endless discussion and debate.
Even so, Jaspeth seemed threatened by him, enough to stand from his throne and replace Yute with a vision of a past Yute whose actions might speak louder than his words and might linger in memory long after his arguments were forgotten.
It took Livira longer to understand what she was seeing than she felt it should have. The realisation that she was looking at the sabber raid that had slaughtered Evar’s people hit her like a blow to the stomach. Her people, Jons—the soldier who had, with Malar, brought her from the Dust—were part of that massacre. Even those from the Dust merely stood and watched, not seeking to intervene.
Lord Algar, whose enmity had plagued her ever since childhood, had broadened his wickedness to genocide. King Oanold at last had the canith he had always wanted, a people untutored in war, ripe to fall before the scythe of his bitter veterans.
But Yute—Yute had been the key to it. How had he forgotten so much of his past power? He had been an assistant and the library had been an open book to him. But a millennium of city life had left him little more equipped to navigate the Exchange than she’d been on her first visit.
It hadn’t been his fault. Not exactly. He’d balanced the harm that might be done by loose humans in the Exchange against the seemingly small chance of trouble occurring in the brief gap between the first refugees passing through the portal and his own arrival. It seemed as if that delay had been longer than it should have been, though. Even given the size of the party. Had something kept him in the Exchange longer than he had planned? Or was it perhaps an artefact of the way time flowed at different speeds inside and outside the wood?
Either way, Jaspeth had made a shrewd play. However guiltless Yute might be, the canith would now hear the screams of their ancestors behind all of his arguments. And the rest of them would see that his attempt to navigate unknown waters had caused great harm. How could such a man sail the far more hostile seas that lay between Irad and Jaspeth’s shores?
As the vision of Yute’s past deeds began to fade, Livira felt a pull and recognised its source. Yute’s recollection of his time as an assistant might have been wiped clean by the passage of centuries and the difficulty of any timeless knowledge finding space in a mind caught within the flow. But Livira’s experience lay little more than a day behind her, and her memory had been a thing of legend among the librarians. The pull was the Mechanism at work. They were being ejected. They would stumble from its doors, over a score of them, back into the dangers that had chased them into the reading room, and straight into the fire of the argument that Irad and Jaspeth had lit beneath them.
“Evar.” Livira spoke the word into the void. “Evar Eventari!” She wanted time with him and him alone. She wanted to speak without an audience. She wanted his attention without the competition of friends and enemies. “ Evar. ” And drawing on faint echoes of the Assistant’s power, she made a space in which they both stood. A room of shadows and flame flickers.
“Livira?” Evar looked around him and came to her, arms reaching.
Livira wrapped her own arms around the canith, surprised once more by the size of him, the sheer physicality after being so long beyond touch, the smell of him, an animal scent, distinct, strong even, but provoking an undercurrent of excitement as she breathed him in. She buried her face in the hollow just beneath his sternum, her cheek subject to the innumerable soft prickles of the short fur there.
They stood in the embrace, neither of them willing to break the silence with questions or words of any sort, lest doing so might somehow invite a wider world and its problems into their moment.
At last, Evar shifted his hands until they were under her arms. She stood still, not knowing what to expect. When, without apparent effort, he lifted her until their faces were level and the best part of a yard lay beneath her dangling toes.
“I missed you.”
“I missed you too.” She had, if “ached for” was the same as “missed.”
“Let’s not lose each other again.”
“No.” Livira shook her head. If she had been in charge of the distance between them, she would have closed it immediately and repeated their first kiss.
Evar brought her to him, and pressed his face into her neck, nuzzling, a deep sound in his throat that sounded as if it came from a beast far larger than him, a northern bear perhaps, or a mountain ox. His mane engulfed her and with it that scent of his which filled her lungs with trembling desire.
“Where are we?” Evar lowered her to her feet, and she found her legs less willing to hold her up than they had been just a short while before.
“A place... I made.” Livira wasn’t sure how to say it. “A pause between the world’s breathing. Time won’t notice we’re gone, but I don’t know how long I can keep us here.”
Evar sighed. “Yute brought the killers to my home.”
“He didn’t know. It’s Oanold that deserves the blame.” Livira hesitated, unsure. It was Oanold who deserved the blame, but surely all those others, the soldiers who had followed his order, deserved the blame too. Perhaps there hadn’t been any order and the mere sight of canith without weapons had been enough to spur them into slaughter. It went deeper. The soldiers were just people. People given leeway, grievance, and a sharp edge to rebalance the scales. The canith were hardly saints. Every one of those trapped then killed in the chamber were descendants of the warrior and the priest who had come to Livira’s settlement and watered the Dust with the blood of simple farmers. The same warrior and priest who had scaled Crath’s walls and set the city on fire. “There’s a lot of blame,” she concluded, unhappy at the defeat in her voice. If she could hate one group or the other, she would at least take some comfort in the purity of that conviction. As it was, she feared that, if she allowed it, the world might one day bring her insights that would undermine her hate even for Algar or Oanold; she might come to understand them as products of weakness and circumstance rather than demons spat from a dark hell with motivations that were simple evil and nothing else. Livira shivered. For a moment it even seemed that Jaspeth might be right—too much information could drown you; the world was simpler in black and white, more easily enjoyed, less fraught with guilt.
Evar studied her silence. “Yute brought them. That’s all Clovis will have heard.” He looked sad. “Whatever happens, I am on your side, Livira. I won’t arrive too late again.”
“Whatever happens.” Livira felt scared. She wasn’t given to fear, though she had been so full of it when Oanold had her that she thought it might stop her heart. This fear was a different kind. A dread. The conviction that nothing would be right no matter how hard they might wish it. “Whatever happens, we’ll face it together.”
“Together.” Evar bent towards her, and the kiss came, sweeter and deeper than before, and closer to their final one.