The Book That Wouldn't Burn, page 10
‘Hey!’ Evar hollered at it. ‘Over here!’
The Assistant had almost never been a loving mother, providing information rather than hugs, lessons in place of comfort. But ‘almost never’ is not ‘never’ and seeing her in peril pulled on a hook set deep in Evar’s heart, a hook he’d never been aware of before, and without hesitation he turned to go back.
A hand gripped his shoulder and hauled him down into cover once more. ‘Idiot.’
The Escape bowed its head, straining its jaws as it tried to divide its prey into two. A thin hiss of rage leaked from the insect as unknown pressures failed to achieve its goal. With a toss of its head, it threw the Assistant a good fifty yards across the room then zeroed its black gaze on the spot where Evar had showed himself.
‘We’ve got to move.’ Starval released his brother and scurried away. ‘Stick with me.’
Evar was no stranger to playing hide and seek among the jumbled desks of the reading room, and Starval’s skills at both the hiding and the seeking parts were unsurpassed, but the Escape covered the ground with frightening speed, stepping over rows of double-stacked desks and staring down into the valleys between. Evar hadn’t ever had to consider such a high vantage point when concealing himself.
‘Here!’ Starval hauled him under a table. Despite being the smallest of the siblings, he had a wiry strength that Evar constantly underestimated.
The Escape hunted them through the desk maze, in some places crashing through walls and toppling stacks, in others picking its way delicately in an almost-silence broken only by the soft clicking of its armour. Starval led the way through tunnels they’d made long ago, back when they’d thought Clovis the scariest thing that would ever stalk them here.
‘Can you kill it?’ Evar whispered at Starval’s shoulder, crouched amidst a thicket of table legs beneath a thin wooden sky.
Starval produced one of his throwing stars with a flourish, a wicked piece of sharp iron fashioned laboriously from two book hinges. He had others that were cogwheels with sharpened teeth – source unknown. ‘Maybe.’ He sounded doubtful. ‘But definitely not while keeping you alive at the same time.’
‘Since when has that bothered you?’
Starval turned his head sharply and looked at Evar with genuine surprise. ‘You’re the only one I can stand to be around. I’d miss you.’
A black leg crashed through a desktop ten yards to their left. The Escape freed the limb with an irritated shake that sent half a dozen other desks tumbling away and rattled the brothers’ cover.
‘This way.’ As he crawled away Starval tugged on a cord. Evar hadn’t seen him do it but somewhere along their journey Starval must have tied the other end to a desk leg. The tug set off a collapse way off to their left and the Escape raced in that direction, scattering desks with such ferocity that they came raining down on all sides.
‘We can’t do this forever.’ Evar caught up with his brother. ‘And there’s no way we’ll make it down the passage without it seeing us.’
Starval was looking at his hands, both flat to the floor. ‘We may not need forever.’
Evar realized for the first time in all the panic of running and hiding that it was unusually gloomy beneath the desks. Normally the library’s light would be as bright in their current hiding place as everywhere else, but now there were mist-like shadows. More than that, they seemed to be moving, a slow tidal flow, most visible around Starval’s fingers. ‘It’s being drawn back in?’
Starval nodded. ‘With luck we can just wait it out.’
Evar frowned. It was certainly true that Escapes always liked to put a lot of distance between themselves and the Mechanism as soon as they got free of it. And Starval was pretty much an authority on creatures of the night.
‘Where is it now?’ Everything had gone worryingly quiet. Evar lifted his eyes above the fallen desk to his right.
‘Idiot.’ Starval hauled him down almost immediately.
In his brief glimpse across the reading room Evar’s gaze had followed the trail of scattered desks and fixed for a moment on the midnight mass of the Escape, blacker than a hole cut into the world, its prey all the more clear for that blackness. It had the Assistant in its jaws again. The sound of the first impact came as soon as Evar lost sight of the scene. A concussive blow like Clovis hammering her armour too close to his ears.
The sound echoed through him. For all that she seemed impervious, the Assistant gave him the distinct impression that if her limit of endurance was ever reached it would be sudden. There wasn’t any give in her, nothing left a mark, except for that one wound on her temple and the old cuts on her palms. The Escape smashed her into the floor a second time and Evar had a vision of the Assistant shattering like cast iron driven beyond its strength.
Evar found himself running towards her. What he might achieve he had no idea but staying put and watching apparently wasn’t an option. The library had given him few opportunities to test his bravery. In the stacks earlier he’d been terrified and had run to save himself. But here, with the Assistant at risk, it wasn’t even a choice, and he flung his own fragile body towards her seemingly indestructible one.
Starval’s shoulder hit the backs of Evar’s knees, taking him to the floor mid-stride. ‘You’re going to get us both killed.’ Starval sent two throwing stars slicing through the air as the Escape’s head turned their way. One hit an eye and the other bedded into its jaw, but the thing lurched towards them even so, abandoning the Assistant. Starval threw again, exhausting his supply, and still the Escape came on, gaining momentum, desks hurled into the air on both sides as it rushed them.
‘Run!’ Starval slithered into the nearest cluster of desks. ‘Evar—’
The Escape came crashing on, the thunder of its approach drowning out anything else Starval might have had to say. The smoke from its wounds bled away in horizontal lines as if caught by a strong wind. Wherever Evar hid, the Escape would scatter his cover and devour him. With sudden inspiration he turned and ran across the clear ground, aimed directly for the Mechanism. The door was still closed but somehow the structure was sucking the Escape back in.
Evar sprinted, unable to look behind him, expecting jaws to close in on both sides at any moment. He felt the Escape’s cold malice focused on his back, aching between his shoulders. The din of its charge overwrote his booming heart and the labour of his lungs. Unwilling to check his speed Evar hammered into the Mechanism’s grey wall, taking the impact on his shoulder and hip as he turned to meet his fate.
The Escape had skidded to its own halt and stood about thirty yards back, legs rigid, slanted to resist the pressure that had darkness streaming from every surface, to be sucked into the Mechanism’s vortex. The creature trembled, the vibration fierce enough to blur its outlines. One foot – a hook bristling with black spines – slipped, only to regain traction a yard further forward. The smoke billowed from it, pieces of its exoskeleton ripping free and hurtling towards the grey wall at Evar’s back. Even as he ducked a large plate, the whole Escape disintegrated, the bulk of it sucked in on the Mechanism’s endless inhalation while some dark core found new form and fled towards the passage, aiming for the freedom of the stacks.
Evar shuddered as the wash of darkness flooded over him and was drawn away.
He was still trying to brush the invisible filth from his chest and arms when Starval reached him. ‘Are you insane?’
‘I had to save her,’ Evar said, feeling foolish.
‘How? By temporarily blocking its mouth with your body?’ Starval gestured towards the Assistant, now on her feet again and walking unhurriedly towards them. ‘It’s not as if she needed your help. Clovis couldn’t put so much as a dent in her even if she had all day and a big hammer …’
It wasn’t until she drew near that Evar saw the damage. Part of her shoulder was gone, fractured away along one of the grey seams that ran through her. Not a large chunk but noticeable to eyes that had watched her for most of twenty years. A rough-edged wound showing only more of the same flesh beneath. To Evar it felt disproportionate, like a chip from a tooth, the damage magnified by the tongue’s exploration and ability to lie. The Assistant was part of their foundation. And she had cracked. He had let it happen.
‘Come back with me.’ She turned and walked away.
The brothers shared a look. Evar wondered if his was as unreadable as Starval’s or if the lost feeling welling up inside him were written there as plainly as he felt it was.
Starval frowned and looked away. He hunched as though cold, scratching at his arms. ‘Come on.’ He moved away from the Mechanism and followed the Assistant.
Evar shivered, glanced back at the Mechanism, then followed too. He felt something else, something not related to the Assistant’s sudden hints at mortality. Evar shivered and knew that Starval had felt it as well. The force that had sucked the armour off the Escape – it had also pulled at the brothers. Not with the same fierce insistence, but it had been there, and a ghost of it was still there, maybe it had always been there, only understood now after all these years. The Mechanism wanted them back as well. After all, Evar and his siblings had escaped it too.
… sorting hat! But even the most sober of systems must admit the possibility that the judgements levelled against the young, no matter how exhaustive the testing on which they might be based, must allow some ‘wiggle room’. On the forest floor certain blooms unfurl long after snowdrops and crocuses have tested the icy crust …
Career Advice for Mid-Ranking Civil Servants, by R. I. Perrin
CHAPTER 10
Livira
As Yute led Livira out of the shadow of the Allocation Hall’s portico, he raised his cane and slid his other hand inside the cloth cover. Miraculously an array of spokes spread out, stretching the fabric between them into a circle that cast him into shadow once more.
‘It’s a parasol,’ he said, seeing Livira’s amazement. ‘The sun is unkind to skin as pale as mine. Ironic that a world as ancient and used up as ours basks in the fierce regard of such a youthful star.’ He led on, across the plaza.
Livira could barely understand half the man’s words, and it was nothing to do with his accent this time. She opted for silence and followed in his wake, wondering what kind of job he might have for her at the library and what a library was. Like Malar, Yute didn’t check to see if she was with him. It was as if, without even meeting, the two men had exchanged the set of invisible chains by which she was bound, links forged from the certainty that alone she would be more lost on the crowded streets of the city than she ever could be in the featureless wastes of the Dust.
‘Your parents were killed by sabbers.’ It didn’t sound like a question.
‘No.’ The Dust had killed them. That’s what Aunt Teela had said. And though it had been a storm that took her mother and a septic cut that had taken her father, Livira was minded to agree. These were among the many weapons that the Dust wielded against flesh.
‘No? But you came in from the Dust in the care of a soldier.’ Yute glanced back at her for the first time.
Livira had started to curl her lip at the word ‘care’, but it was true at least that the soldiers had not left them to die, and Malar had paid out the debt he thought he owed her. ‘Sabbers killed my aunt and took us from the village.’ She had wondered about that. ‘Why did they want the children?’
Yute frowned and turned away. ‘I don’t know. They don’t normally treat children any differently to anyone else.’
He led Livira across the vast square, passing the central fountain. She found herself staring at everything and everyone. The variety among the people astonished her.
‘That man has hair like Lord Algar. That one too!’ She pointed at a fat man with red cheeks, the grey coils of his hair unmoving despite the breeze.
Yute gave an amused snort and pressed down her pointing arm. ‘Those are wigs. People with an abundance of money and spare time turn to fashion. A librarian’s robes offer an escape from such vices.’
He led on, aiming for the gap between two of the halls fronting the square’s far edge. Behind the largest of these halls the mountain’s gradient, which had been arrested by the plaza, now reasserted itself and, in a hurry to catch up, a flight of steps wound its way back and forth across what was essentially a cliff face that Livira doubted her ability to climb.
Master Yute set a steady pace, though he paused to gather himself at each of the turns where a small level area had been cut into the rock to allow people to pass without danger on the narrow stair. As they gained elevation, he began to look more and more weary, sweat sticking his white hair to his skull. The wind grew stronger and occasionally tried to wrestle the man’s portable shade from his grip, straining the spars supporting the cloth. On the third such occasion Yute gave up and folded his parasol back into its original form.
‘Not so far now.’ He sighed, looking up at the steps zigzagging across the elevations still to come.
Livira followed. The ache burned in her calves and thighs, but she could have overtaken Yute – the age promised by his white hair was a lie but perhaps some illness had weakened him. By the time they reached the top his breath was laboured, and the parasol was serving as the cane Livira had first taken it for. The fact he didn’t try to hide his weakness made her trust him more. Not much, but more.
‘What’s the library?’ Livira could only go for so long without asking a question. On the Dust she had learned to answer them for herself, but they had never ceased to bubble from the depths of her mind and sit behind her tongue, building pressure.
‘A library is a place where books are kept and made available,’ Yute said. ‘The library, the particular library to which we are ascending, is the greatest of all libraries by a similar margin to that by which this mountain is greater than your nose.’
Livira nodded to herself. Malar had said the city thrived by trading knowledge, and she now knew that knowledge could be trapped in ink. It could be snared in words and locked to the pages of a book such as those she’d been shown in the Allocation Hall.
The stairs brought Yute and Livira to the top of the cliff, and a steep path led them to join a paved road that snaked its way still higher up the mountain’s flanks. Houses crowded the road’s margins wherever there had been space to carve a platform for them, and in other places they clung to the rock face like sweat-bugs, some on alarming arrays of wooden beams, stilts that stepped up the slope and looked too frail to support the teetering edifices they bore. The houses here were far less grand than those around the plaza, but to Livira’s eye they had much more character and variety, seeming as individual as faces, and not just human faces. Yute paused to gather himself outside a house of perhaps five or six storeys, each of which was not much larger in area than Aunt Teela’s house and none of which seemed to be set quite squarely atop the one below. Unlike the dwellings to either side, no two windows in the tower were the same, and at the very top the structure sported an unlikely number of turrets, none of which seemed large enough for a person to enter.
‘Yute!’ A woman of middling age and considerable girth came from the front door of the tall house and out into the street, skirts swishing as she swept past a man and his slate-laden donkey. ‘You’ll burn up!’ She snatched the parasol from his grasp and opened it above him.
‘Ah, yes.’ Yute spread a white hand before him, studying it with a frown as if expecting to see tiny flames licking around the fingers. Livira noticed for the first time that the man wore a single piece of jewellery, a silver ring set with a small moonstone of the sort that might very occasionally be found out on the Dust. The tears of god, Ella had called them, scattered across the world in the long ago.
‘Honestly! Get inside.’ The woman took his arm and tried to steer him across the road to the open door behind her, only noticing Livira at this point. ‘Another one, Yute?’ Her voice somewhere between disapproving and disappointed.
Yute tore his gaze from his hand. ‘Livira, meet Salamonda. Salamonda, Livira.’
‘She looks like she’s been through a thorn bush backwards,’ Salamonda said, not unkindly. ‘And she could do with a bath.’
‘I’ve ha—’ But Salamonda didn’t give Livira a chance to protest that she had already had a bath. She fastened a meaty hand around Livira’s forearm and began to pull her towards the doorway, abandoning Yute in the street.
The ground floor was a kitchen, crowded with cupboards, hung with hams and links of sausage, strings of garlic, onions, and other unknown but surely edible objects, the air thickened by heat and by an array of scents that filled Livira’s mouth with saliva. A whole meal dangled just out of her reach!
A large iron stove poured warmth into the room, a table took up half the free space, its scarred surface scattered with knives, pots, onions here, a carrot there, bottles of unknown liquids standing sentinel dangerously close to the edge. Three small windows, one arched, one square, one round, pierced the rear wall overlooking a precipitous drop to the city below, and through these light streamed, hurling shadows across the floor, turning dust motes to golden dancers, and gilding every curl of smoke that escaped the stove.
‘No dawdling.’ Salamonda drew Livira on behind her as if fearful that Yute, now coming in through the front door, would catch them and wrest his charge free of her grip.
‘More climbing,’ Livira muttered as they began to ascend a wooden staircase that wrapped tightly back and forth across the inner left-hand side of the tower. The steps were barely wide enough to accommodate Salamonda’s girth and creaked alarmingly the whole way up. Yute followed behind as they passed room after room, all comfortably cluttered and filled with a diversity of wonders, few of which Livira felt equipped to name.
The third floor was lined with shelves, dark wood polished to a high shine, and every shelf, floor to ceiling, groaned with books. In sections, runs of similar books made bands of colour: ochre, warm brown, dark crimson; other shelves were more chaotic, with additional books laid lengthways across the tops of others. A large table was mostly hidden beneath a jumble of leather-bound tomes, many left sprawled open with their pages fanning like the plumes of strange birds.
