The Book That Wouldn't Burn, page 31
Livira soon discovered that two and a half years of wearing shoes had left her soft. Her feet were starting to get sore by the time she’d crossed the first chamber with eight more to go. And it didn’t help that every time a book slid underfoot, sending her tumbling, the Raven treated her to the full force of its ear- and head-splitting condemnation, as if the whole mess were her fault along with the decision to come this way.
The next forbidden chamber, number 67, was the first she’d seen with iron shelves, a planning decision that time had shown to be unwise. The books on the lower four-fifths of every set of shelves had turned orange in the slow but constant rain of rust. Rust also covered the floor to a depth of half an inch and more, crunching unpleasantly beneath her aching feet.
Chamber 46, also forbidden, would have given a heart attack to Master Lapla, who oversaw the team of bookbinders that Jella apprenticed with. It was any librarian’s nightmare. In class, Master Logaris had suggested many times that just as the centre of every chamber was an area of sustenance for any human, erasing tiredness, easing hunger and thirst, at least in the short term, the whole of every chamber was an area of sustenance for books. He remarked that under the close attention of Crath’s librarians, the books in the trainee library had fared notably less well over the past century and a half than the books in the library proper, despite the rats, cats, spiders, moulds, fungi, lichens, and such that somehow eked out a living among them. In fact, those conditions appeared to have sustained books that were referenced in other books as having been written several thousand years before.
How, then, Chamber 46 contained more book dust than books, Livira couldn’t say. It reminded her of an etching of Tneerast after the earthquake, its towers fallen into ruin, its wall toppled, their stones spread before the city. In Chamber 46 most of the shelving had collapsed, leaving a sparse forest of spires from which ancient planks slanted to the floor. The books lay in ruin too, as if the earlier chamber where Livira had crossed book-drifts had been marched over repeatedly by a series of armies in hobnailed boots. Pages were scattered, crumpled, torn. Ancient tomes lay open with only the smallest fraction of their contents still connected to broken spines. And these were the survivors. The greater part of the chamber’s contents had long ago been ground to a fine dust, almost evenly distributed across the floor, ranging from ankle-deep to calf-deep. Livira raised a cloud behind her such as she hadn’t since she quit her home and entered Crath City’s gates. The dreams and wisdom, prejudice and pride of untold millions of authors from many nations and many centuries were now just dust and ruin, making her sneeze and sticking to her feet.
Livira had arrived at the portal in Chamber 7 tired, hungry, and thirsty, despite the boosts from each chamber’s healing centre. She was also beginning to worry about the length of her absence. Master Logaris had been known to send junior librarians to check up on sick trainees. Meelan said Logaris only did it because the rooms were hard to clean if you left a corpse in one for too long. But whatever the motivation, the threat was real. Hopefully Carlotte would tell Logaris it was women’s problems this time. They’d observed the excuse close down their schoolmaster with startling speed on several occasions, and both of them were of an age now where they could appeal to it.
Livira studied the portal and the fallen assistant. She’d dreamed of this place so often in the years since she’d last been here that the reality of it now seemed fragile. As if at any moment the clanging of the morning bell might shatter the scene before her and replace it with a yawning view of her bedroom ceiling.
The Raven had found a perch and watched with interest as Livira tried to push through the portal. Just as before, it refused her. The assistant lay unmoving, grey and lifeless, her fingers vanishing into the shimmer of light that filled the circle. She’d told Livira on the last occasion that the Exchange was forbidden. Livira had decided that she wasn’t satisfied with that state of affairs and always travelled prepared for the eventuality that she might regain access to the chamber.
Livira took the long, thin rope from her pack and knotted one end around the assistant’s ankle. It had been hard to acquire all the cords that she threaded and twisted to make it. It had been hard to carry it so far, back and forth across the library. She also had two blankets sewn together. Arpix might have suspected she’d taken his, but he’d never guessed why.
Livira found a ladder in a nearby aisle and hefted it a couple of feet at a time, moving it around a corner and down the long straight stretch until it leaned against the side opposite the assistant. The effort turned her arms to jelly and, she was sure, added several inches in length to both. With her muscles still trembling, she climbed the rungs to the top of the shelves, taking the other end of the rope and the double blanket with her.
Once at the top she laid the blanket flat on the dusty wood and began to pile books from the shelf below onto it. It took a while and she nearly dropped one large tome with what felt like a stone cover. She could only imagine the scolding the Raven would have given her and doubted that her hearing would have escaped without permanent damage.
Eventually, satisfied, she folded the blanket carefully around her collection and gathered the corners together, putting a knot in each. She made a noose of the rope and tightened it around all four knotted corners. Next, she lugged the ladder two yards to the left. Then, gripping the shelf-top’s edge, she used both feet to inch the bundle towards the drop on the other side.
Gravity seized the blanket-sack without warning. It fell about ten feet before the rope went taut. Down below the assistant tilted without flexing, as if she really were the statue she appeared to be. She scraped across the floor with the sound of nails being raked down a chalk board, a sound that Master Logaris occasionally employed to gain the class’s attention. Where the assistant’s head had lain a silvery sheen caught Livira’s eye, as if a puddle of silver blood had pooled there from the injury on her brow. The assistant hit the shelves with a bang and at a leisurely but increasing pace she began to rise, drawn upwards on the rope by the books’ descent.
Livira had practically slid down the ladder and was through the circle of light a moment later. Her theory that it was the assistant’s touch which kept the portal sealed now confirmed.
‘How about that one?’ Livira sat up, stood, and pointed to the portal beside the one she’d emerged from earlier. ‘It’s not on the same column as the other three and it’s in the same row as mine.’
Evar chewed the inside of his cheek and it reminded her of Arpix. Both of them shared a certain studious reluctance to just jump into things. A quality that Livira had to admit was probably in short supply where she was concerned. Even so, after several long moments of thought, Evar nodded.
‘I can’t think of another way to learn anything here, save for waiting for an assistant to show up.’
‘I’m not sure waiting works very well here,’ Livira said. ‘And they might be called assistants but I’m thinking “impediments” would be a better name.’
Evar seemed to ponder that one. ‘My Assistant, she … well, I think she’s constrained by a lot of rules. I think she does what she can.’ He shrugged. ‘And what you said about waiting not working. Well, I’ve wondered about that. I mean. You said you were away for two years?’
‘Two and a half.’
‘Two years, and I’m out of that pool for a few minutes before you turn up. What are the odds of that? And then there’s the pool itself. I mean, all right, it took me to Clovis’s childhood. That’s odd, but let’s put it to one side for now. It took me to the day the sabbers came. It took me to within hours of that attack. The most important day of her life. Again, what are the odds?’
‘Long?’
Evar nodded. ‘So, time’s more than just odd here. It seems to work to bring us what we want, maybe? Or need? Or what’s important to us? I don’t know. But whatever it is it’s not straightforward.’ He came to join her beside the portal. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘Let’s go!’
The instant Livira stepped through she knew she’d made a mistake. The air clawed at her eyes and scalded her throat. It was as bad as the cloud that the alchemists had tried to kill her with. She retreated through the portal immediately and fell onto the grass, choking.
It took a while before her lungs allowed her to speak, and her eyes were still streaming. ‘Evar?’ She couldn’t see him but then she could hardly see the trees through the blur of her tears. She should have been able to hear him coughing though. ‘Evar!’
Wheezing, she crawled to the portal again. ‘Evar?’
He hadn’t made it back. He was trapped on the other side, dying. Or dead. Livira had no desire to go back. None whatsoever. Even so she screwed up her courage, dragged a deep breath into her raw lungs, and rushed forward hoping to find him before the poison of that place sealed her eyes. She’d find him and drag him back. She’d—
A large shape heading in the opposite direction collided with her somewhere just inside the portal’s shimmering light. She lost the precious breath she’d stored and found herself carried backwards, thrown once more onto the grass of the Exchange.
‘Livira!’ Evar loomed over her, dark against the sun. ‘What’s wrong?’
It took several minutes before she could answer him with anything but coughing.
‘Why could you breathe there, and I couldn’t?’ Livira wanted to know once she was able to make a whole sentence.
‘Maybe ghosts don’t need to breathe,’ Evar said. ‘It smelled … dangerous, but it didn’t hurt me.’
‘You were a ghost there too? I didn’t have long enough to find out. But I guess I must have been myself if it did this to me.’ She paused to cough and spit, starting to get a bit self-conscious about the drooling, red-eyed mess that she was. ‘What did you see there?’
‘It was the library again. It looked just the same, but the pool was in front of a white door, so I went through. I mean literally through the door. And on the other side was some sort of stone temple built into the side of a mountain. There were … creatures … there, about half my height but wider and hunched over and covered in shaggy yellowish hair. Just mounds of hair really. With legs. And arms.’ Evar made a circle with both hands to show arms thicker than Livira’s body. ‘And a kind of single claw from the back of their hands, like a blade.’
‘A different world,’ Livira wheezed.
Evar seemed sceptical. ‘Maybe they have creatures like that somewhere outside the library – just a place you haven’t been.’
‘Maybe. But they don’t have different air.’
Evar frowned. ‘The sky was green. I saw it through the pillars at the front. Not like here at all.’
Livira laughed, which set her coughing for a while. ‘I – I would have thought – that was a pretty big clue, even for a ghost.’
‘Until today I’d never seen a sky,’ Evar said. ‘Now I’ve seen two.’
Livira wiped her eyes again. ‘So, we changed worlds by changing columns, and you changed times by changing rows … Which tells us …’
‘That a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,’ Evar said. ‘And as my brother Mayland was fond of saying, that’s a law that scales swiftly. A lot of knowledge is a very dangerous thing. A man who knows how to sharpen a stick can stab his neighbour to death. That’s a little knowledge for you. But Clovis knows about weapons that can level continents and leave nothing save dust. And Mayland knew about wars in which that actually happened.’
Livira, who had lived most of her life amid seemingly endless dust, wondered for the first time quite how that dust came to be there, and if its origins might be more sinister than the drying up of a lake. ‘What’s your alternative? Ignorance?’
‘Ignorance is bliss – that was another of Mayland’s favourite sayings. I think it came from the mythology he liked so much about the foundation of the library. In that creation myth the first woman and first man start in bliss, in a perfect garden, and a single drop of forbidden knowledge spoils everything.’
Livira didn’t like that idea at all but although her instinct was to say so, she decided to bite her tongue rather than criticize Evar’s dead brother. She’d picked up at least a smattering of tact from Arpix and the others over the years, though it still seemed the most difficult of the languages she’d been asked to learn. Instead, she offered a theory. ‘I think we might be in the same world but at different times. And when you come back in time, you’re a ghost because you can’t be allowed to change what’s already happened. You went through a portal along the column that joins your one to mine, and you were a ghost in your sister’s childhood. We both went through a portal off the column and we were in a different world with different air and different sky. But you were a ghost because it’s in your past. Move along a row to move back or forward in time, change columns to change worlds. We should go through another portal, one that lies between yours and mine, and try to gather more data.
‘But my working hypothesis is that every pool off the line joining our pools connects to a different world. Let’s say that line runs south to north. Taking pools off our line, east or west, changes where we are in space. And moving north’ – she indicated the line between her pool and Evar’s – ‘changes time. That direction is my future. South is my past. If any of us goes through a pool that leads to our past then we’ll be a ghost – because if we could be seen or heard there, or touch anything, we could change what has happened, and that would make no sense.’ Livira drew a breath. ‘Your pool connects to a time many years ahead of mine. We live in the same world but at different times. You will live in my future. I lived in your past.’
Even as she said it Livira didn’t really want it to be true. It seemed sad to have found a new friend only to learn that they were separated by such an unforgiving barrier. She might be an old woman in his time. Or have been dead for hundreds of years. If Evar were to visit her time he would be a ghost, invisible and untouchable. A sad smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She had been happier before the idea occurred to her. ‘Or perhaps ignorance is bliss.’
‘Which should we choose?’ Evar looked along the line.
‘You could come to mine. But I think you’d be a ghost there too. I wouldn’t be able to see you or even speak to you, just like Clovis couldn’t.’ It seemed unfair.
‘You could come to mine,’ Evar offered. ‘Maybe we’d both be “real” there …’ But even as he spoke, he seemed to regret having said it. He furrowed his brow in a deep frown and Livira felt that he didn’t really want her there. Perhaps he wanted to bring someone better back to his siblings, a grown-up at least even if he couldn’t find this woman he’d been dreaming about.
Livira decided to let him off the hook and pretend he hadn’t made the offer. ‘Well, if the pools are counting time, like beads on a line, there must be a gap of years between them, each one would be a further step back into the past or into the future. So, choose one that aims at a time you want to visit.’
‘Years between them?’ Evar rubbed at his chin. ‘But it aimed me at the right day.’
‘So maybe the fine adjustments are up to you. Maybe you aimed yourself – or could have. We could go and see you as a little boy.’ Livira grinned. ‘I’d like to be bigger than you. Stop having to crane my neck for once.’ She walked slowly to the next portal. If she was correct then it lay in her future, a few decades at most if what Evar said about Clovis was right. ‘I’d suggest trying to find the woman you’re searching for, but you don’t have a when or a where. Which leaves the field pretty open!’
‘Mayland!’ Evar looked up sharply. ‘I want to see what happened to him. It was only a year ago, so—’
Somewhere, not close by, an inconceivable weight struck the ground. The light in every portal shuddered, ripples moving from the outer edge towards the centre. The trees shook. From high above their heads knife-shaped leaves began to tumble through the air. The light itself flickered.
‘What was that?’ A stupid question but one that Livira was too shocked to keep from spilling out.
‘I don’t know.’ Evar raised his arms as if he might be attacked at any moment and turned slowly, checking all directions. ‘It reminds me—’ The thump came again, setting the light dancing. ‘Our Mechanism is breaking. Mayland used to say that things didn’t wear out in the library, not things that were part of it. He said the library was being attacked. This feels a bit like that.’
‘Look!’ Livira pointed behind him. A black smoke or mist was rising from a distant pool.
‘You still have that claw?’ Evar asked.
‘I do,’ said Livira, surprised. She always kept the brass claw on her, a memento of her first expedition within the library. She held it out to him. ‘What are you going to do?’
Shadows or smoke were rising above another two pools closer at hand.
‘Use a little knowledge.’ Evar reached up with both hands, the claw in one of them.
Livira’s vision shook and blurred and suddenly the trees were far shorter, their branches reaching out to interlace above her head, dividing the blueness of the sky into innumerable polygons. Evar had cut or torn free a branch that looked too thick to have come free so easily. She would have remarked on his strength but something as black as the Raven had pulled itself from the more distant of the three corrupted pools.
‘Pools! I’m seeing pools too!’ Somehow the thought seemed more important than the horror drawing itself up to its full height off among the trees. As if changing the course of the conversation might somehow banish the creature to the sidelines.
In two quick motions Evar stripped the branch of the smaller branches it had come with. ‘Stay behind me.’
‘What? I can fight too!’ She looked for a branch of her own, but they were all out of reach.
