The Book That Wouldn't Burn, page 45
Bush Tucker, by Ancoo Walkabout
CHAPTER 48
Livira
Livira broke the kiss. She had started it, so it was hers to finish. Part of her wanted to stay locked in Evar’s arms until their lips were sore and their jaws ached. There was a kind of peace to it that reminded her of the wood between now and then, and a thrill that carried the exhilaration of jumping from shelf top to shelf top, and another more primal excitement that made her want to find a private place in which to learn all his secrets and share her own. But, as always, it was a question that demanded the services of Livira’s tongue.
‘Was that your first kiss?’
‘It was that obvious?’ Evar’s grin faltered.
‘No!’ She reached for his hand. ‘It was marvellous. I just wanted to know. That’s who I am. I like to know things. That’s something you should know.’ She stopped, aware she was babbling.
‘It was my first.’ Evar nodded. ‘Clovis doesn’t kiss. She’s more the punching type.’ His grin returned.
Livira echoed it. It wasn’t her first kiss, but it was, by a long way, the one that mattered most to her. Evar might have met her only a couple of days before, but for her it had been ten years. Ten years in which the Exchange and its mysteries had populated her dreams. But gradually it had been Evar himself, not the trees, quiet skies, and endlessly deep pools, that had occupied her thoughts in the quiet moments when she was alone. Evar, every time her many questions left her in peace for long enough to let her mind wander. Evar, trapped in time, a fly in amber, emerging into a world – into many worlds – equipped only with the naivety that the years had stripped from Livira. She’d been the child and he the adult, but she’d grown, learned, a year’s study for every few hours that Evar had spent in his snail’s crawl through two pools.
He’d fought to save her from monsters. Risked his life for a stranger. Malar had done something similar. She’d told herself she’d wanted to save Evar back, but it had become more than that. Perhaps she’d wanted to save him for herself. Time would tell. A kiss could lead to all sorts of places. Not all of them good. The library’s stories had taught her this before practice confirmed it. She had her eyes open about that, she wasn’t an idiot, as the majority of girls in the stories seemed to be.
‘Livira?’
Livira blinked. ‘Yes?’
‘I thought I’d lost you there. What were you thinking about?’
‘Everything.’ She reached for his hand. ‘Come on.’
‘Where are we going?’ Evar looked as though anywhere with more kissing would suit him.
‘We need to find someone. You don’t think it’s odd that this whole temple seems to be empty?’ More kissing would suit her too, but for once in her life she resolved not to run headlong into something. This felt too important to rush.
Evar frowned and nodded. ‘It is strange.’
Livira turned for the doors. Her lips prickled with the memory of his kisses. Strangely, although he was clean shaven, he had still seemed bristly against her skin. A silly smile took possession of her mouth, remembering how good it had felt to have his arms around her, and how she could have them around her again. She pushed through the great doors, still surprised when they offered no resistance whatsoever. It wasn’t until she reached the steps again that another of the many questions swimming in the ocean of her mind surfaced to plague her.
‘Expectation …’ She stopped halfway down the stairs.
‘Yes?’ Evar asked behind her.
‘We built the Exchange ourselves. Or at least we furnished it. You gave it pools, and trees not much taller than you, and no birds.’
‘I have birds now …’
‘And I gave it portals, and tapwoods, and ravens.’ She turned towards him.
Evar nodded.
‘And here, the ground kept us up because we expected it to. And when I expected to fly … I could. Hells, our footsteps were echoing back in that temple – what sense does that make, except that we expected them to?’
‘True.’
‘So, we might still be in the Exchange for all we know. Seeing what we expect. Or a mix of what we expect and what the Exchange shows us.’
Evar licked his teeth. ‘It’s possible.’
‘And what about me and you?’ Livira edged towards her main concern. ‘We’re speaking the same language. What are the odds? Are we even seeing each other, or just what we expect to see?’
‘I … I don’t know.’ A note of concern entered Evar’s voice.
‘In Crath City the young women have taken to painting their nails with coloured lacquer – a new creation from the alchemists at the laboratory. A friend of mine located the book that taught them the formula.’ Livira extended her hand and spread her fingers, concentrating furiously. Her nails turned scarlet, then a poison green, then a deep blue. She held them up. ‘Do you see it?’
‘See what?’ Evar stared.
‘The colour on my nails?’
‘… no.’ The admission dragged from unwilling lips as if he didn’t like the taste of it. ‘Wait.’ Evar held up his own hand in denial. ‘You were inky when I first saw you. And bruised. I didn’t expect either of those things. I didn’t expect to see you at all.’
‘So maybe the Exchange shows us a mix of truth and expectation,’ Livira said.
‘Or just truth!’
‘How do I know I’m seeing you? You don’t see my blue nails.’ Livira made a fist and willed them back to normal. ‘I could make my hair reach my ankles. Or grow a third arm. And you wouldn’t see it.’
‘Those aren’t the truth.’
Livira ran her fingers across her lips, thoughts churning. Was Evar seeing the real her, and if he wasn’t, would he like what he saw when expectation’s scales were removed from his eyes?
After a long pause she started back down the stairs. ‘Let’s find some people. I expected to see lots. And that didn’t work.’
Evar suggested they try the next great hall along the perimeter of the square.
Livira disagreed. ‘We should try a house. Houses always have people. It might be some kind of weird holiday where everyone has to stay home, because they’re not in the streets and they’re not in the temples. Not that one at least.’
‘Well, they couldn’t have got in, even if they wanted to,’ Evar said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You didn’t see the bar on the inside? Those doors weren’t going to open from outside. I assumed that was why there was nobody there but us ghosts.’
And so, at Livira’s insistence they took to the air and flew over the city’s rooftops, faster than a man can run, and aimed themselves at the clustered housing of low town, down by the great gates to the city.
‘There! Do you see it?’ Livira had caught a wisp of smoke rising from a chimney and angled herself towards it.
‘See what?’ Evar chased her.
Rather than answer, Livira landed on the roof beside the terracotta smokestack. ‘You can smell it now.’ She’d meant the smoke, but there was something else too.
Evar sniffed. ‘The whole city smells down here. Of lots of things. But there’s one thing in particular. A barbed kind of smell. Gets into your nose … You must have caught it too?’
Livira was busy studying the street below. A pool of blood lay across the flagstones, smeared as if the originator of it had hauled themselves away, or been hauled. Two of the front doors she could see hung on their hinges. The houses, like the one they were standing on, were five-storey affairs with many small windows. Lodging houses, she guessed, renting rooms to poor labourers or whole floors to families of rather modest means. Katrin and her husband lived in a similar place, though somewhat smaller and more run-down even than these.
‘Blood,’ Evar said. ‘I can smell that too, now. Looks like our efforts to arrive when there wasn’t going to be any fighting didn’t work!’
Livira sniffed but caught nothing save the drifting smoke that had first brought her to the chimney. Evar’s sense of smell seemed far more sensitive than hers. ‘Let’s go in.’ Livira let the sinking feeling that had settled on her carry her down through the roof tiles, through the horsehair mats beneath them, through timbers, boards, and plaster.
‘Oh, hells.’ Evar dropped beside her, stumbling on the bed.
‘I didn’t think I could hate the sabbers any more than I already did.’ Livira could smell the sharp chemical stench now, gathered in the room where the wind hadn’t yet fully cleared it. It reminded her strongly of the gas that the rogue alchemist had been paid to kill her with. A sweeter, sickly odour ran beneath it. The smell of corruption, of flesh turning bad.
A woman lay on the bed with her baby beside her, tumbled in the blanket. Her body had contorted, every limb at a painful angle, the tendons visible in her neck, foam in her mouth, eyes bulging from their sockets, their lustre dulled by the alkalines that had eaten her lungs and scorched her skin. A sabber lay face down in the doorway, blood leaking from beneath its head.
‘The bastards …’ Livira whispered.
Evar looked confused. ‘I don’t understand what happened here.’
Livira shook her head, trying to refuse the sight, but even as she did so she sank through the floor to see what truth lay below.
On the next storey, four sabbers lay dead in the largest room, huddled together. On the stairwell a young man had broken the railings in his death throes.
‘The idiots killed themselves with their own weapon!’
On each floor it was the same. All humans, or all sabbers, or a mix of both, all dead. Livira staggered from the house’s tall entrance, retching, Evar on her heels. A glance through the doorway of the house opposite revealed the corpses of a woman and a sabber locked together in the hall.
‘How far did this reach?’ Evar gasped in horror.
‘The whole city.’ Livira understood as she said it. ‘The whole city. Everyone killed on both sides. That’s why the pool brought us here. We wanted somewhere there wouldn’t be any fighting …’
Understanding dawned slowly across Evar’s face. He looked sick. ‘What kind of demented foe brings a weapon like that into a city? A weapon they clearly lacked the wit to control?’
‘They’re animals,’ Livira snarled. If she’d had a sabber before her in that moment, and Malar’s skill … she would have cut it down.
‘The world would be better without them.’ Evar nodded sadly, his eyes bright with unshed tears. ‘We should go. There’s nothing left for us here.’
They walked to the end of the street, each wrapped in their own thoughts, clenched around the horror of what they’d seen.
‘We should fly,’ Evar said. ‘I don’t want to see any more.’
Livira nodded. Not to acknowledge the enormity of the crime that had been committed here almost seemed the coward’s way out. And yet what was she supposed to do? Enter every house, witness every corpse? Stay until the stench of their rot engulfed the whole city and flies obscured the sky?
‘You’re right. We should go.’ She turned for one last look back down the street. It felt like it might be one of many similar roads in her own city. ‘Wait! There! Look!’
‘I don’t see it.’
There was nothing where Livira’s finger was pointing. But there had been, she was sure of it. A white child at the window, bone-white, white face, white hair, gone almost as soon as spotted, taken by the shadows. ‘A little boy.’ She started off in the direction she’d pointed.
‘Don’t.’ Evar caught her shoulder. ‘What if it was a boy? We can’t help him. We can’t comfort him. We can’t do anything but watch. All this has happened. We’re nothing here.’
An unexpected sob racked Livira, convulsing her body.
‘Livira …’ Evar tried to turn her to him, but she couldn’t let him, not now. And like an arrow she took to the air.
Livira didn’t slow until she reached the twin pools on the platform before the howling wolf god’s head. All the assistants were gone, perhaps taking their own portals to return them to the depths of the library unknown weeks or months of travel from the entrance.
‘Let’s get out of here.’ Livira stepped towards the nearest pool as Evar landed less gracefully beside her.
‘Agreed.’ He gathered himself to jump.
‘Wait.’ She reached for his hand. ‘So we both go to the same place.’ She laced her fingers between his, remembering the kiss that had been forgotten in the horror that followed. It had been a good kiss. More than good. ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault … obviously. I’m just …’
‘I understand.’ Evar gave a grim smile and squeezed her hand. ‘This has been my third nightmare. I’m not sure the past is a land I want to visit again.’
She wanted to protest that she was in his past, her pool many places down the row from his, but instead she just nodded. ‘On three then.’
‘Three.’
They jumped, passing through echoes of the original emotional turmoil, hardly noticed now, burdened as they were with their own. A moment of rushing, passing lights, a sense of swinging around some vast corner, and they were side by side on hands and knees, panting beside a pool in the quiet of the woods.
Livira lifted her head at the sound of a guttural snarl and the pounding of running feet. For a moment she thought another Escape was coming for them. But this was somehow worse. A full-grown sabber with a streaming mane of red fur was charging towards them. A female one.
‘Evar!’ A scream half of terror, half warning.
But Evar was already gone, tearing across the grass towards the foe. They slammed together at devastating speed about five yards from Livira. Surprise registered on the sabber’s face just before the impact but somehow it managed to twist at full sprint, evading Evar whilst simultaneously straight-arming him into the ground. By some miracle, Evar’s trailing foot hooked the sabber’s ankle and even as it went down with a roar of hate, he was on it.
Again, the thing twisted, its speed and strength breath-taking, reversing their positions, pinning Evar to the ground.
‘Evar!’ The sabber roared. ‘What the fuck are you doing? Are you blind? She’s a sabber!’ The sabber glanced up at Livira, pure hatred in its eyes.
‘No, Clovis! No! It’s this place. It changes what you see—’
Clovis slammed her forearm into Evar’s face, leaving him dazed, then sprang to her feet. ‘Your eyes, maybe. Not mine.’
And Livira, still kneeling by the pool, understood in that moment that the sabber was right.
Kindness is a language in and of itself. In order for it to be understood it requires that both the speaker and the listener be trained in its syntax.
Linguistics: A Study of the Heart, by Kian Najmechi
CHAPTER 49
Livira
Evar rolled onto his front and levered himself up, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. Livira could see the sabber in him now, written into every line. The Exchange hadn’t hidden him beneath illusion, it was more that somehow her expectations had accentuated what might be taken as human and pushed the rest into the background. With his sister, Clovis, there’d never been any doubt. People were wrong to call them dog-soldiers. There was certainly something of the wolf about them, especially in the mouth, but their movements held something more feline.
Clovis broke the spell that had bound them in the broken moment of realization. She hurled herself at Livira, only to fall, snarling, as Evar lunged and caught her trailing ankle with both hands. The force of Clovis’s heel stamping into his face was sickening.
‘Run!’ Shouted through a mouth full of blood as Evar hung onto his sister despite the awful punishment.
With a cry of confusion, Livira launched herself towards what she hoped was her own pool, as she did so becoming peripherally aware of something closing on her with awful speed. The rush of that advance filled her ears as she dived for the pool. The waters closed around her and in an instant she was rolling hip over shoulder across the library floor.
She came to a halt on her backside, facing the portal, and scrambled away from it, terrified that the sabber would burst out of it to tear her throat open with its teeth.
Nothing.
Livira realized that even if the sabber had followed her it would be a ghost, unable to harm her, venting its impotent fury unseen and unheard. On any other day Livira might have laughed in relief but now she just fell back, covered her face with both hands, and let her thoughts churn. The black sea of her emotions refused to settle on a reaction. Sorrow, anger, and shock wrestled each other. Hate warred with softer instincts. Time passed: it felt like an age. And at last, with her face still covered and the battle inside her unresolved, Livira let out a single scream that carried all the conflict inside her head out into the silence of the library at a volume that would even have impressed the Raven.
‘Livira! You’re bleeding!’
Livira sat up sharply. ‘Arpix! Thank the gods!’ Here at least was one good thing. One mistake that had corrected itself. One less thing to feel guilty over.
Arpix fell to his knees at her side. ‘Where are you injured?’
‘I’m not inju— Oh!’ The blood had stained the lower part of her robe crimson. Cautiously, she reached for the hem. Her leg had started to hurt … or it had been hurting all along and she’d just been too chained in her thoughts to notice? She pulled the robe up. A long ugly wound had been torn down her calf. Clovis had come closer to catching her than she knew. The sabber had laid a single claw on her as she dived into the pool.
Arpix reached for her leg, but Livira flinched away before his long, print-stained fingers made contact.
Evar is a sabber! A horrible thought had twisted its way into her mind. ‘How do I even know you’re you?’
Arpix looked confused. ‘Don’t I look like me?’
‘That place is full of lies!’ Livira tossed her head at the portal that had spat him out.
‘Don’t I sound like me?’
‘It’s not enough.’ She snarled the words past gritted teeth, the pain pulsing in her calf muscle now. Part of her welcomed the distraction. Anything to keep from thinking about Evar. She pressed him from her mind with vicious force of will. He didn’t exist.
