Page 107 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“What has he done?” Carlotte asked, though the tone of her voice indicated that she had already started to understand.

They saw Wentworth first, crouched, his head on his paws. And then a piece of impenetrable blackness, whose silhouette Livira eventually translated into that of a great dog, as large as Wentworth and in a very similar pose, facing him.

“Volente…” The library’s second-most-accomplished guide.

Between them, a shimmering pool whose uneven edge recalled Livirato that day when the Exchange had delivered her to the mountainside just a little too late to witness Yute’s bloody rebirth from the assistant he had once been. He and his wife-to-be had both shed their impervious skins and with them the timeless existence that had held them.

Leetar gave a strangled cry and fell to her knees. Her brother had died in the making of such a pool, that time with the blood of Celcha’s brother, Hellet, who had become an assistant in his turn, aimed and engineered by Mayland to begin this whole collapse, tearing down the library from the inside.

“Why would…” Carlotte stood, bewildered.

“He sacrificed himself to save us.” Arpix choked. “He loved us all. I think. He just never knew how to say it.”

Livira looked at her friend while the tears started to roll, hot down her cheeks. Arpix perhaps had understood the librarian better than any of them, bound as he had always been by the same restraint. What he’d just said wasn’t something that would ever have escaped his lips before Clovis’s arrival. The canith moved up behind him and pressed her forehead to the back of his hair, her mane nearly encompassing them both.

A head-sized chunk of the ceiling smashed down beside them, burying itself in the fallen books.

“Come on,” Mayland said, advancing on the blood pool that had been Yute before the falling roof had crushed him. “He did this so we could reach the centre. Don’t waste it.”

Mayland slowed as he reached the shimmering surface, glancing between Wentworth and Volente who sat like grieving sphinxes, guarding the way. A moment later he gathered his courage, stepped forward and was gone. Kerrol and Starval followed. Yolanda, weeping, stepped after them and let her father’s blood take her. Clovis and Arpix shepherded Leetar and Carlotte through, then took their chance too. Before he went, Arpix turned to lock eyes with Livira, paying no heed to the freshening rain of stone around them. “It’s time.”

Livira, cradling the raven in her arms, came to stand at the edge of what must be her friend and mentor’s last gift. She looked from Wentworth to Volente. “I’m so sorry.”

Volente whined softly. Wentworth only blinked.

“Will you be all right?” she asked. “You should come with us.” But she knew that neither beast would leave their master’s final resting place, even if the mountain were to fall upon them both.

Livira drew a shuddering breath and followed the others into the scintillating depths.

To fix something it is sometimes necessary to break it first. Often this goes wrong.

Bone Setting: A Beginner’s Guide, by Bradley Wood

Chapter 49

Livira

Yute’s portal, his last act, delivered them all to the centre in one painless step. The clear space in which Celcha stood expanded to accommodate them. When Livira looked back, there was no doorway to return by, no view of Chamber 2, just the hardpan desert stretching away, and the vast spiral of flat stones encompassing them, each bearing the rudiments of writing, a record of the first struggles of many and varied intelligences with the ideas of impermanence, thought, and memory.

Livira went to her knees and lowered Edgarallen gently to the ground. When she stood up she found Celcha’s staff levelled at her in accusation.

“You broughtthat?Here?” Celcha pointed at the book still in Livira’s hands, its cover stained with the raven’s blood.

“Kill or cure?” Livira suggested, a little sheepishly. Had she just been running for the last safe haven, like a bug as the water level rises, or had she had a plan?

A tremor ran through the desert, rattling stones. Celcha stumbled as if this had been the first vibration to reach this place. “Kill or cure, if you must, but one merely requires that we wait, and the other I have no idea how to accomplish. Everything I have tried has failed.”

“Kill or cure seems a very binary choice.” Yolanda sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, looking very much as if she were a child to match her apparent years, in actions if not in words. “My father died so that we might explore other options.”

Mayland took a step towards the girl, then sat cross-legged beside her, still the taller of the two. “I wronged you, and your father. I murdered…” He stared at the ground between his feet. “I…I have excuses but they are not good ones.” Kerrol came to sit beside him. Starval followed, taking his place on his brother’s other side. “Your father took me…led me somehow…to see an old woman who taught me many things in a short time without even seeming to try. She shone a very different light on book burning for me. The destruction of the library no longer feels as palatable as it once did. It hurt me. I wanted to hurt it back. This is not a basis on which to proceed.”

Livira stood, slightly stunned. Yute’s sacrifice had mechanically moved them all to the centre, of the library, but somehow, more fundamentally, it had shifted the immovable objects that had been his daughter’s ideology, and Evar’s brother’s credo, towards the centre too. Here at the last minute of the last hour of the last day, it seemed that compromise was possible. All that they lacked was a solution.

Part of her wanted to scream at them. They couldn’t have done this days ago? Years ago? When there was time left to hammer out the details of an agreement?

Livira advanced on Celcha, pushing her staff aside. “Can you save the library?”

“I don’t believe so. Can you?”

---