Page 20 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“It works only for one person at a time. If there’s more than one, it pushes you out.” Desperation pushed Arpix to invention. “But one person can go to a paradise. They can claim a palace, a city, a whole world! Fill their belly with the finest foods: roast pork, spiced chicken, pomegranates, grapes, wine, sweetmeats—”

“Stop!” Oanold held a hand up, one arm hugging his belly.

Whether he was talking to his personal guard or not, they stopped. Every person in the aisle within hearing distance had their eyes on Arpix as if instead of seeing a lanky librarian they could picture only a towering pile of the foodstuffs he’d been listing. He’d even made his own belly rumble and his mouth water.

Oanold elbowed his way past the two guards and came to look up at Arpix. “You understand that when you awaken such appetites they must be satisfied?”

Arpix nodded unwillingly, not wanting to acknowledge the contract he was entering into. “Yes, sire.”

“And how do you propose to deal with the many threats I enumerated?”

Arpix hesitated. Livira had told him the Mechanism was what he needed. Or at least he thought she had. So, either she had forces marshalled there that she believed would save him. Or she thought it was safe there now, and that the Mechanism would save him. Or he had misheard her in the chaos of being ejected from her story. Or this was the best choice out of many bad ones, and all those threats remained. Whichever of those conjectures might be correct hardly mattered if Arpix couldn’t convince the king to take him back to the reading room.

Arpix knuckled his forehead, trying to press his brain into the necessary invention. “I believe that the mechanoid will have killed or dispersed the skeer at the western door so that no reinforcement can reach the main chamber. And that the sabbers will have fled, with the mechanoid in pursuit. And the last skeer, if it didn’t attack you when you crossed the chamber twice, must be hiding with the hope it can send a report about what has happened back to the nest. In short, the way should be clear.”

To Arpix’s surprise,the king believed him. It seemed that in desperate times people were ready to follow anyone with an idea. The drawback being that if the idea proved to be wrong, the consequences promised to be harsh.

Arpix found himself in grand company, walking behind the king and Lord Algar, who in turn walked behind a vanguard of what were presumably six of their most capable soldiers.

It wasn’t until they reached the corridor to re-enter the chamber where the soldiers had battled Clovis and her brothers among the book columns that there was enough space to see the whole of the king’s diminished following. Arpix estimated that eighty soldiers hemmed in a group of maybe two dozen civilians, some of whom were prisoners. He spotted first Salamonda and then Neera among their number.

“Eyes forward.” A soldier slapped him around the head.

With a ringing in his ears, Arpix followed the king towards the great white door.

The book-column chamberhad a faintly acrid smell to it that undercut the rankness of the unwashed bodies crowding around Arpix. Whatever had caused the odour to pervade such a large space must have been a significant event. Arpix’s thoughts turned immediately towards fire—but there was no evidence of one, not the haze of smoke or the flicker of flame glimpsed through the shifting corridors between the columns. It was, in any event, a smell more reminiscent of the alchemists’ laboratory in Crath City than of the blaze that had so nearly consumed him four years ago in the library.

The soldiers advanced cautiously through the book columns, their numbers hidden once more, a cordon around the king and those following him. Many glances strayed to the heights, and on several occasions gleaming metal ’sticks were levelled at suspiciously dark patches, ready to spit their deadly projectiles at the first sign of motion.

Others watched the corridors of sight coming into vision then fading as they advanced through the orchard of columns. Arpix held scant regard for the soldiers but given that the monstrous skeer could charge them at any moment, he was, for the first time, glad to have them around him. The rapidly changing lines of sight made for a strange kind of claustrophobia, and Arpix’s time on the plateau had taught him to fear the skeer. The only thing worse would be to be stalked by a cratalac.

Many times, Arpix saw the dark spatter of drying blood left on the library floor from the fighting retreat. He hoped none of it belonged to Clovis or her brothers. Twice, they passed the bodies of soldiers left behind onthat retreat. None of the living soldiers made any effort to drag the cooling remains with them. None of them talked of their next meal. It seemed to Arpix that their hunger would lead them to kill and eat someone they could consider “other” than themselves before they would take advantage of a fellow soldier’s death in such a manner. He wondered how long that fine distinction would survive the last mouthful of the innocent victims they’d murdered.

After about half an hour of walking through the seemingly endless forest of columns, they reached the path that the huge mechanical ganar had torn for itself. Despite the extra space, the going slowed: the ground lay littered with books, heaped in places, and twisted metal columns lay at intervals across the path. Many of the disk-shaped shelves had been left torn or bent, presenting the hazard of razored edges and sharp corners.

The acrid smell grew stronger as they followed the mechanoid’s path towards the reading room entrance. A powdery white residue began to appear on the book heaps and reached a dozen yards up along the books on the surviving book columns. It began to rise around the soldiers’ feet, a low, stinking fog, some kind of heavy alchemical smoke.

“Sire.” A soldier stopped and gestured with his ’stick. At first neither the king nor Arpix saw what had caught the man’s attention. The soldier went forward and reached up to touch the offending object with the end of his weapon. A steel cogwheel about eighteen inches across had embedded itself to its midpoint in the books, cutting through their spines.

“The mechanoid…” Arpix said, “it must have exploded.” Even as he said it, he saw more debris lying ahead of them.

“Let’s hope it killed those damn sabbers first,” Lord Algar muttered. “I had that one we shot. Had it in my hands.” He stared into his empty palm as he spoke.

A cold horror crept across Arpix’s skin. Had the sabber been Clovis? Was it Evar? Fortified by anger, Arpix followed down the corridor into the reading room. A white cloud rose behind them, swallowing the view of the way they’d come.

The wreckage of the huge mechanoid lay sprawled across the floor, dwarfing the Mechanism that sat like a grey loaf at the centre of the chamber. The metal ganar appeared to have exploded from within, its chest anopen bloom with jagged metal petals, and jettisoning the majority of its inner workings at high speed. Pieces of it could be seen everywhere, random chunks of torn metal in some places, cogwheels of all sizes from smaller than a fingernail to larger than a man, battered metal boxes leaking fluid and trailing wires, and other fragments stranger still.

Of Clovis, Livira, and the others there was no sign.

As Arpix entered the chamber he became aware of a buzzing. Not the frantic directionless energy of a housefly, nor a mosquito’s high whine, but the low menace of a hornet hive waiting to take offence. At first, he thought it must be coming from the wreckage of the automaton but moving in behind the soldiers he was forced to revise his opinion. It was the Mechanism that was humming, seemingly with increasing urgency. And in his inner pocket an answering vibration set his teeth on edge.

Livira’s book! The Mechanism could sense it coming, and theyreallydid not seem to agree with each other.

Arpix might have said something there and then, but ahead of him a soldier vanished with a desperate cry and trailing arms, looking as if the library floor had grown a mouth and swallowed him whole.

To avoid being shot do not stand in the path of the bullet. This will require greater dexterity the longer you delay your preparations. A good first step is moving to the country where gun ownership is lowest.

Be Prepared, by Scout Master Miles Dunblame

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