Page 30 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“It’s a corridor of destruction wide enough for an army,” Livira said. “They just break or push down any tree that gets in their way.”

“That does sound like skeer…”

Finding their wayback to their point of arrival proved too great a task of navigation: one patch of a great forest looked very much like another. Instead, they flew low enough to see any likely signs of passage, whilst retaining sufficient height and speed to inspect many square miles each hour.

On discovering one of the trails, it was Carlotte who divined the direction of skeer travel by noting the lie of the trampled vegetation. They followed it, immune to the heat and humidity, untroubled by the legions ofmidges or by mosquitoes that were sized more like small birds than insects and looked capable of draining a whole armful of blood. A smaller track joined theirs and later their track joined a bigger one, like tributaries converging to form an ever-larger river. It also put Livira in mind of the near-invisible paths that spread from any bone-ant nest, along which the ants would drag victims as large as a rat and as heavy as a human femur.

“It doesn’t quite feel real, does it?” Carlotte asked, back at ground level, having insisted on walking.

“It’s a bit like what the Mechanism does,” Livira said. “As if the whole world were a book and we were just turning the page to reach the part we want. If it weren’t for people like Chertal and Celcha I’d think that’s all it was. An illustrated history—painted with such vivid colours that it fools the eye.”

“Celcha?”

“A ganar who saw me dancing with Evar over the city. But not our city. I mean, it’s in the same place, but this was a thousand—”

“Evar?” Carlotte stopped walking. “Dancing!”

“The point is that she could see me too.” Livira continued to glide forward, her toes inches above the flattened vegetation.

“WHO IS EVAR?”

Livira turned to face Carlotte, while still moving forward with Yolanda and Leetar flanking her. “He’s…” It felt strange to say it out loud. Especially in the depths of a huge forest that would be ancient dust by the time she was born. She and Carlotte had been close, bound tighter still by their love of gossip. It felt like only yesterday Livira had ushered her into the pool to escape the canith. But also like two centuries ago. Time stretched between them in all manner of ways as Carlotte began to dwindle into the distance, still refusing to follow.

“I love him,” Livira said simply, suddenly unsure if she’d ever said that before, especially to Evar.

“I needallthe details!” Carlotte was at her elbow in an eye-blink.

“I think we’re getting there.” Leetar raised her arm to point ahead.

Something could be seen above the treetops, an irregular black-and-green something, like a mountain, but not a mountain.

“No guards,” Yolanda observed. “Their confidence is alarming.”

The way ahead did appear to have no eyes on it. But from what Livira knew about the skeer, only the suicidal would seek them out for violence. She still had trouble fitting into her head the idea that it was the ganar who bred the skeer. The small, inoffensive ganar—who had lived as slaves beneath the cities of men and canith alike—had first come down to invade the world, throwing their slave-bred skeer armies at unsuspecting towns and cities…Or was it first? Were they in turn answering some older insult? It didn’t matter. As Yute had said: it was a cycle. A cycle that ground lives into dust and sucked worlds dry.

As they drew closer, the track they had been following widened from a river to a delta and ahead of them lay square miles deforested not by the axe or saw but by bludgeoning force. The mountain revealed itself as a misshapen pyramid of some black substance—perhaps metal—smooth but complex. It had been there for a long time, judging by the vines hanging from its projections in waterfalls, and the full-grown trees that had managed to find footing in some of the larger hollows.

“A ganar night-ship?” Livira wondered. It seemed impossible that it had travelled from Attamast, sailing the black space above the sky, but equally impossible that it could have been constructed so deep in the forest without the knowledge of the surrounding kingdoms.

Yolanda seemed unimpressed, though the child rarely showed emotion of any kind. She led the way out into the cleared space without pausing to gawp at the great structure in its midst. The others had to hurry after her to catch up.

Livira swallowed the words of caution her tongue had tried to give voice to. Nobody would see them. They were in no danger. That was the point of the exercise. They could be reading a book about this place for all the harm it could do them or they might do it.

As they crossed the rutted soil and pulverised, long-dead remains of perhaps a million trees, the distance to the night-ship closed far more slowly than Livira had anticipated.

“It’s bigger than the citadel,” Carlotte breathed. She looked at Livira despairingly. “There’s no hope for Chertal…”

Livira stretched her mouth into what she hoped was a sympathetic line.From what she remembered, there weren’t even ruins visible on the Arthran Plateau in their day. She knew it was more important to Carlotte whether the city fell to ruin within months or centuries than it was to her. Even so, a brief wander through the streets, and a short time within the palace, had made the place far more real to her than just some dead empire noted in the histories. If she could, Livira would help Carlotte’s king, though she couldn’t see how that was possible.

“Over there!” Carlotte pointed.

A skeer column was emerging from the forest to the west, along an established trail. Dozens, scores, hundreds. A river of the insectoid warriors, marching so close to each other that they resembled a single vast multi-legged organism.

Yolanda led the way towards the newcomers. Livira found herself in reluctant second place, filled with sudden doubts concerning her invisibility. Even if she hadn’t seen the destruction the skeer were capable of, some primal instinct warned her to keep her distance, telling her that any distance where she could still see the things was too small and should be enlarged by sprinting away.

“You’re sure they can’t see us?” Leetar gave voice to Livira’s concern. Even Carlotte, who had been seen by nobody but her king for years now, looked worried.

Closer up, the dull thunder of heavy feet spearing the earth and driving on made conversation impossible. Livira tried to imagine the mass of skeer coming at an army of men. Their momentum seemed unstoppable.

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