Page 31 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“HOW CA—” Livira’s shout fell away as within the space of two heartbeats the entire column came to a halt. “…can…”

The question went unfinished. Two hundred skeer heads turned her way. The half a dozen black eyes each insectoid possessed seemed to sweep across her. Three skeer at the front broke from the pack, their lustrous white armour plates gleaming, the dark edging and the veins, that looked black even in the library light, showing a deep, rich blue in the fierceness of the sun.

Slowly, tilting their heads in an almost human gesture, the three began to advance towards Livira and her companions, as if searching forsomething they couldn’t quite focus on. Without warning, they broke into a flat charge, and with a single scream shared between them, Carlotte and Leetar fled.

Livira, frozen in the moment, discovered with predictably poor timing the sudden inability to move which so often afflicts prey beneath the claws of predators. She had died to such creatures before. Her near-indestructible assistant body had been bludgeoned into pieces. And standing there, paralysed by primal terror, she knew with utter conviction that ghost or no ghost, the creatures were mere moments from reducing her to bloody ribbons.

One hallmark of intelligence is a propensity for doing stupid things.

Pull the Pin, by Frank Oltmanns-Mack

Chapter 15

Arpix

The soldier had fallen through a portal that appeared to have been drawn on the floor by the splattering of a large quantity of assistant blood, then concealed beneath the dust. Whether the assistant had been destroyed by the huge metal automaton or by the explosion that ripped the automaton apart, Arpix couldn’t say. Either way, it seemed impossible that any assistant could have lost so much blood and survived.

All around him, soldiers were probing the ground with their weapons, alert to the new threat. Several of the lost man’s comrades stood around the edge of the revealed portal, but none had made any move to follow him even after the muffled sound of a stick-shot had reached them from the other side.

Some of the soldiers spreading out across the dust-laden chamber were pushing civilians ahead of them. An older woman, a painfully thin young man, and, looking as frightened and helpless as the rest, the head librarian, Master Acconite. Arpix stood for a moment, skewered by sudden amazement, though the scene contained nothing he hadn’t seen before. These soldiers, these men and women, weren’t the sabbers who had at such cost swarmed over the walls of Crath City. They were fellow humans who had sworn to defend the city and everyone in it. They had lived among the citizenry, neighbours in the same districts, elbow to elbow in the markets, listened to the same songs, danced in the same taverns. And yet here they were, a month or two after the fall of that city, carrying out all the evilsthey had ascribed to their enemy, on their own people, literally eating the very citizens they’d vowed to protect—and that had been the worst of the accusations they could find to level at the canith, an unfounded accusation as far as Arpix knew. And even as they did it, they delighted in their victims’ pain, perhaps to distance themselves from it, or perhaps something had broken in their minds. Kerrol would know, Arpix thought. Kerrol would offer some dispassionate and horribly truthful analysis that concluded all mankind carried the seeds of such monstrous behaviour in the marrow of their bones from the moment of birth.

And now the soldiers were using the weakest of their captives as an expendable property to test dangerous ground. In this vast temple to learning, populated by works of intellect stacked higher than houses, the city’s head librarian was being goaded ahead of murdering cannibals to test for danger. Cannibals who just months before had seen their duty as being to protect him and all their fellow citizens. Murderers who had loved their children, helped their friends, and seen their lives as everyone else did, reaching from one small hope to the next, wanting to be good, wanting to be seen, wanting to be valued.

A shout alerted everyone to the fact that another portal had been found. Arpix hoped fervently that Livira, Clovis, and the others had all managed to escape the automaton. The lack of corpses gave him hope. But given the ferocity of the explosion, which had torn inches-thick metal plate like paper, he wasn’t sure any bodies would have survived in large enough pieces to be noticed, let alone recognised.

The buzzing from the Mechanism had grown louder, a grating rumble now as if stones were being dragged across rough ground. Of all of them, only Arpix seemed to notice it. The others had little idea that it should be silent, like the rest of the library.

The answering call from Livira’s book had become a trembling whine that rose and fell in time with the pulses of sound from the Mechanism. Arpix was already worried both that someone would see the thing trembling in his pocket, and that it would shake itself apart into a collection of loose pages, and lose its power.

Livira had said to take the book to the Mechanism, and while thesoldiers hunted for more magical pits into which they might fall, Arpix edged closer to the grey structure at the centre of the reading room.

“You, librarian!” Lord Algar fixed Arpix with his single eye. “Come here!”

Two soldiers turned from their search and angled towards Arpix, still probing the white dust ahead of them.

The king raised his grey head from a fascinated study of the portal that had swallowed one of his men. “Shoot anything that comes out of there,” he directed. “And you, boy, you promised me a banquet.” Oanold swatted down the ’stick barrel one of his personal guards was raising towards Arpix. “He’llwishhe’d been shot if that was all lies. Don’t any of you dare kill him!”

Arpix felt the weight of the king’s authority settle on him, adding to Lord Algar’s command. He’d obeyed the rules his whole life. And those were only rules, not law. Laws were a whole other level, and the king’s word was law. Dry-mouthed, he looked from Oanold, the king not just of Crath City but an entire nation beyond, to the Mechanism. Part of him was desperate to sprint for the grey block just twenty yards away. If the salvation Livira had offered didn’t reveal itself, perhaps he could hide inside until his captors left.

Arpix spotted Salamonda and Neera surrounded by soldiers, their wrists bound. The moment passed and the breath he’d been holding hissed out of him. He wanted to think that it was the other captives that kept him from running, rather than an inability to defy authority. He wanted to be more like Clovis and less like himself. He hung his head. “I wasn’t lying.” Arpix lifted the book he’d plucked from the shelves almost at random.A History of Western Aphasia, 2nd century to 4th century, by R. Lethe, written in a little-used dialect of Juntran. As long as Western Aphasia had restaurants, or feasts, or poorly guarded kitchens, and at least one peaceful month, it should be possible to find some food. The illusionary fare wouldn’t sustain any who consumed it, but they’d get the full benefit of the taste and perhaps some sense of fullness. Arpix wasn’t particularly confident about the details, but Livira had told him plenty of stories. “I can show you how to reach the food. You just need to take this book into the Mechanism and then—”

“Bring me the book!” Oanold waved at his guards. “And watch our spare librarian. I don’t want him slipping off anywhere.” He snorted as if he’d made a joke.

Bony hands gripped him painfully while the history was pulled from his fingers and taken to the king. Oanold squinted at the title then turned the volume this way and that as one might inspect a puzzle box. Then, with a dissatisfied grunt, the king pushed through his guards and approached Arpix. The white powder from the floor coated the bottom eighteen inches of his stained robes and a low white cloud rose in his wake. He still walked like an overweight man, waddling even though the fat had melted from his bones.

The soldiers around Arpix backed away as Oanold approached with four of his personal guards. The king trailed a sour look up the length of Arpix’s body, his gaze dark with suspicion. Arpix realised just how old and unhealthy the man was. His paints and powders were cracking, and the skin beneath showed its age, his eyes looking as if black stones had been thrown into a half-set pudding.

“Tell me…” The king looked around at the soldiers around him. “Hmmm. Over there I think.” He gestured to the Mechanism, clearly not ready to share the secret key to this promised feast with those that served him. “You, Jons.” He indicated the hard-eyed veteran. “Keep your weapon trained on the spare. If I say I want him shot, I don’t expect to be kept waiting.”

The man nodded and raised his ’stick until its single dark eye pointed directly at Arpix.

“Come on then,” Oanold urged, unable to keep from licking his lips. “Lead the way.”

Hunger was, Arpix had observed during his long stranding on the Arthran Plateau, a powerful motivator. He took the lead as instructed. Lacking anything but his own feet to probe the ground with, he scuffed away the dust, and it filled the air with a whitish fog.

No word of reprimand came from Lord Algar. It occurred to Arpix that the lord, whilst goaded by the same pangs of hunger that afflicted them all, was exercising more caution than King Oanold. The king was Algar’s own probe, testing the threat of the Mechanism in the same way that Arpix was testing the ground for Oanold.

Arpix walked on. In his pocket the book’s vibration became something wild, as if it were mere moments from exploding into shredded pages and broken bindings. The Mechanism’s rumbling slid so deeply down the registers that he could feel it through his feet, almost like the wheels of some great wagon shaking the ground, an avalanche rotating into being from some place beyond the senses.

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