Page 32 of The Book That Held Her Heart

The fear had left him. If he fell through a hidden doorway, it was unlikely to place him in worse hands. If the Mechanism tore itself apart and killed him in a storm of shrapnel, it would be a quicker and cleaner death than his imminent demise in Oanold’s keeping.

“Stop!” Oanold could feel it now.

All around them the ground’s vibration was turning the dust back into the smoke it had once been, a slowly rising cloud already calf-deep. Arpix pulled out Livira’s book. The moment his fingers found it, the book ceased to vibrate and instead it was Arpix who shook—not in a teeth-rattling way but in a manner that blurred his boundaries, so that he seemed to see himself from the outside, an overlapping collection of half-seen Arpixes, all of them holding the same book, as if it were the only real thing about him.

“Stop, damn you!” Oanold barked. “Stop him!”

Stick-shot rang out—one or many, Arpix couldn’t tell—he felt no pain. Perhaps with so many images of him, none was the right target.

Ten yards lay between him and the Mechanism. Some instinct told him that he wouldn’t make it. That if he tried to advance, then the many Arpixes would each go a different route and he would lose himself, and his purpose. Instead, though it hurt his librarian soul, he drew back his arm to throw the book at the Mechanism.

To Arpix’s great surprise, King Oanold came charging through the rising smoke and seized his arm. Arpix had painted too tempting an image of the feast that waited within the Mechanism. Oanold had seldom been accused of being clever but even his worst critics rarely denied that he was cunning. Some instinct had told the king that the book was the key to his promised meal. Despite having more than sixty summers behind him, the old man threw himself upon the young librarian, reaching for the book.

Perhaps it was the shock of being clawed at by the screeching monarch of the nation in which he’d lived his whole life, or weakness from fouryears of eating little but beans—either way, it was not a contest that Arpix won. Both of them stumbled closer to the rumbling Mechanism before Oanold’s sharp elbow struck Arpix in the neck and with a cry of triumph he jerked Livira’s book from Arpix’s grasp.

Oanold’s victory shout became a startled yelp as one of his feet tangled in some stray piece of the fallen ganar’s internal workings. The king staggered backwards, arms pinwheeling, almost losing hold of his prize. His outstretched hand struck the grey wall behind him.

The impact of book against Mechanism should have made no noise. Instead, it was as if a clapper larger than an ocean-going ship had struck the mother of all bells, the sound so deep that it wrapped up the echoes of the ’sticks’ roar into it and rolled through the room setting everyone in tumbling motion.

From where he landed, through dazed eyes, Arpix could see that both Oanold and the book had slid down the Mechanism’s wall to rest at the base, the book falling open as it landed. Even as Arpix convinced himself he must be dreaming, Livira’s book began to vomit pages into the air, enough pages for a dozen books, scores, hundreds. The stream continued, filling the space above with a maelstrom of loose leaves rising even more swiftly than the dust rose.

Arpix saw the library floor fracture, black chasms spreading like the fingers of a dark hand, the cracks more real than anything that lay between them and Arpix’s eyes, showing through as if they were the only truth and the rest of the world mere suggestion.

The first and largest of these fissures opened beneath King Oanold and, still clutching the page-spewing volume, he fell into darkness, wailing all the way.

The king was the first of scores to topple and be swallowed. Even as the victims fell, the sound grew. The rolling thunder of great wheels, and the sure and certain knowledge that something was coming.

The curative power of time is often overstated. However, old arguments do sometimes become dust beneath the march of years. Feuds often survive all recollection of their cause but are on rare occasions outlived by some of the participants.

Life’s Too Short, by Methuselah Adamspawn

Chapter 16

Evar

The act of being throttled drew Mayland’s attention back to Evar, and once more Mayland’s will imposed itself on the library’s blood running through his brother’s veins. Evar’s grip loosened and Mayland pulled free.

The weight of the presence at Evar’s back, combined with his siblings’ focus in that direction, turned him around. The matter of Mayland’s crimes, and the control he held over Evar’s body, would have to wait.

Another round of thunder, the loudest yet, shattered the air, and for a time no speech was possible. It seemed, in the ringing aftermath, that perhaps the blast had been the crescendo. Certainly, the torrents of falling pages began to slow.

Somehow a lone figure, robed, cowled, and bearing a staff, had crossed the undulating surface of loose paper, advancing through the thickening page-fall to get within twenty yards of the canith without even Starval noticing. And Starval noticedeverything. Only now as the paper downfall thinned was the newcomer’s presence obvious.

Evar eyed the stranger speculatively. The wizard who had earlier emerged from the rain of falling pages had turned out to be some piece of rogue fiction, trying to snare him into an archetypal story. This new arrival looked more obviously false, and also rather short. “It’s another story, right?” Evar muttered to nobody in particular.

The stranger proved to have remarkable hearing. “If I am, I’m a cautionary tale.”

Mayland took a step back, worry, perhaps even fear, taking possession of his face. Evar realised that he couldn’t remember ever seeing Mayland look worried.

“You took quite a risk returning to the vaults, Mayland.” It wasn’t a canith voice, or a human one, but something more guttural.

“Shit…” Starval drew his blades. Clovis kept her hands at her sides, still undecided in the matter of friend or foe.

Mayland managed to affect nonchalance and shrugged. “We fell.” He looked up, far above the newcomer’s head. “Besides, the view is better from down here.”

Evar followed his brother’s gaze and there, in the black heavens where there had been nothing before, was a red star. Beneath it, picked out in flecks of crimson by ten thousand falling pages, a pillar of light, as if the star were pouring almost all of its brightness into gravity’s arms.

“And lo, the star in the east which has led me hence,” the cowled stranger said, as if reciting a line.

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