Page 36 of The Book That Held Her Heart

The black expanse of the ship’s side grew to encompass their vision, and as Livira’s eyes adjusted she saw it resolve into an alien landscape, half architecture, half biology, all black. Yolanda, tiny in the distance, vanished through the wall beneath a vast protrusion that resembled a knobbled dome and served no purpose that Livira could guess at.

“She’s worried the awful monsters can see us, right?” Carlotte shouted as if the wind were whistling in their ears—which, since they were ghosts, it wasn’t.

“Yes.”

“So worried that she’s going into their lair to find more?”

“Yes.”

“I hope they can’t…” The wall of the ship loomed, then leapt at them like blindness, and with a slight shudder they were through. “…touch us too…” Carlotte trailed off.

“I felt that,” Leetar murmured beside Livira. They were standing in a softly lit corridor. To the left a featureless door sealed the way. About fiftyyards off to the right was a strange dislocation, as if a giant had grabbed the structure and shoved one part out of alignment.

“I did too.” Livira rubbed her arms, trying to rid them of the odd sensation. The light shuddered around them, then restabilized. It had a pervading, sourceless feel to it, but whether it cast shadows or not she couldn’t tell.

For her part, Carlotte was pushing her arm in and out of the wall. “It’s like spiderwebs! How can I be feeling it? Everywhere else even the ground doesn’t feel like it’s really there…”

Livira remembered the huge ganar automaton that had chased Evar and had also seemed to be chasing her. At the end of the pursuit it had, with a sweep of its leg, sent Malar flying, making some form of contact with him even though they had been ghosts, unable to interact with Evar in any way at all.

“The assistants can see ghosts, move them about, do what they like.” Livira touched the wall, feeling that tingling resistance as her hand slipped into it. “Maybe these ganar are so clever that they’ve unlocked some of the library’s secrets and used them in their creations. Maybe this ship could twist time around it?”

Leetar peered dubiously down the corridor. “If they can do that sort of thing why fight with legions of skeer?”

Livira shrugged. “This place looks pretty broken. Did they leave their moon by choice? Were they running from something? Did they build this, or find it? Did—”

“Questions, questions!” Carlotte snorted. “I’d forgotten what you were like.” She shook her head. “The one that matters is where did that little girl run off to?”

Livira considered. “She’s not the sort who stops until she’s given a good reason to. That way.” She pointed at the opposite wall in the direction they’d been travelling. “Hang on tight.” And they plunged deeper.

Walls, corridors, chambers, pulsing flows of light, tight-packed crates, the throb of sound—all of it flashed past, and every hundred yards or so a new hull would oppose them, a box inside a box inside a box. Each hull added new resistance to their passage, until at last, Livira strained to pullher two companions through a wall of black steel or something equally durable.

In the dark heart of the night-ship a deep red light throbbed through the corridors, too dim to illuminate anything save corners and angles. Yolanda stood some distance off before a great valve that sealed the end of the passageway they had stopped in. The whiteness of her skin and wrappings caught the crimson in the unsourced light and returned it, leaving her blood-clad.

Livira swept along the corridor to join her.

“It’s in here.” Yolanda sounded doubtful—not doubtful that what she’d sought lay behind the door, but doubtful that she wanted to go through.

Livira opened her mouth to suggest going in, but then she felt it too. The closest thing she could liken it to was a smell, the reek of Oanold’s camp in the centre circle of the chamber where Livira had returned to her body. It wasn’t a smell, but it held that same corruption, the absence of hope, a surfeit of horror, a pain that was more terrible because nobody cared about it than for the detailed manner of its infliction, though that too was an obscenity. She opened her mouth again, this time to say that they should go—but those words wouldn’t leave her tongue either.

“We should go in.” As Yolanda spoke, the door opened noiselessly and a ganar, its pelt crimson in the ambient light, bustled out.

Livira and her companions stepped aside, letting the creature pass without intersecting with them. It reached no higher than Livira’s lower ribs and like its fellows didn’t bother with clothes, though this one wore a pair of goggles such as she had seen at the alchemists’ laboratory. It went past briskly, occupied with the illegible scrawl on a notepad in its hand.

A chemical stink wafted into the corridor before the door resealed itself. The odour, at once both cloying and clawing, made Livira gag, even though she knew no poison could touch her and that she needed no air to breathe.

With a muttered something that sounded rather like an oath, Yolanda pushed through the closed door. Steeling herself, Livira followed.

The chamber beyond was large, circular, domed, and lit by the samelight that seemed to slide through the reds into blackness. At least a dozen ganar moved around the periphery, some monitoring dials and panels on which glowing characters flowed in cascades of text. Others looked to be alchemists at work with tubes and potions and radiant heat sources to set the liquids in their flasks bubbling.

Four great standing circles of patterned metal walled off the centre of the chamber, though imperfectly due to their shape. In the space each circle encompassed lay a mirrored surface some three yards across and stopping a hand’s breadth before the metal so that no means for supporting it could be discerned.

Gritting her teeth against what felt like an inevitable shock, Livira followed Yolanda towards one of the gaps that would afford entrance to the space between the four mirrors. She noted with mild surprise that she could see her reflection and Yolanda’s in the nearest mirror. It reminded her that Leetar and Carlotte remained outside, probably listening to their instincts, which felt by far the more sensible course of action.

She ducked through the gap, not wanting to touch the rings or their mirrors. On a low table whose span dwarfed the ganar, and that marched away to the four points of the compass in mirrored infinities, lay something that exercised all parts of the word “nightmare.”

Livira recognised the cratalac only from descriptions given to her as a child, from a claw she had once found in the Dust before swapping it with Acmar for sweetmeats from the markets, and from diagrams in an obscure book on the biology of cata class insectoids. It was this latter source that proved most useful since it had focused mainly on partly dissected pieces of the creatures. At the time, Livira had wondered how exactly the authors, A E Weebling and E A Webly, had come by their specimen, and had assumed that some still larger creature, like a roc, had helpfully killed one and scattered parts.

The other animal used to construct the patchwork hybrid before them was not one that Livira recognised. Shortly before she doubled up to vomit, she reached the conclusion that the brilliantly white, heavily muscled beast must be native to Attamast, brought down from the moon by the ganar for this purpose. She backed away, retching, tears filling her eyes.

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