Page 37 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Few of the pieces joined each other directly. Silver pipes, tubes of flexible glass, and bundled wires connected one twitching chunk of cratalac anatomy to a white-fleshed upper arm. Another black piece of cratalac thorax, carefully dissected and weeping ichor that the many pores on the table swallowed away, lay beside a beating organ whose pale meat pumped milk-white blood into yet more tubes. It seemed a half-completed jigsaw monstrosity, marrying flesh that was never intended to fit together.

“Why would they do this?” Livira wiped her mouth and tried to control her rebelling stomach. She kept her distance, physically repelled, the strongest emotion in the roiling sea within her: sadness. Something was looking out at her from those nightmare eyes, something in pain, something somehow almost familiar. “What is it?” She found herself whispering and was not sure why.

“A template of some kind,” Yolanda answered in a hollow voice.

There were enough pieces of the two—at least two—creatures on the table to form a new monster, but even if the parts could be welded together through some ganar magic, the resultant creation would be an awkward patchwork that surely couldn’t function even if the same fluid could run through its veins and sustain it.

“The mirrors,” Livira said, “they have to be important.” She forced herself to stare along the endless lines of reflected tables, each with an ever-decreasing image of herself and Yolanda beside it. “Something…changes…” The overlap and rapidly diminishing scale made it impossible to be sure, but the thing on the table seemed to evolve into the distance.

“A melding. It’s a projection and a melding.” Yolanda shifted her position. “The skeer—all of them—they’re copies of this.” She waved a hand at the carnage on the table. “But blended somehow.”

“If we destroyed it then maybe—”

On the table, something moved. The head was three slices, the outer pair from the white monster, the central one cratalac, offering the weeping walls of its cranial contents to either side. If pushed together the resulting horror would have six eyes, the outer two winter blue and the inner four black. All six were watching Livira. She knew it even though none of them held a pupil to indicate direction. Cratalac claws tapped gently on the metal tabletop—not gently enough to evade the ganars’ attention though,all of them hurrying unspeaking to their stations to read the dials and adjust numbers on screens.

A broken sound filled Livira’s head without bothering with her ears. If it was a voice then the translation normally afforded to ghosts by the library was failing—it sounded like pain and anger and dreadful wordless promises of revenge, all mixed into one nerve-shredding mind howl.

The aftermath of any explosion is an opportunity, both for picking up the pieces, and for moving on.

Maintenance of Munitions, by Sergeant Tyler Dickerson

Chapter 18

Arpix

Arpix lay amid the rumbling and the dust and the page-fall, unsure of whether he’d been hurt in the detonation that had thrown him across the chamber, and if so, how hurt. He tried not to breathe, not wishing to fill his lungs with the sour smoke. At first that had been easy, what with the wonder of it all stilling his breath. And then, when the wonder had worn thin, it had still been easy, since his lungs, evacuated of breath by the initial impact with the floor, refused to fill themselves. Now though, starved of air beyond the point at which complaining chest muscles and bruised ribs held sway, Arpix sat up sharply, shedding drifts of loose pages, and inhaled with the ferocity of a drowning man.

The act might have drawn attention to him, but for the fact that dozens of similar figures were also in the act of sitting up, or rolling from side to back, or struggling to their knees, anonymous in their powdered whiteness.

One person, turning onto their side, promptly vanished with a scream, having rolled into one of many broad fissures spreading across the floor. Arpix would have paid this distressing occurrence more attention but for the fact that he suddenly understood himself also to be sitting beside a chasm large enough to swallow him.

He shuffled away and got unsteadily to his feet, his mind still dazed. The old smoke, reinvigorated by a new explosion, hung in the air, sour onthe lungs and reducing vision to ten yards or so. Where Arpix stood, the floor was largely intact, though divided by cracks. Towards where the Mechanism had been, the cracks became chasms.

Dust-clad as the survivors were, it was hard to tell friend from foe, but as his focus returned Arpix could identify the soldiers by the shape of their uniform, and of course those who had found and picked up their ’sticks declared themselves immediately. Glancing around, it seemed that more than half of the company had fallen through the cracks into— Arpix peered into the nearest one and found this did little to answer the question. The darkness onto which the fissure opened was populated by shifting shapes and distant islands of light. He thought he even glimpsed the Exchange for a moment before a grey cloud of what might be leathery wings obscured the view.

“Salamonda!” Arpix called out her name in the instant memory returned her existence to him. He felt immediately guilty. “Salamonda? Neera?” He spun, trying to find them in the crowd of dazed and dusty figures. In three strides he had a hand on the shoulder of the nearest non-soldier, turning them to face him. A stranger.

“Arpix?” A voice turned him back towards the Mechanism.

The thinning smoke revealed a yawning pit where the structure had been. Around the jagged perimeter, with their heels at the very edge of the bottomless drop, stood Clovis, Evar, Starval, and Mayland. A fifth figure swayed there with them, far shorter, holding a staff out for balance.

“Arpix!” Clovis began to run, slamming into him a moment later, lifting him from the ground, swirling him in a tight embrace alarmingly close to the edge of another chasm. And although her face was pressed against his neck and shoulder, breathing him in despite the dust, he found that he didn’t mind at all.

“You’re alive!” They said it together as she set him down. They grinned at each other and then, looking about them and realising both where they were and who they were among, their smiles slipped, Arpix’s into a worried frown, Clovis’s into a snarl. The white sword flashed into view, and around them a dozen soldiers either bent for their ’sticks or began to raise the ones already in their hands.

“Don’t!” Arpix held his palms out. “We don’t—” But it had been too late even before he started. The time for reason and negotiation had long since passed.

Clovis spun away, snarling. She’d let her heart lead her into a situation that her warrior mind would never have allowed. Weapons levelled at her on all sides, ones that could sidestep both her quickness and her blade skills. Arpix found himself stepping towards her. Not wanting either of them to die alone.

“Stop!” A barked command, spoken in canith.

The soldiers might not have understood the word, but the tone made their eyes flicker to the source. Brows rose and the soldiers stared at the dust-white apparition now holding a blade to Lord Algar’s overlong neck.

Somehow during Arpix and Clovis’s brief reunion Starval had found a circuitous route that must have involved considerable leaps, camouflaged himself in the dust, identified the enemy’s leader, and come through their number to take him unawares. The shortest of Clovis’s brothers, he was barely taller than the man he had hold of but looked infinitely more deadly.

“Lower your weapons!” Evar arrived through the thinning dust clouds. He snarled the words in the soldiers’ own language.

Even with the dark eyes of several ’sticks pointed his way, Arpix’s heart lifted a fraction at seeing Evar alive. He reached for Clovis’s sword arm and held it below her wrist, her almost invisible fur bristling against his palm.

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