Page 40 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“You don’t need to tell us. Tell your hand.” Celcha continued to tip the flask and a black drop formed at its lip.

Evar recognised the stuff immediately. The library’s blood. He’d seen Yute make it into a tiny horse that ran around his palm. It hadn’t lasted, though. The same stuff now ran in his veins, bonding him with the library in a way that a life lived entirely within its walls hadn’t managed.

The drop swelled, pregnant with possibilities, glistening, swirling with dark reflections…and fell.

“Oh!” Salamonda cried out and nearly dropped the cake in her hand. Evar had never seen one, but he’d seen illustrations. This looked far more tempting. So large that it started to sag over the sides of Salamonda’s hands, beginning to teeter until Celcha released her grip and gave Salamonda two hands to wrestle with her creation.

“Is it real?” Neera gasped.

“It smells real!” Evar’s nose was full of the wonderful aroma.

“Mnnghhn!!” Salamonda’s mouth was too full to form comprehensible words.

“Is it real, or a trick?” Evar demanded. The Mechanism wouldn’t feed you, he knew that. Or rather it would feed you, but it wouldn’t sustain you.

“Both.” Celcha eyed him with sudden interest. “It’s real and it’s a trick.”

The ganar stepped towards him and Evar stepped smartly back, worried in that moment that the little creature might turn his blood to cake with a wave of her hand. Celcha halted her advance, turned, and caught her staff as Neera let it fall. The young woman joined Salamonda, uninvited, in devouring the cake. The thing fell apart between their two sets of hands, crumbling chunks dropping to the floor. The canith resisted following those pieces to the ground, mouths twitching into snarls of self-control. The soldiers, wary of the canith, hesitated, but an older woman, a citizen of Crath City, in a simple shawl and skirt, broke from the lines, scrabbling after the crumbs.

That single act of casting aside caution in favour of food started a flood. The soldiers surged forward.

“Stop!” Celcha raised her staff and her voice boomed like rolling thunder from every direction. Everyone stopped, even the soldiers on their knees, though those with something in their mouths continued chewing. “Nobody who fights will be fed. Everyone who doesn’t fight will be.”

And with the combination of threat and promise, Celcha turned aside what could easily have been a riot, one that might have tested whatever peace magics she’d woven. Instead, under the direction of officers indistinguishable from the rank and file, the remnants of Oanold’s army formed an orderly queue.

“Those Escapes could have been anything we wanted?” Starval asked Evar’s question. “We could have been eating them instead of being hunted by them?”

“We could have turned them into this…cake?” Evar joined in.

Mayland shook his head. “To make something real, like she’s done, that’s rare skill.”

Evar realised in that moment that the hunger he saw on his brother’s face had little to do with cake. What Celcha had done, Mayland couldn’t do. Time’s variable currents and the unpredictable twists of fate had somehow reversed Mayland’s and Celcha’s places. The ganar was the master now. And possibly what hurt Mayland most was that she wasn’t taking advantage of the upper hand.

“To do that here,” Mayland continued, “I didn’t know it was possible. In the Exchange I might—”

“The Exchange!” Evar couldn’t believe he’d been discussing cake when he still had to find Livira. “How do we get there? You know a way, right?”

“I know a way.” Mayland didn’t look very enthusiastic about the prospect.

“Let’s go, then.” Evar glanced around as if Mayland might open one of the magic doors.

“We will.” Mayland nodded.

“Yes.” Clovis elbowed her way between her brothers, headed towards Celcha. “But first, we eat.”

Some take the librarian’s “Shhhh!” to mean that the library is a place for peace. It was never thus. On every shelf ideas make war. The silence is so that we may hear their screams.

Long Overdue, by Gertrude Steel

Chapter 20

Anne

Anne stood looking up at the black silhouette of the library on a night of breaking glass. Beside her, the two strangers who had proved much stranger than they had first appeared, and they had been far from ordinary to start with.

It seemed that from the moment of Yute and Kerrol’s arrival her life had crumbled, and yet she knew that this day would have happened regardless of them. It was almost as if the nightmare had somehow summoned them to it, as witnesses from afar.

A small part of her wondered if perhaps her mind hadn’t broken at some point, and she had simply failed to notice. Maybe delusions were what enabled people to keep going when their world fell apart. Or worse still, perhaps each person walked around in the shroud of their own delusion all the time. The people of Amberg were certainly running around wearing versions of a world sewn for them by those hungry for power, a world in which the Jews were devils feasting off their flesh. Perhaps her version of events was just as false, and some more concrete reality dwelt in the overlap of many minds. Or worse, maybe there was none, no underlying reality at all, just competing sets of lies, all screaming to be heard, fighting to walk the stage alone behind the mask of unsullied truth.

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