Page 44 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Grease Paint Smile, by Benedict Cumberband

Chapter 21

Livira

“How could it see us?” Leetar shuddered convulsively as if spiderwebs might be clinging to her, still thick with many-legged occupants.

They were back in the brilliance of the sun, out by the margins of the great clearing that surrounded the ganar night-ship. The horror of what they had discovered within had driven them out again almost immediately.

“Chertal can see us. A ganar saw me and Evar da—” Livira glanced at Carlotte and decided not to repeat what she and Evar had been up to above a freshly minted necropolis.

“Some few are cracked,” Yolanda said, sounding like an elderly mage rather than a young girl. “Cracked by blows they sustained in life. Some are even born that way. And they glimpse us. But that thing in there…broken as it was…could even see us through its minions. And maybe…” She paused as if the idea made her uncomfortable. “The immortal can often see what belongs to the future. Immortality is a step out of time. And wounded as it was, I fear that creature—that made-thing—might bear immortality as just another of the burdens thrust upon it. Endless pain and endless horror. The price of birthing a nation of slave-soldiers for the ganar.”

“But the ganar were slaves themselves!” Livira protested. Arpix had told her that they had been kept in chains, labouring to dig out the very ruinsof the city that Chertal was even now building. Kept beneath the palaces and temples of the mighty in Crath City or its predecessors.

“This is the wheel we’re bound to,” Yolanda said. “And the library is our best chance of getting free of it. Oppressors become the oppressed. Opportunity makes tyrants. Write these truths large enough, populate so many shelves with them that no fire could ever consume them all, and pray that they’ll be heard. Jaspeth would have us stumble blindly into these crimes over and over, not remembering the last time, free of shame that we have failed yet again to learn from the record of our mistakes.”

Livira looked at her hand, still stained with the ink she had written her story in. An indelible accusation, like the blood-spatter guilt of the murderer. “My book couldn’t threaten the library. It makes no sense.” The place had stood for millennia. Possibly for geological ages. The scrawlings of a girl barely out of her teens could no more scratch the impervious floor of that place than could an ant.

Yolanda levelled a cold pink stare at her. Livira could see a lot of Yute in the girl, but his gentle sense of humour seemed to have fallen out of the mix in favour of some trait from her mother. “It’s harder to believe it in this time, and easier to imagine in the land of your birth, but this entire world, and its moons with it, were made from nothing more than accumulations of dust. The great ruin of one star, or many, falling back into itself after the most violent of deaths.

“The accumulation of things as small as dust can build worlds, and the gathering of things as insubstantial as letters can build vast libraries…the mounting weight of the minuscule can break them too. Your contribution may have been small on the grand scale, tiny, but it was the last of many straws. We have assuredly passed the tipping point, and the ruin that ensues may be without limit.”

Carlotte had been rubbing at the tatters of her once-fine gown, as if physical traces of the nightmare inside the night-ship might be lingering on her. She looked up now and shook her head. “What matters to me is helping Chertal. Yute’s daughter is probably right about the being-cracked business. The childhood that man had—well, I don’t want to talk about it. And he kept me going when I was all alone. For years. So, do I have to bang those too-clever heads of yours together?” She looked pointedly fromYolanda to Livira. “Or is there a better way to get an idea to drop out of one of them?”

“Oh,” Livira said. “I thought that was obvious.”

Carlotte took a threatening step towards her.

“Balls!”

“Livira…” Carlotte raised a hand.

“Get one of those iron balls! The ones the ganar use to control skeer. You bring your king and most of his army out here. We track the smallest ganar-led patrol we can find. We guide the king and his soldiers to them. And if they get their hands on the ganar, don’t all die in the process,andcan work the ball, they’ll have protection.”

Carlotte frowned. “Won’t the ganar know how to…undo…the magics if someone else gets hold of one of their toys?”

“It’s a weapon,” Livira said. “If you steal a sword or a bow, the previous owner can’t stop it working just because it was theirs once or they made it. Also…” She closed her eyes, dredging through memories. “I think the ganar left their moon because they were escaping other ganar in some huge war. There are lots of factions, different races, they don’t trust each other. They’re not going to make weapons and defences that other ganar can simply turn off.”

Carlotte shrugged and then nodded. “We’ll do it.”

“How many soldiers can your husband muster?” Yolanda asked.

“He’s not my— Well, he is. But we never…so it doesn’t really count.” Carlotte looked rapidly from Livira to Leetar before fixing her slightly flustered gaze on Yolanda. “Five thousand?”

“And how many skeer could they trap and kill?” Livira asked.

Carlotte’s frown returned. She bit her lip, thinking. “Well, you’ve seen those things. They’re monsters!”

“How many?” Livira persisted.

“Like…five?”

“No, really! How many?”

“I have no idea,” Carlotte admitted. “I don’t think Chertal or his generals do either. I mean…if the soldiers don’t just wet themselves and run away like I would. Fifty?”

“We’ll see what we can do,” Yolanda said. “We need to leave this place,soon. Dead husband or protected husband, both are the same as far as leaving goes, yes?”

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