Page 74 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Well, there’s an unloading area round the back, separate, behind a wall. And I saw them unloading barrels…”

“Thatispretty suspicious,” Starval mocked.

“And one of them sneezed.”

“Don’t care,” Starval said. “He can be making his own special brew out of humans, I don’t give two hoots. We’re here for the book. It’s amaybeplace anyway. Mayland said so. This whole world is a what-if.”

“You think this place is a maybe and we’re not? We’re the one true world and those alternatives we climbed through are ‘pretend’? I’m not even sure anymore if all the people you killed in the Mechanism were pretend. But Iampretty damn sure that we’re just another maybe. So, don’t go killing people here because they don’t matter. Everyone matters. Everywhere.”

“Or nobody does.”

“Right.” Evar faltered, unsure how his brother meant that last part. “King Oldo?”

“What?”

“King Oldo. That’s what he said to call him, unless we’re friends. Then Oldo’s fine. I wonder what that’s about.”

“I’ll find out using my assassin skills.” Starval drained his tankard and wiped his whiskers. “Hey you, Gothon.”

The old canith turned with the exaggerated caution of the very drunk.

“Why do people call him King Oldo?”

“Says he’s a Hosten. Cousin of a cousin of a cousin probably.” Gothonhad started to slur his words. “Secret police would’ve strung him up long ago if it was any sort of decent claim.”

Starval turned to Evar. “There you have it.” He pushed Evar’s beer at him. “Drink up, time to go.”

“Go?” Evar eyed the suds slopping in the wooden tankard. “Where?”

“We’ll find that out on the way. I’m sure this city has more to offer than the Stained Page’s taproom. I’ll grant you the ale’s decent, the landlord mysterious, the food good, and it has a better class of drunk than most places. Still, I don’t plan to wait here until our siblings find us, or until they do the job we came to do and head off, leaving our sorry arses here.”

Evar frowned at his drink and set it down. “Let’s go then. I’ve got a book and a girl to find.”

Starval missed a quarter-beat then set off for the door.

The sun hadset and been replaced with streetlights. The fog had thinned considerably but Evar’s view of the city remained limited. Starval led off as if he knew where he was heading.

“Where are we going?”

Evar had kept his mouth closed while Starval had taken one turn after another, each narrower and darker than the next, as if he were trying to worm into the city’s underbelly by force of instinct. He emerged now into a muddy square, narrower across than the height of the shabby buildings that hemmed it in to create a shaft showing a black sky and Attamast’s disk, the moon a curious shade of purple in a sky laced with ribbons of cloud.

Evar shivered. It felt as if the surrounding tenements had turned their backs on the square, ashamed of it. The occasional shuttered windows released only whispers of light, and the place reeked worse than the privy huts behind Oldo’s tavern.

Three lines of ragged washing hung out of reach, crisscrossing the space above them, the garments grey and listless. There didn’t seem to be any exits.

“Where are we going?” Evar repeated his question.

By way of answer Starval posed a question. “Where did we come from?”

Evar spread his hands, not prepared to enter into one of Starval’s games.

“A prison,” Starval said. “A place we all expected to grow old and die in, within a mile of the spot we were born.”

“I guess…”

“A place we’d all found our own escape from long before Mayland disappeared. And then you discovered that the pool led somewhere…and changed everything.” Starval began to pace as he always did when agitated. “Clovis had lost herself in revenge fantasies years before that. And you’d fled into your own obsession: finding an exit. Forms of madness, that’s what Kerrol called them behind your backs.”

“To our faces too,” Evar grunted. “Or at least to mine.” Clovis might have punched him.

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