Page 85 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Arpix couldn’t help the apologetic shrug that took hold of him, but he didn’t deny the story. It was true, after all.

“We’ll meet this potentate of yours together or not at all.”

Eyebrows were raised, but nobody was ready to argue with a flame-maned warrior still dripping with the ichor of half a dozen skeer.

The elegant LadyGharra suffered Clovis’s presence in her personal carriage without laying down protective sheets first. She seemed somehow more hesitant to allow Arpix in, despite his relatively unsoiled appearance. Somewhat mortified, Arpix remembered quite how long it had been since his last good wash, and how sensitive a canith’s nose was. He felt himself shade to crimson as he squeezed in beside Clovis, wondering if Lady Gharra’s nose might provide her with a full account of Arpix’s night. Clovis, on the other hand, seemed unconcerned, growling to her new sponsor a comment that Arpix couldn’t decipher.

The driver shook his reins and the horses set off, pulling them along at a speed that Arpix had never experienced before. He took the door handle in a white-knuckled grip and tried to pay attention as Lady Gharra continued to quiz Clovis on where exactly she’d come from.

Clovis proved remarkably bad at lying, and uninterested in trying. After failing to deflect their host with “a small place to the east,” she turned to Arpix. “You explain it. I’m tired now.”

“You’re bleeding!” Arpix pointed to a damp patch around a rent in her newly acquired cape, high on her shoulder.

“It’s just a flesh wound.”

“What other sorts are there?” Arpix looked up at Lady Gharra. “She needs to be seen by a surgeon.” He reached for the cape. “Let me see! You’ll need stitches at least— Ow!” He snatched his hand back, stinging from Clovis’s slap.

“We can deal with it later,” she growled.

Lady Gharra smiled. “Wherever you’re from, I can see that you’ve come a long way together.”

“We’ve come from the library,” Arpix said, knowing that the questions would not stop. “Things are falling apart. Doorways are opening. We’re not from around here. Not this city, not this kingdom, nor continent.”

Lady Gharra’s eyes widened but perhaps not so much as they might have if this was a complete shock to her.

The carriage rolled sedately out of the square, and Arpix watched a city both strange and strangely familiar go by. A city built of maybes and of different choices, just as every life and every city is. As the driver turned left and right, it seemed to Arpix a portrait of the decisions that, individually and en masse, shaped both people and worlds.

It felt inevitable that King Oanold would be waiting for them in the potentate’s throne. Where else would such a man’s personal evil and hunger for power take him but across the bodies of the persecuted and defenceless to his own benefit? In this city, just as in Arpix’s, Oanold lay at the heart of the disease which time and again dragged his species through cycles of destruction. It was Oanold who, with the library in his grasp, had not merely ignored its lessons, but taken great efforts to paint over themwith lies more pleasing to his ears than the inconvenient truths of collective experience.

Anger had long been a stranger to Arpix. He’d lived a monk’s life, an austere existence dominated by learning. But as Clovis had opened new chambers within his mind, those discoveries hadn’t been limited to new excesses of good feelings. Surrender to emotion carried edges that cut both ways. Arpix’s detachment had shielded him to some degree from the horror that Oanold had thrust upon him. Now, raw from the exposure Clovis had drawn him into, insisting with her honesty and appetite that his soul come forward into the light, and be shared…he found that anger, rage even, flared when he thought of Oanold’s many crimes.

Irad and Jaspeth might be the avatars of some ancient struggle over the alpha and omega of mankind and many other kinds. But the real war was surely the one that Oanold and his lackeys brought with them everywhere they went. The real evil was easy enough to point at, and Clovis’s solution, to cut it out with her white blade, felt more reasonable with each passing moment as the distance to their destination narrowed.

Clovis had tosurrender her sword at the main door. The potentate’s palace stood more or less in the space once occupied by the Allocation Hall in Arpix’s version of the city. He wondered what Crath City looked like now, two centuries after the canith had sacked it and beneath the vast skeer hive. Were its towers levelled, or thick with the insectoids’ eggs?

Such pondering distracted Arpix from the opulence of the hallways and corridors through which Lady Gharra led them, now with a contingent of palace guards to watch over them. Arpix realised how unmoored he’d become from his old life, how adrift on a sea of time and possibility, unable to return to former shores. All that mattered to him now were the friends he’d made, or rather who had made him their friend. They were the foundation that he carried with him. The finding of those friends was the reason he was walking towards the throne room of a murderous dictator. The grand matters of the library’s fate, of the futures of the seemingly endless species whose intelligence bound them to Irad’s great work, all of that wassomehow secondary to securing the safety and company of the people he’d grown with.

As they came to a halt before a towering pair of gold-plated doors, Arpix considered that he had perhaps stumbled across the paradox that lay at the heart of the problem. He lacked the farsightedness required to see past the cycles of destruction to a solution, but the short-sightedness that afflicted him, the focus on friends and family, was at its core what being human was, and without it—

“You’re doing it again,” Clovis said.

“What?” Arpix blinked and looked around at the servants and guards on all sides.

“Thinking too much. I can hear your brain grinding.”

The doors began to open, saving Arpix from a futile denial. Even though he knew the throne room had been constructed specifically with the goal of impressing people, he was impressed. Though far smaller than a library chamber, it somehow made Arpix believe, at least on an emotional level, that it was larger. Pillars of pinkish marble, veined with purple, black, and gold, held aloft a ceiling from which a god and his angelic host peered down through painted clouds.

Armed guards stood at attention within the shadows of each pillar. On a musicians’ gallery there would surely be hidden guns aimed at the hearts of any who approached the throne. Arpix resisted telling Clovis of the impossibility of action. She would know already, better than he did. And his comment would see them arrested immediately.

The glitter of courtiers was confined to either side of the throne, where a dozen lords and ladies stood. The floor seemed to have been given over to petitioners, or perhaps to those on whom the potentate was going to pass judgement. Given the swift and summary nature of his own death sentence, Arpix imagined that only the richest or most significant of New Kraff’s citizenry got to be sent to the gallows by the potentate’s personal command.

Lady Gharra led them to the end of a short line of petitioners, all more grandly attired than Arpix or Clovis. The man immediately ahead of them, whose considerable girth was bound up in purple velvet, and whose obvious wig shimmered with what looked to be gold dust, sniffed loudly, andturned to identify Arpix as the source of his disgust. To her credit, Clovis didn’t punch the lordling.

The figure on the throne was still too distant for Arpix to identify as Oanold. The potentate looked like a geyser of costly fabrics, practically imprisoned by the weight of silks and satins that flowed in all directions, and his wig was considerably larger than his head, with oversized grey coils mounded around him. And yet this was the man who had apparently demonized a sizeable chunk of his population in order to elevate himself to power. He’d plunged the Amacar into a nightmare to provide his people with someone to hate, and to unite them around that common purpose.

One of the courtiers stepped up onto the dais and, coming up behind the throne to avoid the overspill of trailing cape, leaned around the great gilded chair to whisper to the ruler.

The potentate’s head lifted and turned until it fixed its shadowed gaze in Arpix’s direction.

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