Page 9 of The Book That Held Her Heart

She alighted in a small square off a crowded thoroughfare. Yolanda and Leetar dropped down behind her.

A woman walked by in dazzling colours, and unknown cloths. Livira stared in wonder. “What now?” The options seemed endless, but also somehow pointless. They couldn’t touch anything. They could achieve nothing. To act they needed to find the present, their own particular “now,” but that lay further away than ever—the price paid for having sent the others forward.

“In my experience it’s simply a matter of waiting,” Yolanda said. “Having a look around often helps too.”

Livira had too much going on in her head to enjoy the exploration of a long-dead city. Malar had died. Meelan had died. Evar had been mortally wounded and then stolen away by his treacherous brother. Arpix, Salamonda, and Neera had been captured by cannibals…She drew a deepbreath. None of that would happen for over a thousand years. Time was on her side, even if her heart wholly rejected the idea and even her brain couldn’t properly accept it.

At any other time Livira would have chased her curiosity. Questions would lead her. But for once she had no questions. In one stroke Livira saw how power corrupted her. She had been given gifts—gifts to see more deeply into more lives than she could ever have imagined, to sample more views, more countries and cultures…hell, she could fly to the moons. And yet that power wouldn’t bring her closer to the people of this time, it wouldn’t make her care more. Instead, it had, even at this early stage, added a distance between her and those still bound by the laws of the place. She could neither touch the world around her nor be touched by it. She might be able to walk through walls, but there was another wall, an invisible one that stood between her and everything she would see, and that wall she couldn’t breach.

To Livira’s surprise it was Leetar who led off, skirting around a passing couple, turning left at the next corner. Livira followed at a slower pace, not moving to avoid anyone, overlapping strangers here and there, momentarily drenched in images of their lives, washed over by whatever emotion held the heartbeat before they were through and gone. She walked through the corner, glimpsing the interior of a house before emerging into the street.

None of it mattered to her.

Leetar followed the currents of the citadel and Livira followed Leetar, Yolanda trailing. Livira had only been in two cities, and this one was not like either of them. The differences would have fascinated her another day. She would have remarked upon and questioned everything from the architecture to the fashions, from the foodstuffs to the temple awnings. Today she passed by oblivious, wrapped too tightly in her own affairs to worry about the arbitrary point in history into which they’d dropped.

It wasn’t until they entered a grand square lined with tall and many-balconied buildings that Livira pulled up short. Two huge statues stood at the centre of the square amid a collection of smaller, but still large, heraldic beasts in stone. A king fully as tall as the five-storey buildings bordering the square, and reaching to his shoulder, a queen.

Livira frowned. “She…seems…” Livira rose smoothly from the flagstones, gaining height for a better view. She drew level with the rooftops, then dropped like a stone as the surprise hit her.

“Fuck me…” Livira picked herself off the ground and stared up at the stone faces lit by the morning sun. “That’s Carlotte!”

The true value of freedom is revealed only in its absence. It is a structural ingredient whose removal takes with it the colour, taste, and substance of life. A similar effect is observed in gluten-free cakes.

Baking to Win, by Joshue Shoe

Chapter 5

Arpix

Arpix had no memory of the time between being dismissed from Irad and Jaspeth’s audience within the Mechanism and coming to his senses amid the book towers of the adjoining library chamber. His waking view was of his own heels dragging across the floor. It had taken him a while to figure out that the source of his motion was the two large, ill-smelling soldiers. Each had an arm under one of his. He tried to twist free and, in failing to do so, reached the understanding that his wrists had been bound behind him.

Arpix had still been woozy, his thinking eclipsed by the mother of all headaches, when the soldiers’ retreat across the chamber had been interrupted by yells, stick-shot, and the screams of the dying. Arpix hadn’t seen the canith, but it had seemed that Clovis and all her brothers must have attacked, judging by the chaos and the death toll, which he later overheard to stand at twenty-one.

In the end the canith were driven back without Arpix seeing any of them. At least one was reported shot. Arpix hoped that was a lie, but if true he hoped it was neither Clovis, Evar, nor Kerrol, in that order.

Before long Arpix had found himself back in the chamber where he’d first encountered Yute’s group and later been joined by Livira as she fled the very menace that had now snared him in turn.

Standing on his own feet, and being hustled along the aisles, Arpix was dismayed to catch glimpses of Neera and Salamonda. He tried to call outto Salamonda, wanting to know who else had been captured, but the guards shoved him forward, and he lost sight of her amid the crowding troops and narrow spaces.

Arpix stumbled on, wondering who else had fallen into Oanold’s hands. It couldn’t be everyone because the canith had attacked and the soldiers had been retreating at speed. It seemed they must have Livira though, or else why had Evar led his family against stick-fire with just one sword between them?

Livira had said the king’s troops, unprepared to suffer the misery of hanging on to life inside the centre circle, had fallen to cannibalism. It had sounded both awful and unbelievable. But here, among the stinking, gore-splattered soldiers, beneath the cold hunger of their gaze, he felt it to be true. He’d never had much meat on him, even before the slow starvation of the plateau, but he feared for Salamonda who remained considerably sturdier than he did, and for Livira’s friend Neera, who although slim, had enjoyed Yute’s century-spanning pilfering from Salamonda’s kitchen.

Arpix’s concerns rapidly became much more personal when, still with bound hands and with the fresh addition of a gag, he found himself surrounded by three soldiers who proceeded to beat him whilst joking about “tenderising the meat.” The fact that he was a head taller than the largest of his tormentors seemed to antagonise them. Arpix had never been punched before, not even as a child by another child. He was astonished how much it hurt. He wanted to reason with them, but even if he hadn’t been gagged an early punch took all the air from his lungs, and the ensuing pain removed any ability to put words in order.

Blows landed from random directions, not so swiftly that one blurred into the next. They gave him time to feel each one. Letting the fear build. Letting him wonder just how badly they would injure him. A heavy fist slammed into his ribs and Arpix reeled back, crying out around his gag. How long would it last? It seemed to have taken forever already.

“Leave that man alone.”

Arpix straightened painfully to see a figure almost as tall and narrow as himself approaching down the aisle, seated soldiers moving their legs out of his way. Even through tear-filled eyes Arpix recognised the man—LordAlgar had come to his rescue and Arpix felt ashamed of how deeply grateful he was.

“Take his gag off.” Algar stopped a yard short of them in his soiled finery, frowning slightly. “This is no way to treat a librarian.”

Arpix winced as a bearded soldier yanked the gag away.

“What’s your name, young man?”

“A-Arpix.” Despite the unconvincing nature of Algar’s concern, Arpix felt like crying. He could taste his own blood, and something was wrong with the vision in his left eye.

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