Page 91 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Tremon loomed over the pair of them, her height and width even more intimidating in the narrow confines of the sewers. “The more of us gathering, the more chance of the potentate’s spies forewarning him. And even if we had an army, you can only feed it down one of these tunnels at the same rate. If a hundred of us can’t do the job, then a thousand would fail too, bottled up at the entry point.”

Narbla, taller than Tremon but painfully thin, leaned in, the stink of her absent pipe haunting the air around her, pushing back even the sewer’s foulness for a moment. “If we had an army, we’d need you to protect the head and the tail of it from the monsters at the same time. And you don’t even seem sure you can protect the people immediately around you.”

Livira bit her lip and swallowed her sharp reply. The canith wasn’t wrong. She’d struggled against that one Escape at the Gates. Ahead, in the wound made by the potentate’s reckless wielding of her book, there might be scores of the things, or more.

People had called Livira reckless her whole life long, whether it be getting into fist fights with boys twice her size, throwing herself into the mouths of monsters, or bringing down the enmity of powerful men upon herself. It had almost never been a compliment. “Reckless” was not a quality valued in a librarian. Job requirements centred on rather different adjectives such as “meticulous,” “measured,” and “methodical.” Leaps of faith were not encouraged.

Now, as she stood knee-deep in filthy water, ahead of her a tunnel full of all the worst horrors that imagination could fashion, and with her retreat blocked by a hundred strangers, she felt that perhaps she should strive to be less reckless in future.

“The blood of the library takes your fear and writes it out before you.” Livira held her lantern high and advanced, calling out her words for those behind. She had of course told them this before, but if repetition would imprint the lesson on their minds, then she would say it until her throat ran dry. “Do not give what lies ahead of us any fuel to burn. If you’re going to feed it ideas, let them be good ones. Useful ones.”

Good thoughts would help, but the blood seemed less receptive to them than to anxiety and distress, perhaps because it was the result of a wound, born of violence.

“Turn left.” Carlottehad been given a map and had insisted on walking beside Livira. “No, right!”

“Spends half her life in a library—can’t read.”

“Books, I can read. Maps, not so much.”

“You didn’t pore over them when you were gloating over your empire?” Livira teased.

“Don’t start on me, Livira Page!” Carlotte scowled over her map. “How long did it take you to pull me off a throne into knee-deep shit?”

“I prefer to think of it as water with added shit. Actual shit would bemuch harder to walk in than this. Plus, to be fair, I am walking you back into a palace. Maybe you can keep this one. The Saviour did say the people could choose who they want.”

“Well, that sounds like madness.” Carlotte huffed. “You’re just going to get the best liar that way.”

She had more to say, but Livira held up her hand. “We’re close. Let me focus.”

Despite her words, the ensuing silence set her mind to wandering rather than narrowing down on the looming sense of untrammelled power lying ahead of them. She thought of her book, and the knot it traced through time, being used to make the library bleed. She tried to visualise the holes that the potentate had already punched through chamber walls, and the harm that might have been wrought upon the shelves beyond.

It had to be Oanold. A man of his avarice wouldn’t have lost hold of such a prize however far he’d fallen. And of course he’d fallen into himself, within a different set of maybes, for sure, but it seemed that when fate hadn’t seen him born into power, he’d just cut himself a new path to it, careless of who or what had to bleed so that his voice became the loudest.

Carlotte saw it before Livira did. The rapid cessation of splashing beside and behind her brought Livira to a halt. The blackness of the fissure intersecting the sewer tunnel swallowed the lantern light so completely that it might just have been a stain upon the walls.

A long, thin black leg, armoured and jointed, reached out of the fissure almost immediately, seeking purchase on the stone beside it.

“Why are we doing this again?” Carlotte asked in a faint voice.

“For Evar.” Livira had never felt less certain of the big picture, the one in which she was a warrior for Irad, a champion of his everlasting, ever-reaching library. Its eternal failure was written into the rocks in geological ages, strata of civilisation and ruinous war, repeated and repeated. And yet were men any more flexible, any more capable of change? Oanold, the bad seed sown through endless perhapses, had brought horror and unbounded cruelty to this city and probably stalked unknown numbers of its shadow cities in similar roles. “For Evar, and for each other.” That was what she was sure of.

“Who thought of spiders?” Tremon called out just behind Livira. As theblack horror hauled itself clear of the fissure, Tremon turned away, admonishing her troops. “A spider? It’s hardly original.”

Livira had to admire the woman’s courage. Livira had told them what to do, and they had agreed, but to agree and to do were very different things. All Tremon’s strength would mean little in the face of what her nightmares might summon from the blood. Her disdain, however, and the scattered laughter among the Saviour’s ranks, were better than arrows or spears.

The arachnid horror shrank slightly, even as it tugged free an imperfect back leg from the inky blackness it was writing itself out of.

“Enough. You’re mine!” And with a confidence that was nine parts fear and one part reckless self-belief, Livira walked empty-handed towards the creature.

She reached for the memories of her time as the Assistant, and for the timeless recollections that the entity had owned before she ever occupied its shell. The Assistant had never known a moment’s fear, and Livira drew on that. The Assistant, however, had also never had any clever strategy for dealing with Escapes. The largest one she had encountered had thrown her around the reading chamber like a rag doll and fractured off part of her near-immortal body. Livira had no such resilience to fall back on.

The spider rushed at her, hind legs thrusting it forward at inescapable speed, whilst an array of sharp-pointed forelimbs angled at her like a thicket of black spears. Every fibre of Livira’s being wanted to raise her arms in futile defence. Instead, she kept her eyes open, her body frozen, and her mind searching for that ineffable connection with which she had reduced the blood-skeer at the tavern to a puddle of tar.

She felt the sharpness of the reaching limbs, the impact of her attacker slamming into her, and staggered with it. A moment later she opened her eyes, closed by reflex. The Escape had broken on her like a wave, and now dripped down all around her. She hurt in particular places, more than she should, and the hands that sought the reason came away bloody.

“Livira!” Carlotte took hold of her, searching for signs of injury.

Tremon and others came forward, wary of the glistening pool around her.

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