Page 33 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“It’s only just appeared,” Evar protested. “It hasn’t led anyone anywhere.”

“And yet here you are.” The stranger lifted their head and offered a narrow slice of a smile.

Evar saw the big square teeth, the golden fur touched with grey covering cheeks and chin. “Ganar,” he breathed. Then more loudly, “Who are you?” And in the moment’s silence that followed, he turned to face his brothers. “Who is this? Both of you know.”

The ganar pulled back its cowl. To Evar it looked much like the automata that had plagued their travels through the library, but it felt presumptuous to accuse the first ganar he’d met of being the author of that misfortune.

“My name is Celcha. You’ve met my brother, Hellet. These two”—she gestured at Starval and Mayland—“ruined my life. But they also gave me a life by engineering my transfer from the Arthran mines to the library.” She looked from each sibling to the next, dark eyes giving nothing away. “What I can’t forgive”—the pagescape surged around them as if thegraveyard of books had become a rolling sea—“is that they made me kill an entire city, from babies born to slavery to the queen born to her crown.”

“Made?” Mayland struggled to keep his feet as the ground rose and fell beneath him. The fear that had been in his face didn’t make it to his voice.

“Tricked me. Tricked us.” Celcha’s growl, very different to a canith’s, reverberated through the air as though she were the size of her largest avatar. The page-storm’s intensity picked up again, swirling around them.

“You knew you were going to poison them! That was always going to be a dangerous business,” Mayland shouted over the flutter and flap. “The stain on my hands doesn’t clean yours!”

Starval had one arm raised, ready to throw his knife. Evar caught his wrist. “Don’t.”

Evar knew the ganar before him had spent a lifetime trying to engineer her misplaced revenge on him and Livira. A revenge properly aimed at Mayland and to a lesser extent, Starval. And whilst he didn’t want to see his brothers die for that crime, the ganar deserved a better answer than a dagger in the throat.

The ganar advanced on them along a path that stayed level and untroubled by the storm. A final spasm of the page-quake threw Mayland to his hands and knees. The rest of them staggered but kept their feet. Clovis’s hand found the hilt of her white sword.

“I can’t forgive.” Celcha levelled her driftwood staff at Mayland, a gnarled thing, polished by age. “But I’ve watched the bitter harvest of revenge and the years since have tempered that old anger. Even exacted upon the correct targets, revenge…however tempting”—and here she looked meaningfully from Mayland to Starval and let her gaze linger on each—“is no longer my goal. I continue my journey to my own centre, and of necessity to the centre of the library.”

“There’s a centre?” Evar blinked.

“Of course there’s not a centre,” Mayland snapped. “It’s a quest to distract the gullible. It’s exactly what happened to you with that story trope just now. The old wizard comes to tell you you’re special, and that you need to save the world. It’s just like that, only on a grander scale. This ganar”—he waved a hand towards Celcha without sparing her a glance—“thinks she’s drained the library dry of every secret but the last. Instead, she’s beenduped by a fiction that’s escaped the vaults. She thinks she’s some sort of mystic, and all that’s happened is she’s fallen for the simplest—”

“She knows more than you do?” Clovis asked. “It sounds like that’s what you’re saying.”

Evar couldn’t help snorting. Celcha barked something that might have been a laugh.

“I’m looking for a way to destroy the library,” Mayland said, ignoring his sister. “And that doesn’t start with finding the centre. It starts here. Or, more precisely”—he pointed to the red star—“up there!”

“On that we’re agreed.” Celcha raised her staff towards the star. “That’s why I’m here and where I’m heading.” She started to walk off across the paper dunes. “You may accompany me.”

Mayland stood, watching her go with a sour expression, as if few things might displease him more than being forgiven.

“Well?” Starval prompted. Starval had never had a problem with being forgiven. It was his standard operating procedure: to do what he wanted and then ask forgiveness afterwards. “What now?”

Mayland released a long sigh and, without comment, set off after the ganar.

“Wait!” Evar hurried after Celcha too. “I don’t care about stars and centres. I just want to get back to the library. Or wherever Livira is. The rest of it can go hang.”

“Oh, we’re going back to the library all right.” Celcha, who seemed ridiculously short now that Evar had drawn level with her, leaned on her staff as they climbed a rise. Despite her height, and the fact that she’d spent a large chunk of her life planning his and Livira’s demise, Evar’s sense of her was one of gravitas: she reminded him of Yute. Both of them wise and at the same time sad, as if the former bred the latter. “That’s the biggest chink I’ve seen, and I’ve been around awhile.” She nodded ahead to the star and the column of light beneath it. “Once we get close it’ll suck us all up, whether we want it to or not. It’s the mess on the other side you should be worrying about. Something bad happened to put that hole there. Something very bad.”

Evar resigned himself to following. His questions had multiplied beyond hope of answers. And when it came down to it, what he wanted mostwere results rather than answers. He wanted to find Livira and know she was safe. He wanted to apologise for leaving her behind when he went after Arpix, without saying that he wouldn’t do it again. Whether he had that right or not, he would always take the bullet in her place.

Evar and Clovis kept pace with Celcha, flanking the ganar. Clovis had her sword out now, and her eyes to the crests of each rise. It seemed Evar’s sister’s desire to get back matched his own. She’d been prepared to go to war for Arpix, but that wasn’t setting the bar particularly high for Clovis. The fact that she’d retreated to save Evar spoke volumes though, and he would not forget that particular testimonial to the depth of the bond between them.

Clovis looked serious now, focused, nervous even. Not the eager, fierce anticipation of combat he would have expected if it were simply a second chance to wage war on those who had slaughtered her people. Clovis saw Evar glancing at her and bared her teeth, but he knew her too well to miss the true feelings behind the bravado. Clovis was worried. Worried for Arpix. Worried they would be too late. And if he was honest, Evar was too. He’d never had a friend before, save Livira who was both that and more. But Arpix, he realised, was his first male friend, and as soon as he was sure of Livira’s safety, Evar would be turning all his thoughts towards aiding Clovis in rescuing him.

Celcha led on, circumventing the largest page-dunes, and steering clear of dust lakes in which she said a cart and horses could sink from sight even as the ropes to haul them out were being unslung. Evar noticed that the hazy, half-seen backgrounds that had seemed to shift when studied and to change when his attention wandered from them, were now closer though no less strange. To their left marched a grey jungle, its papery leaves slowly taking on a dark greenish-grey if he stared at them. A quick diversion would see him in among those trees, chasing whatever it was that could be glimpsed flitting between thick trunks. To his right the narrow streets and tiled roofs of some town where shadowy figures haunted the alleys—humans maybe, to judge from their walk.

“Hey…”

“What?” Clovis turned his way.

“I don’t…know.” For a moment he could almost have sworn he sawKerrol vanish down one of those alleyways, following a pale human man and a human girl, towering over the pair.

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