Page 70 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Lady Amma of Iccrah,” the woman replied, plucking at her skirts.

“Really?”

“Of course not.” Amma snorted. “I can’t tell if you’re the worst spies the Gates have ever seen, or if this is genius.”

“Spies?” Livira thought it would take a world-class spy to fake the surprise now owning her face. “What’s there to spy on in this dive? No offence, Amma.”

“See, there you go. I’m almost tempted to tell you! Genius!”

One of her companions, an older woman, almost as much underweight as Amma was overweight, jabbed a sharp elbow into Amma’s gut and turned to gossip with another neighbour.

“Oh shush.” Amma shook her head. “There’s no crime in knowing that our benevolent potentate sends his agents out to protect us all.”

“From what?” Carlotte asked.

“People say the Saviour recruits in the places hope’s abandoned.” Amma glanced around at the room. “So, obviously they wouldn’t come to our little paradise.”

“The Saviour?” Livira asked. “It’s some sort of religion? A cult?”

“Oh, you two. You’re killing me.” Amma reached for her second tankard, presumably one paid for with Carlotte’s silver. She ran a tongue over yellow teeth stained with grey.

“Honestly—” Livira was interrupted by shrieking outside the tavern.

The door burst open and the shrieker, a robust young man whose voice had been driven by panic through more octaves than Livira thought possible, rushed in, knocking patrons out of his way. A wild-faced woman replaced him in the doorway and at first Livira was certain she’d been the one chasing him. Her conviction lasted only long enough for the woman to shout, “It’s a bug!” and for a black shape to snatch her away leaving only a crimson splatter to prove she’d ever been there.

The room erupted, tables overturned in panic, one person trampling the next in a general rush for the back. The noise made communicationimpossible. Livira found herself being borne along on a tide of human fear, separated from Carlotte, her main concern not what was at the door but how to draw breath in the crush and how to keep from joining those unfortunates already on the floor.

Rotated by the crowd, Livira saw that the blackness that had snatched the woman had now returned to fill the doorway. A dull thud, then another, and the wall began to spill its blocks inwards, the doorframe splintering.

Livira found herself free, like driftwood cast upon the shore by a retreating tide. In front of her, the broken remnants of tables and chairs, behind her a press of humanity and canith, each trying not to be the one left showing their spine to whatever was coming.

The dust from the destructive nature of the monster’s entry was what finally teased its shape from the unyielding blackness of its form. Livira realised several things in swift order. Firstly, that the thing before her looked a lot like a skeer from some child’s nightmare, mixed with touches of extra cratalac for good measure. Secondly, that it had been shaped by the fear of the people running from it. And thirdly, that it was an Escape.

In a shower of broken timber and stone the horror charged at her. Livira stood, frozen in the moment, armed only with her empty hands and the conviction that she would not allow herself to die there.

“Mine.” She had time only for a single word, but her mind ran faster than her mouth. Livira had learned a lot over two centuries within the Assistant’s skin. The fearsome grip of her memory, a cage that hardly ever relinquished even the smallest recollection, had been unable to hold on to more than a tiny fraction of those years, but she’d kept the broadest strokes of it. Her time with Yolanda had been a tutorial in and of itself, a series of lessons in the power of belief within the unbelievable labyrinth of the library.

She knew that the blackness before her was the library’s blood, the ultimate clay, given form by the undirected terror of the masses. Her task in the fraction of a heartbeat remaining to her was to imprint her own desire upon it, the focused determination of the individual overriding the unconscious will of the many.

She failed. The midnight spear of the skeer-blade took her in the stomach and sent her tumbling.

“Livira!” Carlotte broke free of the retreating mob, stumbling and tripping over the smashed furniture as she came for her friend.

Gasping and wheezing, Livira found her feet. She’d blunted both the edge of the weapon that hit her and the force behind it. Now with one hand extended, fingers splayed, as if to project her command, she advanced on the faltering Escape.

Rather than seek to change the skeer-thing into some other shape, Livira sought the shortest path to safety, attempting to return it to its natural form.

The horror matched her advance, stuttering towards her on four great legs whose points drove deep gouges in the ale-stained boards and shattered furniture. It came onwards, a hissing wail escaping from every vent in its armour. The thing dwarfed her. It scraped the ceiling, spraying limewash and splintering the boards above. Every inch of it bristled with the cratalac barbs and hooks that lay so deeply embedded in the racial memories of all that those creatures preyed upon. But as it came, darkness ran from it like wax from a candle thrown in the hearth. Its raw substance dripped from it, poured from it, pooling about its feet.

“Get back!” Carlotte came to stand with Livira, white-faced, wielding a broken chair.

The Escape surged, closing the last yard, its dripping jaw opening inches before Livira’s face.

“Don’t.” Livira used her other arm to push the chair down as Carlotte tried to swing. “Stay calm. You’re feeding it.”

“I will be if you—” Carlotte gave up her struggle to disentangle the chair. “If you won’t let me…fight it…” She trailed off, noticing the creature’s increasingly rapid collapse. “You’re doing that?”

“I’m trying to.”

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