Page 89 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going—”

“And if I told you there were babies being murdered in another land across a wide ocean? Would we set sail as soon as we’re done here? You can’t save everyone, Evar. When we stepped through that chamber door, the world grew so much bigger. You have to learn when to let go.”

“And you have to learn when to take hold.” Evar shaded his eyes against the day’s sunshine. The city, whose existence he had half doubted in the enfolding fog, now shone before him, its palace a magnificent thing, too huge to find a single man in. “So. How do we start?”

They started witha fire. Starval had used the last of his stolen money to buy supplies on the way up to the palace early that morning. The processhad proved difficult as both brothers were finding it hard to understand the locals, and vice versa. Starval speculated that the Exchange’s translation effects, which Mayland had used his knowledge to try to extend, were wearing off.

Their distraction required a distraction. Evar had drawn forth a handful of his blood—a painful and unpleasant process—and fashioned from it a black monster, a miniature cratalac that he set chasing people in the street beside the wall of the palace gardens. The screams and panic drew the eyes of guards in two watchtowers with overview of the road.

Starval took the opportunity to toss a ball of rags over the wall into a place where the green-clad branches of several trees waved above the surrounding masonry. A few minutes later the alchemical wonder he’d buried within the rags ignited, and the device began to emit copious amounts of smoke that billowed out from the tight-packed foliage.

Evar and Starval climbed quickly and dropped into bushes.

“Well, that shouldn’t have worked.” Starval confirmed that the shrubbery now concealing them was not their first bit of luck.

Evar frowned in concentration, focusing his will until his blood-golem joined them. He gave it the form of a horse now, finding that far less disturbing than a cratalac’s nightmare shape. He picked it up and put it in a pocket, unwilling to return the stuff to his veins. “We should have done this earlier, when it was still dark,” he muttered.

“There’s an entire literature on that, brother. Darkness conceals, but a rich man’s house turns in on itself in the witching hours, sealing its points of entry. The palace is expecting visitors. Its doors are as open as they ever get.”

And with that Starval began their covert approach through the statue-dotted greenery of the potentate’s gardens towards the palace and the invitations of its hundred windows.

“And that wastoo easy as well.” Starval closed the shutters over the window he’d forced and looked around the empty chamber.

“I can hear a bell.” As Evar mentioned it, the distant noise stopped. Theroom they were in was bigger than some of the houses they’d passed on the way. Large portraits, darkened by age, and bright displays of polished weapons, decorated the walls. More colour and plaster mouldings made a wonder of the ceiling, and the artistry lavished on the furniture dropped Evar’s jaw. “Why is no one here?”

“That’s palaces for you.” Starval moved to the door opposite the window. “More rooms than they know what to do with.” He oiled the handle. “I believe that bell was an alarm of some sort. Which might explain why we’re getting away with this. Someone else is providing a distraction for us.”

“That seems…unlikely.” Evar joined him.

“As unlikely as meeting Oldo on the day he’s taken prisoner?”

Evar opened his mouth to sayYes, even more so, but closed it again, realising that Starval’s point wasn’t to quibble over odds, but to remind him that the Exchange had delivered them with a sense of purpose and timing. Though what that purpose might be, Evar had no idea.

The pair of them made staccato progress, covering entire corridors in a swift advance, sheltering in a doorway for long minutes. Wherever the emergency was it seemed that the problem lay in some distant part of the palace, and was drawing guards from their posts.

“It’s here,” Evar said. “The book.” He looked around as if it might have been carelessly abandoned on a windowsill.

“You can feel it?”

“It’s here. Maybe not close.”

Evar followed Starval, trying to exercise whatever part of him had shivered with recognition. He hadn’t written the book, but he was in it. He had literally travelled within its pages, and somehow those pages reached out for him even now. They reached in some ephemeral way, wound so closely around simple hope, that in the next moment he could convince himself that hope was all it had ever been. But no. It was there.

He wondered if the book had played a role in what had happened to them all, and what now enveloped them. Oanold had fallen, clutching the book. They had all followed through a broken space still churning with the disrupting currents of its passage.

Livira had written her book in innocence, a compendium of her hopesand fears, loves, losses, an account of her life, an aspiration of life to come. But Mayland, and Starval—he had to admit Starval’s hand in this—both his brothers, guided by Jaspeth, had fashioned Livira’s work into a weapon that could destroy the indestructible library.

Was a weapon all it was now? A burning fault-line running through worlds? Or was it still a book too? Books, in Evar’s experience, were always trying to show you something. They might shout it into your face, the author’s spittle practically flying from the page, or they might make you work to tease it from a story that seemingly ran in the opposite direction. But whatever their approach, books would, if given the opportunity, lead you to some window in a high tower, or crack open a door you had passed a thousand times and never truly seen, or venture up a mountainside to a rocky shoulder from where an unsuspected vista opened out before you. They would show the reader something, and there, on the edge of some new understanding, small or great, invite another step.

But here, hunting evil, deep in the heart of the potentate’s power, what lesson could be learned? Oanold had taken the book, fallen into another life, and here he was, inflicting new terrors on new people. Was that what the book had wanted to show them—that Oanold was somehow the worm at the centre of any rot? That his malignance spanned worlds, time, and possibility? Had Clovis’s instinct for revenge been right all along?

“Focus!” Starval yanked on Evar’s mane. “This is difficult enough without your mind wandering. Be here. Now. Not off with your girl.”

Twice, servants happened across them, but as Starval had moved in for the kill Evar had deflected him. Instead, he’d dazed them with a few blows, then left them bound and gagged behind furniture in rooms that he guessed would receive few visitors.

Starval tutted and shook his head but accepted the added danger as part of whatever lesson Evar was attempting to teach him. It was a lesson that Evar was far from sure of himself. He wanted Starval to share his own instinct for mercy. Softness, Starval would call it. Weakness. And Evar, perhaps agreeing, but convinced there was more to it as well, could, despite all his reading, find no convincing form of words that might change his brother’s heart. It seemed to be a thing you just knew or didn’t know. Evarcouldn’t leave it at that though. Perhaps Livira would know a better way. Or Yute, or Kerrol, though he had never sought to change Starval’s mind, merely to observe it.

The second servant had been a canith, and in his uniform Evar led Starval through new corridors and up a flight of stairs. One guard, with a long gun at his side, remained at post on the stairs while somewhere below them muffled gunfire could be heard. Some combination of his distraction, combined with the supreme confidence with which Starval followed his “guide,” allowed the brothers past without challenge.

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