Page 92 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Is it bad?” Livira winced.

“It’s not good.” Carlotte frowned, hunting out other wounds. “But they’re shallow. Like you were stabbed with the world’s shortest knife…three…no, four times.” She closed Livira’s robe, scowling at the Saviour’s men as they edged around. “You’re sure this Evar is worth it?”

“He is. But I’d do this just to stop the monster that’s seated on this city’s throne. Even if it wasn’t Oanold.”

Livira freed herself from Carlotte’s attentions and pushed the fallen Escape back into the fissure it came from. The black blood rolled through the sewer, swirling the water around it and pouring into the darkness.

Livira advanced, trying to avoid doing so cautiously, for with something like the library’s blood caution invited in whatever it was you were being cautious about. She stood in front of the glistening black wall, understanding now that the fissure wasn’t an impossibly dark passageway, but was full of blood, brimming with it, forming an undulating wall where it met the sewer tunnel. It had looked like an opening before she defeated the Escape, but now the blood deigned to reflect some small part of the light they turned its way, she could see that had been illusion.

Back among the ranks queuing in the tunnel, far enough to be protected but not too far to see, the Saviour stood, watching her through his enigmatic mask. With the blood of the library before her, it seemed that the library’s eyes watched her through that white mask. She wondered about the man behind it. He was helping the Amacar, seeking an end to their persecution, decrying the systematic murder of their children on the island that had once been Carlotte’s city, and Celcha’s prison. Was he doing it for the right reasons, though, or as his own path to power? And did that matter?

Livira sucked in a breath and, in accordance with her will, the blood drew back, creating the imagined tunnel. She stepped in. “Follow me. Don’t touch anything. And…try not to think.”

Livira took firm hold of Carlotte’s hand and advanced at a brisk walk. She tried to follow her own instructions and not think about how much like the gullet of some great monster the disturbingly flesh-like tunnel was. At first the passage’s floor provided firm footing, but the deeper Livira went, the more two competing thoughts tried to surface from the back of her mind. In one she was walking out onto a frozen lake, and the icebeneath her feet grew thinner with every passing yard. In the other scenario, she advanced through wetlands, and what had at first been soft earth gradually became sucking mud that released her feet with reluctant slurps, muddy lips drawing her ever deeper. The increasing pressure with which she gripped Carlotte was matched by her friend’s earnest attempt to crush all the bones in her hand.

In the end, perhaps what saved Livira from crashing through or being sucked down was that she had lived a life out on the Dust and then within the library, a stranger to both ice and mud. Fiction can paint strong images in a mind but is at its most potent when the raw material already lies within you, the writing just a key to turn the lock of memory.

What about a dust-bear?

“Shut up!” Livira found she’d spoken out loud. She glanced back along the line of the Saviour’s raiders. The floor of the tunnel had become a writhing mess of entangled black serpents, and from the ceiling fresh horrors were descending, smaller versions of the arachnid that had driven its spikes into her, each dropping on its own thread. Even as she watched, a tentacle wrapped around a broad-shouldered man three places ahead of the Saviour, and in an instant he was gone, hauled away into the liquid wall with barely time to start his scream.

“Close your eyes!” Livira shouted. “Everyone. Close them now.” She closed her own for good measure. “A forest. You’re in a wood.” She imagined the Exchange, its timeless trees, endless pools. “You can feel the roots beneath your feet. The season’s turned. Leaves are falling on you.”

Livira carried on calling out her vision, subverting the terrors around them. Serpents became the gnarled roots of oaks, questing for water. Spiders became dropping leaves that slid harmlessly away. Unsure of how many of the Saviour’s party had bought into her version of the world, Livira could only push on, creating the tunnel ahead of her, and hoping that it resealed itself sufficiently far behind her so as not to trap any of those following.

How far the fissures from the potentate’s destruction within the library had spread beneath the city, Livira couldn’t say. Nor could she imagine how so little damage had been done to the buildings above. It seemed more like a collision of two overlapping worlds than a process following thecommon laws of push and shove. The tunnel that opened ahead of her as she advanced would turn left or right at her urging, and however she turned she found no bedrock to block her way, no shaped stone, no sewer bricks. It felt as if she had somehow entered the library’s bloodstream, and though it might eventually deposit her at some predetermined spot beneath the palace, there might be no path through the ground that any logical mind would agree she had followed.

The journey seemed endless, not long…exactly…more as if she had stepped outside time just as she had on her visits to the Exchange. The possibility that the potentate might be long dead when she finally emerged, the crimes of his reign confined to the pages of history books written in now-dead languages, seemed a real one.

With her eyes closed tight she sensed rather than saw when the blood drew back to reveal something new. Ahead, through the tunnel’s black annulus, the works of man could be seen again. The walls of another sewer tunnel. And, at the edge, a startled soldier in a uniform too fine for a grimy tunnel.

Livira pushed immediately, driving thick pulses of the library blood ahead of her, letting it gout into the space beyond the tunnel’s end. She made no effort to give it form. The defenders’ own secret terrors would be far more likely to set them running than anything she could create and running might save their lives.

“Fuck me sideways.”Carlotte emerged from the blood-tunnel and fell to her hands and knees, ignoring the filthy water. “Thank all the gods. Even the rubbish ones that look like frogs.” Several years as a queen appeared to have coarsened her language rather than refined it.

“Come on.” Livira dragged her friend up. She looked both ways down the tunnel, steeling herself against the despairing screams echoing back towards her.

The Saviour’s people began to stumble out behind her, some falling white-faced to their knees and retching, not at the foulness of the sewer but at what they had survived. The Saviour came out too, supported by Tremon, his mask slightly askew, a hint of greying stubble exposed.

Once, long ago, Livira had come before King Oanold upon his throne. She had walked away from that encounter as a librarian, despite his strong desire that she be thrown penniless into the streets. If Crath City had owned sewers large enough for people to roam, then no doubt Oanold would have wanted her and all the other “dusters” permanently employed within them, deep in the filth of people they were not fit to gaze upon.

Now she was rising from the sewers of another Crath to face the same king upon a different throne. And though he might wrinkle his nose at the aroma she brought with her to his halls, the true cause of his revulsion would be not the ordure on her robes, or any personal fault his royal eye singled out among her attributes, but instead something a librarian would describe as “categorical.” His credo of dividing and demonizing had forever set her upon the shelf of untouchables and rejects, scheduled for destruction.

Livira bowed her head and took a deep breath, acclimatized to a stink that was at least honest. “Come on. Let’s finish this.”

We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.

Arm of the Sphinx, by Josiah Bancroft

Chapter 40

Livira

“This is what we’re here for.” The Saviour straightened his mask and addressed the group as the last of his force hastened from the darkness of the blood fissure. They stood in the sluggish flow of the sewer, the thirty or so canith stooped to avoid the ceiling, leading Livira to conclude that humanity had founded the city, and that a peace with the canith, more than that—an integration—had been brokered by one of the monarchs whose line the potentate had ended so bloodily.

“This is where you take back what belongs to the city and not to one man.” In the tunnels the Saviour’s oratory rolled and echoed, his deep voice drawing the attention of all those who’d made it through the recent horror. “This is where you say ‘no’ to all the evils this so-called potentate has wrought upon this city and upon our land. Not all of us will make it. But wewillprevail. We will topple this throne and make a new future for all our peoples. Thank you all for making this stand—for siding with what is right and good.”

Livira found herself nodding. Despite knowing the power a skilled speaker could exercise over their audience, she wanted the raiders to succeed, but more than that: she wanted the Saviour’s vision to become a reality.

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