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“Returning with the book will restore your flesh. It’s the fractures that keep you apart.”

“So, all I need is a portal.” Livira tried not to roll her eyes.

The assistant pointed behind her. A shimmering circle of light had sprung silently into being amid the wreckage of shelves and drifts of fallen books.

“But when I go to the time that the book is in, I’ll be a ghost there too. It’s going to make bringing anything back tricky. How’s that going to work?”

“I don’t know how. It might not work at all. Would you rather be a ghost now or then? Time doesn’t care.”

Livira twisted her mouth, favouring the assistant with the hard stare that generally made people look away. The assistant gazed back, impassive as a wall.

Belatedly, Livira remembered the soldier. “What do you think, Malar?” She turned, looking for him. “Malar?”

She was just in time to see his back as he stepped through the portal and the light swallowed him.

A language may tell you more about the people who own it than do the things they use that language to say to you. We have in our collection no language without a word for anger. There are some few—some very few—with no word for revenge.

One Hundred Chambers, by X’thon Qylar

CHAPTER 8

Celcha

Ahan’ah... mu-mutupk.”

Celcha, sitting with her back to the shelves, turned in surprise and looked up at the skinny child addressing her.

Lutna frowned. “Did I get it right?”

“I don’t know,” Celcha said. “What are you trying to do?”

“AHan’ah mutuupk.” Lutna smiled nervously.

Celcha looked around at the rest of the trainees, most of them sitting down, making best use of the rest break that Librarian Markeet had called. The humans and canith had clustered together, away from the two ganar. None of them were paying her any attention. “Are you unwell?”

Lutna looked put out. “It’s your language. Ahan’ah mutuupk. How are you?”

Celcha blinked. She never heard a ganar speak anything but the language they were speaking now, a tongue she’d recently learned was called modern Eursian. She knew a few words in the old tongue but they didn’t sound like anything the girl had said. “Ahanah mutupuk?”

“Ahan’ahh mutuupk,” Hellet said beside her. “It means ‘are you well.’ It’s a common ganar language, though not the one our ancestors spoke.”

Celcha didn’t ask how Hellet knew or why he’d never thought she might like to know. Maybe must have whispered it to him and, broken as he was, Hellet rarely looked up through the cracks of his inner world to see her and her needs. “Where did you learn it?” She directed the question at Lutna.

Lutna looked down, rubbing the toe of her shoe on the floor.

“She probably learned it at the palace,” called over the pushy boy who had made fun of Celcha’s nootki carvings.

“The palace?” Celcha asked.

“I don’t live there.” Lutna held her hands up as if warding off a blow. “I mean I didn’t before here. Only visited. With my father. He’s the fourth son of the queen’s third daughter.”

“Princess!” the boy hissed. Librarian Sternus cuffed him wearily over the head.

Lutna aimed her back at the boy. “I’m not really a princess. Not a proper one. But there were ganar at the palace. You know. Downstairs. They taught me a bit of their language. I’ve always been good at languages... I thought...”

“Mutuupk,” Hellet said, not looking up from his study of his claw scars. “Your mouth is the wrong shape for the uu-sound. You’re close enough to understand.”

“Everybody up!” Librarian Sternus clapped his hands. “Four more chambers to go.”