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“They probably want to capture them again. The creatures seem like a formidable asset,” Kerrol said.

Translating for both parties kept Arpix too busy to add his own thoughts to the mix.

“Can you eat a cratalac?” Salamonda asked. “I feel like you should be able to. You are what you eat, after all, and they were going to eat us.”

That was enough for Arpix to interject, “I’m as tired of beans as any of you, but those things looked like a spider’s nightmare and smelled worse on the inside than they did on the outside. I wouldn’t want to risk it. I mean if we poison ourselves out here—”

“Too salty,” Evar said.

“You tried some?” Arpix looked at the canith in faint horror. “Raw...?”

Jost, sitting opposite him in the circle, gagged.

Evar shrugged. “I’ve never tasted anything that wasn’t grown around our pool. I was curious.”

Meelan shook his head. “The real question is, What are we going to do now?”

“Do? What is there to do?” Librarian Jost had been uncharacteristically quiet since the attack, muted by the horror of it all no doubt. “We need our visitors to leave. They’ve clearly angered the skeer. We never had any of this before. What’s next? More monsters? Rocks catapulted at us? Spears dropped from the sky? These sabbers can take themselves elsewhere and the skeer will follow.” She ran her fingers through her long hair, thinner and paler than it used to be, then nodded as if agreeing with herself in the absence of other support.

Meelan scowled at her. “I meant that this all has to mean something. The canith that Livira found centuries in our future have found us, out here, in all this nothing.”

“Well, we did shine a light for them,” Jella said. “And they made a dust cloud...”

Meelan turned his hard stare her way, but she just gave him a weary smile. “It’s not just the canith. There’s Wentworth too. Yute sent him.” Jost snorted and started a retort, but Meelan carried on, talking over her dismissal. “Yute knows where and when we are. He’s watching over us. He expects something from us. All of us, canith and humans. Something more than huddling here in the dust and eating beans until we die. We didn’t just drop here at random. The library sent us. We thought it was so the skeer couldn’t eat us. But maybe there’s more to it. Maybe there’s something important here. Something we need to do.”

“He’s right.” Arpix wasn’t sure that he was, but he understood that what they needed more than the truth was a purpose. Yute had said something about that years ago. The deputy head librarian and former assistant had extolled the virtues of the gift of purpose. They needed a direction, even if it pointed to exactly where they were. Direction would draw them together. With direction there would be no talk of the canith being sent away—not that they could be sent away, and not that Arpix would send Clovis wounded into the wilds even if he could. “He’s right. We’ve been missing something this whole time. Clovis was right when she wanted to search the mine for whatever it was holding back the skeer. That might not be what we need to find, but we need to find something, and we won’t if we don’t look.”

Evar had been squatting beside Kerrol, not slumped like the rest of them but poised for action. For some while now he’d been gazing up at the queen’s head as the last rays of the sun played across the time-worn stone, throwing the features into a sharp relief of crimson and shadow. Arpix wasn’t sure the canith had heard a word of what was probably the most impassioned speech he’d ever given.

“She...” Evar got slowly to his feet, frowning deeply. He raised a hand to shade his eyes. “...looks... familiar...” He turned to look down at the others. “No?”

“What are you talking about? Who looks familiar?” Arpix stood too, trying to see if out past the giant head and shoulders emerging at a slant from the plateau’s surface there was someone approaching.

“Oh dear gods...” Jella’s voice shook with barely checked emotion. “The nose... It’s the nose.”

“What’s the nose?” Arpix wondered if everyone had gone mad. Or perhaps it was him. He’d read that quicksilver caused insanity when it poisoned you.

“The statue,” Meelan said faintly. He was catching it too, whatever the madness was.

“There’s never been a nose,” Arpix said crossly. The nose, or at least the end of it, had been knocked off the statue. “What? You think we’re supposed to be looking for the nose?” It was ridiculous. “A magic nose? You think that’s what holds the skeer back?”

“I think you’re right.” Jost had stopped tugging her hair and was peering at the statue with her head to one side. “How did a sabber see it when we didn’t?”

“What are they all staring at?” Clovis snarled, sounding as impatient as Arpix felt. “Who’s familiar, Evar? How can you even tell? They all look the same to me, at least until I’ve had a good sniff of one.”

Then Arpix saw it too. It hit him in one sudden moment, like a fist that ghosted through all his ribs and struck him square in the heart. It really was the nose. It was big, but not that big, yet somehow it had been the key to recognising her.

“Damn...” Arpix didn’t even chide himself for swearing. “Is that... it’s Carlotte, isn’t it?”

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare

CHAPTER 22

Evar

How did you recognise her when we didn’t?” Arpix asked, amazed.