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“You do.” Arpix nodded. “Look after them for me.” He shook free and ran back down to the nearest body, skipping across the rocks in his disintegrating shoes.

The closest of the fallen was Atle Norstad, a quiet, studious man who had nearly earned his librarian’s robes but never complained about falling at the last hurdle. The groans had come from him. Blood bubbled from his mouth, and as Arpix rolled him to his side the scale of his injury became apparent, his chest cratered by an impact not even a skeer warrior could survive. Atle watched the sky, wide grey eyes filled with innocence and vague surprise.

“I’m so sorry...” Arpix felt ridiculous, apologising as if he’d spilled the man’s chai at dinner. “I’m so sorry.” He moved on, passing the second figure for the most distant who had managed to lift themselves a little from the ground.

“Arpix!” Evar’s despairing shout. The whirr of skeer wings filled the air like the promise of a coming storm.

Arpix reached the moving figure. It was Jella. “Up!” He wrenched her to her feet, not even questioning where the strength came from. “Are you hurt?”

“I...” Jella set a hand to her bleeding nose. “I just fell.”

“Come on!” Arpix dragged her forward, only to have the woman collapse with a cry of pain.

“My ankle!” Jella sobbed with the agony.

A shadow swallowed the slope.

“Leave me!” Jella tried to pull free of his hands. “Run!”

“Never going to happen.”

“Arpix.” Jella looked at him, horrified, her eyes flitting to the mosaicked sky above them, skeer-dark and sun-bright. “Damn you, Arpix! Run!”

Arpix bent and tried to pick Jella up. Privation had stripped her to a shadow of her former self, but it was still all he could do to lift her now that the terror had left him. He was still scared of course, but he wasn’t terrified. He’d been terrified of leaving her alone to die. He wasn’t terrified of dying with her. Just scared. “We’re going to make it.” He managed a couple of staggering steps up the slope. “Nothing to it.”

The first stones of the new rain hit close by.

Suddenly Evar was there. The canith slung Jella over his shoulder with a grunt and began to run back up the slope so fast that Arpix could barely keep pace. Rocks hammered all around them, exploding with breathtaking fury.

Arpix didn’t expect to reach the fissure. But he did, and waiting hands hauled him down in Evar’s wake.

The majority of each breath we take is gas of types that will not sustain us. The truth, like oxygen, is necessary if we are to live. And, like oxygen, if it is all we get, it will kill us.

The Good Lie, by Emily Mendicant

CHAPTER 30

Evar

The orb!” Arpix started back towards the daylight in a moment of panic. “I dropped it.”

“You did.” Evar revealed the iron ball. It filled his hand and seemed to shiver with a distant excitement. “I picked it up.” He offered it to the man.

“Keep it,” Arpix said. “Maybe you’ll hold on to it better than I did.”

Evar shrugged and stowed the ball in his book satchel.

The humans had lost two of their number but at least they were out of the rock storm now. Within the fissure the outer edges of the pervasive library glow replaced the slanting shadows of late afternoon. The small band of survivors navigated the chaos of the ruined pre-library complex and reached the large cavern separating the living quarters from the library proper. Here Evar ceded his place supporting Clovis to Arpix and led the way, although he had only crossed the cave once before. The humans strung out behind him, bloodied and battered, negotiating the convolutions of the cavern floor as best they could. Ahead the white rectangle of the canith door into the library shone like a beacon.

Wentworth had been waiting for them at the entrance to the main cavern. Now he was content to follow at Salamonda’s heels, occasionally straying to investigate an interesting-looking hollow or some forgotten fragment of an old page.

Evar approached the door and reached for it slowly, only half believing it would respond. Having library doors open for him was still a moment of great significance. He’d spent his whole life beating against their obdurate refusal and only seeing them open in his dreams. He still struggled with the reality. He had never imagined that they would melt away before his touch like mist. Even now, it felt as if they had lied to him with their permanence and with their white surfaces so hard that even iron couldn’t make a scratch.

“Come on.” He beckoned the humans through. It was strange to think that without him they would be trapped in the chamber just as his people had been trapped in a different chamber until Livira set her hand to their door and freed them.

The room beyond already looked too big to easily fit within the mountain, and that was without considering the others beyond it, hundreds of them at the least, possibly thousands. Evar hadn’t paid it much attention during their escape but now he stood in the entrance, drinking it in. The first canith chamber. The gateway to the knowledge that his species had accumulated over untold generations and to which they returned time and again after each cataclysm visited upon them, be it by their own hands or those of some other.

From the top of the steps, he could see across the whole span of the chamber, across a patchwork landscape of shelving from different eras, much as Livira had described in the first human room. He knew that out past other doors there were books written not just in ink on paper but in knots in string, notches on sticks, collections of different shells threaded on cords, bumps and holes set onto thin sheets of leather, stories and wisdom recorded on whatever medium presented itself to the people of the time. Perhaps the skeer wrote theirs on sheets of the same exudate that made their armour and their city, forming the letters from scent rather than ink. The urge to record was nearly as old as memory itself. What was life if not a song sung to the music of the past for the future to hear?