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“She said: Where will it take us?” Malar still sounded ready for a fight.

“To the library.” The assistant answered as if “the library” was all the detail anyone could ever want. As if it were a single thing, one point, not endlessly spread out across time and space.

“We’ll work it out.” Livira took Malar’s arm. “Come on.” She was sure of one truth where assistants were concerned. Persistence would not wear them down. Even the geological persistence that would eventually wear down the mountain ranges where the library pretended to conceal itself would not change an assistant’s mind. “Hold on to my arm. If my aim’s off, I might well need you to kill something.”

Livira thought it more likely that they would end up lost in the library a thousand chambers deep than face to face with a skeer, but talking about the danger was a good way to get Malar’s attention. She led the way into the portal, focusing her thoughts on Evar, but not just Evar. She had lost others too: Arpix, Jella, Meelan, and Carlotte, and others. Yute had taken her childhood friends from the Dust into the Exchange; Neera and Katrin would be rubbing elbows with the head librarian and Lord Algar. If the portal could deliver her to them all, without splitting her into separate chunks or arriving decades late, she’d be very grateful. She tried to beam that gratitude into the mix of images that she followed through the spinning chaos within the portal.

“Where the hell are we?” Malar looked round, startled and suspicious.

A warm room, dimly lit, low rafters hung with garlic, onions, bags of spices, a pot bubbling on the stove. “It’s...” Livira wanted to say it was Salamonda’s kitchen but, before she could finish speaking, a portal smaller than the one at her back opened just above the main table and sprouted a grey-sleeved arm. A white hand patted around, fastening on half a loaf of bread.

“Yute?” Livira crossed rapidly to the table and caught the disembodied arm around the wrist. Instantly she was jerked forward by something far stronger than the arm she had hold of. “Malar!” She shouted the soldier’s name and reached for him with her spare hand. Their fingers locked together as the kitchen spun away, tumbling into the distant recesses of whatever grey void it was that had swallowed them.

For a moment Livira could see Yute, standing startled before a towering shelf of emerald-green books. She felt her grip on both the hands she held slipping. Yute filled her vision for a heartbeat, and in the next her grip broke, and she fell, rolling head over heels, flipping through space, hitting the floor, bouncing, hitting it again, and each time with an awful cracking sound as if her bones were breaking.

She staggered from a portal almost too dizzy to stand, feeling sick and bruised, though other parts of her brain were telling her with great certainty that she had simply lifted her foot in the Exchange and set it down in this new place.

Livira found herself facing a curving, book-lined aisle in what could be one of ten thousand parts of the library. Two things struck her immediately. The first was the awful stink of the place, a mix of sewage and decay. The second was that many of the books had been torn from the shelves and that a few yards ahead of her a half-naked old man appeared to be sleeping on an irregular bed of them. He lifted his head, bleary-eyed, as the twists and turns of Livira’s journey suddenly caught up with her and set her reaching for the nearest shelves to keep herself upright.

“Who the hell are you?” The old man struggled into a sitting position, pulling a stained purple robe over his sagging belly. He peered at her with deep-set eyes that were black and hard with suspicion. Comical wisps of grey hair formed a border for the bald dome of his head. “Guards! Guards!” He looked around. “Damn their eyes. Where are they?”

Despite the terrifying completeness with which Livira’s memory imprisoned the past, it wasn’t until the man started calling for guards that she recognised him. “Recognised” was too strong a word. She deduced his identity with considerable certainty from a collection of scattered visual clues.

“You’re him,” she said. And felt instantly foolish. “You’re the king.”

Hate and Love run a race in which Love is both the tortoise and the hare. Hate shoots the hare with the starting pistol and reloads without undue haste before setting off after the tortoise.

Cabbages and Kings, by Wally Russ

CHAPTER 32

Arpix

He’s taking too long.” Clovis, who had seemed to be knocking on death’s door only a few hours earlier, made it to her feet against all expectations and all of Arpix’s advice.

“Do I have to push you over to get you to rest?” Arpix had run out of sensible threats.

“I’d like to see you try,” she growled, licking her teeth with a long tongue. Despite the challenge in her voice, her eyes held an invitation that made him look away.

“Kerrol. You’re supposed to be good at persuasion. Can’t you get her to be sensible?”

The tall canith shrugged and leaned back against the stack of books he’d fashioned into a chair. “I’m not a medical expert but I feel that my sister is at her best in a fight. Lying down might work for most patients but Clovis is—”

“Shut up and help me look for him.” Clovis aimed a kick at Kerrol.

“I have to draw the line there.” Arpix put himself in Clovis’s way. “If you leave this circle, you lose all of its support.” He reached for some military analogy. “It would be like sending your reserves away at the height of a battle.”

“Sometimes you have to toss the strategy book aside.” Clovis advanced.

“Kerrol! Help me!” Arpix found himself grappling with Clovis, both his hands locked in hers.

Kerrol lay back. “No, this is good bonding. It’s all very healthy.”

“What are you talking about, you idiot?” Arpix realised he’d said it in his own tongue and growled his next words in canith as he struggled to hold Clovis back. “You can see how sick you are. I’d never be able to stop you otherwise.” Even fresh from her deathbed the canith was ridiculously strong. Arpix had never been athletic, but you couldn’t help but build some muscle when you spent so much of your day carrying stacks of books about, hiking across library chambers, and climbing endless ladders. Years on the plateau had worn much of that fitness away but had replaced it with the products of a different kind of labour.

Clovis leaned into him, confusingly close, her hot breath on his neck. She seemed to be enjoying the contest far too much. She sniffed at his ear.

“I thought you were sick!” Arpix found his arms being pressed down to his sides. Clovis might be only a hand taller than him but close up that made a world of difference and made him wonder how his friends must see him as he towered above them. Meelan didn’t even reach his shoulder.