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“Maybe it was you who gave me a fever.” Clovis grinned and licked the side of his face. A heartbeat later he was falling, legs swept from under him. “But my brother needs me.” She walked on towards the opening of the nearest aisle. “He’s an idiot. They’re all idiots. But he’s the one most likely to get himself killed without my help.”

By the time Arpix got to his feet, Clovis had reached the edge of the centre circle. Her step faltered as she left the rejuvenating aura and entered the aisle. She shook herself, snarled, and pressed on. Kerrol walked past Arpix, following his sister.

“Where are you going?” Arpix understood Kerrol to be of little use in a fight even when his shoulder wasn’t injured.

“Ours is what the textbooks call a highly dysfunctional family, but someone has to keep it together.” Kerrol shrugged, muttered a pained curse at having flexed his shoulder, and followed his sister.

Arpix turned towards his friends, who’d all been watching the canith with fascination. “None of you leave this circle. For any reason. I’ll be back!” And before any of them could offer to come with him or try to keep him there, he hurried after Kerrol.

He caught up with them fairly swiftly. Clovis walked as if she were fifty years older, leaving Arpix to wonder how she’d put him on the ground quite so easily.

“We’re never going to find him, you understand that?” Arpix asked. He didn’t like to nag but nobody could find anyone else in a library chamber unless they’d agreed on a meeting place they both knew.

“You understand that he was carrying the weapon?” Clovis replied.

“Oh.” That particular fact had escaped Arpix’s attention. It didn’t help in finding him, and it didn’t make finding him more urgent, but it did mean that his loss would have even larger consequences if they didn’t locate him.

“We’ll have a bit of a walk around and by the time we go back, hopefully Evar will be there.” Kerrol nodded to himself.

“It’s fine,” Clovis said. “I have a plan.”

“Which is?” Arpix asked.

Clovis took his hand and pulled him closer, before slinging her arm over his shoulders and using him as a crutch. “I brought my favourite human with me, and he’s very clever.”

Arpix sighed. He considered sliding out from under her arm and leaving her to it, but worried that she might genuinely need him in order to stand. He furrowed his brow, thinking furiously. It just wasn’t possible to find one person amid thousands of acres of shelving.

“There was a lot of crashing.”

“Yes.” Clovis leaned on him and nodded.

“So, whatever was doing this was leaving a trail of destruction. It might be too large for the aisles.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Clovis said.

Arpix ignored her. “And it came from the west. But we didn’t see any damage when we came to the centre circle from the main door. So, it seems unlikely whatever it was has been crashing around in here for weeks or longer. Plus, we didn’t hear it at all until after we were settled. All of which tells us...”

“Something good.” Clovis sagged against him.

“That we should go to the west door and follow the trail of the thing that Evar went to investigate.”

Clovis straightened up, took her arm off Arpix, and slapped him on the back. “Told you I had a plan!”

Clovis proceeded to lead the way, first to the wall and then to the door, setting a pace that whilst no challenge for Arpix must have taken a toll on anyone as sick as she’d been and still was.

At the west door the trail they were looking for was one a blind man could follow. Even in the wider aisles books had been knocked from shelves with abandon, often splintering the wood on which they rested. Where the gap narrowed, something wider than three canith together, and stronger than ten, had pushed over whole units of shelving, some fifty yards long. In three places whatever they were following had battered its way through the shelves and into another aisle, pulverising books by the score and bringing down others in sufficient number to bury the floor a yard deep.

When they finally rounded a corner to discover the author of all the destruction it was the canith who gave gasps of recognition, but it was Arpix who was finally able to name what they were looking at.

“It’s the same damn thing that chased us before. Only a lot smaller!” Clovis started a wary advance but Arpix grabbed her arm.

“First: Stop! It might start moving again. Second: Smaller? This thing is a lot smaller than something else?” The metal guardian was larger than anything Arpix had seen in the library. Larger than the winged man in Chamber 2 whose hand the trainees would shake for luck. Larger than Volente. Certainly larger than Wentworth or the Raven.

“The other one could barely get through chamber doors,” Kerrol said.

Clovis put her hand on Arpix’s where it held her arm. “Do I have to knock you down again?”

Arpix released her with a frown. “At least let’s try to approach it from the other side. It will be easier to escape along a narrow aisle than down one it’s already widened.”