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The cat strolled into view as if he just happened to be passing.

Yute shook his head and stood up. “I’ve fed that cat for well over six hundred years.”

Salamonda bent to scratch the cat’s neck. “We need to find Livira.”

Wentworth sat down, extended a hind leg across his body, reaching for the ceiling, toes splayed, and began to lick his furry thigh.

Evar exchanged a glance with Arpix. Jella opened her mouth and said nothing. Meelan asked the question: “Does this mean she’s—”

Wentworth abandoned his grooming without warning and started to amble off towards the shelves.

“He’s found her.” Yute looked more confused than relieved.

“That’s good, no?” Evar looked between Yute and the cat’s retreating rear end, ready to follow.

“It... is.” Yute nodded. “But look where he’s headed.”

“In Livira’s direction?”

“He leads where you can follow. If he was heading to one of the doors he would go this way, that way, that way, or this way.” With each option Yute indicted the direction of the chamber’s four exits. None of those directions was Wentworth’s. The cat was heading directly towards the middle of the chamber.

“Livira’s in the same room as us?” Evar started to follow the cat, disbelieving, while at the same time willing him to go faster.

Clovis took his arm. Not in her normal way—as if it were a wrestling match and she needed a lever to throw him—but in a manner she had rarely used. “This could be bad, brother.”

“Bad?”

“You can’t smell it?” She lifted her head and sniffed deeply. “I’ve been smelling it ever since we arrived.”

And Evar could smell it. Even without drawing another breath. The scent that had hung in the air, faint but persistent. He’d just been too focused on everything else to acknowledge it.

Blood. Old blood. Fresh blood. Blood and excrement. Lots of both.

Just as a person can be divided into component elements, 3.2% nitrogen by mass, 0.1% magnesium, etc., each of us can be viewed as a mix of cat and dog, yin and yang replaced with miaow and woof. Ironically, too much of either makes for a fine feline or hound but a terrible human.

The Pigeon-Fancier’s Guide, by Omega Prime

CHAPTER 38

Arpix

Wentworth led the way towards the chamber’s centre, and everyone followed. Yute’s band dragged their heels, exchanging nervous mutters. Had the library allowed any shadows Arpix felt Yute’s people would be jumping at each one. These were not warriors. A mother held a baby to her breast; a boy of perhaps twelve followed his father.

Arpix noted, though, that none of them suggested leaving Livira to her fate. He wasn’t sure they would have gone for anyone other than Livira. All through the good fortune that had taken her from a hut on the Dust to the quarters of a full librarian, she had remembered her roots and supported those who had fared far less well. It was the story of that care which bound them to her.

Such was the fear written across the faces of Yute’s group, however, that without additional help perhaps even Livira’s need couldn’t have moved them forward. It seemed that whilst their journey to this place from the Exchange had been far shorter than Arpix’s, they had seen plenty of horror along the way.

The addition of three canith to their side, and the orb to protect them from the skeer, allowing an escape from the chamber, appeared to have tipped the balance in Livira’s favour. Normally, no descendant of the Dust would ally themselves with sabbers, but the nature of the opposition made them acceptable if not trustworthy. Oanold’s implacable hatred for sabberkind gave Yute’s followers faith in Evar, Kerrol, and Clovis’s intentions, at least as far as the king was concerned.

Arpix walked with Clovis and Kerrol just behind Meelan and his sister. Leetar carried on a whispered conversation with her brother as they walked, both of them exchanging their experiences. At first there seemed to be an argument about which of them was now the older sibling. Later, from the snatches Arpix caught, he learned that the door they had first taken from the Exchange was not the same one that had brought the group here. There had been some misadventure and a retreat.

On both occasions that Yute had ushered the survivors of the fire through portals from the Exchange he had made sure they all left before following on through himself. He came last to ensure nobody was left unattended amid the door-filled forest. Unsupervised use of the doors could lead to disaster, he’d said. Later he’d admitted that even he was not qualified to use the Exchange safely. At that, a shiver had run the length of Arpix’s spine, thinking of the many journeys Evar and Livira had taken through those same portals.

Leetar confessed to Meelan that following the soldiers’ passage through the first door, King Oanold had revealed his presence among them, shedding the disguise in which he’d fled the fall of his city. He had taken command and some sort of bloody conflict had ensued in which quite a number of soldiers were killed.

Leetar glanced back at this point and her voice fell below hearing. The next audible parts of the conversation indicated that after his arrival Yute had managed to get the king and his soldiers to return to the Exchange to try a second portal. That door was the one which had led them to this part of the library. Leetar did not yet appear wholly convinced that she was separated from her old life by more than a distance that could be measured in miles, and by the fact that the city had been on fire and full of canith. The idea that hundreds of years had also passed was, for now, a step too far for her imagination.

Despite their evident worry, Arpix found it hard to share the apprehensions of Livira’s countrymen. He knew the library as a place of peace, more familiar than the home he’d been raised in. Whatever King Oanold’s failings, and they were many, the man was hardly a monster. Arpix had read of rulers who impaled thousands in their streets or hunted out witches for burning on the thinnest of pretexts.