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When in danger of being dispensed with, the trick is to make yourself indispensable. Those with foresight will have mastered some small but vital skill. In order to maintain this edge one should habitually refuse to share information.

The Danger of Education , by P. Floyd

Arpix

Arpix had been there, speaking with Livira! It had all been so real, even the bits that should have been wholly unreal—like wearing the white child’s body. He hadn’t managed to hold on to it, though. Like a fever dream the whole city had fallen apart around him. And with a sudden start, Arpix had found himself back in the library amid the foulness that King Oanold had made of it. Livira’s book—the work of magic that had somehow transported him to her, inside a story that was true—fell from fingers numb with shock.

He was back in the library aisle. It was choked with resting soldiers. Behind him, the trio who had been beating him. In front of him, his unlikely saviour, Lord Algar, who had come bearing Livira’s book.

Lord Algar scrutinized Arpix and the recognition in his eye told Arpix that the man before him had also been transported by the text. Arpix bent to pick up the book without asking for permission—a librarian’s instinct. As he lifted the volume, Arpix saw, in the place where it had fallen, the faintest crazing of cracks. On any other surface he wouldn’t have noticed, but the walls and floor of the library never showed even the slightest defect. Scholars had alleged that even if the sun were to consume the world, the stuff of the library would somehow endure, being made of something sterner than mere matter.

Arpix offered the book to Lord Algar. Arpix had no schooling in such matters, but Livira was given to sharing on many subjects and had spent considerable time researching the topics of espionage, subterfuge, and—though few would believe it having talked to her—diplomacy: Algar’s own related area of expertise.

Arpix had picked up a few pointers, albeit unwillingly. Consequently, he now knew that if he tried to hold on to the book, it was unlikely he would ever hold it again. Offering it back to Algar improved his odds at a second chance with it. “It’s a powerful piece of work. Somehow, it’s become entangled with the library at a fundamental level.”

Algar spread his hands, declining to take the volume back. “And how might such a power be exercised?” He tilted his head in question. “Any useful ideas, young Arpix?”

The slight stress on “useful” did not pass Arpix by unnoticed. If he ceased to be useful, the soldiers who had been beating him were ready and waiting, already warmed to their task. Livira had been trying to tell him something—in the story—something she’d known for sure? Or just a desperate guess? The Mechanism. She’d been saying something about the Mechanism.

“I might have an idea, but I should really take a closer look—”

Something was happening at the far end of the soldier-choked aisle. Men and women were scrambling to their feet and pressing themselves hard against the shelves.

A shortish, overweight figure in a purple robe was approaching, with guards crowding at his back. “The king…” Arpix based the claim on the robe and the grey wig balanced on the old man’s head. He looked nothing like the man on the currency. “The king’s coming.”

“We’ll speak of this later,” Algar snapped.

“My friends, Neera and Salamonda, the other prisoners. They can help with this,” Arpix lied, raising the book. “I need them both.” He hoped the stare with which he met the lord’s gaze was as meaningful as the one it was replying to. If the man wanted to hide this from his king, Arpix had his own demands, conveyed in a diplomacy of exchanged stares and slantwise allusions. Designed in Arpix’s case to wring concessions from the man with the upper hand without bruising his pride.

Algar gave the faintest of nods, then turned to greet King Oanold. “Sire! I’ve been interrogating the new prisoners.”

Arpix slipped the book into the pocket within his robe. The king waved aside Algar’s words with a flexing of his fingers and peered past him. “A librarian.” He sniffed. “They must use this one for reaching the top shelf.” He laughed, triggering a wave of false amusement. “Touch of canith in him, do you think?”

“I think, sire”—Algar inclined his head—“that in a library we should make best use of any librarian we find.”

The king scowled. His dull eyes, their colour dark and indeterminate, roamed over Arpix critically.

“He came out of the same door the sabbers did. Proof of collusion if any were needed!”

“They were chasing us, sire!” Arpix hated himself for the lie, for reinforcing the man’s prejudice, and for honouring him with a title. “We were running for our lives!”

The king sniffed, unconvinced. “We have the head librarian. Do we really need any others?”

The head librarian? Arpix nearly said the words out loud.

“Master Acconite’s insights are useful to us, sire.” Lord Algar inclined his head again. “But a youth with considerably more recent experience of exploring deep among the chambers would also be an asset.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” King Oanold narrowed his pouchy eyes once more and studied Arpix with an air of distaste. “Yute has clearly allied himself with the dogmen. I’m sure he was working against us in secret for years. Striking deals with the sabbers behind our backs, manoeuvring to place dusters in the librarians’ ranks. A plot of epic proportions. It’s how the sabbers took the walls. There’s no other way we could have lost to them. Cheating, treachery, subterfuge, all the tools of the sabber and the duster. How do we know this librarian isn’t one of Yute’s protégés, up to his overlong neck in treason?” Flecks of spittle caught the library light as they fled his lips. “Treachery and treason! Crath City was stolen from me. Everyone’s saying it.”

“You make fine points as always, sire.” Clearly not willing to tie his colours to any mast in imminent danger of sinking, Lord Algar merely gestured to Arpix. “Well? Answer His Majesty!”

“When the library caught fire, Master Yute left me to burn,” Arpix said. “I didn’t escape to the enchanted forest like the rest of you. I was saved along with a few others by an assistant. The library saved me, not any of the librarians. I’m a citizen of the empire, and I owe my allegiance to you, sire.” Arpix made an awkward bow. As he straightened, he could see that the king’s open hostility had mellowed to something less readable.

“The only librarian I have any time for is the one that leads us safely out,” Oanold said with surprising candour.

Arpix took it as a mark of the man’s desperation. When his soldiers ran out of prisoners their hunger would turn to anger and there’d be no ruling over them. The king was asking him if he knew the way out.

“Are you that man? The one who knows the way out?” Oanold cut to the chase. Power rarely bred patience.

“I…” What had Livira been trying to tell him? Something about the Mechanism. She wouldn’t want him to take the soldiers there unless all the others had already left the place. Arpix couldn’t lead the king out of the library without a canith to open doors, and he wasn’t about to suggest they needed one. The king would just try to capture Clovis or one of her brothers, and then torture what he wanted out of them. And it wouldn’t work. “I can do something almost as good,” Arpix said with a conviction he didn’t feel. “Or even better. But we need to go back to the place you found us in, the reading room off the next chamber.”

“The chamber with the sabbers, and the insects, and the mechanical giant that tears through steel bars with its bare hands? The place we just made a strategic retreat from?” King Oanold motioned two of his men towards Arpix. They came forward with expressions that promised nothing good.

“The door I was coming out of when you captured me leads to many worlds,” Arpix spoke fast, trying not to sound panicked.

“Lies!” barked the king. “Why did you come back out of it to this misery?”

“It works only for one person at a time. If there’s more than one, it pushes you out.” Desperation pushed Arpix to invention. “But one person can go to a paradise. They can claim a palace, a city, a whole world! Fill their belly with the finest foods: roast pork, spiced chicken, pomegranates, grapes, wine, sweetmeats—”

“Stop!” Oanold held a hand up, one arm hugging his belly.

Whether he was talking to his personal guard or not, they stopped. Every person in the aisle within hearing distance had their eyes on Arpix as if instead of seeing a lanky librarian they could picture only a towering pile of the foodstuffs he’d been listing. He’d even made his own belly rumble and his mouth water.

Oanold elbowed his way past the two guards and came to look up at Arpix. “You understand that when you awaken such appetites they must be satisfied?”

Arpix nodded unwillingly, not wanting to acknowledge the contract he was entering into. “Yes, sire.”

“And how do you propose to deal with the many threats I enumerated?”

Arpix hesitated. Livira had told him the Mechanism was what he needed. Or at least he thought she had. So, either she had forces marshalled there that she believed would save him. Or she thought it was safe there now, and that the Mechanism would save him. Or he had misheard her in the chaos of being ejected from her story. Or this was the best choice out of many bad ones, and all those threats remained. Whichever of those conjectures might be correct hardly mattered if Arpix couldn’t convince the king to take him back to the reading room.

Arpix knuckled his forehead, trying to press his brain into the necessary invention. “I believe that the mechanoid will have killed or dispersed the skeer at the western door so that no reinforcement can reach the main chamber. And that the sabbers will have fled, with the mechanoid in pursuit. And the last skeer, if it didn’t attack you when you crossed the chamber twice, must be hiding with the hope it can send a report about what has happened back to the nest. In short, the way should be clear.”

To Arpix’s surprise, the king believed him. It seemed that in desperate times people were ready to follow anyone with an idea. The drawback being that if the idea proved to be wrong, the consequences promised to be harsh.

Arpix found himself in grand company, walking behind the king and Lord Algar, who in turn walked behind a vanguard of what were presumably six of their most capable soldiers.

It wasn’t until they reached the corridor to re-enter the chamber where the soldiers had battled Clovis and her brothers among the book columns that there was enough space to see the whole of the king’s diminished following. Arpix estimated that eighty soldiers hemmed in a group of maybe two dozen civilians, some of whom were prisoners. He spotted first Salamonda and then Neera among their number.

“Eyes forward.” A soldier slapped him around the head.

With a ringing in his ears, Arpix followed the king towards the great white door.

The book-column chamber had a faintly acrid smell to it that undercut the rankness of the unwashed bodies crowding around Arpix. Whatever had caused the odour to pervade such a large space must have been a significant event. Arpix’s thoughts turned immediately towards fire—but there was no evidence of one, not the haze of smoke or the flicker of flame glimpsed through the shifting corridors between the columns. It was, in any event, a smell more reminiscent of the alchemists’ laboratory in Crath City than of the blaze that had so nearly consumed him four years ago in the library.

The soldiers advanced cautiously through the book columns, their numbers hidden once more, a cordon around the king and those following him. Many glances strayed to the heights, and on several occasions gleaming metal ’sticks were levelled at suspiciously dark patches, ready to spit their deadly projectiles at the first sign of motion.

Others watched the corridors of sight coming into vision then fading as they advanced through the orchard of columns. Arpix held scant regard for the soldiers but given that the monstrous skeer could charge them at any moment, he was, for the first time, glad to have them around him. The rapidly changing lines of sight made for a strange kind of claustrophobia, and Arpix’s time on the plateau had taught him to fear the skeer. The only thing worse would be to be stalked by a cratalac.

Many times, Arpix saw the dark spatter of drying blood left on the library floor from the fighting retreat. He hoped none of it belonged to Clovis or her brothers. Twice, they passed the bodies of soldiers left behind on that retreat. None of the living soldiers made any effort to drag the cooling remains with them. None of them talked of their next meal. It seemed to Arpix that their hunger would lead them to kill and eat someone they could consider “other” than themselves before they would take advantage of a fellow soldier’s death in such a manner. He wondered how long that fine distinction would survive the last mouthful of the innocent victims they’d murdered.

After about half an hour of walking through the seemingly endless forest of columns, they reached the path that the huge mechanical ganar had torn for itself. Despite the extra space, the going slowed: the ground lay littered with books, heaped in places, and twisted metal columns lay at intervals across the path. Many of the disk-shaped shelves had been left torn or bent, presenting the hazard of razored edges and sharp corners.

The acrid smell grew stronger as they followed the mechanoid’s path towards the reading room entrance. A powdery white residue began to appear on the book heaps and reached a dozen yards up along the books on the surviving book columns. It began to rise around the soldiers’ feet, a low, stinking fog, some kind of heavy alchemical smoke.

“Sire.” A soldier stopped and gestured with his ’stick. At first neither the king nor Arpix saw what had caught the man’s attention. The soldier went forward and reached up to touch the offending object with the end of his weapon. A steel cogwheel about eighteen inches across had embedded itself to its midpoint in the books, cutting through their spines.

“The mechanoid…” Arpix said, “it must have exploded.” Even as he said it, he saw more debris lying ahead of them.

“Let’s hope it killed those damn sabbers first,” Lord Algar muttered. “I had that one we shot. Had it in my hands.” He stared into his empty palm as he spoke.

A cold horror crept across Arpix’s skin. Had the sabber been Clovis? Was it Evar? Fortified by anger, Arpix followed down the corridor into the reading room. A white cloud rose behind them, swallowing the view of the way they’d come.

The wreckage of the huge mechanoid lay sprawled across the floor, dwarfing the Mechanism that sat like a grey loaf at the centre of the chamber. The metal ganar appeared to have exploded from within, its chest an open bloom with jagged metal petals, and jettisoning the majority of its inner workings at high speed. Pieces of it could be seen everywhere, random chunks of torn metal in some places, cogwheels of all sizes from smaller than a fingernail to larger than a man, battered metal boxes leaking fluid and trailing wires, and other fragments stranger still.

Of Clovis, Livira, and the others there was no sign.

As Arpix entered the chamber he became aware of a buzzing. Not the frantic directionless energy of a housefly, nor a mosquito’s high whine, but the low menace of a hornet hive waiting to take offence. At first, he thought it must be coming from the wreckage of the automaton but moving in behind the soldiers he was forced to revise his opinion. It was the Mechanism that was humming, seemingly with increasing urgency. And in his inner pocket an answering vibration set his teeth on edge.

Livira’s book! The Mechanism could sense it coming, and they really did not seem to agree with each other.

Arpix might have said something there and then, but ahead of him a soldier vanished with a desperate cry and trailing arms, looking as if the library floor had grown a mouth and swallowed him whole.