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To avoid being shot do not stand in the path of the bullet. This will require greater dexterity the longer you delay your preparations. A good first step is moving to the country where gun ownership is lowest.

Be Prepared , by Scout Master Miles Dunblame

Evar

Evar remembered being shot. It hadn’t hurt. It had been a punch that had somehow stolen his strength and left him kneeling at the mercy of the human soldiers. He remembered the one who had not been uniformed. The one-eyed man who had been about to gouge out one of Evar’s own eyes.

“Clovis!” Clovis had saved him.

Clovis had dragged him back to the reading room, back to Livira. He remembered Livira holding him, and how he had tried to stop her tears. But in the end his arms had been too heavy to lift.

Falling. That was the last thing he remembered. Falling!

Evar opened his eyes. Or thought he did, because at first it seemed that there was no difference. He saw a vast black sky. It took a moment for him to wonder how he knew it was a sky.

Because I’m on my back. He wanted to say the words, but they sounded only in his head. Because something is falling from the sky. “Rain?” It wasn’t rain, though. Even without ever having seen rain, Evar knew that was not what he was seeing. Snow perhaps? One of the white flecks appeared to be dropping towards him. As it came closer, following an erratic path, he understood it to be something far more familiar than snow. A page. It was a falling page. It veered away to land somewhere to his left.

“Evar?” His sister’s voice. “He’s waking up!”

Clovis’s face moved into Evar’s field of vision, softened by concern.

“Clo,” he croaked her name, and tried to move.

Starval crowded in from the other side, obscuring his view of the black heavens and the scattered fall of pages. “Take it easy. Mayland said you’re going to need time.”

“Can’t…move.” Evar frowned, straining to lift anything that could be lifted. He realised then that not only didn’t he hurt, he couldn’t feel anything at all. Not heat, or cold, or the ground beneath him, or his own hands as he tried to make fists.

“Mayland said you’d find it strange to start with.” Clovis echoed Evar’s frown.

“Had a big hole in you, brother. Too much blood in your lung. Not enough in the rest of you.” Starval’s gaze kept darting from here to there, alert for ambush.

“What…” Evar swallowed to wet his throat. “What did he do?”

“We should sit him up,” Clovis said.

Starval’s mouth made a flat line. He nodded and bent in. Together they started to lever Evar up.

“Livira?” He couldn’t even turn his head to look for her.

The look Clovis gave Starval was enough answer.

“Alive?” He couldn’t feel his body, but he could still feel pain.

“Yes…” Clovis said, trailing uncertainty.

“Kerrol?” Evar wanted Kerrol. Of all of them Kerrol really felt like an older sibling, combining authority with competence in an annoying but non-threatening way.

“Gone.” Starval looked grim.

“Not dead,” Clovis hastened to add. “He went with the white human. The older one.”

Sitting up did little to help Evar make sense of his surroundings. They seemed to be on a gently rolling landscape of loose pages and dust, everything around them black despite a directionless illumination bleeding from the air to paint all of them in a kind of half-light.

In the distance their surroundings became less certain, taking on a hazy aspect with almost surreal shapes suggested here and there. Evar blinked, wondering if the behemoth-sized creature, barely visible where it lumbered at the limits of his vision, were some after-effect of his ordeal.

His top half was bare, and his lolling head offered him a view of his own chest, along with the hole that had been punched through him. The wound looked too black, even if the blood had had time to dry and crust, and the hole had a curious liquid quality to it. The veins around that area seemed darker too. In fact, he’d never seen any veins crossing his ribs before. An image came to him, of a tiny black horse galloping around the perimeter of a white hand.

“Ah…” He understood it and, in that moment, raised his head. “Mayland did this. He used…the library’s blood.” The black stuff from which the Escapes shaped themselves in response to fear, and from which Yute had fashioned horses, flowers, butterflies, and fire. That same blackness now ran in Evar’s veins.

“It was the only way to save you.” Clovis removed the uncertainty from her voice but not her eyes.

“You were going to die.” Starval seemed sure of that at least.

Evar raised a trembling arm. He was talking to his body in a new language. With his muscles deaf to his normal instructions, he found himself having to learn Yute’s control over the unformed creation that leaked from the library’s wounds and now filled his own. The Escapes had been monstrous because he had expected them to be. With Livira he had flown because she had taught him to believe that he could. Now he managed to stand through a combination of belief that he should be able to and his body’s ability to meet those demands. He found it to be a strange experience. Very similar to what he had known before, but also not the same.

Feeling a hundred feet tall, but also, to judge by Clovis and Starval, the same height he had always been, he turned to see the full extent of his surroundings. Paper drifts, lakes of dust, a gentle fall of loose pages from infinitely black heavens, distant mysteries that might be anything from mountains to monsters. The only sensible question was: Where are we?

“Where’s Livira?”

“She didn’t come through,” Clovis said.

“Through?”

“The assistant was destroyed. His blood made a portal. Three portals—or pools.” Starval waved the detail away. “We came through one of them. She didn’t follow. The automaton was going to explode or burn. Either way, she’ll have left by one of the other pools.”

“Where’s the door?” Evar glanced around in case he’d missed a sparkling door of light somewhere in the twilit paper wasteland.

Starval made a brief upward gesture. “We fell. Only…slowly…like the pages.”

Evar looked up, already knowing that there was nothing to see. “She would have followed if she’d been able to. Where’s Mayland?”

“Scouting. He says he knows this place,” Clovis said.

“And where are we?”

“At last.” Starval grinned. “That would have been my first question.”

Clovis glanced around doubtfully. “He says we’re in the vaults. Below the library. An infinitely deep shaft below each chamber, the same width and breadth as the chamber.”

“But how—”

“Don’t ask.” Starval shrugged. “All he’s saying is it doesn’t matter how far you climbed up or how far you dug down, you’re not finding a ceiling or a floor. And the pages—anything that’s destroyed up above, consumed by fire, eaten by hungry readers, devoured by book-mites…it all comes fluttering down here. It’s like an underworld for books.”

“And we just wait here, do we?” Evar turned, moving with slowly growing confidence.

“We were watching over you !” Clovis said, her face unreadable.

“I’m going to find Livira.” Evar chose a direction and started walking, keeping things slow on the unfamiliar footing.

“I’d like to find Arpix,” Clovis said. “But just wandering off and getting lost isn’t going to help. Mayland says—”

“Mayland murdered Yute’s wife in front of us!” Evar spun round. “He wants to destroy the library!”

“And?” Clovis shrugged. “I liked it outside better. The library stole our lives. It’s a wonder we survived without murdering each other.”

“The library didn’t do this to us. Our own people did. And the humans, and probably the ganar and the skeer and other creatures we don’t even know the names for yet. The library caught fire when canith were attacking humans. And yes, they probably had their reasons. But the fact is that the library didn’t do anything to us. It was just there. And it was misused.” Evar looked at his brother for backup.

Starval echoed Clovis’s shrug. “One of the many ways I know to kill people is to take something that you know will attract them, make it lethal, and leave it where they will find it. For example, a juicy red apple, into which poison has been injected. You might say that neither the apple nor the poison meant you any harm. You just misused them both when you took that bite. But still, you would wish that someone had found it first and destroyed it. And you would agree that leaving it for you to find was in no way an act of kindness.”

It seemed to Evar that Mayland’s voice was coming out of Starval’s mouth. Even so, the points he made were hard to argue with. Evar knew in his gut that the library was not an act of violence. He knew it was well intentioned and a force for good. But the words to make that clear, to persuade others of the choice his heart had already made…they were proving hard to find.

“We need to find Livira. And Arpix. And the others.” Evar realised that the circle of people he cared for had been steadily growing. He felt a duty to Salamonda whom he had come to like despite the language barrier. He was concerned for Livira’s friend Neera, and not entirely because of the hurt it would do to Livira if she were to come to harm. “We don’t need to be…wherever here is.”

“We still need Mayland to get us out.” Clovis didn’t sound as if she was disagreeing with the rescuing-Arpix bit. “So, we’d better stay put. How are you feeling? That wound looks…odd.”

“It feels odd.” Evar glanced down at it again. “But it beats bleeding. I feel…” He certainly didn’t feel like he’d been knocking at death’s door. “Ready.”

A glimmer caught his eye. The gleam of something that wasn’t endless pages. A ring? A gold ring. Evar bent to pick it up. The metal felt cold in his hand, heavier than it should have been.

“Mayland told us not to pick anything up,” Starval said.

Evar looked at the ring in his palm. “I think you’ve spent too much time listening to what Mayland tells you.” Even so, the whisper that ran around the back of his head, just beyond hearing, felt as if it came from the object in his hand, and Evar did wonder whether in this case Mayland’s advice might be worth heeding.

Evar was about to drop the ring when Clovis spun around and, following her line of sight, he made out an approaching figure.

“Escape…” Evar’s first thought left his unguarded mouth. He was both right and wrong. The thing was made of the library’s blood. Coming out of the darkness its blackness had hidden it until it was almost upon them. But it was in the shape of a person, not some ravening monster.

“You found the ring!” The voice emanating from a face too black for features was deep and grave with undercurrents of wonder, perhaps even awe, and a suppressed excitement. “You touched it and yet you are not consumed.”

Evar closed his hand around the ring, even though his first instinct was to drop it. “Who are you?”

As he spoke, the figure paled from midnight to evening, with hints of a face emerging, hints of a cloak, a broad-brimmed hat. A tall canith, though bent with age, eyes like the last stars in a predawn sky.

“The ring has chosen you, my son. You, of all your generation.” The visitor touched his hat. “And I am Gamdot, come to guide you.”

Shades slowly began to appear across the man, like plumes of coloured oil rising from the deep to spread across the surface. His cloak took on a brownish hue, the weave of the cloth visible, his mane a majestic grey beneath the indeterminate weather-beaten green of his shapeless hat. The eyes that had been stars became piercing blue, nested in the wrinkles of advancing age.

“Why me? Why has it chosen me?” Evar had many other questions and concerns, but destiny’s hand pressed upon his shoulder. He had been called to greatness. A purpose awaited.

“Why indeed?” The old man came closer, leaning on his staff to study Evar. A mage perhaps. It seemed impossible that just moments before he’d lacked detail or colour. Compared to Clovis or…the other one…he seemed sunlit where they walked in shadow.

“I wish it had not come to me…” Evar felt the ring’s weight on his heart rather than in his hand. It held a tangible power, at once both fierce and frightening.

“So do all who live in such times, but that—”

The point of a sword jutted bloodily from Gamdot’s forehead. It withdrew with the same sudden violence with which it had appeared, and the mage fell gracelessly, spattering blood across the pages beneath him.

Gamdot’s fall revealed Mayland, shaking the gore from a short sword.

“What? What in all the hells—”

“The Chosen One trope.” Mayland snatched up some loose pages and used them to clean his blade. “Easy to get caught up in. You need to be careful down here. There’s a lot of dead fiction and it’s still looking for an audience. If you’re not paying attention, it’ll suck you down faster than quicksand.”

Already Gamdot’s body was leaking a tar-like substance that on contact with the pages beneath him ate its way through, sinking deeper.

“That particular variant was new and easily dealt with.” Mayland nodded to the dissolving corpse. “Others are well established and very old. Those can be a problem, or a solution if you handle the situation well. But the main danger down here, the reason we can’t stay very long, is—”

“You stopped Livira following me!” Evar advanced on his brother, ignoring the still-drawn blade. Mayland wasn’t going to run him through. And even if he was, Clovis and Starval would never let it happen.

Mayland’s glance took Evar in from head to toe. He didn’t try to lie. “She would have got in my way. Better to leave her to take another path than bring her here and have to kill her. I didn’t think you’d like that.”

“But you don’t mind?” Evar accused. “You murdered one librarian. You’d happily break another one’s neck?”

“Look, we have to get on. This is the best place to find what we need but we don’t have long.” He glanced over his shoulder as if something might have followed him out of the distant dreamscape.

“I’m not going anywhere with a murderer!” Evar started to cross his arms over his chest, felt ridiculous, and let them fall. “I watched you kill that woman…”

“They’re sabbers, Evar. They killed our people.” Mayland looked to Clovis for support. Clovis frowned and studied her feet, the nails of her left hand digging into her right arm.

“And who says I’m not going to get in your way?” Evar’s growing anger coloured his voice. “I don’t want to take your path. Kerrol didn’t either, or he’d be here too. And what about you, Clovis? You want to collapse the library that Arpix has worked in since he was a child? Bringing books to people who wanted them, needed them? You let one experience make you think the only good human was a dead one. Are you going to let another convince you that the whole library needs destroying? Yes, we were trapped in it—”

“It was our whole lives, Evar. And generations before us!”

“But it was still an accident. Not something the library did to us. Call it Livira’s fault. If the Assistant hadn’t cared—if she hadn’t had Livira’s humanity in her—she would have left our ancestors to burn and none of us would have ever existed, much less been trapped. It was bad, yes! But we have to stop looking for somewhere to put the blame. It’s like hating the rock you stubbed your toe on.”

Mayland stepped between Evar and Clovis. All around them the drifting pages rustled in an invisible wind. “Words are fine things, and pretty arguments can be made from them, but one thing I’ve learned in my travels is that they almost never change anyone’s mind, certainly not in the time they take to speak, or even in a day. Sometimes, over years, they might change a person’s course…” The sporadic fall of loose pages from the black vault overhead seemed to be freshening into a steady drizzle. A low and distant rumble shuddered through the darkening half-light. Evar had never heard thunder before but felt that perhaps this might be it.

“So, the historian advocates what when it comes to changing minds?” Evar demanded. “A punch to the face? Internecine war?”

“Time generally does the trick. It does heal all wounds, after all. I will acknowledge that words work better in the business of changing minds when they’re on the page of a book rather than on the tongue of someone with a contrary opinion. They need to be consumed in private and in the reader’s own time. But face to face? In the moment? No. Changing your mind feels like being defeated. It wounds the ego. And our opinions were never founded on words—they’re just the garnish added on for show. A display of plumage to attract those of a similar mind.”

Mayland filled Evar’s vision, but even so he became aware of something odd happening all around them. The pages underfoot were variously crumpling and folding themselves into strange shapes, some reminiscent of parchment flowers. The rustling competed with the fluttering fall of pages, now thick enough to limit vision to ten yards or so. The thunder came again, louder, nearer, angrier. A sourceless rage began to bubble deep inside Evar. Mayland’s lies, Mayland’s machinations had led them to this. His brother had abandoned them. Left them trapped when he could so easily have shown them the way out.

The anger winding its way up from Evar’s guts found its echo on Mayland’s face. A mocking sneer, a poorly disguised hatred staring out of what had become a stranger’s eyes.

Mayland shook his golden mane. “Words have had their chance. So, forgive me if I cut to the chase. I am going to destroy the library. And I won’t allow you to stop me, Evar.”

Another boom from above as if a raging god were trying to break the sky. Pages fell in off-white curtains, a tumbling confusion adding to the drifts on which they already stood.

Reflexive anger drove Evar’s hand towards his brother’s throat. At no point did he mean to harm him. Simply to show Mayland that he wasn’t in a position to deliver ultimatums. In a fight Mayland had no hope against Clovis, Starval, or Evar, and it was time to remind him of the fact. Whether it was a lesson that Evar would enjoy teaching wasn’t the point.

It was possible that Clovis or Starval could have stopped him, but neither of them tried. Both stood statue-still, almost lost in the page-fall. Instead, Evar’s hand simply slowed as if he had thrust it into mud that thickened as he pushed through it.

“How?” Evar snarled, trying first to press forward and reach his target, and then to pull back the imprisoned arm.

“I’m impressed by the speed with which you learned to control what’s running in your veins, brother.” Mayland’s eyes flitted to the hole in Evar’s chest. “But I’ve been studying the library’s blood for years. I’ve been gone longer than you think I have.”

“I—” A wave of Mayland’s hand cut off Evar’s hot reply by taking command of both his jaw and his tongue. The casual gesture of power didn’t seem to be for Evar’s benefit though. Mayland stared past him into the page-fall, eyes narrow. “Well, this complicates things.”

And in that moment a new strength filled Evar, redoubling his rage. His hand found Mayland’s throat, and within a blinding maelstrom of falling paper he lifted his brother from the ground with a single arm and began to squeeze.