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The contemplation of any single object will eventually draw in every other, and with them all wisdom. But a swifter path to understanding our kind is to consider a child stamping upon ants.

One Good Deed Burns Another , by Charity Jones

Livira

For no obvious reason three of the skeer had broken from their column. Whether the trio’s route would lead them directly to Livira’s group wasn’t clear, but they would certainly come far too close for comfort.

“We should go…up?” The returning Carlotte took a firm hold on Livira’s arm.

“They can’t see us.” Yolanda, always so certain, allowed a measure of uncertainty to enter her voice, mixed with amazement.

“You! Stop!” From the back of the column a small figure emerged from the forest of armoured legs.

Livira had never seen a ganar in the flesh, but she was sure that she was due many years of nightmares about the huge metal versions that had hounded her within the library. This one was less than four feet tall, almost as broad, and covered with a long coat of golden hair that fell in slightly curling sheets.

“Stop!” the ganar repeated and held up a plain iron ball indistinguishable from the one that Evar and Arpix had brought with them into the library.

The three skeer froze as if every joint of their armour had seized at once.

“Back in line!” the ganar barked, running his fingers across the sphere’s surface in complicated patterns.

The trio returned to their places, the middle one seeming to fight the command, its body stuttering with effort. The ganar stood for a moment, looking first towards Livira and the others, his gaze not quite settling on them, and at the ball in his hands, as if perplexed. Then, with a brief hunch of his shoulders, the ganar headed back into the column.

“That’s the ball Arpix found. He used it to push the skeer away. They couldn’t come within a hundred yards of it,” Livira said. She wished she’d had more time to talk to Evar and the others about their experiences outside the library prior to intercepting her escape from King Oanold’s evils, but everything had happened so quickly. She wished a lot of things about what happened after their reunion had been different…

“Arpix?” Carlotte looked amazed. “Fighting skeer?”

“Not fighting, no!” Livira laughed off the notion.

“He killed a cratalac,” Leetar said, quietly. “Meelan told me.”

“Arpix?” Livira and Carlotte said it together in matching tones of disbelief. “Killed a cratalac?” Carlotte finished for them both.

“With quicksilver.” Leetar nodded as if she could hardly believe it herself. “Meelan told me.” The way she said her brother’s name hurt Livira’s heart.

“Wait, how do you know about cratalacs?” Livira turned to Carlotte.

“They’re the worst thing in this forest. I saw one once, and I do not want to see another!” Carlotte shivered. “The stories they have for scaring children here, they’re about cratalacs. They scare the grown-ups too.”

Yolanda remained silent, watching the skeer column draw away towards the fallen night-ship. Livira went to stand beside her. “Maybe we could get one of those metal balls for King Chertal. Then he could defend the citadel.”

“Absolutely not.” Yolanda shook her head absently.

“Why not?” Livira wouldn’t care about seeking the girl’s permission, but she had no idea how they could steal an item they couldn’t touch, and her hope was that Yolanda might come up with a solution.

“Haven’t you been listening?” Yolanda looked up at her and blinked. “Every interaction with the past damages reality. Nobody knows quite how much it can take before…” She moved her hands apart while fluttering her fingers.

“Well, leaving Carlotte here is going to do more damage. So, let’s do this and take her back to our time.”

“There are other ways to deal with that situation,” Yolanda said darkly. She steered her gaze towards the night-ship. “What I’m interested in right now—no, ‘terrified of’ would be a better way of putting it—is that the skeer could see us. Your friend and her king are a danger. Your ill-advised book is a terrible threat. But a whole species that can look through time…I can’t understand how any of us still exist!”

“Maybe we could guide the king and his army to ambush—”

“I’m going in.” And, without giving Livira any chance to object, the girl took off, flying directly at the night-ship’s central mass.

Livira steeled herself against a sense of growing dread and reached out a hand to both Leetar and Carlotte. “We’re following. If we lose her, I don’t give much for our chances of ever getting back.”

Livira’s words proved sufficient motivation and moments later she was hauling the other two through the air. Despite Livira’s best efforts the white child was streaking away. Leetar’s and Carlotte’s doubts were anchors holding Livira back, and she had doubts of her own to do that.

The black expanse of the ship’s side grew to encompass their vision, and as Livira’s eyes adjusted she saw it resolve into an alien landscape, half architecture, half biology, all black. Yolanda, tiny in the distance, vanished through the wall beneath a vast protrusion that resembled a knobbled dome and served no purpose that Livira could guess at.

“She’s worried the awful monsters can see us, right?” Carlotte shouted as if the wind were whistling in their ears—which, since they were ghosts, it wasn’t.

“Yes.”

“So worried that she’s going into their lair to find more?”

“Yes.”

“I hope they can’t…” The wall of the ship loomed, then leapt at them like blindness, and with a slight shudder they were through. “…touch us too…” Carlotte trailed off.

“I felt that,” Leetar murmured beside Livira. They were standing in a softly lit corridor. To the left a featureless door sealed the way. About fifty yards off to the right was a strange dislocation, as if a giant had grabbed the structure and shoved one part out of alignment.

“I did too.” Livira rubbed her arms, trying to rid them of the odd sensation. The light shuddered around them, then restabilized. It had a pervading, sourceless feel to it, but whether it cast shadows or not she couldn’t tell.

For her part, Carlotte was pushing her arm in and out of the wall. “It’s like spiderwebs! How can I be feeling it? Everywhere else even the ground doesn’t feel like it’s really there…”

Livira remembered the huge ganar automaton that had chased Evar and had also seemed to be chasing her. At the end of the pursuit it had, with a sweep of its leg, sent Malar flying, making some form of contact with him even though they had been ghosts, unable to interact with Evar in any way at all.

“The assistants can see ghosts, move them about, do what they like.” Livira touched the wall, feeling that tingling resistance as her hand slipped into it. “Maybe these ganar are so clever that they’ve unlocked some of the library’s secrets and used them in their creations. Maybe this ship could twist time around it?”

Leetar peered dubiously down the corridor. “If they can do that sort of thing why fight with legions of skeer?”

Livira shrugged. “This place looks pretty broken. Did they leave their moon by choice? Were they running from something? Did they build this, or find it? Did—”

“Questions, questions!” Carlotte snorted. “I’d forgotten what you were like.” She shook her head. “The one that matters is where did that little girl run off to?”

Livira considered. “She’s not the sort who stops until she’s given a good reason to. That way.” She pointed at the opposite wall in the direction they’d been travelling. “Hang on tight.” And they plunged deeper.

Walls, corridors, chambers, pulsing flows of light, tight-packed crates, the throb of sound—all of it flashed past, and every hundred yards or so a new hull would oppose them, a box inside a box inside a box. Each hull added new resistance to their passage, until at last, Livira strained to pull her two companions through a wall of black steel or something equally durable.

In the dark heart of the night-ship a deep red light throbbed through the corridors, too dim to illuminate anything save corners and angles. Yolanda stood some distance off before a great valve that sealed the end of the passageway they had stopped in. The whiteness of her skin and wrappings caught the crimson in the unsourced light and returned it, leaving her blood-clad.

Livira swept along the corridor to join her.

“It’s in here.” Yolanda sounded doubtful—not doubtful that what she’d sought lay behind the door, but doubtful that she wanted to go through.

Livira opened her mouth to suggest going in, but then she felt it too. The closest thing she could liken it to was a smell, the reek of Oanold’s camp in the centre circle of the chamber where Livira had returned to her body. It wasn’t a smell, but it held that same corruption, the absence of hope, a surfeit of horror, a pain that was more terrible because nobody cared about it than for the detailed manner of its infliction, though that too was an obscenity. She opened her mouth again, this time to say that they should go—but those words wouldn’t leave her tongue either.

“We should go in.” As Yolanda spoke, the door opened noiselessly and a ganar, its pelt crimson in the ambient light, bustled out.

Livira and her companions stepped aside, letting the creature pass without intersecting with them. It reached no higher than Livira’s lower ribs and like its fellows didn’t bother with clothes, though this one wore a pair of goggles such as she had seen at the alchemists’ laboratory. It went past briskly, occupied with the illegible scrawl on a notepad in its hand.

A chemical stink wafted into the corridor before the door resealed itself. The odour, at once both cloying and clawing, made Livira gag, even though she knew no poison could touch her and that she needed no air to breathe.

With a muttered something that sounded rather like an oath, Yolanda pushed through the closed door. Steeling herself, Livira followed.

The chamber beyond was large, circular, domed, and lit by the same light that seemed to slide through the reds into blackness. At least a dozen ganar moved around the periphery, some monitoring dials and panels on which glowing characters flowed in cascades of text. Others looked to be alchemists at work with tubes and potions and radiant heat sources to set the liquids in their flasks bubbling.

Four great standing circles of patterned metal walled off the centre of the chamber, though imperfectly due to their shape. In the space each circle encompassed lay a mirrored surface some three yards across and stopping a hand’s breadth before the metal so that no means for supporting it could be discerned.

Gritting her teeth against what felt like an inevitable shock, Livira followed Yolanda towards one of the gaps that would afford entrance to the space between the four mirrors. She noted with mild surprise that she could see her reflection and Yolanda’s in the nearest mirror. It reminded her that Leetar and Carlotte remained outside, probably listening to their instincts, which felt by far the more sensible course of action.

She ducked through the gap, not wanting to touch the rings or their mirrors. On a low table whose span dwarfed the ganar, and that marched away to the four points of the compass in mirrored infinities, lay something that exercised all parts of the word “nightmare.”

Livira recognised the cratalac only from descriptions given to her as a child, from a claw she had once found in the Dust before swapping it with Acmar for sweetmeats from the markets, and from diagrams in an obscure book on the biology of cata class insectoids. It was this latter source that proved most useful since it had focused mainly on partly dissected pieces of the creatures. At the time, Livira had wondered how exactly the authors, A E Weebling and E A Webly, had come by their specimen, and had assumed that some still larger creature, like a roc, had helpfully killed one and scattered parts.

The other animal used to construct the patchwork hybrid before them was not one that Livira recognised. Shortly before she doubled up to vomit, she reached the conclusion that the brilliantly white, heavily muscled beast must be native to Attamast, brought down from the moon by the ganar for this purpose. She backed away, retching, tears filling her eyes.

Few of the pieces joined each other directly. Silver pipes, tubes of flexible glass, and bundled wires connected one twitching chunk of cratalac anatomy to a white-fleshed upper arm. Another black piece of cratalac thorax, carefully dissected and weeping ichor that the many pores on the table swallowed away, lay beside a beating organ whose pale meat pumped milk-white blood into yet more tubes. It seemed a half-completed jigsaw monstrosity, marrying flesh that was never intended to fit together.

“Why would they do this?” Livira wiped her mouth and tried to control her rebelling stomach. She kept her distance, physically repelled, the strongest emotion in the roiling sea within her: sadness. Something was looking out at her from those nightmare eyes, something in pain, something somehow almost familiar. “What is it?” She found herself whispering and was not sure why.

“A template of some kind,” Yolanda answered in a hollow voice.

There were enough pieces of the two—at least two—creatures on the table to form a new monster, but even if the parts could be welded together through some ganar magic, the resultant creation would be an awkward patchwork that surely couldn’t function even if the same fluid could run through its veins and sustain it.

“The mirrors,” Livira said, “they have to be important.” She forced herself to stare along the endless lines of reflected tables, each with an ever-decreasing image of herself and Yolanda beside it. “Something…changes…” The overlap and rapidly diminishing scale made it impossible to be sure, but the thing on the table seemed to evolve into the distance.

“A melding. It’s a projection and a melding.” Yolanda shifted her position. “The skeer—all of them—they’re copies of this.” She waved a hand at the carnage on the table. “But blended somehow.”

“If we destroyed it then maybe—”

On the table, something moved. The head was three slices, the outer pair from the white monster, the central one cratalac, offering the weeping walls of its cranial contents to either side. If pushed together the resulting horror would have six eyes, the outer two winter blue and the inner four black. All six were watching Livira. She knew it even though none of them held a pupil to indicate direction. Cratalac claws tapped gently on the metal tabletop—not gently enough to evade the ganars’ attention though, all of them hurrying unspeaking to their stations to read the dials and adjust numbers on screens.

A broken sound filled Livira’s head without bothering with her ears. If it was a voice then the translation normally afforded to ghosts by the library was failing—it sounded like pain and anger and dreadful wordless promises of revenge, all mixed into one nerve-shredding mind howl.