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Embarrassment is an anaesthetic allowing us to laugh off all but the worst of injuries to save face. An audience inhibits. So much of what we do is guided by the notion that we are being observed, be it by random strangers or the divine eye.

Grease Paint Smile , by Benedict Cumberband

Livira

“How could it see us?” Leetar shuddered convulsively as if spiderwebs might be clinging to her, still thick with many-legged occupants.

They were back in the brilliance of the sun, out by the margins of the great clearing that surrounded the ganar night-ship. The horror of what they had discovered within had driven them out again almost immediately.

“Chertal can see us. A ganar saw me and Evar da—” Livira glanced at Carlotte and decided not to repeat what she and Evar had been up to above a freshly minted necropolis.

“Some few are cracked,” Yolanda said, sounding like an elderly mage rather than a young girl. “Cracked by blows they sustained in life. Some are even born that way. And they glimpse us. But that thing in there…broken as it was…could even see us through its minions. And maybe…” She paused as if the idea made her uncomfortable. “The immortal can often see what belongs to the future. Immortality is a step out of time. And wounded as it was, I fear that creature—that made-thing—might bear immortality as just another of the burdens thrust upon it. Endless pain and endless horror. The price of birthing a nation of slave-soldiers for the ganar.”

“But the ganar were slaves themselves!” Livira protested. Arpix had told her that they had been kept in chains, labouring to dig out the very ruins of the city that Chertal was even now building. Kept beneath the palaces and temples of the mighty in Crath City or its predecessors.

“This is the wheel we’re bound to,” Yolanda said. “And the library is our best chance of getting free of it. Oppressors become the oppressed. Opportunity makes tyrants. Write these truths large enough, populate so many shelves with them that no fire could ever consume them all, and pray that they’ll be heard. Jaspeth would have us stumble blindly into these crimes over and over, not remembering the last time, free of shame that we have failed yet again to learn from the record of our mistakes.”

Livira looked at her hand, still stained with the ink she had written her story in. An indelible accusation, like the blood-spatter guilt of the murderer. “My book couldn’t threaten the library. It makes no sense.” The place had stood for millennia. Possibly for geological ages. The scrawlings of a girl barely out of her teens could no more scratch the impervious floor of that place than could an ant.

Yolanda levelled a cold pink stare at her. Livira could see a lot of Yute in the girl, but his gentle sense of humour seemed to have fallen out of the mix in favour of some trait from her mother. “It’s harder to believe it in this time, and easier to imagine in the land of your birth, but this entire world, and its moons with it, were made from nothing more than accumulations of dust. The great ruin of one star, or many, falling back into itself after the most violent of deaths.

“The accumulation of things as small as dust can build worlds, and the gathering of things as insubstantial as letters can build vast libraries…the mounting weight of the minuscule can break them too. Your contribution may have been small on the grand scale, tiny, but it was the last of many straws. We have assuredly passed the tipping point, and the ruin that ensues may be without limit.”

Carlotte had been rubbing at the tatters of her once-fine gown, as if physical traces of the nightmare inside the night-ship might be lingering on her. She looked up now and shook her head. “What matters to me is helping Chertal. Yute’s daughter is probably right about the being-cracked business. The childhood that man had—well, I don’t want to talk about it. And he kept me going when I was all alone. For years. So, do I have to bang those too-clever heads of yours together?” She looked pointedly from Yolanda to Livira. “Or is there a better way to get an idea to drop out of one of them?”

“Oh,” Livira said. “I thought that was obvious.”

Carlotte took a threatening step towards her.

“Balls!”

“Livira…” Carlotte raised a hand.

“Get one of those iron balls! The ones the ganar use to control skeer. You bring your king and most of his army out here. We track the smallest ganar-led patrol we can find. We guide the king and his soldiers to them. And if they get their hands on the ganar, don’t all die in the process, and can work the ball, they’ll have protection.”

Carlotte frowned. “Won’t the ganar know how to…undo…the magics if someone else gets hold of one of their toys?”

“It’s a weapon,” Livira said. “If you steal a sword or a bow, the previous owner can’t stop it working just because it was theirs once or they made it. Also…” She closed her eyes, dredging through memories. “I think the ganar left their moon because they were escaping other ganar in some huge war. There are lots of factions, different races, they don’t trust each other. They’re not going to make weapons and defences that other ganar can simply turn off.”

Carlotte shrugged and then nodded. “We’ll do it.”

“How many soldiers can your husband muster?” Yolanda asked.

“He’s not my— Well, he is. But we never…so it doesn’t really count.” Carlotte looked rapidly from Livira to Leetar before fixing her slightly flustered gaze on Yolanda. “Five thousand?”

“And how many skeer could they trap and kill?” Livira asked.

Carlotte’s frown returned. She bit her lip, thinking. “Well, you’ve seen those things. They’re monsters!”

“How many?” Livira persisted.

“Like…five?”

“No, really! How many?”

“I have no idea,” Carlotte admitted. “I don’t think Chertal or his generals do either. I mean…if the soldiers don’t just wet themselves and run away like I would. Fifty?”

“We’ll see what we can do,” Yolanda said. “We need to leave this place, soon. Dead husband or protected husband, both are the same as far as leaving goes, yes?”

Carlotte scowled, her mouth moving to form a “no,” but the word that eventually emerged was “Yes.”

And Livira understood. Life as a ghost, an untouched, unseen, unheard observer, was barely life. It was a form of the same starvation that the library’s healing circle offered. A type of death that walked the line but didn’t cross it. One of the horrors of Irad and Jaspeth’s compromise, pleasing no one.

Even for an introvert at ease with their own company, such isolation would build into an unbearable burden. For Carlotte who lived for company and needed to gossip in the same way she needed to draw breath, it must have been so much worse. She needed to leave. And even with unknown odds, a gamble like this was worth taking.

In the end an army from the city of Arthran followed the mad king out of the doors of his palace to do battle with the skeer. It was suicide. All of them knew that much. But Chertal’s visions had brought him to the throne against impossible odds. They knew him to be ruthless, often capricious, subject to dark moods, long silences, and longer manias, but they also knew that he spoke to spirits, saw things that mortals were not meant to see, and knew secrets that no one could know.

Six thousand foot-soldiers followed their king down the narrow stair to the city below the citadel and together they issued from the western gate to cross the plain beyond the walls. Ahead, the forest waited, vast, unknown, and full of death.

The process of bringing the army and a suitably sized skeer patrol together, whilst avoiding the chance of meeting a larger force or having the insectoids reinforced during the ensuing battle, took considerable organizing. The skeer had to be tracked from above in order to prevent detection through their connection with the template-skeer in the night-ship. At Yolanda’s insistence, King Chertal had to be kept updated by Carlotte alone, to prevent extra damage to reality, over and above that already being caused. And the king, not being an idiot, knew that he was being given a goodbye present, making these interactions protracted and emotional. None of which did any favours to the morale of his troops who, bound for a seemingly suicidal encounter, heard rumours of their red-eyed leader shouting his heartbreak at thin air in the dubious privacy of his royal tent.

“They have to win, right?” Carlotte hung high above the forest with Livira, her voice tight with tension. “I mean, it’s nearly sixty soldiers to each skeer.”

The smallest skeer patrol to venture out far enough to be attacked without fear of interference during the course of a short battle numbered one hundred and four insectoids and two ganar.

“I hope so.” Livira had seen the beasts in action. It was hard to imagine a man killing one on the battlefield. If sixty human warriors had the same fearless dedication the skeer demonstrated she would have more confidence, but she had read enough accounts of war to know that armies are made of individuals, and their courage was a fragile mix of both the collective and the individual. Chertal’s soldiers wouldn’t keep attacking until the last of their number was killed. As the bodies mounted without success, their resolve would falter and fracture, and they would flee. The deaths of their foes would help to keep them on the field. But where the balance lay and what could be expected of them, she really didn’t know.

King Chertal had been given every advantage. His forces had had the time to hide themselves in the treeline beside the skeer-broken trail by which the patrol approached. They had the wind in the right direction to hide their scent. They had approached without detection. They’d dug traps further along the trail. They had ample supplies of arrows, two thousand archers, even five ballistae primed with iron-shod spears longer than a man and as thick as Livira’s arm. Carlotte’s gift of the secret of black powder was too recent for arrow-sticks of the sort in Crath City to have been developed, but six hundred of the king’s force were armed with devices they called “guns,” which would fire a lead ball at lethal velocity over short ranges. Sadly, they took almost a minute to reload and were prone to various failures. Even so, Livira imagined a volley of six hundred shots would be devastating.

Livira’s memories of her own violent encounter with skeer were thankfully and uncharacteristically vague. Her mind still held glimpses of the Soldier performing martial miracles in his near-indestructible body before even his limits were exceeded. Suddenly, she missed Malar, in that raw, emotional way that hollows out a chest and fills the rest of a person with an aching absence.

“Stay here.” Livira caught Carlotte’s hand as she made to descend, having now grasped the rudiments of flight. “You don’t want to see this up close.”

The white column of skeer tromped along the trail, churning the earth and raising a small haze of dust behind them. In another ten miles they would reach areas of the forest less denuded of game and spread out to hunt. The patrol’s speed showed no variation as it moved into the killing ground.

From on high, Livira didn’t hear the command, the thrum of bowstrings, the hiss of arrows in flight, nor the deeper thuds of ballistae launching their missiles. Livira couldn’t imagine how many arrows it would take to put down a skeer warrior. Maybe there was no number that would achieve that goal. Even the insectoids struck by ballista bolts continued to move, though Livira couldn’t imagine that they could refuse death for long after such grievous perforation.

In short order the bulk of the skeer force charged into the treeline where the Arthran soldiers waited with spears, swords, and axes. And of course, with six hundred guns. As the skeer vanished among the trees, the guns began to boom, so many that it made a near continuous roar for what seemed an age. White smoke filtered up through the canopy, and Livira wondered if any of the insectoids had survived.

Five skeer remained to shield the pair of ganar. Neither of these two seemed inclined to show its face, relying instead on the skeer’s natural violence rather than seeking to guide the battle.

Here, Chertal had followed Livira’s advice, delivered by Carlotte. The king had been unwilling to split his force, wanting instead to overwhelm the foe by weight of numbers, and hoping that those numbers would also instil the necessary courage. He had, however, on Livira’s instruction—Livira being painted by Carlotte as a famous general from a great warrior nation, rather than a young librarian—set five hundred soldiers among the trees on the opposite side of the trail, with instructions not to loose so much as a single arrow during the initial engagement.

Now as screams rose from the woods to the left of the ganar, arrows and spears began to rain in from the right, peppering the five remaining skeer with sharp iron. The skeer hunched around their masters, refusing to fall or to run. Torrents of arrows fell upon them while the carnage continued among the trees on the far side of the trail. Nothing could be seen of that battle, only the swaying of the foliage in the still air. But for the screams, audible even at Livira’s height, and the splintering of wood, she might have been able to imagine there was merely a fierce squall passing.

The first of the skeer engaged on the far side began to emerge from the trees, red and dripping, seemingly alert to the new danger to their masters. There were far more of them than Livira had thought could possibly have survived this long.

Taking their cue, Chertal’s second force charged at the five pincushioned skeer. Hundreds of men in the first wave, more following. All determined to get to the ganar and somehow break their control over their slaves before those slaves broke every soldier under the king’s command.

Livira watched the human deluge and it reminded her of watching bone-ants swarm a ram beetle out on the Dust when she was a child. The skeer scattered half a dozen men with each sweep of their blade arms but anchored to guarding the ganar they couldn’t rampage through the attackers. Even at the height Livira maintained with Carlotte and the others, the carnage looked red and awful, underscored by the screaming of the wounded and the war cries of those seeking their courage.

“That’s him!” Carlotte clutched Livira’s arm and pointed. A small knot of heavily armoured knights was emerging from the treeline on the side from which the second force had attacked. Two bore vibrant banners, and at their centre, the king.

Chertal’s personal guard pushed into the fray. One crumpled, impaled on the spiked limb of a skeer, and was flung into the air on a glittering arc of metal and spraying blood that carried them back to the trees.

“Chertal!” Carlotte released Livira and began to drop like a person who couldn’t fly.

Against her better instincts, Livira gave chase. Yolanda and Leetar made to follow.

The sheer violence of the scene seemed to double every time the distance to it halved. The skeer’s brutal strength when applied to flesh made a ruin of even the most skilled fighters. Armour, be it iron-studded leathers, chainmail, or plated steel, made little difference. The mere sound of it—splintering bone, chopped meat, joints wrenched from sockets—turned Livira’s stomach. The mass of corpses and the injured mixed among them stole her breath.

“This has happened,” Livira muttered to herself. “This happened. Everyone who died here, everyone who survived, all the people in the city. They died already. They’re all dead. They’re the dust.” She repeated it, faster, with more intensity. It didn’t help. History or not, she was in the page, not outside it, and the battle she was dropping into was written in blood, not ink.

“This already happened.” Livira landed beside Carlotte, outside the main knot of figures locked in combat. “It’s over.” And suddenly, almost as Livira said that it was over…it was.

Not one of the five skeer had fallen, but as one, they stopped moving, as did the half dozen that had ploughed into the king’s second force from behind, and the two score still returning from the increasingly shattered forest on the left flank.

For what seemed an age, but might have been moments, the skeer stood without motion, allowing the soldiers to hew at them. Two of the five fell during these moments, finally damaged beyond their mechanical ability to stand.

The din of battle died as soldiers began to understand that something had changed. Without warning, the remaining skeer turned and fled to all points of the compass, some trampling more of Chertal’s troops as they ran, others hitting trees, some of which toppled. The two fallen skeer began to haul themselves brokenly away, crushing wounded men and women as they went. Soldiers finally stopped those two by driving spears into the most obvious of their eye sockets.

Chertal emerged, unsteady on his feet, armour running crimson. In one gauntleted hand he held an iron ball. He reached clear ground and thrust his prize aloft.

The cheering that followed was loud enough to drown out whatever he had to say but a pale shadow of what six thousand voices would sound like.

Livira hoped the ganars’ weapon would serve Chertal and his people well. Looking around at the few hundred still on their feet and the scattered survivors stumbling from the trees, it was clear that the cost had been ruinous.

“Come on.” Yolanda interposed herself between them and the king, stepping through the fallen. “We need to go.”

Livira had expected Carlotte to protest, or at the very least to drag out a dramatic leave-taking, but she hung her head and allowed herself to be led away.