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The horror of hunger is not how completely it strips away humanity—one pain will do that as well as another. The horror is that it happens slowly enough for us to see it go, a strand at a time, until that ugly, mewling appetite lies naked for all to see.

Intermediate Cookery—Cajun Style , by Gordon Bennett

Arpix

Arpix managed to restrain himself and not run to join the queue for the fruits of Celcha’s magics. He told himself that waiting was the civilised thing to do, that he had waited this long to eat and could easily wait a little longer. Even so, had the ganar’s flask been even a touch smaller, Arpix suspected he would have been amongst the crowd of half-starved soldiers, scrabbling for his own bite.

The first of the soldiers, though they might have requested roast beef, fresh bread, or anything else their imagination could summon, asked instead for water. Celcha dripped the library’s blood and where each drop fell, a brimming bucket stood. The sight of soldiers quenching their long thirst and wiping the grime from their faces with wet hands was nearly enough to break Arpix’s reserve. He could somehow smell the water—though he’d been sure that water held no scent—and it was enough to wake the awful thirst that had been building ever since his return to the library.

Clovis held back too, saying that she wouldn’t lower herself by standing in line with the troops. Arpix suspected that she would actually have relished fighting for food, but to stand behind the soldiers who had slaughtered her people was more than she could stomach. Violence would be only a sneer away.

In time, the queue shrank to just two of the civilians who had until recently been the soldiers’ prisoners and prey, just as Arpix had. He stood behind the last of them, and after helping himself to water he asked Celcha if he might have a plate of butter cookies, the ones he remembered from Salamonda’s kitchen and that had haunted his dreams across five hungry years on the Arthran Plateau. The ganar took his hand and let another drop of the blood fall, tilting the flask further than she had at the start. And there, in his open hand, on a glazed earthenware plate, were eight golden, buttery cookies, as perfect as he had ever imagined.

Arpix was so astonished, despite seeing the miracle dozens of times already, that he promptly dropped the plate with a despairing cry.

Clovis caught it. So fast. So fluid. So sure, that she took his breath away. She raised the plate, its precious burden still in place. “Yours.”

“Do you— Would you like one? Some?” He received the plate in hands that trembled just as much as Salamonda’s had, his mouth full of saliva, his stomach a hard and demanding knot.

Clovis sniffed the plate, inhaling so deeply that Arpix half expected the topmost cookies to start lifting towards her nose.

“You keep them. I’ll have mine.” She stepped forward, towering above Celcha. “Steak. Please.”

For far too short a time Arpix lost himself in an ecstasy of eating. He filled his mouth, shuddered with pleasure, remembered to chew, swallowed, filled his mouth. His resolution to pace himself joined the one about keeping some for later, in the graveyard of good intentions.

At last he looked up, wiping crumbs from his mouth with one hand while holding his belly with the other. Clovis had already devoured her steak, whose merits she had either read about or picked up from her brothers and was licking her teeth with enormous satisfaction. The gaze she turned on him was accompanied by a half-smile. A smile that suggested she still had appetites to be met.

With their hunger dented, the canith and Arpix grouped together while Celcha led on, bound for the door by which the ganar automaton had entered. Salamonda and Neera came to join them, Salamonda walking boldly up among the towering canith and giving Arpix a rib-creaking hug, while Neera hung back, still nervous.

“You saved us all,” Salamonda said, her face pressed into Arpix’s chest. “I don’t know how, and I’m happy keeping it that way. But it was you.”

Arpix didn’t try to deny it, although the result had been somewhat cataclysmic, and only luck had prevented Salamonda from tumbling into the cracks that spread from the destruction of the Mechanism. Slowly, he freed himself from the old woman’s embrace. Over the course of their years on the Arthran Plateau, Salamonda had provided Arpix with more mothering than his own loving but undemonstrative mother had managed in the twenty years prior to their stranding. In consequence, he bore the current attentions without complaint until the soldiers coming up behind encouraged them both to move.

Clovis eyed Salamonda’s hugging without comment, showing her teeth to Neera, who fell back three more paces. Arpix threw Clovis an admonishing glance and beckoned Neera to join them. His gaze lingered on the shabby line of Oanold’s troops following the ganar, the gift-giver, source of their food. None of them that he had noticed had asked for meat of any kind. It seemed impossible that these men and women, now exchanging grins of relief at being fed and watered, and perhaps at having the burden of the king’s authority removed from their shoulders, were the same who had literally been eating their fellow citizens alive not much more than a day previously. How long after the dust and blood were washed from their hands and faces would their crimes continue to stain them? Would they forgive themselves, forget, move on with their lives, settle, marry, produce children? As if they had not been monsters. As if the horrors behind them belonged to strangers. Perhaps, having taken on the skins of ogres all together rather than singularly would make it easier to shed them and walk away. A shared offence, owned by nobody.

Arpix found it hard to imagine that he would forgive them. But also, that he might live among them for years to come and somehow maintain this level of…was it hate he felt? Arpix didn’t think he had ever hated before. It felt like sorrow, but with the knives turned in every direction, not merely inwards. He didn’t like it. He should, he thought, find a way to leave the soldiers behind, though they constituted the bulk of the survivors. Without the uniforms only their relative youth would mark them out among the others who escaped the city.

“You think too much.” Clovis took his hand and pulled him along, keeping pace with the others.

“Perhaps I do.”

“You hate them too.” Clovis motioned with her head to indicate those behind them, not looking back.

“Everything about what happened makes me sad.” Arpix couldn’t deny what she’d said. “At least you can tell yourself they’re a different species. To me, they’re a mirror. They’re telling me that something’s rotten at the core. This cycle Jaspeth says the library binds us to. The reason Mayland wants to destroy it…It’s not the library, it’s us. It’s humans.” He looked at the hand Clovis hadn’t taken control of. “It’s me.” Their eyes met, hers large and grey, his feeling like small, hot beads, prickling in their sockets, insufficient windows onto an insufficient soul.

Clovis didn’t answer, but her grip tightened on his hand, and she chewed at something, as if finding every answer she had unsuited to the task. “Not just humans.”

It was all she had to say. And perhaps it was all there was to say. No species came to the fore without having emerged through an epic struggle of tooth and claw. Nature put its creations through a constant meat grinder, and nothing survived that was not prepared to do anything to cling to its existence. Anything at all. Every hand that ever wrote out words was driven by an intelligence born of war, and instincts shaped to win at all costs. The hope that they could rise above such things was only that, a hope, fragile and apt to tear apart in the winds of any challenge.

“How are we going to find her?” Evar’s voice, up ahead, pulled Arpix from his gloomy philosophizing.

“We’re going to find the book,” Mayland replied. “It would be better if we didn’t find your human with it.”

Starval, an unlikely peacemaker, interjected over Evar’s hot reply, “Nobody is going to harm Livira, and finding her book might be a big step towards finding her.” The assassin pushed between his brothers, both a head taller than him. “So how do we take that step, Mayland?”

“Well, that’s obvious enough, isn’t it?” Mayland ran a three-fingered hand up across his face and into his mane. Arpix still found canith expressions hard to read, but it seemed to him that Mayland looked tired, the confidence in his words not mirrored in his face.

“Indulge me.” Starval reached up to sling an arm around Mayland’s shoulders.

“We go into the cracks the book fell into.”

“What?” Evar turned back. “The cracks we’ve been walking away from ever since we got here?”

Mayland shrugged. “I was hungry.”

Evar stepped threateningly towards him.

“And you do know how time works here, brother?” Mayland shook off Starval’s arm. “If we get there we’ll arrive when we need to.”

“If?” Evar asked.

“If,” Mayland confirmed. “We’ll be heading into a wound that the library is trying to heal. It will be…dangerous.”

Evar turned and started to stride back in the direction they’d come. The soldiers fell quiet as he approached and parted before him, falling away to either side, revealing Lord Algar seemingly stranded by his pride with no one save two of his personal guards to back him up. It seemed that Evar would pass him by without a word. And he almost did. But at the last moment, and quicker than the eye, he sent the lord reeling away with a backhanded slap.

“Ha!” Clovis barked a laugh.

Algar’s retainers prevented him from falling, and he covered his bloody mouth with both hands. Clearly Evar had exercised restraint. A full-grown canith could easily break a man’s neck with such a blow. But even Evar’s good nature had its limits, it seemed. And Arpix couldn’t find it in his heart to blame him.

Starval followed, nodding to himself. “Seems like we know how far Celcha’s peace extends. Slapping’s allowed.”

Whether it was just his snarls or that they caught some of his meaning, the soldiers moved back rapidly from Starval’s approach. Mayland strode after him.

“Come on.” Clovis pulled Arpix’s hand.

Arpix glanced from Salamonda to Neera. “You have to stay with Celcha and the others. She’ll look after you.”

“We’re coming!” Salamonda bristled.

“Really, no.” Arpix used every ounce of the authority his companions had slowly heaped on his shoulders during the Arthran years, despite his protests. “I’ll bring Livira and the others back. We’ll find you. I promise I’ll do everything in my power to make that happen. But you can’t follow.”

And as Clovis followed her family with Arpix in tow, Salamonda and Neera stayed.

The canith and Arpix moved swiftly back along the route they’d taken.

“What is it?” Clovis asked when Arpix glanced back for the third time. “You saw those cowards. They won’t follow us.”

“Not that,” Arpix growled back. He hadn’t been thinking any soldiers might come seeking revenge. “It’s Algar. The man Evar hit. I feel as if we’ve left a poison seed in Celcha’s charge. I worry what’s going to have grown by the time we come back.” He had more to say but didn’t say it. What really worried him was not the idea that Lord Algar might somehow overpower Celcha, an individual with magics that seemed nearly equal to those of Irad and Jaspeth themselves. His concerns remained wider and more ephemeral. It helped him to believe that Algar was in truth a poison seed—a corruptor who through special talent and unique evil had pulled others under his sway and led them into the horrors that had followed. What truly worried Arpix was the possibility that Algar was nothing special, and that if it hadn’t been him, someone else would have stepped up to lead the mob to the same destination.

“You’re doing it again,” Clovis said.

“What?”

“You know.”

“I promise to stop thinking too much,” Arpix lied.

“Liar.”

“Stop!” Evar held up a hand.

Arpix and the others backed in the direction he next indicated.

“What is it?” Starval held a blade in each hand.

The library answered him. A crack advanced across the floor, accompanied by a deep, barely audible creaking. The leading edge moved in short bursts, its progress slower than a man walking. Behind the front edge, the sides of the crack continued to retreat from one another, much more slowly but still fast enough that before Arpix lost sight of it among the book columns, the fissure was wide enough to accept his fingers if he cared to offer them.

“It’s spreading,” Starval said, rather redundantly.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Evar turned to Mayland. “Isn’t your job done? You should just leave.”

“This is a wound. It might yet heal. We have to get to the book and ensure that it continues the destruction. If we just leave it, the damage might be limited and localized.” Mayland led on, tracking the crack back towards its source.

“You don’t want to destroy the library,” Arpix hissed at Clovis as they followed. “Do you?”

“I haven’t decided.” Clovis kept her gaze forward. “It’s complicated. I think I have a brother in each camp now. Evar’s sided with his Livira and the strange little girl, trying to save the place. Mayland’s trying to tear it down. Kerrol went with Yute to find another way.” A long pause. Arpix could feel Evar and Starval listening hard whilst trying to look as if they weren’t. “And what about Arpix?” she asked casually.

Arpix would have bet on himself to be on the side of the library every time. Now though it seemed that Clovis was right. It was complicated. He was on the side of books, of writing, of stories and histories, the recording of wisdom and discoveries. But the manner of its distribution…the bricks and mortar of it…the library? “I’m with you,” he said at last.

By the time they reached the entrance to the reading room, the crack had grown large enough to accommodate a canith with a little elbow room to spare. Arpix couldn’t resist looking into the fissure periodically. The thing drew his attention, holding the same fascination as a long drop, though there were no depths to be seen, only blackness and the occasional ghostly image, as if his imagination was patterning itself into the dark that dwelt there.

The crack didn’t follow the corridor but forged its own way through the wall, a tear that reached up at least five yards. However, other cracks had spread along the corridor from the reading room, crossing it in several places, intersecting, and emerging to finger their way through the book columns, some of which hung at angles, their footing removed.

“Do we really need to go down there?” Arpix eyed the corridor dubiously.

“What we really need to go down is one of these.” Mayland pointed to the crack they’d been following. “We just needed it to get wider. This will do.” Again, despite the confident depth of the canith’s growling, there was a twitchiness about him that did nothing to set Arpix at ease. Not that there was much that could set him at ease about dropping into a bottomless chasm filled with midnight and ghosts.

“How do we do it?” Evar was already at the edge of the crack, peering into it, eager, or at least determined, to begin his hunt for Livira.

Mayland’s shoulders slumped. He sat on the library floor. “We need to go in together. Holding hands.”

All five of them sat in a line, Arpix at one end, holding Clovis’s hand. Their advance towards the crack was undignified. If not for the plunge ahead of them, Arpix would have found it comical. One human and four canith shuffling forward on their backsides. Clovis’s grip on his hand tightened to the point where it hurt. Arpix didn’t complain. He’d rather end up with broken fingers than lost in the dark on his own.

“Don’t put your feet in yet,” Mayland cautioned as they closed the last yard. “Something might grab them. We go together. On my count. Five. Four.”

“Are we going on one or zero?” Arpix had no more desire to stick his legs into the crack than into an open fire.

“Three. Two.”

“Are we—”

“One.”

“Now?”

“Go!”

Arpix pushed his legs over the side, ready to wriggle forward for the drop. He didn’t need to. The drop seized him, and he was gone.