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Studies indicate much lower rates of rollercoaster riding in countries where people frequently experience mortal fear involuntarily.

Compulsory Carnival , by Evie Wong

Evar

Falling, Evar discovered, was every bit as terrifying as he had imagined it would be when Livira had taught him to fly. Instinct tensed his everything as he dropped through the far-too-penetrable dark. Aeons had constructed the canith body to expect the sensation of falling to end swiftly and painfully. When, after the first scream had emptied his lungs, Evar found himself still plummeting, further acceleration opposed by the great rushing wind of his already fatally fast descent, he started, ever so slowly, to unclench.

He still had hold of Starval’s hand, but the roar of air passing around and between them made any communication impossible. Slowly, it began to be the unaccustomed darkness that most unnerved Evar. Until his recent escape from the library, he had never experienced a night, and only in the tunnels beneath the plateau had the darkness thickened to something like what now wrapped him.

It seemed bizarre that it was possible to get bored of falling, but Evar found his fear of a sudden end to what had felt like a short trip was being replaced by the worry that there wasn’t going to be an end to it at all.

“I—”

A sudden jolt cut off his first attempt to complain. A jolt, a twist, flashes of light, and he ended up sprawled across something more forgiving than the library floor, with a mouthful of grass.

Evar rolled to all fours, spitting, ready to fight. The Exchange lay all around him. Clovis had fetched up against a tree and had some sharp complaints about the situation. Arpix lay dazed, his legs still in the pool they all appeared to have been spat from. Mayland was getting to his feet.

“…what in the hel—” Starval dropped from a nearby tree, followed by a shower of leaves.

Evar went to help Arpix up.

“Something’s different.”

Now that Arpix mentioned it, Evar saw that he was right. The sky, that had always been a timeless blue, had turned an ominous shade of grey. And a chill breeze had insinuated itself among the trees, twitching at the leaves. To Evar it seemed a wound more grievous than cracks in the library floor, like the one they’d dropped into. The Exchange had always filled him with a kind of peace, a muted joy, the sort of contentment that had made him want to sink roots too and remain a part of the place. Now, it felt wrong, like a song sung off-key.

“I didn’t think we’d end up here.” Starval brushed leaves off his leathers.

“I brought us here.” Mayland wasn’t looking at any of them, but staring up at the branches, turning slowly as if he might be hunting for the sun.

“This pool should take us back to where we came from,” Arpix was explaining to Clovis, whose ventures into the Exchange had been limited to two brief excursions, on one of which she’d made a spirited effort to kill Livira. “Though, since we came from a crack in the ground…I’m not really sure.” He pointed along the row. “If I’ve got my bearings right, that’s the future, and the past is back there.” He indicated the pools marching off to his left. “And each of the parallel rows is another world, I believe. Each with their own past and future pools.” He glanced towards Mayland. Evar guessed that the human had a list of questions as long as his arm, but was naturally hesitant to engage with the canith who had murdered the head of the librarians’ order in this very place.

“So, where has this damn book gone?” Clovis asked the question of nobody in particular while removing a piece of bark from her mane.

“There are lots of pools to choose from…” Evar rolled his neck. As much as he hated to be dependent on Mayland, it seemed that without his brother their chances of finding either the book or Livira were essentially zero.

“It’s not in any of these.” Mayland continued his study of the branches as if Oanold and the stolen book might be hiding in a tree.

Arpix couldn’t restrain himself any longer. “You appear to have ruled out all of space and time. Where else do you suggest we look?”

By way of reply, Mayland waved a hand and somehow the action divided Evar’s vision. Every tree became two overlapping images of a tree, pulling slowly apart from one another. As the distance between them grew, each image doubled again and the speed with which they were parting company increased. The gaps widened, the doubling happened again, the speed increased.

Within the span of a few heartbeats a great stack of identical Exchanges layered the space above them, ghostly and translucent, and with some sense unconnected to his eyes, Evar knew that the layers repeated below them too.

“Time and space.” Mayland encompassed their surroundings with a sweep of his arm. “Possibility.” He pointed upwards. “May have beens, might have beens, must have beens. In short: alternatives. That’s where the book fell.”

“How do we get up there?” Evar didn’t care about the wriggling of time. He cared about how he felt, and he felt that each hour he wasted was an hour in which Livira faced dangers without him. To his mind and body, the conviction was as real as the falling had been once he’d dropped into the crack, but unlike the plunge, the shock of it wasn’t wearing off the longer it went on.

“It’s more a question of where we want to get to.” Mayland began to climb steps that weren’t there, rising towards the first of the perhaps infinite layers.

“Wait!” Evar tried to follow. “How are you doing that? Wait!”

Mayland glanced back, irritated. “I doubt any of you who can’t work out how to follow me are going to be much use.”

“I wasn’t aware that being useful was a necessary qualification for being part of our family,” Evar found himself scolding. “Go on then, you’ve walked away from us all before.”

Mayland continued his ascent, without looking back. “We’re not a family, we’re a chance alignment.”

“That’s all any family is!” Evar shouted.

Mayland stopped. Dark and curiously grim eyes found Evar’s. He drew a deep breath, and said, “Brother, you really would be better off walking away from this. Staying here. Doing anything else. But if you really must come, then just climb the stairs.”

“What stairs?”

But Arpix, stepping into thin air and elevating himself to Evar’s height, answered the question. “It’s a state of mind. I think it’s a visual metaphor for ascent of some kind.”

“Huh?” Clovis tested the air around Arpix with her foot, finding nothing.

“Up here.” Arpix turned slowly and touched between his eyes. “Look at me.” He took both Clovis’s hands in his. “You need to want to follow me.”

“I guess hunting is a type of following.” Clovis grinned.

As Arpix climbed the invisible stairway backwards, leading Clovis up, it seemed to Evar not dissimilar to the way that Livira had taught him to fly. Arpix appeared most confident as a teacher, and Clovis, eager to learn, rose from the ground, her steps mirroring his.

With an effort, Evar calmed himself, focused only on the next layer of the Exchange, until it seemed almost solid, and without looking at his feet, began to climb the stairs that weren’t there.

“Well, this isn’t right,” Starval complained behind them. “I’m the one who’s great at climbing. Never met anything I can’t climb, except the library walls. And I still haven’t. There’s not a damn thing here to climb.”

“Just pretend there is,” Evar said. “If growing up in a library doesn’t equip you for pretending then I don’t know what would.”

Starval raised a foot and with great deliberation set it back down, passing through any invisible step that might be there on the way. “Damn it!”

Mayland looked back. “You know why you’re still down there, brother. It’s a matter of commitment. You know what I’ve asked of you and why it must be done. If you have the courage of your convictions, step up.”

Starval locked eyes with Mayland, a bleak stare. It had in it something of the look his eyes used to hold on emerging from the Mechanism after a long day of imaginary death dealing, plying the trade for which he’d trained so long. “Damn you, Mayland.” Once more he took the step, and this time, he rose.

They climbed through several dozen layers before Mayland halted, jumped down, and set his feet squarely on grass which in that moment became as real as the grass they’d left behind. The trees, the pools—it was the Exchange as Evar had always known it, but with a greyer sky and a cool whisper of a breeze. The malady that had changed the Exchange they left behind was present in this alternative but to a lesser extent.

“So, all we need to do is find this king and take the book off him?” Clovis looked around her. “And everything can go back to how it was?”

“It’s easier to poison a well than purify it.” Starval patted the nearest tree as if uncertain whether it could be trusted.

“I don’t intend for anything to go back to how it was, sister.” Mayland narrowed his eyes. “We’re here because I don’t trust that venal human to finish the job Evar and Livira started and Arpix helped along recently in grand style.”

“How do you even know about Oanold?” Arpix asked, still wincing at the praise he’d received for unwittingly destroying the Mechanism.

Mayland started a slow walk along the nearest timeline, pausing by each pool. “Starval and I have done quite a bit of spying. Once I realised what Evar and his human were making, I needed to understand all the factors at play so I could manipulate events should they go off course.”

“I don’t understand why you even needed us,” Evar growled. “Couldn’t you just write your own book or whatever?”

“It’s a complicated knot you two tied through time. It’s written into our lives. Fated, if you like. Something I could take advantage of once I became aware of its existence, but not a thing I could craft myself. In any event, completing a work like this needs vision. And Arpix’s little king can’t see past his own greed. Besides, given the manner of his arrival and the level of his ignorance, he may well have spread himself across dozens of alternatives. This one is just my best bet. And in each alternative he will, most likely, have fallen into himself. We’re not looking for Arpix’s Oanold. We’re looking for whatever he was in this alternative.” Mayland pointed at the pool just ahead of them. “Let’s just hope he didn’t land hard enough to scatter, or if he did, that at least the book will be here.”

And then, as if what he’d said made sense or was in any way enough to equip them for what lay ahead, Mayland reached out an open hand to Starval and to Clovis. Evar took Starval’s hand and Arpix Clovis’s.

“Ready?”

Evar swallowed his “no.” Livira was out there, and her book was the key he needed to unlock whatever doors stood between them.

“How do we stop ourselves from doing the same thing as Oanold?” Arpix asked. “The fragmenting thing, and the falling-into-ourselves thing. We’re not going to be any use if we forget who we are and why we’re there.”

“Focus on who you are and why you’re going,” Mayland said. “If you smear out across possibilities, that’s not such a problem. You can search them too. Staying yourself is the key. Using the Exchange should ensure that, but these are strange days. Any other questions?” He looked left then right.

Receiving no answer from any of them, Mayland stepped forward, and the waters took them.

“Where are we?” A twisting jolting rush had filled Evar’s eyes and mind with unimaginable colour, only to leave him stumbling into a dimly lit somewhere, blinking to clear his vision of shades he would never be able to remember.

“It looks like a rather poor copy of the library.” Starval’s whisper reminded Evar that stealth might be a sensible precaution.

They were in a chamber whose ceiling was almost low enough to touch and whose walls were scarcely more than ten yards apart. The bookshelves that filled the place were so short that simply by lifting up on his toes Evar could peer across their tops. Large windows at the front of the chamber should have filled the place with light, but the space beyond them was grey and featureless.

Evar seemed to have emerged from a portal rather than a pool, a shimmering circle of light drawn on the chamber’s rear wall. “Where’s Arpix?” Evar spun around. “Where’s Clovis? Where in all the hells is Mayland, come to that?”

“I lost hold of them.” Starval moved out slowly among the shelves. “Hopefully Mayland’s nearby.”

“Hopefully they all are.” Evar reached for Starval’s arm. “We could go back. Look for them.”

Starval shook his head. “They came through. We’ll find them here. And it’s not like Clovis and Mayland can’t look after themselves. We’re the ones that need saving now they’re gone.”

Evar frowned, looked back at the portal, shrugged, and branched off into a different aisle to Starval’s.

Evar’s path brought him to the front of the chamber ahead of his brother. His surprise at finding a counter there with a balding human behind it, reading a book, was matched only by the man’s at seeing Evar emerging from the aisles.

The man blinked several times, glanced down at his book, rubbed his eyes, and set the volume on the polished surface before him. “I could have sworn the shop was empty.” He rubbed his eyes again, wrinkling the pouchy skin of his face, before smiling. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

Evar inspected his empty hands. “Not yet, I’m searching for a very rare book, by Livira Page.”

“Never tell a shopkeeper that what you’re looking for is rare, my friend.” The man stood from his stool. “Maybe Inistren has it. He specialises in rarities. Five doors down on the left.”

“This is a shop?” Evar asked.

“Of course it is.” Starval came up behind him, setting a hand on his shoulder. “A bookshop.” He turned to the bemused shopkeeper. “Thank you for finding him. My apologies, sir, sometimes our brother wanders.” And Starval steered Evar to the street door.

“Are there any more of you back there?” The man peered towards the shelves.

“Just us.” Starval reached for the door handle.

“Careful.” Evar pulled back. “Looks like a dust storm out there.” He had encountered two dust storms whilst on the Arthran Plateau, and both had been deeply unpleasant.

“Wasn’t it foggy when you came in?” The man looked puzzled. “Rolled in from Lake Cantoo before dawn, I thought.” His frown deepened.

Starval laughed and tapped the side of his head. “Dust storm! My brother’s imagination sometimes carries him away.”

A moment later they were out in the cold, grey damp with the shop bell tinkling behind them. Evar shook his brother off. “I’m not an idiot.”

“You should stop acting like one then.”

“It looked like a dust storm!”

“To someone who hasn’t seen any other type of weather.” Starval hunched against the chill, tiny droplets of water already gathering on his dark fur.

“Should we try this other shop?” Evar looked both ways down the street. He couldn’t see much, just the grey shapes of people walking before the fog swallowed them, and a few hanging signs above what he assumed were other shops. Bookshops possibly.

“We need to get a better understanding of the place,” Starval said. “I doubt we’ll find what we need in a bookshop. Better to look for trouble. Wherever it is, the book is going to be making waves of some sort.”

“Won’t that man back there end up wandering into the Exchange and causing more problems? We left a big sparkly door in his shop.” Evar could already see the shopkeeper through the windows, advancing into the ordered ranks of his own shelves with the caution of a man expecting to discover something entirely new. “And why did he seem more surprised that we’d got into his shop without him noticing than by the fact we’re canith? Most humans I’ve met either want to run away screaming or to kill me.”

“It’s that thing the Exchange does,” Starval answered, still eyeing the unyielding greyness for threats. “The effect carries over when you come through a door, even when you’ve not gone back to the past. Only lasts a few hours. Anyone that looks at us will see something close to what they expect to see. Also, they’ll understand us, and we’ll understand them. Once it wears off, things can get tricky.” With that, he headed off into the fog, and with a last glance back, trying to fix the shop front into his memory, Evar followed.

“You sound like an old hand at this sort of thing.”

Starval shrugged. “I may have been away longer than you think. Not as long as Mayland, though. He’s very definitely the elder brother now.”

“How long?” Evar hadn’t really considered the possibility. Since Mayland and Starval vanished in the Exchange after Mayland killed Yute’s wife it seemed that a couple of weeks might have passed. Certainly not more than a month. A lot of things had happened, but somewhere between a week and two weeks felt right.

“It’s hard to tell when you’re on the move. Maybe a year. More perhaps. Mayland’s plans have a lot of moving parts. We spent a lot of time oiling the wheels. Not everything paid off but—”

“You seem pretty committed to it then.” Evar lowered his voice as if someone—Mayland maybe, even if he wasn’t there—might overhear them. He returned to his normal tone, feeling foolish. “Committed to destroying the library? You’ve put a lot of effort into it.”

Starval shrugged. “What’s an assassin if not an agent of change? Besides, it’s been nice to be needed for once.”

“I…” Evar was going to say he needed Starval but opted not to insult his intelligence. Starval and Clovis had both, by a combination of chance and inclination, made weapons of themselves. Evar, though he’d dedicated himself to getting them out of that chamber, had at the same time hoped that neither would ever have cause or opportunity to put their skills to use. Things had not worked out as he hoped. “Is every shop on this street a bookshop?”

“Seems that way.” Starval reached up and set the nearest sign swinging. Manenoth’s Grimoires . “This, however…” He slowed in front of the next set of windows, whose panes were smaller, squares of puddle glass that distorted the warm glow from within and muted the faint refrain of a song. “…seems to be a tavern.” He advanced to the door, a heavy slab of oak with iron studs across its length.

“A tavern?” Evar hesitated. “Isn’t that where people break barstools over each other’s heads?”

“Only in books.” Starval wiped the wetness from his mane. “Besides, we’re on a street full of bookshops. It’s going to be full of readers. How bad could it be?”