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Anyone undertaking extensive travels should, like the nomad, carry the essential core of their existence with them. Be it a shrine, portrait, or simply a favoured stone. Without a centre the soul becomes unmoored and immune to the wonders of change.

The Eternal Tourist , by Halley Combit

Livira

“I don’t feel good.” Livira’s stomach had already threatened rebellion over the carnage that unfolded after King Chertal’s army ambushed the skeer patrol. Now though, something else added itself to her discomfort. They had flown a few miles over the forest to put additional space between themselves, the battlefield, and the night-ship. Without warning, the act of flying, which had been effortless, had become a burden.

“Livira?” Carlotte descended beside her.

“You’re crying.” Livira tried to distract herself from her own problems by focusing on Carlotte’s. “It was horrific. The fighting. We should all be crying after what we’ve seen…”

Carlotte wiped at red eyes. “We should. I should. But it wasn’t that. It’s Meelan. We’ve been busy the whole time since you got here. Now we’re leaving, it’s hit me. He won’t be there.”

Yolanda had dropped lower in Carlotte’s wake, bringing Leetar with her.

Carlotte noticed her. “Sorry.” Deferential, as if a friend’s grief should bow before that of a sister.

Leetar managed a weak smile, hair whipping around her face as if she weren’t a ghost and the wind of their passage could touch her. Belief, Livira noted, was a force of nature too.

“Brothers are strange things. We fought a lot, not all of it as children. And when we weren’t fighting, we really weren’t that interested in each other’s lives. But you can’t believe how much it hurt losing him.” She paused, momentary doubt on her pretty face. “For a trained diplomat I can say some stupid things.”

“Tell me about brothers.” Livira, still struggling to keep flying, needed something to think about other than the pull of the forest beneath them. “I never had one…” Leetar had been there, seen the canith family split between all three of the choices that Irad, Jaspeth, and Yute had laid before them. Evar would have come with her to save the library, she knew that. Kerrol went chasing Yute’s endless compromises. Mayland had stolen Evar away with Starval and Clovis to seek the library’s destruction. “And now we’re getting to the sharp end of things.” It wouldn’t be long before the bonds of Evar’s family were put to the test, set in the balance with ideals, conviction, ambition—every corrosive product of an intelligent mind and a wounded childhood. It was Livira’s family too, almost more real than the one that she’d been born into out on the Dust. Livira and Malar had raised Evar and his siblings, albeit behind masks the library had imposed on them. “Tell me about brothers.”

Leetar brushed a hand across her face, dragging aside the auburn spray of her hair, her expression that of someone grappling with too large a question. Just as Livira thought she wasn’t going to answer, Leetar shook her head and said, “They’ll always surprise you.”

Instead of asking further questions, Livira found herself on a downward trajectory, like an overambitious hawk that had taken off with prey clearly too large for its wingspan. “I…I need to rest.”

The treetops threatened, close enough to see individual branches, the flutter of leaves.

“Catch her!” Yolanda’s call from higher up.

Carlotte tried, but a moment later everything became a green blur, a rushing thicket of tree limbs, and then a sudden, jolting reunion with the ground, almost hard enough to convince Livira that she’d become something solid. She lay, cradled by the forest floor, groaning.

“What’s happened to her?” Carlotte demanded as Yolanda alighted with Leetar.

“I’m fine.” Livira forced herself into a sitting position.

“Something’s happening.” Yolanda offered Livira a small white hand to help her up.

Livira forced the sarcastic reply to stay on her tongue and let the surprisingly strong child heave her to her feet.

“There.” Yolanda nodded to where Livira had landed. To what Livira would have to admit was more of an impact site than any ghost had a right to make.

“What are those…” Livira peered at black lines that almost seemed like…

“Fissures,” Yolanda said. “Something is happening. Your book and the hole it keeps cutting through time has started to break the world.”

Livira dusted herself off, feeling heavy, slow, and rather bruised. “Well, get me back to it then, and maybe we can do something about it. I think—”

Carlotte’s shriek cut her off.

“What? What is it?” Leetar tried to stop Carlotte’s hopping dance of pain or distress.

“Something bit me!”

Yolanda went to where Carlotte had been standing. “There’s nothing here. Just this bush.” She waved a hand through its leaves and jerked it back with a yelp.

“Told you.” Carlotte shook Leetar off and hobbled back.

Livira turned away, distracted by the glimpse of a reflecting surface between the tree trunks. “Is that a…pool?”

“They moved!” Leetar said. “When you touched them. The leaves.”

Carlotte reached out gingerly, squealed, and snatched her hand back. “I can touch them!” She did it again. “I really can.” She buried both hands in the leaves. “I haven’t touched anything in years. I mean except me. And you three, just recently.” She moved her hands. “This is so weird.”

“There’s another one.” Livira pointed to a second pool. Then a third. The others ignored her, still discussing how they could all touch the bush that had “bitten” Carlotte.

Livira turned around, taking in their surroundings. Fragments of sky fingered in through the foliage, the sun absent now, hidden behind slate-grey clouds.

“We’re in the Exchange. Somehow.”

That got Yolanda’s attention. Pink eyes widened in recognition. “It shouldn’t be possible.”

“It wasn’t like this?” Carlotte turned from the bush and looked around too. She slapped a tree and examined its bark with fascination. “It wasn’t so wild?”

“It’s changed,” Livira agreed. And the Exchange was not a place that was given to change. She was sure of that. Change was a time-thing. And yet somehow, though it was different, it was also the same. She had been to this place before, she was sure of it. “What does it mean? Can anyone just wander in here now? What if the skeer find it?”

“It means that things are falling apart quicker than I thought possible,” Yolanda said. “I think the book is calling you back to it.”

“That’s a good thing?” Livira edged closer to the nearest pool, pushing the undergrowth aside with her feet. Brambles grappled at the hem of her robe.

“The closer you get the more you’ll accelerate the damage,” Yolanda said. “But also, it’s probably the only way to ensure that it stops. Though, if you make a mistake, that would be the end of everything.”

“A mistake? What exactly is it that I have to do?” Livira asked.

“I’ve no idea.”

“Are you sure this is the right pool?” Carlotte’s grip tightened. Already Livira’s bloodless fingers were heading towards the whiteness of Yolanda’s.

“There’s only one pool,” Livira murmured, seeing in her mind a faint, timeless recollection of a wild wood, a stream, a glowing sphere larger than she was. “There’s no pool…only the nexus.”

The water before them began to glow, lit from within by its own light.

“The nexus,” Yolanda agreed. “You’ve seen it?” A sharp look, her face made sinister by the shadows painted across it from below.

Livira nodded. “It doesn’t matter which pool. The book’s part of me. I’m part of it. It’s calling.”

The pool that wasn’t a pool flowed and rose and in the space of three moments became that same ball of radiance Livira had seen in the memories of her years as the Assistant.

“Touch it.” She reached out with the hand knotted with Carlotte’s and with the one knotted with Yolanda’s.

They touched it and were gone.

Livira stumbled into a cool white mist. For a moment she stood, blinking, her robe pulled tight around her. She wondered if she might be in some strange sort of in-between domain. An insubstantial, interstitial place.

“Where’s the girl gone? Yolo? I want to say she’s called Yolo.”

“Yolanda.” Livira turned to find Carlotte standing behind her, looking even colder than she felt. Behind Carlotte, the portal through which they’d come decorated a stone-block wall, the shimmer of its light lending a glow to the nearest fog.

“Where’s Leetar?” Carlotte started off into the mist.

Livira caught her arm. She could see the ground beneath their feet, brick-paved, and literally nothing else save the wall behind them. “Maybe we should wait.”

Carlotte stamped on the floor. “It’s solid! Let’s go and see what else we can touch! Maybe they’ll have food…”

“We can’t just lose ourselves in all this.” Livira waved her free hand at the dampness. “Yolanda and Leetar will never find us.”

Carlotte shrugged. “That creepy girl can take care of herself. She’ll be invisible in this stuff in any case. And Leetar…I’m sorry, I know you like her, and she’s Meelan’s sister and everything, but yawn. Even her family weren’t rich enough to buy her a personality. I mean—” She broke off, noticing how Livira was looking at her. “They’re standing right behind me, aren’t they?”

Livira was sorely tempted to say yes. “Yes.”

Carlotte spun round to face the empty mist. “Oh, you bitch!”

“Even if I didn’t like her, and I do a bit, and even if she was boring, which she might be, we can’t just aband— Stop it. They aren’t standing behind me.”

Carlotte continued to stare wide-eyed at the mist over Livira’s shoulder for a few more moments, then gave it up. “All right, we can wait a little while. But not long. I haven’t eaten in years, and I’m hungry!”

Livira retreated to the portal, wondering if she should go back and where it might take her. A sudden thought hit her. “You didn’t let go of Leetar’s hand, did you?”

“No!” Carlotte looked shocked. Livira couldn’t tell if it was fake shock or the real thing. “It did get kind of rough in there though!”

“It did?” Livira had been stepping into the light one instant, stumbling from the portal the next.

“It did.”

The sound of people approaching forestalled any further discussion. Male voices, raised in heated debate, both loud and strangely muffled.

“We should move,” Carlotte said. “Quickly.”

“Why?” Livira had come to find her book, which might prove difficult without speaking to anyone or even being seen.

“Do you know what the local punishment for witchcraft is?” Carlotte asked. “In my city they just threw them off the plateau, and I always said that was stupid because if they really were witches, they might be able to fly.”

“I don’t see—”

Carlotte thrust a pointing finger towards the glowing portal.

“We should move.”

Ten yards proved sufficient, even with her vision extending not much further than the reach of her arm, to tell Livira she was in a city. She stumbled over a kerb, stepped in a wet gutter, and slipped in something nameless. They passed a doorway then a window holding a span of remarkably flat glass, and then another doorway between windows of a more familiar sort through which warm light spilled. She smelled ale, and the chant of a rowdy song challenged the fog.

“In here!” Carlotte reached for the door. “Maybe they have food!”

Much as she shared Carlotte’s desire to plunge into some warm place and be fed, they had no money, no idea where they were, and no plan. “Not here. Somewhere quiet.”

Carlotte looked ready to argue, but behind them the approaching men seemed to have missed the existence of the portal entirely and were still at their heels. Two tall figures loomed through the glowing mist.

“Quickly!” Livira pushed Carlotte onwards.

They passed two more shops. From one hanging sign Livira read, Markam Makram’s Fine Folios . “Bookshops?” She glimpsed the answer through the window of the next: well-stacked shelves inviting inspection.

“This way?” Carlotte paused at a corner and turned to face the side street. “We might find a meal more easily somewhere less educational.”

Livira glanced back. The pursuit, if it had been a pursuit, seemed to have ended. The men might have been diverted into the tavern. She peered down the street Carlotte had chosen, and after a moment of indecision, nodded. “This way.”