Page 31

No insurrection will ever succeed without angry people. Fortunately, nobody ever seizes power without angering anyone.

The Unicycle of Violence , by Maximus Macrinus

Livira

“What was that?”

Before Livira could answer, it came again, a blow struck from beneath, as if some buried leviathan were testing its bonds. A blow that made the bedrock shudder, throwing Livira to the ground and setting every rooftile rattling.

“Earthquake?” suggested Carlotte, who had already reached for the support of the wall. Her answer was one that few who hadn’t trained at the library would think of. Their homeland had never evidenced such tremors. “Earthquake” wasn’t part of the local vocabulary.

A third shock, like the tolling of some great bell far beneath the sea, and then nothing.

“Well, that was odd.” Carlotte released the wall, somewhat self-consciously despite the enfolding mist.

Livira, frowning, picked herself off the ground. She seemed to have been treated more roughly than Carlotte, who in turn had been more shaken than the buildings. “It was familiar.”

“Tell me about it over lunch.” Carlotte moved on down the street. “Or dinner, or breakfast, whatever damned time of day it is. I—just—want—to—eat!”

Livira followed her. “I felt it in the library. That same sensation. When my book hit the floor and cracked it.”

That made Carlotte pause and turn. “Cracked it? The library floor? Your little book?”

“Yes.”

“You think Oanold’s dropped it?” Carlotte looked doubtful.

“I don’t know.” Livira felt suddenly uneasy, not wanting to talk about her book and the damage it seemed to be wreaking. “Let’s keep going.”

They pressed on through the streets, Carlotte and her hunger leading the way. Her appetite appeared to be too lazy to climb the slope on which the city had been built, instead following the gradient at each opportunity like spilled milk. Rather than thinning, the mist thickened about them, something Livira hadn’t thought possible. People who passed close by were never more than shadows in the surrounding greyness.

“We could ask someone where we are,” Livira suggested. They were definitely in a city.

“They might toss us in jail.” Carlotte led the way down a flight of worn stairs between two tall, grimy buildings. “As foreign spies or some such. I want to eat…Godsdammit, does this murky piece-of-shit city only have one damn tavern for the entire populace? I’ve half a mind to turn round and go back to…what was it? The Stained Page?”

Reaching the last step, she followed the nearest wall, sniffing as though by relying on her nose she might hunt out the meal she was so desperate for.

“We should be looking for Yolanda and Leetar,” Livira complained.

“We’re as likely to find them at a table eating a good meal as wandering blind in this stuff.” Livira picked up the pace. “More likely, if they’ve any sense.”

Without warning, a full-grown canith loomed at them out of the fog. Livira let out a yelp of surprise, but that was as nothing compared to Carlotte’s reaction. She took to her heels, shrieking as loudly as she would if she’d been grabbed and bitten.

Livira set off after her, not wanting to lose her in the mist.

“I do beg your pardon…” The canith’s parting words, at once apologetic and somewhat startled, chased her as she ran.

Livira followed the sound of running feet and shouted for Carlotte to stop. After about a hundred yards she did, though Livira couldn’t say whether it was her shouts that had brought her to a halt, or the hanging sign and the warm light spilling through puddle-glass windows challenging the weather.

“Heaven’s Gate.” Livira read from the greying board above them. The faded illustration might have been a fist clutching a tankard, or two frogs fighting. “It doesn’t look very heavenly.” One of the windowpanes had been replaced with a piece of wood, and the drinkers hunched over the tables inside did not look to be in paradise. “Maybe it’s called that because people say they’d die before they ate here.”

“If I don’t eat something immediately, I’ll die right now.” Carlotte shoved the door open and went in.

Livira followed her, muttering, “Out-of-towners coming through, please rob us…”

The tavern resembled a cave, being low-ceilinged and dimly lit. The patrons seemed mainly to be labourers, perhaps a market stall keeper or two, ruffians who hustled a mean existence out on the streets, and by the stink of a shabby hulk near the door, a night-soil man. There were canith too, sharing the squalor: by the empty fireplace an older female, bone-thin, sucking on a pipe whose smoke competed with the fellow by the entrance for the title of stinkiest thing in the place.

Carlotte, who on any of the non-ghost days that Livira had known her, would have turned on a heel and walked back into the street retching, ploughed on, making for the bar. Livira followed. It was the sort of place her people would have come to, exhausted after a day of whatever Crath City had demanded of them. She could imagine Acmar and Benth here, bent over a table, nursing an ale, Acmar smeared with the dirt from whatever road he’d been digging, Benth’s leathers scorched from the blazing iron in the foundry that had claimed his life so long ago.

“Two bowls of something hot. And bread. And butter.” Carlotte had reached the bar and slapped down several coins that she must have kept through the years since she’d fled her burning city. “And then two more bowls of the same stuff and some more bread. And more butter. And if it gets to my table really fast, I’ll pay double.” She lifted a silver crown. “How many beers will one of these pay for?”

The red-faced barman took the coin and squinted at it, eyes widening. Livira would have been surprised if the man hadn’t been surprised. However far away he imagined the silver piece to have come from, its true journey was much much longer and stranger. “About fifty.” He paused then added, “Ma’am.”

Some of Chertal’s imperial ways had rubbed off on Carlotte. “Free drinks for everyone until it runs out!”

The resulting rush solved the problem of securing a table. The meal arrived at breakneck speed, and although basic, the magic of an empty stomach worked its culinary wonders. For quite some time Carlotte and Livira ignored everything around them, including each other, and concentrated on eating. When Livira did eventually surface from her second bowl of stew, it wasn’t any of the more animated chatter around her that caught her attention. Instead, as the sounds of her own slurping began to diminish, a rhythmic banging drew her eyes towards the low ceiling. “What’s that?”

“Mmmm?” Carlotte did not look up from the task of cleaning her bowl with the last of the bread.

“It sounds like…”

“They don’t call it a knocking shop for nothing, dear.” A hefty woman in a shapeless, colourless dress grinned from the next table.

“Oh.” Livira had realised, too late to shut her mouth, that the sound was probably that of a bed’s headboard smacking against a wall. Or, if beds were too fancy for such an inn, perhaps just the thump of flesh on floorboards. Whichever it was, the participants seemed to have plenty of stamina.

Carlotte finally looked up, wiped her mouth, and pushed her bowl away. She patted her belly and gave a loud, satisfied belch. “Excuse me.”

Their neighbour in the tentlike dress laughed at that. “And here I was thinking you were a princess who was down on her luck.”

“A queen actually.” Carlotte frowned at the faded blue tatters of her gown. “And I’ve a feeling my luck’s turned for the better. Where would I get some decent clothes? Something warm?”

The woman drained her tankard and wiped the foam from her upper lip. She looked about forty but could be in her thirties or fifties. She had passed into that zone where Livira lost the ability to make good guesses.

“I’m Carlotte, by the way.”

“Lady Amma of Iccrah,” the woman replied, plucking at her skirts.

“Really?”

“Of course not.” Amma snorted. “I can’t tell if you’re the worst spies the Gates have ever seen, or if this is genius.”

“Spies?” Livira thought it would take a world-class spy to fake the surprise now owning her face. “What’s there to spy on in this dive? No offence, Amma.”

“See, there you go. I’m almost tempted to tell you! Genius!”

One of her companions, an older woman, almost as much underweight as Amma was overweight, jabbed a sharp elbow into Amma’s gut and turned to gossip with another neighbour.

“Oh shush.” Amma shook her head. “There’s no crime in knowing that our benevolent potentate sends his agents out to protect us all.”

“From what?” Carlotte asked.

“People say the Saviour recruits in the places hope’s abandoned.” Amma glanced around at the room. “So, obviously they wouldn’t come to our little paradise.”

“The Saviour?” Livira asked. “It’s some sort of religion? A cult?”

“Oh, you two. You’re killing me.” Amma reached for her second tankard, presumably one paid for with Carlotte’s silver. She ran a tongue over yellow teeth stained with grey.

“Honestly—” Livira was interrupted by shrieking outside the tavern.

The door burst open and the shrieker, a robust young man whose voice had been driven by panic through more octaves than Livira thought possible, rushed in, knocking patrons out of his way. A wild-faced woman replaced him in the doorway and at first Livira was certain she’d been the one chasing him. Her conviction lasted only long enough for the woman to shout, “It’s a bug!” and for a black shape to snatch her away leaving only a crimson splatter to prove she’d ever been there.

The room erupted, tables overturned in panic, one person trampling the next in a general rush for the back. The noise made communication impossible. Livira found herself being borne along on a tide of human fear, separated from Carlotte, her main concern not what was at the door but how to draw breath in the crush and how to keep from joining those unfortunates already on the floor.

Rotated by the crowd, Livira saw that the blackness that had snatched the woman had now returned to fill the doorway. A dull thud, then another, and the wall began to spill its blocks inwards, the doorframe splintering.

Livira found herself free, like driftwood cast upon the shore by a retreating tide. In front of her, the broken remnants of tables and chairs, behind her a press of humanity and canith, each trying not to be the one left showing their spine to whatever was coming.

The dust from the destructive nature of the monster’s entry was what finally teased its shape from the unyielding blackness of its form. Livira realised several things in swift order. Firstly, that the thing before her looked a lot like a skeer from some child’s nightmare, mixed with touches of extra cratalac for good measure. Secondly, that it had been shaped by the fear of the people running from it. And thirdly, that it was an Escape.

In a shower of broken timber and stone the horror charged at her. Livira stood, frozen in the moment, armed only with her empty hands and the conviction that she would not allow herself to die there.

“Mine.” She had time only for a single word, but her mind ran faster than her mouth. Livira had learned a lot over two centuries within the Assistant’s skin. The fearsome grip of her memory, a cage that hardly ever relinquished even the smallest recollection, had been unable to hold on to more than a tiny fraction of those years, but she’d kept the broadest strokes of it. Her time with Yolanda had been a tutorial in and of itself, a series of lessons in the power of belief within the unbelievable labyrinth of the library.

She knew that the blackness before her was the library’s blood, the ultimate clay, given form by the undirected terror of the masses. Her task in the fraction of a heartbeat remaining to her was to imprint her own desire upon it, the focused determination of the individual overriding the unconscious will of the many.

She failed. The midnight spear of the skeer-blade took her in the stomach and sent her tumbling.

“Livira!” Carlotte broke free of the retreating mob, stumbling and tripping over the smashed furniture as she came for her friend.

Gasping and wheezing, Livira found her feet. She’d blunted both the edge of the weapon that hit her and the force behind it. Now with one hand extended, fingers splayed, as if to project her command, she advanced on the faltering Escape.

Rather than seek to change the skeer-thing into some other shape, Livira sought the shortest path to safety, attempting to return it to its natural form.

The horror matched her advance, stuttering towards her on four great legs whose points drove deep gouges in the ale-stained boards and shattered furniture. It came onwards, a hissing wail escaping from every vent in its armour. The thing dwarfed her. It scraped the ceiling, spraying limewash and splintering the boards above. Every inch of it bristled with the cratalac barbs and hooks that lay so deeply embedded in the racial memories of all that those creatures preyed upon. But as it came, darkness ran from it like wax from a candle thrown in the hearth. Its raw substance dripped from it, poured from it, pooling about its feet.

“Get back!” Carlotte came to stand with Livira, white-faced, wielding a broken chair.

The Escape surged, closing the last yard, its dripping jaw opening inches before Livira’s face.

“Don’t.” Livira used her other arm to push the chair down as Carlotte tried to swing. “Stay calm. You’re feeding it.”

“I will be if you—” Carlotte gave up her struggle to disentangle the chair. “If you won’t let me…fight it…” She trailed off, noticing the creature’s increasingly rapid collapse. “You’re doing that?”

“I’m trying to.”

The Escape swung at Livira again. She made no attempt to block it. That would only add strength to the blow. The limb broke across her, splashing down, black drops rolling over her like water from a bird’s feathers.

“Back!” Livira thrust her hands at the creature in a gesture of negation. The black nightmare retreated several steps. “Out!” It turned unwillingly towards the wrecked doorway.

For a moment Livira stood, panting with effort, her whole body a knot of tension although her mind was doing the work. A shard of pain struck between her eyes, and rather than struggle for further mastery she simply spread her hands. The remainder of the Escape collapsed as if it had only ever been a liquid and the vessel holding it had suddenly vanished.

Livira stood, breathing hard. The tavern room lay in ruins, the majority of its patrons having fled out the back. The Escape was now an oil pool, reflecting nothing, rendered insensitive by Livira’s will that it should be so.

Some of those felled in the exodus but not badly injured began to pick themselves up. The canith with the foul-smelling pipe emerged from the shadows of the furthest corner. She tilted her head, the grey straggles of her mane falling across her face but not obscuring the dark-eyed curiosity in her stare. Laying a hand on both Livira and Carlotte, she started to steer them towards the wreckage of the entrance and the thinning mists outside. “Come with me. Quickly.” She kept her growl low. “There’s someone you should meet. Unless you want to stay and explain this to the death’s heads.”