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The sewers of a great city are often feats of architecture that put to shame the homes of many of those living above them. This begs the lie of the claim that our rulers treat the poor like shit. The poor are treated much worse than shit is.

Environmental Agency Report into Unregulated Discharges of Sewage into English Coastal Waters , Vol. 14, 2023, by various authors

Livira

“This is all of us?”

The sewer junction chosen might be the largest underground space that New Kraff had to offer, but it wasn’t large. The fact that the Saviour’s entire assault force was packed within it, or visible in the lantern light extending down the five adjoining tunnels, did not fill Livira with confidence.

“We’re talking about reaching the heart of a palace here,” Carlotte enlarged. “This lot wouldn’t get past the front door of my…” She trailed off, probably not wanting to confuse the issue with talk of her recent title and home.

Tremon loomed over the pair of them, her height and width even more intimidating in the narrow confines of the sewers. “The more of us gathering, the more chance of the potentate’s spies forewarning him. And even if we had an army, you can only feed it down one of these tunnels at the same rate. If a hundred of us can’t do the job, then a thousand would fail too, bottled up at the entry point.”

Narbla, taller than Tremon but painfully thin, leaned in, the stink of her absent pipe haunting the air around her, pushing back even the sewer’s foulness for a moment. “If we had an army, we’d need you to protect the head and the tail of it from the monsters at the same time. And you don’t even seem sure you can protect the people immediately around you.”

Livira bit her lip and swallowed her sharp reply. The canith wasn’t wrong. She’d struggled against that one Escape at the Gates. Ahead, in the wound made by the potentate’s reckless wielding of her book, there might be scores of the things, or more.

People had called Livira reckless her whole life long, whether it be getting into fist fights with boys twice her size, throwing herself into the mouths of monsters, or bringing down the enmity of powerful men upon herself. It had almost never been a compliment. “Reckless” was not a quality valued in a librarian. Job requirements centred on rather different adjectives such as “meticulous,” “measured,” and “methodical.” Leaps of faith were not encouraged.

Now, as she stood knee-deep in filthy water, ahead of her a tunnel full of all the worst horrors that imagination could fashion, and with her retreat blocked by a hundred strangers, she felt that perhaps she should strive to be less reckless in future.

“The blood of the library takes your fear and writes it out before you.” Livira held her lantern high and advanced, calling out her words for those behind. She had of course told them this before, but if repetition would imprint the lesson on their minds, then she would say it until her throat ran dry. “Do not give what lies ahead of us any fuel to burn. If you’re going to feed it ideas, let them be good ones. Useful ones.”

Good thoughts would help, but the blood seemed less receptive to them than to anxiety and distress, perhaps because it was the result of a wound, born of violence.

“Turn left.” Carlotte had been given a map and had insisted on walking beside Livira. “No, right!”

“Spends half her life in a library—can’t read.”

“Books, I can read. Maps, not so much.”

“You didn’t pore over them when you were gloating over your empire?” Livira teased.

“Don’t start on me, Livira Page!” Carlotte scowled over her map. “How long did it take you to pull me off a throne into knee-deep shit?”

“I prefer to think of it as water with added shit. Actual shit would be much harder to walk in than this. Plus, to be fair, I am walking you back into a palace. Maybe you can keep this one. The Saviour did say the people could choose who they want.”

“Well, that sounds like madness.” Carlotte huffed. “You’re just going to get the best liar that way.”

She had more to say, but Livira held up her hand. “We’re close. Let me focus.”

Despite her words, the ensuing silence set her mind to wandering rather than narrowing down on the looming sense of untrammelled power lying ahead of them. She thought of her book, and the knot it traced through time, being used to make the library bleed. She tried to visualise the holes that the potentate had already punched through chamber walls, and the harm that might have been wrought upon the shelves beyond.

It had to be Oanold. A man of his avarice wouldn’t have lost hold of such a prize however far he’d fallen. And of course he’d fallen into himself, within a different set of maybes, for sure, but it seemed that when fate hadn’t seen him born into power, he’d just cut himself a new path to it, careless of who or what had to bleed so that his voice became the loudest.

Carlotte saw it before Livira did. The rapid cessation of splashing beside and behind her brought Livira to a halt. The blackness of the fissure intersecting the sewer tunnel swallowed the lantern light so completely that it might just have been a stain upon the walls.

A long, thin black leg, armoured and jointed, reached out of the fissure almost immediately, seeking purchase on the stone beside it.

“Why are we doing this again?” Carlotte asked in a faint voice.

“For Evar.” Livira had never felt less certain of the big picture, the one in which she was a warrior for Irad, a champion of his everlasting, ever-reaching library. Its eternal failure was written into the rocks in geological ages, strata of civilisation and ruinous war, repeated and repeated. And yet were men any more flexible, any more capable of change? Oanold, the bad seed sown through endless perhapses, had brought horror and unbounded cruelty to this city and probably stalked unknown numbers of its shadow cities in similar roles. “For Evar, and for each other.” That was what she was sure of.

“Who thought of spiders?” Tremon called out just behind Livira. As the black horror hauled itself clear of the fissure, Tremon turned away, admonishing her troops. “A spider? It’s hardly original.”

Livira had to admire the woman’s courage. Livira had told them what to do, and they had agreed, but to agree and to do were very different things. All Tremon’s strength would mean little in the face of what her nightmares might summon from the blood. Her disdain, however, and the scattered laughter among the Saviour’s ranks, were better than arrows or spears.

The arachnid horror shrank slightly, even as it tugged free an imperfect back leg from the inky blackness it was writing itself out of.

“Enough. You’re mine!” And with a confidence that was nine parts fear and one part reckless self-belief, Livira walked empty-handed towards the creature.

She reached for the memories of her time as the Assistant, and for the timeless recollections that the entity had owned before she ever occupied its shell. The Assistant had never known a moment’s fear, and Livira drew on that. The Assistant, however, had also never had any clever strategy for dealing with Escapes. The largest one she had encountered had thrown her around the reading chamber like a rag doll and fractured off part of her near-immortal body. Livira had no such resilience to fall back on.

The spider rushed at her, hind legs thrusting it forward at inescapable speed, whilst an array of sharp-pointed forelimbs angled at her like a thicket of black spears. Every fibre of Livira’s being wanted to raise her arms in futile defence. Instead, she kept her eyes open, her body frozen, and her mind searching for that ineffable connection with which she had reduced the blood-skeer at the tavern to a puddle of tar.

She felt the sharpness of the reaching limbs, the impact of her attacker slamming into her, and staggered with it. A moment later she opened her eyes, closed by reflex. The Escape had broken on her like a wave, and now dripped down all around her. She hurt in particular places, more than she should, and the hands that sought the reason came away bloody.

“Livira!” Carlotte took hold of her, searching for signs of injury.

Tremon and others came forward, wary of the glistening pool around her.

“Is it bad?” Livira winced.

“It’s not good.” Carlotte frowned, hunting out other wounds. “But they’re shallow. Like you were stabbed with the world’s shortest knife…three…no, four times.” She closed Livira’s robe, scowling at the Saviour’s men as they edged around. “You’re sure this Evar is worth it?”

“He is. But I’d do this just to stop the monster that’s seated on this city’s throne. Even if it wasn’t Oanold.”

Livira freed herself from Carlotte’s attentions and pushed the fallen Escape back into the fissure it came from. The black blood rolled through the sewer, swirling the water around it and pouring into the darkness.

Livira advanced, trying to avoid doing so cautiously, for with something like the library’s blood caution invited in whatever it was you were being cautious about. She stood in front of the glistening black wall, understanding now that the fissure wasn’t an impossibly dark passageway, but was full of blood, brimming with it, forming an undulating wall where it met the sewer tunnel. It had looked like an opening before she defeated the Escape, but now the blood deigned to reflect some small part of the light they turned its way, she could see that had been illusion.

Back among the ranks queuing in the tunnel, far enough to be protected but not too far to see, the Saviour stood, watching her through his enigmatic mask. With the blood of the library before her, it seemed that the library’s eyes watched her through that white mask. She wondered about the man behind it. He was helping the Amacar, seeking an end to their persecution, decrying the systematic murder of their children on the island that had once been Carlotte’s city, and Celcha’s prison. Was he doing it for the right reasons, though, or as his own path to power? And did that matter?

Livira sucked in a breath and, in accordance with her will, the blood drew back, creating the imagined tunnel. She stepped in. “Follow me. Don’t touch anything. And…try not to think.”

Livira took firm hold of Carlotte’s hand and advanced at a brisk walk. She tried to follow her own instructions and not think about how much like the gullet of some great monster the disturbingly flesh-like tunnel was. At first the passage’s floor provided firm footing, but the deeper Livira went, the more two competing thoughts tried to surface from the back of her mind. In one she was walking out onto a frozen lake, and the ice beneath her feet grew thinner with every passing yard. In the other scenario, she advanced through wetlands, and what had at first been soft earth gradually became sucking mud that released her feet with reluctant slurps, muddy lips drawing her ever deeper. The increasing pressure with which she gripped Carlotte was matched by her friend’s earnest attempt to crush all the bones in her hand.

In the end, perhaps what saved Livira from crashing through or being sucked down was that she had lived a life out on the Dust and then within the library, a stranger to both ice and mud. Fiction can paint strong images in a mind but is at its most potent when the raw material already lies within you, the writing just a key to turn the lock of memory.

What about a dust-bear?

“Shut up!” Livira found she’d spoken out loud. She glanced back along the line of the Saviour’s raiders. The floor of the tunnel had become a writhing mess of entangled black serpents, and from the ceiling fresh horrors were descending, smaller versions of the arachnid that had driven its spikes into her, each dropping on its own thread. Even as she watched, a tentacle wrapped around a broad-shouldered man three places ahead of the Saviour, and in an instant he was gone, hauled away into the liquid wall with barely time to start his scream.

“Close your eyes!” Livira shouted. “Everyone. Close them now.” She closed her own for good measure. “A forest. You’re in a wood.” She imagined the Exchange, its timeless trees, endless pools. “You can feel the roots beneath your feet. The season’s turned. Leaves are falling on you.”

Livira carried on calling out her vision, subverting the terrors around them. Serpents became the gnarled roots of oaks, questing for water. Spiders became dropping leaves that slid harmlessly away. Unsure of how many of the Saviour’s party had bought into her version of the world, Livira could only push on, creating the tunnel ahead of her, and hoping that it resealed itself sufficiently far behind her so as not to trap any of those following.

How far the fissures from the potentate’s destruction within the library had spread beneath the city, Livira couldn’t say. Nor could she imagine how so little damage had been done to the buildings above. It seemed more like a collision of two overlapping worlds than a process following the common laws of push and shove. The tunnel that opened ahead of her as she advanced would turn left or right at her urging, and however she turned she found no bedrock to block her way, no shaped stone, no sewer bricks. It felt as if she had somehow entered the library’s bloodstream, and though it might eventually deposit her at some predetermined spot beneath the palace, there might be no path through the ground that any logical mind would agree she had followed.

The journey seemed endless, not long…exactly…more as if she had stepped outside time just as she had on her visits to the Exchange. The possibility that the potentate might be long dead when she finally emerged, the crimes of his reign confined to the pages of history books written in now-dead languages, seemed a real one.

With her eyes closed tight she sensed rather than saw when the blood drew back to reveal something new. Ahead, through the tunnel’s black annulus, the works of man could be seen again. The walls of another sewer tunnel. And, at the edge, a startled soldier in a uniform too fine for a grimy tunnel.

Livira pushed immediately, driving thick pulses of the library blood ahead of her, letting it gout into the space beyond the tunnel’s end. She made no effort to give it form. The defenders’ own secret terrors would be far more likely to set them running than anything she could create and running might save their lives.

“Fuck me sideways.” Carlotte emerged from the blood-tunnel and fell to her hands and knees, ignoring the filthy water. “Thank all the gods. Even the rubbish ones that look like frogs.” Several years as a queen appeared to have coarsened her language rather than refined it.

“Come on.” Livira dragged her friend up. She looked both ways down the tunnel, steeling herself against the despairing screams echoing back towards her.

The Saviour’s people began to stumble out behind her, some falling white-faced to their knees and retching, not at the foulness of the sewer but at what they had survived. The Saviour came out too, supported by Tremon, his mask slightly askew, a hint of greying stubble exposed.

Once, long ago, Livira had come before King Oanold upon his throne. She had walked away from that encounter as a librarian, despite his strong desire that she be thrown penniless into the streets. If Crath City had owned sewers large enough for people to roam, then no doubt Oanold would have wanted her and all the other “dusters” permanently employed within them, deep in the filth of people they were not fit to gaze upon.

Now she was rising from the sewers of another Crath to face the same king upon a different throne. And though he might wrinkle his nose at the aroma she brought with her to his halls, the true cause of his revulsion would be not the ordure on her robes, or any personal fault his royal eye singled out among her attributes, but instead something a librarian would describe as “categorical.” His credo of dividing and demonizing had forever set her upon the shelf of untouchables and rejects, scheduled for destruction.

Livira bowed her head and took a deep breath, acclimatized to a stink that was at least honest. “Come on. Let’s finish this.”