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We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.

Arm of the Sphinx , by Josiah Bancroft

Livira

“This is what we’re here for.” The Saviour straightened his mask and addressed the group as the last of his force hastened from the darkness of the blood fissure. They stood in the sluggish flow of the sewer, the thirty or so canith stooped to avoid the ceiling, leading Livira to conclude that humanity had founded the city, and that a peace with the canith, more than that—an integration—had been brokered by one of the monarchs whose line the potentate had ended so bloodily.

“This is where you take back what belongs to the city and not to one man.” In the tunnels the Saviour’s oratory rolled and echoed, his deep voice drawing the attention of all those who’d made it through the recent horror. “This is where you say ‘no’ to all the evils this so-called potentate has wrought upon this city and upon our land. Not all of us will make it. But we will prevail. We will topple this throne and make a new future for all our peoples. Thank you all for making this stand—for siding with what is right and good.”

Livira found herself nodding. Despite knowing the power a skilled speaker could exercise over their audience, she wanted the raiders to succeed, but more than that: she wanted the Saviour’s vision to become a reality.

With the talking over, Tremon took the lead, organizing the vanguard, assigning a replacement for one of the Saviour’s personal guards who hadn’t emerged from the fissure. Guns were readied, knives drawn from their sheaths and replaced, sharpness confirmed.

The big woman seemed to know the way, and her soldiers followed her, eagerness now starting to replace the haunted looks they’d carried from the fissure. Livira recognised among them the two guards from the chamber that Narbla had first brought her and Carlotte to. The younger smaller man she’d named Scar, and the older wider one, both having replaced their crossbows with the weapons the locals called guns, which looked similar to the ’sticks she was familiar with, but more deadly.

The first shot rang out before they reached the palace, but it wasn’t fired at the raiders or by them. By the time Tremon led them up the steps from the palace basement levels, the Escapes had already scattered much of the potentate’s defence. The library’s blood lay here and there in great pools, its potency spent, at least for now. The bodies of palace guards were scattered in greater numbers and more pieces.

When Tremon’s vanguard met the first resistance, they found it disorganized, the guards confused about the nature and direction of the attack, unable to focus their numbers against the Saviour’s force.

Well protected towards the rear of the incoming party, Livira felt both guilty and relieved. She had no desire to be in the thick of the fight and could contribute little to it. But even so, she didn’t want other people dying on her behalf. The Saviour seemingly found it easier to keep his eyes on the bigger picture. The fate of a nation was being decided today and he reminded his followers of it several times.

The back of the force, while safer than the front, turned out not to be safe. Carlotte screamed when guns boomed nearby in quick succession. Plaster and splinters exploded from the wall close to Livira’s head. Three raiders behind collapsed, one with an unearthly scream of pain, while the remainder turned and began to exchange fire with the palace guards coming up from behind.

Other raiders hurried the Saviour away. Livira dragged Carlotte after her. Both of them were bloody, peppered with wall fragments, but without serious injury as far as Livira could tell.

The advance devolved into a fractured, vicious series of skirmishes through the sumptuously decorated halls and corridors of the palace. Increasingly scattered and gore-stained raiders pushed on through grand, bullet-splintered doorways. Livira picked her way over the bodies of palace guards in gorgeous uniforms, their colours so vivid that their hearts’ blood looked almost drab pumping across them.

“—ira—”

Livira couldn’t hear Carlotte even though her friend was shouting at her side. Her ears rang with the explosion of guns on all sides, a high-pitched tone filling the aftermath and drowning out words. Everything felt distant, far away, as if were she to reach out to touch the walls they would retreat from her or break into something as insubstantial as mist. What Livira could feel, with more surety than anything her eyes showed her, was the closeness of her book. She could practically taste it—a concrete presence, more real than whatever stood between her and it.

Carlotte yanked her sideways through a door. Ahead of them Tremon, one arm limp and bloody, was wrestling with a guardsman before huge, ornate doors that had to lead to the throne room. A handful of other raiders slightly outnumbered the remaining guards, and fought it out with knives, swords, and guns that had spat out all their bullets.

The Saviour himself, spear in hand, charged and felled a guard who had been about to strike Tremon from behind. The Saviour stumbled, pulled down by the man he’d impaled.

In the next moment the great doors were booming as a raider, his bloodlust roused, hammered on them with the stock of his long gun.

“Charges…” Tremon cast aside the limp body of the man she’d been throttling one-handed. “Charges.”

The raiders had come prepared, and a few moments’ work saw explosives set in place around the edges of the potentate’s last defence. Fuses were lit, followed by a general exodus, and then a blast that renewed the ringing in Livira’s ears.

Tremon, sagging and leaving bloody footprints, led the return into the swirling smoke. The doors, already hanging on the ruins of their hinges, fell inwards at the raiders’ approach, as if just waiting for the suggestion.

Close to the dais upon which the throne stood was a large cage on wheels, big enough to hold half a dozen full-grown canith. It held only one at the moment, and a slightly built figure. Yute! The librarian stood clutching the bars, eyes hunting the smoke swirls as if he had yet to pick Livira out among the raiders. The other prisoner, the canith, stood behind Yute, contemplating the room with a degree of detachment, and it was that more than the darkness of his fur that identified him to Livira as Evar’s brother Kerrol.

The potentate stood before his throne in the echoing grandeur of his throne room. He clasped Livira’s book, holding it to his chest as if it were a shield, or a talisman that might protect him from all the ills upon his doorstep. A single defender waited with him, a dark-skinned, shaven-headed warrior in ceremonial armour, a great two-handed scimitar held with the arc of its blade resting against his shoulder.

“But that’s not…” Livira turned away from the potentate and his throne.

The Saviour, coming in between the fallen doors, had been fiddling with the straps of his mask as if it had been torn loose during the fighting. He stopped now, and let it slide as he gazed upon the man he’d come to tear down.

“Oanold…” Livira stared at the man behind the mask. How was this possible?

“You know me?” Oanold glanced her way, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me by my full name…” He shook the distraction away and returned his gaze to the potentate. “It’s over!” he called out. “The only decision you need to make is whether you surrender with dignity or have to be dragged out screaming.”

Livira had never seen the man standing in front of the throne, the bloody-handed potentate who had unleashed horror on his own streets. He was a narrow twist of a man, the kind to pass unnoticed not just through a crowd but through life in general, eyes of an indefinite colour set slightly too close together below a slightly too large forehead. But somehow what lay behind that forehead had set him on a course to write the history of nations.

In answer to Oanold’s question the potentate thrust Livira’s book out before him in a gesture of negation. A shot rang out, maybe two, but the illusion of flying pages had already filled Livira’s vision, and she saw nothing more of the throne room. Pages shot forth, impossibly, pouring through the front cover, flying towards the raiders standing by the ruins of the potentate’s doors. The pages rushed forward flat on, untroubled by the resistance of the air, growing larger as they came. An illusion, but one that refused dismissal despite its obvious falsehood. Individual pages wrapped themselves around individual raiders, engulfing them before crumpling into balls that would fit within a fist and skittering away across the floor.

For several long moments the pages veered this way and that, avoiding Livira whilst swallowing away everyone that stood with her. And then suddenly she was dwarfed by a white page overwritten in her own hand, and before she could protest it had folded her within it.