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In the aftermath of any great struggle feelings of anti-climax, post-coital tristesse, hangover, and/or general depression are not unusual. What next? What now?

Potty Training , by Melinda Rees-Mogg

Livira

Livira sat on the step of the missing potentate’s dais with her head in her hands. Carlotte sat beside her, pressed close, wise enough to say nothing. Leetar perched on her other side, the space of a hand between them. Livira could sense the woman wanted to speak but was abandoning one line after another as it reached her lips.

The rest of her friends, and, she supposed, enemies, stood around the throne room. The blackness, filling every doorway and window, gave the place an unearthly feel, as if it might be some grandiose stage set on which players were about to perform in the roles of ancient gods.

Yolanda was speaking with Yute. Livira saw it as a sign that this really was the end of the world. An estranged daughter talking to her father.

Starval had taken on the job of keeping Oanold under guard. Having the canith hulking over him had kept the man from complaint or snide remarks, so far. It seemed that Evar and Starval had happened upon Oanold in the most sympathetic incarnation imaginable for the man, and since neither of them had ever laid eyes on him before, they had been allowed time to warm to him.

Learning the larger truth had certainly soured Starval on the king who stood before him, but not to the point at which he was going to murder him on the spot. Clovis might have fewer reservations on that score, but Arpix had successfully kept her at a distance, despite his own reasons for despising and fearing Oanold. Even in her distress Livira noticed Clovis and Arpix’s new closeness, moving through each other’s personal space, one brushing against the other, like sibling cats raised to see each other as extensions of themselves. It made her own loss cut all the deeper.

Evar’s absence left Livira hollow. Her moments of near divinity in which she had seen the fabric of not just one but many worlds, laid bare before her, had equipped her with enough understanding to know that if Evar was out there, he wouldn’t be able to make it back to her until the small matter of the end of the library was resolved. The experience had not, however, equipped her with enough understanding to know if he was still out there in any meaningful sense. And if he had died, then the blame was squarely hers. She had left him when he needed her.

Where the throne had been, a portal now acted as a window to another place. If Livira were to turn round she knew she’d see the ganar Celcha, who had tried for so long to kill both her and Evar. That misplaced effort, based on incomplete evidence, had inspired Celcha to tread another path for the next century and more of her kind’s long life. The ganar had somehow reached the centre of the library, a journey that Livira imagined was less about miles covered and more about reaching some elevated state of enlightenment. She also imagined that somehow the destruction that her book was wreaking upon the library had made Celcha’s quest easier, opening new pathways for her. Causality rather than coincidence.

On the last stage of her journey Celcha had managed to shed her companions, directing each of them to places they wanted to be. Salamonda and Neera she had sent, along with other citizens of Crath, to a town named Tru where friends, including Jella, awaited them. Lord Algar and a contingent of the soldiers had returned to Crath City shortly after its sacking. Because they had not left the library since fleeing the city’s invasion, Celcha’s skills were able to return them in full. A dangerous destination, but the pull of the known proved strong.

Celcha was even now employing the wisdom, acquired over a lifetime of study, in an attempt to save the library from the collapse that Livira had initiated with her book. If such a repair could be achieved anywhere then the centre was that place. Thus far, all Celcha had managed was to slow the process’s acceleration.

The ganar’s position had allowed her to perform other minor miracles though, including finding and contacting Livira. At first the contact had been in the form of the throne tumbling through a newly opened void in the stonework beneath it. Livira’s initial thought had been that the book was working its destruction again and that cracks from the library were spreading out through the foundations of not just the city but the mountains themselves.

When it became apparent that a portal had formed, Livira, Yute, Yolanda, and others had come to peer in cautiously. To begin with, Celcha had not been visible. The view moved continuously, as if the other side of the portal were the eye of some questing cyclops. It looked like the library, and yet not like it. Smaller, somehow older, though the library had always seemed both ancient and timeless. The view moved swiftly, along narrow aisles whose shelves were stacked with scrolls, beneath vaulted roofs.

“Remarkable.” Yute’s voice trembled with awe. “I believe that’s Alexandria.”

“Where?”

“One of the foundational libraries from the first-cycle worlds.” Yute nodded to himself. The view pressed on into a pillared hall where stacks of clay tablets imprinted with innumerable sharp-edged marks rested on stone shelves. “Hanjanika,” Yute said, nodding again.

The journey continued and all resemblance to the library fell away as the viewpoint passed into a sequence of natural caves. By the light of fissures in the roof where vegetation trailed in with green fingers, Livira could see that the walls were covered with art, most of it simple and stylized, the shapes of herd animals, their motion captured in a few powerful strokes, the fleetness of a gazelle, the thunder of a buffalo, other objects of the hunt she couldn’t recognise, pigments not of her world, daubed by hands that might have shared little in common with hers.

The viewpoint swept on relentlessly into the dark. Here and there were islands of illumination where artists laboured on their endeavours by the smoky light of a single flame. And suddenly out into the blazing sunshine of a hardpan desert across which a near infinity of stones were arrayed with an order that couldn’t be nature’s work. No two the same, large, small, light, dark, but almost all of them flat, pieces of slate fractured from a cliff face by frost, river stones smoothed by millennia of patient flow, discs of rock fashioned by the sea and thrown upon the beach by a storm’s rage.

The point of view’s mad rush slowed and as it did so, drew closer to the ground. Livira saw that every stone bore a mark. A circle. A slash. A grid pattern. Two waving lines, one mimicking the other.

“It’s the birth of writing,” Yute whispered.

Without warning, the march of stones ended and where the next might be expected was a foot. The point of view’s advance stopped, lifted, and pulled back, revealing the ganar in a small, circular patch of ground, clear of stones. She stood, looking up at them, leaning on her driftwood staff, her once-golden fur grey with age.

“Celcha.” Yute spoke first.

“Yute.” The ganar nodded. “Livira.”

“We don’t have long,” Yute said.

“We never did,” Celcha replied.

“Is there anything we can do?” Livira asked.

“If there is, then it’s here at the end and at the centre that it must be done.” Celcha gestured with her staff at the lines of stones radiating in all directions from the centre.

Mayland loomed beside Livira, staring down into the portal. For a moment she remembered another doorway, one he had taken Evar through before locking her out. Part of her wanted to raise her book and drive him back, lest he jump through this portal too and close it behind him, still reaching for the power to make a unilateral choice.

“Jaspeth should be here,” Mayland rumbled. “This is too important to be in the hands of…us. We’re a random, ragtag rabble.” He sounded defeated, devoid of the arrogance that had seemed to define him.

“And Irad!” Yolanda joined them. She at least still had passion.

Celcha showed her square teeth in that ganar smile that always looked like pain. She shook her grey head. “There is no Irad, no Jaspeth. They’re just the extremes of the argument given form. This matter has always, and will always, be decided by collections of people washed up on this particular shore by chance.” She touched the heel of her staff to one of the flat stones around her, and the wavy lines across it lifted into the air, bringing with them the cries of gulls and the smell of the ocean.

Celcha had sought them, needing wisdom, or at least Yute’s wisdom. Despite her age and learning, even at the library’s heart she couldn’t cure its ills. Not alone. Livira she sought perhaps less for wisdom than because of the history between them. If at the end of times one didn’t revisit the choices made during a life, then when? And Livira had written the book that was unwriting them all.

In the end no great epiphany was visited upon them. The argument ranged back and forth as it ever did, even without Irad and Jaspeth present as avatars of its poles. Livira had suggested that if any answer existed, it might be more easily discovered if they all joined Celcha at the centre. With the portal at their feet it seemed only a step away. The ganar explained that sight and sound were all that could be shared through the doorway she’d opened. Reaching the centre was difficult—for her it had been a lifetime’s quest—and even under the current circumstances the door in front of them couldn’t take them to her.

All that resulted from Celcha’s great work of magic was that Yute and Kerrol got to return to the place they had been before they fell into Oanold’s trail. Yute had no ideas that seemed of use to Celcha, but he felt that in his time with Kerrol, apart from the others, he had missed something vital. The thought that he had unfinished business there possessed him. And Celcha agreed to send him. Kerrol also wanted to return, though he said it was to see a girl. Mayland’s asking to go with them had been a surprise, but Yute had agreed without protest.