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To fix something it is sometimes necessary to break it first. Often this goes wrong.

Bone Setting: A Beginner’s Guide , by Bradley Wood

Livira

Yute’s portal, his last act, delivered them all to the centre in one painless step. The clear space in which Celcha stood expanded to accommodate them. When Livira looked back, there was no doorway to return by, no view of Chamber 2, just the hardpan desert stretching away, and the vast spiral of flat stones encompassing them, each bearing the rudiments of writing, a record of the first struggles of many and varied intelligences with the ideas of impermanence, thought, and memory.

Livira went to her knees and lowered Edgarallen gently to the ground. When she stood up she found Celcha’s staff levelled at her in accusation.

“You brought that ? Here? ” Celcha pointed at the book still in Livira’s hands, its cover stained with the raven’s blood.

“Kill or cure?” Livira suggested, a little sheepishly. Had she just been running for the last safe haven, like a bug as the water level rises, or had she had a plan?

A tremor ran through the desert, rattling stones. Celcha stumbled as if this had been the first vibration to reach this place. “Kill or cure, if you must, but one merely requires that we wait, and the other I have no idea how to accomplish. Everything I have tried has failed.”

“Kill or cure seems a very binary choice.” Yolanda sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, looking very much as if she were a child to match her apparent years, in actions if not in words. “My father died so that we might explore other options.”

Mayland took a step towards the girl, then sat cross-legged beside her, still the taller of the two. “I wronged you, and your father. I murdered…” He stared at the ground between his feet. “I…I have excuses but they are not good ones.” Kerrol came to sit beside him. Starval followed, taking his place on his brother’s other side. “Your father took me…led me somehow…to see an old woman who taught me many things in a short time without even seeming to try. She shone a very different light on book burning for me. The destruction of the library no longer feels as palatable as it once did. It hurt me. I wanted to hurt it back. This is not a basis on which to proceed.”

Livira stood, slightly stunned. Yute’s sacrifice had mechanically moved them all to the centre, of the library, but somehow, more fundamentally, it had shifted the immovable objects that had been his daughter’s ideology, and Evar’s brother’s credo, towards the centre too. Here at the last minute of the last hour of the last day, it seemed that compromise was possible. All that they lacked was a solution.

Part of her wanted to scream at them. They couldn’t have done this days ago? Years ago? When there was time left to hammer out the details of an agreement?

Livira advanced on Celcha, pushing her staff aside. “Can you save the library?”

“I don’t believe so. Can you?”

“Not if it needs more than wishing really hard in all directions.” Yute’s death hung behind Livira like an approaching dust storm of earth-breaking proportions. But all of their deaths waited just a step ahead of them, and she had no time for grief. She turned her book over in her hands. Whatever gravity it had carried before seemed absent now. It was just a book. She opened it at a random page, and with a shock saw that it was blank. She leafed through—they all were. “I can’t, no.” She let the empty journal slip from her fingers, its stories told and gone. It hit the ground and nobody noticed. “We can’t stop it.”

“And what”—Arpix raised his voice, raw with loss—“what will happen to everything that was the library? I don’t just mean the books and the assistants, and the guides…I mean all that…”

“Magic,” Carlotte supplied.

Arpix shot her a disapproving look just as he had when she’d said “magic” on Livira’s first day in the library complex. Clovis put her hand on his shoulder. “Magic,” he grunted.

Kerrol looked up. “Perhaps you can build something new with it. A new library from the ruins of the old one.”

Mayland shook his head without raising his eyes from the dry ground. “And who would fashion its rules? Who would play god for us this time? Will you be Irad, or shall I?” Silence held for a moment, then he spoke again. “The library showed Yute Anne’s world for a reason. And Yute led me there for a reason too, though I thought it was my idea at the time. All of us went on our own journeys.”

Starval stood up, dusting himself off. “There was a point to all of those Oanolds?”

Livira thought about it. “That we’re all made as much by the world we’re born into, by chance and circumstance, as by the content of our character? How is that helpful?” Though as she replayed the image of Oanold’s head being spat from Wentworth’s jaws she had to acknowledge that although the man had been a demon, he hadn’t had to be. He could have been a garrulous landlord who risked himself to save children from the engine of state-driven murder.

“And what were we supposed to learn?” Carlotte frowned as if the thought of returning to the classroom were somehow repellent.

“We saw that none of the species were innocent. Even the ganar.” Livira shot a look at Celcha, who had been the slave of both humans and canith, witness and victim to enormous cruelties. Her kind were small, not given to violence, so often exploited. “The ganar saw our world in their sky and made war on all of us. They created the skeer through obscenities of science and bred them as slaves of their own.”

Celcha’s staff slipped from her fingers.

“Perhaps none of us are the worst, and none of us are beyond salvation.” Arpix pressed his lips into a flat line.

“We’re all imperfect.” Clovis backed him up.

The ground shook and the stones danced. In the distance a dust storm threatened. As Livira steadied herself and looked around, she saw that it was coming from all directions, the ground itself being pulverised and thrown against the sky.

“That’s it?” Livira eyed the oncoming wave of destruction. “It’s all a bit vague and tenuous, don’t you think?” She had to raise her voice. A directionless wind had blown up, and the stones’ rattling had become an unbroken complaint.

Mayland stood to face the end, dark and thoughtful. “Vague and tenuous can be more enduring than impervious and immovable. I think that’s what saved Anne’s world. The book burners came, but what they wanted to destroy couldn’t be found all in one place. It was there and here and hidden and on display, subject to a thousand different systems, owned, loaned, copied, shared.”

Carlotte took Livira’s hand. The storm was devouring the intervening distance with remarkable speed. It seemed less like a dust storm now, having grown darker by the mile, to the point of being almost black, as if the floodgates on an ebony sea had been opened, allowing it to inundate the plane. Arpix threaded his fingers with those of Livira’s other hand. She looked up at him, Clovis on his far side, and made her bravest smile for him.

“I wish Evar was here.” Arpix was barely audible against the thundering approach now. “You two had more stories to write together.”

“We did.” Livira bowed her head, another tear escaping. The ground vibrated so much with the intensity of the oncoming destruction that dust rose from it, nearly obscuring her feet. Through the haze she spotted her book once more, shaken open, its blank pages fluttering. “We really did!”

Yolanda approached, stooped, picked up the book. She held it out to Livira. “We could try, together.”

Arpix and Carlotte released Livira’s hands. She reached uncertainly for the journal and its blank pages. The white child did not release her gift as Livira took hold. She glanced around the assembly and at the churning wall rushing towards them on every side. It was jet-black now, the blood of the library rushing to drown them all. “Mayland! We need you too.”

The canith shook free of his thoughts and came quickly to join them. He drew a deep breath, looked from Yolanda to Livira, then cupped the book from beneath, his hand almost large enough to encompass both covers.

Yolanda muttered to herself, her eyes red from weeping. Whether it was incantations or formulas or some other ancient wisdom, Livira felt her power. Mayland’s rumble reached them even through the building roar, his own education in how to destroy the library now repurposed to different ends. Livira simply poured herself into the pages just as she had spent so many days and weeks and years doing when she first wrote her stories there.

Their workings wound around each other like the threads of some complex melody. The book lay open in Mayland’s hand, with Yolanda and Livira each gripping a cover, the pages riffling wildly back and forth in the buffeting wind.

Arpix said something, lost in the howl. Kerrol turned to face the storm. And in the space of one heartbeat everything was spinning, raging chaos.

Livira’s aim, and, she intuited, the aim of her two accomplices, had been to draw down the thundering sea of the library’s blood into the unwritten book. The book itself had become a hole in time, and what was a hole if not a way to reach one thing from another?

Livira’s teacher, Master Heeth Logaris, had once held up a bottle of black ink, and declared, “This, Yuteling, is the blood of the library. It contains vast power, so treat it with respect. The manner of its application is unimportant, the groove of a quill, the aperture—that’s hole to you, Yuteling—of a push pen, the brush of a Henlo-scribe. But what it sets upon the page may be wisdom that will build or topple empires.” At this point he had returned the bottle to its high shelf and tapped a blunt finger to the as-yet-unadulterated page. “The ink is potent, but this”—he tapped the page again—“this is king. The blank page. Unlimited possibility. This, Yuteling, is where the future lies.”