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The true value of freedom is revealed only in its absence. It is a structural ingredient whose removal takes with it the colour, taste, and substance of life. A similar effect is observed in gluten-free cakes.

Baking to Win , by Joshue Shoe

Arpix

Arpix had no memory of the time between being dismissed from Irad and Jaspeth’s audience within the Mechanism and coming to his senses amid the book towers of the adjoining library chamber. His waking view was of his own heels dragging across the floor. It had taken him a while to figure out that the source of his motion was the two large, ill-smelling soldiers. Each had an arm under one of his. He tried to twist free and, in failing to do so, reached the understanding that his wrists had been bound behind him.

Arpix had still been woozy, his thinking eclipsed by the mother of all headaches, when the soldiers’ retreat across the chamber had been interrupted by yells, stick-shot, and the screams of the dying. Arpix hadn’t seen the canith, but it had seemed that Clovis and all her brothers must have attacked, judging by the chaos and the death toll, which he later overheard to stand at twenty-one.

In the end the canith were driven back without Arpix seeing any of them. At least one was reported shot. Arpix hoped that was a lie, but if true he hoped it was neither Clovis, Evar, nor Kerrol, in that order.

Before long Arpix had found himself back in the chamber where he’d first encountered Yute’s group and later been joined by Livira as she fled the very menace that had now snared him in turn.

Standing on his own feet, and being hustled along the aisles, Arpix was dismayed to catch glimpses of Neera and Salamonda. He tried to call out to Salamonda, wanting to know who else had been captured, but the guards shoved him forward, and he lost sight of her amid the crowding troops and narrow spaces.

Arpix stumbled on, wondering who else had fallen into Oanold’s hands. It couldn’t be everyone because the canith had attacked and the soldiers had been retreating at speed. It seemed they must have Livira though, or else why had Evar led his family against stick-fire with just one sword between them?

Livira had said the king’s troops, unprepared to suffer the misery of hanging on to life inside the centre circle, had fallen to cannibalism. It had sounded both awful and unbelievable. But here, among the stinking, gore-splattered soldiers, beneath the cold hunger of their gaze, he felt it to be true. He’d never had much meat on him, even before the slow starvation of the plateau, but he feared for Salamonda who remained considerably sturdier than he did, and for Livira’s friend Neera, who although slim, had enjoyed Yute’s century-spanning pilfering from Salamonda’s kitchen.

Arpix’s concerns rapidly became much more personal when, still with bound hands and with the fresh addition of a gag, he found himself surrounded by three soldiers who proceeded to beat him whilst joking about “tenderising the meat.” The fact that he was a head taller than the largest of his tormentors seemed to antagonise them. Arpix had never been punched before, not even as a child by another child. He was astonished how much it hurt. He wanted to reason with them, but even if he hadn’t been gagged an early punch took all the air from his lungs, and the ensuing pain removed any ability to put words in order.

Blows landed from random directions, not so swiftly that one blurred into the next. They gave him time to feel each one. Letting the fear build. Letting him wonder just how badly they would injure him. A heavy fist slammed into his ribs and Arpix reeled back, crying out around his gag. How long would it last? It seemed to have taken forever already.

“Leave that man alone.”

Arpix straightened painfully to see a figure almost as tall and narrow as himself approaching down the aisle, seated soldiers moving their legs out of his way. Even through tear-filled eyes Arpix recognised the man—Lord Algar had come to his rescue and Arpix felt ashamed of how deeply grateful he was.

“Take his gag off.” Algar stopped a yard short of them in his soiled finery, frowning slightly. “This is no way to treat a librarian.”

Arpix winced as a bearded soldier yanked the gag away.

“What’s your name, young man?”

“A-Arpix.” Despite the unconvincing nature of Algar’s concern, Arpix felt like crying. He could taste his own blood, and something was wrong with the vision in his left eye.

“Well, Arpix.” Algar gave an unsettling smile. “I want you to tell me all about this book.” The poorly bound volume he lifted into view was one that Arpix had never seen before.

“I…” The truth, Arpix felt, would deliver him back into the hands of the three soldiers and the continuation of their fun. Arpix had always been a great believer in the truth, but with his many sources of pain only now beginning to divide themselves into individual hurts, that faith was wavering. “Could I see it more closely?”

Lord Algar held it in front of Arpix’s face, eyes narrowing.

Arpix searched in vain for a title or an author, but the covers were worn smooth by time. The faintest pattern persisted but he could make out no more than a circle occupying most of the front, filled with barely visible lines squiggling this way and that. “If I could…” He tried to bring his wrists out from behind him. “…look inside?”

Algar glanced at the bearded guard and gave a slight nod. “It came from one of your colleagues. Young like you, though not one of us.” He set a conspiratorial hand to Arpix’s shoulder as the guard untied him.

Arpix brought his arms forward and rubbed at both aching wrists. He sensed he might be being offered a chance to remove himself from the menu. “Livira had it?”

“The duster, yes.”

“Where is—”

“She’s safe enough and not far away. But what I’m interested in is what you can tell me.”

Verification. Arpix was familiar with the concept. Librarians preferred to get the information in one book confirmed by a second source. Better still, many unrelated sources. Oanold’s forces must have recaptured Livira and be holding her close by. If what Arpix said contradicted Livira’s story, she would feel the consequences. The trouble was that Arpix didn’t know what she’d said and didn’t know anything about the book in the first place.

“Can I see inside?” Arpix moved his hand towards the book.

Algar drew it back. “If I give it to you, and you do anything I don’t like, I’ll have to ask Jons here to break both your arms. He’s recently had a sword stuck through him and is in very poor humour.” The aristocrat managed to wrap a diplomat’s expression of regret around the bluntness of his threat.

Arpix glanced nervously at the soldier by Algar’s right shoulder, a grizzled veteran, seamed by old scars, chest blood-soaked. His fatal-looking wound had presumably been healed by the centre circle; the pale eyes with which he regarded Arpix gave the lie to the grey in his short-cropped hair—this was a dangerous man.

Arpix took the book in trembling hands and opened it somewhere in the middle. He saw immediately that the pages were all of slightly different sizes and made of a wide variety of parchments and paper. The comfortable sprawl of Livira’s quillwork greeted him. This was Livira’s book, the one that she’d been writing for years but that had always been scattered inside other tomes in the library, a cuckoo book securing each new page in the nest of some other volume. She must have worked fast to collect the leaves into one manuscript on the day that the library burned.

He’d opened the book at the start of a new chapter, or more accurately the beginning of one of the stories that Livira was always going to weave into a coherent whole but never had. “The Phantom Queen”—it wasn’t one he’d ever heard her talk about. Though from what Evar had said during his stay on the plateau it might be that some of the book had actually been written by Livira whilst in the body of the assistant that had raised the canith children.

What strange fiction Livira might have created whilst in that timeless state Evar couldn’t say, but a familiar name at the foot of the page caught his eye. “Carlotte…”

Arpix, rather than starting at the beginning, began with the line that had snared his attention. “?‘It does look a bit like Carlotte.’ Leetar squinted up at the giant statue.”

And without transition Arpix was there with them. A wide square, bordered by tall buildings with balconies at every level where figures, made tiny by the distance, looked out from their dining tables, their hanging gardens, their soirees, and their gatherings. The light was different here, bright but gentled by some quality of the air. Moisture! Arpix breathed it in. Not the arid mountain air he’d always known, not the wind that leached the water from your skin as it skipped by.

“It is Carlotte,” Arpix said, staring up at the familiar statue. In his time on the plateau only the head and one shoulder emerged from the ground, and the prominent nose had been damaged. Here it was perfect. “It’s her.”

“How would you know?” Livira was standing to his left, looking down at him.

“I…” Any attempt at an answer was lost in the realisation that Livira was towering over him. He’d been so dwarfed by the two statues in front of him, Carlotte and some unknown king, that he’d not noticed how almost everyone in the square loomed above him too. It was as if he and Livira had reversed their traditional positions where he stood head and shoulders taller than she did. He looked down at himself. “What?” He was dressed all in white, and where his arms emerged, his skin was as pale as the turns of linen that wrapped his body.

“Yolanda?” Livira knelt beside him. “Are you sick?”

“N…no…” Arpix shook his head. Somehow, he was a child. The same white child that had joined them just after Livira had escaped the king. Yolanda had been the one who led them to the Mechanism and the audience with the library’s founder, Irad, and with Jaspeth, the brother who opposed him.

“Why would anyone build a statue of Carlotte?” Leetar asked.

It felt like the wrong question. “How did Carlotte get to be queen?” Arpix asked in a girl’s voice. Asking how he got to be the white child seemed an even more pressing question, but something kept Arpix from posing it. The situation felt somehow fragile, like a page that might easily be torn. Arpix had nothing good to go back to. He wanted to stay. And to do that, some instinct told him that he should follow the rules of the piece. He’d always liked rules. At least as far as they represented a vessel that could hold compassion as well as the order that he always sought.

Livira shot Arpix a look. “How do you even know who Carlotte is?”

“I…uh.” Arpix could feel the story slipping away from him. Though suddenly he wasn’t sure it was a story. Certainly, Livira couldn’t have written it as her normal self. She could never have anticipated the statue. And if she wrote it as the Assistant then maybe it was real, seen across time. Because there definitely was a statue of Carlotte out on the edge of the Dust. “Is this real? You’re really Livira? Oanold’s men didn’t catch you again?”

“What?” Livira stared at him. “You know that he didn’t. Thank the gods.” She looked so sad and scared and horrified all at the same time that Arpix was sorry he’d asked.

“But he got Arpix, Salamonda, and Neera, and who else?”

“Only them.” Livira set her jaw. “But it hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen for thousands of years. And that’s plenty of time to figure out how to save them.”

The square was fragmenting around Arpix now. As if invisible spirits were individually removing bricks, flagstones, rooftiles, and speeding away with them. The story was slipping through his fingers. He didn’t belong in it. He half saw Algar’s single eye watching from a hawklike face.

“We need help now, Livira! It’s happening now! They’ve got your book. I’m reading it!” Arpix could hardly hear the voice of the girl he was speaking through. A wind tore around him howling.

“Me…ism…it…oo the mec—”

And with a convulsive shock that saw him drop the book, Arpix was back in the library amid the foulness that King Oanold had made of it.