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Format: Hardcover, 576 pages
Release Date: May 9, 2023
Publisher: Ace
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy / Epic
Two strangers find themselves connected by a vast and mysterious
library containing many wonders and still more secrets, in this
powerfully moving first book in a new series from the international
bestselling author of Red Sister and Prince of Thorns.
The boy has lived his whole life trapped within a book-choked chamber older than empires and larger than cities.
The
girl has been plucked from the outskirts of civilization to be trained
as a librarian, studying the mysteries of the great library at the heart
of her kingdom.
They were never supposed to meet. But in the library, they did.
Their
stories spiral around each other, across worlds and time. This is a
tale of truth and lies and hearts, and the blurring of one into another.
A journey on which knowledge erodes certainty and on which, though the
pen may be mightier than the sword, blood will be spilled and cities
burned.
Mark Lawrence's The Book That Wouldn't Burn is the first installment in the authors Library Trilogy. This is a fantasy series that revolves around an ancient and mysterious library. The story mostly takes place in and around Crath City. The two key players in this book are Livira and Evar. Livira is a girl from
the Dust, the poverty-stricken land outside the city where people
barely have enough food and water to survive. As the novel opens,
Livira’s village is attacked by a group of vicious doglike soldiers
known as sabbers.
After being saved by a group of soldiers led by Malar, Livira and the survivors are taken to Crath City where they will be placed in various allocated jobs which they will be stuck with for the rest of their lives. Dust people basically have no rights, and are despised by the King and others. For some reason, or the other, Livira ends up being sent to the library where she quickly learns her way around and ends up navigating chambers filled with danger and mysteries and millions of books where she will eventually meet up with Evar in what appears to be an alternative timeline.
Evar Eventari is a young man in his early 20s
who has spent his entire life trapped in a chamber of an enormous
library, together with his four adopted siblings (Kerrol, Starval, Clovis, and Mayland) and endless towers of
books. Evar has been raised by one of the library’s Assistants, a
porcelain-looking android-type figure, and protected by a curious looking Soldier who may or may not be an automation. When Evar decides he's had enough of the secrecy behind his missing brother, he goes on an expedition that will see him cross paths with Livira over the course of 8 years.
The story's world building begins with the bible. Athenaeum, the legendary library was founded by
Irad, the great-grandson of Adam and Eve and the grandson of Cain, the
inventor of fratricide. Irad fought with his own
brother, Jaspeth, who considered the Athenaeum to be a temple to the sin
of knowledge. Jaspeth was determined to tear down the library as
atonement for the original sin of Adam and Eve, i.e., disobeying God by
eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
The struggle
between Irad and Jaspeth has been passed down from generation to
generation, with Jaspeth, the enemy of knowledge, reflected in figures
such as King Oanold, casting the epic struggles of humankind as a battle
between knowledge and ignorance. One can call this the struggle between good and evil, but which is good, and which is evil? The story itself is so twisted, that when certain aspects are revealed, you have to go back and re-read the section just to make sure you were hallucinating or doing doing Crack Cocaine with Hunter and Ashley.
Both Livira and Evar's viewpoints are intriguing to follow as the
mysteries of Crath, the dust, the grand library, and the wider world are unraveled to the reader. Honorable mentions for supporting cast members go out to the librarian Yute, the soldier Malar, vengeance-driven Clovis, and
Wentworth the humongous cat. In addition, the author presents a clever science-based magic system that has clear rules and consistency.
Elements such as ghosts, time travel, world-hopping, library beings that
may transcend time, and a book that will not burn will give an idea of
some of the concepts featured here.
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Chapter 1
Livira
They named Livira after a weed. You
couldn't grow much in the Dust but that never stopped hungry people
trying. They said livira would grow in places where rocks wouldn't.
Which never made sense to Livira because rocks don't grow.
Unfortunately, not even goats could eat the stuff and any farmer who
watered a crop would find themselves spending most of their time
fighting it. Spill a single drop of water in the Dust and, soon enough,
strands of livira would come coiling out of the cracked ground for a
taste.
Her parents had given her a different name but she hardly
remembered it. People called her Livira because, like the weed, you
couldn't keep her down.
"Come on then!" Livira picked herself up and wiped the blood from her nose. She raised her fists again. "Come on."
Acmar shook his head, looking embarrassed now that a ring of children
had gathered. All of them were dusty but Livira was coated in the stuff,
head to foot.
"Come on!" she shouted. She felt woozy and her head rang as if it were the summoning bell and someone kept beating it.
"You're twice her size." Benth broke into the circle and pushed Acmar aside.
"She won't stay down," Acmar complained, rubbing his knuckles.
"It's a draw then." Benth stepped between them, a broad-shouldered boy
and handsome despite his broken nose. Seeing Livira's scowl he grabbed
her hand and raised it above her head. "Livira wins again."
The others cheered and laughed then broke and ran before the advance of a tall figure, dark against the sun's white glare.
"Livy!" Her aunt's scolding voice. Fingers wrapped her wrist and she
was being jerked away towards the black shadow of the family hut.
Aunt Teela shoved a cracked leather bucket at her. "The beans need watering."
"Yessum!" Livira had always loved the well. She spat a bloody mess into
the dust then grinned up at her aunt before hurrying off with the
bucket. Her aunt shook her head. You could put Livira down but you
couldn't keep her there.
Livira's hurrying didn't last long. She
slowed as she passed Ella's shack. The old woman collected wind-weed,
or rather the kids chased and caught it for her, racing over the hardpan
in pursuit of the tough, fibrous balls. The things were almost entirely
empty space and Ella's cunning fingers could coax the randomness of
their criss-crossed strands into meaning that pleased the eye. Deft
twists could render a horse or man suspended in a network of threads
within the outer sphere that was itself just a lattice of thicker
strands.
Livira watched Ella work. "I wish I could do that."
Ella looked up from her task and held up her current piece on the palm of one wrinkled hand. "For you."
Livira picked it up, a small sphere of wind-weed just five or six inches across.
Immediately Ella took up a replacement and began anew.
Livira studied her unexpected prize. It looked half-finished, the mass
of fibres compressed towards the middle seeming like just a clotting of
many threads that wove nothing. But as she rotated the ball a shape
emerged within it, still vague, like a man approaching through a dust
storm, indistinct but definitely there. A young man or maybe a boy.
Though if asked how she could tell his age or sex, Livira would have no
answer. And it seemed to her that she knew him, or rather that she
recognised him.
"I wish I could do that," she said again, cradling the ball in both hands.
"You have other talents, dear." Ella didn't look up from her task.
Livira's past efforts with the wind-weed had been comically bad and part
of her thanked Ella for not offering false hope that she would get much
better.
"Talents?" Livira kicked at the dust. A memory like a
steel trap seemed more of a curse than a blessing. A poorer memory, one
that ran the dry glare of one day into the next, might stop the time
weighing so heavily even on young shoulders. And she was pretty much
unbeatable at the game of hollows and stones, but it seemed to make the
old men angry rather than pleased. She also understood the odds when the
younger men gambled on the game-better than any of them did-but none of
them were interested in her advice. "All my skills are useless."
"There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find an application."
"Well . . . Acmar can fart a tune."
Ella looked up at that, lips pursed, dark eyes unreadable. Livira
glanced down, noticed the bucket at her own feet, and, thus reminded of
her task, opted to skip away.
The well was a yard wide and a
hundred yards deep. Livira had asked a thousand times how they ever
managed to dig it. She’d scratched holes in the hardpan herself and
never got deeper than the width of a hand. The well lay outside the
settlement, beyond the bean rows. The scent of water attracts all sorts
in the Dust, and rarely the sort you want wandering around your huts at
night.
There was a wetness in the air above it, as if the well
itself were a great throat. Livira could feel the dampness of its breath
on her skin. She liked to lie on her belly with her head over the edge
and stare down into the blackness. The children said Orrin had fallen in
and that's where he went last month. But the water had stayed clear and
sweet. Livira thought that a dust-bear had taken Orrin. The boy had
never looked where he was going. And whilst that might lend credence to
the idea that he could have walked into the well, there were, Livira
said, many more dust-bears waiting just beneath the surface than wells.
Livira cranked the windlass, lowering the attached bucket towards the
unseen water. She liked the well because it kept them all alive, but
that wasn't the only reason. In her mind it was a connection to another
world, out of reach but most definitely there. A world where what they
needed most was commonplace, a world of darkness and flow, full of its
own secrets, home to wet things that swam in blindness, tasting their
way through unknown caverns.
"What you doing?"
Livira
jumped, startled out of her daydreaming. She saw it was Katrin in her
shapeless, dusty smock, hands crimson from shelling jarra beans. "I'm
juggling elephants."
Katrin frowned, considering the statement. Katrin was loyal, kind, but really quite slow sometimes. "You're not ju-"
"It was a joke." Livira rolled her eyes and spun the windlass. "You can see what I'm doing."
"Oh." Katrin's frown deepened. "Why did you fight Acmar?"
Livira kept turning the handle. The rope spooling off the windlass was
darker now-the new length that Old Kern had added so that the bucket
would be able to reach the water again. The level had been sinking ever
since Livira could remember. "He called me a weed."
"But . . . we all call you Livira."
"He called me weed." Livira shook her head. "It's not the same."
That had been part of the reason, the spark that had made her throw the
first punch. But the real reason was that he had tried to snatch her
scrap from her. That's what Aunt Teela had called it when Livira showed
it to her. A scrap of paper. The wind had revealed this treasure to
Livira months earlier, pushing aside the dust to expose a corner. A torn
triangle, no larger than the palm of her hand and, like an old man's
skin, thin, wrinkled, discoloured by age. Dark marks patterned it. Her
aunt had shrugged when Livira showed her and had grown inexplicably
angry when Livira persisted in asking about the marks, saying at last,
"They're just scribbling. Tally marks for counting beans at market."
"But-" Livira had wanted to protest that there were so many different
marks, they were too beautiful just to be counting, but Teela had cut
her off and had set her to her least favourite chore: cleaning out the
cookpot.
Livira shook off the memory. "See what Ella gave me!" She lifted the wind-weed that she had tied to her belt with a cord.
Katrin narrowed her eyes at it. "It looks like what we give Ella in the first place. Did it go wrong?"
"No!" Livira started to rotate the ball, searching for the best angle, but Katrin looked away.
"Did it hurt," Katrin asked, "when Acmar hit you?"
"Yes." Livira scowled and let the ball drop. "Lots." The windlass had
run out of rope so she began to wind the bucket back up. After a few
turns the reassuring resistance told her that the bucket had filled.
Every time she carried out the task a small part of her held its breath,
thinking that one day there would be no resistance. One day the water
would simply not be there. An even smaller part of her hissed its
disappointment when the turn of the handle revealed that new weight.
When the water was gone there would be a change. Not a good change. But a
change nonetheless. And sometimes, in the dark of the night with the
hollow sounds of the Dust all around and the bright stars cold in their
heaven, sometimes what scared Livira more than the water running out was
that the water would not run out and that this would be her life. Dust,
and beans, and dry-wheat, and the wind, and the little huddle of huts
like stones gathered in the vastness of the empty plain, until she ran
out rather than the water, and she joined the dust, and the wind carried
her away as if she had never even drawn breath.
"I like Acmar," Katrin said.
Livira made a face and put her back into the winding. All the girls
liked Acmar, at least to look at. Livira had never been able to put into
words quite why he made her angry. It was to do with the way he didn't
value any of the things she valued most. And all that lack of interest
did was make him spokesman for the settlement, because none of them
cared about those things really, not even Katrin or Neera, who said they
were her best friends.
"You can have him," Livira grunted, her
arms growing tired, her hands sore. "I'm going to the city soon. And you
can all live in the dust while I . . . while I . . ." She didn't really
know what they did in the city. She thought perhaps her scrap had come
from there, stolen from the city folk by the wind. All she'd ever seen
of the city were its walls, as a low smudge in the distance. She'd had
to walk half a day even for that view, climbing the ridges to the west,
returning to the settlement parched and dusty late at night to a frantic
Aunt Teela. People said that the city was full of marvels with new ones
added every week. But none of them had ever been there or even seemed
interested in trying.
"I'm going to the city," Livira repeated.
"They won't let you in, silly." Katrin put out her tongue. "Even the dust doesn't get past their gates without permission."
She was just quoting what came out through Kern's grey beard, but it
made Livira angry because she feared it might be true. "What I think
is-"
Livira's hot reply faded from her lips and she rested
against the windlass handle staring out to the east. There it was again,
distant and dancing in the heat haze. A figure. "What I think . . . is
that someone's coming!"
. . . and other doubters. The historian
must ensure that all their work is plainly marked as such, for if it
were presented as a work of fiction its readers would clamour that it
lacked sense, the events too implausible, too random, and too cruel.
Truth will set you free . . . from certainty, comfort, and the beliefs
upon which we rely for sanity . . .
A History of Histories, by William Ancrath
Chapter 2
Livira
People never came to the settlement. Livira hadn't ever seen a visitor,
had never met a single person who hadn't grown among the four dozen
souls who sheltered in the huddled shacks. It was the sort of place that
you went from, not to. Kern went from it to the dust markets. The
patched waistcoat he was so proud of allegedly came from the city,
purchased at great cost from a dust-market stall. What he bartered on
his trips might then go on to bigger markets or to the city itself, but
Livira had always had to take the existence of these places and people
on faith. Now-someone was coming!
"Stranger!" Livira let the
bucket fall and charged back through the bean rows, shouting her news,
Katrin hard on her heels, eating dust. "Stranger!" She raced along the
rows, rattling the drying beans in their pods. Only this morning she'd
been watching the old men play stones and hollows, dreaming of an escape
to something more, to a world that lay beyond the haze. Now that world
was coming to her. "Stranger!"
"What are you saying?" Aunt Teela caught Livira's arm in a steel grip as she emerged from the crop.
"A stranger! Someone's coming!" Livira repeated at a lower, more comprehensible volume.
Teela's face stiffened as if a deadwasp had stung her. Her hand fell to her side. "Tell everyone."
Livira ran on, shouting. Something in her aunt's expression had put a
chill into her and now fear edged her cries. The summoning bell took up
the alarm.
“What do they want?” Livira stood with the
others out by the well. Everyone she knew was there, except those few
too old, too sick, or too small to emerge from their huts. Aunt Teela
held her hand in a painful grip. Livira waited, still sweating from her
run. The sun seemed brighter, the dust sharper on her lungs.
"You stay close to me, Livy. Do as you're told for once in your life."
Her aunt pulled Livira's face around to hers, meeting her gaze with
over-bright eyes. "I love you, child." Aunt Teela was not a woman given
to displays of affection and this one filled Livira with a fear far
greater than any that Acmar's approaching fist had instilled.
