The Book That Wouldn’t Burn (The Library Trilogy, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

Evar’s brother Mayland had always said that the fact they could see the walls of their prison was a blessing afforded to very few.

All of us in our secret hearts, in our empty moments of contemplation, stumble into the understanding that nothing matters. There’s a cold shock of realisation and, in that moment, we know that nothing at all is of the least consequence. Ultimately, we’re all just spinning our wheels, seeking to avoid pain until the clock winds down and our time is spent. To give someone purpose is to free them, however briefly, from the spectre of that knowledge.”

The stars, scattered in forgotten glory, demanded her attention as if she had no more pressing concerns.

Yute had said that the library allowed men to teach themselves how to light fires long before it taught them how to extinguish them. And the result was that time and again they burned their world down with some cunning new kind of fire.

“The first librarian, founder of the great library, had a younger brother, Jaspeth. Jaspeth felt that since their great-grandparents had lost the gods’ good graces by foolishly seeking knowledge, it was hardly a good idea that just three generations later Irad was building a great palace to knowledge where all could come and partake of it. Knowledge, he said, was not wisdom. Irad, he said, was continuing the work that the devil had started. They went to war over it. Though neither of them ended up killing their own brother like their grandfather had. Instead, they formed an uneasy peace. A compromise. The library is that compromise. The knowledge—all knowledge—is there for the taking, waiting on a shelf, ready to be picked up. But it must be found. It cannot be summoned effortlessly from a ring and projected onto a wall. Not unless someone puts in the necessary work and cleverness, and then only for as long as that cleverness is preserved. All that knowledge lies there, as agreed, locked behind the letters of ever-changing alphabets in the words of ever-changing languages. It sits there among the lies, mistakes, delusions, and untruths of the unwise. It is, to make a long story shorter, never easy.” “But none of that’s true?” Livira’s eyes followed the fading traces of the ring’s projections. “All of it is representative of a truth. Truths cast many shadows, some of which are very different when the light shines from one direction than from another. The library is a compro...

“It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.”

“How can they let it all burn?” she demanded. “They?” Yute asked. “Them! The assistants.” She waved her arms as if it might help. “You know. Like the one who somehow turned all these people’s food to dust by lifting his little finger. They can’t stop a fire . . . or just provide fireproof books?” “Everything is a compromise.” Yute raised his hand so she could see over his shoulder the ring whose moonstone he had joked could hold every book in every chamber of the library. “The assistants are Irad’s servants. The dark that escapes from between, the blackness that’s the library’s own blood, is what Jaspeth bends to his will.” Yamala glanced at her husband and tutted, as if she disapproved of such candour. Yute ignored her and carried on. “The library exists on the knife edge between their conflict—their disagreement. It hangs in a web of checks and balances. The library is both the tree and the apple. It offers not knowledge of good and evil but knowledge for good or evil. Of course fire could be forbidden. But one of the compromises that holds back the war—not your little one here, but the big one—is the agreement that if a civilisation is not capable of keeping a book from burning then perhaps it wasn’t ready for whatever knowledge was held within.”

“I found myself in sympathy with Irad’s brother. Unlike Jaspeth I didn’t want to destroy the library and let the races crawl from increasingly infertile mud at every cycle. But I felt they should be taught to walk before they were given racehorses, chariots, ornithopters to take them to the sky. I felt that knowledge should be earned through wisdom. “Sadly, my own wisdom has not been equal to the task. I have grown old, and war has overtaken my efforts. “But the truth is that I traded immortality for the chance to help you.

The main comfort in maintaining a journal is not that those who come after you may read through the progress of your life. Nor is it that, however faded, flexible, and fallible your memory may become as the tide of years washes over it, you will have this record to look back upon. It lies primarily in the illusion that were you only to press on at the end of this Tuesday and write your way into Wednesday, you would become the master of your life, subject to no bounds save those of imagination. The Journals of Samantha Peeps, by Samantha Peeps

“Jaspeth. Irad’s brother. That’s what your Yute said. Irad made the library and the assistants to tend it for him. Jaspeth opposes the library, and the Escapes are his servants, trying to tear it down.” “Do they really need to?” Malar asked. “It’s burning, in case you didn’t notice.” “It’s always burning somewhere,” Livira pointed out. “Yute said that too. But it’s just the books that burn. And the shelves. The assistants restock, and people like us, creatures like us, rebuild. That was the compromise to stop the war—the library’s vulnerable, difficult, inconvenient, but eternal.”

“We’re not our bodies, Simon.” “We’re not not our bodies. You can’t pretend we’re some sort of angelic intelligence tied unfairly to our flesh. We are our flesh—it shapes our needs, our desires, our hunger—” Sam conceded the point by silencing him with a kiss. Fireman 6: Lust in the Ashes, by Miranda Lovegood

With invisible claws it hollowed her, cored her, picking away until even the letters of her name began to come loose like the teeth of some old skull abandoned out on the Dust, finally drawn from their sockets by the patience of the rattling wind. The Escape took everything, leaving nothing but a husk. And, in the empty darkness of that husk, Livira, who had throughout her life been defined by the steel trap of her memory, opened her eyes and took it all back. “I don’t forget.” The swiftness of Livira’s reclamation turned the Escape inside out and its remnants drifted from the assistant’s head wound to join the smoke.

She knew that the vast majority of those books were not on fire, and that was well. She knew that a small fraction, constituting an enormous number, were on fire, and that was part of the accord, the compromise that had avoided a Ragnarök and instead plunged the library into its state of eternal cold war. Undesirable but acceptable. And she knew that amid all those oceans of the written word there was just one book that should by rights be burning, and yet was refusing the flames.