We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Book That Broke the World, the second installment of Mark Lawrence’s Library trilogy—publishing with Ace on April 9th.
The Library spans worlds and times. It touches and joins distant places. It is memory and future. And amid its vastness Evar Eventari both found, and lost, Livira Page.
Evar has been forced to flee the library, driven before an implacable foe. Livira, trapped in a ghost world, has to recover the book she wrote—one which is the only true threat to the library’s existence—if she’s to return to her life.
While Evar’s journey leads him outside into a world he’s never seen, Livira’s path will taker her deep inside her own writing, where she must wrestle with her stories in order to reclaim the volume in which they were written.
The secret war that defines the library has chosen its champions and set them on the board. The time has come when they must fight for what they believe, or lose everything.
“Speak!”
Kerrol twisted free and raised his hands apologetically. None of his unparalleled skills at reading people were required to understand how close to the edge Evar stood. “I’m sorry for your loss, brother.”
“You said you could find her!” Evar snapped, unwilling to let go of the offered hope but also unwilling to believe it.
“I needed you to come with us.” Kerrol lowered his gaze. “Couldn’t leave you there for the next skeer that happened by.”
Evar wasn’t aware he’d swung for Kerrol until Clovis caught his wrist and pulled the blow aside. “Enough!” She pushed between them. Kerrol stepped back, unruffled, as if he’d anticipated both the attack and their sister coming to his aid.
“You don’t even know!” Evar shouted at both of them. “You don’t even know…” He jerked his arm free of Clovis’s grip. “Livira was the Assistant!” He tried to stop shouting, tried to steady his voice, but it kept breaking around surfacing emotion. “Her spirit. Her ghost. It entered the Assistant centuries ago. She was trapped in there ever since. The other one, Malar, was trapped in the Soldier. Until…”
Clovis stepped back, frowning, minute shakes of her head to express her disbelief. “No.”
“He certainly thinks it’s true,” Kerrol observed.
“IT IS TRUE!” With effort, Evar reeled in his anger. “It’s true. They raised us. Two humans trapped in assistants raised you, Clovis.”
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The Book That Broke the World
Clovis shook her head more fiercely, but when she opened her mouth to deny it, no words came.
“I wasn’t lying.” Kerrol drew Evar’s attention to himself. “Misleading perhaps. I know your human’s in that book. Take it to the Mechanism and you’ll be together again, in a manner of speaking. It will help.”
“I don’t have the book,” Evar growled. He wasn’t even sure if there was a book anymore.
“So, what we need is an assistant to tell us where it is,” Kerrol said. “And whilst I don’t know where to find one of those with any great precision, I do know that it will be out here and not back in there.” He waved a hand at the corridor leading back to their chamber. “Plus, if that skeer decides to move, any of us still in there may well be trapped for another two hundred years.”
Evar’s shoulders slumped, his anger diffused. He couldn’t feel aggrieved against Kerrol, even though he was sure he’d been expertly manipulated.
Clovis shook her head a final time. “Come on.” She led off along the wall. “And quietly. This is skeer territory. There’ll be more of the bastards coming. Lots more.”
Evar refused to be led away. “Where’s Starval?” He looked back at the corridor. He wasn’t leaving Starval behind.
“With Mayland,” Kerrol said. “I saw them both go into a different pool.”
“Mayland…” Evar still hadn’t come to terms with the idea that Mayland hadn’t died, he’d just left, and had been in and out of the Exchange all this time they’d been mourning him. “Why did Starval—”
“I don’t know.” The pain of the admission ran through Kerrol’s words.
“Enough!” Clovis said. “Come on!”
“Where are we going?” Evar finally allowed himself to be led, and fell in behind her.
“Outside. I can’t fight them all by myself. I’m good… but not that good. We need warriors.”
If it wasn’t for needing to find Livira’s book Evar would have asked why they should fight the skeer at all. He wouldn’t have cared if they claimed the library while there was a whole world out there to explore with Livira. Instead, he asked, “And you know the way, do you?”
“I know that staying still is not the way to the outside,” Clovis said, “and that if we walk in a straight line for long enough, we’re bound to reach the edge at some point.”
“At some point.” Evar nodded. Clovis didn’t yet understand quite how large the library was. If they chose the wrong direction, they might walk until they got old and still not find the other side.
Evar trudged behind Kerrol, who in turn followed Clovis. They had no food, no water, and doubtless they would find—or be found by—more skeer long before they met an assistant. Bound tightly in thoughts of Livira, Evar couldn’t find the space to care about his own prospects. He’d spent a lifetime trapped with the one he had come to need most, and hadn’t known it. Instead, he’d bent his whole being towards escape. And here he was, trailing through the great beyond, discovering it to be no different to the place he’d come to despise. No different, except that it lacked her. How many people, Evar wondered, had spent their youth, their whole lives, battering at locked doors, only to find—if they ever managed to open them—that there was nothing on the other side they couldn’t have found on their own side? When they were children, the Assistant had often told them a tale that seemed to capture this “wisdom” in a handful of lines, a tale about three goats wanting to cross a bridge. The lesson had sailed above Evar’s head. Mayland had noted that the same mythology pierced a thousand cultures like a spear driven through sentience of every kind, perhaps even that of goats. And still, despite it all, Evar had pounded on his door.
And that was where, in the end, he’d found her. That was where his extravagant race to “save” her had ended. Before his precious door. She’d even been the one to open it for him. When he’d finally understood the riddle of the book, understood that Livira had been locked away in the Assistant’s flesh for all these lifetimes, and started to run back to find her… what had he expected? He’d been so focused on getting there in time that he’d given no thought to what would happen next. Had he believed he could haul the girl bodily from the Assistant’s flesh? It hadn’t been her body that had gone into the Assistant, it had been her ghost. But the blood and bone of her, where had that gone? Those had vanished when she went from the now into the past through that portal in the wood between. The whole thing made his head hurt, even without considering the book—Livira’s book—which had somehow eaten its own tail and existed looping around two centuries in the past, like an infinity sign burned through the years. None of it—
“Evar!”
Evar startled out of his thoughts. “What?”
“This.” Clovis held up a plate of skeer armour, almost large enough to cover her chest. It looked strangely weathered, like the wooden doors in the city’s poorest quarter, porous and weakened by age. “They shed them from time to time.”
Looking around, Evar saw that the shelving had driven them from following the chamber wall and that they were in a long aisle that vanished into the distance in both directions, shelves rising above them for several times his height. A ladder on broken wheels leaned across the gap ahead of them.
“They’re close.” Clovis sniffed the air.
Evar pushed his selfishness aside. He might not be overly bothered right now if his misery saw him sleepwalking into a fatal encounter, but his siblings would share that fate. In the absence of Starval he was the expert on concealment and evasion. Clovis would come into her own if they came face to face with the skeer, but it would be better if that didn’t happen.
“They can probably scent us too.” Evar scanned the shelves. He pulled a couple of books from shoulder level, opened them both, then discarded them. “Keep your eyes open for anything written in Carcasan. The more substantial tomes. They’ll be written on tweel vellum.” Evar didn’t know what tweels smelled like in life; however, their cured skins carried a gentle but penetrating reek. Wrapping a person’s feet in a few pages and secreting loose leaves around their body would confuse the nose of even the best hunting dog.
Evar took hold of the ladder. “I’ll go up and have a scout around.”
Clovis caught his arm. “Keep your mind on what you’re doing. Daydreaming about your sabber-girl will get us all k—”
“I’m focused.” Evar pulled free and began to climb.
From on high the chamber presented itself very differently. The shelf tops resembled banding across rolling hills or the swells of some alien ocean. In places they were completely level with each other; elsewhere their heights jiggled around some common mean, but generally they grew or shrank gradually, creating slopes. Where the height changed dramatically from one aisle to the next a cliff face formed. These were rare but drew the eye.
Evar stayed on the ladder for a long time, raising his head above the shelf top just enough to see. At last, convinced that no skeer had dared the heights, he moved from the ladder to the top boards in one fluid motion, keeping low. Something towards the middle of the chamber had caught his eye but he’d needed more elevation to understand it. Even now he lacked the required height. He stood up tall, ignoring his sister’s hiss of caution.
In a great bowl formed by the increasing shortness of the shelves sat something much larger than any living creature Evar had seen. Not that it was alive—but it appeared to have been modelled on a beast that struck a chord in Evar’s memory. Crouched as it was, knees to chest, head down, thick overlong arms wrapping its legs, the thing was almost spherical. It seemed to be fashioned from metal plates, steel, bronze, and brass, and decorating every limb was long golden fur, so cunningly cast into the metal that it truly looked like a shaggy pelt.
To Evar, the strangest thing about it was not its size or the manner of its construction but the fact that he recognised the creature on which the titan had been modelled. He had seen its much smaller cousins when he had tried his first and only off-world portal. It had taken him to a library where the air itself had been poison, driving Livira back immediately. Only the fact that he’d been a ghost there had allowed him time to look around. But those creatures had been half his height.
“What is it?” Clovis’s hiss came from ankle level. “What do you see?”
Evar motioned her to silence. Unnervingly, despite being at least a quarter of a mile away, the mechanical being raised its head and looked in their direction. It unclasped the hands around its knees, each sporting a blade-like claw that jutted from the back. The great blunt head tilted left, then right. The faint popping sounds reaching Evar must have been loud retorts as ancient joints unlocked. He could see that, inexplicably, the golem bore a single dull iron manacle around its left wrist. A band of metal that would have encircled Evar, Clovis, and Kerrol if they stood close together.
“Oh crap.” Evar didn’t know how he knew the thing wanted him dead. But he did know it.
The roar lagged behind the opening of the golem’s tooth-lined mouth, but when it arrived it shook the air. Evar was already sliding down the ladder with Clovis barely keeping ahead of him.
Kerrol looked at the pair of them expectantly.
“We need to run,” Evar said. “Now!”
Excerpted from The Book That Broke the World, copyright © 2024 by Mark Lawrence.
