The Book That Broke the World

In the present, upon entering the city, Celcha realizes the backed-up gas has entered the library and will put all the staff to sleep. Several hundred assistants emerge from the library with Hellet. Two of the assistants tear off their flesh and emerge as all-white children. Celcha follows the children as they walk into the city to tell the ganar about the situation. She feels “suddenly guilty at the size of the unasked-for responsibility she was about to thrust upon the ganar who had expected to wake to another ordinary day” (191).

At a temple, Celcha realizes the bodies she’s seeing are not people sleeping. She is horrified to realize that everyone in the city has been killed by the poisonous gas, including the ganar, and she “had delivered it to them” (194). She sees two ghosts, one a canith and one a human female, and believes that they are Maybe and Starve. She watches them dance with joy and then kiss. She knows Maybe and Starve guided Hellet’s actions and are responsible for the deaths. She vows revenge.

Celcha fears that when outsiders learn of what happened, they will blame the ganar. She blames the library, which “had put too much knowledge into her brother’s hands, too fast for even his genius to keep pace. It had given him power without the wisdom to know how little he understood it” (197). 

As she returns to the library, she surmises that one of the assistants who tore himself apart must be Yute, removing the eternal skin of the assistant to step back into the flow of time and see if he could influence events. An assistant pulls Celcha into the Exchange and shows her the portals. She realizes Hellet has chosen to take the form of an assistant. He says the library is responsible for the catastrophe, “And it is a thing that cannot be broken from the outside” (199).

Two hundred years later, Arpix tends to Clovis’s wound and reflects on this act of care as a bridge between their species, which have been at war. Arpix is frustrated because he cannot find the weapon that holds back the skeer. Clovis suggests they ask Wentworth to help, and Salamonda asks Wentworth to bring them a skeer. 

Wentworth drags a skeer through the barrier, and it disintegrates into pieces. Jella asks what reason they had for killing the creature. The skeer’s ichor, or blood, reacts to the barrier, and Arpix realizes they can use this.

While the humans continue to search the tunnels for the weapon, Evar sits with Clovis, who is becoming weaker. While the night sky fills him with a sense of peace, Evar grows angry watching the skeer. He thinks, “They didn’t hate him. They didn’t understand him. […] The skeer didn’t care one way or the other. This was simply their nature” (213). 

Evar is startled when the skeer advance across the perimeter, but they are pushed back again as Arpix comes toward them carrying what looks like a rusty iron ball. It is the weapon, which they finally found in a wall in the buried city.

In the Exchange, Livira and Malar encounter Mayland and Starval, two of Evar’s canith siblings. Mayland asks whose side Livira is on. He describes civilization as little more than a cycle of cities burning and building themselves on the ruins of the last, an outcome of Yute’s compromises over the years. He insists that wisdom is separate from knowledge and that lessons should be learned from experience, not taught from books. He says if the library were closed, people could live without the curse of memory, and that would be a type of freedom.

Livira compares burning books to throwing children off a cliff, but she also reflects on memory as a mediation between knowledge and experience, thinking there should be a middle ground. Malar reminds Livira that one chooses sides with one’s gut, and since he considers her family, he will take her side. He knows Livira will never let the library be destroyed. An assistant appears and asks for her book.

Arpix’s group follows Wentworth across what was once the Dust. As they near Crath City, 200 years after he lived there, Arpix reflects that the canith who destroyed his city were likely destroyed, in turn, by the skeer. He wonders what they are returning to and reflects on the prejudices against canith his people held. 

As they near a skeer nest, skeer fly overhead, dropping rocks. Several in their party are hurt, and Arpix goes back for Jella. Evar helps him.

Evar, holding the orb, leads the group into the library. His chamber holds canith knowledge, but he reflects on the many records the library holds, representing all species. They go to the circle in the center of the room to try to heal their party, including Clovis. 

One of the Escapes starts chasing Evar, and he runs out of the room. As he fights it, the orb he carries causes it to shut down, but his leg is injured in the fight.

Livira doesn’t want to surrender her book; she feels it is a physical part of her and sees it as something that makes her immortal. Instead, she and Malar enter a portal and find themselves in Salamonda’s kitchen. They see a hand emerge from another portal, reaching for a loaf of bread. Livira believes the hand is Yute’s and reaches for him. She falls into another chamber, which reeks, and encounters a thin, dirty, old man she recognizes as King Oanold, who rules Crath City.

Arpix, Clovis, and Kerrol search for Evar. They find the Escape, which Arpix says is shaped like a ganar. They find Evar, injured.

After she recognizes King Oanold, Livira sees a web of cracks spreading from where she landed on the library floor. The king’s soldiers interrogate her, breaking her arm in the process. The center circle heals her, but the pain is intense.

The king says they are searching for Yute, the traitor, and Livira sees that the people with him are hungry. She also recognizes the soldier holding her, Jons. The king demands that Livira open a portal for him. She escapes and tumbles into an enclosure where she sees another young man she knows, Gevin, whose legs have been amputated at the knee. Gevin tells her to run.

As Jella and Salamonda work to heal him, Evar thinks there may be hope for humans and canith to learn to live together. Arpix wonders why the ganar automaton didn’t move until it saw the canith. 

They progress through more chambers. Evar kills a skeer who is guarding a door, but he feels guilty for attacking it because it appears to be in a state of hibernation. When Kerrol tricks him into moving away from the door, Evar is briefly terrified that he won’t be able to open it. He recalls all the times he tried to escape from his library chamber.

Arpix reflects on how he has always kept his life small, but he is attracted to Clovis, who is like a force of nature. When they find another door blocked by skeer, Kerrol uses the orb to remove them. Clovis smells humans, and suddenly, people atop the book stacks begin throwing things at them. They are hostile because they see the canith. Jella identifies the group, and they join the newcomers, who bring them to Yute.

The newcomers escaped the library several weeks ago, while Arpix’s group has been on the Dust for four years. Arpix makes introductions and asks that the canith in their group not be held responsible for the crimes of past canith. Yute confesses that he has been stealing food to feed them, and Salamonda is indignant. As Yute reaches into his pocket, he says someone caught hold of him. There is a sharp sound, and Arpix sees a crack appear in the floor, black mist rising from it.