World at Knife’s Point

Naya holds a dying man in her arms.

It was reckless to save him.

More than reckless – unlawful, punishable by death. Or worse, expulsion.

She pulls at the collar at her neck, presses a shaking hand to the man’s throat. His pulse picks up, flutters like moth wings against the light pressure of her fingers.

No one has ever entered her world before. It is sealed shut with magic – a great domed barrier that swirls like a vast oil slick against a desert sky, a bowl clapped down over its skittish prey.

Her people talk of Outsiders entering their world as dark prophecies, superstitions about the turning of magic, a lightning crack forming at the seams.

The end of the world.

A world that already hovered on the brink of extinction one hundred years ago, when a colossal desert serpent sniffed out the magic with its forked tongue, swatted the city down with a single thrash of its tail. Its body coiled up the spires, cracked steeples like bone-dry kindling, nudged a single lit candle to start its fire, charmed by the smallness of the act.

No one would have survived if it weren’t for those who still knew the magic, were calm enough to summon it from within the fire’s belly. They lured the beast away, died putting every last fiber of enchantment into the barrier that would hide the survivors away for good, a demarcation of worlds in which anyone can leave, into the mouth of the snake, but no one can enter.

Until now.

Naya takes a deep breath, steadies the tremor in her hands. Beneath her the man shifts toward her, as if drawn in, even in unconsciousness, the wrist she pulled him through the Wall still in her hand. He is young, hardly older than herself. Too young to die.

Naya glances behind her. They are alone.

The ruins lie deathly still behind them, a single tattered flag, ghost gray, bunched and swaying like a hanged man at the end of a snapped beam. Her people have long abandoned the charred ruins of the once great city, rebuilt their settlement in the valley deep below, unaware that Naya has just ripped open the magic from above, pulled a bleeding heart into her hand.

She lifts the man beneath his arms and drags him across a narrow belt of sand, heaving him into the gaping mouth of the ruined library. Inside the roof is gone, and the trees grow dense and wild. Ancient books still line the warped shelves, vines twining along the ridges, sage growing up between the splintered planks. The room holds vestiges of magic, books once used for enchantments still whole, miraculously resistant to rot and desert heat.

If she has any chance of bringing this man back to life, it will be as close to this magic, and as far from her people as she can get.

----

Leven wakes in stages.

First he is aware of her, she always comes first.

Even when she’s not there, the absence of her comes first, the traces left behind, or lack thereof – the negative space a third presence, growing and retreating like shadows. He reminds himself that when she is furthest from him, she is halfway back, rather than halfway gone.

Next he is aware of the pain, his body cracked like the paneled pores of the desert, his head throbbing along a curve, like a crescent scythe angled into his brow, an agonizing burn on his lower back where he was touched by a sun ghost.

Between her and the pain and the desert heat that is all sweltering fever, he catches mirage fragments of his surroundings – an overgrown library that is rife with magic – books solid and healthy caressed by twining ivy and a forest floor that shouldn’t be possible in a desert – an imposing willow tree at its center, of which he lies at the roots. Even in between consciousness he knows he’s on holy ground.

The Magician’s Library, he breathes out, offers the words up on ancient dust-motes like incense. One of the greatest lost wonders of the world.

When she returns, Leven tries to keep his breath even, feigning sleep. He slides his gaze to her whenever he is sure she’s not looking, catches her between the swaying tendrils of the willow. She is pale in a shocking way – like the sun doesn’t touch her, a luminous moon that will forever be the coolness of summer nights. She is an anomaly, a bright question at the edge of his consciousness, one that he asks over and over like a broken record. He knows not to lift the needle for the answer, wills himself to hold her mystery like a caught butterfly in the loose prayer of his hands.

He burns where she touches him – his temple, the back of his head, and always the pulse at his wrist where she first grabbed him in the desert, pulled him from the precipice, into her world.

Now his world ticks like a clock around her and the numbers read like clean heat, and the callous on her left palm, and the aloe between her skin and his, all shivery sunlight across cool waters.

It is many revolutions of her before his mind comes fully back, the answer a weight pressed to his chest, which he swallows into his gut, all fluttery trembling – this girl who is the one.

The one he is meant to kill.

Get the book, kill the girl, a cold voice slithers in his mind.

The easiest job he’ll ever do – he wants to laugh – the library his very bed, the girl his naive lover.

He pulls the knife from his boot after she’s left for more food, amazed she didn’t think to look for it as she brought him back to life. He frowns at how vulnerable she’s made herself, wonders how she’s survived this long.

He holds the knife out in front of him, watches the blade shake in his hand.