The Book That Wouldn't Burn: The Library Trilogy: - Softcover

Lawrence, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593437926 ISBN 13: 9780593437926

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Lawrence was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. After earning a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College London, he went back to the US to work on a variety of research projects, including the “Star Wars” missile-defense program. Since returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He never had any ambition to be a writer, so he was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight. His first trilogy, The Broken Empire, has been universally acclaimed as a groundbreaking work of fantasy, and both Emperor of Thorns and The Liar’s Key have won the David Gemmell Legend Award for best fantasy novel. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593437926
• ISBN 13: 9780593437926
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 576
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: ACE; https://www.penguin.com/; ; Bachstelzenweg 10; Ibbenb?ren; 49479; Deutschland