With me being the bookworm I am, it might seem queer that I didn’t go to the library sooner than I did. But books were a nice thing in my life, a luxury and a reminder of better times, and I didn’t want to start letting nice things back into my world until I thought there was at least a chance of making it through the next couple of days. The lightvine took the edge off my fears, though, just a bit, and maybe it was the act of feeding myself or some chemical in the lightvine itself, but all that really mattered to me was that I started thinking of ways to fill the hours, and my grey working the way it does, what jumped to mind first of all were books.

So I went to Rackamore’s library . . . and that was when I saw what she’d done to it.

I knew that books were valuable to some coves, and boring to others, but I’d never ventured beyond that thought to the idea that books might be something to be hated or destroyed. Books were like lungstuff, I’d liked to think. There were bottles of lungstuff kept for safekeeping all over a ship. There to use when you needed them, but that didn’t mean you burned them up just because you had enough to breathe somewhere else. But I suppose that was how an educated girl from Mazarile saw such things, and it didn’t mean that everyone else was obliged to have the same view.

Bosa had destroyed Rack’s library. It wasn’t an accident, or a side-effect of close action. This had been systematic, and it must have taken two or three of them to get the job done. They’d gone in with sharp tools – maybe the long-bladed yardknives that coves like Hirtshal used to cut rigging – and they’d hacked and hacked, gashing books apart at their spines, so that the pages had come out and gone fluttering all around the room, like a snowstorm with palm-sized flakes. But a yardknife will cut anything, even a page floating in the breeze, so they must have kept on hacking, slicing and dicing those pages until it would have taken a hundred years to stitch them back together. They’d used fire, too, so that for every white fragment there was a black or brown one, and there was still ash hovering around when I gulped a breath of it down my gullet. I was inhaling his library, or a bit of it, and somewhere in that choking taste was enough history to cram a thousand lifetimes. I coughed out some of it, but not the whole of it.