Interesting book where an infinite library, spanning all worlds and times, provides both refuge and danger?
Different species see each other as enemies ("sabbers"), and the library tries to tell them history is only repeating, but that's hard to get.
Good sudden twist where Livira and Evar turn out to be separate species. Her book, which he took into the Mechanism, which is where you can live "inside" books, turns out to create a crack in time.
"The first librarian, founder of the great library, had a younger brother, Jaspeth. Jaspeth felt that since =.their great-grandparents had lost the gods' good graces by foolishly seeking knowledge, it was hardly a good idea that just three generations later Irad was building a great palace to knowledge where all could come and partake of it. Knowledge, he said, was not wisdom. Irad, he said, was continuing the work that the devil had started. They went to war over it. Though neither of them ended up killing their own brother like their grandfather had. Instead, they formed an uneasy peace. A compromise. The library is that compromise. The knowledge - all knowledge - is there for the taking, waiting on a shelf, ready to be picked up. But it must be found. It cannot be summoned effortlessly from a ring and projected onto a wall. Not unless someone puts in the necessary work and cleverness, and then only for as long as that cleverness is preserved. All that knowledge lies there, as agreed, locked behind thee letters of ever-changing alphabets in the words of ever-changing languages. It sits there among the lies, mistakes, delusions, and untruths of the unwise. It is, to make a long story shorter, never easy."
