“What?” he protested. “I’ll barely have time to survey the shelves. Six months. A year would be better.”
“End of.” Kenneret smiled coolly. “The month.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “I’d better get started, then.” And he spun on his heel and stalked out of her office. The door slammed behind him. Then it opened, and he stuck his head back into the room. “Your Majesty,” he added, his voice etched with acid, and then slammed the door as he left again.
“My goodness,” Dorriss murmured, gazing at the closed door with her eyebrows raised. “That one is going to be trouble.” Then she glided closer to the desk and picked up the crumpled letter that had been sent to Merwyn Farnsworth.
With a sigh of relief, Kenneret stood up from her uncomfortable velvet chair. Before Dorriss could leave, she asked the question that had been bothering her since the beginning of the interview. “Steward, he asked about the previous librarian. There was nothing odd about her death, was there?”
“I believe not, Your Majesty,” she said, adding the letter to a folder stuffed with other papers. “Does Her Majesty wish me to begin searching for someone more qualified to serve as royal librarian?”
Kenneret sighed. “Yes. We suppose that you must.” She didn’t think Merwyn Farnsworth—or whoever he was—could do too much damage to the royal library before they found somebody to replace him.
And then, with an effort, she dismissed the new librarian from her thoughts. It was only the library, after all. It was only books. She had much more important things to worry about.
5
Alex could still hear the echo of the door he’d slammed, the one that led into the queen’s office. Storming out of there had probably been a mistake, but when she’d said he had until the end of the month—fifteen days!—to set the royal library to rights, it had infuriated him beyond all toleration. A whole team of expertly trained librarians couldn’t do it. He certainly couldn’t, not all by himself.
Still, he’d started on this road, and he couldn’t stop now. He had to keep going and see what happened, even though he’d probably wind up either tossed out the front gate of the palace, or tracked down by the people he’d been trying to avoid for the past few months, or, most likely, he’d fail so spectacularly that blast it into a million pieces would no longer be just a figure of speech.
Alex stalked down the long hallway, walking fast until he’d taken the edge off of his annoyance. The queen obviously didn’t believe for a second that he was a librarian. There she’d sat, a smug smile on her face, all stiffly formal in her lacy brocade dress, with a heavy-looking gold circlet resting on her intricately braided brown hair and stacks of jeweled rings on every finger. Still, she was young, not that much older than he was, and she’d seemed uncomfortable. All that royal we and Your Majesty business, as if she had to be constantly reminded that yes, she was the queen. Or maybe she had to constantly remind everybody else. He wondered who had her doubting herself so badly.
Never mind the queen. He had more important things to deal with.
The library had to be around here somewhere.
He kept going, around corners, up wide, sweeping staircases, across echoing, marble-floored halls, prowling through darkened drawing rooms. He passed a few footmen—they reminded him of bees in their black-and-white-striped waistcoats—and even fewer maidservants, clots of royal officials, not to mention bejeweled, perfumed courtiers by the dozens. But no library.
Finally he stopped and looked around. The walls of the hallway he was in were mirrored, showing him reflections upon reflections of his own shabby self. The edges of the mirrors were gilded. A reminder of how wealthy the Kingdom of Aethel had once been—but it was all a bit tarnished now. Dust had collected where the floor met the wall; clearly there weren’t quite enough servants to keep it all in order. The kingdom had once been a center of trade, with people from everywhere coming and going at all times, though more recently it had grown isolated from the rest of the world. Not as wealthy, not quite as gilded or great.
The chairs lined up against the walls were gilded, too, and dusty. They were there in case you got tired from wandering lost through the palace, Alex figured. It was, he realized, enormous. What it must cost to heat the place in the winter!
In the nearest mirror he caught a sliver of black, reflected. It wavered, and he turned to see the steward in her black silk dress gliding toward him down the hallway.
“Ah, Librarian Farnsworth,” she said briskly.
“Alex,” he corrected her.
“Hmm,” she murmured. She wore a ring of keys at the end of a chain at her waist, and they jingled as she walked.
“I’m trying to find my way,” he said. “This place is huge. It’s like a maze.”
“Just wait until you see the library,” she said with a thin smile. “Come with me.”
The steward was short and plump and very correct; she had light brown skin and wore her iron-gray hair in a tight knot at the back of her neck and had deep lines at the corners of her mouth. Lines of disapproval, Alex guessed, not ones she’d gotten from laughing. She disapproved of him, that was for sure.
“When you have guests,” he asked, “do you give them a map of this place so they don’t get lost?”
“No,” she said. “We give them a footman to show them the way.”
Well, they weren’t going to give him a footman. He tried to pay attention as she led him through the palace’s winding corridors and echoing chambers until they reached an unobtrusive door set at the end of a deserted hallway with worn carpeting on the floor.
“This is it?” Alex asked.
“It is,” the steward replied. She held out a bunch of keys on a heavy iron ring. They ranged from the size of a fingernail to a heavy key as big as his hand.
Librarian keys. Alex felt a prickle of excitement as he took the jangling ring and turned to the door. Sorting through the keys, he found the one that looked like a good match for the lock, and tried it. He turned it, and the door creaked open. Pushing it wider, he peered in. His hands trembled a little with excitement.
A library. His library, at least for a while.
It was dim. Tall windows off to the right were covered with velvet curtains, and just a little light filtered in. Spiderwebs were draped around the doorway. He stepped farther in and looked up . . . and up. The room was huge and round, and so far across that every creak of a chair and turn of a page would echo. Bookshelves stretched up the walls, level upon level of them, with balconies and ladders and catwalks, all the way to the ceiling, which was lost in darkness. Alex caught a fluttering movement in the high shadows—were bats living up there?
“Librarian Farnsworth,” the steward said from behind him.
He nodded to show that he was listening, while noting that the main floor was made of uncarpeted stone inlaid in some kind of pattern. Two long wooden reading tables with chairs took up half the space. There were also desks and cabinets for the card catalogs, and rows of bookshelves taller than he was made of carved wood, all stuffed with books.
“A warning,” the steward said. “This library has been locked since the death of the librarian, nearly a month ago. And before that . . .” Alex glanced back at her and saw that she was frowning. “Maeviss Clark, the librarian, was very, very old, and spent most of her time asleep, or reading. The royal library has been essentially untended for many years.” She pointed at the huge room before them. “This is only a small part of it. Sections of it were hacked out of the cliff itself. There are locked rooms that have never, in my time here, been opened. There are rooms that have been found once and never seen again. There are hidden doors. I have heard rumors that one of the librarian’s assistants, who disappeared many years ago, is still in here somewhere. In short, there was probably a good reason why the previous librarian made sure she and the pages that served her were holed up in her office most of the time.”
The keys weighed heavily in Alex’s hand. He felt goose bumps on his arms an
d tried not to shiver. Looking up, he met the steward’s cool gaze. “You’re trying to frighten me,” he said slowly. Then he added, “It’s not going to work.”
The steward frowned. “Just as you are a librarian—or you claim to be—I am a steward. It is my job to know all that goes on in this palace. There are dangers here.” Her lips thinned into a narrow, disapproving line. “I think it’s very likely that you won’t live to see the end of your fifteen-day trial. You should get away from here while you still can.”
6
Yes, Alex had felt a bolt of blank terror when he’d crested the hill and seen the Winter Palace for the first time. A flash of What am I getting myself into?
It had been a four-day journey from Purslane, the pack of supplies that he’d finagled out of the innkeeper was almost empty, and he’d hiked past miles and miles of flat farmland, the rich dirt plowed and ready for winter. In the distance, toward the north, were forested hills, a line of darkness on the horizon. He was passed on the road by courtiers in fine carriages, coming in from their estates to spend the winter at the palace. He walked through quiet country towns where the harvest festival was over. But he hadn’t passed many ordinary people. Except for the nobility, the people of Aethel did not travel. They were not curious. They tended to look inward, not outward.
And at the end of his journey, Alex had looked up, and there it was. The Winter Palace.
With the dazzle of the setting sun in his eyes, he thought at first that the palace was a mountain. Or . . . not a mountain exactly. A cliff? It was a huge wedge of rock with a flat top, shaped a bit like a loaf of bread. And, squinting against the sunlight, he’d seen that the royal palace was sort of draped over the entire thing. There was a huge central area at least six stories high, built right into the cliff; it had turrets and galleries of windows with pointed arches over each one, rows of pillars, and a main doorway framed with lavishly carved stone. Banners in black and gold fluttered from every spire. Wide staircases were everywhere, leading down to the gardens, and to rolling hills, which were covered by a city whose buildings seemed tiny, and cowered below the massive palace.
He wasn’t stupid; he knew what palaces were for. They weren’t like castles or fortresses; they didn’t tell the world, If you bring war to us, we will step on you like a bug. No, a palace said, We are powerful beyond measure and we barely even notice your buglike existence.
Then the setting sun had dipped behind the cliff, and the palace’s shadow fell and darkened the land all around it. And yes, Alex had felt a little like a bug.
But only for a moment. Now that he’d gotten in, past the queen and her steward, he stood in the middle of the library’s huge center room and thought back to his view of the palace. One end of it, he remembered, looked older and rougher than the rest. An almost castlelike turret that seemed as if it hadn’t been built into the cliff, but that it had grown out of it, like a fat mushroom. The library. He wondered how far into the rock it went. Pretty far, he guessed.
Before she’d left, the steward had made one more thing clear. The queen was the queen, but she, the steward, ran the palace. The queen did not need to know about the state the library was in, and she was not to be bothered. If he had problems, he was to come to her.
Then she had offered him one more chance to leave. A bribe, really. Twenty gold coins to be gone by morning. No one would blame him, she said. It was a bigger job than he could handle; everyone would understand that.
Hah.
Nice try, he thought. But they weren’t getting rid of him so easily.
What she didn’t seem to understand was that even though he wasn’t Merwyn Farnsworth, he was, in fact, an actual librarian, and he had something to prove. He could no more leave than, well, than a sea captain could abandon his or her sailors on a sinking ship.
He started across the huge main room, weaving between the heavy wooden tables, his footsteps on the stone floor echoing, and the keys on their ring jangling, until he reached the source of the light that leaked in from outside. Setting down the keys on the nearest table, he grasped the edge of one black velvet curtain with both hands and dragged it back, revealing one narrow window two stories tall. To his dismay, the windowpanes were small, and they were encrusted with probably years of dirt and smudges. When he’d finished pulling back the curtains of the other windows, he surveyed the room again. Still too dim. He’d need a better light source. Especially at night. After sunset, this place would be like a cave.
Time to have a look at the books.
There were, he counted, five levels, with balconies at each one. Spiral staircases led from one level to the next. The railings that edged the balconies and stairs were made of wood, elaborately carved, but scratched and dull with neglect. The air smelled of mold and damp stone.
And the books. Row upon row of them, all shrouded with dust and jumbled on the shelves, jammed in any which way, all out of order. Gardening manuals next to mathematical treatises next to military histories next to books with pictures in them of fluffy animals, meant for small children. He knew people who would look at these shelves of books and call it thick wallpaper, as if they were only for decoration. He knew even more people who would look at the books with narrow-eyed suspicion, but Alex knew what treasure these books really were. His fingers itched to set them straight, to get them cleaned and cataloged and organized. He could imagine what the room would look like with plenty of light, the wood polished, the books dusted, their leather covers oiled and gleaming. It would glow golden. It would be the greatest library in the world.
Not that anyone would see it, or read its books.
He surveyed the main room again, and spotted an arched doorway that, he found, led into a smaller circular room with a much lower ceiling. Opening the curtains in that room, he saw a desk piled with books, papers, empty teacups, all of it coated with dust. He set down the keys among the clutter and surveyed the rest of the room. The walls were lined with shelves that were crammed with books. There was a couch that had once been luxuriously covered with red velvet, but was now faded and patched, with tufts of stuffing leaking out. A ratty, lumpy pillow sat at one end. The floor was covered with a flowered rug, also filthy and dusty.
Circling the desk, he pulled out the carved wooden chair and sat in it.
The librarian’s office. His office.
What would Pa say if he could see him now?
Alex couldn’t help remembering their last argument.
Pa had shouted. The dark brown skin of his face had been flushed with anger—only Alex had the ability to set him off that badly. And then Alex had shouted something even worse, something maybe unforgivable, and he had stalked out of his pa’s office. He had kept going, out of his home and down the road, and he wasn’t going back. Ever.
Right.
He should probably do something . . . librarianish.
He rooted around in the papers and books on the desk until he found what he was looking for. A light-well, which was a chunk of translucent rock about the size of his fist. If it was left out in the sun during the day, it soaked in the sunlight and then gave it back again, slowly, as a warm, golden glow. Any proper librarian knew that light-wells were the only things used for light in a library.
This light-well was empty and dark. Taking it with him, he got to his feet and left the office, going to stand in the exact center of the main room.
For a long moment, all was quiet. He could practically hear the dust settling. The things that had been flying around earlier in the shadows of the high ceiling had gone still. The silence grew heavier. The bracelet of words around his wrist tightened with anticipation. His ears prickled with listening.
And then, then he heard it.
The sound started near the ceiling, at the very highest shelves, the fifth level of balconies. A rustling, as of pages turning. The noise grew louder, the sound like the rush of a waterfall flowing down from one level to the next, rustling, bumping, an even louder thumping.
Alex’s mou
th felt dry. Dust sifted down around him, glinting in the dim light like silver snow. Echoes filled the room, making his ears ring. He checked the letters printed on his wrist to see if they spelled out anything he could use to settle the books, but they were a jumble, forming no words. Clenching his fists, he willed his voice not to crack when he spoke. “All right,” he said steadily. “That’s enough.”
Abruptly, the noise stopped.
He took a deep breath. This library had been locked up, undisturbed, since the librarian had died. It should be quiet and still and safe.
But it was not.
Alex had been marked by the Red Codex, and he’d been attacked at Purslane Castle, so he’d had good reasons to suspect that something strange was happening to books. They were alive, he realized with a sudden, bone-deep certainty. Books were alive. Not just the dangerous ones; all books were alive. Sort of. Not like people, but in some strange, bookish way. They had been asleep, and now they were waking up.
Why were they waking up?
He didn’t know.
Had they woken up before, sometime in the distant past? They must have. That would explain why libraries felt creepy to most people. The old librarians had to know that books were alive—this was one of their secrets. Maybe these guardians kept their libraries locked to keep people out and to keep the books in.
Maybe . . . oh, here was a snaky idea. Maybe books woke up when they were read.
A book is more dangerous than any sword, he’d told the queen. He knew he’d been exaggerating. But what if it was true?
Was this library truly dangerous? Was it a danger to him? And to anyone who came into it?
He wasn’t sure. But he knew one thing. It was time to get to work.
The question that bothered him was, what work? Alex wasn’t sure how librarians dealt with books that were, quite probably, alive in some way. Putting them in order might help settle them. Cataloging. So that’s where he started.