Torchlight

by Theresa Dahlheim

  “Yes, sir.” He decided he would not ask any questions this time. Lord Henrey, like Magus Richard, looked like he had too much on his mind.

  Contare and his First Minister passed papers and ledgers back and forth, talking about tallying the grapefruit harvest, capturing smugglers, realigning land taxes, subsidizing the hospitals, and renewing the spells on the streetlights, the icehouses, the sewers, the bridges, the gates, the cisterns, and the walls. It reminded Graegor of business meetings between his father and Johanns, when he had learned to keep still and look attentive while enduring excruciating boredom. But this wasn’t as boring. It was too new, and all too soon would be his job.

  After over an hour had passed—judging by the two clocks that seemed to be working out of the half-dozen sitting on Contare’s shelves—there was a tap at the door, and another magus came in. He looked barely older than Graegor, with dark brown hair and the sort of face that intrigues girls. “This is my clerk, Jeffrei Adamsson,” Contare said, his mouth quirking in an inexplicable grin. “He’s just starting his third year at the Academy.”

  Jeffrei offered a well-executed bow. “A distinct honor, Lord Sorcerer.”

  Graegor inclined his head. “Thank you, Magus.”

  “Jeffrei,” Contare said, “I think Lord Graegor has suffered enough administrative tedium for today. Why you take him over to the library and show him around? The sooner he starts to learn where things can be found there, the better.”

  “Of course, my lord.” Jeffrei inclined his head first to Contare, then to Lord Henrey, and Graegor did too. It felt good to stand up and stretch, and it would be interesting to see the Academy library, which was, of course, famous. In the outer room, Karl waved to him as he followed Jeffrei out of the office and into the hallway.

  “Did you have good sailing from Telgardia, my lord?” Jeffrei asked, low and polite. He had a distinct eastern-city accent, like many of the common folk Graegor had met in Chrenste.

  “It rained most of the way, Magus, but we made good time. And please, call me Graegor.” He felt he had to squash the “my lord” right from the start.

  “My thanks. Please call me Jeffrei.”

  Graegor nodded, and the pause grew awkward as he cast about for something else to say. “Um,” he said finally, and felt stupid.

  “Second letter of the Kroldonnai alphabet.”

  “What?”

  “Re, um, ka. All vowels.”

  Graegor’s brain caught up with Jeffrei’s. “So do Kroldon children learn to sing their re-um-kas?”

  Jeffrei grinned. “It’s more of a chant, really.” He gestured at the top of the staircase, and Graegor preceded him down.

  “You speak Kroldonnai?” Graegor asked when they reached the bottom.

  “I read it better than I speak it.” Jeffrei doubled back along the stairwell at the bottom instead of going toward the foyer. “I’ve been told my accent’s atrocious.”

  They reached a door that Graegor hadn’t noticed before, and it opened for them when Jeffrei touched it. They emerged onto a porch and started down the curving, shallow stairs. The sun beat fiercely into Graegor’s eyes, and he shaded them as Jeffrei pointed ahead. “The library’s the next building over, past the garden here.”

  “Lord Contare told me it’s one of the oldest buildings on the island.”

  “And it might be the largest, too. It’s hard to know for sure, since trying to map out the square footage would drive any competent architect insane, but some people swear it’s bigger than the Hippodrome.”

  They moved along a small path through a lavish garden with trees and ferns and flowers, which stopped abruptly at a high brick wall. A few yards to the left was a plain oak door, and when Jeffrei touched it, it swung inward with a low sigh to reveal a shadowed corridor. “Do all the doors open by themselves?” Graegor asked, tapping the thin metal frame around the doorway as he followed Jeffrei through.

  “The main entrances to the Academy buildings do, and most of the side doors.”

  “So where’s the main entrance to the library?” Lamplight beckoned from quite some distance ahead. Graegor slowly breathed the stuffy air, filled with the musty scent of books and ink.

  “There isn’t one.”

  “There isn’t one?”

  “Not anymore. There’s one door that most of us students use, since it’s closest to the dormitories, but it’s no bigger than that one back there. The original main entrance somehow got lost in all the renovations. They had plans for a huge foyer and a brand-new wing during the Restoration, but they never did it. So now it has twenty ‘side’ doors but no grand entry.”

  “That’s strange.” Graegor trailed his hand along the wall and within two steps it smacked against the edge of a shelf.

  “Wouldn’t be Maze Island if it wasn’t,” Jeffrei said with amused pride.

  They reached the room that was the source of the lamplight. It had solid shelves of books and messy stacks of paper on wide tables, but no one was there. A spinning fan whispered through the air above their heads, trails of ivy lifted to the ceiling by the draft. Jeffrei went up two steps to reach another doorway, which led to another quiet, book-filled room, which had four ways out. Jeffrei stopped, glancing from one doorway to another. “You choose. North, south, east, or west?”

  “Um ... west.”

  “Onward.” Jeffrei continued straight forward, which Graegor would have sworn was north. They came to a staircase and climbed it. It turned at a right angle at a lamplit landing, which was buried under a tumbled mass of scrolls which required leaping over.

  “I hope that isn’t anything important,” Graegor murmured, glancing back.

  “If it is, the librarians will clean it up.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The Index room, eventually. Might take us a while to get there. This is part of the poetry section.” They came to a long corridor, and Jeffrei went through the first door to a big room, which led to a smaller room, which led to a closet, which led to another room, and so on and so on, deep into the ancient building. Books and scrolls were stacked on shelves, on stairs, under windows, under tables, on lintels, and even in a cavernous fireplace. Most rooms were lit, but by a wide variety of sources—oil lamps, candles, and the magical glowing globes were each just as likely to appear as another. There were even torches, such as in a long corridor stacked with ancient, loose parchment.

  “It’s a total maze,” Graegor remarked.

  “Some people think that’s where the island got its name, but the sorcerers were calling it that before the library was even built.”

  “You’re in here a lot, aren’t you?”

  Jeffrei laughed, and it echoed from the high ceiling of the long, narrow room they were crossing. “Oh, yes. The professors make sure of that.”

  “How long did it take you to find your way around?”

  “I’m still finding my way around, and I’ve been here two years.”

  “Great. I’ll probably get lost and end up wandering around from now until the day that never was ...”

  “Not to worry. The librarians would find you when they locked up.”

  “How do you lock a door that opens when you come near it?”

  “With a big latch. And another spell.” Jeffrei paused at a landing that overlooked another long, narrow room. “Down there is part of the theology section. See that door on the north wall? That leads outside. A group of us tried to open it one night.”

  “You couldn’t?”

  “The spell was stronger than we thought. But then, we hadn’t worked together before, so pooling our power wasn’t that easy.” He paused, then added, “And we were drunk as sailors, so that didn’t help.”

  “Well, when you can barely stand up ...”

  Jeffrei grinned at him. “Solstice?” he guessed.

  “Right.” Close enough. “I’m just glad I didn’t get sick.”

  Jeffrei laughed. “One of my friends puked on the dean’s coach.”

  �
��Oh, God.”

  “Jeh, all over the seat. We were going to steal it and park it on the porch of the girls’ dormitory, but after, we just ran away ... well, staggered away.”

  About ten minutes, several subjects, and dozens of rooms later, they squeezed through a narrow doorway and entered a large room with a parquet floor and a vaulted ceiling. Books stood on shelves against the walls in neat order, and a line of identical tomes marched down the center of a narrow table that could have seated fifty people. Two librarians sat at tables at one end of the room, near a set of double doors that stood open to a smaller room beyond. “Here’s the Index room,” Jeffrei said, his voice lowered. The librarians didn’t look up. “If you go through those doors, and through two more rooms and around a corner, you come to the door that’s closest to the dormitories.”

  Besides the long table, there were orderly rows of smaller tables, each with four empty chairs. “Why aren’t there more people around?” Graegor asked. Besides the two librarians, they had seen only a half-dozen other people since entering the library.

  “The Academy isn’t in session this month.” Jeffrei pointed as they moved further into the room. “See the stained glass way up above the doors? Those are the only windows in the entire library.”

  Graegor hadn’t even noticed that there weren’t any other windows. “Why are they the only ones?”

  “Inventory control.”

  “Inventory control?”

  “You can’t take books out of the library. There’s a ward on every door, so if you try, the librarians know it. It’s enough trouble for them to keep up the wards on so many doors without worrying about students throwing books out windows.”

  “How do the librarians know?—I mean, what if I brought in a book of my own? Would the ward alert them when I left with it?”

  Jeffrei frowned as he continued staring up at the abstract mosaic of the stained glass window. “No, it wouldn’t, because I’ve brought books in here before. I don’t know how the ward works.” This obviously bothered him. “We should ask Lord Contare. I’ve never thought about it.”

  “We could ask the librarians ...”

  Jeffrei shook his head absently. “They wouldn’t tell us.” A pause. “Hm.” After another pause, he gave an irritated shrug and lowered his gaze back down to the room. “Oh, over here—you should see this.” He crossed the room to the wall, where a break in the bookshelves was lit by one of the glowing globes. It hung, from nothing, several feet above a walnut bookstand with a tilted top—the kind of piece Graegor’s father would have made—which held a single, massive volume. The book was bound in white, and a red silk bookmark lay across its open pages. The script was tiny, filling two columns on each page. “This is Legends of the Island. It’s a collection of every poem or song or story or anything else ever told about any of the sorcerers, all translated into modern Mazespaak. Sorcerer Pascin compiled it.”

  Graegor lifted the pages slowly, and saw other bookmarks peeking from the top binding—eight in all, one for each Circle. “I wish I could read it.”

  “I’ve read through the first two sections—the first and second Circles.” He grinned. “I get a lot of leg cramps and neck aches from standing here for hours at a time, but it’s worth it.”

  “They don’t let you take the book to a table?”

  “The librarians didn’t even want to let students see it. But Sorcerer Pascin told them he had written the book so that people could read it, not so it could grow mold in a vault somewhere. This little shrine was the compromise.”

  “Lord Contare said the Academy has a printing press. Couldn’t they make copies for people to read, and keep the original somewhere safe?”

  “There are some copies, mostly in the sorcerers’ private libraries, and some were sent back to their kings. But it’s such a huge book that it’s hard for the printers to sell, and they’d rather print smaller books and broadsheets that will make money quickly. It’s hard to argue with them, since their profit offsets the cost of tuition. Without the printing press and the city taxes, it would cost my father more than he makes in a year to send me here.” Jeffrei slowly ran his fingers over the binding of the book. “Sorcerer Pascin wanted the original kept in the library. Considering how many time this place has caught fire, that’s a strange wish, but it’s his book.”

  “Maybe he feels the librarians can best care for it.”

  “Maybe.” He smiled a little. “It’s his only child.” He paused, then again shook off a reverie and led Graegor back toward the center of the room, to the long, narrow table. “These,” he said softly, but grandly, “are the Indices.” He used both hands to pull out one of the enormous books. Like all the others, it had a shiny black leather cover and gold-leaf Mazespaak script on its front and spine. “Find your subject in the Index, and it will tell you what books and scrolls the library has for that subject, and what room they’re in.” He opened the book and carefully turned the pages. Graegor saw that many were blank. “They left a lot of room for listing new titles,” Jeffrei explained. “See—” He pointed to a line of Mazespaak script. “The subject is Plants, Essenan, Mosses. The six titles are listed here. This column tells you what language each book was written in, and over here, it says that they’re all in room 114.”

  “How do you find room 114?”

  “Well, that’s the real trick, isn’t it?” He shut the book and put it back.

  They dove back into the turns and twists of the many-shelved rooms, and Jeffrei showed Graegor the numbered brass plates to the left of each lintel. As they climbed stairs, the numbers grew higher; as they moved roughly east (or west; Graegor had no idea anymore), the numbers were all odd; as they moved roughly west (or east), the numbers were all even. Adjoining rooms did not always have adjoining even or odd numbers, but they were close, and eventually they arrived at room 114, which was beyond a room marked 110 and up some stairs from an oversized closet marked 116. Graegor hadn’t seen anything marked 112.

  The room was large, with at least a dozen rows of stacks, and it took some searching, and even some crawling, to run down the six slender volumes about Essenan moss. They were all written in blocky Essenan script, but the simple drawings on the frontispieces were easy enough to identify.

  Graegor sat back on his heels and waved away the cloud of dust they had disturbed, then sneezed six or seven times. “God bless you,” Jeffrei said as he shelved the books.

  “Thanks.” He hadn’t brought a handkerchief, so he gave his nose a quick wipe with the edge of his short sleeve while Jeffrei’s back was still turned. “It seems like you would spend a lot of time searching for what you want.”

  Jeffrei stretched his legs into the aisle and rested his back against the edge of the shelf. “True. But it’s a good way to get your blood moving after hours of studying.”

  Graegor sat down on the bare floor too, leaning against the uniform row of books lining the room’s longest wall. “Just how many rooms are there?”

  “More than three hundred.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to just build a new library? A big, square building with long, straight rows ...”

  “Maybe.” Jeffrei grinned and wiped cobwebs from his hands onto his trousers. “I’m sure that’s what they had in mind when they made the library a Restoration project. But can you imagine moving all these books? They kept putting it off and putting it off ... eventually they just repaired anything that was broken or cracked, and that was it. Except not too long after that there was another fire, and in the rebuilding they accidentally knocked out a load-bearing wall, and had to fix that ...”

  “Did a sorcerer put a curse on this place a thousand years ago?”

  Jeffrei laughed. “Some people think so. But most of the students like it this way ... lots of dark corners.”

  It took Graegor a second to realize why the students would like dark corners. He’d forgotten that girls attended the Academy too. “Don’t they get caught?”

  “It’s sort of an honor sys
tem. You try not to think about any noises you hear from the other side of the wall.”

  “I mean, caught by a professor or a librarian?”

  “I don’t suggest that,” Jeffrei said with mock gravity. “It’s not a good idea.”

  “I’m not saying anyone gets caught on purpose.”

  “Unless they want to be expelled, no.”

  “You can get expelled for kissing?”

  “Not kissing, but what comes after kissing.”

  “Oh.” Then, because something else had been gnawing at his gut, and because he wanted to get off the topic of what came after kissing, he asked, “Is the Academy difficult? I mean, really difficult?”

  “It’s not easy.” Jeffrei folded his arms over his chest, his gaze frank. “For one thing, all the classes are taught in Mazespaak, so you’ll have to learn that pretty fast.”

  “I know. Lord Contare says sorcerers are good with languages, so he doesn’t think it will take me long.”

  “How much school have you had already?”

  “Five years. That’s standard at home—start at ten, end at fifteen, get an apprenticeship.”

  “A lot of students come here with no education at all. We have tutors and mentors to help, but some don’t make it through the first few terms.”

  “I suppose that’s what I’m worried about. I know I’m only going to be taking some of the classes, and I’m not expected to graduate, since most of what I’m learning is going to be from Lord Contare, but ...” He made a helpless gesture to encompass the outside world. “I don’t want people to think I’m stupid.”

  Jeffrei grinned. “You’ll be fine.”

  Graegor snorted. “That’s easy for you to say. You know you’re smart enough. Lord Contare chose you.”

  “Yes, well ...” Jeffrei’s arms unfolded, and he let his hands and his gaze fall into his lap. “A lot of people don’t think I deserve it.”