I trailed off. As I pushed the cheese under her nose, her face had blanched first with distaste, then swelled to revulsion, and wound up in something oddly like fear. Her eyes flashed from the morsel of cheese to my face. I cannot imagine what she saw there, but it seemed to fill her with dread. She backed away, staring at me with her hand over her mouth, then began to run, sobbing as she fled.
Passersby eyed me with hostile curiosity. What had I done? I tried to shrug and smile reassuringly at the faces turned toward me, but this-not surprisingly-didn’t help. Maybe I still had chocolate sparrow bits on my shirt.
I made for the library. At least there I wouldn’t feel like some absurd fish flopping about on the floor. There I could lose myself in a good book or six. Even a bad one would be better than trying to blend in with these people. It had been an odd day. But as I have learned to remind myself, things can always get worse.
SCENE XIV The Plot Thickens
I didn’t bother trying the main door to the library, but went straight to the side entrance. The door opened as easily as it had before, though a key had been pushed into the lock from the inside, as if someone had tried to lock it without realizing that the mechanism was rusted away. The writing table had been pushed back up against the second door, but it yielded as it had done before and I was in before you could say “minimum security.”
“Aliana?” I whispered, with the hushed reverence I reserve for libraries. There was no answer. I walked around a great case of medical books and peered at the main entrance, but there was no sign of her or anyone else, so I wandered through the aisles of piled and shelved volumes, wending my way back to the drama stacks. I settled here and randomly plucked a book from the shelf behind me.
“The Tragical History of Shatrel, Lord of Dambreland, and the Horrid Revenge of Benath Kazrak,” I read aloud. “Sounds good to me.”
And so I settled and read under the pale, glowing dome for an hour. But when I reached the fourth act, with Shatrel’s demonic machinations in full swing, the thing ended abruptly. There were thirty pages missing, cut out at the spine with a knife or scissors. I cursed quietly to myself and replaced it in the shelves. The next one I selected got a careful examination before I started reading, and this produced a curious discovery: The play’s final pages were intact, but much of the second act was missing, cut out like the conclusion of the other play. I took down a pile of books and flicked through them. Over half of them had some pages missing: a couple missing only three or four pages, some lacking a good deal more, one being reduced to no more than a dozen leaves.
I put them back and sat pensively. This was not the result of decay, neglect, or the passage of time. These books were not accidentally burned, nor had their pages fallen out of rotted bindings or been casually torn out by owners who needed a piece of scrap paper. These had been rigorously and systematically mutilated. To someone like me who had seen similar work done by the Diamond Empire in Thrusia, this could mean only one thing: censorship. But of what and by whom?
I often find that I think better on my feet, so I rose and began to pace the library floor. It was a large building and I had seen only a fraction of it. Since there didn’t seem to be anyone about, this seemed as good a time as any to see what else was there while I mulled over recent developments.
I saw it like this: Long ago, Phasdreille was the center of a glorious civilization and it produced much that was fair and wonderful to behold. The city architecture by itself would have been ample evidence of this, but so was the literature I had been reading and the paintings I had seen in the king’s palace. In more recent years, however, something of the fire that had inspired the “fair folk” had gone out. What I saw now was a society devoid of passion and intensity except in their understandable hatred for the goblins: a society ruled by fashion and ostentation, by the shallowest performance and superficiality. In such a culture, even the great literary products of its past could be considered scurrilous and disreputable. So the good people of present day Phasdreille had opted to rid themselves of what they now considered degenerate.
It sounded right to me, but the real test would be to turn up some local history books and see what had happened to create this shift in attitude. Perhaps it was the appearance of the goblins themselves? With this in mind, I began to climb the stone-balustraded spiral staircase that coiled up to a great gallery which skirted the dome. It was lined with books and doors into other, darker rooms. Since I wasn’t finding the books I had been looking for I began trying the doors. A few were open but led to tiny storage rooms with empty crates and boxes. The rest were locked.
I suppose some part of me had always known this, but my few months adventuring had driven the point home: The best doors are always locked, and how much you want to get into a room is directly proportional to how difficult it is to do so. Tell a child he can go in any room but the one at the end of the dark corridor and, as all good storytellers know, that’s where he’ll want to go as soon as he’s left alone in the house. The same is true of romantic conquest, I suppose: forbidden fruit, and all that. This I offer as explanation for using my handy fruit knife (which hadn’t seen much fruit lately) to throw the tumblers in the lock of one particularly interesting-looking door.
It was bigger than the others, heavy and studded with square-headed iron nails that were now quite black. The handle was a great iron ring that hung stiff and heavy, and the lock was old, purposeful but far from intricate. After no more than a couple of minutes probing and twisting in the massive keyhole, something turned over and fell back. Breathlessly, I twisted the ring and pulled. The door opened.
Inside it was gloomy, but I could make out a short flight of stairs and then, as I cautiously ascended them, what seemed to be a large room. No, not large, cavernous. It extended back a hundred feet or more and was about a third of that in width. It was lit by tall, narrow windows with leaded and stained glass depicting heroic scenes. All along the walls were bookcases and desks and boxes and piles of papers. I approached the nearest table and looked at the manuscripts arranged neatly on its top.
There was a pile of books of poems by a single author by the name of Brontelm, all of which seemed to be missing pages as the plays downstairs had. Beside the book, however, was a stack of paper. My heart jumped as I guessed that these were the excised pages. They would show me what the city authorities deemed so offensive that the library had to be decimated. I sat down and began to read eagerly, instantly realizing that the entire collection consisted of love poems. Censored love poems! This ought to be good.
My enthusiasm was unmerited. I got through the first ten sheets and stopped. I had read a dozen different poems about haughty mistresses, dark ladies whose crystal eyes shot death to their lovers’ hearts, cherry lips which breathed jasmine flowers, and variations on the usual courtly love twaddle, and found nothing to offend, nothing racy or provocative. I had read Thrusian guides to grammar and pronunciation with more erotic content.
My gaze strayed to a box beside the table. In this were heaped other tomes, pamphlets, and books of various sizes and types, all old, all irreverently discarded, covers torn off, pages splayed and disheveled, crumpled and ripped. Given the care with which the books were preserved elsewhere, this seemed strange, so I plucked one out of the crate to see if I could figure out what it was that made it little more than refuse. It was written in some unintelligible language full of curls and dots and trailing lines like feathered tails, graceful but strong and forthright so that I found myself wishing I could read it. I carefully replaced the book in the box, but when I looked at the other boxes arranged around the room, a troubling pattern emerged. Every book bore the same graceful and unreadable script, and they were, it was clear, the sad remnants of a great many volumes. The boxes were grouped around a central hearth with a broad chimney which was blackened and choked with ash but quite cold, allowing me to paw through the cinders in the grate. I found the corners of pages and bindings, badly burned, but all showing the same beautifu
l, unintelligible script.
Libraries are not places you tend to associate with book burning. I supposed it was possible that the piles of mutilated manuscripts could have been infected with some parasite and had to be destroyed to preserve the rest of the collection, but it was bloody odd that every text in the other language had been set aside to be torched. I had seen none of these books in the halls downstairs, and only those in Thrusian seemed to have been painstakingly edited. It seemed clear that everything in this other tongue was being systematically rooted out and destroyed, but why? Maybe those who could read them were all dead, but could knowledge of a language die so completely that its literature was of absolutely no use to anyone? In this extensive library was there no grammar or lexicon to those feathery traces, nothing to make it worth keeping them?
Among the dead embers I found some pages printed with the cursive script that were less badly damaged than the others, and I took them, folding them into the pocket of my jerkin. I left the room quietly, and, in a few minutes, was able to click the lock on the heavy oak door into place. They would never know I had been there, whoever “they” were.
Well, they wouldn’t unless they saw me standing around like the lingering ghost of someone who, well. . did a lot of standing around. Sorry, but my mind was too preoccupied with the sound of footsteps on the stairs to waste time thinking up suitable similes. I came to myself and moved quickly, running on tiptoes around the gallery. On the far side of the dome was an archway and a corridor, but until I got there I was completely exposed. The banister around the gallery was made up of slim stone posts with a top rail and it afforded me no cover whatsoever. As I looked hastily around, two blond men reached the head of the stairs. I froze where I was.
They were each carrying a stack of books, leaning back slightly with their chins holding the tops of the piles to their chests. I caught a few muttered words from the sides of their mouths, but they were too preoccupied with managing their burdens to turn around and notice me. I started, very carefully, to move again, and stepped behind the cover of the great marble arch. From there I peered back while the men opened the door to the great room I had just left and disappeared inside. But any hopes I had of nipping out and down the steps were dashed as another pair appeared on the stairs, weighed down with books like the others. I ducked back into the arch and began to pace quietly down the corridor, trying to get away from all this officious activity. As I left the dome behind, the light lessened, but it was still bright enough to make out the doors set into the walls on either side and the larger, bronze-faced doors at the end.
These were set with intricately cast panels polished to a high golden luster, each seeming to show the construction stages of a great building which emerged from behind scaffolding in the topmost frames. Amidst the scenes of its great halls was a panorama of the structure from outside, and in the center of its roof was a broad dome, crawling with laborers. It was the library I now stood in. I put one hand on the handle to try it, and pulled it away hurriedly. It was warm.
I tentatively put the flat of my palm against another bronze panel. That, too, was almost hot to the touch, and throbbed faintly as if blood coursed through the metal and timber door. I was now conscious of a faint hum emanating from within, as if a swarm of bees had settled on the other side. But it wasn’t just a sound. I felt suddenly dizzy, disoriented, and when I stepped back, my head swimming, I had to reach out to the walls to steady myself. I found myself leaning on one of the corridor’s side doors. As I released my weight onto it, it opened suddenly.
I fell forward and collapsed on the floor. For a second I lay there, confused, then I rolled onto my back and found myself looking up at the long, graceful legs of Aliana.
She squatted down close to me, her face expressionless.
“What are you doing, Mr. Hawthorne?”
“There’s a fire, I think, in the room at the end of the hallway. I felt it through the door.”
She looked at me for a second and then got hurriedly to her feet. “The brass-paneled doors over there?” she said, stepping past me into the corridor and pointing.
“Yes,” I answered getting to my feet. “I’m not sure, but I touched the doors and I felt something. . ”
She had approached the doors and put her face close to them. Suddenly she turned back toward me and she was moving quickly.
“You’re right,” she said hastily. “I can smell the smoke, too. That is one of our largest storage areas. We must raise the alarm or we could lose the whole building.”
And then she was marching away. I followed her out of the corridor into the dome gallery where she started shouting for assistance. The book carriers appeared, looking apprehensive and startled.
“There’s a fire in the main storeroom,” Aliana called. “You two, get everyone out of the building. Mr. Hawthorne, that includes you. The rest of you, help me get some water up here and we’ll see how much we can save.”
So much for my sneaking about. So much also for my claims to heroism. Here I was being turfed out like someone’s elderly mother-in-law while others more capable looked to the valiant defense of the library.
“I can help, too,” I began.
“No,” said Aliana firmly. She gave me a quick look and added in a gentler, but still urgent, tone, “You are a guest of the king and I will not have you come into unnecessary danger. Please. Let us handle this.”
“All right,” I shrugged. “But be careful.”
She gave me a long, strange look as if caught completely off guard, then moved rapidly back to where the blaze was raging, without another word or a glance back.
I was ushered down and out. Once in the streets, I ran around the building looking for signs of the conflagration. There was a pall of smoke over the building, but it was hard to see how much of it came from the various chimneys that peeped discreetly from around the dome. I caught a passing guard and told him of the fire and he ran to contact the appropriate authorities. I sat around to watch.
A few minutes later a horse-drawn cart with a great tank on the back drew up and a group of uniformed men with axes and pails alighted and entered the building. After that, nothing.
Time passed and the firefighters emerged, apparently none the worse for their labors. I watched them leave and then returned to the door through which they had come.
Aliana was there. “I thought you’d still be here,” she said.
“I’m glad to see you unharmed,” I replied.
“It was a minor affair,” she said, still not inviting me in, “but it could have been much worse had you not reported the blaze as quickly as you did, though you should not have been here at all.” She looked at me from beneath lowered brows, but the reprimand was almost playful.
“Sorry,” I said. “But at least I was of use.”
“Indeed,” she replied. “Much of what was damaged was old binding material scheduled for disposal anyway, but it could have spread disastrously. We have had a narrow escape.”
“Narrow enough to justify my asking you to join me for dinner?”
“What?” she asked, caught off guard again.
“Dinner with me. As a kind of reward. For me, I mean. There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about.”
“Like what?”
“The battle for one,” I said. “And the library. So what do you say?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. She seemed confused, as if this had never happened to her before. “I will have to think about it,” she concluded.
“Fair enough,” I said.
She smiled and began to close the door. “Farewell, Mr. Hawthorne. Till next time.”
“Till next time.”
So I hadn’t lost all my charm, I thought to myself wistfully. Progress, of a sort, had been made. It was only a matter of time before she succumbed, and if that didn’t get Renthrette’s goat I was a pickled fish. Which I’m not. This return to erotic possibilities, however distant, suddenly reminded me of how I had heard of th
e library in the first place.
I fished in my pocket and drew out the letter which Renthrette had brought and read to me. Since I had never actually finished reading the thing, I unfolded it and looked it over. Being unused to love letters, especially courtly love letters, I was unsure of what to make of it, which was probably why I had all but forgotten about it. Of course, part of me was excited that there was someone here, someone pretty sophisticated and elegant, if her diction and perfume were anything to go by, who was apparently interested in me. This very elegance and sophistication constituted, however, a pretty major stumbling block for someone as out of his depth in the king’s palace as I was. I could fake it a bit, from time to time, and I had as quick a brain as most or all of them, but I didn’t have, and didn’t want, the training in insincerity. This courtly verse and delicate verbal sparring bored the pants off me (and if that isn’t the most inappropriate figure of speech ever invented, I don’t know what is), and I wasn’t about to work at getting it right for weeks so that some gorgeous tart in silk and rubies could reward me by presenting me with a scarf for me to wear in my hat, or whatever the hell they did round here in place of sex.
But I could not pass up female attention, however odiously it was versified, so I read the rest of the note. After that stuff about the play and the rather promising references to kisses and heaving breasts, it got down to the serious business of courtly metaphor. My eyes ran over two pages of rare stones, phoenixes, swans (and other-so far as I could tell-unchocolated fowl), sighs like clouds (hers), glances like javelins (mine), and a host of other tedious stock allusions. It was as if my self-proclaimed admirer had been locked in a small room for five years with nothing to eat but the most aristocratic of love poems, something far from unlikely around here. The second to the last paragraph, however, promised more than Renthrette had spotted or chosen to reveal, though I had long since quit trying to read something hopeful into her foiling of my amorous adventures. It ran as follows:
Will Power wh-2 Page 21