From far above, he felt the tug of the forbidden area, the area of the time anomaly. It pulled him, and he knew that if he brought the bowl there, and perhaps the sketch book, he would have a greater chance of success. The anomaly itself, connected to the bowls, would hopefully give them some kind of boost that would help Astrid find him. Then, the Time Corps could use her bowl’s reflection to get a lock on his location and time.
He poured the water from the bowl into an old water skin he had found in the kitchen, slung the strap over his shoulder and took the bowl and sketch book up the stairs. He was less afraid this time. The ibis was there, waiting, but facing the creature was less terrible than endlessly failing at using the bowl.
The outer rooms were just as he had remembered them, filled with junk and clutter. The floor mosaic now pictured a white comet burning across a star-filled night sky. He moved on to the room with the columns. This time, the faces at the tops of the columns were of an ape, a raven, a fox and a cat. He set the bowl down on the floor and poured in the water. It took a while for it to settle into stillness, and he studied the column heads. All had their eyes open, but did not seem to be watching him with any malevolence. For the first time, he felt almost comfortable there.
He listened for the ibis, but heard nothing. Then he whispered Astrid’s name to the bowl. Nothing. He carefully erased and redrew Astrid’s name on the picture of the mirror. But even if she did see it, what more could he tell her that would help her find him? He had given her all the information he could. He had to focus on the bowl and the time lock.
The other rooms silently called to him, and he felt them in his mind in that way the Library had of intruding into his thoughts. The rooms pulsed softly, welcoming. Was this some kind of trap set by the ibis? Or was the Librarian in another part of the Library, and this was Elliot’s chance to go farther, to discover how far the time anomaly went? Before, he had felt fear. Was this new sensation of tranquility only a trick of the mind, part of the anomaly, or was he able to detect the ibis’s absence?
He emptied the bowl back into the skin and carried it through the rooms, passing sitting rooms and reading areas. The long dining table stood empty. The ibis wasn’t here. He knew it with certainty now. He could feel a palpable difference in the place.
He climbed a staircase, then another, moving higher until he was sure he must be close to the top of the Library. Pausing on one of the landings, he thought of pulling out the bowl, but he knew he could get even closer to the anomaly, right up to where it might actually rip time and allow the bowl to work. The fabric of the rug underfoot changed as he watched, from black with roses to a green and gold geometric pattern to plain orange. The banister went from marble to wood and back again.
He walked down a hallway, and he knew what he sought waited at the end. The anomaly tugged at his mind, like when he had looked out into the void. Malachy had said that people went mad looking out into it, but it had never affected the tortoise. But Malachy was a solid, earthy being. Elliot knew better than to think that he would be immune.
He turned the ornate handle of a white and gold door. The room inside was an ordinary sitting room, but a fire crackled in the fireplace. A book lay open on a side table, as if its owner might return any moment, but Elliot did not take more than a moment to register this. What drew him were the large open French doors.
They opened into the void.
A huge round balcony spread out beyond the doors, the largest he had ever seen. And above it and below stretched the endless, lightless black of the void. The balcony was like a second room, it was so large, filled with plants, a low stone table, two chairs and even a small fountain. It would have been a lovely place to relax if it hadn’t been hanging out into pure emptiness. Also, most pleasant balconies did not include a deathly still woman lying on a cushioned platform at the center.
The woman was petite with dark skin and hair and she lay on her back, holding a scroll to her chest, as a corpse might clutch a lily. The cushion she lay on was oval, and all around her lay rolls of parchment, papyrus, thin sheets of wood and pieces of ordinary paper. All of them had writing on them, though from this distance, Elliot could not read them.
He walked out to her. Though he was deep into the anomaly, none of the plants on the balcony changed as he watched, and the papers near the woman remained fixed and still. He looked back into the room and saw the painting at the far end change from a seascape to a still life of a dead pheasant. The fire burned green for a moment, then returned to normal orange and yellow. Nothing at this side of the room changed, and the balcony felt eerily still.
This was the eye of the storm.
This was the center of the anomaly.
He pushed aside a few pieces of papyrus and set the bowl on the stone table beside an old-fashioned oil lamp, the kind that looked like a stone version of Aladdin’s lamp. A tiny flame burned from the tip. Elliot was torn between filling the bowl and approaching the woman. He poured the water.
“Try to be quick,” said a female voice in his head. He spun around to find her eyes open, but not watching him. She looked like a drowsy person stargazing.
“I sent him away, but he’ll return,” she said, and he understood that her voice was coming into his mind through the part of his brain dedicated to the Library. It was as if the library was a separate room, and a window opened into the rest of his mind. Her words were little birds, slipping inside.
“Who are you?” he asked. The water needed time to settle, and he took a step toward her, not wanting to get too close.
“I am the Librarian’s wife. Thoth’s wife. I am Seshat.”
“And you’re the center of the time anomaly.”
She did not answer.
“You’re also the thing that watches in the Library, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
She did not need to say any more. He knew with perfect clarity that she was the Library’s heart, the center of the entire thing. She was the living catalog that touched every mind within the place, the thing that grew inside his mind with time. But there was more. She was more than the heart and mind of the place, the collector of information. She was the embodiment of the idea of the Library.
These ideas came to him in a rush, overwhelming him for a moment. Seshat had allowed the information transfer. She had willed it.
It also meant that she was the watcher from the pillars. It meant she was the one who controlled where the library went.
“Can you move the Library?” he asked. “Can you move it to touch the human world?”
And then, she changed. One moment, she was young and alive, although eerily still, and the next she was charred, the top layer of her skin blackened and cracked, revealing blood red tissue beneath. Her lips were gone, her charred teeth exposed in a death’s grin, her features burned away, leaving only a skull covered in the remnants of flesh. A second later, she was alive and healthy once more, gazing at the sky.
“Why did you change?” he said as calmly as he could manage. His heart was pounding hard.
“I am as I have been these many, many centuries.”
“Burned and alive?”
“Yes.”
He had a moment when he wanted to simply ask her to take the Library to his world, but a tiny ounce of chivalry remained inside him.
“Can I help you?”
“No. I am both and neither, but I live still. I do not wish to die.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean I was going to kill you,” he said. “I just thought maybe—I don’t know. If there’s something you need, maybe I could do something.”
“You did not come here to help me.”
It was true.
“I want to go home. To the human world. Can you get me there?”
“I can.”
“Then do it. Take me back to when this pla
ce touched the human world. That was in Egypt, right?”
Once in Alexandria, he could find a way to communicate with the Time Corps. He saw something in the void then, a luminous thing, like a crack. He rushed to the edge of the balcony.
“Only a void wyrm,” Seshat said. “It will not come close.”
He watched the thing, long and serpentine, move farther away, no doubt in search of other food. Something else moved closer, and he knew it was the yellowish light of day from his own home world.
“I know you,” she said. “But you did not come here from Alexandria.”
“No, but you can leave me there. I can find my own way home.”
“Your friends came to that old library,” she said and Elliot turned to look at her. She was blackened again, but it did not frighten him as it had before. “The girl with the ape feet, the cat, the raven and the fox. They looked and looked for a way to get to you.”
Was that why the heads on the columns had been an ape, fox, cat and raven? Hazel and the Professor both had the strange primate feet of humans from their home world. Yukiko was a fox, and Pangur Ban and Huginn might have been with them. Had Seshat pulled those images from his mind, or was she showing him his friends from Alexandria?
She continued. “They also looked for a way to save the earth man.”
“What earth man? We’re all from earth.”
“The man who became earth, the one they wanted to revive.”
Elliot didn’t know what she meant, but he could find out everything when he got home. If the Time Corps had been to ancient Alexandria already, then it meant they could travel farther than they had when he left. Getting him home would be a snap.
As the Library drew closer to the human library, he could make out the interior of a room, a place of seated scholars and shelving filled with rolled scrolls and folded documents. Others were open and in use. This was the Library before it had grown into its current form. Seshat was not taking him outside, into the city, but straight into the building.
“Not there!” said a man, and Elliot turned to find the Librarian. This was Thoth, the ibis, though now a simple man, tall and slender with brown hair and eyes. He looked every bit like an ordinary man of about forty in his black suit and loafers, but Elliot was far beyond judging by appearances.
“The boy who took the bowls,” said Thoth.
Elliot resented being called a boy, as he was in his twenties, but no sooner had that thought occurred to him than he questioned it. How old was he, really? How long had he been in the Library? Could he age backwards here? No, that thought was ridiculous, and his body was just as he expected it to be. Except for the tail which curled, snakelike, brushing against his ankles.
No. He couldn’t have a tail.
Thoth was watching him with a thoughtful look, and an idea flew through Elliot’s mind, one that caused everything to make sense, but it was like words flying by on a computer screen, like a scroll being unrolled too quickly, and he could not catch it.
The tail was gone.
Thoth was now a giant ibis. He was tall and lean, like a stork, with the long, curved beak and wide-splayed toes common to wading birds. His feathers were white, but his head and legs were black, as were the tips of his wing feathers. But the next moment he was a man. Seshat was one moment a beautiful woman and the next a burned and tormented horror. Elliot clutched the railing and he remembered the black bowl, sitting on the table. He glanced away quickly, hoping that ibis would not notice it. The water would be settled now, but there was no opportunity to use it. It was a telephone, wasn’t it? Or something similar. A television screen, but made of water? It was hard to remember.
His thoughts halted when he saw the creatures teeming around Seshat. Her eyes were wide open in terror now, and her mouth was frozen open, as if she was calling out. She was back to her smooth-skinned self, but the creatures, insects, rodents, tiny serpents, all crawled and scurried and slithered over her body. They had been bits of paper, papyrus and wood before, but now he saw their true forms. One bit her throat, another dug its pincers into soft flesh at the inside of her elbow. Another, this one iridescent and insectile, leapt onto her cheek and crawled toward her mouth.
Elliot ripped the thing from her face and hurled it away. He scooped and threw the tiny horrors onto the ground, away from the paralyzed woman. There was a sound in his mind, a high keening noise, which could only be Seshat screaming. Elliot threw more and more of the creatures away, though they cut at his hands like tiny bits of glass.
But no sooner than he had cleared a few away, than they crawled back. He thought of the void. He would throw them there, where they could freeze or burn or suffocate or just hang in limbo until a void wyrm ate them.
He hurled a few over the railing, but though only two of them had wings, they all floated back, like leaves on the wind, only to alight on the ground and return to their relentless march toward Seshat.
His hands were bloodied and stinging. As he continued to fling the things away, he glanced inside. The fireplace.
Fire. Everything was afraid of fire.
The Librarian, now a man, stood between him and the open doorway, doing nothing more than watching with his arms folded. What was wrong with the man? His wife was being attacked and he simply stood there.
But the fireplace wasn’t the only source of flame. The little stone oil lamp sat beside his bowl and the pieces of papyrus on the table. He could hurl it in among the skittering creatures, but he didn’t want to hurt Seshat. And throwing the lamp onto the ground might break it, but it might not. He snatched up a piece of papyrus, rolled it and held it into the flame.
Thoth leapt forward to stop him, but the papyrus caught quickly and Elliot dodged beneath the man’s arms to hold the flame in among the largest clump of monstrosities on the ground.
How quickly they caught fire.
How surprisingly quick.
They curled and blackened, some sliding away as if blown by the wind, and igniting others. The fire spread.
Thoth howled and tried to gather them up, but dropped the burning things just as quickly. Elliot crawled up beside Seshat, and pushed handfuls of creatures onto the ground where they burned with their brothers, slithering and skittering and rolling together as they died.
“This is the place,” said Seshat, and Elliot realized that the screaming inside his head was still going, the high-pitched minor note like an endless train whistle. The sound was not coming from Seshat.
The Alexandrian library, the one in the human world, was close now. Only a few more moments, and the Library would be touching it. But it was not as it ought to be. The people inside were only partially human, though they changed as he watched. The walls undulated and music came to him, high piping that blended with the sound in his mind until he could not tell the two apart. Colors shifted and blended until he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing.
The moment the two libraries touched, a harsh wind pulled at Elliot, rippling his clothing and pulling all of the burning creatures away, through the gaps in the railing and over it, through the few feet of space until they landed on tables and chairs, on shoulders and hair, and all along the shelves and cases housing the texts of antiquity.
Thoth roared then, and launched himself over the balcony, becoming the great slender white bird with black-tipped wings, gliding downward. Elliot was about to follow, but Seshat yelled a commanding, “Stop!” and all sound ceased, including the screeching in his mind. The human library pulled away while the flames grew and people fled. Thoth, half aflame himself, leapt amid the chaos, trying to save his library.
And then all was silence and the human library withdrew into the void.
“Again, it burns,” said Seshat. “It always burns. He does not wish to be there. I should not have taken you there.”
“I needed to go
home,” he said. “I still do.”
He looked at her, and now all the corpses of the tiny evil creatures were gone. All of them had been nothing more than paper, papyrus and thin slices of wood. Now all that remained were charred curled bits crumbled on the ground.
“What was on those papers?” he asked.
“Words. My husband created many words for me. As long as information comes to me, I live.”
“And if the information stops?”
“My husband sees to it that it does not. It is all he can do for me.”
“He drove me mad, didn’t he?” Elliot asked.
“He did not permit you to leave. But in his madness, he drove you to set fire to his writings and then the Alexandrian library. There was only one way it could be. It was always thus.”
“Will he return?” he asked.
“He always returns.”
“What about my friends?”
“They did not perish in the fire. They were outside the Library.”
But if that brief moment when the flaming papers had flown into the human library was the only time this place touched his world, then the Time Corps had missed their only opportunity to save him.
Chapter 43
“Well, Neil,” said Hazel. “I don’t know what to do.”
She pushed aside the cover on his crate and pulled back the cloth covering his face. It was unchanged.
“I don’t know about this name of God business,” she said. “You had ‘truth’ in your mouth, not the name of God. And Huginn says that Seshat didn’t know of any name of a single god. We’ve tried everything. I have no other ideas.”
She sat beside the crate and sighed. Tears blurred her vision as she blinked and studied him. He was dead. Her friend, the man who had saved her life in so many ways through the years, was gone. From freeing her from her cruel uncle as a child to saving her life a few times in the Time Corps, he had been her faithful colleague, loyal crewmate and closest friend. He had always been there, silent and steady. He loved her, she knew. She couldn’t doubt it, though she wondered why he had never acted upon the feeling.
The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series) Page 111