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Copyright © 2016 by Jen Swann Downey
Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover illustration © Luke Pearson
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
Fax: (630) 961-2168
www.sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.
Source of Production: Worzalla, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA
Date of Production: April 2016
Run Number: 5006449
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1: Lybrarians with a Y
Chapter 2: Whim’s Gift
Chapter 3: An Inconspicuous Entry
Chapter 4: Among Friends, Mostly
Chapter 5: Marshmallow Talk
Chapter 6: Not My Best Angle
Chapter 7: Brooms, Beds, and Bangs
Chapter 8: Don’t Eat the Baklava!
Chapter 9: Lybrarians’ Council
Chapter 10: The Archivist’s Apprentice
Chapter 11: Potato, Potah-to
Chapter 12: The First Principle
Chapter 13: Turn of Events
Chapter 14: Through a Threadbare Hole
Chapter 15: To London, 1913
Chapter 16: Seals
Chapter 17: Deals
Chapter 18: Dirty Laundry
Chapter 19: Waves
Chapter 20: Shore
Chapter 21: A Modest Proposal
Chapter 22: A Name and a Face
Chapter 23: Valiance and Verity
Chapter 24: An Unexpected Meeting
Chapter 25: The Organ Player
Chapter 26: Something to Sing about
Second Guide to Petrarch’s Library
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For John and Jackson and every other valiant spirit
Chapter 1
Lybrarians with a Y
Twelve-year-old Dorrie Barnes was on pins and needles.
And thumbtacks.
The thumbtacks were plastic—and scattered the length and breadth of Great-Aunt Alice’s shabby ballroom where the Barnes family did most of its living and dining and everything-else-ing. The reason that Dorrie, coffee can in hand, was crawling among the thumbtacks—and occasionally upon them, feeling slightly mocked by their cheerful colors—was that she had a four-year-old sister. A sister who had thought it made perfect sense to create a thumbtack garden beside the sofa and even more sense to run over it with a vacuum. The results had been spectacular.
Only a minute before, the tacks had been zinging through the air, ricocheting with hard pings off windows and Great-Aunt Alice’s piano, embedding themselves in lampshades and couch cushions, and sending four members of the Barnes family streaking for cover. The fifth member—the perpetrator of the event—had simply squealed in delight. The sixth member—Great-Aunt Alice—had not been home at the time. Even if she hadn’t been halfway around the world, it’s quite likely she would still have escaped the need to streak for cover since, preferring order to chaos, she visited the Barnes on their side of her decrepit mansion as rarely as possible.
The reason Dorrie was on pins and needles was because a week ago, she’d been abruptly sent home from Petrarch’s Library, the headquarters of the Lybrariad, a society of warrior lybrarians who took very unkindly to people who set fire to books or tossed writers into rat-infested dungeons. Hypatia, the director of Petrarch’s Library, had given Dorrie only the haziest idea of if or when she’d be invited to return.
Since the lybrarians who occupied Petrarch’s Library were just as likely to spend a Monday morning rappelling down a cliff with swords clamped between their teeth as shelving books…
And since Dorrie had longed to chase down villains with a real sword ever since she could hold a fake one…
And since, while staying in Petrarch’s Library, Dorrie had unexpectedly served as the Unofficial Temporary Apprentice to Hercule-Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac—possessor of the finest sword skills and grandest nose of the seventeenth century—and wanted to serve as Savi’s Extremely Official Until-the-End-of-Time Apprentice more than she wanted her heart to keep beating…
Dorrie was finding the uncertainty excruciating.
Much worse than the pain caused by the thumbtack that had just driven itself into her knee.
“This is why we can’t have nice things,” said Dorrie’s father, breaking into her thoughts. “Like appliances.”
Dorrie glanced over at the corner of the ballroom-declared-kitchen to see him lifting several tacks out of a pot of clam chowder with a slotted spoon.
“Or electricity,” said Marcus, Dorrie’s fourteen-year-old brother, chasing a blue one around the top of his snare drum.
“Well, who left the vacuum out?” Dorrie’s mother asked as she coaxed several more tacks out from between the crevices of her keyboard.
“Well, what sane person would ever think she’d use it as a deadly weapon?” Dorrie asked, neatly side-stepping her mother’s question.
“I’m not she! I’m Miranda!” bellowed Miranda from the high stool in front of the sink, to which she’d been banished.
“She is a menace,” said Marcus, sucking on a punctured finger.
Miranda, her red curls in their usual state of defiant chaos, began to fill the sink with water. “I am an artist.”
Dorrie went back to gathering and let Petrarch’s Library take shape clear and bright in her mind’s eye. She saw it first as a bird would, rising to its towering heights on its sea-encircled island, where it touched hundreds of points in time but belonged to none of them. Dorrie beat her imaginary wings so that they bore her through a window and through a good number of the library’s jumbled chambers and corridors. In the walls of some stood the black, stone archways that connected Petrarch’s Library to smaller, time-anchored libraries in ancient India and the Aztec Empire and medieval West Africa. The lybrarians called the libraries that lay on the other side of archways Spoke Libraries.
Even if Petrarch’s Library hadn’t connected to hundreds of centuries, Dorrie would have found it astounding. Dozens of floors tall, immensely wide, and peppered with courtyards and gardens, it was made up of squashed-together Ghost Libraries—libraries that had been destroyed in
their own times and places but lived on as part of Petrarch’s Library. Dorrie had found that they had melded in the most odd and surprising ways, creating an interlocked labyrinth of staircases, chambers, and passages. The shelves, racks, and trunks in the Ghost Libraries still groaned with their collections of stories, speeches, and histories that people had scribbled onto parchment, paper, and papyrus—or pressed into tablets of mud and wax or painted on billowing lengths of silk.
From the moment she’d left Petrarch’s Library, Dorrie had felt driven to return, but as the days had slipped by in Passaic, New Jersey, with no word from the lybrarians, her mood had slid from alert hope to creeping doubt to outright despair that she’d ever hear from them again—especially now that the Foundation, the Lybrariad’s old enemy thought to be defeated, had returned from the future more powerful than ever.
She’d begun to wonder if she really had spent two months in Petrarch’s Library with Marcus while time virtually stopped in Passaic. That very morning, she’d yanked open her top dresser drawer, flinging underwear left and right in search of the balled-up argyle sock she’d hidden. Relief had filled her when a good shake had sent the silver keyhand’s armband tumbling out of the sock and onto her bed.
Feeling only a little stupid to be whispering to a sock, Dorrie had repeated the words Hypatia had spoken when she’d given the armbands to Dorrie and Marcus as a token of her trust in them.
“We would have offered to take you on as full apprentices…”
Dorrie idly shook the can of tacks and frowned. Would have. The words had been spoken and the armbands given when Dorrie, Marcus, and the lybrarians thought they might never possibly see each other again. But now that Dorrie’s own Passaic Public Library was to stay connected to Petrarch’s Library as its official twenty-first-century wing and Dorrie and Marcus could serve as apprentices, the question was…would the lybrarians still want them?
A firm knock nearly made her drop the can of tacks. Dorrie glanced at the back door and felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Three silhouettes could be made out through the door’s curtained window. With her heart beating wildly, she scrambled to her feet and ran to the door, Marcus on her heels. Together, they wrenched it open.
“Mistress Wu!” Dorrie shouted in great relief, recognizing the broad-shouldered figure of Hypatia’s assistant.
Mistress Wu had exchanged the long kimono she wore in Petrarch’s Library for a lilac pantsuit, a white blouse, and a patterned scarf tied in a billowy bow around her neck.
“Phillip!” Dorrie cried, throwing her arms around the soft middle of the first lybrarian she had ever met. Phillip wore a jaunty fedora, out from under which two clouds of red, frizzy hair insisted on their freedom. “You’re here! And…”
Dorrie’s eyes traveled upward to take in the figure that loomed behind Phillip and Mistress Wu like a mountain in the background of a vacation photo. Bald as a melon and thick with muscle, he wore a cardigan knit with a pattern of cats.
“This is Menelik,” said Phillip, following Dorrie’s gaze. “He’s been watching over your family’s home, just in case the Foundation has other operatives in Passaic.”
Menelik gave a small nod, the flowered shoulder bag he carried shifting slightly.
“So sorry we’ve kept you waiting,” said Mistress Wu, both hands curled around the handle of a briefcase. “So many meetings. So much going on.”
“Did you get Petrarch’s Star back?” Dorrie couldn’t help but blurt out. Petrarch’s Star was a thick stone star covered in runes. A stone whose existence the Lybrariad had only just learned about. A stone capable of blowing holes into the past—and into Petrarch’s Library itself. A stone, Dorrie now knew, the Foundation wanted to get its hands on very badly.
“Not yet,” said Phillip. “But we have a large number of lybrarians hunting for Mr. Gormly.”
Hot anger toward Mr. Gormly shot through Dorrie. He’d betrayed the Lybrariad and disappeared with Petrarch’s Star.
“Excuse me,” came Dorrie’s mother’s voice. “But do we know you?”
Dorrie whirled round to see her parents standing in the doorway. She glanced back at Phillip and Mistress Wu. “These are our parents.”
Phillip held out his hand. “Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.” He wiggled his fingers slightly, but neither of Dorrie’s parents took his hand. “Or Paracelsus if you’d like.” His fuzzy eyebrows danced a little. “Or plain old Phillip is fine.”
Still, Dorrie’s parents hesitated.
“I’m Wu Yongtai,” tried Mistress Wu. “Phillip and I, and the rest of the staff, think a good deal of Dorrie and Marcus and—”
“Our parents that we haven’t explained anything to yet,” Dorrie clarified in a rush.
“Oh,” Mistress Wu said, taken aback. “I see.” She collected herself. “Well, we’ve come to discuss with you the possibility of offering Dorrie and Marcus apprenticeships.”
Dorrie and Marcus let out twin whoops, and Marcus offered Dorrie a high five. The relief and excitement bounding through Dorrie made her miss his hand, but she didn’t care.
“What sort of apprenticeships?” asked Dorrie’s mother, sounding bewildered.
“With them!” said Marcus, jerking his thumb toward the visitors.
“They’re lybrarians with a y,” announced Dorrie over the sound of Miranda sloshing water on the floor inside the house.
“With a…?” Dorrie’s father began, a sharp note in his voice. “Where did you meet these people?”
“In a dark alley,” said Marcus. “They leaned out of a van and offered us candy.”
“He’s kidding, he’s kidding!” cried Dorrie.
“Oh, dear,” said Mistress Wu, her eyes fixed on something inside the house. “While I as yet have only the most rudimentary understanding of electricity and appliances, I do wonder if the little girl should be doing that.”
Everyone turned to see Miranda preparing to drop the plugged-in family toaster into the overbrimming sink.
“Miranda! No!” cried Dorrie’s mother.
Before Dorrie could even think of moving, Menelik’s hand twitched, and the toaster, as if it had suddenly developed a will, flew out of Miranda’s hands, its cord ripping from the wall as it fell with a harmless crash onto the counter. A boomerang clattered to the floor.
Dorrie’s father charged inside and swept Miranda up off her perch and into a suffocating embrace.
“Thank you,” said Dorrie’s mother breathlessly, staring at Menelik with her hand on her heart.
“Yes, thank you, Menelik,” said Mistress Wu, nodding at him. She blinked at Dorrie’s mother. “Perhaps we could come in now and discuss matters?”
“Of course, of course,” said Dorrie’s mother, looking highly flustered but making way.
Mistress Wu bustled inside. “Such an interesting walk over from the Passaic Public Library. Hitching posts that take coins. Ingen—” She broke off, taking in the highly disorganized state of the Barnes’ book collection with the sad horror usually reserved for a grisly traffic accident. Hastily, Dorrie picked up a dictionary lying open on the floor, its spine tortured into an arc. She shoved it onto a shelf.
“Please sit down,” said Dorrie’s mother, gesturing to the kitchen table as Dorrie’s father, still looking suspicious, placed a jar of pickles on it as if not yet completely convinced the visitors deserved them.
Soon, all were seated around the table except for Menelik, who had lowered himself into the scarred leather chair by the woodstove and pulled a ball of yarn and two wooden needles from his bag, and Miranda, who had planted herself near Menelik’s knee to stare fixedly at his now-flying hands.
Mistress Wu blinked at Dorrie’s mother and father in turn. “How are you at believing the impossible?”
“What kind of impossible?” Dorrie’s mother asked slowly.
Dorrie coul
d hold herself back no longer. “Impossible like, last week, Marcus and I fell through a hole in the floor of a secret room behind the janitor’s closet in the Passaic Public Library into a much, much bigger library underneath it with thousands of rooms. It’s called Petrarch’s Library, and it’s the headquarters for a secret society of lybrarians with swords who rescue people who get into trouble because of stuff they write, and now we want to be their apprentices and help them fight people who want to steal writing from the world.”
“Surprise!” shouted Marcus, throwing his hands up in the air.
Chapter 2
Whim’s Gift
Dorrie’s parents stared from Dorrie to Marcus to Mistress Wu to Phillip.
“Okay…what’s the joke?” demanded Dorrie’s father.
“If I may,” said Mistress Wu.
For the next hour, she described how Petrarch’s Library had first sprung into existence around the shocked fourteenth-century poet Francesco Petrarch.
“He was tending a cooking fire on a mountainside meadow at the time, having spent the day traveling. Night had fallen, and after a sound like the crack of a whip, five walls began to heave their way upward out of the earth around him, spreading and stretching toward one another until he stood at the center of a vast towering pentagon, with only the star-studded sky above for a roof. He saw that one wall was stone, one wood, one iron, one brick, and one paper.
Dorrie listened raptly because she’d never heard the story of the Library’s beginning.
“In each wall appeared a black archway, pricked as full of searing starlight as the sky above. In a short time on the other side of four of the archways, four rooms coalesced out of the dark. One was full of books, one of mud tablets, one of papyrus scrolls, and one of wooden blocks. In time, Petrarch would learn that each was a library that lay in a different wheren.
“A wheren is a particular place and time,” said Phillip. “Eleventh century Rome or fourteenth-century Kathmandu.
“It means ‘where’ and ‘when’ all in one word,” added Marcus.
The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks Page 1