“Just a minute,” said Francesco, his voice commanding.
Dorrie and Marcus skidded to a stop, and Dorrie turned slowly to face Francesco.
“Welcome back,” he said, his tone neutral, revealing nothing. “Before you reenter Petrarch’s Library, I want to make sure we are perfectly clear on a point. You, Dorothea Barnes, are not—at any time or for any reason or under any circumstances—to employ your ability to navigate the archways of Petrarch’s Library.”
Dorrie flushed. “I wasn’t planning on it.”
“See that you don’t change your plans or you will find that your apprenticeship has ended.”
Dorrie nodded, the thought chilling her.
There was a burst of sound from Lybrarian Davis’s headphones. Hurriedly, she slipped them back on. “Davis here. Go ahead.” She froze for a moment and then reached for a pad. As she scribbled down a string of numbers and letters, a fierce glow that verged on triumph appeared in her eyes. “The end,” she said crisply and tore the earphones back off. The other lybrarians had stopped typing and were looking at her expectantly.
“Lybrarian Petrov found the spot where Mr. Gormly has been staying,” Lybrarian Davis said, her voice rich with satisfaction. “In an abandoned warehouse by the river.”
Dorrie’s breath caught. A cheer went up from the lybrarians.
“Is he there?” Francesco demanded.
“Not at the moment,” she said, “but Petrov has reason to believe he’ll be back and that Petrarch’s Star is still in his possession.”
Rich relief flooded Dorrie.
“Get three more mission lybrarians over to that address,” Francesco commanded a lybrarian wearing a cowboy hat set with a great number of rhinestones. He turned to Dorrie and Marcus and pointed at the hole in the floor. “And you. Go!”
As he hurriedly began to talk with the other lybrarians, Dorrie, with Marcus on her heels, sprang for the rough wooden steps the lybrarians had built to reach the jagged hole from the lip of the Roman bath below. Had they not been keyhands, the hole would have behaved as if it were simply a transparent piece of the floor: solid and unyielding. But for Dorrie and Marcus, the invisible barrier became penetrable. Descending through it, Dorrie felt the familiar warmth engulf her—almost pleasant compared to the searing heat she’d felt her first time through.
When her head dropped beneath the level of the barrier, she paused, thrilling to the sound of the bath’s gently slapping water, giddy with happiness. She was back in the wild jumble of Petrarch’s Library—and Mr. Gormly had been found!
On fire to tell the other apprentices what they’d heard, Dorrie and Marcus pelted through the set of swinging doors that led into the Gymnasium, bumping into the weapons training mistress, who was carrying an armload of javelins, and nearly knocking her off her feet.
“More care, please!” cried out Mistress Mai with more surprise than anger. “I’d prefer to be taken out in the line of duty than by a door!”
“Sorry!” Dorrie called out. She sprinted across the room, hoping to see Savi dueling another lybrarian, his rapier flashing, but he wasn’t there.
After exiting through another door, they careened up and down stairwells and through familiar library rooms and corridors—some grand, some shabby. Dorrie slowed to a panting halt when they reached one of the black stone archways.
Above it, white letters twisted to spell out “Athens, 399 BCE” between two images of a crossed pen and sword. To its left, an ancient water clock slowly trickled out the minutes. To its right, a calendar carved into the wall showed the current date in the wheren on the other side of the archway. Dorrie knew the archway well having once fallen through it accidentally and then snuck through on purpose during the last quarter. She jumped back when the sweaty-armed housekeeper she, Marcus, and Ebba had met while in Athens pushed a mop into view.
“I can never get used to the fact that people on the other side of the archways can’t see us,” Dorrie said.
“She’s probably still cleaning up after that riot we caused,” said Marcus.
“We?” said Dorrie indignantly as she watched the woman attack the pigeonholes full of scrolls with a dust rag. “That was all you.”
Last quarter, Dorrie, Marcus, and Ebba had slipped through the archway to look for a scroll they’d lost in the little, tiled Spoke Library on the other side, only to be mistaken for hired servants and sent to pass out wine and grapes at a party. There’d been musicians, and Marcus, unable to resist, had taught the drummer, Timotheus, a few choice seventies rock rhythms. There had been a violent reaction from the partygoers. Chairs and wine bowls had flown.
“Who knew they were so set in their musical ways?” said Marcus.
Dorrie stared at the housekeeper’s retreating back. They also hadn’t known they’d run into Mr. Biggs there.
When they at last reached the whitewashed wooden door that led to the Apprentice Attics, Dorrie heard voices arguing on the other side. Not stopping to listen to the words, she threw the door open to the room the apprentices called “the den.”
Inside, the apprentices were sitting and lying and perching in remarkably creative ways on the worn furniture around the rough, brick fireplace, their attention focused on an older apprentice named Amo that Dorrie didn’t know very well.
“You’re back!” shouted Ebba, leaping off the arm of one of the sturdier battered armchairs.
She and Dorrie flung themselves at each other and hugged fiercely, laughing, the yellow cloth band that held Ebba’s dreads back falling over her eyes. Around them, general whooping and hollering ensued. Dorrie and Marcus were treated to a wide variety of welcoming gestures, including a punch on the arm each from Sven, who wasn’t a big fan of speech; a hot baked potato each from Mathilde (“I just read them out!”); and a fervent “Finally!” from Kenzo, who, too young to be an apprentice, still spent as much time in the den as possible.
Saul, who was older than Marcus, waved from where he sat perched on a table next to Fatima, another apprentice Dorrie didn’t know very well yet. A blue smudge of ink lay across a cheek, and two short plaits of dark, gravity-phobic hair shot out from the sides of her head. She was plinking a stringed instrument that lay in her lap.
Izel, Millie’s best friend, experimented with a couple forbearing looks, as if she thought Dorrie and Marcus were getting far too much attention. Dorrie was mildly relieved to notice that Millie, for once, wasn’t beside her or anywhere in the den for that matter.
“I was afraid your parents wouldn’t let you come!” said Ebba.
Dorrie grinned. “They almost didn’t.”
Many hands pulled Dorrie and Marcus toward the fire. With deep pleasure, Dorrie let herself be tossed onto the balding horsehair couch, a good many of the apprentices piling on after her.
“Can Sven read out the marshmallows now?” begged Kenzo, trying to reach a floppy magazine that had been jammed behind a stack of battered books on the mantelpiece.
“I’ve got so much to tell you!” said Ebba.
“Me too!” said Dorrie. She was about to blurt out what she’d heard from Lybrarian Davis when Amo spoke.
“Excuse me.” Dorrie saw he was standing beside an easel. He pushed his spectacles up the steep grade of his nose. “Welcome back and all that, but we were in the middle of talking about this quarter’s attics cleanup.”
Audible groans rose from the apprentices.
“This is important,” shouted Amo. “Do you want to fail the inspection?”
“If we fail, none of us gets to take practicums this quarter,” explained Ebba to Dorrie and Marcus.
“No group of apprentices has failed in ages,” said Mathilde.
“Yes, but this place has never been more disgusting!”
Dorrie glanced around. The floorboard cracks held stale popcorn. A loaf of moldy French bread stuck out from beneath a chair. Random belon
gings, crumpled paper, and abandoned half-filled mugs covered the tabletops. In short, it looked just the way it always did.
Mathilde yawned. “So what? It’s always disgusting the day before the inspection.”
“And then we clean it up,” said Saul. “And Mistress Wu passes us.”
“Last quarter, she almost didn’t,” said Amo. “If Izel hadn’t fake-cried, we’d have failed.”
Izel batted her eyes and did a little curtsy. Some of the apprentices snickered.
“Here,” said Fatima, jumping off the table and going over to the fireplace, where Kenzo was now practically trying to climb the chimney to get at a magazine. She plucked it down and tossed it to Sven. On its cover, a woman in a bun painted a vase below the words Saturday Evening Post.
“I can’t afford to be barred from practicums this quarter,” said Amo, looking like he might really cry himself. “I’ve got my lybrarian field trial after this quarter, and if don’t improve my spear-throwing, I’m going to fail my personal weapon skills demonstration.”
“All right, all right,” said Mathilde. “Don’t get your dashiki in a double Windsor. We’ll clean it all up tomorrow like we always do.”
“That’s not good enough!” said Amo. “Which is why I’m proposing we start cleaning up tonight.”
A mutinous roar rose up from the apprentices. Sven stopped leafing through the magazine.
“How could you even suggest such an outrageous break with tradition?” blazed Mathilde, her voice filled with mock indignation.
“We have all day tomorrow,” said Fatima. “The inspection isn’t until 2:00 p.m.”
Amo snatched up a piece of thin paper from the easel. Dorrie saw that the words at the top spelled out “Summer Quarter Practicums.” She longed to look at it more closely.
“I can’t take any chance,” said Amo, jabbing at the paper with his finger. “I need to take Spears, Axes, and Cats: Throwing Objects with Precision and Flair!”
Mathilde snatched the paper from him and did her own jabbing. “Well, I have every fervent intention of taking Acquiring Written Artifacts by Women Who Nobody Has Bothered to Publish—taught by the one and only Rachel Davis, mission lybrarian and suffragist extraordinaire—and you don’t see me jumping around in a panic.”
Hearing Lybrarian Davis’s name, Dorrie again remembered the news she had to share.
“Let’s just vote,” said Sven in his quiet, stolid way.
“Something most women out in the wherens never get to do,” said Mathilde sniffily. “But fine.” She raised her hand high in the air. “All in favor of ruining one of our last nights of ease and sloth, say ‘aye.’”
Nobody spoke.
Amo glared at her. “All in favor of not waiting to the last minute to clean up and yet guaranteeing we’ll all get to take our practicums, say ‘aye.’”
Again, nobody spoke.
Marcus looked from Mathilde to Amo. “I’m pretty much confused, but I don’t think we’re doing any window washing tonight.”
“I. Made. You. Pie charts,” said Amo stiffly, and raking them all with a highly disappointed gaze, he tore the papers from the easel and stalked into his bedroom, closing the door loudly behind him.
The ceaselessly burning wood in the fire made a popping sound.
“Sheesh,” said Mathilde. “Save me from acting like that when I’m a senior apprentice.”
Dorrie could wait no longer. She struggled forward out of the pile of apprentices and perched on the edge of the sofa. “We saw Lybrarian Davis out in Passaic.”
“You did?” said Mathilde, looking rapturous and dropping to her knees. “What was she like? How long is she staying in Petrarch’s Library? Did she talk about her practicum?”
Marcus tilted his head back thoughtfully. “Confidently insouciant. No idea. And did not mention it.”
Mathilde looked disappointed.
“But listen!” Dorrie said. “While we were talking to her, she got a message. The Lybrariad has found Mr. Gormly’s hideout!”
Chapter 5
Marshmallow Talk
There were gasps and cries of excitement from all over the room.
“They’re going to stake Mr. Gormly’s hideout out,” said Marcus. “Which, let me just say, is very hard to say.”
“And they think he still has Petrarch’s Star,” added Dorrie.
Everyone began to talk at once.
“The lybrarians could be surrounding Mr. Gormly this very minute!” said Ebba, her eyes shining. “Maybe they already have the star back!”
“That would be a relief!” said Fatima.
Dorrie threw herself back on the cushions. “Especially if the Foundation has already rebuilt that Whim’s Gift thing.”
The apprentices looked at her blankly.
“You haven’t heard?” Marcus asked.
Mathilde poked at Sven with the toe of her pointed shoe. “The marshmallows, Sven. This conversation most definitely requires marshmallows.”
While Sven leafed through the magazine, Dorrie and Marcus took turns explaining how the Foundation needed Whim’s Gift to make Petrarch’s Star work. Dorrie broke off midsentence as Sven bent over an advertisement showing snow-white marshmallows spilling out of a cardboard box. She knew it took great imagination and focus to read objects out of books and that not everyone in Petrarch’s Library could do it. Those who could were usually able to read out only one sort of thing. Ebba could read out animals—though since last quarter, when she’d read out Roger, an aurochs the size of a moving van, she’d been forbidden to exercise her skill without express permission.
Lightly, Sven dropped his fingers onto a clump of words below the picture:
ANGELUS MARSHMALLOWS ARE FLUFFY, DELIGHTFUL, DELICIOUS—A MASTERPIECE OF THE CONFECTIONER’S ART.
“So what does Petrarch’s Star look like anyway?” asked Fatima.
Dorrie looked up with a start, realizing that among the apprentices, only she and Marcus had ever set eyes on it. And they only for a brief moment.
“Well,” said Dorrie as Sven began to slowly draw his fingers together as if trying to catch hold of a tiny dropped bead. “It’s made of gray stone, and it’s thick. Like a…like a…biscuit or something. And it’s got marks carved into it.”
“I heard Hypatia talking to Master Callamachus about it at breakfast yesterday,” said Saul. “She said Kash made a rubbing of the marks, and they’re the same ones that Petrarch used in that journal you got from your great-aunt Alice.”
Dorrie whipped around to face him, feeling stupid that she hadn’t realized this herself. “I guess they were,” she said.
“That might explain Hypatia’s message,” said Ebba, picking a piece of papyrus off a table. “A messenger left it for you a few hours ago.”
Taking it, Dorrie scanned the words. “She wants to borrow the journal.” Hurriedly, she reached for her pack and pulled out the little book with its bumpy spine and cracked leather cover. All the apprentices gathered around and stared at the title’s worn gilt lettering.
“Still not moving,” said Marcus.
During the last quarter, one of the strangest and most glorious things about Petrarch’s Library that Dorrie had discovered was the fact that she could pull just about any book or mud tablet off any shelf in the library, and no matter what language it had been written in, the symbols would twist and reshape themselves into English words. For Ebba, they would reshape themselves into Songhai. For Kenzo, Japanese. But the words in the little red book remained stubbornly inscrutable.
Dorrie flipped it open. There were a few surprised murmurings from apprentices who’d never seen the journal. The shape of a star had been carefully cut out of just about all the pages. Only a few in the front and the back had been left intact. Faded words filled the pages, written with the strange collection of symbols known as Petrarch’s alphabet.
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“Hypatia said the marks on Petrarch’s Star don’t shift either,” said Saul, staring at the star-shaped cavity.
“But why don’t they?” asked Kenzo.
“Probably because the words aren’t written in a real language,” said Saul.
“Don’t say that in front of the Archivist!” warned Mathilde. “He’ll start gibbering all wild-eyed about how it’s most certainly a language.”
Dorrie and Marcus’s eyes met. While they’d never actually spoken to the lybrarian known as the Archivist, they’d met him on their first day in Petrarch’s Library, when he’d arisen drunk and disheveled from behind a table, nearly scaring them to death. It was his job to document the changes in history that occurred every time the Lybrariad ran a mission.
“Well, if it’s not a language, what else would it be?” asked Dorrie.
“A code,” said Izel, her eyes glittering with the pleasure of a spilled secret. “That’s what Lybrarian Della Porta thinks. The lybrarians have brought him in to try to break it.”
Dorrie got distracted at that moment by the fact that between Sven’s fingers, the corner of a cardboard box had appeared. She watched in awe.
“Read it! Read it! Read it!” the other apprentices began to chant.
Sven’s face reddened, and the box slipped backward.
“Quit that,” said Mathilde. “You sound demented, and you know how Sven hates attention.”
A dead silence took hold, and staring eyes replaced the encouraging cries.
“Well, that’s not much better,” muttered Sven, but nevertheless, he succeeded in again coaxing the corner of the box out, and then as the page of the magazine flexed and widened, the whole box emerged from between two lines of words.
This time he grinned, red faced, as the cheering resumed.
Soon, great gobby marshmallows were hanging over the fire, impaled on a variety of weapons and a few sharp sticks gathered for the purpose, and the apprentices were swooning at the taste.
“I bet Mr. Biggs wishes he was enjoying one of these about now,” said Mathilde as she jammed a fifth marshmallow onto the tine of a grappling hook hung from one of Sven’s fishing poles.
The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks Page 4