When they’d practiced standing in their boats and moving from bow to stern in rough water, only Dorrie had managed to stay upright and in her dinghy. During one pleasurable practicum, Mistress Daraney had grown annoyed enough with Izel’s squeaks of protest about the blisters forming on her hands that she’d thrown a haddock at her.
As the weeks passed, Dorrie found it more and more difficult to hold on to her resentment toward the Archivist. Not because of Savi’s opinion on the matter, but because no matter how much stiff indifference she displayed, the Archivist never altered in his patient kindness toward her. She knew in her bigger moments that it wasn’t his fault that Savi had been called to other duties. Finally, one morning, she could resist no longer and ate one of the cookies he left beside her elbow. On the next, when he offered her tea, she nodded, and on the third morning, her resistance crumbled altogether, and she took both tea and cookies.
One day, knees creaking, the Archivist bent awkwardly and began to pull a small wooden trunk out from under one of the benches. Dorrie left her work and went to help him.
“One of the other Tyre keyhands broke her Tyre-Persepolis skipkey,” he huffed as together they lifted the trunk and set it on the table. “I said she could use mine until it’s repaired.”
He blew off a thick layer of dust and lifted the lid, letting it fall back on its hinges. “Oh, but I did love the constant key-skipping back when I spent more time out in the wherens! Sometimes, I’d go from Khampur to Guinea to Kish all in one day. Maybe stop at a dozen branch libraries to pick up news and check on the progress of our missions, and still get back in time for a late-night hot toddy at the Inky Pot.”
Dorrie peered inside the trunk and saw a shallow tray. It was broken up into compartments, each of which held a rectangle that reminded Dorrie of her sister’s dominoes. The two halves of these rectangles were made of completely different materials joined with a hinge. A metal prong the length of the hinge stuck up at an angle from one end. No two of the “dominoes” looked quite alike.
“These are the skipkeys?” she said aloud, immediately reminded of her talk with Marcus in the Inky Pot.
The Archivist gave a wheezy laugh. “Not what you were expecting?”
In fact, they weren’t. Since she’d first heard of their existence, she had imagined them as very ornate, heavy brass keys like the one that stuck out of Great-Aunt Alice’s old-fashioned desk back in Passaic.
He lifted one out. “Here’s the one we want.” One half was made of dark, highly polished wood and the other of some kind of stone. He turned it over in his hand. The backs of the squares of wood and stone had a thin layer of deep-brown leather tightly affixed to them. Each square of leather was embossed with a series of letters and numbers. One read PSPLS 327B and the other, TYRE 327B.
“Here,” said the Archivist, dropping the skipkey into Dorrie’s hand.
The two squares wanted to fold toward each other, leather side out, but were kept from meeting by the metal prong.
“Just don’t move the stop stick,” said the Archivist, pointing to the prong. “That’s the first thing you learn about handling a skipkey.”
“What’s it do?” asked Dorrie, pulling her fingers away.
“It keeps the two halves of the skipkey from touching until you want them to.” He took the skipkey from her and bent the stop stick slightly upward. “It’s flexible, see? When the time is right, you push it out of the way and let the skipkey fold completely. Tyre touches Persepolis and”—he leaned toward her conspiratorially—“you hope you don’t land on somebody’s grandmother.”
They both laughed.
On the evening before Ebba and Dorrie were due to head out to London, 1913 at last, right before dinner, Roger broke out of his yard and got wedged in a narrow alleyway nearby. This was unfortunate for several reasons. For one thing, he’d startled the very elderly lybrarian-in-training when she turned into the alley, and her false teeth had flown out again and this time broken into bits on the cobbles. For another thing, rumors had been flying all day that Mistress Lovelace’s famous chicken potpies were going to be served at dinner. Dorrie and Ebba knew they wouldn’t last long.
Under duress, Marcus agreed to help Dorrie and Ebba ease Roger back out with the help of a bucket of lard.
“If all the chicken potpies are gone when we get to the Sharpened Quill, I’m personally sacrificing Roger,” Marcus announced when they’d finished freeing the aurochs.
“Don’t worry,” Ebba said when they’d finally succeeded in freeing the aurochs. “I know a shortcut up to the Commons.” She led them through a door in the alley wall and across the slippery floor of the Biblioteca Marciana. In the far wall, Ebba pushed through another door. Instead of another room, Dorrie saw sky and sea and a very narrow ledge of rock onto which Ebba skipped.
“What is that?” Marcus asked, staring at the ledge.
Ebba looked surprised. “It’s the Middle Shelf. Didn’t you ever go out on it last quarter?”
“No,” said Marcus, peering past Ebba at the precipice just beyond her toes. “And I didn’t do any sword-swallowing either.”
“It goes all the way around the outside of Petrarch’s Library,” said Ebba, starting down the ribbon of stone as though she had goat hooves rather than feet. “It’s perfectly safe as long as you stay away from the edge.” She disappeared from view.
Cautiously, Dorrie and Marcus inched out after her.
“There’s also a Bottom Shelf and a Top Shelf,” Ebba called over her shoulder. “They’re very useful for getting around if you don’t mind a little weather.”
“Or death!” said Marcus, clinging to the Biblioteca Marciana’s outer wall.
When they’d gone a few yards, Dorrie heard the sound of violently splashing water. Ahead, the ledge disappeared into one of the Library’s perpetual rainstorms.
Dorrie paused. “It looks kind of wet.”
“Don’t worry,” said Ebba, who had stopped at a row of hooks. “We keep umbrellas on both sides of the rainstorm.” She handed them around.
About fifteen feet into the storm, Ebba turned into the dark mouth of a stone tunnel. Dorrie followed. Initially relieved to get off the slick precipice, she soon wondered if the tunnel was a real improvement. It sloped steeply downward, lit only by candles that flickered wanly on the walls. Greasy-looking puddles stretched over much of the floor, and the air smelled horrible.
“Tallow candles,” said Ebba as Dorrie and Marcus both covered their noses.
Soon, the smaller puddles became one big puddle that quickly became ankle-deep.
“There’s no earthly way of knowing,” Marcus started singing in a creepy monotone, “which direction we are going.”
“Cut it out,” said Dorrie, unnerved.
“I don’t know why more people don’t use this shortcut,” Ebba said from up ahead.
Dorrie heard a squeak and then a splash that seemed to speak clearly of the presence of rats.
“That’s one reason,” said Dorrie.
“There’s no knowing where we’re rowing,” sang Marcus, “or which way the river’s flowing.”
Dorrie elbowed him hard in the ribs.
At last, Dorrie saw brightness ahead. It came from a break in the tunnel wall. They stumbled up a few wet steps into a nice, dry whitewashed corridor.
It ended abruptly at a door painted blackest black and covered in cobwebs. Ebba stopped, looking confused. “There used to be an iron staircase here with a piece of the National Library of Peru at the top.”
Dorrie stared at the bug-eyed gargoyle with a lolling tongue that served as the black door’s knocker. “You think it’s a new Ghost Library?”
Ebba nodded. “It must have squished in sometime recently and changed things around.”
“Chicken. Pot. Pie,” said Marcus with some urgency.
Dorrie realized the door was sl
ightly ajar. Against the protests of the hundreds of little hairs on the back of her neck, Dorrie pushed it. The hinges made a horrible grating sound. Cautiously, she stuck her head inside. Dark wooden bookcases ranged around the walls and brooded over velvet moth-eaten furniture set some distance from an immense stone fireplace. A dark chandelier lit the place with its dirty-looking, guttering candles.
Marcus and Ebba poked their heads in as well.
“Cozy,” said Marcus, eyeballing a moth-eaten stuffed vulture. “In a gravediggers’ clubhouse kind of way.”
Dorrie saw that the room held four other doors: one on either side of the fireplace and another two flanking a portrait that hung on the wall opposite the fireplace. “Maybe one of those will take us toward the Sharpened Quill.”
“Ugh,” Ebba said fiercely, catching sight of the great, shaggy head of a bison that hung over the fireplace. “Someone had better have eaten every bit of him!”
“I don’t think that would make me feel any better if I were him,” said Marcus.
Dorrie walked farther into the room, the others shuffling along behind her. She felt a rush of cold air, and the door slammed behind them. They screamed and clutched one another.
“The tunnel wasn’t so bad,” Marcus choked out.
“It was just a draft,” Dorrie said firmly, talking to herself as much as the others. Slowly, they disentangled themselves. Despite the allure of chicken potpie, the odd room made her want to linger.
The books on the shelves were some of the most mildew-ridden, blackened, crumbly ones Dorrie had ever seen in Petrarch’s Library. “These look positively ancient,” she said, pulling down one of the tomes. She read the title: “Poisons with Which to Wither Your Enemies.”
“Definitely matches the decor,” said Marcus, pulling down another. A reddish-brown blotch on its cover looked terribly like a bloodstain. “The Executioner’s Art. Cheery.”
Ebba reached for one as well beside the fireplace. “True Spine-Tingling Ghost Stories from around the World. I love ghost stories.” She sank onto the floor to give the book a closer look, nearly sitting on the head of a polar bear. Its lips were pulled back in a fierce snarl, and the flames from the fire flickered eerily through its yellow teeth. The rest of its pelt was spread out as a rug. “Poor creature!” cried Ebba, jumping up again.
Dorrie wandered toward the portrait. A set of dark, hooded eyes stared at her from beneath a top hat, one eye looking slightly more protuberant than the other. The man’s eyebrows were fixed at such a sinister angle that Dorrie wondered if anyone had ever had the nerve to talk to him when he was alive. On a shelf below the portrait, two fat, grinning brass toads sat keeping a row of books upright. Dorrie peered more closely at the face in the portrait. There was something else in it, something…
“What’s with the stuffed stuff in this place?” asked Marcus, staring at something sitting on top of a pipe organ. “Look at this one.” Dorrie turned to see Marcus opening his jaws wide near the snout of what looked like a small crocodile.
“Darling!” sang out Ebba as the creature opened one eye and launched herself at Marcus with a great gurgling snarl.
He windmilled backward. Darling hit the ground with a heavy thud and scurried after him on her powerful, stubby legs.
Dorrie grabbed hold of Marcus’s arm and raced for the nearest door, seizing Ebba with her free hand on the way.Letting go of them, she wrenched the door open. A skeleton, heavy with chains, erupted from the darkness beyond the doorway, its arm and leg bones dancing madly and its jaws clacking.
In a storm of shrieks, Dorrie, Marcus, and Ebba retreated clumsily, getting in one another’s way and overturning a hollow elephant leg. Weapons spilled across the carpet. As Dorrie dove for a broadsword, the skeleton withdrew, and the door it had erupted from slam closed.
“What kind of maniac puts a spring-loaded skeleton in a closet!” yelled Marcus as he and Dorrie clambered up on the sofa, dragging Ebba along with them as she made soothing sounds in the direction of the advancing lizard. Darling clawed her way up onto the sofa after them, forcing the apprentices to climb higher onto a long table that stood behind the sofa.
“Watch the candles!” warned Dorrie as Marcus nearly knocked over a candelabra. The lizard’s tail lashed. Panting, Dorrie held the sword out in front of her, trying to keep the animal at bay.
“She’s scared!” said Ebba.
With another mighty lunge, Darling chomped down on the sword blade. It broke off in her mouth like a breadstick.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Marcus cried as Darling crouched to spring again.
He kicked the candelabra toward her. Rather than sailing off the table, it simply bent over under his foot and then sprang back up again as though on a hinge, its flames dancing. The lizard shied away from it and fell onto the floor. Before Dorrie could think what to do next, a creaking sort of cracking sound from above made them all look up. The chandelier was trembling. A great web of cracks appeared in the ceiling.
“The suspense is terrible,” whispered Marcus. “I hope it lasts.”
Dorrie heard a snap. The three apprentices leaped off the table in different directions as the chandelier plummeted. Sprawled on the floor, Dorrie watched it jerk to a jangling, bouncing halt about where their heads had been. A low growl made her look toward the end of the couch. Darling was advancing around it in a slow, toothy, purposeful way. Dorrie scrambled to her feet and raced for the door beside the portrait. It refused to open. Desperate, she grabbed hold of one of the brass toads on the shelf below the portrait, intending to throw it at Darling. Instead, Dorrie felt herself swung around violently as the wall spun. Before she could make a sound, Ebba, Marcus, and the slobbering monitor lizard disappeared from view.
Chapter 14
Through a Threadbare Hole
Dorrie felt herself losing her grip on the toad. In another moment, she’d fallen hard on a flagstone floor. Panting, she raised her head and looked around.
She was lying on a landing at the top of a flight of curving stone steps. On the wall that had spun, two torches in iron brackets cast their flickering light on another portrait, this one of a woman with russet hair, sky-blue robes, and much nicer eyes. Directly across from the portrait stood a wooden door set in a stone wall, its top curved to a peak. Dorrie turned back to the portrait, wondering if behind it, Ebba and Marcus were still in one piece.
From down the stairway came the sound of another door opening, followed by ponderous footsteps, and suddenly, Dorrie knew exactly where she was. Her heart nearly stopped. She was outside Master Francesco’s tower office. For a moment, she considered explaining the situation to him but then dismissed the thought immediately. As angry as Izel had said he was about Dorrie making the Passaic Public Library front page news, Dorrie felt certain that if he found her lurking outside his door, he’d assume she was up to no good.
Fervently hoping Ebba had been able to work her animal magic on Darling and that she and Marcus were safe, Dorrie darted behind a moth-eaten tapestry and tried to make herself as thin and as silent as paper.
Through a threadbare hole, she saw Lybrarian Della Porta come into view. He knocked on the door. After a moment, Master Francesco threw it open. Stronger light illuminated the landing.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Francesco, looking haggard and slightly unsettled. “Any breakthroughs on the code-breaking?”
“Not quite yet,” said Della Porta, “but soon, very soon. No, I’ve come about another matter.”
“Yes?” said Francesco.
“As you may know,” said Della Porta, “I have made something of a study of ancient Athens during my life.”
“Because you desire to serve as the next Athens keyhand,” said Francesco, his voice impatient.
Della Porta gave him a sharp look. “Keyhand Diadora is not going to live forever, and I don’t care if it offends you that I say it. The role will have t
o be filled, and yes, I would like to be considered, but that’s not why I’ve come.” He pulled a piece of papyrus from a book he held and handed it to Francesco.
Dust tickled Dorrie’s throat, and she suppressed a cough.
“I realize the Foundation could be remaking Whim’s Gift just about anywhere, but here is a list of locations in Athens, 399 BCE I think the Lybrariad should prioritize investigating.” Della Porta poked at a place on the papyrus. “I believe a house owned by one Critius warrants special interest. He would have been just the sort of person to appreciate the Foundation’s goals and throw in with them.”
“Thank you,” said Francesco, sounding anything but grateful. “Keyhands Aspasia, Leandro, and, yes, Diadora have also provided me with extremely long lists of suggestions, and I assure you that my overtaxed, overstretched, under-rested mission lybrarians will get to yours just as soon as humanly possible.” He began to withdraw into his office.
“One more thing,” said Lybrarian Della Porta.
The tickle in Dorrie’s throat now a clawing tiger, she despaired of the lybrarians ever leaving the landing.
“What?” demanded Francesco.
“It’s about Hypatia’s ill-considered decision at the Council.”
“It wasn’t Hypatia’s decision,” Francesco said.
“Hypatia, the Board of Directors, what does it matter,” said Della Porta. “The point is that it was a bad decision. Mr. Biggs as good as told us that the Foundation has that missing History of Histories page.”
Dorrie drew a sharp shocked breath. There was a moment of silence.
“And yet he is treated like a guest!” continued Lybrarian Della Porta.
Francesco stared at him icily. “He’s being treated like a prisoner in accordance with Lybrariad principles.”
“For Petrarch’s sake, Francesco,” cried Lybrarian Della Porta. “Algernon Sidney’s fate aside, there is a crux mission on that History of Histories page. A crux mission!”
Dorrie’s thoughts raced, trying to remember what the other apprentices had said about crux missions. They were missions that changed the world in huge ways.
The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks Page 13