Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  The Library was not a single building, but rather a complex of buildings on the edge of campus, with only one way in. It was said to have one copy of every book ever written. This was probably an exaggeration, despite the fact that it seemed to have a functionally infinite interior. The Library was bigger on the inside, and it iterated.

  It certainly had a great mad pile of things shelved within it. Finding them was another matter: there was no card catalogue, and several attempts to establish one had met with madness, failure, and disappearances.

  There were, however, Librarians. Librarians, with their overdeveloped hippocampi, their furled cloaks, their swords and wands sheathed swaggeringly across their backs. The university bureaucracy was nightmarish, Byzantine, and largely ornamental. But those caveats did not apply to the Librarians, an elite informational force second to none. They were lean, organized, and they knew when to turn left and when to turn right.

  This one looked dubious, and a little concerned. “I recommend against this,” said the Librarian.

  It did nothing to settle Euclavia’s stomach.

  She held up the scrap of paper, with its scrawled note proclaiming: A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spirituous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy. By Frederick Accum.

  “My tutor wants me to read this for my thesis.”

  With—she hoped—the outward appearance of calm, she added, “Special Collections.”

  “Hmm,” said the Librarian. She extracted the soggy scrap from Euclavia’s grasp and perused it closely. “Have you been sleeping with your tutor’s spouse or something? Any reason for him to want you dead? No?”

  “No,” Euclavia said firmly, wondering. She was aware of Bucephalus falling back from her rear, very silently indeed for somebody with four hooves as big as dinner plates walking on a hardwood floor. She stuck a hand back and grabbed his mane before he sidled completely out of reach.

  He snorted. He could have dislodged her easily and made a break for it, but other than leaning against her grip, he didn’t put up a fight.

  “It has a chapter on mushrooms,” Euclavia said helpfully.

  “I can’t imagine how it would be useful. It’s from an interdicted plane, you see. Nonfunctional thaumosphere. Very difficult to get books in and out of a place like that. But we’re committed, very committed. Still, that’s why it’s in Special Collections. The Special Collections Librarian is very interested in such works.”

  The Librarian pronounced her colleague’s title with an upward flicker of her eyes, as if she expected it to make an impression. It was that expectation more than any prior knowledge that gave Euclavia the creeping chills.

  “So tell us about this Librarian,” said Bucephalus.

  The Librarian shook her head. “She doesn’t really like to be discussed.”

  “Tell us about the labyrinth, then,” Euclavia suggested.

  The Librarian smiled. “It changes without notice. Try not to get caught between the sliding stacks when they move. We can check you out a ball of twine.”

  “We have one.” Euclavia held it up.

  “Good,” said the Librarian. “Then you’re prepared. You’ll want three days of food. Pencils and notepaper—pens are not allowed. A sleeping bag or bedroll. No fires. Browse at your own risk. Urination and defecation in designated restrooms only. No shoes on the antique carpets. That goes double for horse-shoes. First aid stations and water are with the restrooms. We say, every five kilometers, but really they move around. Any questions?”

  Euclavia and Bucephalus shook their heads.

  “Do you need to go back for anything?”

  Negative again.

  “Please don’t feed the books. Some of them will beg.”

  “Beg?”

  “Everybody wants something,” the Librarian said. “It’s the metric for a successful story.” She wrote something down and handed it to Euclavia. It was a number, and it glowed faintly. “Here. This will illuminate your researches.”

  Euclavia took it and said “Thank you” automatically.

  “In libres! In libres! Into the books!” the Librarian cried.

  An archway did not so much open behind her as become apparent for the first time, as if Euclavia had suddenly noticed it. She glanced over at Bucephalus and found him staring, too, nostrils flared, eyebrows elevated. If his ears were mobile, they would have been pricked tip to tip.

  Bucephalus held her gaze for a moment longer, then glanced over at the Librarian. “Say,” he asked. “What do you have on alchemically dissolving and later reconstituting skeletons in animatable form?”

  “What kind of skeletons?”

  “ . . . mammal?”

  “It’s always the quiet ones,” she said.

  And then she issued them a second pass, with another faintly phosphorescent call number scribbled on it.

  Bucephalus plucked the ball of twine from Euclavia’s palm and tied one end in careful knots, high among the ornate carvings on the archway. “There,” he said. “That should be out of the way.”

  He seemed suddenly cheery. Euclavia didn’t trust it. She shouldered her pack and they set off into the stacks, falling into step with one another. Now his hooves clattered cheerfully on the floors, the flash of white stockings on mahogany-black legs showing bright in the gloom.

  “Where’s the fatalism?” Euclavia asked.

  The centaur snorted. His tail stung her shoulders as he gave it a particularly good swish. “This is fatalism,” he replied. “I’ve made the decision to die happy.”

  At first, the shelves were wooden, widely spaced and low enough to see over. They were crammed with bright, slender, large-format books with hard board covers. Euclavia reached for one with a lavishly illustrated front, the image half-concealed behind its smaller neighbor. The colors were glorious and she itched to touch it.

  Bucephalus caught her wrist. “Browse at your own risk,” he murmured.

  “It’s the children’s section!”

  His eyebrows were shaped like commas, but in their articulation they provided all the punctuation a novelist could desire. “Don’t tell me small humans are immune to nightmares.”

  Euclavia still remembered a few so vividly it didn’t seem as if more than a decade had passed. “Point taken,” she said, and drew back her hand without stroking that jewel-toned spine.

  She glanced down at the scrap with the call number on it. The scrawl still glowed with a faint, silver-violet light. When she turned to the right, she thought it became incrementally brighter.

  She held her scrap up and swung from side to side so Bucephalus could see the effect. “Check yours.”

  He pulled it from the sporran he wore slung around his human waist, hanging against the chest of his horse-part. “To the right,” he said after a moment’s study.

  “Going my way?” she joked.

  He snorted, but she thought he felt the same relief that she did. At least they wouldn’t have to split up, or make the decision to spend longer in the Library together, to track down both sources. Not yet, anyway.

  A black thing, cat-sized—something with wings, or something like a black rag or sack caught up on a wind—flapped and tumbled from above. There might be vaults up there, a groined roof lost in shadows. There might be stars, Euclavia thought. She imagined she caught a glimpse of rectangles of transparent indigo speckled with shimmering lights, but it was like looking upward through water. Everything wavered, as if the shadows were veils of smoke or translucent silk lashed in a wind, half-obscuring.

  The thing with the ragged wings—if they were wings—landed atop one of the shelves a few rows off and scuttled along it batlike, spiking elbows above its back. It lowered an indistinct head and sniffed, hard and frequently. It turned, then—just the head, rotating like an owl’s—and fixed Euclavia with a fiery green stare
, flat and reflective as the glare of light off still water.

  She froze and it hissed, or perhaps it hissed and she froze. A moment later, its glare was interrupted. Then it kicked off hard, wings—if they were wings—extended and flurrying, a slim emerald-colored folio depending from its back feet. Euclavia saw that it wore white cotton gloves over what were unmistakably birdlike talons.

  “What was that?” Euclavia asked.

  “Retrieval system?”

  She turned to slap his shoulder, but he was staring after the whatever-it-was, not watching her for a reaction, and his expression looked earnest. Earnest, and concerned. So she patted him instead. His hide was wet already with nervous lather.

  They walked on, taking turns trailing the twine behind them, long enough to become hungry and stop at a rest room for food and a nap. The rest was physical only: Bucephalus remained standing up, like an ill-at-ease stallion, and Euclavia managed nothing more than to drift and briefly doze. It didn’t leave her refreshed.

  After a few desultory hours, they washed their faces, used the facilities, and drank some weak tea made from the hot water tap before continuing. Several more of the black flapping creatures flitted about overhead. Some bore volumes in their white-gloved talons. None of them, after the first, paid any heed to Bucephalus and Euclavia.

  They didn’t run out of twine, which was a minor miracle. Consider the source, though: they had gotten the ball from a minotaur.

  Euclavia was about to campaign for a break for lunch—she had apples and cheese in her bag, and saw the cheery red glow of a restroom sign off to the right—when something ahead rumbled softly, more a shiver through the floor than a real noise Euclavia heard with her ears. She looked at Bucephalus, who was already looking down at her.

  “Your hearing is better,” she said.

  His grin was more of a wince. “The stacks. They’re moving.”

  So they were.

  Euclavia and Bucephalus came to a railing. Below it was a drop of at least one story, down to an enormous, possibly boundless room.

  As they paused on the edge of the Children’s Section, Euclavia strained her eyes to peer into the gathering gloom of Nonfiction. She saw before her serried rank upon rank of gray steel shelves, stretching into haze, dimness, and misty infinity. Even from the elevated height she stood upon, each stack was taller than Bucephalus, and she gave up trying to calculate the number of books that might be visible after a few moments of desultory math that nevertheless left her an ache between the eyes.

  They were not in neat rows, but rather formed a sort of irregular pattern of right angles. Like the sort of maze you might draw with a pen, Euclavia thought. Trying to trace it with her eyes made her dizzy.

  “So many books,” Bucephalus said.

  “It’s a labyrinth, not a library.”

  “The path to knowledge follows many strange turnings,” he replied. She didn’t know if it was a quotation.

  The air had a faint, sickly, rancid odor. Something that made Bucephalus snort and stamp. She didn’t ask him to identify it.

  “Down the stairs?” she asked.

  He gave her a haunted look, and followed her along the rail.

  But the stairs, when they found them, were spiral. No challenge for Euclavia, but Bucephalus would not be descending in that fashion. They stood there, side by side, frowning down at the wrought steel spiral.

  “It’s only about twelve feet down,” he said at last. “I could jump.”

  “You cannot jump,” she answered. “You’d have to go over the railing. That’s three more feet, and onto a hard floor. You’ll break your legs.”

  “If only we had a block and tackle. I could lower myself.” He looked around. “This is a public building, right?”

  “Technically.”

  “So it has to be accessible.” He paced off toward the nearest side wall, visible because of the glow of yet another sign indicating a restroom.

  Euclavia dug out her scrap and glanced down at it as she followed. The silver-violet glow was dimming. “We’re going the wrong way.”

  “Says you. Hah, there it is!”

  He gestured. Her eye followed. She blinked. Picked out in cheery red symbols over a filigreed cage door was the word “mezzanine,” and through the cage the interior of a lift was just visible.

  “You’re going to trust that thing?”

  “Can’t get down the spiral stair,” he remarked with casual bravado. “If you’re too chicken I’ll meet you on the ground floor.”

  She probably would have taken him up on it, but she could see the foamy white lather worked up in the creases of his joints, and she knew he wasn’t any less scared than she. So she tossed the ball of twine over the rail and then followed him in to the lift—he raised and lowered and locked the grate—and waited while he pushed the button marked ground. The thing hesitated for a moment and then started up with a shudder that left her clutching the centaur’s arm with both hands. But then it smoothed out, and by the time it (gently) settled level with the ground floor, she was shaking out her robe and trying to pretend to both of them that she was entirely nonchalant.

  He raised the grate, and they both stepped out briskly. He left it open behind them, she noticed, and she figured that was a sensible precaution in case they had to leave in a hurry.

  “Ugh,” he said. “Stinks even worse down here.”

  “It smells like something rotten,” she said, turning to find the string. She handed the ball to him.

  He gave her a look that made her wish she hadn’t commented. “It is.”

  They entered the maze. There were more of the ragged black things here, flitting from place to place overhead, occasionally perching atop one of the stacks to glare down at them balefully with their flat, reflective green or gold or orange eyes. Three different books tried to seduce Bucephalus, and two more made passes at Euclavia. They stayed strong, though she admitted to herself that if she’d been alone, she might not have been able to resist running her hands over the one with the copper-tooled limp leather cover.

  But Bucephalus caught her looking, and she drew her hand back in time.

  “Looks like it might be illuminated,” she said, in apology.

  He snorted his horsey laugh. “My mother always did say books would be the death of me.”

  He handed her back the ball of twine to keep her hands busy. It didn’t seem much smaller.

  They walked on. They chose their direction by the gleam of the call numbers, though Euclavia admitted to some misgivings. What if the papers would try to lead them in a straight line? What if the route through the labyrinth of the stacks was circuitous? What if they starved before they found a way out?

  They were quickly out of sight of the mezzanine, and after a few more hours, Euclavia couldn’t even be certain she knew what direction it lay in.

  But they only found themselves retracing their steps out of dead-ends when they tried to second-guess their simple guides, and in the end they shrugged and decided maybe the Librarian had known what she was doing.

  They were actually starting to relax a little bit, and were debating how far to push on past the halfway point in their supplies, when they stumbled across the body.

  It wasn’t entirely unexpected. The stench had been growing stronger and stronger, and was now gaggingly heavy. When they rounded the corner and found the corpse, though, Euclavia was unprepared for how much worse it was than she’d been braced for. It was humanish, human-sized, but—a small blessing—not really too distinct in the gloom. A flock of the black wing-things perched along it in a ragged single line, their heads bobbing as they gorged.

  One looked up. Then another.

  Euclavia glanced down at her scrap. Their way led forward.

  Bucephalus’ tail swished dramatically. His eyes were rimmed with white. Euclavia agreed wholeheartedly.

  But Bucephalus said, “We have to go past.”

  So they edged. The space between the stacks was narrow—three feet or so—a
nd the corpse sprawled across most of it. They got within an arm’s length and the biggest wing-thing hissed, reared back, and began to beat its wings aggressively. It wasn’t large—the body between the wings was the size of a large house cat—but the teeth in its indistinct shadowy snarl were as long and white as bone needles.

  Euclavia wondered if the person on the floor had died of hunger, or of some more direct means.

  “Aw, bugger,” Bucephalus said. He grabbed her wrist and lunged forward.

  Euclavia lost hold of the twine. She found herself dragged into the air, dangling beside his broad, lathered shoulder. The centaur leaped. She swung against his side, arms wrenched, splattered with voluminous horsey sweat. He landed with a jarring thud. She cried out; they had hurdled both the bat-things and the body. Her arm twisted as she spun, and her other side collided with the centaur’s barrel.

  She threw her other arm over Bucephalus’ withers and held on for dear life, facing backwards, her knees drawn up before her in an attempt not to swing under his belly and get trampled or disemboweled. She had a great view backward as the bat-winged things began to rise up, screeching, from their meal.

  “Run,” she yelled at Bucephalus. “They’re coming!”

  Her arm slipped off his shoulders as he sprang forward again. Euclavia felt a sudden trembling—strong, now, not the almost subliminal vibration of before. But still nearly silent. The narrow corridor between the stacks on either side, she saw, was tightening.

  Euclavia half-expected Bucephalus to pick her up and swing her over his withers, but perhaps centaurs simply didn’t think of themselves as beasts of burden. Instead he dragged her—still—by the wrist at a near-gallop, and she bounded along beside him, pulled into impossible leaps, keeping her balance only because he steadied her with his powerful arms. The stacks rolled, closing behind them. Euclavia swore she could feel them clipping Bucephalus’ heels, but they were menacingly almost-silent in their well-oiled motion. Only the precise, heavy clicks with which they slid flush and locked together gave away the mass and power of their closing.