by Terry Brooks
She stewed about it for a while, and then finally there was a knock on the door, and when she called back it opened and Thom stepped inside.
“Good morning,” he greeted cheerfully. “Are you all right?”
She brushed back her hair and gave him a short nod, unwilling to admit that she hurt everywhere and hated everything. “Is there somewhere I can wash?” she asked instead.
He took her down the hall to one of the doors she had passed earlier and opened it for her. Inside, there were counters with basins and pitchers of water. On the wall hung towels. None of it looked too clean or too new.
“You can use these,” he told her. He looked vaguely embarrassed. “I’ll stay outside until you’re done. So that no one disturbs you.”
When he was gone, she stripped off her clothes and began washing herself as best she could, thinking all the while how much better things would be if she were back in Sterling Silver. Halfway through, it occurred to her that she could make it better simply by using a little of her magic. A shower with hot water, a soft towel instead of a harsh rag, and a little warmth in the floors would make things almost bearable. She nearly gave in to the temptation. But using magic would risk revealing her location to her father and mother. More than that, it would indicate a certain weakness of character. If she used magic to lessen her hardship, she was admitting that she wasn’t tough enough to deal with things the way they were. She hated the idea that she wasn’t strong enough to endure a little discomfort. She thought herself better than that, and she wasn’t about to do anything that would prove her thinking wrong.
So she suffered through the coldwater splash and the freezing air and the rank smells and the rough surface of the towel, and she was pretty much finishing up when a panel in the wall opened and a handful of rangy monkeys appeared. At least, that was what they appeared to be as they crowded into the room, all but tumbling over one another as they pushed clear of the opening. When they caught sight of her, naked save for the towel she was desperately trying to wrap about herself, they straightened up as if electrified and hissed like snakes. She screamed in response—more from embarrassment than fear—yelling at them to get out.
The door to the room flew open and Thom charged in, caught sight of Mistaya, made a vague attempt at shielding his eyes, and then quickly placed himself between the monkeys and her, shouting loudly at the former until they all piled back through the hole in the wall and slammed the panel shut behind them.
“Sorry about that,” he muttered, keeping his back turned and his eyes averted. “Those are some of the Throg Monkeys. They aren’t supposed to be in this part of the building, but they seem to go wherever they want these days. Even His Eminence can’t keep them in line. Guess they’ve been using this washroom for themselves.”
“Can you just keep looking over there until I’m dressed?” Mistaya asked rather pointedly.
“Oh, certainly, of course,” he agreed at once. “I wouldn’t have come in at all if I hadn’t heard you scream, but then I … Well, I didn’t know what … It could have been anything, after all … Really, I didn’t see anything … much.”
He trailed off awkwardly, apparently unable to find any good way to end the conversation. She left things hanging there while she quickly finished drying and dressing in her old clothes, promising herself a change as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
“What sort of creatures are those Throg Monkeys?” she asked finally. “Trolls or kobolds or what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t even know where they came from. His Eminence found them and brought them here to do the heavy work in the Stacks. Which was a waste of effort, it turns out. They don’t do very much work at all. They wouldn’t do any except that I found a way to make them. They seem to think that work is beneath them. Mostly, they just sit around looking bored.”
“Except when they’re poking their noses in where they don’t belong.”
“Except for that.” He hesitated. “Did they frighten you?”
“They came through the walls rather suddenly. So, yes, they frightened me. But they won’t get a chance to do that again, I can promise you.”
She finished tying the stays to her blouse and cinched her belt. “Throg Monkeys, huh. I thought I knew every species of creature in Landover, but I never heard of them.”
“I thought the same thing,” he agreed. “Can I turn around now?”
“You can.” She waited until he was facing her. “There, you see? No damage done. But I am hungry.”
He took her back outside and down the hall to the kitchen where he had fed her the night before. The kitchen had been empty then, and it was empty now. She couldn’t quite figure out who did the cooking or when they did it, but there was a pot of something bubbling on the stove. Thom ladled them up two bowls of something that might have been thin stew or simply gruel, added hunks of bread, and pumped two cups of water from a sink. They sat at the same table, a small wooden block with benches, and consumed their meal. It did not look appetizing at the outset and did not improve with the tasting. Mistaya ate hers anyway, concentrating on the bread. She needed something in her stomach.
“Now that you’re here,” he asked her after the meal was nearly consumed, “how long do you intend to stay?”
She thought about it a moment. “How long do you think I will be allowed to stay?”
He shrugged. “Depends. If you want to continue to pretend to be my sister, you can stay as long as you like. Otherwise, I think you better make plans to leave after breakfast.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “That’s rather abrupt, isn’t it?”
“You saw how things are around here last night. If you want to stay, you have to work in the Stacks. That was the excuse I gave for your being here.” He gave her a quick smile. “Look, I want you to stay. I told you that last night. I want to have someone to talk to.”
He hesitated. “Okay, it’s more than that. I don’t want to talk to just someone. I want to talk to you. I like you.”
She almost blushed, but not quite. “Well, I don’t mind being your sister if that’s what it takes for me to stay. But don’t you have to get permission from His Eminence?”
“Oh, sure. But he’ll agree. He likes beautiful things, so he’ll like you well enough.” He faltered, apparently realizing what he had just said. He brushed nervously at his mop of dark hair. “We can go see him after you’ve finished eating.”
“I’m finished,” she announced, and she stood up.
He took her back out of the kitchen and down the hallway past all the doorways to the servants’ rooms, including her own, until they were back in the front anteroom where the big desk fronted the two huge closed doors. Only now the doors were open, and Thom led her through.
She stopped short when she saw what was there. They had entered a cavernous chamber with ceilings so high she could only just make out massive wooden support beams standing out in stark relief against the shadows. The floor of the room comprised huge stone blocks on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of shelves, row upon row running left to right and back into farther darkness. The shelves were each perhaps twenty feet high and connected by rails on which rolling ladders rested. Books and papers of all sorts were crammed into the shelves and stacked on the floors and dumped in piles in the aisles. Although there were windows high up on the walls on either side, their glass was crusted with grime and dust and cobwebs, and the natural light was reduced to a feeble glow. Usable light emanated from more of the tiny flameless lamps she had seen in the hallways earlier, these attached in pairs at the ends of the shelves, their yellow glow almost, but not quite, reaching to the center of each shelving unit.
“The Stacks,” he announced. “It’s kind of a mess up here, but better when you go farther in. We’ve been working back to front and from the middle outward. Don’t ask me why; His Eminence ordered it done that way. So those parts are cleaned up and organized.” He paused and looked at her. “It’s a big job. You can s
ee why we need help.”
She could, indeed. As she was thinking that the number of workers necessary to clean up this mess was not a handful, but hundreds, a pair of the Throg Monkeys emerged from the gloom between the stacks, hunched over and conversing in low tones. When they caught sight of Thom and her, they abruptly turned around and disappeared back into the gloom.
“That’s the way they are,” Thom advised. “They do their level best not to be found so that they don’t have to work. They are very good at it, too. Every day, I have to hunt them down and herd them over to the section we’re working on. It takes up a lot of valuable time.”
She kept staring in the direction of the vanished Throg Monkeys, thinking how creepy they were. “How many of them are there?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know. I keep trying to count them, but I can never get them all together in one place. There are a lot, I know.” He frowned. “It seems as if there are more all the time, but I don’t know how that can be—unless they’re breeding, of course, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that. Fortunately.”
He grimaced. “However many there are, there aren’t enough since only a small percentage of them ever do any work. The only thing I can trust them to do is lift and haul; they’re hopeless at organizing and filing. I keep telling His Eminence that we need better help to finish this job, but he never does anything about it.”
He gave her his loopy grin. “But now we have you—my little sister, Ellice. Things are looking up!”
She gave him a grimace of dismay. “How long have you been at this?”
He looked skyward for a moment. “Oh, about three years now.”
“Three years? Three whole years?”
The loopy grin returned. “Well, it’s slow going, I admit. But His Eminence seems satisfied. Come on. Let me introduce you.”
“Wait!” She held up her hand to stay him. “What am I supposed to do when I meet him? What should I say?”
“Oh, that’s easy. You really don’t have to say much of anything. His Eminence will do all the talking. You just have to play along. Remember your lines. You are my little sister, Ellice. We live in a little village at the south edge of the Greensward called Averly Mills. When I introduce you, bow to him. Always address him as ‘Your Eminence’ or just ‘Eminence.’ Can you do that?”
She could if she had to, though she didn’t much like the idea. But she held her tongue. “Does he have a name other than ‘Eminence’?” she asked instead.
Thom gave her that familiar shrug. “He says his name is Craswell Crabbit, but I think he made it up. It doesn’t matter because he won’t allow us to use that name anyway. Only ‘Your Eminence’ will do.”
“Is he a noble of the Kingdom? Is that why he insists on being addressed as ‘Your Eminence’?”
Thom beckoned with a sweeping gesture of his arm, directing her to follow. “Come with me. You can decide for yourself.”
He walked her down the right side of the Stacks and along the far wall until he came to an ornately carved oak door, scrolled with all sorts of symbols and runes and edged in gilt. At the very center and right at eye level was a sign that read:
HIS EMINENCE
Knock Before Entering
The letters, also outlined in gilt, fairly jumped off the polished wood of the door. Directly below was a huge metal knocker resting on a metal plate. It looked to Mistaya as if it would take a fair-sized battering ram to knock the door down if it was secured.
Without hesitating Thom lifted the knocker and let it fall once. A silence followed, and then a rumbling bass voice replied from within, “You may enter, Thom.”
How the inhabitant knew who it was who’d come calling was a mystery to Mistaya, but Thom seemed undisturbed and pressed down on the door handle to release the latch.
The room they entered was large but not cavernous, and it in no way resembled the Stacks. Here the wood was polished to a high gloss, the walls decorated with paintings and tapestries, and the floor laid with rich carpet. The ceiling was much lower, but not so low as to make it feel as if it were pressing down, and there were slender stained-glass windows at the rear through which sunshine brightly shone in long, colorful streamers. A massive desk dominated the rear center of the room, its surface piled high with documents and artifacts of some sort. His Eminence sat comfortably behind it in a high-backed stuffed armchair, beaming out at them with a huge smile.
“Thom!” he exclaimed, as if surprised that it was the boy who had entered. Then he stood up and held out his arms in greeting. “Good morning to you!”
Mistaya didn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t exactly this unbridled display of camaraderie. Nor was Craswell Crabbit quite what she had envisioned. Sitting behind his desk, he looked fairly normal. But when he stood up he was well over seven feet tall, skeletal beyond simply lean or gaunt, a collection of bones held together by skin and ligaments. As if to emphasize how oddly thin he was, his head was at least two sizes too big for his shoulders, an oblong face suggesting that the obvious compression it had undergone hadn’t been quite enough to make up for the job done on the body. Because his legs and arms were rather crooked, even given the oddity of the rest of his body, the whole of his appearance was something rather like that of a praying mantis.
“Good morning, Your Eminence,” Thom replied promptly. Rather quickly, Mistaya thought, he led her forward to stand before the desk. “This is my sister, Ellice.”
“Ah, what a lovely child you are, Ellice!” the spider enthused, reaching out with one bony hand to take her own.
“Your Eminence,” she responded quickly, letting the hand he held hang limp as she gave him something between a bow and a curtsy.
“Come for a visit?” he pressed. “All the way from … ?”
“Averly Mills, Your Eminence,” she answered smoothly.
“Yes, that is the name. I’d forgotten.” He smiled. “Missing your brother, are you?”
She noticed now that his head was shaved of hair, but fine black stubble grew over his bald pate and along the smooth line of his angular jaw in a dark shadow that refused to be banished. His sharp eyes locked on her own, and she could feel them probing for information that she might not wish to give.
“Yes, Your Eminence,” she answered. “I thought perhaps I might be allowed to remain with him for a time. I am willing to work for my keep.”
“Oh, tut, tut, and nonsense!” the other exclaimed in mock horror. “We don’t treat our guests that way!” He paused, cocking his head at her. “Then again, we are short of helping hands just now, and our library reorganization clearly lacks the concerted effort it requires. Why, if not for your brother, we might not have made any progress at all!”
“Ellice is a good worker,” Thom cut in. “She can read and write and help me with the organizing. She would be an immense help.”
“I would be pleased to do whatever I can,” Mistaya affirmed quickly, trying out a smile on him.
His Eminence looked charmed in his praying-mantis sort of way. “How very gracious of you, Ellice! I would not ask it of you, but neither will I refuse the offer. You may begin work at once! Please consider yourself a part of our family while you are here. Thom, has she met everyone?”
“Mostly, Your Eminence,” the boy answered. “Pinch last night, some of the Throg Monkeys today, although I don’t know which ones or whether they even care. Not all of them, I’m sure. They seem to multiply daily. Anyway, thank you for allowing her to stay with me. I miss her every bit as much as she misses me.”
“Well, I am certain you do.” The oblong face tilted strangely, as if about to fall off its narrow perch. “Though you’ve never once mentioned her before, have you?”
Mistaya felt a chill go up her spine. But Thom simply gave that familiar shrug. “I never thought it important enough to speak about, Your Eminence. You have so much else with which to grapple that it never seemed appropriate to talk about myself.”
The tall man clapped his hands. �
�How very thoughtful of you, Thom. Indeed, you never disappoint me. Well, then. You’ve had your breakfast and taken a look around, Ellice?”
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
“Then I shall not keep you a moment longer. Your brother goes off to work and you must join him. We shall visit again, later. Goodbye for now.”
He gave her another smile and a perfunctory wave that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything other than a dismissal. Giving deep bows and muttering their profuse thanks, the boy and the girl backed from the room and closed the door.
At once Thom put a finger to his lips. In silence, they retraced their steps back down the aisleway and to the front end of the Stacks. When they were safely clear of the walls and out in the open, Thom turned to her.
“What do you think now? Is he a noble of the realm?”
She made a rude sound and didn’t answer.
It was only a few minutes later, the boy and the girl gone by then, that a knock sounded in the wall of Craswell Crabbit’s office. His Eminence grunted and a hidden panel slid smoothly aside to admit Rufus Pinch. The hirsute little man trundled over to the side of the desk he couldn’t see over from the front and peered up accusingly at its occupant.
“Mr. Crabbit,” he greeted.
“Mr. Pinch, don’t call me that.”
Pinch ignored him. “Surely you don’t believe their story, do you?”
His Eminence smiled beatifically. “I tend not to believe anything anyone tells me, Mr. Pinch. That way I am never disappointed. Are we speaking of our Thom and his lovely sister, Ellice?”
“I don’t know who she is, but she’s not who she claims. You can be certain of that.”
“That, and much more, I think. But you are absolutely right. She isn’t who she claims. But then neither is he, in case it had escaped you.”
Pinch looked puzzled. “He isn’t?”
Craswell Crabbit steepled his fingers in front of him. “Do yourself a favor, Mr. Pinch. Don’t try to do the thinking in this partnership. Leave that to me. Stick with what works best for you. Spying. Keep an eye on those two and find out what they are up to.”