The Lost Books Page 6

  On silent feet, Alex headed toward the light. It wasn’t from a candle—not open flame, but something stronger. Rounding a corner, he came upon a man taking a book from a shelf.

  “What are you doing in my library?” Alex asked abruptly.

  The man, whoever he was, set the book back on the shelf and turned to smile at Alex without showing his teeth. He was completely bald, his head shiny, like polished wood. He didn’t have any eyebrows, either, or eyelashes. He wore gloves covering his hands. His frock coat was made of yellow silk, embroidered with glistening seed pearls. All very fine and fancy. And out of place among the dusty, cobweb-covered books.

  Some random courtier, Alex assumed.

  “This is your library?” the man asked in an unexpectedly deep, resonant voice. He held up a fully charged light-well and looked Alex over, from head to toe.

  “Yes,” Alex said. “I’m a librarian. The door to the library is locked. How did you get in here?”

  The man would have raised his brows if he had them; instead he just lifted the skin over his eyes. “Surely you are mistaken,” he said smoothly. “The door was open.”

  “No,” Alex snapped. “I’m not mistaken.” He was very careful about the locks in the library. He didn’t want random people wandering around, making the books more unsettled than they already were. “Wait.” He narrowed his eyes. “You were here the other night, weren’t you? Sneaking around in the dark.”

  “Sneaking?” the man exclaimed. “Surely I don’t look like someone who sneaks!” Before Alex could spit out an answer to that, the man waved a hand as if shooing away a pesky fly, and said, “Never mind. We won’t dwell on your irresponsibility in leaving the door unlocked. I was told that the name of the new royal librarian was Merwyn Farnsworth. You, I assume?”

  “That’s right,” Alex lied.

  “Really,” the man said, drawing out the word. “I thought I met a librarian named Farnsworth many years ago. An old man, even then. But perhaps I am the one mistaken this time?”

  “And you were mistaken before, too,” Alex insisted. “The library door was locked.” He held up the ring of keys he was carrying and jingled it, to prove his point.

  The man gave his toothless smile again. “My goodness, you are persistent. And a bit young for this job, don’t you think?”

  Alex felt his temper flare up. He opened his mouth to say something that would probably get him into trouble. Then he stopped. The passageway they were in was lined with shelves. All of the books, he realized, had gone absolutely still. Almost as if they were afraid. Their silence and stillness had that sort of cowering feel to it.

  Something else was going on here. Taking a deep breath, Alex shoved his temper aside. “I’ll take you to the door,” he said evenly, “so you can leave.”

  The man looked faintly amused, as if Alex had said something funny, which he definitely had not. He inclined his head gracefully and let Alex lead him down the passage and out to the balcony that overlooked the main room of the library.

  Instead of preceding Alex down one of the spiral staircases, the man went to the railing that edged the balcony. It was intricately carved, but covered with dust. Fastidiously, the man brushed at the railing with his gloved fingers, then leaned over to survey the library. “So many books,” he said, almost idly. “It is rather a large job, isn’t it?”

  “I can manage it,” Alex replied, knowing full well that he couldn’t. Trying to make it seem as if it didn’t matter, he leaned an elbow on the balcony rail.

  The man looked around. “I don’t see any pages. Surely you have one or two, like every proper librarian?”

  “Not at the moment,” Alex said. His lack of pages was a problem, he knew it, and he didn’t need this flippant man to remind him about it.

  “Ah. You are so young and, one can assume, inexperienced.” The man’s voice dripped with concern. “It is clear that the royal library is too much for you.”

  “I told you I can manage it,” Alex said, getting irritated again.

  “Of course you can.” The man was all condescension. “Well, I shall take my leave of you now, Librarian Farnsworth. I am certain that we shall meet again soon.”

  Leaning on the balcony, Alex watched him go down the winding stairway. The man was carrying the fully charged light-well, so he was surrounded by a yellow glow as he crossed the main floor.

  Wait for him to reach the door, Alex told himself.

  The door had been locked. Alex was absolutely certain. He was ready to go down with his jingling ring of keys to let the man out. He even had a barbed comment ready to go for when he would slam the door in the man’s face.

  But, after pausing to send another patronizing glance in Alex’s direction, the man opened the door and left.

  Scowling, Alex went down the spiral staircase and stalked across the stone floor. At the door, he sorted through the keys until he found the right one.

  Too young, the man had said. No pages. Irresponsible. Inexperienced. And I once met an old man named Farnsworth, and you are clearly not him.

  Strictly speaking, all of those things were true. Alex had a feeling they were supposed to make him feel inadequate, and maybe even stupid. Instead, they made him pay attention. They put a little edge on him.

  Alex had absolutely no doubt. He had not left the library door unlocked. Something else was at work here.

  He didn’t know who this man was, but clearly he was up to something.

  As his frustration grew, Alex realized that he was rubbing his left wrist. Pushing up the sleeve of his shirt, he checked the bracelet of letters.

  They were moving, shifting, climbing over each other like ants. As he watched, holding his breath, the letters rearranged themselves until they spelled out a word. And the word was . . .

  KEYS.

  9

  Keys.

  He wasn’t sure what it meant, beyond the obvious. Yes, he had a key to the library, and somehow that sly courtier did, too. But what else could it be? Some kind of warning?

  With his finger he rubbed at the black letters that spelled out KEYS against his pale skin. The letters didn’t smudge, like ink. It was as if they were printed on a page. And then, the letters started tingling again, shifted, and stilled. Now they spelled nothing at all.

  Alex watched them for another minute to see if they’d tell him anything else. Which they didn’t. “Blast it,” he muttered, and took his own set of keys and locked the door behind the courtier, whoever he was. Then he went straight back to the room where he’d left the book about blackpowder explosions. Checking the ring to be sure that he had the key to the padlock holding the book closed—he did—he shut the door to the closet, locked it, and piled the sandbags in front of it again. The library was unsettled, that was for sure. If this particular book was affected, the results could be . . . well . . . explosive.

  While he worked, he tried not to dwell on what keys meant, or on what the courtier had said. He hated that the man had so easily seen through him. It was so glaringly obvious that Alex was in over his head and, maybe, didn’t know what a librarian’s real job was. But he wasn’t going to panic. No. One of the many things he’d learned from his pa was that anything worth doing took time. You couldn’t just train with the sword one afternoon a week and hope to get anywhere. No, you trained for hours every day; you took sword fighting apart, down to its most basic elements, and you put it back together, and then, after years of work, maybe you’d be ready to train with edged blades instead of heavy wooden practice swords. And then, if you ever got into a real fight, you wouldn’t be killed by your opponent within the first thirty seconds.

  One book at a time, he told himself, and got back to work.

  Later that day, on the third-tier balcony, he found a room that held mostly cookbooks with, oddly, some books about natural disasters mixed in. Cakes and quakes, he guessed—somebody had mis-shelved them. Carefully he pulled out all the disaster books and stacked them by the arched doorway to be put in their pro
per place. Turning, he picked up his fading light-well and started to leave the room, when he heard a bump-thump from one of the shelves. He went to inspect the source of the noise.

  A History of the Earthquakes of Xan read the spine of the book. “Sorry,” he told it. “Almost left you behind.” He took the book off the shelf and carried it to the pile of books at the door.

  He was just about to set it down when he saw its cover. Smooth brown leather edged with brassy gold, and in the center . . .

  He caught his breath. It looked like the same exact symbol he’d seen on the book that Merwyn Farnsworth was reading when he’d died.

  Or, Alex suspected, when he’d been killed.

  The same book that had attacked him, too.

  He gazed down at the book in his hands. It seemed ordinary. There was no sense of creeping evil. The cover was worn, as if it had been read many times. It looked harmless.

  But it was heavy. Too heavy for a book its size.

  Alex ran a finger down the edge of the front cover. He really wanted to open it. Would it be like the Vines: Plants of Wonder book that had, maybe, killed Master Farnsworth? After reading the first page, would the book actually try to kill him?

  “I’m a librarian,” he said to himself. “I can do this.”

  He’d been trained as a soldier, after all. He knew how to fight. The same rules applied, if you thought about it, to books and to swords. For one thing, you didn’t run away from a challenge. You met it, head-on. His pa had taught him that.

  If he was ready for it, he could hold the book off. All he had to do was close his eyes, and he would stop reading. He knew he needed to see what was in there. He needed to get the measure of this book, to figure out what it was, exactly, because he was certain that it was much more than just a book about earthquakes in faraway Xan.

  Carefully he turned the book to face him. He held it, ready to open.

  The room he was in went still. The books on the shelves around him had gone deathly quiet. Even the light-well had dimmed. The letters printed on the skin of his wrist tingled just the slightest bit, almost in warning.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Alex,” he told himself. “Put the book down.”

  And then he opened it.

  The first page was blank. As he stared, the charred symbol appeared, expanding to fill the entire page, outlined in ember-colored fire. It smelled of smoke and rotten eggs. The symbol seemed to pulse, drawing his eyes. Almost against his will, Alex reached up, took the corner of the next page, and turned it.

  And in that second the book came after him.

  The words came in a rush—no faint numbness in his fingertips this time, no—before he could even blink, they had him. Words snatched at him, swirling around him. They whispered and howled. The ground under his feet started to shake—an earthquake, happening right there in the room with him! His hands went numb, and then as cold as ice. All around him, the books were being shaken off the shelves. The stones in the walls started to shift.

  And he couldn’t move.

  Then, with a groan, one of the shelves ripped away from the wall, sending books flying in every direction. They pummeled at Alex like heavy fists, and then the shelf crashed to the floor right before him. An inch closer, and he would have been crushed.

  The quake grew worse, and the stones under his feet started bucking and creaking.

  Without his pa’s training, he would have panicked, but he knew how to keep control of himself in a fight. With the last fading scrap of himself, he managed to slam the book closed. It dropped from his fingers and landed on the ground.

  Shaking too much to stand, Alex followed it down. He sat with his head on his bent knees. The room fell suddenly still. As the floor stopped moving, a last bit of dust sifted down from the ceiling.

  The book lay before him.

  The symbol was scorched even more deeply into its cover.

  Slowly, without taking his eyes from the book, Alex climbed to his feet. He picked up the light-well, backed out of the room, closed the door, and with trembling hands, locked it. He leaned against a wall, feeling sick and shaky.

  The last royal librarian had died mysteriously, and Alex was willing to bet it was because she had picked up a book just like that one. It had attacked her, and she hadn’t been ready for it, and so it had killed her.

  There were, he felt certain, more books hidden in the library with that strange symbol on their cover. No books of any kind were ordinary. He’d figured that much out. But the marked books—somehow, they had been changed.

  Every single one of them had become a trap.

  Wondering about the symbol and what it meant, Alex made his way to the main room. Leaning on the balcony at the third level, he surveyed the library by the faint glow of the light-well. It was cavernous. The dusty air trembled; there was a low rustling noise. The books were restless. They knew what had just happened.

  They were afraid.

  Of what?

  Maybe they didn’t want to be marked with the symbol. “I’ll try to protect you,” he told them.

  Wait. What had he just said? Protect. “Ohhhh,” he breathed. That was what a librarian was, he realized, and he wanted to curse himself for being so slow to figure it out. A librarian was not just a cataloger, a sweeper, a duster, a collector of frass, an alphabetizer, a keeper of keys. A librarian was a protector. Of books.

  A heavy, watching silence fell. He waited.

  From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of movement. He couldn’t help it, he flinched, and the thing he’d seen disappeared again. Carefully, he straightened and held himself absolutely still.

  And then he caught a glimpse of something floating just behind his left shoulder. A square of white. A single page. Shyly, it edged closer. He stayed quiet and still, and the page floated through the air, undulating as if it was swimming through water like a fish, coming to hang in the air at his eye level. Three more pages joined it.

  “Hello,” he whispered.

  As he watched, a word took shape on the first page, as if it was being written by an invisible hand with an invisible pen, thin, wavery, inky lines against the stark white of the paper.

  Librarian, he read.

  “Yes,” he whispered. He waited, holding his breath, and more words appeared.

  Librarian, we are your pages. We await your orders.

  He let himself feel a moment of fierce pride— Yes! His own pages! By fighting off the earthquake book, he’d proven himself to them—he was a librarian!

  It was the pages’ job to help him. He knew they were simple creatures. He couldn’t say to them, Go find out what’s marking the books in the library with that snaky symbol. They could only carry messages and take specific, concrete orders. And he knew just where they could start. He held up the light-well, which was down to its last flicker. “Pages, are there any more of these around?”

  We will search the library, wrote the page. With a rustle, it flitted away, joined by two others. They swooped through the cavernous room like white birds, flew into a passage, and were gone.

  10

  The next morning, there was a pile of empty light-wells waiting for him on the desk. One by one, Alex examined them.

  “Blast it,” he said aloud when he’d finished. Every single light-well was dead. They’d been left in the dark corners of the library for too long, and none of them would take in any more sunlight.

  Well, this would never do. He needed to talk to the queen.

  The pages had brought him some other things. On a table next to the window he found a bowl of water, still warm, a bar of soap, and a fluffy towel with a crown embroidered on it in gold thread.

  “Is that a hint?” he asked the pages that were hovering nearby. Sniffing his armpit, he decided that it probably was. He needed a wash.

  But first things first.

  The books in the royal library were waking up. Some of them had been marked and were decidedly dangerous. He didn’t know why and he didn’t know how, but he w
as the one who would be dealing with them, while protecting the other books as best he could. At least, for the next ten days he would, according to the queen.

  So he ran through his weaponless sword training, and did his footwork and agility drills, spending extra time on it, until he was panting and dripping with sweat. He could imagine his pa scoffing at how soft he’d gotten. He needed to stay sharp.

  Then he washed up and found that the pages had delivered clothes, which they’d left draped over the chair at his desk. Everything was too big, but the trousers came with a belt, and it was all clean. To top it all off, they’d brought a frock coat made of brown velvet, with tarnished gold braid at the cuffs and at the edge of the high collar. It was a bit worn, secondhand. He put it on and turned up the sleeves so it fit better. The coat had the royal bear and shovel and sword embroidered in gold thread on the front of it, topped by a golden crown.

  A page edged up to him, almost shyly, and dropped something at his feet.

  A woolly hat with a red pompon on top.

  Alex bent and picked it up. “Thanks,” he said, wondering where the pages had gotten it, along with the rest of the clothes.

  Pulling the hat over his untidy hair, he headed toward the library door. It took all of his willpower not to stop and read every single book on the shelves that he passed. He loved reading—loved taking a neglected book off the shelf and opening it, smelling its book smell, feeling the smooth pages under his fingers. When he read, it felt like the words were like rain falling on thirsty earth. They did something in his head—they made things grow in there. He’d been too busy for reading. That would have to change. Once he got all of this trouble with the marked books settled . . .

  If it didn’t settle him, that is.

  With a regretful shake of his head, he left the library, carefully locking the door behind him and putting the key into his coat pocket. He started down the long hallway and came out into a corridor busy with people dressed in clothes far finer than his own, and also footmen and maidservants in their black-and-gold uniforms, along with other servants carrying buckets of coal or firewood or cleaning supplies.