The Accidental Keyhand (7 page)

SWORDS IN THE STACKS

It was decided that Phillip should keep Dorrie and Marcus company for the night while they recovered.

“Though I daresay Francesco won't appreciate that we let them sleep in the Mission Room,” said Mistress Wu as she and Ursula departed.

While Phillip lit a lantern in the darkening room, Dorrie and Marcus sat in the bathrobe and dressing gown that Millie had brought and feasted on the platters of food. Their wet clothing hung over the fire screen, dripping and steaming pleasantly. After stuffing themselves full of onion soup, sardines, slice after slice of yellow cheese, and a staggering number of eclairs, Dorrie felt a deep weariness stealing over her. Phillip turned down the lantern and settled himself in one of the fat armchairs beside the fire. Dorrie and Marcus eased themselves down beneath their blankets.

Watching the fire's dancing flames, still and quiet at last, Dorrie realized that her fingertips still felt faintly warm and had not really stopped feeling that way since she had come through the hole. She drew the hand that Tiffany had bashed out of the blankets. A crescent of blue-black darkness had formed at the base of her thumbnail. She tucked her hand back under the blankets and stared again at the fire.

She and Marcus truly were…
elsewhere
…with no Miranda to shout for her imaginary dog and no dinner pots to wash with her father and no familiar blue comforter with the hole that sighed feathers over her. And no chance of her mother easing open the door to whisper, “Good night, Sweet and Sour.” But she and Marcus had stumbled upon something incredible, and it hadn't cost her even her bargain with Tiffany Tolliver.

Dorrie thought about the Irish monk on the other side of his archway. When she'd dashed past him, had he really been sitting in an entirely different time? One filled with oxcarts and court jesters and bows and arrows? Her head hurt pleasantly at the thought. Back in Passaic, now was now, the past almost a dream, and the future unknowable. In Petrarch's Library, now must be something else entirely.

Despite the shadow cast by the unmet director of security, a small thrill spun through Dorrie's chest. She fell asleep, leaving any farther thinking in the room to the mouse hunting for crumbs in a shadowy corner.

***

After what seemed like mere minutes, Phillip woke Dorrie with a little shake and the news that she and Marcus had slept half the morning away, that he would soon have to leave on business outside Petrarch's Library, and that Ebba was on her way over to keep them company until Hypatia returned.

Dorrie stretched. “What should we do while we wait?”

“Well, I suppose you could curl up and read a book. We've got a few of those around. Or count dust motes. Or wash the windows in here.” He gently shook Marcus, who responded with all the animation of a sack of sand. “Of course, if you're the sort of person who would prefer to explore the Library, well, there's no accounting for taste.”

Dorrie grinned at Phillip and took over the job of waking Marcus. As she used her fists to pound her brother into groggy awareness, Phillip crouched by the fire and pushed a little three-legged iron pot deeper into the flames. “I'll eat a lot of things out of books, but I draw the line at coffee.”

In the morning brightness, Dorrie noticed that over the mantel hung an enormous black chalkboard painted with a grid of white lines and words crowded in between the lines. At the top, large letters shifted and swam like eels before Dorrie's eyes, finally spelling out the words “Mission Docket.”

“Why do the words in this place
do
that?” asked Dorrie.

Phillip glanced at the blackboard. “Ah, one of the Library's useful peculiarities. Instant translation. If I say or write it in Latin, you hear or see it in…”

“English,” said Dorrie, catching on.

Phillip poured the steaming coffee into a mug. He held up the iron pot, beaming. “Coffee, anyone?”

“Sure,” said Marcus, as though he drank it every day at home.

Phillip poured a second mug full and handed it to Marcus, who took a substantial sip. An instantaneous facial paralysis seemed to strike him. As soon as Phillip turned away, Marcus promptly spit the coffee back into the mug.

“Hand me that book of Basho poems, will you?” Phillip said to Dorrie, jerking his chin toward a thin volume with a marbled paper cover that sat on the cleared table. “Ursula brought it over when she realized you were going to sleep right through breakfast. Her own copy.”

Dorrie passed the book to him. Phillip settled himself comfortably back in his chair and flipped through the book's pages. “You can't beat haiku for the quick breakfast.” He stopped at a page near the back. “Ah! Here's just the thing.” With the fingertips of one hand resting gently on the open book, Phillip cleared his throat. Seeming to focus all of his attention of the page below his fingertips, he began to read out loud. “Coolness of the melons, flecked with mud, in the morning dew.”

Dorrie stared as Phillip began to draw his thumb and forefinger together on the page as if trying to get hold of the end of a thread or the head of a pin. Something seemed to be growing between them. Dorrie gasped as the little book seemed to stretch and flex. In another moment, Phillip had eased a pale green melon from its pages and set it on the table. He looked up into Dorrie and Marcus's flabbergasted faces.

“Quite a nice one! Fruit isn't really my forte.” He picked up a knife and jabbed it toward a basket sitting on the hearth. “Ursula brought those as well. Help yourself. She had to go back to the repair and preservation department. The Archivist came crawling in with a pounding headache about dawn and needed her attention.”

Marcus reached into the basket and helped himself to a flat rectangle made of nuts and seed and bits of fruit, all held together in a sticky amber glaze.

“Will the archivist guy be all right?” asked Dorrie.

“Perfectly,” said Phillip, cutting the melon into pieces.

Dorrie looked up at the words written below “Mission Docket.” “Imperiled Subject…Nature of Threat…” she read out loud, enjoying the sensation of watching the initially unreadable yellow letters coil and straighten to form words she could comprehend. “Wheren…Assigned Lybrarian…Outcome.”

Her eyes traveled down the names below the heading “Imperiled Subject.” She read the names silently: “Simon Morin, Casimir Liszinski, Su Shi, Katharina Henot.” The column labeled “Nature of Threat” was almost too horrible to read. Dorrie's eyes skittered over words like “beheaded” and “burned at stake” and “tortured.”

“So all these people,” said Dorrie. “They're the ones in trouble for writing something?”

“That's right,” said Phillip, wafting the steam from the coffee toward his nose. “Wrote something someone didn't like.” He took a small sip. “It's always the limericks that seem to get people in the most unexpected trouble.”

Dorrie's eyes caught on the last name listed under “Imperiled Subject.” Petrarch's Library. Her eyes ran across the words that filled the little boxes next to that entry: “Persistent Inquiries by Person Unknown, Timbuktu…1597…Kash…Ongoing.”

“Petrarch's Library is an imperiled subject?” asked Dorrie.

“Oh, not to worry,” said Phillip. “It makes the list regularly. Rumors of imminent discovery. Innuendo. People seek it like lost Atlantis. Our director of security is a great one for thoroughly checking out each and every whiff of a threat to our inconspicuousness or any plots against us.”

“What
are
these?” exploded Marcus, staring at what was left of his sticky bar, a look of utter satisfaction on his face.

“Ambrosia,” said Phillip. “One of our lybrarians reads them out when she's worried, and she's frantic about her friend Socrates.”

Dorrie's eyes flashed to the Mission Docket.
Socrates.
She'd just seen that name on the board…near the top.

Marcus shoved the last of the bar into his mouth. “It must be such a bummer to be named Socrates.”

“How so?” asked Phillip.

“You tell people your name,” said Marcus, “and all anyone can think about is
the
Socrates.”

Phillip pulled a piece of ambrosia out of the basket. “Well, I am thinking about
the
Socrates.”

“See!”

Phillip lifted one eyebrow. “Yes but that's because I'm also
talking
about
the
Socrates.”

Marcus stopped chewing. “Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher. Socrates who had to drink the poison hemlock. Socrates who was big into asking questions?”

Phillip put his mug down. “Otherwise known as the Socrates of Athens who was charged with impiety, made to stand trial, argued his own defense, was found guilty, and sentenced to drink a pretty goblet full of the stuff. Yes, the one and only.”

“Isn't it a little late for worrying?” said Marcus. “I mean, didn't that all happen thousands of years ago?”

“You forget,” said Phillip, crossing one leg over the other. “From Petrarch's Library, one can walk into an Athens in which Socrates hasn't yet drunk the hemlock.”

A knock sounded on the door.

“Come in,” boomed Phillip.

Ebba, the girl they'd seen the previous day, poked her head around the door. She smiled shyly at Dorrie and Marcus.

Phillip packed up the coffeepot and mugs. “You can find Ursula over in the repair and preservation department, if you need her. Ebba will take you to the Apprentice Attics and find a room for you there. It's been a pleasure to meet you. When I return, we must talk about the state of alchemy—I mean, chemistry—in the twenty-first century.” He hurried out the door.

After they'd changed from their bathrobes back into their clothes, they met Ebba out in the polished marble hallway.

Ebba smiled uncertainly at Dorrie and Marcus. “So how do you feel about bicycles?”

They only had to walk a short way until they found four of them parked in a jumble by a broad brick stairway. Stuffing their robes in Ebba's satchel, they pedaled along behind her, making a dizzying number of turns. Through open doorways and passing them in the corridors, Dorrie glimpsed people in turbans and people in bowlers. People in hoods, fezzes, bonnets, colossal wigs, and straw sombreros. People in saris and gum boots, bow ties and kilts, habits and high-heeled shoes, kimonos, bloomers, robes, doublet and hose, fringed leather, gowns of every length, and trousers of every sort of cloth. Often in very odd combinations. Many stared at Dorrie, and she couldn't help but stare right back.

At the top of a flight of stairs, they left the bikes leaning against a wall.

Ebba turned suddenly. “I know you're there, Kenzo.”

A younger boy with lank black hair and ears that stood out like sugar-bowl handles leaped out from behind an enormous urn and scowled. “How?”

“I could hear you breathing.”

The boy joined them as they trooped down the stairs, staring at Marcus with astounded bright eyes. “Is it true you busted a hole into Petrarch's Library?”

Ebba looked embarrassed. “Kenzo, don't accuse them of that.”

“I'm not accusing. I'm just asking.”

“No, we just fell through one that was already there,” said Marcus. “At least that's what we're going to tell Scuggans.”

“So, do you live here?” Dorrie asked Ebba, as they turned a corner into a room hung with tapestries and filled with heavy wooden trunks.

“Of course,” said Kenzo, looking at Dorrie as though she'd just fallen a few notches in his estimation.

Ebba pushed her yellow headband back. “Kenzo, they've never been here before. They don't know.” She led them up a narrow set of wooden stairs. “Kenzo lives here with his mother in some rooms off the Dutch Royal Archives Library. She works in the reference department.”

“Ebba's an apprentice,” said Kenzo. “I'm
going
to be one. Maybe next year.”

“Apprentice what?” asked Marcus.

“Lybrarian,” said Kenzo. “What else?”

Ebba stopped on the landing and looked at Kenzo sternly, her hands on her hips. “Aren't you supposed to be helping with lunch?”

“Okay, okay,” said Kenzo, kicking the spindles as he made his way back down the stairs.

“How did you and Kenzo get here?” asked Dorrie, as they continued up the next flight of stairs, wondering if they had also plunged accidentally into Petrarch's Library.

“Kenzo came here when he was just a baby, after his mother had to leave Japan. The Lybrariad rescued them. I was born here. Lots of people live here who aren't lybrarians. Refugees, mostly. Or the children of refugees. My parents were from Timbuktu, but now they live out in Haven, the village on the other side of the island. I spend some time here and some time with them.”

As they rounded a corner to a carpeted corridor, Ebba almost ran into a tall woman who had just emerged from a stone archway without looking. “I beg your pardon, Ebba,” the woman said, looking distractedly at them for a moment before moving on. She was dressed all in white, the cloth hanging in a loose drape over one shoulder. A thin circlet pressed down on her long, gently curling dark locks, which were pulled back into a loose bunch at the back of her head.