Chapter 11 #3
“Alix, if you need help—”
I sucked in a gasp, looking over her shoulder. “That man over there, he is pulling his pants down; is he trying to urinate on the books?”
“Wait, what?” Maybe my boss was a little vague on Jane Austen’s backlist, but she was not putting up with anybody defiling her territory. She whipped around and went straight into a jog, neck craning over her walkie-talkie. “Library Security, someone get Library Security—”
The minute her back turned I dove for the bookshelves and fumbled for my Library card.
It wasn’t the same set of shelves I’d originally traveled through, but the door obligingly opened up anyway—even as Elizabeth was hissing, “Chad, get up here!” into her walkie-talkie behind me—and all but yanked me inside.
Where I walked into a fight.
In the big leather armchair nearest the oak counter, the Gallerist sat with long black-booted legs crossed, looking supremely amused. The Librarian stood nose to nose with a new arrival, shouting her head off.
“—miserable condescending tech-head booby—”
“Nafasam,” the man intoned, clapping a hand over his heart. “You wound me.”
“Don’t you nafasam me,” the Librarian snarled, jabbing a finger into his chest. She nearly had to go up on tiptoe to do it; the man was over a head taller than she was. Tall, Black, burly, stubble silvering along his jawline, decrepit jeans and a Star Trek: Next Generation T-shirt.
“That’s the Programmer,” the Gallerist called over to me, sipping from another of those robin’s-egg-blue Wedgwood cups. “Don’t worry, they shout like this every time they meet. Un petit gateau sec?” Waving an elegant hand at the tray on the counter.
“Thanks.” I swiped a cookie off the plate, melting at the taste of fresh-baked shortbread—the Library nixed any sensation of hunger or need to eat the moment you passed through its doorway into astral limbo, but it still provided such a nice line of snacks.
You didn’t need to be hungry when you curled up with a book to want a cup of tea and a plate of something tasty, after all.
You just needed a book, and then the Library thoughtfully provided the tea and the tasties.
This particular bit of tasty was lemon-lavender shortbread, utterly delicious and piping hot like it had come right out of the oven, and I wondered briefly where the Astral Library did all this baking.
Did lemon-lavender shortbread just magic itself out of the ether, or was there a tiny kitchen somewhere staffed by more ghosts?
Were there culinary ghosts just as there were book ghosts, baking their way through all the cookbooks they hadn’t had time to try while still alive?
I put that thought away for the more urgent matter at hand.
“Has the Librarian checked the, um, wards? The safeguards?” She’d said she needed time to think, to drill down on what exactly was threatening her Patrons. “What did she find out?”
“Look, love,” the man in the Star Trek T-shirt said, breaking into the Librarian’s diatribe before the Gallerist could answer my question.
His accent was English, leaning toward Cockney rather than BBC.
“Much as I enjoy trading insults, I’ve got a defrag I should get back to. Unless you need my help?”
She just gave him a withering look.
“You do, don’t you?” He grinned, ruffling a hand over the back of his head, and caught sight of me for the first time. “And since when did you pick up a mini-me, Shahrzad?”
“Your name is Shahrzad?” I asked at the same time the Librarian snapped, “She is not a mini-me, she is my Page, and I haven’t acquired her, I simply can’t scrape her off, ” and the Programmer laughed as he came to envelop my palm in his.
“You hide people in . . . video games?” I ventured a guess, shaking his hand.
First an Astral Library, then an Astral Gallery, then—What? An Astral Server? An Astral CPU?
“Bang on,” he said, sounding cheerful. “Fancy being a wench baking sweet rolls in Skyrim or a sorceress slinging spells in The Witcher, I’m your man.”
“I’m picking up a couple of Patrons living in Sense and Sensibility and Sanditon,” the Librarian said witheringly. “I doubt they want to hide out in The Witcher.”
“I’ll tuck ’em into Ever, Jane,” he said cheerfully. “What, you think Austen fans don’t game?”
“Ever, Jane closed down during the pandemic,” the Gallerist observed, crunching through another bar of shortbread.
“Not in AGNIS, it didn’t—”
“Agnes?” I asked, lost.
“AGNIS. Astral Gaming Network Interspace System,” he explained.
“Trust a tech-head to require an unnecessarily complicated acronym,” sniffed the Librarian.
“Trust a Luddite not to move with the times—”
They were off and sniping again, and I turned back to the Gallerist. “That brother and sister who were here when I left—”
“Tucked into a lovely little Van Gogh café,” the Gallerist reassured me. “They’ll be safe until they can return to their books.”
“Are they going to want to go back to their books?” A question that had been preying on me since resettling Stephanie and Sarah and Larry in their various paintings.
“If their husbands or parents or whoever they’re running from have proved they can find them in their books, aren’t they going to want new ones?
” Or to leave the Library altogether . . .
“That will be up to them,” the Gallerist said simply. “We can offer sanctuary to our Patrons—and protection—but not miracles.”
“Do not make me Shush you,” the Librarian was snapping up at the Programmer, who clapped a hand to his heart as if stabbed.
“Don’t invoke the Shush, Shahrzad. Not with the books already scared.
” The Programmer glanced upward toward the volumes still flapping around the ceiling, and I could have sworn I saw the green glass windows shiver in their panes at the S-word, which was very much capitalized in the way he delivered it.
I had no idea what a shush did here, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.
It’s terrifying enough when an ordinary librarian shushes you, much less the Astral Librarian.
“I have work to do and Patrons to rescue, so if you wouldn’t mind Control-Alt-Deleting yourself back to your defrag—”
“Alt-F4, thank you very much. If you have any Patrons you need me to hide—”
“You are not stashing any of my Patrons in one of your bloodthirsty game worlds. Please find somewhere nice and tame to hide them, where they won’t get their heads swacked off by sword-happy paladins—”
“You didn’t always disapprove of my bloodthirsty game worlds, Shahrzad. In fact, I remember a certain weekend I took you to the West Weald in Elder Scrolls IV and you had too much Argonian Bloodwine and took a hand ax to—”
“Not. Relevant,” the Librarian gritted out.
“Or what about that little getaway to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey; is that not relevant either? You, me, the lemon-scented breezes, sun rising romantically over the Parthenon. The sunburn on your—”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Not to mention the mosquito bites on my—”
“Hey!” I raised my voice, and they both cut off, looking over at me. I drew a deep breath and addressed the Librarian. “What did you find out about who’s behind all this? Checking the safeguards, the—” I waved an encompassing hand. “Everything. What’s happening? Who’s mounting the attack?”
The Librarian’s snappishness faded like mist; she took off her rectangular glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t?” She was the Gandalf, the Aslan, the Glinda. She was supposed to know everything.
“The wards are intact. The safeguards are in place. No book worlds have been intruded upon, no attempts have come against the Library itself. Just more of those.” Indicating the red cards scattered across the big oak counter.
I tried to wrap my head around that. “Has there been any explanation from the Library Board?”
“Another notification about the annual meeting.” The Librarian nodded at another crumpled ball of paper on the oak counter. “Nothing else.”
“Isn’t that odd?”
The Gallerist spoke up. “Not necessarily. My Gallery Board is always behind the time; they might as well be a collection of Fourth Dynasty mummies.” A very cynical, very French snort. “And since when have you ever heard of a Board of Anything that was useful in a crisis?”
Valid point, but my unease was rising and I could see theirs was too—the Librarian’s, the Gallerist’s, the Programmer’s. “I—I suppose it’s good there’s been no attack,” I said, trying to find the silver lining. “Gives us time to dig them out, whoever they are—”
That was the moment another red card shot out of the book-drop slot next to the big oak counter.
Instead of dropping to the floor the way the first one had, it shot across the room directly toward me.
I threw a hand out to bat it away, but it slashed across the side of my palm before finally spinning to land below the huge globe in its bronze stand.
I stared at the side of my hand, which now beaded blood from a paper cut.
A deep, nasty one, like the edges of that blood-dark card had been sharpened.
“Um.” I held up my hand, trying very hard not to drip on Beau’s pristine muslin confection of a gown. “Are we sure these red cards are actually warnings?”
The Librarian looked at me, her dark brows winging upward. “I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, do we really know if they’re warning us about the problem, or if they are the problem?”
“As long as they are informing us of Patrons potentially in danger, our foremost priority must remain fixed.”
“But—”
“Tell me, Miss Watson, is sanctuary a word you take lightly?” Her question wasn’t rhetorical; she asked it and then stood waiting for an answer.
I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
“I do not take it lightly,” she continued when it became clear I wasn’t going to reply.
“In centuries past, the offer of sanctuary meant safety—from being forcibly removed, from bodily harm, from death. That is what I offered you when you arrived here. That is what I offer any soul who comes through Library doors. Someone—we do not know who, we do not know why, we do not know how—is trying to violate the Library’s sanctuary and endanger those under its protection.
” Her dark eyes behind their rectangular glasses glinted.
“I am the Librarian. I can do nothing else until they are made safe.”
“But—”
“I want as badly as you to know who is behind this and what they are planning. But any Patrons being threatened must be secured first. In other words, Miss Watson, when a shark attacks a cove full of swimmers, you must get the swimmers safely out of the water before taking on the shark.”
She looked so imperturbable, this little woman with her gray bun and her sensible shoes and her tablet, that I felt instantly foolish.
Maybe she didn’t know absolutely everything that was going on here, but she was still the Gandalf, the Aslan, the Glinda.
I’d read enough fantasy to know that if you’re on a quest and you aren’t the grumpy elder with the magic and the centuries of experience, it’s better to shut up and pay attention to the person who is.
“Hear, hear,” I mumbled, just like Bilbo Baggins to Gandalf.
“We’ve dawdled long enough,” the Librarian announced, giving another withering glare to the Programmer, who just linked his arms behind his head and grinned at her.
“We’ve already got stops to make in Sense and Sensibility and Sanditon, now another in .
. .” Inspecting the new card, which the Gallerist had fished out from under the globe and handed over.
“Goodness, Wuthering Heights. Come along, Miss Watson.”
“Take care of her, eh?” the Programmer said softly to me as the Librarian went rummaging in a new book to find our entry point. His grin had faded to something more serious. “Shahrzad plays it cool, but margin-traveling is a lot more exhausting than it looks. She’s about done in.”
I wanted a moment to think about that, because all around me the Library was showing signs of unease: the books weren’t full-out panicking and flying off their shelves but they were rustling uneasily; the huge globe was spinning in its stand and the moving seas engraved on its sphere were roiling in bronze storms; the old-fashioned paper cutter had raised its long arm and was chopping downward over and over in an ominous rhythm.
Chop. Chop. Chop. It sounded like a guillotine.
I wanted a moment to pause, to think, but I didn’t get one.
The Librarian threw down the book in her hands and stepped into it, I grabbed her elbow, and once again we were off—to one last ominous, crunching sweep of the paper cutter.
Chop.