Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  Laszlo imagined that he could actually feel his spirits sag. Spend all day in here, cleaning up? Even with magic, it would take hours, and gods knew what else might jump them while they worked. Evidently, his face betrayed his feelings, for Molnar and Astriza laughed in unison.

  “Though not because of anything you four will be doing,” said Molnar. “Putting a section back into operation after a major incident is Librarian’s work. You four are finished here. I believe you get the idea, and I’m passing you all.”

  “But my book,” said Laszlo. “It—”

  “There’ll be more aspirants tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. You’ve done your part,” said Molnar. “Aspirant Bronzeclaw’s suggestion is a sensible one, and I believe you deserve to carry it out as soon as possible. Retrieve your personal equipment, and let’s get back to daylight.”

  If the blue-robed functionaries in the Manticore Index were alarmed to see the six of them return drenched in gore, they certainly didn’t show it. The aspirants tossed their book-satchels and lantern fragments aside, and began to loosen or remove gloves, neck-guards, cloaks, and amulets. Laszlo released some of the buckles on his cuirass and sighed with pleasure.

  “Shall we meet in an hour?” said Lev. “At the eastern commons, after we’ve had a chance to, ah, thoroughly bathe?”

  “Make it two,” said Yvette. “Your people don’t have any hair to deal with.”

  “We were in there for four hours,” said Casimir, glancing at a wall clock. “I scarcely believe it.”

  “Well, time slows down when everything around you is trying to kill you,” said Astriza. “Master Molnar, do you want me to put together a team to work on the mess in Manticore Northwest?”

  “Yes, notify all the night staff. I’ll be back to lead it myself. I should only require a few hours.” He gestured at his left eye, now swollen shut. “I’ll be at the infirmary.”

  “Of course. And the, ah . . . ”

  “Indeed.” Molnar sighed. “You don’t mind taking care of it, if—”

  “Yes, if,” said Astriza. “I’ll take care of all the details. Get that eye looked at, sir.”

  “We all leaving together?” said Yvette.

  “I need to grab my impression device,” said Casimir, pointing to the glass niche that housed a focus for the index enchantments. “And, ah, study it for a few moments. You don’t need to wait around for my sake. I’ll meet you later.”

  “Farewell, then,” said Lev. He and Yvette left the Manticore Index together.

  “Well, my boys, you did some bold work in there,” said Molnar, staring at Laszlo and Casimir with his good eye. Suddenly he seemed much older to Laszlo, old and tired. “I would hope . . . that boldness and wisdom will always go hand in hand for the pair of you.”

  “Thank you, Master Molnar,” said Casimir. “That’s very kind of you.”

  Molnar seemed to wait an uncommon length of time before he nodded, but nod he did, and then he walked out of the room after Lev and Yvette.

  “You staying too, Laz?” Casimir had peeled off his bloody gauntlets and rubbed his hands clean. “You don’t need to, really.”

  “It’s okay,” said Laszlo, curious once again about Casimir’s pet project. “I can stand to be a reeking mess for a few extra minutes.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  While Casimir began to fiddle with his white crystal, Astriza conjured several documents out of letters that floated in the air before her. “You two take as long as you need,” she said distractedly. “I’ve got a pile of work orders to put together.”

  Casimir reached into a belt pouch, drew out a small container of greasy white paint, and began to quickly sketch designs on the floor in front of the pulsing glass column. Laszlo frowned as he studied the symbols—he recognized some of them, variations on warding and focusing sigils that any first-year aspirant could use to contain or redirect magical energy. But these were far more complex, like combinations of notes that any student could puzzle out but only a virtuoso could actually play. Compared to Laszlo, Casimir was such a virtuoso.

  “Caz,” said Laszlo, “what exactly are you doing?”

  “Graduating early.” Casimir finished his design at last, a lattice of arcane symbols so advanced and tight-woven that Laszlo’s eyes crossed as he tried to puzzle it out. As a final touch, Casimir drew a simple white circle around himself—the traditional basis for any protective magical ward.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry, Laszlo. You’ve been a good chambers-mate. I wish you’d just left with the rest.” Casimir smiled at him sadly, and there was something new and alien in his manner—condescension. Dismissal. He’d always been pompous and cocksure, but gods, he’d never looked at Laszlo like this. With pity, as though he were a favorite pet about to be thrown out of the house.

  “Caz, this isn’t funny.”

  “If you were more sensitive, I think you’d already understand. But I know you can’t feel it like I do. Yvette felt it. But she’s like the rest of you, sewn up in all the little damn rules you make for yourselves to paint timidity as a virtue.”

  “Felt what—”

  “The magic in this place. The currents. Hell, an ocean of power, fermenting for a thousand years, lashing out at random like some headless animal. And all they can do with it is keep it bottled up and hope it doesn’t bite them too sharply. It needs a will, Laszlo! It needs a mind to guide it, to wrestle it down, to put it to constructive use.”

  “You’re kidding.” Laszlo’s mouth was suddenly dry. “This is a finals-week joke, Caz. You’re kidding.”

  “No.” Casimir gestured at the glass focus. “It’s all here already, everything necessary. If you’d had any ambition at all you would have seen the hints in the introductory materials. The index enchantments are like a nervous system, in touch with everything, and they can be used to communicate with everything. I’m going to bend this place, Laz. Bend it around my finger and make it something new.”

  “It’ll kill you!”

  “It could win.” Casimir flashed his teeth, a grin as predatory as any worn by the vocabuvores that had tried to devour him less than an hour before. “But so what? I graduate with honors, I go back to my people, and what then? Fighting demons, writing books, advising ministers? To hell with it. In the long run I’m still a footnote. But if I can seize this, rule this, that’s more power than ten thousand lifetimes of dutiful slavery.”

  “Aspirant Vrana,” said Astriza. She had come up behind Laszlo, so quietly that he hadn’t heard her approach. “Casimir. Is something the matter?”

  “On the contrary, Librarian Mezaros. Everything is better than ever.”

  “Casimir,” she said, “I’ve been listening. I strongly urge you to reconsider this course of action, before—”

  “Before what? Before I do what you people should have done a thousand years ago when this place bucked the harness? Stay back, Librarian, or I’ll weave a death for you before your spells can touch me. Look on the bright side . . . anything is possible once this is done. The University and I will have to reach . . . an accommodation.”

  “What about me, Caz?” Laszlo threw his tattered cloak aside and placed a hand on the hilt of his sword. “Would you slay me, too?”

  “Interesting question, Laszlo. Would you really pull that thing on me?”

  “Five years! I thought we were friends!” The sword came out in a silver blur, and Laszlo shook with fury.

  “You could have gone on thinking that if you’d just left me alone for a few minutes. I already said I was sorry.”

  “Step out of the circle, Casimir. Step out, or decide which one of us you have time to kill before we can reach you.”

  “Laszlo, even for someone as mildly magical as yourself, you disappoint me. I said I checked your sword personally this morning, didn’t I?”

  Casimir snapped his fingers, and Laszlo’s sword wrenched itself from his grasp so quickly that it scraped the skin fr
om most of his knuckles. Animated by magical force, it whirled in the air and thrust itself firmly against Laszlo’s throat. He gasped—the razor-edge that had slashed vocabuvore flesh like wet parchment was pressed firmly against his windpipe, and a modicum of added pressure would drive it in.

  “Now,” shouted Casimir, “Indexers, out! If anyone else comes in, if I am interfered with, or knocked unconscious or by any means further annoyed, my enchantment on that sword will slice this aspirant’s head off.”

  The blue-robed Indexers withdrew from the room hastily, and the heavy door clanged shut behind them.

  “Astriza,” said Casimir, “somewhere in this room is the master index book, the one updated by the enchantments. Bring it to me now.”

  “Casimir,” said the Librarian, “It’s still not too late for you to—”

  “How will you write up Laszlo’s death in your report? ‘Regretfully unavoidable?’ Bring me the damn book.”

  “As you wish,” she said coldly. She moved to a nearby table, and returned with a thick volume, two feet high and nearly as wide.

  “Simply hand it over,” said Casimir. “Don’t touch the warding paint.”

  She complied, and Casimir ran his right hand over the cover of the awkwardly large volume, cradling it against his chest with his left arm.

  “Well then, Laszlo,” he said, “This is it. All the information collected by the index enchantments is sorted in the master books like this one. My little alterations will reverse the process, making this a focus for me to reshape all this chaos to my own liking.”

  “Casimir,” said Laszlo, “Please—”

  “Hoist a few for me tonight if you live through whatever happens next. I’m moving past such things.”

  He flipped the book open, and a pale silvery glow rippled up from the pages he selected. Casimir took a deep breath, raised his right hand, and began to intone the words of a spell.

  Things happened very fast then. Astriza moved, but not against Casimir—instead she hit Laszlo, taking him completely by surprise with an elbow to the chest. As he toppled backward, she darted her right arm past his face, slamming her leather-armored limb against Laszlo’s blade before it could shift positions to follow him. The sword fought furiously, but Astriza caught the hilt in her other hand, and with all of her strength managed to lever it into a stack of encyclopedias, where it stuck quivering furiously.

  At the same instant, Casimir started screaming.

  Laszlo sat up, rubbing his chest, shocked to find his throat uncut, and he was just in time to see the thing that erupted out of the master index book, though it took his mind a moment to properly assemble the details. The silvery glow of the pages brightened and flickered, like a magical portal opening, for that was exactly what it was—a portal opening horizontally like a hatch rather than vertically like a door.

  Through it came a gleaming, segmented black thing nearly as wide as the book itself, something like a man-sized centipede, and uncannily fast. In an instant it had sunk half-a-dozen hooked foreclaws into Casimir’s neck and cheeks, and then came the screams, the most horrible Laszlo had ever heard. Casimir lost his grip on the book, but it didn’t matter—the massive volume floated in midair of its own accord while the new arrival did its gruesome work.

  With Casimir’s head gripped firmly in its larger claws, it extended dozens of narrower pink appendages from its underside, a writhing carpet of hollow, fleshy needles. These plunged into Casimir’s eyes, his face, his mouth and neck, and only bare trickles of blood slid from the holes they bored, for the thing began to pulse and buzz rhythmically, sucking fluid and soft tissue from the body of the once-handsome aspirant. The screams choked to a halt, for Casimir had nothing left to scream with.

  Laszlo whirled away from this and lost what was left of his long-ago breakfast. By the time he managed to wipe his mouth and stumble to his feet at last, the affair was finished. The book creature released Casimir’s desiccated corpse, its features utterly destroyed, a weirdly sagging and empty thing that hung nearly hollow on its bones and crumpled to the ground. The segmented monster withdrew, and the book slammed shut with a sound like a thunderclap.

  “Caz,” whispered Laszlo, astonished to find his eyes moistening. “Gods, Caz, why?”

  “Master Molnar hoped he wouldn’t try it,” said Astriza. She scuffed the white circle with the tip of a boot and reached out to grab the master index book from where it floated in mid-air. “I said he showed all the classic signs. It’s not always pleasant being right.”

  “The book was a trap,” said Laszlo.

  “Well, the whole thing was a trap, Laszlo. We know perfectly well what sort of hints we drop in the introductory materials, and what a powerful sorcerer could theoretically attempt to do with the index enchantments.”

  “I never even saw it,” muttered Laszlo.

  “And you think that makes you some sort of failure? Grow up, Laszlo. It just makes you well adjusted. Not likely to spend weeks of your life planning a way to seize more power than any mortal will can sanely command. Look, every once in a while, a place like the High College is bound to get a student with excessive competence and no scruples, right?”

  “I suppose it must,” said Laszlo. “I just . . . I never would have guessed my own chambers-mate . . . ”

  “The most dangerous sort. The ones that make themselves obvious can be dealt with almost at leisure. It’s the ones that can disguise their true nature, get along socially, feign friendships . . . those are much, much worse. The only real way to catch them is to leave rope lying around and let them knot their own nooses.”

  “Merciful gods.” Laszlo retrieved his sword and slid it into the scabbard for what he hoped would be the last time that day. “What about the body?”

  “Library property. Some of the grimoires in here are bound in human skin, and occasionally need repair.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Waste not, want not.”

  “But his family—”

  “Won’t get to know. Because he vanished in an unfortunate magical accident just after you turned and left him in here, didn’t he?”

  “I . . . damn. I don’t know if I can—”

  “The alternative is disgrace for him, disgrace for his family, and a major headache for everyone who knew him, especially his chambers-mate for the last five years.”

  “The Indexers will just play along?”

  “The Indexers see what they’re told to see. I sign their pay chits.”

  “It just seems incredible,” said Laszlo. “To stand here and hide everything about his real fate, as casually as you’d shelve a book.”

  “Who around here casually shelves a book?”

  “Good point.” Laszlo sighed and held his hand out to Astriza. “I suppose, then, that Casimir vanished in a magical accident just after I turned and left him in here.”

  “Rely on us to handle the details, Laszlo.” She gave his hand a firm, friendly shake. “After all, what better place than a library for keeping things hushed?”

  A Woman’s Best Friend

  Robert Reed

  The gangly man was running up the street, his long legs pushing through the fresh unplowed snow. He was a stranger; or at least that was her initial impression. In ways that Mary couldn’t quite define, he acted both lost and at home. His face and manner were confused, yet he nonetheless seemed to navigate as if he recognized some portion of his surroundings. From a distance, his features seemed pleasantly anonymous, his face revealing little of itself except for a bony, perpetually boyish composition. Then a streetlamp caught him squarely, and he looked so earnest and desperate, and so sweetly silly, that she found herself laughing, however impolite that was.

  Hearing the laughter, the man turned toward her, and when their eyes joined, he flinched and gasped.

  She thought of the tiny pistol riding inside her coat pocket: A fine piece of machinery marketed under the name, “A Woman’s Best Friend.”

  The stranger called to her.<
br />
  “Mary,” he said with a miserable, aching voice.

  Did she know this man? Perhaps, but there was a simpler explanation. People of every persuasion passed by her desk every day, and her name was no secret. He might have seen her face on several occasions, and he certainly wasn’t the kind of fellow that she would have noticed in passing. Unless of course he was doing some nasty business in the back of the room—behaviors that simply weren’t allowed inside a public library.

  As a precaution, Mary slipped her hand around the pistol’s grip.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Don’t you know me?” he sputtered.

  Not at all, no. Not his voice, not his face. She shook her head and rephrased her question. “What do I call you?”

  “George.”

  Which happened to be just about her least favorite name. With a reprimanding tone, she pointed out, “It’s wicked-cold out here, George. Don’t you think you should hurry home?”

  “I lost my home,” he offered.

  His coat was peculiarly tailored, but it appeared both warm and in good repair. And despite his disheveled appearance, he was too healthy and smooth-tongued to be a common drunk. “What you need to do, George . . . right now, turn around and go back to Main Street. There’s two fine relief houses down there that will take you in, without questions, and they’ll take care of you—“

  “Don’t you know what night this is?” he interrupted.

  She had to think for a moment. “Tuesday,” she answered.

  “The date,” he insisted. “What’s the date?”

  “December 24th—“

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” he interrupted.

  Mary sighed, and then she nodded. Pulling her empty hand out of the gun pocket, she smiled at the mysterious visitor, asking, “By any chance, George . . . is there an angel in this story of yours?”

  A gust of wind could have blown the man off his feet. “You know about the angel?” he blubbered.

  “Not from personal experience. But I think I know what he is, and I can make a guess or two about what he’s been up to.”