The Burning Page

by Genevieve Cogman

  Wait. By the angle of the bookshelves, there shouldn’t be a shadow there. Which meant that the shadow was being cast by something irregular above her. Which meant . . .

  ‘Books, form a shield above me!’ she shouted, in the same breath that a voice from above called down, ‘Shelves, crush that woman!’

  Books and shelves collided above her head. Irene ran for cover in a shower of wood and pages and dust, mentally cursing her opponent’s grasp of tactics. What could she do to stop him? She needed either to be up on the same level as him, or to find some way of hiding herself from him.

  She looked up at the high bookshelves again. She did have an advantage. She was on the ground. Gravity was her advantage.

  ‘Ready to surrender yet, Ray?’ Alberich called down to her.

  Irene pressed her back against her current shelter. The metal corners of an unfamiliar book ground into her shoulders, and she shifted sideways to ease it out from its place on the shelf. That would do. ‘Are you going to shout “Come out, come out, wherever you are”?’ she answered.

  ‘If you make this a children’s story, then I’ll make it a cautionary tale,’ he taunted. There was no sign of any movement in the surrounding shadows. She couldn’t get a bearing on where he was. But the shadow she’d seen above her had been cast by a real thing, and the voice talking to her now was a human voice. The earlier thing had sounded anything but . . . So Alberich was back in a human form again. Less dangerous in some ways, more in others. ‘Did you ever read your Struwwelpeter?’

  The door flew open, in he ran, the great, long, red-legged scissorman! ‘My parents never liked me reading horror stories.’ Irene edged sideways along, squinting up at the tops of the surrounding bookcases. The clock sounded louder now. She prayed that didn’t signify anything ominous for her Library. ‘So of course I read them anyhow.’

  ‘You sound like the disobedient type. I should have recruited you earlier.’ And there he was, just the edge of a curve of a shadow on the bookcase to her left, the equivalent of two storeys up. He’d gone down on all fours, making his shadow smaller, but now that she’d spotted him she could keep track of him. ‘The offer’s still open.’

  Irene brought the book she was holding to her lips. ‘I still don’t understand what you want from me,’ she said, trying to make it sound like negotiation. ‘I’m not the only young Librarian out there. I’m certainly not the only one who’s ever been demoted. Convince me that you aren’t about to kill me the minute I step out of hiding.’

  ‘You’re the only one I can find who read that story in the Grimm book.’

  ‘It’s that important to you?’

  ‘It is. You see, Ray, I need to find my son.’

  The words my son didn’t make sense at first. The story in the Grimm book had mentioned his sister’s child, not his child, and Irene’s first thought was that Alberich must have misread something. But then the concepts fell into place in her mind, and she tasted bile in her mouth. His son. His sister’s son. What he did to his own sister . . .

  Perhaps Alberich expected that reaction from her, for he paused only for a moment before he went on. ‘The Library kept him from me, Ray. Don’t I have a right to my own flesh and blood?’

  There were so many things wrong with that statement that Irene found herself incapable of answering. She snapped out of her momentary shock and whispered to the book in her hands, ‘Book that I am holding, fly up and knock that man up there from where he stands!’

  The book went up like a comet, scraping her fingers with the force of its ascent. A cry of, ‘Shelves, shield me!’ and the meaty thud of an impact came from above her.

  But Irene was already running. ‘Dust, hide me!’ she shouted, holding a length of tattered tulle across her nose and mouth against the rising clouds of dust.

  She trailed her free hand along the bookcases lining the passage so as not to collide with them. Tears ran from her eyes as she blinked frantically, trying to see where she was going. This method of hiding herself did have a few associated problems. But at least it concealed her from Alberich.

  Until he loses patience and just levels all the bookshelves in the area, her sense of incoming doom pointed out. Keep on running.

  The astonishing thing was that he hadn’t done what he did once before – sinking her into the floor and calling on all sorts of chaotic forces to destroy her. If it had been Irene trying to destroy him, she’d have used whatever she had available.

  Unless . . . could she have missed something here? Alberich had created this place, or at least forged it out of a Fae world so far gone into chaos that it had no firm reality left. He’d set it up in a very specific way. Did this mean that he couldn’t go round unleashing chaotic power into it randomly, any more than a mad scientist would set off dynamite in the middle of his own laboratory? It would explain a few things.

  Though it wouldn’t save her, if Alberich caught up with her. Even if he left her alive in return for telling him about his . . . son. She couldn’t help flicking through a mental list of male Librarians she knew, wondering if they might be the son in question. Admittedly she was better at discussing their literary tastes than their pre-Library histories, but she didn’t think any of them could have had that sort of history.

  The fog of dust blinded Irene nearly as much as it did Alberich, and she was taken by surprise as she stumbled into the central area. She was conscious of a wide-open space in front of her, even if she couldn’t see it clearly yet, and some sort of massive tangle of open dark stairs and glowing lights.

  ‘Bookcases!’ came a furious shriek from above her. ‘Block her way!’

  The two high bookcases on either side of her bowed down and collapsed in a great landslide of shelves and books. Pages filled the air, mingling with the dust and tumbling like huge snowflakes. She had to dodge back frantically to avoid being hit by the falling bookcases, and then her way was well and truly blocked. She’d have to clamber over them, or go round – either of which would lose time and make her far too obvious.

  Something that had been nagging at the back of her mind finally broke through. This is a high-chaos world. Alberich’s using the Language far more to frame his intent than in terms of precise description. And I’m doing the same. Just how far can I push this?

  She gritted her teeth and braced herself. ‘Floor! Open beneath the barrier and let me pass!’

  The floor groaned, then split with pained creaks and cracking, the two sides pulling apart like the edges of a wound. The resultant gap ran beneath the toppled bookcases, narrow, uneven, dark and full of splinters . . . but it looked big enough for Irene to get through. With a silent prayer that Alberich couldn’t see her and that his next words wouldn’t involve such verbs as close, smash or crush, Irene squeezed through the crack. She had to lower her head and wriggle sideways, and with every panting breath it seemed that the riven floor was pressing in on her and about to squeeze shut.

  She broke through to the other side with a gasp of relief. The dust was not so thick or noxious now – perhaps the barrier of bookshelves had blocked it off, or maybe it was simply settling of its own accord – and she could see the construction at the heart of Alberich’s library.

  It was an openwork tangle of metal stairs and books, perhaps a hundred yards across at first glance. The stairs writhed around each other, ignoring such petty constraints as railings or supports and rising several storeys high at the corners. The books gleamed amid the dark metal, scattered through the network in some sort of pattern and glowing with their own light. And in the middle of the pattern of books and stairs was the clock, which was still ticking. It was a shadowy clock face hanging in the air, with ivory-pale hands that moved ever closer towards midnight. It didn’t give off any sort of gleam or glow. Instead it was a point of immense darkness, the sort of thing that Irene imagined a black hole might look like if given physical form and shrunk to such a tiny scale. And it wasn’t Irene’s imagination that it was ticking faster.

  Before the
clock reaches midnight, Alberich had said. She was almost out of time.

  All sorts of options presented themselves. Stopping the clock or moving the books were the most obvious. Irene ran for the nearest flight of stairs. Her feet rang on the metal steps as she sprinted up them. Fatigue had vanished, now that she was so close to success.

  She made it to the first landing, where one of the books waited, on display. The part of her mind that became distracted during moments of life-threatening danger couldn’t help wondering about it. It must be one of the unique specimens Alberich had stolen. Where was it from, who was the author, what was the title – and if and when this was all over, would she ever get the chance to read it?

  And then she saw that there was a fine cage around it. The steel meshwork was wide enough for her to examine the book, and allowed its glow to escape, but it certainly wasn’t wide enough for her to slide the book out. There wasn’t even an obvious lock, let alone a key. Words in the Language were worked into the metal, but she didn’t recognize them: they were a vocabulary that she had never learned.

  ‘Ray!’ Alberich called. Irene looked up and saw him walking towards the interlacing open stairs, strolling through the air on a bridge of books that tumbled to the ground as he passed.

  It was the first time she’d actually seen him in the flesh throughout the whole wild chase. He was tall, and painfully thin – assuming this was actually a body that looked like his original one, and not just another stolen skin. The hooded black robe that he affected (really, how clichéd) was draped over his gaunt frame, flapping in the wind which blew pages and dust alike across the landscape of bookshelves. His brown hair was streaked with grey and was thinning like a monk’s tonsure, but he walked with the firm pace of a young man.

  She considered using the Language to drag those books from under him and let him drop, but that seemed too obvious. Besides, he could simply order the books back again. She’d never duelled like this before. One needed to strike in a way that the opponent couldn’t simply reverse.

  The book lay there in its cage as if it was mocking her. ‘Yes?’ she called back. Could she order all the cages to open, so that the books would fly out? But taking the time to give such an order would give Alberich a full sentence in which he could strike back.

  He stepped off the bridge of books onto one of the further staircases, a good twenty yards away from her and five yards further up. ‘Have you quite finished with your adolescent rebellion?’

  ‘No,’ Irene retorted. She reached out to touch the cage, but yanked her fingers back as she felt the prickle of chaotic power in the ironwork. ‘Come closer and I’ll demonstrate.’ Could she order the metal stairs to bind him? What could she say that Alberich couldn’t counter?

  ‘I want to tell you one thing.’ His sentences were shorter now, more clipped. Was it in case she counterattacked mid-metaphor? ‘Your home world? Your parents? I am going to find them. You have inconvenienced me. They will pay for it.’

  It was a petty, spiteful threat. But the sheer malice contained in it, the absolute viciousness of his tone, cut at Irene and made her flinch. ‘You haven’t a chance,’ she retaliated, edging sideways along a horizontal stretch of walkway. Perhaps she could manage something if she reached the clock.

  ‘Oh? Really? I’ve had centuries of life. I’m good at what I do.’ Alberich kept his distance, but started to trace a parallel course to hers, clearly planning to keep between her and the clock.

  Irene laughed. It wasn’t a very good laugh, but it bolstered her spirits. ‘You don’t understand. My parents are Librarians. They can run from you forever!’

  To her surprise, Alberich actually stopped walking. ‘They’re what?’ he said.

  ‘Librarians. Like you or me.’ She wondered what she’d said that had managed to unsettle him. ‘So, you see . . .’

  Then she saw his face clearly, and her words ran dry in her mouth. He wasn’t shocked or unsettled. He was amused. His face showed those centuries of age, and they had left lines of cruelty etched around his mouth and eyes that were as clear as the Language itself. His voice was full of a horrible good humour as he spoke. ‘Ray, my dear, my very dear little girl. That simply isn’t possible. I should know. Two Librarians can’t have a child.’

  Irene blinked. That statement didn’t make any sense. ‘But you said you have a son . . .’

  ‘That’s how I know.’ He began to walk again. ‘You have no idea what it took. I had to take her deep into chaos to make it possible. All that for a son whom you are keeping from me.’ His mouth opened impossibly wide, and his tone deepened to a roar. ‘So don’t insult me with such stories.’

  ‘Believe what you want,’ Irene snapped. She was closer to the central clock now. Unfortunately, said closeness involved a vertical drop of about five yards before she could edge any further on a horizontal level. Manageable with caution and with the Language, but less welcoming with Alberich there to mess things up. ‘I know—’

  ‘You obviously don’t know anything,’ he cut her off. ‘And nobody ever told you. No doubt to spare your feelings and keep you loyal. Are you some orphanage brat, Ray? Or were you stolen from a cradle?’ He was walking faster now, his steps keeping time with the clock. ‘If it wasn’t for the inconvenience you’ve caused me, I might even feel sorry for you. I know all about how it feels to find out your whole life was based on a lie.’

  ‘Really? So what was yours?’ It was a poor comeback, but it was the best Irene could do. The rest of her mind was flooded with the concept that she wasn’t what she thought she was. For every sensible objection of he’s lying and why should I believe him and he’s trying to confuse you, there was a counter-argument – in the way that he’d seemed genuinely surprised when she’d said she was the child of two Librarians. She would swear it hadn’t been faked.

  Did it make any difference if she wasn’t the child of the people she’d called parents? If the fact of her birth was a lie, then was it such an important lie?

  ‘The Library claims to preserve the balance between chaos and order. But that’s a lie. That’s what children get told to keep them quiet and obedient.’ They were on a level with each other now, and he stopped to look across at her. ‘If you join me, I’ll tell you the truth.’

  Irene remembered a line from that Grimm fairy story she’d read months ago, about Alberich and his sister. ‘Is it something to do with the “Library’s secret”?’ she asked. ‘One that we all “wear branded upon our backs . . .” But even if there is a secret, why would that make the Library a lie?’

  ‘Blind faith is just another word for slavery,’ Alberich said. ‘You say you’re preserving some sort of balance, but you’re really perpetuating stagnation. Wake up, Ray! Open your eyes. And if you’re too blind to see anything on a larger scale, don’t you feel anything for the books that you give the Library? It swallows them up and keeps them and will never let them go. Look at that book next to you.’ He pointed at the closest metal cage, which held a scroll bound in ribbons of gold and purple. His voice was full of pride and greed, a collector’s lust manifest in his every word. But he spoke as if he expected her to understand his desire, his joyful ownership of those priceless books. And perhaps she did. ‘The complete Mabinogion,’ he continued, ‘with the full tale of Culhwch and Olwen. All of the quests! And that one.’ He pointed to his left. ‘Hugo’s La Quiquengrogne, his sequel to Notre-Dame de Paris . . . Other books here, hundreds of them, all unique. Books you will never see anywhere else. Books that would be the pride of any collection.’

  ‘Which you stole.’

  ‘Only because the Library didn’t steal them first. Metal, hold her feet!’

  His use of the Language had come without a change in tone or expression, and Irene was caught by surprise as the stair that she was standing on flowed up and round her shoes, writhing to her ankles. Chagrin bit at her as she realized she’d been distracted by the conversation. By the promise of books and secrets. What better bait? No doubt she could unloose th
e bindings as easily as Alberich had invoked them, but that would give him enough time to do something worse.

  The clock hammered away and the air seemed to shiver with a growing power and tension. More torn pages drifted through the air, floating by like huge moths.

  ‘It won’t hurt,’ Alberich said, in a tone that pretended reassurance, but his eyes were full of that cruel amusement she’d seen earlier.

  ‘What won’t?’ There had to be an answer. She had to save the Library. Save the books. Save herself.

  ‘Chaos. There’s a point when the body either accepts it or destroys itself. Mine accepted it. And look what I can do!’ He stretched his arms out in a gesture that embraced the clock, the twisted staircases, the mad library. ‘You will join me or you will die. Tell me, Ray, isn’t it a relief to come to the end of choices? To know the game’s over? You can relax now. Stop being your parents’ tool.’

  He spoke fluidly, with the grand indulgence of a man enjoying his words, but his eyes were on her throughout. He was waiting for her to use the Language to try to either free herself or kill him.

  Irene took a deep breath. Why not just say yes for the moment? common sense suggested. Buy time. Tell Alberich some of what he wants to know. Get his trust. Be practical. You said to Bradamant earlier that there was no point in just getting yourself killed.

  And the books here were unique, the fruit of all Alberich’s years of theft. Surely anything was worth it to save them? Even if it meant selling herself into slavery and betraying the Library . . .

  No. This was a question of priorities, she realized. These books here were a priority. Her own life was a priority. But the Library, all the other Librarians, and all the books there were the biggest priority of all.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It is a relief. Paper! BURN!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Irene’s shout echoed through the maze of stairways. The books went up like tiny novas, blazing like the hearts of stars. There was no hesitation, no slow kindling at the edges or catching by degrees. They burned as if they were glad to burn. The drifting pages caught fire as well, wafting through the air with a sudden new energy, and the surrounding bookshelves shook with the force of the concussion as their contents flamed up where they stood.