Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,149
discarded toys, and the whole screaming mess fluttered on down the aisle, leaving a slowly falling haze of upflung dust in its wake. Coughing and sneezing, Laszlo and his companions stumbled shakily to their feet, while the noise and chaos of the indoor cyclone faded into the distant mist and darkness.
“My thanks, humans,” said Lev hoarsely. “My clan’s ancestral trade of scale-grooming is beginning to acquire a certain tint of nostalgia in my thoughts.”
“Don’t mention it,” coughed Laszlo. “What the hell was that?”
“Believe it or not, that was a book,” said Astriza.
“A forcibly unbound grimoire,” said Molnar, dusting off his armor. “The creatures and forces in here occasionally destroy books by accident. And sometimes, when a truly ancient grimoire bound with particularly powerful spells is torn apart, it doesn’t want to stop being a book. It becomes a focus for the library’s unconscious anger. A book without spine or covers is like an unquiet spirit without mortal form. Whatever’s left of it holds itself together out of sheer resentment, roaming without purpose, lashing out at whatever crosses its path.”
“Like my face,” said Laszlo, suddenly aware of hot, stinging pains across his cheeks and forehead. “Ow, gods.”
“Paper cuts,” said Casimir, grinning. “Won’t be impressing any beautiful women with those scars, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I’m impressed,” muttered Yvette, pressing her fingertips gingerly against her own face. “You just let those things whirl around as they please, Master Molnar?”
“They never attack other books. And they uproot or destroy a number of the library’s smaller vermin. You might compare them to forest fires in the outside world—ugly, but perhaps ultimately beneficial to the cycle of existence.”
“Pity about the lamps, though,” said Yvette.
“Ah. Yes,” said Molnar. He tapped the head of his staff, and a ball of flickering red light sprang from it, fainter than that of the lost lamps but adequate to dispel the gloom. “Aspirants, use the empty book satchel. Pick up all the lantern fragments you can see. The library has a sufficient quantity of disorder that we need not import any.”
While the aspirants tended their cuts and scoured the vicinity for lantern parts, Astriza glanced around, consulted some sort of amulet chained around her wrist, and whistled appreciatively. “Hey, here’s a stroke of luck.” She moved over to a bookcase nestled against the outer library wall, slid Lev’s grimoire into an empty spot, and backed away cautiously. “Two down. You four are halfway to your sixth year.”
“Aspirant Vrana,” said Molnar, “I believe we’ll find a home for your book not a stone’s throw along the outer wall, at sixty-one Manticore Northwest. And then we’ll have just one more delivery before we can speed the four of you on your way, back to the carefree world of making requests from the comfort of the reading rooms.”
“No need to hurry on my account,” said Casimir, stretching lazily. His cloak and armor were back in near perfect order. “I’m having a lovely time. And I’m sure the best is yet to come.”
It was a bit more than a stone’s throw, thought Laszlo, unless you discarded the human arm as a reference and went in for something like a trebuchet. Along the aisle they moved, past section after section of books that were, as Master Molnar had promised, completely unharmed by the passage of the unbound grimoire. The mist crept back in around them, and the two Librarians fussed and muttered over their guidance spells as they walked. Eventually, they arrived at what Molnar claimed was sixty-one Manticore Northwest, a cluster of shelves under a particularly heavy overhanging stone balcony.
“Ta-daaaaaa,” cried Astriza as she backed away from the shelf once she had successfully replaced Casimir’s book. “You see, children, some returns are boring. And in here, boring is beautiful.”
“Help me!” cried a faint voice from somewhere off to Laszlo’s right, in the dark forest of bookcases leading away to the unseen heart of the library.
“Not to mention damned rare.” Astriza moved out into the aisle with Molnar, scanning the shelves and shadows surrounding the party. “Who’s out there?”
“Help me!” The voice was soft and hoarse. There was no telling whether or not it came from the throat of a thinking creature.
“Someone from another book-return team?” asked Yvette.
“I’d know,” said Molnar. “More likely it’s a trick. We’ll investigate, but very, very cautiously.”
As though it were a response to the Master Librarian’s words, a book came sailing out of the darkened stacks. The two Librarians ducked, and, after bouncing off the floor once, the book wound up at