Unhallowed (Rath and Rune #1) - Jordan L. Hawk Page 0,11
of the room, and a good many natural tree branches had been nailed at varying heights.
Ves frowned, not understanding, until his gaze reached the shadowy recesses near the ceiling.
“Gods of the wood!” he exclaimed. “Those are bats. You have bats in your library!”
“Big brown bats,” Rath said smugly. “Eptesicus fuscus.”
Perhaps disturbed by their voices, one or two of the bats stretched out leathery wings and blinked. One yawned, displaying tiny, sharp teeth. The occasional soft squeak or chirp drifted down, though most of the bats seemed to be sleeping.
“But why?” Ves asked. “That is, they’re very cute—they are bats, after all—but surely they don’t belong in a library.”
“Perhaps in a place like Boston, where people aren’t open to unconventional ideas. Mr. Quinn read an article, oh, three or four years ago about two libraries in Portugal that have had bats living in them since the 1700s.” Rath smiled up at the bats. “They eat insects, you see. Beetles, moths, all sorts of things you don’t want chewing up books. They live in here during the day—this is the American History Collection by the way—and at night we put canvas covers on the furniture, leave the door open, and let them do what bats do best. They return of their own accord by morning, though if one or two remain in the stacks during the day no one truly cares. The junior librarians are tasked with cleaning the bat room each day, so in a way I’m glad they weren’t here when I first began. Come along.”
He walked out, as though he’d said nothing extraordinary at all, and Ves scrambled to follow him. Had he just been hired by a library or a madhouse?
The rest of tour was as normal as it could be, given the structure of the labyrinthine place. “The rarest of the books are kept here, under lock and key,” Rath said at last, when they’d reached what Rune hoped was the most remote of the rooms. The shelves here were all against the walls, with each bookcase bearing a locked grate of iron bars to prevent their removal. Ves stepped closer, peering through the bars. Most of them bore no titles on the spine, but he glimpsed Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults in the original German edition, alongside De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn.
Ves’s skin prickled. Doubtless the librarians assumed these to be nothing more than valuable rare books, but to him it was a staggering collection of the darkest tomes of sorcery and madness. Necromancy, the secrets of the arcane arts, the truth of the things humanity shared its world with…all of it was here.
His mother would have done literal murder to get her hands on these. They’d made do with Dee’s English translation of Al Azif, half a copy of Cultes des Goules, and a version of Livre d’Eibon patched together from copies written in Greek and Latin. Most of those had been in terrible shape; charred or water-stained, or simply falling apart from centuries of use.
That was how he’d learned his art, first by watching his grandfather, then taking over from him when Grandfather’s arthritis grew too bad and his eyesight too poor. Removing broken covers and replacing them with new, stitching partial manuscripts into a whole, painstakingly wiping away stains and repairing tears…
It had been one of the few things that had brought him moments of joy. One of the few things he could actually do well, without fear of constant berating. He’d failed Mother and Grandfather in every other way, so it had been nice to have something to cling to, to feel proud of.
“Mr. Rune?” Rath asked.
Ves realized he’d been staring blankly at the books. Heat rose to his face. “Forgive me. I was wool-gathering.”
Rath’s gaze sharpened. “Do you recognize some of the titles? I thought the Boston Public Library had no interest in such…subjects.”
Could Rath know the truth about the world? Mother had divided humanity into sorcerers and sleepers. The first were worth paying attention to; the rest were unworthy, ignorant. Asleep with their eyes open.
“One of my friends worked in the reading room,” Ves lied. He couldn’t afford to have friends. “He’d occasionally get odd requests, and I thought I recalled that book on cults as one of them.”
It sounded reasonable, at least. After a moment, Rath’s shoulders relaxed. “I see. Given the rarity of these tomes, we obviously don’t make them available to just any visiting scholar who manages to obtain a pass.”