the right direction, at least. Come on, we might be able to get a taxi here.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE LIBRARY TURNED out to be embedded in the middle of a complex of buildings, through which we walked as inconspicuously as possible, dodging the crowds, until finally there was only darkness, silence, us. The mosque reared above everything, cool and symmetrical in white, slightly insubstantial in the dim light, backed by a million stars. I stopped to stare suspiciously at some large, bright ones that I didn’t recall seeing a few nights ago, tinged with blue and green.
“Johnny—”
“I know. Seeing the birth and death of stars is a bad sign, since they’re all millions of light-years away. The time dilation effects of transitory magical particles and the… listen, just don’t look. They’ll pull on you.”
“Pull?”
“Don’t look.”
On either side of us stretched neat brick walls, pierced with round-topped doorways, all shut, many with signs on them that I couldn’t read but could guess what they said: No Trespassing. Or, No Admittance If Not A Student. We’d seen a lot like that so far, Johnny walking blithely past them, hopping gates and picking locks. The mosque looked as big as the Coliseum back home—maybe bigger. How many people had I seen at the hockey games on TV?—no, it had to be bigger than that. The roof was dark green, lit up only here and there from streetlights in the darkness. The annex next to it was covered in fantastic tilework, colours muted, bordered in carved cedarwood and flanked by big black pillars. I inhaled the wood scent deeply, wondering that I could smell it at all. You probably couldn’t during the day, when it was busy with tourists and students and worshipers. “That’s the Medersa el-Attarine,” she whispered. “Not us.”
“What?”
“That’s for tourists. Sorry. This is us.”
“This is... much creepier.”
The door, flanked with UNDER RESTORATION: DO NOT TRESPASS signs in a dozen languages, was big enough to walk an elephant through, but shut so tightly you couldn’t fit a piece of tissue paper between the joints. Johnny ducked under the barricades and pushed anyway, then pulled, to no effect. I ran my fingers gently along the complicated carvings in the dark wood, touched here and there with gold or enamel. Everything was mirrored, balanced, mathematically precise. It looked like the doorway to a very fancy hotel, not a place where you could find books on monsters and mayhem. But how would we get in?
Johnny looked up appraisingly at the roof and said, “Oh man, they are not gonna like this.”
“I haven’t even heard the idea and I don’t like it.”
“You’re gonna like it even less in a minute.”
We circled the annex to a cluster of support buildings, low sheds and quonsets. Johnny stopped at a random—or so it seemed to me—shed and flexed her fingers for a minute. “Boost me up,” she said. “If I can get up and over the roof, then I’ll figure out how to let you in.”
“Are you... no way. I’m almost a foot taller than you, I’ve got way more reach, and what if there’s guards or something inside the wall? I’ll go. You, stay put. I’ll let you in.”
“I’m lighter! You’ll sound like a marching band crashing around up there.”
“And you’ll sound like one when you fall off the roof. We need you alive to save the world or whatever, we don’t need me for anything.”
She glared at me. “If you’re so unqualified, why’d I let you come?”
“Dunno. Guess if we get stuck in the desert you can eat me?”
“Gross. Like that Guy Pearce movie.”
“I’m way more food than Guy Pearce.”
“Look, if I don’t make it, then we can—”
“And if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass hopping.”
“Shush.”
I cupped my hands in front of me, let her step in, and shoved her up onto the roof of the shed, my amulet-stung palm bursting briefly with pain, gone when her weight left it. I heard her scrabbling for purchase for a second, then looked up to see her standing on the roof, arms out. “There’s kind of a dip in it,” she said in a loud whisper. “Ugh. Didn’t figure on that. See you on the other side!”
As she got a running start for the next roof up, I felt my face stretch into an involuntary grimace of horror, like watching the boys dart into the road with their hockey sticks, not watching for cars. But she leapt and landed, dusted herself off, and looked up at the next