Will Power

the stone floor with rust.

It was dark and cold inside and I had to push the door wider just to see where I was going. It was dry, but smelled unused, stale even. The corridor was narrow and, after only a few yards, turned sharply to the left. The light from the doorway was no use here and I stumbled and grazed my calves on the edge of a stone step. I felt with my hands: there were more steps ahead. Arms spread like a nervous chick poised to jump out of the nest for the first time, I ascended the stairs.

Different people have different passions, and you only have to find the right one to make them behave irrationally. My passions were few and fairly straightforward: food, drink (especially beer), money (not that I ever had any), women (likewise), books in all forms, and plays in particular. My days as an adventurer had brought me most of these, though when adventuring gave you anything you could be fairly sure that it would turn out to have a heavily muscled swordsman attached. I didn’t like creeping around in dark corridors, but if there was reading matter as well as light at the end of the tunnel, I’d give it a go. If the seven-foot-tall, sword-wielding custodian was out to lunch, so much the better.

At the top of the stairs my fingertips found vertical wooden boards, a cold metal ring, and a keyhole through which nothing could be seen. I fumbled with the ring and, actually trying to be quiet for the first time since I had broken in, turned it till the door clicked. Unlocked, I thought, pleased with myself, and pushed. It shuddered and gave slightly, but there was clearly something solid against it on the other side. I tried again. No joy.

The trouble with passion is that it can make you singleminded to the point of stupidity. Perhaps that is why I found myself sprinting up the stairs and throwing myself in a shoulder-cracking thud against the door. The door burst open, the table on the other side turned over and crashed to the floor, and I followed suit, landing on my side in a heap of parchment. As things quieted and I began squeezing my collarbone tentatively, an inkwell which had been catapulted off the table rolled quietly away, leaving a thin black trail on the parquet floor.

After a moment of silence, I rolled over onto my back and found myself bathed in a chill, gray light. It came from the dome directly above, which was translucent, and glowed with a soft radiance, pale and easy on the eyes. It was stone, I think, and was supported with darker buttresses that arched up into the center like ribs, but it lit the entire building like a vast lantern with a paper shade. And all around me, on great lurching shelves, at the ends of sliding ladders, stacked into the very dome itself, were books. It was like stumbling onto a lake of cool, crystal water after three weeks in the desert. It broke over me like a crash of triumphal music.

I had never seen anything like it.

Half-delirious, I rolled over and onto my feet, sprang to the nearest wall of spines, and plucked one out.

“A Rhetorical Method for Schoolmasters,” I read aloud, delightedly. The one next to it was Tharnast’s Rules of Logic, and beside that, A Discourse on the Structures of Grammar for the Edification of the Scholar, with a revised appendix on Practical Syntax in Rustic Dialect. Things of beauty, all. I returned them to the stacks, barely able to contain a giggle of excitement, and began to pace the dim corridors of shelves, scouring their contents with my head tipped on one side and grinning like a child accidentally locked in a pantry full of cake, trifle, and cookies.

It wasn’t that I had been starved of reading matter, but books showed up only rarely in the life of an adventurer, and even the library in the Hide back in Stavis tended toward the practical. If you were into siege tactics, herbal remedies, and how to turn a hairpin into a lock pick, that was the place for you. Lisha, Mithos, and Co. were, but while I will read such stuff in the absence of an alternative, I want books to pull me out of reality, not to plunge me into it, hairpin and broadsword at the ready. In Stavis, and indeed throughout Thrusia, the Empire had made books few and far between. Literacy is dangerous, and they had taken pains to discourage it. When they closed the theaters as similarly dangerous, they also impounded and destroyed whatever playbooks could be found. Then poetry, being considered frivolous, obscure, and, in some cases, lewd, was added to the list. Bonfires on street corners became a regular sight, enthusiastic young corporals standing over them full of the spirit of victory and righteousness. It had been some time since I had curled up with a good book; so long, in fact, that the “good book” category was now easily broad enough to include A Rhetorical Method for Schoolmasters.

It didn’t need to be. After only a minute or two, I came upon a table piled high with huge tomes bound with cloth and stiffened with sheets of a board so heavy it took two hands to open them. A catalog. There, in minute, handwritten but perfectly legible print were the titles, authors, genres, and other details about the library’s twenty- five thousand plus volumes. Each record was lettered and numbered to correspond with an area, stack, and shelf. In moments I had oriented myself and was gazing raptly at a ten-foot-high wall of irregular books and manuscripts, some bound with leather and etched with gold leaf, others mere jumbles of papers stitched together or folded into parchment covers, all qualified by a plate halfway up the wall which read, simply, DRAMA.

I shut my eyes and chose one, found a stained, ancient desk with a leather-covered chair in a dark recess between the stacks, and sat quite still and silent for two hours. The sun rose high over the dome and the soft effervescence grew, though I barely noticed it, so totally immersed was I in the world whose pages I turned-less hungrily now, but with a sense of peaceful joy spreading through me like the light in the dome. And though, like the starving man who rejoices over a stale crust, I would have been happy with anything, it was good stuff. Very good, in fact. It was romance: not in the sense of a love story-though that was an element of it-but a romance of the epic variety, dark forces propelling the play toward tragedy and the hand of some providential power pulling everything back from the brink of chaos and destruction, into comic resolution, victory, marriage, and the reuniting of sundered families and friends. Romance is the most painful kind of drama because it announces so clearly that only through art can such horrors be averted, such discord turned to harmony. The end is always joyful, but touched with a galling pathos that reminds the audience that in the world we inhabit, the treacherous survive; the grandfather never recovers his sanity; the fleeing virgin, instead of encountering her long lost brother in the forest, falls prey to bandits, rapists, and murderers. Painful, romance is, and hard to pull off. A badly written romance is, at best, predictably tedious, at worst, laughable and embarrassing. This was neither. The characters were carefully drawn with distinct voices and personalities. The plot was deftly woven, turning artfully in on itself like a serpent, balancing thematic unity and clever surprises. The whole had a lyric ease, a grace of diction, a flowing, intricate, spellbinding beauty that pulled me in so that the rest of the world was forgotten.

It was all the more striking, then, when I found myself pricking up my ears and glancing hurriedly about. I had heard something, could hear it still. It was distant and small, but regular, now slowing, not far from the door I had entered. As it stuttered into stillness, I realized what it was: the inkwell I had upset and left on the floor. Someone had kicked it.

I remained motionless for a second, then rose, quiet as I could, lifting my chair so it would not scrape on the floor. Then I listened. Nothing. Whoever, or whatever, had been over there, was intending to be silent. This bothered me. I drew my belt knife and took a long, incredibly slow, step toward the closest stacks, easing my foot down and rolling my weight from heel to toe soundlessly. Then another step, and I was against a bank of shelves about ten feet high. I moved sideways toward the central area where the great indexes were, eyes flashing from the north to the south ends of the narrow book-lined alley. Then I waited, still several yards from the edge of the stacks, and listened. Nothing.

Out of the corner of my eye, something moved, or seemed to. I turned hurriedly to my right, but the south end of the tight corridor was quite empty. I paused and had just managed to convince myself that it had been a trick of the light when the books directly in front of me exploded out of their shelf and, from behind them, I glimpsed first a pair of eyes which ducked away like an animal’s, then the business end of a large crossbow pointed squarely at my thorax.

“Don’t move,” said a voice, before the possibility had even occurred to me, “and drop the knife.”

It was a collected voice, as voices from behind crossbows tend to be, unruffled and in control. It was also a woman’s. I did as she said and smiled sheepishly. There was a tiny rustle of movement, and when I looked up, the space in the shelves was quite empty. I turned and found her coming from the north end, the crossbow leveled at me but held in that casual way that comes from familiarity. Her eyes were on me and there was neither casualness nor familiarity there. They were blue-gray, large, and beautiful like a snowscape is beautiful: entrancing but cold, and best enjoyed through the window of a room with a fireplace.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” she said evenly.

“Will Hawthorne,” I said. “I came to read a book. I was under the impression that this was a library.”