of what they now considered degenerate.
It sounded right to me, but the real test would be to turn up some local history books and see what had happened to create this shift in attitude. Perhaps it was the appearance of the goblins themselves? With this in mind, I began to climb the stone-balustraded spiral staircase that coiled up to a great gallery which skirted the dome. It was lined with books and doors into other, darker rooms. Since I wasn’t finding the books I had been looking for I began trying the doors. A few were open but led to tiny storage rooms with empty crates and boxes. The rest were locked.
I suppose some part of me had always known this, but my few months adventuring had driven the point home: The best doors are always locked, and how much you want to get into a room is directly proportional to how difficult it is to do so. Tell a child he can go in any room but the one at the end of the dark corridor and, as all good storytellers know, that’s where he’ll want to go as soon as he’s left alone in the house. The same is true of romantic conquest, I suppose: forbidden fruit, and all that. This I offer as explanation for using my handy fruit knife (which hadn’t seen much fruit lately) to throw the tumblers in the lock of one particularly interesting-looking door.
It was bigger than the others, heavy and studded with square-headed iron nails that were now quite black. The handle was a great iron ring that hung stiff and heavy, and the lock was old, purposeful but far from intricate. After no more than a couple of minutes probing and twisting in the massive keyhole, something turned over and fell back. Breathlessly, I twisted the ring and pulled. The door opened.
Inside it was gloomy, but I could make out a short flight of stairs and then, as I cautiously ascended them, what seemed to be a large room. No, not large, cavernous. It extended back a hundred feet or more and was about a third of that in width. It was lit by tall, narrow windows with leaded and stained glass depicting heroic scenes. All along the walls were bookcases and desks and boxes and piles of papers. I approached the nearest table and looked at the manuscripts arranged neatly on its top.
There was a pile of books of poems by a single author by the name of Brontelm, all of which seemed to be missing pages as the plays downstairs had. Beside the book, however, was a stack of paper. My heart jumped as I guessed that these were the excised pages. They would show me what the city authorities deemed so offensive that the library had to be decimated. I sat down and began to read eagerly, instantly realizing that the entire collection consisted of love poems. Censored love poems! This ought to be good.
My enthusiasm was unmerited. I got through the first ten sheets and stopped. I had read a dozen different poems about haughty mistresses, dark ladies whose crystal eyes shot death to their lovers’ hearts, cherry lips which breathed jasmine flowers, and variations on the usual courtly love twaddle, and found nothing to offend, nothing racy or provocative. I had read Thrusian guides to grammar and pronunciation with more erotic content.
My gaze strayed to a box beside the table. In this were heaped other tomes, pamphlets, and books of various sizes and types, all old, all irreverently discarded, covers torn off, pages splayed and disheveled, crumpled and ripped. Given the care with which the books were preserved elsewhere, this seemed strange, so I plucked one out of the crate to see if I could figure out what it was that made it little more than refuse. It was written in some unintelligible language full of curls and dots and trailing lines like feathered tails, graceful but strong and forthright so that I found myself wishing I could read it. I carefully replaced the book in the box, but when I looked at the other boxes arranged around the room, a troubling pattern emerged. Every book bore the same graceful and unreadable script, and they were, it was clear, the sad remnants of a great many volumes. The boxes were grouped around a central hearth with a broad chimney which was blackened and choked with ash but quite cold, allowing me to paw through the cinders in the grate. I found the corners of pages and bindings, badly burned, but all showing the same beautiful, unintelligible script.
Libraries are not places you tend to associate with book burning. I supposed it was possible that the piles of mutilated manuscripts could have been infected with some parasite and had to be destroyed to preserve the rest of the collection, but it was bloody odd that every text in the other language had been set aside to be torched. I had seen none of these books in the halls downstairs, and only those in Thrusian seemed to have been painstakingly edited. It seemed clear that everything in this other tongue was being systematically rooted out and destroyed, but why? Maybe those who could read them were all dead, but could knowledge of a language die so completely that its literature was of absolutely no use to anyone? In this extensive library was there no grammar or lexicon to those feathery traces, nothing to make it worth keeping them?
Among the dead embers I found some pages printed with the cursive script that were less badly damaged than the others, and I took them, folding them into the pocket of my jerkin. I left the room quietly, and, in a few minutes, was able to click the lock on the heavy oak door into place. They would never know I had been there, whoever “they” were.
Well, they wouldn’t unless they saw me standing around like the lingering ghost of someone who, well. . did a lot of standing around. Sorry, but my mind was too preoccupied with the sound of footsteps on the stairs to waste time thinking up suitable similes. I came to myself and moved quickly, running on tiptoes around the gallery. On the far side of the dome was an archway and a corridor, but until I got there I was completely exposed. The banister around the gallery was made up of slim stone posts with a top rail and it afforded me no cover whatsoever. As I looked hastily around, two blond men reached the head of the stairs. I froze where I was.
They were each carrying a stack of books, leaning back slightly with their chins holding the tops of the piles to their chests. I caught a few muttered words from the sides of their mouths, but they were too preoccupied with managing their burdens to turn around and notice me. I started, very carefully, to move again, and stepped behind the cover of the great marble arch. From there I peered back while the men opened the door to the great room I had just left and disappeared inside. But any hopes I had of nipping out and down the steps were dashed as another pair appeared on the stairs, weighed down with books like the others. I ducked back into the arch and began to pace quietly down the corridor, trying to get away from all this officious activity. As I left the dome behind, the light lessened, but it was still bright enough to make out the doors set into the walls on either side and the larger, bronze-faced doors at the end.
These were set with intricately cast panels polished to a high golden luster, each seeming to show the construction stages of a great building which emerged from behind scaffolding in the topmost frames. Amidst the scenes of its great halls was a panorama of the structure from outside, and in the center of its roof was a broad dome, crawling with laborers. It was the library I now stood in. I put one hand on the handle to try it, and pulled it away hurriedly. It was warm.
I tentatively put the flat of my palm against another bronze panel. That, too, was almost hot to the touch, and throbbed faintly as if blood coursed through the metal and timber door. I was now conscious of a faint hum emanating from within, as if a swarm of bees had settled on the other side. But it wasn’t just a sound. I felt suddenly dizzy, disoriented, and when I stepped back, my head swimming, I had to reach out to the walls to steady myself. I found myself leaning on one of the corridor’s side doors. As I released my weight onto it, it opened suddenly.
I fell forward and collapsed on the floor. For a second I lay there, confused, then I rolled onto my back and found myself looking up at the long, graceful legs of Aliana.
She squatted down close to me, her face expressionless.
“What are you doing, Mr. Hawthorne?”
“There’s a fire, I think, in the room at the end of the hallway. I felt it through the door.”
She looked at me for a second and then got hurriedly to her feet. “The brass-paneled doors over there?” she said, stepping past me into the corridor and pointing.
“Yes,” I answered getting to my feet. “I’m not sure, but I touched the doors and I felt something. . ”
She had approached the doors and put her face close to them. Suddenly she turned back toward me and she was moving quickly.
“You’re right,” she said hastily. “I can smell the smoke, too. That is one of our largest storage areas. We must raise the alarm or we could lose the whole building.”
And then she was marching away. I followed her out of the corridor into the dome gallery where she started shouting for assistance. The book carriers appeared, looking apprehensive and startled.
“There’s a fire in the main storeroom,” Aliana called. “You two, get everyone out of the building. Mr. Hawthorne, that includes you. The rest of you, help me get some water up here and we’ll see how much we can save.”
