The Library sits on top of the hill like a big grey egg.
I’d seen it all my life, from below. Everybody has. It’s round, with a dome, and it’s the highest thing in Saltmire except the fog. What I’d never done was stand at the gates.
They’re iron, and tall, and over the top, in stone, is an open book with an eye in it. I had the bead in my pocket. It was the same picture exactly.
Inside the gates, at the top of some steps, was a door, and beside the door, on a chair, was a man.
He was old, and small, and he was wearing a black coat buttoned to his chin, and he was looking at us. Not looking at us. Looking at us the way you look at weather.
“Let me try,” said Ilsa.
“You said you tried four times.”
“I’ve learned things since then.”
She went up the steps. She’d brushed her coat. She’d done something to her hair. She put her chin up and said, in a voice I’d never heard her use, “Good morning. I’m sent from the Guild to collect a book for the guildmaster.”
The man looked at her.
“You’ve no eyebrows,” he said.
“That’s not—”
“No.”
She came back down the steps.
“I’ve learned things since then,” I said.
“Shut up.”
Here’s what I’d learned, lying on the fish-shed roof yesterday with my heart going like a drum: everything has a back.
The Library’s back was a wall, and then a drop, and then a lot of ivy, and above the ivy, high up under the edge of the dome, a row of little round windows that nobody had cleaned in years.
“I can climb,” said Ilsa, looking at it.
“You can’t.”
“I can climb adequately.”
She could climb adequately. I went first, because I know how to feel which bits of ivy will hold, and she came up behind me with her teeth gritted and her coat snagging on everything, and she only swore twice.
The window at the top was shut. It was also so old that the frame came away in my hand when I pushed it, which I’m counting as opening it.
I got my head through.
I’m going to try to tell you what I saw, and I’m going to get it wrong.
The Library is one room. One huge round room, all the way up to the dome, with a floor so far below that the people on it looked like beetles. And the room was full of shelves. Hundreds of them, taller than houses, standing in rings and rows and curves, every one of them packed with books from the floor to the top.
And the shelves were moving.
Not shaking. Moving. Sliding over the floor on their own, slow and smooth and silent, whole rows of them gliding sideways like boats on a canal. A ring of shelves on the far side was turning, very slowly, the way a clock hand turns. Two rows near the middle were sliding apart to let a third one through. Ladders went past on their own along the shelf-fronts, with nobody on them, like they were going somewhere.
Brass rails in the floor, I saw later. Nobody pushing. They were tidying themselves.
Ilsa’s head came through beside mine.
“Oh,” she said.
That was all. I think it’s the only time I ever heard Ilsa not have a comment.
A gallery ran round under the windows, with stairs down to the floor. We went down, quietly, keeping to the wall. The beetles turned into people. Six of them, old, in black coats, reading at tables in the middle where nothing moved. None of them looked up.
Down. Three. Hidden.
“Down,” said Ilsa. “There must be a lower floor.”
“We’re on the lowest.”
“Then there’s a lower lowest.”
We went looking for stairs. That meant going in among the shelves.
The first row we walked down was standing still. Old leather, gold letters, that dry smell books have. So was the second.
The third row started to move while we were in it.
There’s no warning. There’s no creak. One second the shelf on my left was a wall of books, and the next second it was a wall of books going backwards, the whole row, sliding away past my shoulder, and the shelf on my right was coming the other way. The gap we were walking in was getting narrower.
“Run,” I said.
We ran. The gap at the end was a slot of light and the slot was closing. Ilsa got through. I turned sideways and got through with my shirt catching, and behind us the two rows met with a soft, final thump, like a door closing in a house where nobody’s home.
“They tidy,” said Ilsa, breathing hard. “That’s what it is. They’re sorting themselves.”
“They nearly sorted us.”
“So we go between the tidying.”
That is much, much harder than it sounds.
We’d pick a row that looked safe and get halfway along it and it’d start to glide. We’d dodge into the next one and that one was turning. A ladder came sliding along a shelf-front right at Ilsa’s head and she ducked and it went past, empty, rattling, like it was late for something. I looked back once and the row we’d just left wasn’t there any more. There was a different row. With different books.
I did what I do.
I climbed.
A shelf went past me, slow and massive, and I put my foot on the bottom board and my hands on the next one and went up it like a ladder, with Ilsa shouting something below, and at the top I lay flat on a shelf as wide as a bed and the whole thing was carrying me across the Library like a raft.
From up there you could see the pattern. It wasn’t a mess at all. The rows slid in and out of each other like fingers, and the big ring turned, and everything had somewhere to be. It was like lying on top of a clock.
Then I looked down and Ilsa wasn’t there.
“Ilsa!”
“Here!”
Two rows over. In a gap. And the gap was closing, the way the first one had, the shelf on her left and the shelf on her right coming together, and she was looking up at me with her mouth open.
I didn’t think. I got to the edge of my raft, and I hung off it by my hands, and as it slid past the top of her row I let go.
I hit the top of her left-hand shelf, slid, grabbed, and leaned out with my arm hanging down into the gap.
“Grab it!”
She jumped. She got my wrist. I’ve been pulling nets out of the mud since I was eight and she weighed less than a net. I hauled, and she came up the shelf-front with her boots kicking, and she rolled over the top edge onto the books beside me, and underneath us the two shelves met.
Thump.
We lay on our backs on top of a bookshelf, going slowly round a library, and tried to breathe.
“Adequate,” said Ilsa, to the ceiling.
The shelf stopped moving.
We lay still, because everything had been moving and now it wasn’t, and that felt like a thing to pay attention to.
Then I heard a voice.
It was below us, and off to one side, and it was an old man’s voice, and it was angry. Not shouting-angry. Quiet-angry. The kind that’s worse.
“I told you to watch,” it said. “That was the whole of it. Watch, and keep your hands to yourself. Now there’s a mess, and I’m the one who’ll have to mend it.”
Somebody answered. I couldn’t make out words. It was low and it was rough, and it might have been “sorry”, or it might not.
“Go on,” said the old voice. “Out the back. And keep your lot off my hill.”
A door. Not a slam. A click.
Then a cough. A long one, wet and tired, that went on for a while and then stopped.
Then feet, slow, on the floor.
Ilsa and I looked at each other. She mouthed who. I shook my head. We lay there like two books.
The feet stopped right under us.
“Well,” said the voice, and it wasn’t angry at all now. It was warm as toast. “The shelves have brought me something. They do that. Come down, both of you, before the next hour strikes and they start again, and mind your fingers on the way.”
He was the oldest man I’d ever seen who was still standing up.
Thin as a rake, white hair going in every direction, a black coat with sagging pockets, spectacles on a chain. His face was all lines, and all the lines were smiling. He had a hand on the shelf-end to hold himself up, and every breath went in and out of him like it was work.
“Professor Quill,” he said. “I’m the Keeper here. Which means I’m the one who’s supposed to stop people like you coming in through my windows, and here I am, failing at it.” He coughed again, into a handkerchief, and when he’d finished he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a paper twist. “Peppermint?”
I looked at the twist. I looked at Ilsa. Ilsa shrugged and took one.
I took one. It was a peppermint. It was very strong. My eyes watered.
“Now,” said Professor Quill. “I’d like to think you came for the books, but nobody’s come for the books in forty years. So you came for something else. And I’d put money, if I had any, on you being the younger Marsh.”
My stomach turned over.
“How—”
“You’ve his chin. And his way of lying on top of my shelves.” He smiled. “Aldo came here. A year and more ago. He came asking after old maps of the Thornwood, and I let him in, because nobody asks me about the Thornwood any more and I was lonely. A bright boy. Rude, and bright. I liked him very much. He stopped coming, and I wondered.”
“Who were you shouting at?” said Ilsa.
I’d been about to ask. She got there first.
“My assistant,” said the Professor, without missing a beat. “He has lost a book I’ve been wanting for a month, and I was unkind to him, and I shall apologise to him later. I get bad-tempered. It’s the lungs.” He tapped his chest. “Now. What did Aldo leave you?”
I want to tell you I kept my mouth shut. Don’t trust anyone who’s nice to you for no reason. Aldo had written it, and I’d read it a hundred times.
But he’d known Aldo. He’d said rude and bright and that was Aldo exactly. And he’d said it like he missed him.
I took out the bead.
He couldn’t read the marks. I checked. I showed him the scratches and he turned the bead in his thin fingers and shook his head and said it was a code and codes weren’t his field. So I read it to him.
“Down. Three. Hidden.”
“Down,” he said, “is easy. There’s a floor under this one, where I keep the things nobody wants. Three.” He thought. “Three cases from the stair, perhaps. Come on. Mind the shelves, we’ve a quarter of an hour.”
The stairs down were behind a door behind a shelf. The floor below was low and dim and smelled of damp, and the shelves down there didn’t move at all. They were just shelves. I was almost disappointed.
He walked to the third case from the stair. He didn’t count. Then he ran his finger along a shelf, stopped, and pulled out a book.
It was thin and grey and water-stained. The cover said Tide Tables of the Saltmire Coast.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Of course it was. Of course that was where he’d put it.
“Open it,” said the Professor.
A page in the middle had something folded inside it. Thick paper, brown with age, folded twice. I opened it on the shelf with hands that weren’t quite steady.
A map.
Half a map. It had been torn straight down the middle, top to bottom, and this was the left side. A river, a road, the edge of a forest drawn as a lot of little spiky trees. The road went into the trees and stopped at the tear.
And in Aldo’s pencil, along the bottom:
The other half is where the otters sing. — A.
“Otters,” said Ilsa.
“Otters,” I said.
“Ah,” said the Professor. “Well. I’m afraid that’s where I’m no use to you. I haven’t been down this hill in forty years, and I never saw an otter in my life. But you’ll find it. He’d not have left it if he didn’t think you could.” He put a hand on my shoulder. It was light as a bird. “And when you do, come back and tell an old man about it. I’ll leave the window open.”
He walked us to the front door himself, past the man on the chair, who looked like he’d swallowed a wasp.
Outside it was afternoon, with the whole of Saltmire spread out below us in the thinning fog. I had half a map in my shirt and a peppermint going numb in my cheek.
“He was nice,” said Ilsa.
“Aldo said not to trust anyone who’s nice for no reason.”
“He had a reason. He’s old and he likes books and nobody visits him.” She glanced at me. “He gave us sweets, Wick. That’s what old people do.”
“I know.”
“Then stop frowning.”
“I’m not frowning. I haven’t got the eyebrows for it.”
We went down the hill road. And at the bottom, where it meets the first street of the town, I stopped.
There were three men standing on the corner.
Long grey coats. Leather over their faces. Not running. Not coming. Just standing there, the three of them, with their hands in their pockets, looking up the hill at us.
Yesterday they’d chased me across the mud. Now they just watched us walk past.
Like somebody had told them to.