Blue flames danced all around her, and whichever way she turned she saw only smoke, and burning books, and tall book stacks simmering as the histories they contained came under threat as well.
There’s so much here, how can I ever find what I need? she thought.
WhatdoI need to know?
She was worried about Trey, because she had read of his danger in a book that burst into flames. She was worried about Hope because the witch was hauling her ever southward into Kang Kang. And she was worried about herself. She felt that she had been handed some great task, but she could not find her way through it. She was lost here in this burning library, adrift in a place she should know so well. If I’m to be told something, why do I have to go and find it?
“Whatever I have inside me is much deeper than this place,” she said, and she closed her eyes to see. But she could not. She probed with her mind, trying to discover the route back into that basement. Perhaps she had missed something down there? But she could no longer find the door. She dropped to her knees and scratched at the timber floorboards, using her nails to pry up a few loose splinters, widening a joint, prying and straining and finally snapping up a slat of wood as long as her hand. A burning page fluttered across the floor and slipped between the boards, and Alishia pressed her face to the crack to see where it went.
The page fluttered downward, barely touching the thick darkness below. She watched it for a long time, falling, falling, listening to the library destroying itself around her but never taking her eyes from that single falling sheet. And in the instant before it was snuffed out forever she saw shadows moving around it, closing in and starving the flame as though afraid it would reveal them for what they were.
Alishia sat back on her heels and gasped. So deep, she thought. So filled with things.
She stood and ran, an aimless sprint that took her into a warren of narrow passages. Around one corner she came across the worst destruction yet. Fire had eaten into the sturdy timber supports of a bank of shelving and much of it had given way, the fractured stumps of wooden columns charred and exposed like the library’s ribs. Several dozen shelves had fallen, and thousands of books had tumbled into chaos. Many of them simmered, some burned and a couple of hundred had been reduced to little more than a ghost of their old selves, ashen shapes that fell apart beneath the weight of Alishia’s gaze.
The librarian started climbing. It should have been treacherous but she seemed to find her footing easily, mounting the hill of books and standing at its summit to see what was on the other side.
In the library, a forest glade. She closed her eyes and frowned, feeling for an instant the movement of Hope carrying her ever southward. When she opened her eyes again she was still in her library, and before her lay the clearing. The trees all around were made of books, stacked up for trunks, twisted for limbs, torn for leaves. Between the trees and the actual clearing reality changed, blurring from ripped pages to rough grass. Here and there a plant showed both; a bush with twigs and leaves, book bindings around its base and genuine roots protruding above the paper-strewn ground.
At the center of the clearing lay a wide, flat stone. It was dusted with snow and the wind-perhaps birthed by the fires-had blown the fine flakes into lines, shapes and pictures etched into its surface.
I don’t know what that says. But with that thought came the realization that, were Alishia to go down into the clearing, its meaning would become clear.
She began descending the barrier of books, her feet stepping unerringly from one firm foothold to the next. She held her hands out from her sides for balance and thought of Kosar, the thief with the branded fingers, and how he walked like this to prevent his fingertips scraping on his clothing. I wonder where he is now? She glanced down at the books beneath her feet-perhaps one of them held his story, or part of it, or whatever the future may have for him-then stumbled and fell forward. She landed on her side in the strange clearing, sitting up quickly and looking back, terrified that she would be somewhere else entirely. But the library stacks still stretched back from this place.
The grass beneath her hands was cold and brittle. There was no daylight here, only the light of the fires, and it seemed to match the strange twilight existing in the real world. What’s real and what isn’t? Alishia thought. Thiscould be the real world. Everything else-Rafe, Hope, Trey, Erv the stable lad and my library that the Red Monk burned down-that could all be my imagination. Pages in my own book. Ideas I never wished to have. She stood, wiped her hands on her legs and realized that the snow coating the stone slab was actually ash.
She blew the ash from the carvings in its surface.
At first the images and etchings made no sense at all. They seemed to be a random collection of markings: strange letters and obscure symbols, pictures of creatures she did not recognize, numbers written backwards. She blew more ash away, making sure that she had uncovered everything in case the whole picture suddenly came together.
Something grumbled deep in the library and shook the ground; another stack of books tumbling to nothing. And another thousand people die, Alishia thought, disturbed by the idea but certain that it was true. High up where book stacks met in the haze of distance, a massive cloud of fire and smoke erupted, jumping from stack to stack and encircling the clearing like a crown of flames. Fire won’t touch this, she thought, tracing one of the etchings with a finger. As she followed the smooth carving, something stirred in her mind, a memory stretching its legs and unfurling. She frowned and closed her eyes, continuing to touch the same etching back and forth, and each completed circle made the thought stronger.
It was a memory of something she had never done. It belonged to something else. But it was becoming whole and clear, and she moved on to the next carved shape and began following it with the same finger.
Fire bristled high above her and several burning books struck the ground close by. One of them burst apart into a shower of flaming paper, and it took Alishia a few seconds to register the burn on her arm and the smell of singed hair.
“This fire can’t touch me,” she said, and as if to deny her words another burning page landed in her hair and set it aflame. She waved both hands and batted out the fire. She had scorched a couple of fingers, and her palm already held a blister the size of a tellan coin.
The rock called her back and she went. It was the knowledge she needed, and while the rock itself would always be here-wherever “here” was-she understood that her chance to read it would never come again.
Scared now, breathing harshly and feeling the baggy clothes hanging loose around her body, Alishia began to see what the rock had to say.
IT FELT AS THOUGH she was reading a book about the whole world of Noreela in the space of a few heartbeats, rather than the many lifetimes it should really take. She felt drowsy and sick with the information input, but ecstatic as well. Ideas floated through her mind, and they were like words in a sentence that had no clear meaning. Birth Shade needs a seed, she read, and everything else seemed to echo that thought, that image, building on the idea and giving it a history. She was filled with the joy of new life. Around the clearing were young trees and plants, budding flowers and a few fledgling birds and the fleeting shadows of ghost animals that would one day exist here. The stone slab itself was redolent with the memories of birthings, the antithesis of a sacrificial stone. Alishia could almost smell the fresh blood.
And though the images and name-Birth Shade-were there, she still did not fully understand.
I need help, she thought. That’s why I’m here, in this place that really isn’t inside my own mind. That’s why I’m exploring what Rafe left me with, because we need help, all of us, me and Hope and Kosar and Trey and the rest of Noreela. We need help or we’re lost forever.