“If you could take a piece of the sky,” I remarked to the girl who had sold it to me, “and turn it into something edible, this is what it would taste like.”
“They are wonderfully light, aren’t they, sir,” she agreed warmly. “Like a piece of the sky: a charming conceit! You have a most ready wit and a shrewd palate, sir.”
“No,” I said, “you misunderstand me. I don’t mean it as a compliment.”
She gave me a blank look.
“I mean,” I persisted with overly slow clarity, “they have no flavor or texture. They have nothing that would make any sane person want to eat them, let alone spend a vast amount of money on them. I cannot say they taste like soap or excrement or chocolates stuffed with bits of bird, because they do not taste at all. They are a culinary vacuum and I have already wasted more words on them than they could ever deserve. You ought to sell something with a bit of bite. Try this, for example.”
I produced a small piece of the blue cheese I had found in the woodland cave, wrapped in a thin leather cloth. “This is perhaps a bit bold for this place, but give it a try. This is a cheese with real character, a cheese to sample between sips of a dusty red wine, a cheese of boldness, sharp, but still warm, tangy but. .”
I trailed off. As I pushed the cheese under her nose, her face had blanched first with distaste, then swelled to revulsion, and wound up in something oddly like fear. Her eyes flashed from the morsel of cheese to my face. I cannot imagine what she saw there, but it seemed to fill her with dread. She backed away, staring at me with her hand over her mouth, then began to run, sobbing as she fled.
Passersby eyed me with hostile curiosity. What had I done? I tried to shrug and smile reassuringly at the faces turned toward me, but this-not surprisingly-didn’t help. Maybe I still had chocolate sparrow bits on my shirt.
I made for the library. At least there I wouldn’t feel like some absurd fish flopping about on the floor. There I could lose myself in a good book or six. Even a bad one would be better than trying to blend in with these people. It had been an odd day. But as I have learned to remind myself, things can always get worse.
SCENE XIV The Plot Thickens
I didn’t bother trying the main door to the library, but went straight to the side entrance. The door opened as easily as it had before, though a key had been pushed into the lock from the inside, as if someone had tried to lock it without realizing that the mechanism was rusted away. The writing table had been pushed back up against the second door, but it yielded as it had done before and I was in before you could say “minimum security.”
“Aliana?” I whispered, with the hushed reverence I reserve for libraries. There was no answer. I walked around a great case of medical books and peered at the main entrance, but there was no sign of her or anyone else, so I wandered through the aisles of piled and shelved volumes, wending my way back to the drama stacks. I settled here and randomly plucked a book from the shelf behind me.
“The Tragical History of Shatrel, Lord of Dambreland, and the Horrid Revenge of Benath Kazrak,” I read aloud. “Sounds good to me.”
And so I settled and read under the pale, glowing dome for an hour. But when I reached the fourth act, with Shatrel’s demonic machinations in full swing, the thing ended abruptly. There were thirty pages missing, cut out at the spine with a knife or scissors. I cursed quietly to myself and replaced it in the shelves. The next one I selected got a careful examination before I started reading, and this produced a curious discovery: The play’s final pages were intact, but much of the second act was missing, cut out like the conclusion of the other play. I took down a pile of books and flicked through them. Over half of them had some pages missing: a couple missing only three or four pages, some lacking a good deal more, one being reduced to no more than a dozen leaves.
I put them back and sat pensively. This was not the result of decay, neglect, or the passage of time. These books were not accidentally burned, nor had their pages fallen out of rotted bindings or been casually torn out by owners who needed a piece of scrap paper. These had been rigorously and systematically mutilated. To someone like me who had seen similar work done by the Diamond Empire in Thrusia, this could mean only one thing: censorship. But of what and by whom?
I often find that I think better on my feet, so I rose and began to pace the library floor. It was a large building and I had seen only a fraction of it. Since there didn’t seem to be anyone about, this seemed as good a time as any to see what else was there while I mulled over recent developments.
I saw it like this: Long ago, Phasdreille was the center of a glorious civilization and it produced much that was fair and wonderful to behold. The city architecture by itself would have been ample evidence of this, but so was the literature I had been reading and the paintings I had seen in the king’s palace. In more recent years, however, something of the fire that had inspired the “fair folk” had gone out. What I saw now was a society devoid of passion and intensity except in their understandable hatred for the goblins: a society ruled by fashion and ostentation, by the shallowest performance and superficiality. In such a culture, even the great literary products of its past could be considered scurrilous and disreputable. So the good people of present day Phasdreille had opted to rid themselves 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.