Page 57

They advanced another few dozen paces along the corridor from what Hannah had called the reading room before Rose had to ask her next question or explode.

“And these Smiths?” Rose asked. “And this Great Smith? You said they made me to unlock the Library?”

“To break it, dear. To take it apart and figure out how it works. To take its power and use it for their own ends.”

“Can you stop them?”

“Why should I?”

“Because—”

“And no, I can’t. The Great Smith is beyond me and my magic.”

“How do you—”

“I read it in the runes.”

Rose had more questions, but the shapes that had been catching her eye at the end of the corridor now demanded her attention.

“Are those—”

Rose saw that the complications that had been confusing her vision were books, vast numbers of them stacked in towers. They walked on toward this forest. Some of the towers were merely waist height and a single book in width. Others teetered taller than she had imagined one might pile books without them toppling. Some were fatter, many volumes thick, cunningly constructed to reach ten feet in the air, twenty, more, tall as the trees that might have been felled to provide the paper that filled the space between the covers.

Not until she entered the chamber did Rose understand how it dwarfed the simply enormous room they had just left. The reading room could have contained a cathedral. This chamber could hold a city. It had to be miles across. The ceiling gave room enough for birds to soar. And as far as her eye could see, the book forest continued. As many books as she had imagined the world might hold, stacked up in tower after tower after tower after tower.

Hannah led on through the forest, and soon all sight of the immense walls was lost. Generally, the gaps between the stacks gave plenty of room. They could even walk side by side in places. Elsewhere it was a tighter fit. Rose knocked one skinny stack just a head taller than herself and it collapsed in her wake, toppling two more.

“Don’t bother,” Hannah said as Rose started back to try to repair the damage.

It was only then that Rose realized neither of them had spoken since they entered the chamber. There was within it an enfolding silence that had somehow taken hold of her tongue and stilled it.

Rose looked up from her self-imposed labor. “How do you even know where you’re going?” She placed one book on another and, daunted by the task, stood up again. “And don’t say ‘magic’ or I’ll…”

“There’s a flow to everything in the Library. Even more so in the Exchange. You just have to feel it and follow. There are stories here, begging to be told. If you listen hard enough you can hear them and let them lead you. This is a place of currents, time, and coincidence.” Hannah gave a grim smile. “The real problem is knowing if the story is going to turn out well for you or not.”

“But where are you taking us?”

“We’re nearly there,” the witch said unhelpfully.

She wove a path through increasingly toppled areas where books carpeted the floor in distressing chaos, and not simple, paper-clad things like those that filled the majority of Red’s bookshop, but great leather-bound tomes that in their grandeur and antiquity would even shame those in Miss Havisham’s library, inherited from her father and his father before him.

“Here.” Hannah brought them out of the book columns to a large, circular clearing surrounded by a chest-high wall of books, tumbled here and there like a dry-stone wall subjected to a century of storms.

Peering over the wall, Rose saw that, apart from a few heaps of books here and there, the area was largely clear, but with the smooth floor hidden beneath soil that might have been finger-deep or several hands. Gleaming at the center of it all was a single pool, very similar to those in the Exchange, and close to the pool, lying slumped, one arm extended, her head resting on the arm, was…someone…a dark-haired someone. It looked like a girl.

“Is that…”

“The sister,” Hannah confirmed. “Currents, time, and coincidence.”

“This is wonderful!” Rose looked for a way through the wall. “We’ll just—”

With an awful, wet, squelching sound, the bookworm fell from a raw hole in the air and landed beside Sophie. It was the same exact horror that Gar had pulled from his eye in the Rat’s story about Rose’s past. Only much, much bigger.

“Satan’s shit!” Hannah backed off, pale, her wand raised in a trembling hand.

“We have to save her!” Rose ran to the nearest dip in the wall and started to clamber over, slipping back where the books gave way beneath her.

She was still struggling with the spilling books when something else fell from the hole the worm had squirmed through.