A Princess Of Landover Part 16

"Just tell me what you found out, please," he urged in his gentlest, most rea.s.suring voice, hiding every other emotion.

Cordstick straightened. Or at least, he made a failed attempt at it. "My Lord, there is nothing new on where the Princess has gone or what she is doing." He held up one bandaged hand as Laphroig started to vent. "However, that is not to say that our efforts have been totally unsuccessful."

Laphroig stared. "Exactly what does that mean?"

"It means that we know one more thing that we didn't know before I set out to find the Princess, although I'm not sure it's worth the price I had to pay to discover it. The Princess Mistaya has not disappeared for the reasons we thought. Nothing bad has happened to her. No abduction, no spiriting away, nothing like that. Apparently, she had a falling-out with her parents and left of her own volition. Because of the nature of the falling-out, it is thought she has no immediate intention of returning."

Laphroig shrugged. "Forgive me, Cordstick, but I don't see how that helps us."

"It helps, my Lord, because she is seeking sanctuary with an understanding third party. Her grandfather, the River Master, turned her down. She must be looking elsewhere." He paused. "Do you happen to know anyone who might be willing to grant her sanctuary, should I eventually find her and have a chance to speak with her?"

"Ah," said Laphroig, the light beginning to dawn. "So you think she might come here to live?"

"Beggars can't be choosers." Cordstick rubbed his bandaged hands and then winced. "If she agrees to let you act as her guardian, she becomes your ward and you gain legal status in determining her future. As her guardian, you will have ample opportunities to ..." He trailed off, cleared his throat, and smiled. "To persuade her to your cause."

"Indeed, indeed!" Laphroig sounded positively enthusiastic at the prospect. He began to pace, as if by doing so he were actually getting somewhere. "Well, then, we must find her right away before she has a change of heart!" He wheeled on Cordstick. "You "You must find her!" must find her!"

"I must?" His scribe did not sound in the least convinced.

"Yes, of course! Who else can I depend upon?" He dropped his voice to a near whisper. "Who else, but my future Minister of State?"

Cordstick gave him a calculating look. "I was just about to hand in my resignation and retire to the countryside, my Lord."

"No, no, we can't have that sort of talk." Laphroig was at his side instantly, patting him on his good shoulder. Gently, he walked him over to the window, where they could look out over the countryside together. "That sort of talk is for weaklings and quitters, not for future Ministers of State!"

His scribe frowned. "Would you care to put that in writing?"

Laphroig gritted his teeth. "I would be happy to do so." He could always deny he'd written it.

"Witnessed by two n.o.bles of the realm?"

The teeth gritting turned to teeth grinding. "Of course." He could always have the n.o.bles put to death.

"With copies to be sent to a personal designate for delivery to the King should anything unfortunate happen to me?"

"You are starting to irritate me, Cordstick!" Laphroig hissed. But he saw the look on the other's face and quickly held up his hands. "All right, all right, whatever you say. Is there anything else you require?"

Cordstick was edging toward the doorway. "I will find the Princess, my Lord. You have my word. But this time I will require a personal guard so as to avoid all the unpleasantness of this past outing. I think perhaps fifty or sixty armed men would ..."

He ducked through the doorway just as the bra.s.s candlestick Laphroig had flung flew past his head and crashed into the wall beyond. The padding of his limping feet could be heard receding into the distance.

Laphroig closed his eyes in an effort to calm himself, and he unclenched his teeth long enough to whisper, "Just find her, you idiot!"

THE VOICE IN THE SHADOWS.

Mistaya returned to work in the Stacks the following morning and did not speak to Thom even once of the voice. She listened for it carefully, but the hours pa.s.sed, and no one called out to her. The longer she waited, the more uncertain she became about what she had heard. Perhaps she had only imagined it after all. Perhaps the shadows and the overall creepiness of the Stacks had combined to make her think she was hearing a voice that wasn't there.

By midday, she was feeling so disillusioned about it that when Thom declared almost an hour early that it was lunchtime, she didn't even bother to argue.

Seated across from each other at the wooden table in the otherwise empty kitchen, they ate their soup and bread and drank their milk in silence.

Finally, Thom said, "You're not still mad at me for yesterday, are you?"

She stared at him, uncomprehending. Yesterday? Had he done something?

"When I told you I didn't want you going back into the Stacks by yourself?" he added helpfully.

"Oh, that!" she declared, remembering now. "No, I'm not mad about that. I wasn't mad then, either. I just wanted to have a look at what was back there because I thought I heard something." She shook her head in disgust. "But I think I must have imagined it."

He was quiet a moment. Then he said, "What do you think you heard, Ellice?"

His face was so serious, his eyes fixed on her as if she might reveal mysteries about which he could only wonder, that she grinned despite herself. "Actually, I thought I heard someone calling."

He didn't laugh at her, didn't crack a smile, didn't change expression at all. "Did the voice say, 'Help me'?"

Her eyes widened, and she reached impulsively for his hand. "You heard it, too?"

He nodded slowly, his shock of dark hair falling down over his eyes. He brushed it away in that familiar gesture. A lot about him was getting familiar to her by now. "I heard it. But not yesterday when you did. I heard it a few weeks ago, before you came."

She leaned forward eagerly, lowering her voice. "Did you go back into the Stacks to see if someone was there?"

"I did. That was when I found myself in the trouble I warned you about yesterday. We were supposed to talk about it last night, but you forgot. I think you were still wondering about the voice when you left me. Am I right?"

She nodded quickly. "I thought about it all night. And I did forget to ask you what happened. Will you tell me now?"

He leaned close as well, taking a careful look about the kitchen. "Two weeks ago, around midday, I heard the voice. Not for the first time, you understand. I'd heard it before, very faint, very far away. I was always alone, working on cataloging the books. I'd made myself believe I was hearing things. But this time, I couldn't ignore it. I went back into the darkest corners of the Stacks when everyone else was eating lunch or off doing something." He had dropped his own voice to a whisper to match hers. "I have good eyesight, so I didn't take any kind of light that might give me away to Pinch. You know how he's always lurking around. Anyway, I had heard the voice very clearly this time. It was saying the same thing, over and over. 'Help me! Help me!' You can imagine how I felt, hearing it pleading like that. I decided to try to track it down."

He paused, glancing left and right once more. "There were Throg Monkeys back there, dozens of them. But they weren't paying any attention to me. They were carrying books, but they didn't seem to be going anywhere. Some of them glanced my way before disappearing back into the shelving. One or two hissed at me. But they do that all the time, and I keep them under control with the whistle. So they let me pa.s.s without trying to stop me. It got darker and more shadowy as I went, and everything seemed to lose shape. Like it was all underwater, except it wasn't, of course. But the Stacks seemed to ripple and s.h.i.+mmer as if they were."

"Did you hear the voice while you were back there?" she interrupted.

He shook his head. "Not once. I listened for it, but didn't hear anything. The farther back I went, the deeper the Stacks seemed to go. I couldn't find the end. I don't mind telling you that it gave me the s.h.i.+vers. But I kept going anyway. I thought I was being silly feeling scared like that. After all, I hadn't been attacked or anything. Nothing had threatened me."

He took a deep breath. "But then something happened. Something grabbed at me. Not like a hand or anything. More like a suction of some kind, pulling at me with tremendous force. It happened all at once, and I lost my footing and fell down. I was being dragged along the floor toward this darkness that looked like a huge tunnel. I started screaming, but it didn't help. I managed to catch hold of one of the legs of the shelving and pull myself up against it. I clung to it with everything I had. Finally, I was able to pull myself back along the shelves until I was out of its grip. It took a long time, and no one came to help me. Which was probably a good thing, because if I'd been caught snooping I don't think I would still be here and I wouldn't have met you."

Mistaya rested her chin in her hands. "So you never did find out about the voice? Or any of the rest of it?"

He shook his head. "I didn't. And I didn't hear it again, either. I kept thinking I would, but I didn't. So I ended up doing what you did. I convinced myself I was mistaken. I knew I wasn't supposed to go back into the Stacks in the first place-His Eminence and Pinch had made that pretty clear. I just chalked the whole thing up to not doing what I had been told and almost paying the penalty for my disobedience. Not that I didn't wonder; I just didn't know what I should do."

"So what do you think we should do now?" she asked him. "Now that I've heard the voice, too. Now that we know something is back there." She watched his face as she said it, curious to measure his response. "Shouldn't we do something?"

He gave her a momentary look of disbelief, and then he grinned. "Of course we should do something. But we have to do it together, and we have to be very careful."

"We should have a better chance if there are two of us," she declared excitedly. "We can protect each other."

"We'd better go in at night, when everyone is asleep. Maybe whatever is back there will be sleeping, too."

She nodded eagerly. "When do we go?"

"Soon as possible, I guess. Tonight?"

She grabbed his hand impulsively and squeezed it. "I like you, Thom of Libiris! I like you a lot!"

To his credit, he blushed bright red and looked immensely pleased.

They spent the afternoon planning their nighttime excursion, talking about it in low voices as they worked on the cataloging of the books, aware that Rufus Pinch was never far away and always listening. They decided they would go in around midnight, when everyone should be sleeping and no one would be working in the Stacks. They would take glow sticks to give them light, since the shelf torches were always extinguished at night, and they would make their way back into the shadowy recesses of the cavernous room until they found its end. If they were lucky, they would hear the voice while they were doing so. If not, they might at least find the back wall and see what was there.

Several times, as their conversation drifted on to other subjects, Thom remarked again that some of the books from the library seemed to be missing. It was impossible to tell which ones because all he had been given to work with by His Eminence was a list of catalog numbers. The only way he could even tell that books were missing was because he couldn't find a match for some of the numbers on the list, and occasionally he noticed gaps in the books on the shelves.

"Why don't they give you the t.i.tles instead of just the numbers?" Mistaya asked him.

He shrugged. "I don't know. His Eminence said I didn't need the t.i.tles, only the numbers. Maybe he was trying to save on ink."

"Did you tell him that there were books missing?"

"I told him. He said that maybe they weren't really missing, that they were just misplaced. But finding any of them would have meant searching the whole of the Stacks, and I don't have that sort of time. I try to keep an eye out for them, but I haven't found any yet."

She thought about it a moment. "Do the catalog numbers have any relations.h.i.+p to one another? If they did, maybe we could figure out what section the missing books came from."

"The numbers are all different. They don't share any common points that I can determine. Hey, would you hand me that book right there? The one with the red lettering on the cover?"

The subject was dropped again, and they continued with their work in silence. Mistaya soon found herself thinking about how long ago and far away her time at Carrington seemed. It wasn't really either one, but it seemed that way thinking on it. From studying the literature, sciences, and history of a world that wasn't even her own to cataloging ancient books in a library no one ever used in a world no one outside her own even knew existed struck her as bizarre. Neither endeavor seemed particularly important to her, nor compelling in a way that made her feel she was using her time well. She had felt trapped at Carrington and she felt trapped all over again here at Libiris. Why couldn't she find a way to make herself feel useful? Why did she feel so adrift no matter what she was doing?

For a moment, a single moment, she thought about leaving and going home. How bad could it be, if she did? She would have to face up to her father's disappointment and possibly his anger. She would have to prepare herself for a heated discussion about what would happen next. But what was the worst that could come out of that discussion? Maybe she would be sent back to Libiris, but maybe not. If she could manage to keep her temper in check and argue logically and forcefully, perhaps she could manage to talk him into having her do something else. Wouldn't that be better than what she was doing now?

Still, that would mean leaving Thom, perhaps for good, and she wasn't quite ready to do that. She liked being with him; even though most of what they did was work, she was having fun.

"Have you ever asked His Eminence for a copy of his master list of the books shelved at Libiris?" she asked after a while, frustrated by finding yet another set of gaps in the shelves.

Thom shook his head. "I don't think he would give it to me."

She stood up abruptly. "Maybe not. But I think it's worth asking. Let me try."

"Ellice, wait," he objected.

"I'll just be a minute," she called back to him, already on her way. "Don't worry, I won't cause trouble."

Without waiting for his response, she crossed the room to the far wall and followed the aisles through the shelving back to the door leading to Craswell Crabbit's office. The Stacks felt huge and empty, and even her soft footfalls echoed in the cavernous expanse. She could not quite shed her distaste for the feelings the library engendered in her.

As she drew closer to her destination, she heard voices from inside. To her surprise, the door was cracked open.

She crept closer, curious now, taking slow, measured steps so as not to give herself away. She could hear Crabbit and Rufus Pinch, their conversation low and guarded. As if they didn't want anyone to hear, she thought. She slowed further. If she was caught sneaking around like this, she would no doubt be tossed through the front door of Libiris instantly.

"... easier if we had them on this side of the wall," Pinch was saying. "Then we wouldn't have to worry about hauling them all back again."

"Easier, yes," His Eminence agreed, "but ineffective for our needs. To work their magic, they need to be right where they are."

"I don't trust our so-called allies," Pinch pressed, his voice a low growl that bordered on a whine. "What if they go back on their bargain?"

"Stop fretting, Mr. Pinch. What possible reason could they have for doing that? They want out, don't they? And not just into Landover. They need me to accomplish that. They don't have the skills and the experience to read the necessary pa.s.sages."

"They might know more than you think."

"They might ..." His Eminence paused. "Mr. Pinch, did you leave that door open when you entered? That wasn't very wise of you. Close it now, please."

Mistaya tiptoed backward as swiftly as she could to where the shelving unit ended and flattened herself against the wall. She held her breath until she heard the door close, then stayed where she was for another few minutes before moving silently away.

When she got back to Thom, he asked, "Any luck?"

"I didn't ask," she told him. She gave him a shrug and what she hoped was a disarming grin. "He was busy with something else."

She thought about the conversation between His Eminence and Pinch for the rest of the afternoon. She was still thinking about it at dinner that night, sitting with Thom, and later when she went to bed.

But when Thom woke her at midnight, leaning close and gently shaking her shoulder until she came awake, it was all forgotten.

"Shhh!" he whispered, putting a finger to his lips. "No talking, no noise at all!"

She was already dressed as she rolled out of her bed and slipped on her boots. The room was dark except for a sliver of moonlight that slanted down through the single high, narrow window on the east wall. She straightened her clothing, retightened her belt, and gave him a nod. He handed her one of the two glow sticks he was carrying, but she didn't light it. By previous agreement, they would work their way into the Stacks in the dark and light the glow sticks when they could no longer see at all.

They slipped from her bedroom with Thom leading the way, their footfalls virtually noiseless in the deep silence. The hallway beyond was empty and dark, and they pa.s.sed down it without seeing or hearing anything or anyone. When they reached the Stacks, Thom held up his hand for a moment while he studied the larger room carefully. She listened as well, but heard nothing. When both were satisfied that it was safe, they slipped from the shadows of the hallway into the cavernous silence of the Stacks.

In the dark upper reaches of the room, something scurried along the beams and was gone. Mistaya exchanged a hurried glance with Thom, but he shook his head. Whatever was up there wasn't interested in them.

They crossed the open s.p.a.ce to the beginning of the shelving aisles and started for the back of the room.

Somewhere behind them, a door opened and closed on squeaky hinges, the sound echoing in the deep silence.

They froze as one, halfway down the aisle at the first set of shelves, eyes peering back over their shoulders, waiting. Mistaya quit breathing for long moments, certain that someone was about to appear. But no one did, and the sound of the squeaking hinges did not come again. They continued to wait, not wanting to make a mistake, to take an unnecessary or foolish risk. If either one decided to call it off, they had agreed, the other would not argue. They would simply wait and try another time.

Finally, long moments later, they looked at each other and nodded wordlessly. The hunt would go on.

Back into the darkness they crept, moving carefully between shelving units that had the feel of confining walls. The small amount of moonlight let in by the high windows at the front of the room slowly faded behind them, leaving the darkness thicker and more impenetrable. At last they could see almost nothing, and they had to feel their way ahead by using the shelves as guide rails.

When the last of the light dimmed to nothing more than a distant glimmer, Thom brought them to a stop. They still hadn't reached the back wall, and there was no indication that they would anytime soon.

"We have to use the glow sticks," he whispered in her ear. "Remember. They only last for two hours, so we have to get back before time runs out."

She nodded that she understood. Together they broke off the tips, and a soft, golden glow spread away in a pool of light that extended about six feet from each bearer. The way forward made clear, they started ahead once more.

By now, Mistaya thought, they must have covered several hundred yards. But that was impossible. The Stacks couldn't be that deep. There had to be magic at work, and she wondered who had set it in place and why. She reached out for its source, but couldn't find it. She also wondered at the blackness of the s.p.a.ce. She seemed to remember from her work in the daytime that windows on both walls extended back for as far as she could see. Why weren't those windows permitting any moonlight to enter the room? She knew the moon was full and the sky clear that night. Was the magic that made the room seem so much larger also blocking the light and cloaking the room in shadows?