Legend Of The Lost Librarian

A tale of wilderness, warfare and inconsistent alliteration

Part the First

I. Monty conducts an afternoon's business

The interior of the building that housed the Old Acheron Military Oddments Museum and Krichevskoy Memorial Presidential Library was suitably dank and dim, punctuated only by bright slices of sunlight falling through the faux-weatherbeaten roof. A semi-costly ventilation system pumped the correct amount of dust through the sunbeams, and ersatz clockwork rats scurried unconvincingly underfoot, their living counterparts having long since left to avoid the endless school excursion parties that flooded perennially through the gloomy vestibule.

One such party had been half-heartedly vandalizing the furniture in the sprawling non-fiction wing all afternoon, picking at cushions and stabbing tables with glazed eyes and archetypal demonling pouts. The scrape and whine of their jagged tin uniforms formed a cricket-like hum behind the buzz of conversation. Half the class were draped over dilapidated sofas, either singing out of tune or carefully ostracizing the few pupils who had curled up to read books, and the rest were clustered with the teacher on the floor, smoke pouring from their every cranial orifice, passing around vials of low-grade crack.

From behind her plant-festooned desk, Monty viewed them with tolerant amusement. A brief spurt of nostalgia trickled down her brain. Which cliques had she belonged to in her own distant school years? Had she been a nubile crack-fiend, a layabout, a demure reader? Something in-between, if memory served, which it seldom did. Her eyes followed a gangly zombie youth as he walked repeatedly into a bookcase, swearing inexpertly. The nostalgia was gone as swiftly as it had come, but it was all still a distraction from her awful romance novel. Proofreading this drivel, she reflected, was beginning to take its toll on not only her spare time, but also her vocabulary. There were only so many contrived synonyms for "tentacle", and she didn't want to know most of them.

An expiring rat ran into her foot, which had slipped aimlessly out of its shoe. She started a little, and reached down to re-wind its key, but jerked her hand back as, with a splintering "ping", the entire mechanism was efficiently dispatched by the rhododendron in the bottom drawer. Sixty hell on the expense account for a new rat. Another twenty-five to buy a preventive muzzle for the plant, which she should have done long ago. Perhaps another hundred and ten to buy a nicer pair of shoes for, er, work-related trauma. She smiled ruefully. Having sole charge of this run-down government-funded obsolescence had to have some perks.

Monty, it should be noted, had been Netherworld Citadel's sole presiding librarian of non-pornographic literary and military antiquities for approaching seventy-four years. The pay was moderate, the prerequisite qualifications were non-existent and the hours were utterly at her discretion. For a bookish lilim who sailed to complacent success at high school (much to her mother's consummate shame) there were simply no other job openings. She had given the museum-cum-library her time, her unswerving attention and even a diffident liking, and it had given her a place to sleep and reasonable pocket-money, a wealth of useless trivial knowledge, and little wrinkles around the corners of her eyes that belied her relatively young age. A decent trade, as far as she was concerned.

Her backstory was interrupted by a yell, louder than usual. One of the rowdier demons, his grin reaching past his horns, had taken hold of a book-reading fellow-pupil by the ankle and was attempting to light them on fire. She sighed resignedly and shot him in the fourth buttock with the small silver filigree crossbow that resided in the drawer beneath the "Hammer Ineffectually For Service" bell. The hubbub subsided markedly.

She leaned her elbows on the desk by the window, blinking at the sun, doodling on the back of her hand with a magnifying glass, wrinkling her nose at the smoke. The sight of young school demons rampaging through her shelves had once caused her far more worry - but that was before she took the elementary precaution of replacing all the actually valuable or irreplaceable books with dummies. No-one except the late Overlord had really been remotely interested in reading. He had in fact founded the library himself, while in the throes of his last illness; the "Memorial" tag had been a maudlin joke at his own expense. As was the funding - his estate paid the modest upkeep, which was comprised chiefly of Monty's salary and enough spare dosh to keep down the topological genus of the already colander-like roof. The other wing of the building, which housed the war museum, had been derelict for centuries immeasurable. Monty liked it that way; it was nice to be able to tell which exhibits you'd already visited purely by the disturbances in the dust.

The writing on her hand, soot black against the blue, now read "Gahhhhhh", with half another H trailing lazily away down her index finger. She dropped the magnifying glass absently, licking her hand to clear the burn. Her genus of demon typically had skin which carbonized lightly on the surface under extreme temperature and healed swiftly - it was useful for jotting down notes, although in her adolescence she'd often been thankful she wasn't into tattoos, as they would have lasted less than a week. Gahhhhhh? Presumably this rather limp erotica was boring her subconscious to tears. She looked balefully at the book out of the corner of her eye, wondering who would buy the bloody twaddle once the silk-shirt-'n'-dressing-gown-wearing ponce of an author deigned to release it. Probably, depressingly enough, thousands and thousands of twits.

Then, as often happened, her senses suddenly prickled. There was a certain palpable (if ineffectual) kind of menace about that open page. Behind the dull print, the plain black letters describing an improbably steamy diorama, there was something in the paper, between the thin fibres of reconstituted wood. A potent phrase from a human text she had flipped through once sprung to her mind. "When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you." She felt somehow that the book was looking back.

Whether consciously registering an antagonistic presence, or in simple annoyance at the book she had been scouring grimly for syntactical errors all day, she picked up a pen and jabbed it irritably at the page, leaving a neat little puncture and a mess of ink. The tension felt suddenly deflated. Her mind had already wandered back to the sunbeam, but she found herself suddenly thinking that maybe the book wasn't so bad after all; it was trash, sure, but it would appeal to its target demographic, and she'd get a nice cheque for wetnursing it to completion. She could even swear that there were fewer spelling mistakes than she remembered on the ink-blotted page.

II. Naps and catastrophes

The class had left. Monty had said the customary badbyes to the teacher, the second sentence she'd voiced aloud all day. The teacher acknowledged her with a flicker of his five crack-ravaged eyes, and shepherded the class out of the vestibule. One or two were actually gnawing on books as they went, but she didn't bother to retrieve them; they were from the teen fiction section. She had no illusions about the fact that the library now served the general populace only as an "etiquette"-training ground for if they ever should find themselves in a human or Celestian library. Buck it up there, you, you're supposed to eat them, not read them! The cosmopolitan view that three worlds' worth of reading had endowed her with sometimes made her feel that it was all a bit silly - how desperately the Netherworld strove to be the other worlds' polar opposite. Even demons could fathom the idea that actual food was a lot more palatable than books.

The sunbeams had dimmed noticeably as the afternoon wore on, and the rats had all wound down in inaccessible corners. Without the sun on her desk, she felt less languid and more inclined to just trudge upstairs and take a nap. There were no scheduled visits for the rest of the day, and casual patrons were almost unheard of. It wouldn't make any difference to anyone if she just took the afternoon off.

She gave her desk a perfunctory tidy, sweeping papers into the nearest drawers, kicking the wobbly leg of the chair back into a vertical position. A glance out the window confirmed that it was now quite overcast; there was even a patchy bank of fog tickling its way around the floating islands to the east. She yawned widely, revealing several rows of tiny triangular teeth, and snapped her mouth shut again with a satisfied click. A cold breeze was beginning to filter under the door-jam, and she wanted to be in bed before the chilly air woke her up again.

At a hand-clap, a narrow wooden ladder of highly untrustworthy appearance descended from the ceiling, and she began to climb. The ladder was a pain in the rump, but useful - it ensured that she was always tired enough to sleep soundly by the time she reached her room. She ascended through a troposphere of dust, a stratosphere of cobwebs and a thick wood-paneled mesosphere, finally clambering out on to the rough yellow carpet of her attic.

It wasn't a terribly demon-ish room; the spikes, syringes and sundry stabbing implements were displayed to a bare minimum, and the general demeanour was of cosy claustrophobia. Two huge, brooding bookcases dominated one wall, filled mostly with the rarities she'd rescued from downstairs. The table by her blanket-tangled nest of a bed had a plate on it, a small remainder of the cake she'd had the day before. She plumped herself down on the bed and stabbed it vigourously with a spoon. It had always been a childhood superstition of hers that the harder you jammed your cutlery into food, the better it tasted.

As her mouth concentrated on chewing the cake - which was indeed pretty good - a seldom-thought-of idea ran through her mind, looking for something substantial to connect to, but her head had already sunk into the pillow. She felt relaxed, at ease, and somehow powerful. A good day for lazing. All things considered, she had it pretty good here. A nice room, a steady job, a big old musty shack of knowledge... she was queen of the roost. Mistress of all she surveyed. Her eyes closed, and she was standing on the crest of a wave - no, the pages of a book - and tiny screaming imps in silk shirts and dressing gowns were scattering over the text, fleeing the waves of flame she dispensed with a flick of her finger.

Bang!

She rolled over irritably, partially awake again, grumbling and flapping a dismissive hand over her shoulder. If an ornament had fallen off a shelf, or a dire-pigeon had slammed itself into her window, she didn't want to know.

Bang! Thud!

Oh, the door. Sodding door.

Wump, clang, bang, rattle.

"Coming," she half-shouted, half growled. She unwound herself grouchily from the bedclothes and levered herself onto the floor. A glance at the clock revealed that she'd only managed to catch twenty minutes' sleep. She jammed her monocle back into her eye and patted disinterestedly at her hair.

Either not having heard her, or simply for the bloody-minded fun of it, the visitor continued to hammer away as she scrambled down the ladder. She strode through the vestibule and yanked the thick oak door open, with a snarl of "What?"

Her eyes, pointing level, surveyed an empty street. She hissed angrily, then felt a tentative prod at her knee, and looked down. A small Prinny, barely up to her waist, was standing on the doorstep, shifting his weight awkwardly from flipper to flipper. He had numerous official seals tucked into his pouch and an authoritative-looking clipboard of notes, but looked most alarmed to find himself face-to-leg with a bleary-eyed, tousled, barefoot and distinctly cross librarian.

"B-b-bad afternoon, m-miss, dood," he stammered, clicking his beak as sharply as the stitches would allow. He gulped, and by a palpable effort, seemed to regain some of his bureaucratic composure. "I represent the Citadel Planning and Destruction Committee, and I've been instructed to serve you this notice, dood."

Monty fixed him with a blank stare. "A notice?"

The Prinny shuffled nervously. "F-for relocation and demolition in two weeks' time, dood."

"I beg your pardon?"

He held forth the clipboard, rummaging through pages. "Here. This site's zoned for development, dood. See, on this, er, schematic. This whole disused block is being torn down, dood."

A cold sweat was beginning to prickle at the nape of Monty's neck. "Disused? I live here!"

The Prinny moved back almost imperceptibly, obviously anxious to preserve his skin. "Y-you've been assigned compensatory housing, dood." He rifled frantically through the clipboard. "Ah! In the Malbowges. One-room flat with all inconveniences. Excellently bad part of town, dood, er, miss."

Monty, who loathed the Malbowges, was not mollified. Her hands clenched. "This museum is a historic building and a ward of the estate of the late King Krichevskoy!" she hissed, bending down to stare the Prinny in the eye. "Does your two-bit planning committee know that? What will the Assembly say to this?"

The Prinny dropped his eyes, his voice taking on a note of sympathy. "I'm sorry, dood - miss. The Overlord has cut your funding. He's been lobbied by the businesses who took over the lease of the site. He's been trimming down a lot of his father's estate, miss. The museum's not a museum any more."

She sat down numbly in the doorway, staring fixedly at the battered floor. "What are they going to build here when I'm gone?" she heard herself ask quietly.

He coughed. "A joint amalgamation of Zarathustra's Haute Couture and House Of Needless Punching Ltd., miss."

A hopeless chuckle escaped her lips. "How can I compete? Look, you, what ever your name is..."

"Wesley, dood."

"Wesley. Cancel the compensatory accommodation, I think I'll move out of town." She adjusted her teeth into a suitable formation to lie through. "Move on. Been in the citadel a while. Get out into the country, smell a bit of fresh sulphur again. Two weeks, you say?"

He nodded.

"What provision is made for removal of my personal effects?"

Wesley lowered his squawky voice another few decibels. "Anything you want, dood. The land is all the developers want. You can take the chairs, the curtains, the carpet, if you can carry it."

The helpless rage was suddenly diluted by another emotion. She fought to keep her face straight, and patted Wesley's plush head. "Didn't you used to come here for school a few years back? I'm sure I remember you hunting through the cartography section."

The Prinny now looked quite openly sad. "Yes, d-miss."

She rose, smiling a little, and took him by the flipper. "I'd hate to see every little thing here go to waste. Is there a book you'd like to have and take with you? An atlas or anything?"

Wesley nodded fervently, and she led him into the vestibule. He trod as carefully as though he were entering a tomb.

Here ends Part the First.