Art Pact 103

We entered the library through the third-floor window. Either the ground had piled up around it or the entire building had sunk, so that the windowsill was actually about a foot below ground level, and we were forced to step down and bend awkwardly to get under the upper half of the sliding window frame - empty of glass except for a few shards trapped around its edge, but held solidly in place by some hidden nail or perhaps a warping of the outer frame. As I passed underneath it I felt my back scratch across the underside, and a shower of paint flakes fell behind me.

"Careful," Taspet said. I rolled my eyes at her, then stepped down onto a chair on the other side of the window and then to the debris-littered floor of an administrator's office. She clambered in behind me, and Raffla behind her, and it was only when we were all in that I realised that the chair was not where I might have expected it to be.

"Someone's been here before."

"They can't have been," Raffla scoffed. "No-one knows about this place."

"We know about it."

"Correction. I know about it. You two only know because I told you. I didn't tell anyone else, ergo no-one else knows."

She crossed the office to an empty door frame on the opposite side from the window/entrance, stepping over a pile of painted wood slats that I assumed must have once been the door. In the doorway she peeked left and right, and after a moment beckoned us to follow her.

"Yes," she said, leading us to the right, "this is correct."

"Correct for what? I thought you said you hadn't been in here."

"Correct for what I read, correct for what's in the book."

The corridor was less messy than the office, but I began to discount my theory about the earth being piled up around the building - something serious had clearly happened, and I was all too ready to believe that the whole edifice had simply sunk three stories into its own basements or foundations. I wondered exactly how far down the constructions had gone, and whether the building had bottomed out or was just waiting for some extra provocation - some extra weight, perhaps the weight of three young women, one of above-average mass - before continuing its journey downward. The place seemed stable enough, but no doubt that was what the original occupants had thought, and where were they now?

We passed the evidence of the cataclysm: great swathes of plaster fallen away from walls to reveal breeze-block beneath, areas where the ground was littered with rotting ceiling tiles that had tumbled out of metal grids above our heads. In those formerly hidden levels were pipes and wires, some still shiny, some torn, some broken under the force of the impact. In more than one place it looked as though the appetizing plastic covers of electrical wiring had been chewed through by pests, and from far in the distance we could hear the echoing sound of water trickling out of a broken pipe and splashing onto bare concrete. If it had been as long since the incident as Raffla claimed, I would not have been surprised to find holes washed in the floor by erosion. But at the next junction we turned away from the noise and into the stacks. Taspet and I gasped in astonishment, and even Raffla seemed overawed by what she had led us to.

The stacks extended from ground floor all the way up to the very tip of the building, eighteen floors above if Raffla's information was to be believed. It was not a single unified room, more like a series of ring-shaped levels looking out onto a central space which kept the same diameter from top to bottom, so that as the girth of the library increased the ratio of open air to floor decreased. Near the top there was almost nothing - just circular bookcases lining the wall of the building, with a thin walkway beneath them as floor. On the next floor down the walkway was slightly wider, and so on until where we came in there was enough room on the walkway that it could no longer truly be considered a walkway, more a floor, and simple freestanding bookcases were arranged radially in two concentric circles in addition to the books that lined the outer wall. The library floor would have been even bigger were it not for the administrative offices that ringed the stacks - unique to this floor (again, if Raffla was to be believed, but we soon confirmed it), making a sort of constriction in the otherwise unimpeded flow of books.

"Mother of god," Taspet whispered - then, louder: "It's going to take us forever to find it. I mean, it could be anywhere."

"Not anywhere," I told them. "They'll be in some kind of order. Well, most of them..."

Plaster and ceiling tiles, of course, had not been the only things that the fall had dislodged. A surprising number of books had remained in their shelves - tightly packed by some harried cataloguer, no doubt - but perhaps ten percent, perhaps twenty, had been knocked out of place and fallen greater or lesser distances. On the third floor the floor shelves had occasionally fallen over entirely themselves, spilling their contents in great slicks of paper before them, and around the edge of the level there was a steady ring of books that had been thrown clear of the wall shelves. A short trip to the edge of the opening in the floor confirmed what I had suspected - that the top two or three levels of the library had lost a great deal of their contents directly into the open shaft, and they formed a forlorn mountain of books on the ground floor, a mountain down whose sides white drifts of literature and science slowly ground.

"Better hope it's still on the shelf," Taspet said glumly. "I don't think we've enough food to search all that."

"If it's anywhere," I said, "it'll be on the shelf still. It's that kind of book."

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