Chapter 8

Now, I’ve been caught breaking into enough places in the past to know that the usual reaction to someone catching you is not smiling. Generally, I run away, but clearly, this lady had a different strategy. She paced up to me, eyes looking me up and down with an appraising gaze that felt oddly familiar. She was a mage of some sort, based on the colourful menagerie of fabrics that made up her clothes. The multicoloured robes were almost glaring to the eye. Even her hat, a broad-brimmed and pointy-topped thing, was a swirling mix of blue, green and red. Her accomplice at least had the decency to dress in more muted colours. Of course, he was still rolling around and wheezing on the ground, so it may have just been dirt.

“Are you going inside?” The woman blurted the question out excitedly, still smiling. She was starting to look almost giddy.

“Yes-What? Why?” I replied, caught off guard once more.

“Great, we need your help, can you get a book for me?”

“Why?”

The woman grimaced. “Well, we may-be, sort of, got banned.” The second human appeared at her side, still puffing a little, and shot her a disgruntled glance. He was of average height and build, with dark blond hair and slight features. The guy looked more like a noble than a common thief.

“For life.” He added, his voice confirming my suspicions. He had the unmistakable accent of Garrowgreim’s upper classes, albeit poorly disguised. So not just a noble, but a noble not wanting people to know who he was.

“How do you possibly get banned for life from a library?” I cried. I wasn’t sure if I should have been aghast or impressed.

“They said we may have returned a few books that were damaged.” The woman tugged at a wayward strand of auburn hair, clearly embarrassed.

“Damaged?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Yeah, a little rip, maybe a tiny bit bent.” She admitted with a wince.

“Or missing pages.” Added her friend.

“Muddied.”

“Burned.”

“The ones the basilisk shredded?”

“Oh! And that one I spilled tea on!”

“I’d forgotten about that one.”

“Honestly I think that one got them the angri-”

“So, you were trying to sneak in, to steal a book?” I interrupted, sensing they were nowhere near the end of the list.

“No!” the woman cried, aghast, “We’re not thieves! We were just going to borrow one for a bit. We’d bring it back!”

“Righhhhhhht.” I nodded skeptically, “Well the offer is tempting, really, but I’m afraid I’m gonna have to decl-”

“We can pay you.” The dirty noble interrupted.

“How much?” I replied immediately.

“20 silver!” the woman exclaimed, a smile exploding onto her face. Her companion blanched.

“Rima, no! That’s way too much!”

“Deal!” I said, not wanting to give the guy a chance to knock the amount down to something more reasonable. I’ve made far less doing way shadier stuff, 20 silver for checking out a library book is easy money. “What book is it?”

“Hold on,” The guy pulled her back, giving me a cautious glance before continuing in hushed tones, no doubt assuming I couldn’t hear them. How humans ever hear anything with their useless ears is beyond me. “You’re just going to trust some kid we don’t know? He could be a criminal!”

“Oh, right, because we’ve heard all those stories about teenaged criminals that wander around the city with books hanging out of their bags.” I glanced down, and sure enough, the spine of a book was poking out of my satchel. She continued. “I think he seems trustworthy; besides, we need that book. Unless you have a better idea, Fitzy?”

“He could have stolen them, you don’t know.” The man, -Fitzy?- grumbled. It seemed he didn’t have a better idea. The woman, Rima, turned back to me.

“Can you grab A Comprehensive Guide to Shapeshifting Monsters, it shouldn’t be too hard to find.” She smiled again, and I felt as if my heart fell into my stomach.

-

The voice in my head that normally tries its hardest to stop me from being an idiot started jabbering, but the thought of 20 silver pieces in my pocket overruled its completely reasonable and entirely valid concerns. Horrible coincidences and disconcerting irony be damned, the greed had its hooks in me.

So what if they wanted me to check out a book that had me as a subject, that doesn’t mean anything, right? If anything, it would have been more suspicious to refuse after hearing the title. I should have minded my own business and ignored them. Still, there was nothing actively concerning about what they wanted. All I had to do was check a book out and lend it to the pair of them. It wasn’t even anything actively illegal. I didn’t think. Believe it or not, library fraud isn’t exactly a criminal enterprise I’m familiar with.

I pushed past the broad hardwood doors and into the library itself, avoiding the usual crowd of students, clerks, pages, and bureaucrats that swamped the entrance of the building. In addition to its usual lending services, the place also served as an archive for the city, and housed documents and records that went back to its founding. Beyond the doors was a large, open foyer, lit by a mixture of skylights and magic lanterns that lined the walls stretching up towards the cavernous ceiling.

Doors led off in a multitude of directions, all labelled and marked to prevent unwary and unaccustomed newcomers from getting lost amongst the stacks. Librarians and their assistants hurried through the crowds as well, distinct thanks to their billowing white robes which served as a sort of uniform. Rank and seniority were demarcated by colourful bands embroidered onto their sleeves. Junior assistants had no bands, senior assistants had a single blue one, and junior librarians had two blue bands. Senior librarians had one red, archivists had a green band, while researchers had yellow. This system seemed to be the same most everywhere, as far as I’d seen. If there were other ranks, I’d never seen them. No doubt there were, likely sequestered away from prying plebian eyes such as mine.

I wasn’t too out of place, despite my appearance. To anyone who had the time to take notice of me I probably looked like just another page, fetching something for a master far too busy and important to do their own errands. I was too young to be a student and dressed too casually to be a noble or anyone’s assistant. The golden rule of blending into places- keep your gaze level, expression grim, and act as if you’re exactly where you belong. It does wonders.

I made it up to the counter that handled donations, dodging through the groups of assembled intellectuals with my usual ease. It was connected to the counter for returns, made distinct by a little metal divider and a distinct lack of patrons. There was one person at the counter already, a mercifully small queue compared to the snaking lines that led to the multitude of check-in and return stations. He was a slouched, crooked spine old man clad in the blue-grey robes of a senior city bureaucrat, complaining loudly about getting books back, oddly enough. Something about a donation being made in error, thanks to a new and apparently extremely incompetent junior clerk.

Despite his clearly senile ramblings becoming rather repetitive in content, I only had to wait a few minutes before he turned and stomped off, scowling crossly through his smudged bottle-bottom glasses. I took his place in front of the station, smiling a greeting at the weary-eyed woman behind the counter.

“Hello, I’m here to make a donation.” I pulled the satchel up over my head and plonked it down onto the wooden surface before me. “In the name of Mae Carter.”

“Alright, let's take a look.” She slipped on a pair of slight glass spectacles and began to unpack the pouch. Her expression grew unimpressed as she took stock of its contents, realizing the damaged and broken nature of the so-called ‘donations’. A good number of them had been fully ripped in half. One of the poetry books was missing its spine entirely “Well, we do accept any donation, no matter the condition, but this is…” She paused, “Stretching it, a bit.”

“Well, we had a bit of an incident at our bookstore, and we figured that rather than throwing these works out, we’d bring them here. After all, if anyone can restore them, it’s you guys.” I spoke the lie as naturally as one might breathe, not even fully thinking it out before I started talking. Matched with an apologetic smile that I hoped was charmingly crooked, it seemed to do the trick. She shrugged and handed me the bag back.

“Very well, thank you for your donation.”

-

Content that my original errand was complete, -despite the clerk’s grumblings-, I took my leave and disappeared into the depths of the library. Away from the entrance and the main reading areas, the library became the quiet refuge I had come to expect. I wandered up and down the aisles, taking my time as I savoured the dusty smell of the shelves and their contents. Everything I loved about Mae’s shop was present tenfold in that place, and I was in no rush to return to the two weirdos outside too quickly.

Something about them gave me an off feeling. Ok, a different kind of feeling from the usual ones I get around, well, people. It was more the sort I get when I feel like I should have realized something but haven’t consciously figured out what yet. The woman was clearly eccentric, and not just because of her outfit. The tome they were after wasn’t exactly rare I’d managed to read one myself some time ago down south, but it's not exactly casual reading. The guy was likely an adventurer, and that alone was enough to put me on edge with the pair. If he was a monster hunter, I’d bet ducats to dragons that she was one as well. Which was just great.

Considering the events of the day before, I should have been avoiding their ilk like the plague, but 20 silver is 20 silver.

That amount of money probably wasn’t much to some people, but when you tend to spend each day preparing for the next time you have to make a break for the city limits, it’s a nice little nest egg to set aside. Or I could spend it. Drinking was always fun, but a risk, given that I’d been run out of more than one town after letting my disguise slip because I was too drunk. Still, it was worth it sometimes just to get away from my own thoughts for a time.

I passed through the library’s halls like a ghost, avoiding the handful of staff and other patrons that wandered the corridors and aisles alongside me. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I thought it might be a good idea to avoid them anyway, just to mitigate any risk of them stopping me. Yes, I wasn’t breaking any rules, but getting stopped still meant talking to someone, and I felt like I’d talked to more people in the last two days than I had for months. People are exhausting.

I found the magical biology section, sequestered away in a far corner of the magical sciences section. The shelves lost their uniformity as I pressed onwards, regressing into jumbles of bookcases clustered together, separated by piles of paper and leather, disorganized and unkempt. Whoever was in charge of this section was clearly doing a poor job. The organization system quickly broke down, and I had to resort to searching each shelf I came across to see if its contents were of the same ilk as my target. For the most part, the shelves themselves remained sorted, organized alphabetically by title, but from one bookcase to the next, chaos reigned.

The section was poorly lit, as the magical lamps attached to walls and shelves were dim and flickering. It was as if they hadn’t been recharged for some time. No windows were present, so there was no natural light either. If it wasn’t for my natural dark-vision, I’d have been almost completely blind. Still, I might as well have been blind, for my search for the book was fruitless. I even dug through a few of the book piles, hoping to find it buried underneath, with no luck. With a sigh, I started off down a row of shelves in search of a librarian. I could suffer through one more conversation if it meant getting back home in a reasonable time. I didn’t have all day to tear through the place after all.

The tip of my boot tapped something, and my attention was dragged away from searching to focus on the floor in front of me. A notebook, the sort that half the junior librarians seemed to be carrying around, bound with thin leather straps rather than glue and fibres. I picked it up, eyes straining in the dim light to read what was scribbled across the page it was opened to. It was a list, a series of book titles, likely works that the notebook’s owner was fetching for a superior. Almost all of the titles on the list had been crossed off, a thin line of pencil scratched through the letters. The sixth and final book, The Academic Appendix for Carnivorous Cavernous Flora, had the beginnings of a line drawn through it, but the line jerked down halfway through the words, scratching all the way off the bottom of the page.

A chill ran up my spine. That wasn’t the sort of thing somebody would forget or misplace. To find it so carelessly dropped in the middle of an empty section of the library, it let a lingering dread creep its way into my thoughts. I went to turn around and leave, my instinctual cowardice overruling my greed. If those two wanted the damn book so bad they could get it themselves, I wasn’t about to tangle with something that gave me a bad feeling in a library, that’s just common sense. I was getting out of there, 20 silver be damned.

I saw it as I turned, nestled in between Abyssal Spirits of the Rendish Mountains and Accepted Biological Facts Regarding Southern Continental River Demons. It was a Mimic, right where the final book on the list was supposed to be. And it was staring right at me.

To a human, it no doubt looked like the book it had replaced, maybe even down to the page contents. Mimics are tricky like that; they can replicate the inanimate objects they pretend to be to such a degree that humans have yet to figure out a way to tell them apart. Before they take a bite at you, that is. As much as the damn things are good at blending in, they’re also incredibly impatient and tend to attack as soon as they can. I barely had time to react before the damn thing leapt at me, the space where its spine had been splitting apart to reveal row after row of pale yellowish teeth, razor-sharp and dripping with saliva.

If I hadn’t been able to see it for what it was beforehand, it would have taken a chunk out of my forehead before I had a chance to react. It shifted out of its bookish form as it leapt, changing into a greyish-purple blob of a creature that seemed a bit like a mixture between a raccoon, a rabid wolf, and a lump of wet clay, with sickly green-slitted eyes that looked at me with a dangerous hunger.

Since I’d had at least a little time to see the thing before it attacked, it didn’t take a chunk out of my forehead. I stumbled back and away from it just in time, its jaws slicing through a few strands of my forelock instead. My back hit the shelf, and I grabbed a book blindly, swinging it at my attacker with as much strength as I could muster.

That wasn’t all that much strength mind you, but the combination of my panic and the fact the book I grabbed was The Enterprising Monstrologists Guide to Dragons, Large and Small -Vol.26, -a tome roughly the size and weight of four bricks strapped together- meant that I was able to wack the Mimic with a satisfying crunch. It screeched and made to flee; its ambush ruined. It skittered towards the space between the bottom shelf and the floorboards. A second, perhaps more vengeful blow stopped it in its tracks, and reduced its squeal to a gurgle. It was likely dead at that point, or at least not far off. Still, I hit it a few more times for good measure. Just to be sure. Seven, to be exact.

I sat there for a good moment, panting heavily, the book still clutched in white-knuckled hands, held aloft over the twitching mimic, daring it to move again. It did not. Content it was dead, I let the heavy tome slip from my hands. It landed on top of the mimic, stained black and slightly bent at the spine.

Distant voices dragged my attention away from the thing’s corpse. They were getting closer, no doubt drawn by the sounds of my brief scuffle. It hadn’t seemed that loud to me. Had I screamed? Maybe I had, or maybe they had heard the thumping of me killing the stupid creature. It could have been either, sound travels far in such a quiet place after all. I pulled myself up, making sure I didn’t have any blood on me. As I stood, the section of the bookshelf at my eye level caught my attention. There, sitting alone on an empty section of shelving, was A Comprehensive Guide to Shapeshifting Monsters. I snatched it up and ran.