Kathleen
sat down on a stool in the Archivist’s room. It was piled up everywhere with
documents, maps and illustrations, so that what had once been a rather large
room was now really quite tiny. A thick
ledger sat on a small desk next to a long quill and ink. Logotheton pulled a
rickety chair from under his desk and sat down on it; they were sitting only
about three feet apart.
‘Sorry’ he said, ‘I seem to have rather
filled this room up, don’t I?’
Kathleen nodded. She just hoped that he knew
where everything was.
‘How can I help you, Dr Mannings?’ he said
politely
‘I’m looking for a booklet or an instruction
manual’
The Archivist pulled out some wire-framed
spectacles from a desk and put them on.
‘Oh…’ he murmured, ‘how unusual – we get very
few requests for that sort of thing’
He looked at Kathleen thoughtfully.
‘Are you sure this is quite the right place?’
he asked, ‘such things often turn up in the second-hand book shops on the
Zephuros Road’
He sat back and considered this more fully.
‘It’s named after the West Wind you know…
it’s definitely worth a bit of a potter…’
‘I’m not sure that I have time to potter at
the moment, I’m afraid’ said Kathleen as patiently as she could manage, ’I’m in
rather a hurry’.
Logotheton smiled and nodded his head
vaguely. Kathleen sighed a little – it was always a waste of time to talk about
hurrying to any Elven scholar.
‘Umm’ he continued, ‘what thing is the manual
for?’
Kathleen saw no point in being coy about
this.
‘It’s a reality still’ she said, and the
Archivist looked confused.
‘Is that a device that slows down time?’ he
ventured.
‘No’ said Kathleen bluntly, ‘it’s a device
for distilling different fractions of reality’
Logotheton considered this for a very long
time, rocking slightly on his chair. For a while Kathleen wondered if he’d
fallen asleep. Then he looked up at her and smiled.
‘I’ve never heard of that’ he said, ‘it must
be something rather specialist… it certainly sounds like something a bit
special, I’d say…do you know who made it?’
Kathleen shook her head and pulled the fading
instruction notes out of her bag. She made to hand them over to the Archivist.
He shook his head briefly.
‘Let me get my gloves first’
He picked up some very fine cloth gloves from
the desk and pulled them on. After that he lifted the ledger from the desk and
placed it very carefully on the only bare patch that he could find on the
floor. Only then did he take the papers, flattening them on the desk and
examining them very carefully.
Kathleen explained where they had come from
and approximately what the still did. He listened very intently all the while
reading and examining the weft and weave of the paper.
‘This document is worth preserving in itself
you know’ he said, admiringly.
Kathleen was momentarily ashamed for having
taped it to her workbench but what was done was done.
‘Let’s see shall we…’ said the earnest young
elf.
He got up and picked his way across the room
to another door, exactly opposite the door where they had originally
entered. They went through it into a
vast room full of ledgers, all of them exactly like the one he had just moved
from his desk. Each ledger was hung up on a cord that was tied at right angles
to thicker central ropes stretched across the room. There were four rows of the
thicker cords and they ran on along the narrow room for as far as Kathleen
could see.
‘Let’s start with atrekeia…’
Logotheton walked along the narrow space
between the suspended ledgers until he came to the right area. He pulled a few
of the books down and pored through them but none of them seemed to be
relevant. He touched his head and turned
back to Kathleen.
‘Let’s look somewhere else, shall we…‘
He tried several more words that meant
‘reality’ in Archaic Elven: entelikheia,
ontotes, huparI, but with no success. Time dragged on and
he began to make noise about stopping for a cup of coffee. Kathleen prodded him
to try something else.
‘Something more do with distilling?’ she
suggested.
‘On to staktos,
then!’ he said, revelling in the sound of the word.
‘I wouldn’t
be surprised if he liked his tipple’, thought Kathleen, ‘something must have
addled his brain’.
He walked back almost the entire length of
the room and repeated the laborious search in his catalogues. The minutes
dragged on and Kathleen wondered if she was wasting her time. She could see the
haystack alright but where was that bloody needle?
‘Eureka!’
he said suddenly, slightly archly. He seemed very pleased with himself, but
then his smile faded as he read on.
‘Oh, right’ he said to himself, ‘oh dear’
Kathleen began to get very curious and
equally worried.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked
Logotheton closed the book and hung it back
on its chord. He looked a little flustered.
‘I have found a reference to a manual for
that device’ he said ‘but it is a particularly unusual and exceptional
apparatus’
‘I know…’ said Kathleen, with a slight edge
in her voice.
‘It seems that the manual is in the ESR’
He let this fact hang meaningfully in the
air. Kathleen was getting increasingly tense and frustrated.
‘What on earth is that?’ she asked
‘I’m sorry’ said the Archivist, ‘I was
forgetting that you wouldn’t know that…’
Kathleen waited. It was a while before he
answered. He seemed to be assessing something in his mind.
‘It’s the Exotic
Stack Room’
‘Which is?’
‘A room at the very bottom of the library
where our special material of… umm… unusual provenance is kept’
Kathleen had had enough of this. It was time
to get to the point.
‘You mean material from Helios don’t you?’
He looked up her, startled but also, she
thought, rather impressed. He thought for a moment or two.
‘Well, yes – indeed – from the Twin Worlds’
‘Why do you keep it there?’ asked Kathleen
Again the Archivist hesitated as if
calculating something.
‘Away from prying eyes’ he explained.
‘Is it dangerous then?’
‘No, not really – but you know’
Kathleen wasn’t sure that she entirely knew
but that really didn’t matter at the moment.
‘Can I see the material?’ she asked directly.
The elf looked at her carefully. He seemed to
be in two minds.
‘I don’t think so… umm… I’m not sure’
‘Why would you exclude me?’ she muttered
crossly
He murmured something quietly that she didn’t
catch.
‘I am a scholar and a Hybitor member’ she
reminded him ‘I think I have a right…’
As she got more indignant his ability to
resist seemed to ebb away. He shrugged
and pulled out a slip of paper from his pocket.
‘You’ll need to show this’ he said handing
her the ticket. Then he pointed to the
door at the end of the room.
‘Go through there and go as far down as you
can. Then you’ll come to a red door – you can’t miss it it’s the only thing at
the end of the staircase’
She put the ticket very carefully in her bag
and began walking towards the door.
‘Oh’ he said,
Kathleen stopped and turned back to talk to
him.
‘Yes?’
’Be ready for a bit of a surprise’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, uncertainly.
‘When you meet the stack librarian…’ he said
‘Why?’
‘She is rather unusual’
‘In what way is she unusual?’
Logotheton smiled a rather self-indulgent
smile.
‘Oh in many ways… now…where should I start?
She is…’
Kathleen turned on her heels and walked
purposefully towards the door. This was getting ridiculous; he was really
beginning to get on her nerves and she was in such a hurry.
‘Thank you, but don’t bother’ she said,
waving a hand at him, ‘I’ll find out for myself’
No comments:
Post a Comment