The Library of Other Pages

The Library smelled the way Isolde had always hoped heaven would, and it frightened her more than the wolves.

She stood at the top of a flight of marble steps, with her notebook hugged to her chest and a hundred years of dust shining in the light, and looked down into an ocean of books. They rose in tiers. They rose in galleries, in balconies and mezzanines and spiral stairs, up and up through a vast shadowy dome whose summit she could not see, and every wall was lined with shelves, and every shelf was packed with spines. Gold-lettered spines. Cracked brown calf. Cloth in faded blue and green. A sea of them, moving faintly in the dim, as the surface of a lake moves when the wind is over it.

There was no sound but a distant ticking, like a thousand clocks in a thousand rooms.

"Oh," said Odile, in a very small voice.

"Aye," said Brannoc. "Mind your hands."

"I haven't touched anything!"

"That's the way. Keep it so."

Isolde did not say anything. She was looking at the long central aisle, which ran away between the galleries like a river, lit by lamps of green glass on tall bronze stands. She was looking at the endless ranks of reading tables, each with its own small lamp and its own empty chair. And she was looking, with a hunger that she was not at all ashamed of, at the nearest shelf, where a small fat volume in red morocco lay open on a lectern, and the pages turned over very slowly by themselves.

Don't, she told herself. You're a scholar. You know what happens to scholars who forget their manners.

She tore her eyes away.

"The rule's here somewhere," she said. "It'll be written. A thing like this has a proprietress, and a proprietress has a desk."

…

The desk was at the foot of the stairs.

It was a great dark half-moon of carved walnut, with a brass lamp and a brass bell and a ledger, and behind it, on the wall, a mural of fading gold leaf showing a woman with a lantern and a book. There was no librarian. There was only a chair, empty, pushed back, as if someone had risen to answer a question and not returned. Across the front of the desk, in worn inlaid letters of ivory, ran a verse.

She read it with her lips moving. She was almost sure what it would be.

Stacks of stories, row on row,

Every life you didn't know.

Open yours to any page;

Read the youth and read the age.

Much you'll learn, and much you'll mourn,

Selves you might have been, unborn.

Every ending's closed with ink:

Read the last, and drown, and sink.

Other selves will ask you in;

Take the page, and wear their skin.

Never read your final line;

Stop before the closing sign.

End the book, and shut it tight;

Leave the Library by night.

She did not have to count. She had known the shape of it, as one knows the end of a tune. S. O. M. E. O. N. E.

"Someone," said Isolde.

It dropped out of her like a stone down a well. She stood perfectly still. All around her in the dim the great clock-ticking went on, patient and unhurried. A page turned. A lamp guttered.

"What is locked away cannot heal until someone," she said, and heard her own voice shake.

"Someone," repeated Valerian, from behind her.

He had been silent since the Aviary. He came up beside her now at the desk, and put out his bandaged hand, and laid it flat on the ivory inlay, over the last two letters. He was gazing at the word. He had the look of a man listening to a distant bell.

"Someone does what?" said Brannoc.

"That's the end of the clause." She turned a page of the notebook. "Until someone. Someone has to do something. Someone has to be somewhere, or say something." She chewed her lip. "It's an agent. A person. It's not a fate or a moment. Somebody has to act."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"A Stray?" suggested Odile.

"Perhaps." She looked at Valerian. "Perhaps not."

He did not meet her eyes.

…

Each of them had a book.

She had read that on a brass plaque on the wall: Every visitor to the Library finds their volume waiting in the Atrium. It had seemed a harmless piece of poetic fancy. It was not. Down the central aisle, ranked on a long marble table like an offering, lay a row of books, each bound in plain gray cloth and each stamped on the cover with a name. She saw Odile Mary Pruett. She saw Brannoc Aldhelm Rook. The old man looked at his, and his single eye went hard, and he walked away and stood with his back to it.

Odile picked hers up.

She did it with a kind of horrified glee. She turned two pages. She read a line. She let out a squeak, clapped the book shut, and held it against her chest with her face as red as a beetroot.

"What does it say?" said Isolde.

"I'm a countess!"

"Are you?"

"In one of them! In one I married a man with a moustache!" She was giggling helplessly. "And he was awful, Isolde, he was dreadful, he had a monkey. I don't think I'd like to be a countess. I think I'll keep being a scullion."

"I think that's wise."

"I think so too." The giggles stopped. Odile looked down at the gray cover and ran her thumb across it. "There's one where Nan lives. Another one. She doesn't die. She gets to see me turn eighteen." Her voice wobbled. "I'm not going to read that one. I can tell. I'm not going to let myself."

"Good girl."

"But I know it's there."

Isolde found her own at the end of the table.

Isolde Marguerite Hale. It was a small, thick book, in plain gray, with the dust of a hundred years upon it. She stood with her hands at her sides and looked at it for a long time. Her fingers did not want to move. Everything in her that was a reader, a collector, a lover of the written page, urged her to open it, and everything that was a survivor said no.

She opened it.

…

The first page was her own handwriting.

It was a young hand, round and careful, a child's. My name is Isolde. I am seven. This is my book. She turned the leaf, and there was a girl in a pinafore standing at a counter on Tallow Lane with a cat in her arms, and above her a clockmaker's sign. She turned again. A boy of twelve, with ink on his chin, teaching her a verb. A grave, stout professor with spectacles on his forehead. A hundred rooms. A hundred days. She saw it as one sees a river from a high bridge, the whole bright length of it, all at once.

And she saw that it was not the river.

It was a river. There were others. The pages branched. She turned a leaf and found herself in a house she did not know, a tall narrow house with white curtains, where a woman who looked a good deal like herself, in a green dress and a lace cap, was rocking a baby by a window. There was a ring on her hand. A husband stood in the door, laughing. She turned on. The woman was older. The baby was a boy of ten, then a man; and the walls were hung with children. She turned, and turned, and read of a long happy dull life lived entirely among people she had never met.

Not mine, she thought. Not me.

She turned again.

A different house. A different woman. This one sat at a desk in the Sanctum, in a black gown, with a silver lantern at her throat. She was very straight and very pale. She had the Prioress's seal on her finger. She read in her ledger, and wrote in it, and sang with the choir at midnight, and never once looked up. Isolde Hale, Archivist of the Quiet Hour, said the page. Beloved of the Order. Sister of an afflicted child, whose bed she tends daily, and who is, by the Prioress's mercy, never quite allowed to die.

She shut her eyes. She opened them.

She turned the leaf.

Isolde Hale, said the page, at the Library.

…

It was a third version of herself.

She knew it at once. It sat in a chair at the long table, across from her own, in the dim green lamplight, with a book open before it. It wore the gray dress and the ink-stained shoes. It had her braid. It had her notebook in its lap and a charcoal stub in its fist and a smudge of black on the end of its nose. It looked up as she looked, and smiled, and the smile was gentle and sad.

"There you are," said the other Isolde.

"You're not real."

"No. I'm a page." She tipped her head toward the book. "A turning-over. A path you didn't take. I'm the one who, in the cathedral, didn't open the little door. I never found the black key. I never found him." She smoothed the paper with a fingertip. "I went home."

"Home?"

"With the Lantern Company. With Gideon. He was very kind." The other Isolde looked up. She had the green-gray eyes. They were clear and tired. "I was clever. I said I'd made a covenant with the Overseer, and then I thought about it, and I realized it was a trap. So I broke it. At the next threshold. I told him: I'm sorry. I cannot do this. And I walked away."

"You couldn't have."

"I did. He didn't try to stop me. He just stood there." She looked down. "I've thought about his face. I think I'll think about it for the rest of my life."

Isolde's throat had gone dry. "And then?"

"Then it was easy. Gideon is very good at the Doors. He knows all the shortcuts. We passed the next, and the next. In six days I was home." The ghost of a smile. "Linnet was waiting. She was thin as a rail and cross as two sticks, and she'd learned to read the whole of Dryden. The Bloom had gone back like a tide. She said she'd had a dream, and in the dream a voice told her to wake up."

"She's alive."

"She's alive. She married a tailor. I'm an aunt."

"And the Overseer?"

"Oh," said the other Isolde, lightly. "He died."

…

She felt it in the pit of her stomach, a cold plunge like a missed stair.

"He died," repeated the page, kindly, and the lamplight shone on her cheek. "Not at once. It took some weeks. I'm told it was a long business. The Doors close, if you leave them alone, when there's no one to keep them. And the one who keeps them goes with them. He's the lock, you see. Without a reason to hold together, he came apart."

"I don't believe you."

"I didn't, either. I read it in the Order's account." She shrugged. "It's a small thing. A man you knew for a week. Seven days. You'd have been sorry, I think. You'd have lit a candle. But you'd have had your sister." She leaned forward. "Isolde. It's open. The page is open. If you want it, you can have it. You've only to say the word, and wear the skin, and the other one takes your place in the Hollow. You walk out that door. You wake in the Hospice. And a girl who loves you is sitting up in bed asking for tea."

Isolde did not speak.

"It isn't wicked," said the other Isolde gently. "It's simply a trade. One for one. A week's affection against a life. You know what the arithmetic says."

"I know."

"Then—"

"I know what the arithmetic says," said Isolde. She stood up.

She did not know when she had moved. She stood with her hands flat on the cold table, looking down, and her voice came from a long way off, steady and low. "I know it very well. I've done the sum every night. A girl of sixteen and a man I've known a week. Of course I know the sum." She drew breath. "I've done it so many times that I can do it in my sleep. And every time it comes out right, I think: I'm the sort of person who'd let a man die on a threshold because it was sensible."

"It is sensible."

"Yes. That's the trouble with it."

"Isolde—"

"Linnet wouldn't thank me," said Isolde. "That's what you don't know. She'd read the last page. She'd know. She always reads the last page. She'd sit up in bed with her chin on her knees and she'd say, Izzy, what did you do?" Her voice broke. "I won't be the sort of person who walks away. I won't. I'd rather save her with my own hands, or not at all."

"That isn't a choice. That's a luxury."

"Then I'll pay for it."

The other Isolde looked at her for a long moment. Then she laughed, softly, wearily, and shook her head. "I rather thought you'd say that. I'm sorry. I had to ask." She picked up the charcoal. "Go on, then. Read the last page of yours if you like. But I'd not advise it."

"No."

"No," agreed the page. "Well. Goodbye, Isolde. Good luck."

She closed the book.

…

He was standing at a shelf of black leather when he found his own.

It did not look like the others. It was bound in iron. A great clasp of rusted steel held the covers shut, and a chain ran from the clasp to a ring in the wall, and the wall itself was all bare stone, lit by a single lamp. It lay on a stand in a narrow alcove at the end of a passage. He had walked there without choosing. His feet had known the way.

There was no name on the cover.

There was only a mark. It was a plain, small, wedge-shaped scar, struck deep in the metal as if with a chisel. A broken line. A door.

"Do not," said the Overseer to himself. He stood very still. "Do not touch it."

His hand was already on the clasp.

It opened without a sound. The chain fell away. The cover lifted of its own accord, with a faint sigh of old air, and he saw, on the first page, in a thin dark upright hand that he knew as he knew his own wrist, a single sentence.

He is not the keeper.

He read it twice. It did not change.

He turned the page. His hand trembled. There was a line of text, and then a space, and then another line. They were written slowly, with a pen that had pressed hard.

He is the kept.

A tremor went down his spine. He stood with the iron book open on its stand and the lamp swinging above his head, and he heard, as clearly as if she stood at his elbow, the Aviary voice say, kindly: coward. He heard Isolde, in the dark, say: I'll wait.

He turned the page.

The third was blank.

It was not quite blank. In the middle of the paper, very small, written in the same dark hand, was a line of the Old Tongue. He knew what it said. He had known it all his life. It said: Do not read on. Close the book. Go to her. She is the only thing in the whole world that is worth coming back for.

He stood quite still.

Then, from the dark behind him, a voice that was his voice, and not his, said pleasantly: Go on.

Go on, Valerian. It's the last page. It tells you how it ends.

He did not turn his head. He felt the cold of it on the back of his neck, and the vast patient hunger behind the words, leaning close, whispering into his ear with the intimacy of a friend: There's still time. You could leave her. She'll go home. She'll be safe. You could walk out of this Door alone, and never touch her again, and she would live. You'd be doing her a kindness. You'd be doing the only kind thing you've ever done.

He thought: Yes.

He thought: It is true. It is the truest thing I know.

He thought of a girl at a swan pond with her hand on his sleeve, saying: I'll wait.

"No," said Valerian.

He shut the book. He did it with both hands, firmly, as one shuts a door on a draft, and the clasp snapped home. The chain flew back up the wall. The voice behind him gave a sigh, thin and exasperated, and was gone.

He turned and walked out of the alcove at a rapid, unsteady pace, with his heart going like a hammer, and did not stop until he saw the light.

…

She found him in the stacks.

It was a quiet corner, a narrow aisle of black-lacquered shelves at the end of the east gallery, where the lamps were few and the dust lay thick. She had come looking without knowing it. Her feet had taken her, down a spiral stair and along a passage and through a swinging door, and there he was, standing with his back to a bookcase and his arms hanging, quite white.

He raised his head.

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

"Did you read it?" said Valerian.

"No. Not to the end." She was breathless. She had run, she realized. "I read a different one. A page that wasn't me. She said that you died."

"Did she."

"She said I'd go home. She said Linnet would live."

"And you?"

"I said no."

His face did not move. But the breath went out of him, in a long unsteady rush, and he put out a hand and gripped the shelf behind him as if the floor had tilted. "I was told much the same," he said. "I was told that I might leave you. For your own good."

"And?"

"I said no."

They stood looking at each other across six feet of dusty floor, in the dim green glow of a single lamp. She did not know which of them moved first. She thought afterwards that it must have been both. There was a rustle of cloth, and a creak of old boards, and then she was standing very close, with her face tipped up, and his hands had come up to hold her elbows, lightly, uncertainly, as if she might break.

"I do not know how to do this," said Valerian, quite low.

"Nor do I."

"I have a very small sample."

"I know." She laughed, and it caught in her throat. "Valerian. I chose you."

"I did not know that was permitted."

"It's not in the covenant."

"No." His eyes were enormous. "No, I do not believe it is."

He bent his head.

It was the lightest of kisses. It was hardly a kiss at all: a brush of dry warm lips against hers, shy, hesitating, careful beyond bearing, like a man touching a flame to see if it burns. She felt him tremble. She felt the hand at her elbow tighten. She stood on her toes, and put her arms round his neck, and kissed him back with all the force of a week of terror and tenderness, and heard him make a low, astonished sound against her mouth, and felt his arms close round her at last as if the whole world had just been returned to him in a single piece.

When they broke apart, he was crying again.

"I beg your pardon," said the Overseer, unsteadily. "It appears to be a habit."

"I don't mind."

"It is extremely inconvenient."

"Come here," said Isolde, and pulled his head down again.