Read The Accidental Keyhand Online

Authors: Jen Swann Downey

The Accidental Keyhand (8 page)

BOOK: The Accidental Keyhand
5.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Dorrie looked back at the archway and caught her breath. Above it, between two images of a sword crossed with a quill pen, the words “Athens, 399 BCE” glowed. Beyond the archway stood a small white room with a table against one wall, upon which stood a rack of scrolls and little clay pots. Along the top of the walls, dolphins made of bits of blue tile cavorted. “That's a Spoke Library in there, isn't it?” breathed Dorrie.

A tinkling sound caught Dorrie's attention. Two rough stone ledges protruded from the stones on the left side of the archway. The bottom one stuck out farther than the top one, and upon each stood a large clay pot. Water trickled from the higher pot into the lower pot through a clay tube.

“It's a water clock,” said Ebba, peering into the lower pot. “Every hour, the water level rises to another line.” She pointed at a set of deeply etched marks in the clay. “See?”

Beside each mark, figures danced, and in another moment, Dorrie could read “9 a.m.” and “10 a.m.,” hour by hour up to the top of the pot, which read “12 p.m.”

“All the archways have a clock on the left and a calendar on the right,” said Ebba. “So we know what time it is out in the Spoke Libraries. Sometimes time runs slower or faster out there than it does in Petrarch's Library.”

Dorrie looked back down the corridor where the woman in white was just disappearing around a corner. “So she just walked out of a whole other time.”

“Well, yeah,” said Ebba, as if Dorrie had just announced that eyes were for seeing.

“Then how come she looks like she just came back from getting a cavity filled?” asked Marcus. “I mean, she just rode a time-space-continuum roller coaster.”

“Is she the one who's friends with Socrates?” asked Dorrie.

Ebba looked surprised and then worried. “How…how did you know?”

“Phillip told us about her, and we ate some of her ambrosia.”

Relief flooded Ebba's face. “Oh. Yes, that's Aspasia. She's been trying to convince the city of Athens not to bring Socrates to trial, but I don't think she's getting very far. For now, the history books tell us that he'll be summoned to appear before the legal magistrate in about a week. A citizen is going to charge him with the crime.”

“The impiety thing?” asked Marcus.

“Exactly. For saying that the moon and the sun are rocks rather than gods, or something like that. Oh, and also that the stuff he says is making people do bad things.”

“Like what?” Marcus snorted. “Ask irritating questions?”

Dorrie felt a snort of her own indignation coming on. “Yeah, how can you
make
someone do something with words, unless they're under some kind of magic spell or part zombie or something?”

“Or you get the person to agree to a stupid bet,” said Marcus, his expression one of freshly laundered innocence.

Dorrie shot him a thoroughly unlaundered look of irritation.

Ebba looked from Dorrie to Marcus. “You're not really enemies of Petrarch's Library or part of some new Foundation out to destroy us or anything, right?”

“What? No!” said Dorrie. “We'd never even heard of Petrarch's Library before yesterday.”

Ebba grinned. “I didn't think so.”

They continued down the hall. “So, how exactly do the librarians here keep people from, you know, being set on fire for saying the wrong thing?” Dorrie asked.

Ebba looked confused. “Oh, lots of ways. It depends on the situation.”

“Maybe their stubby little pencils are really fire extinguishers,” said Marcus.

“But librarians…” Dorrie chose her words carefully. “They put books on shelves and check out books, or help you find something out. They don't seem very…” She took a deep breath. “Strong or brave or the kind of people who'd know how to do, well, daring things like that.”

“Oh, no,” said Ebba, stopping short and looking shocked. “A properly trained lybrarian is one of the most fearless and fearsome beings in the world!”

“Fearsome?” said Dorrie, trying not to sound doubtful.

Ebba must have heard the dubiousness in Dorrie's voice anyway. “They're wonderful at finding out things and slipping around undetected and getting the right information into the right hands. And of course they're all masters of…” She looked from Dorrie to Marcus. “The Lybrariad thoroughly trains them! Come on, I'll show you.” She launched herself forward at a run with Dorrie and Marcus pelting after her.

After a series of hallways and stairways and confusing turns, Ebba finally slowed down and then barreled through a set of battered brown doors.

Marcus elbowed Dorrie. “It's going to be librarians learning how to yell at people for bringing soda into the library. I know it.”

“Shhh,” hissed Dorrie, pushing open the doors.

They found themselves standing on the edge of a large room that rang with the sound of heavy sticks being whacked against one another, and the shouts and grunts of people kicking and punching in unison in one of the room's far corners. Spears and swords of every conceivable size and shape hung from the walls in great profusion.

“Those are librarians?” cried Dorrie, so loudly that a few people in the process of hauling themselves up long ropes hung from the ceiling stopped climbing and stared at her for a moment.

Marcus's mouth hung open.

Ebba turned to them, her face proud. “This is the Gymnasium, where the lybrarians learn their combat skills. In case they hit a brick wall with the research and stealth. And
only
for defensive use.”

“Combat skills,” repeated Dorrie, sounding very much like Marcus murmuring about Egeria's mermaid-forever hair.

Dorrie's fingers tingled, and her pulse quickened as not far from where they stood, a man in breeches and a billowy white shirt forced a woman in a long gown backward with a blindingly fast succession of sword thrusts and parries. A knot of string held back the man's thick, dark hair. For a moment, his blade and that of the woman came together in a quivering cross. His nose loomed over his face like a monument. It sucked mercilessly at Dorrie's attention.

The woman grunted and the swords slid against each other, first in one direction and then another. The woman tried to thrust, and the man blocked her blade and began to drive her backward again with the casual attention of a shopper pushing a grocery cart. They moved nothing like Mr. Kornberger did when he demonstrated a move. They were a hundred, a thousand times better!

“They're ninja librarians!” crowed Marcus.

A staggering realization swelled and burst into a fountain of blazing sparks inside Dorrie's chest. Here in Petrarch's Library, her desire to wield a sword made a dumbfounding kind of sense.

CHAPTER 8

THE APPRENTICE TABLE

Busy replaying the sword fight she'd seen, Dorrie hardly remembered the bicycle ride from the Gymnasium to where Ebba finally stopped and dismounted, leaning her bicycle up against a wall. Only when they emerged into a grassy, sunlit space the size of a football field did Dorrie come back to her senses. She blinked in the warm brightness.

“This is the Commons,” said Ebba, spreading her arms wide. “It's kind of the center of Petrarch's Library.”

All around the green expanse, the warren of Petrarch's Library rose to various heights. Sunshine poured down onto the Commons and most of the buildings, but patches of thunderous clouds hung low over a few spots in the architectural tangle. Beneath them, various mists and drizzles and soaking storms blew.

Ebba followed Dorrie's gaze to one of the downpours. “The libraries come here with their own weather. There's a perpetual snowstorm over at the Abbey Library of Saint Gall. The apprentices have snowball fights there on the first day of every month.”

Ebba led them along a path of crushed shells that wound around clumps of trees and gardens of various sorts. “Some of the lybrarians like to garden.”

As they walked along a hedge of hydrangeas, Marcus snorted. “If I could travel all over the time map, there's no way I'd waste my time messing around with daffodils and—” He broke off, his mouth open, staring over the hedge, and then whispered hoarsely, “There she is.”

Dorrie craned her neck to see. “Who?”

“Egeria,” choked out Marcus.

Dorrie stood on tiptoe. At some distance on the other side, Egeria, her hair caught up in a long braid, knelt with a group of people next to a raised bed full of bright green, fuzzy-looking plants.

Ebba pushed a branch aside. “Oh, yes, she's way into plants. That's her beginner European field-foraging practicum. It's the first one she's ever taught. She only just made lybrarian this past midwinter. I think she might be one of the youngest ever. She's only sixteen.”

At that moment, Egeria looked up and waved. She had a smudge of dirt on her cheek, covering half of the spray of large freckles sprinkled on her nose. She came to them, smiling. “You've dried.”

Marcus seemed to have relapsed into slip shock and just stared at her.

“Since yesterday, I mean,” she added.

Dorrie and Ebba looked at Marcus in alarm as he began to laugh maniacally, his face turning a dazzling shade of red. He stopped as abruptly as he'd begun. “Nice, uh, garden,” he choked out, sounding as though one of the larger statues from the Reference Room had been laid across his chest.

Egeria looked brightly around at the well-tended beds. “Oh, are you interested in plants?”

“Totally! Plants are just so…so…” Marcus worked his hands around in circles that Dorrie thought were meant to look enthusiastic. “Awesome!” He looked wildly around. “The way they grow up on those stems, with that wide variety of…shapes and smells and…roots and, and—”

Dorrie widened her eyes at him, shaking her head faintly from side to side to warn him that he had crossed into the land of total idiocy, but he seemed unable to extricate himself from his sentence. Before Marcus could embarrass himself farther, Ebba explained that they needed to get to lunch, and Dorrie hauled him on down the path.

At one end of the Commons, Ebba stopped at a two-story, timber-and-plaster building with a steep thatched roof. Diamond-paned windows stood open in the sunshine, and a dozen bicycles and handcarts were scattered around the entrance. A painted sign swinging over the massive wooden door read: “The Sharpened Quill.”

Inside, cutlery clattered and voices rose and fell in conversation beneath a low-beamed ceiling. Heads turned toward them as they entered and the room quieted slightly, then returned to its original volume.

“The apprentices usually sit over there,” said Ebba pointing to a long trestle table in a corner where a crowd of younger people sat. Kenzo noticed them immediately and began to wave at them wildly.

Millie, the other girl who'd discovered them, looked up from her seat nearby. Dorrie smiled tentatively at her. Millie looked straight at Dorrie for a moment and then, without smiling back, turned to speak to a girl sitting next to her. The girl, small and fragile-looking with long, dark hair and eyes like darting green fish, simply stared at Dorrie and Marcus.

Ebba pointed to the back of the room where a table laden with serving bowls and trays stood against the only section of wall not lined with rough-looking, saggy bookshelves stuffed with well-thumbed volumes. “You get your own food. Everything's over there. Come on.”

When they arrived at the apprentices' table after filling their plates, most of those seated stopped eating and talking to stare at Dorrie and Marcus.

Ebba unslung her satchel. “Can you make some room?”

Nobody moved.

“She said make some room, Goggle Eyes,” ordered an older girl with a little brown velvet hat perched on her head. In a rush of knocking knees and sliding plates, the apprentices crowded closer to each other. Millie and the girl with the darting eyes moved last and slowly and not very far. Ebba, Dorrie, and Marcus sat down.

“I'm Mathilde,” said the girl who had spoken, sticking her hand out across the table. She had merry brown eyes and thick chestnut hair parted in the middle and pinned in two coils to either side of her head. To Dorrie, she looked a little older than Marcus, maybe fifteen.

“I'm Dorrie. Dorrie Barnes.” She took Mathilde's hand, glancing at her brother. “And this is Marcus.”

“So are you really keyhands?” sang out Kenzo, while the rest of the table froze, some going pink in the cheeks.

“What's a keyhand?” asked Dorrie.

“You don't know?” asked Kenzo, astounded. “Maybe you really are Foundation.”

“Kenzo,” Ebba said, shocked. “You're being rude again!”

“How is that rude?” Kenzo protested.

Mathilde waved a chicken leg. “Because anyone who isn't Foundation would be insulted at the question,”

“If that person even knew what you meant by ‘Foundation.'” said Marcus.

Kenzo shrugged. “Millie said you probably were.”

“Yeah, well, Millie says a lot of things,” said Mathilde, looking pointedly up the table to where Millie sat. Millie gave Mathilde a hard look back. Mathilde resumed her introductions, pointing across the table at a giant of a boy with a lantern jaw and a shock of red hair. “That's Sven.” The boy nodded in a morose sort of way. “That's Izel,” she said pointing to the girl with the darting eyes who sat next to Millie. Lastly, she patted the boy beside her. His dark lashes were startlingly long. “Saul. Of Ye Olde Tarsus.” She sighed melodramatically. “He doesn't think girls are much good.”

A couple of the older apprentices farther down the table snorted. Saul put down his piece of toast and extended his hand to Dorrie and then to Marcus. “Don't listen to her. She likes to make fun of me.”

Mathilde shook her head so that the gold and brown feather in her hat bobbed mischievously. “What about: ‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.' Paul in a letter to Timothy: First Timothy, chapter 2, verse 12.” She leaned forward, nodding conspiratorially. “Paul was once named Saul. He changed his name.”

“I'm obviously not THAT Saul. I would never write that and you know it!” Saul protested. He turned to Dorrie and Marcus. “I wouldn't. I really wouldn't.”

Dorrie looked back at Saul, bewildered.

“Not yet,” said Mathilde primly. She leaned toward Dorrie. “So wheren are you from?”

Around the table, the chewing of food largely ceased. Everyone at the table looked with rapt attention at Dorrie and Marcus.

“Shouldn't we let them eat before we start diving at them with questions?” protested Ebba.

“It's okay,” said Dorrie. “But…what does ‘wheren' mean?”

“Sorry,” said Mathilde. “It's just a word we use around here. It means both ‘where' and ‘when' at once. ‘Wheren are you going?' or ‘Wheren are you from?'”

“We're from Passaic, New Jersey,” said Marcus. Piously, he added, “A world-class city.”

“What century?” blurted out Kenzo.

Dorrie could hear the apprentices holding their collective breath.

“Twenty-first,” Marcus answered.

Excited murmurings rose from the table. Even Millie looked up.

“So is anyone living on Mars yet?” asked a tall, dark-haired boy.

“Not yet,” Marcus replied, biting into his own toast. “But people have been to the moon.”

“Told you!” said Kenzo loudly, elbowing the tall boy hard.

“Are people still listening to ragtime music?” Ebba asked.

Marcus stopped chewing. “Ragtime? Are you serious?” He looked around the circle of expectant faces. “What's the last year that Petrarch's Library opens into?”

Saul shrugged. “1912.”

Dorrie's mouth fell open. “So you don't know about anything that happened in the world after 1912?”

Millie looked daggers at Dorrie over the top of the newspaper she held. “And I doubt that you know about anything that happened before 1912.”

Marcus leaned back, his arms folded behind his head. “Two words, people: electric guitar.”

Now the apprentices looked at each other confused and amazed.

“Yes, but can women vote in any of the nations yet?” asked Mathilde.

“Of course,” said Dorrie, suddenly wondering exactly how long ago women had started voting.

A surprised and pleased murmur traveled around the table.

Mathilde's eyes shone. “How wonderful!”

“Telepathy?” asked Sven. “Can people communicate by telepathy yet?”

“Uh,” said Dorrie, “I don't think so.” Sven looked so disappointed that Dorrie racked her brain for something that might impress him.

“We have cell phones,” said Marcus. “Which is sort of the same idea.”

Dorrie rolled her eyes. “They're nothing alike!”

“Sure they are,” said Marcus. “With a cell phone, I can send a message to you even if you're miles away.”

“How does it work?” asked Ebba excitedly.

Dorrie frowned. “It's not
real
telepathy! It's just people carrying cell phones.”

The apprentices looked confused again.

“What's a cell phone?” asked Ebba.

Dorrie's face screwed up with the challenge of trying to describe it. “It's a… It's a…” She felt embarrassed as the apprentices waited with bated breath for her answer. C'mon, Dorrie, she thought to herself. You use one almost every day!

Instead of answering, Dorrie decided to ask her own burning question. “So do apprentices learn how to sword-fight and stuff?”

“Of course,” said Millie, as though Dorrie had asked a particularly stupid question. “You can't serve as a lybrarian unless you've mastered a combat skill.”

Dorrie's heart gave a glad leap, remembering the way the man and woman in the Gymnasium had made their swords positively dance. “Who teaches you?”

Sven mashed his peas into his mashed potatoes with artistic flair. “Mostly, the resident lybrarians.”

“Their main job is to turn the regular old librarians who come here every year into true lybrarians,” said Saul.

“If they can,” said Mathilde.

“But we can train alongside them,” said Ebba.

“And learn what exactly?” asked Marcus.

“How to pick locks,” said Kenzo.

“How to snatch a magazine out of the middle of a stack of periodicals with the speed of a cobra,” added Sven with just as much pride.

“It's very thorough training,” said Saul.

Sven put down his fork and began to count off on his fingers. “There's cataloguing, deception and impersonation, publishing law, stealth and illicit entry, library organization, unarmed combat, research skills, armed combat, book repair, fire and explosives—”

Mathilde took a bite out of a large apple. “I think they get the idea.”

Dorrie did. Sven's list had filled her with a giddy excitement that threatened to lift her right off the bench.

Kenzo seemed not to have heard Mathilde. “Patron relations, horsemanship,” he said, now counting on his toes. “Water training, espionage, escape and concealment, meteorology, geography, field survival—”

“Stealth and illicit entry?” crowed Marcus. “Prime cut! This place is now my official personal paradise!”

“We shouldn't be telling them all of this stuff about us,” Millie cut in harshly. “They really could be enemies.”

Dorrie felt her face go hot as a sudden silence descended on the table.

Mathilde looked hard at Millie over her apple. “And you should do a little reading in
Martine's Handbook of Etiquette and Guide to True Politeness
. Didn't Mistress Wu ask us to treat them as guests?”

BOOK: The Accidental Keyhand
5.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Lady Most Willing . . . by Julia Quinn, Eloisa James, Connie Brockway
Consumed by Fire by Anne Stuart
The Wedding of Anna F. by Mylene Dressler
What it Takes by Ascher, Kathryn
Rip Tides by Toby Neal
The Omega and the Assassin by Stephani Hecht
No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL by Mark Owen, Kevin Maurer
Royal Heist by Lynda La Plante
War on Whimsy by Liane Moriarty