Page 40 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

They were down among the shelves now and if the light had been overhead like the sun instead of bleeding from every cubic inch of air, then they would be mired in shadows. The space between shelves was a small fraction of the heights they scaled, and to walk among them was to find oneself at the bottom of a deep book-lined gully. The shelves themselves were wooden, dark with age, pitted and stained by unknown calamities. Livira had no idea that the world held so much wood. Perhaps it no longer did now that these forests had been felled to serve the needs of the library. Without an index their hunt would be simply impossible. A lifetime would likely not suffice even if the book they were hunting could be guaranteed to lie within this first chamber.

With an index they stood a chance, depending on how precise it was and how well order was maintained when returning books. Livira stared up at the dizzying heights to either side of her. Shelf upon shelf upon shelf. She took a deep breath of the book-scented air. “Tell me there’s an index. Also, a ladder.”

“There’s an index,” Jella said. Something in her tone didn’t alleviate Livira’s concern.

Meelan snorted. He pulled a book from the nearest shelf and began leafing through it. He looked up and pulled out the next book, fatter and taller than the first. “Here’s an index.” He handed it to Livira. “There are lots of them.”

“What? Why?” Livira wrapped the heavy tome to her chest.

“This place built the city,” Arpix said. “It built the nation. The empire. All of it. But those guards we passed don’t work for King Oanold. The head librarian doesn’t work for the king, whatever the people in the streets think.” He waved an arm at the aisle stretching away from them. “This is power. This is where the histories are. This is where the great philosophers are. This is where the secrets that arm our soldiers with arrow-sticks are written. This is where the next secrets will be found. You think our people would have even a fraction of what they have now without the library? It wasn’t many generations ago we were fighting each other with bones and rocks, and we thought fire was a great magic...”

“What does any of that have to do with indexes?” Livira asked helplessly. She noticed the book she’d been handed was numbered volume thirty-six.

“Why doesn’t the king have the head librarian killed and replaced by someone who’ll do exactly what he says? Why doesn’t Yute stab the head librarian in the back and take the job for himself?”

“Because he’s not a murderer.” Livira couldn’t imagine Yute raising his voice against someone, let alone a knife.

“Well, Yute might not be...” Arpix agreed. “But in general, it’s because without the index the library becomes unusable, and progress would stall for however many decades were needed to create a new one. And the thing is that each new librarian who gets control knows that in order to keep it they need to change the index so that their knowledge becomes indispensable.”

Livira started to walk down the aisle, running her fingertips over the spines of the books at hand level. Many were not actually books but narrow boxes packed with yellowing index cards like in the trainee library. She spotted a ladder ahead of her, leaning against the shelves and reaching several yards over the very topmost. “They move all these books around every time someone new takes over?” She was aghast at the effort that would involve.

“Not all of them.” Arpix followed her. “Just the ones thought to be most important at the time in question. And that’s the problem. There are lots of different systems at work here at the same time, lots of categorisations.” He caught Livira’s wrist and pulled her fingers down to the wooden edge of the shelf beneath the books she’d been touching. The edge was scarred by innumerable cuts. At first it looked like random damage, the work of hungry rats with a taste for oak perhaps. But now she could see that there were numbers there, letters, codes of dots and slashes, all intermingled, overwritten, competing for space. “Depending where you’re standing a different system will be in use, and the boundaries between those systems are not well defined. Our current head librarian’s system is employed on the outer boundaries—”

“Of the library?”

“Of the area that has been catalogued.”

“But...” Livira struggled to frame her question. “How can there be areas that aren’t catalogued? Surely when the books were put out—”

“The books were all here when the library was discovered—”

“Rediscovered,” Meelan interrupted Arpix’s interruption.

“Rediscovered,” the taller boy agreed. “Don’t say that outside though—only in here. But yes, some savage wrapped in animal skins rediscovered this place less time ago than you might think, and all the books were here already, waiting on the shelves, without any apparent order to them. And we’ve been working at cataloguing and organizing ever since. Spreading out from where we’re standing while a city grew up outside.” He waved a hand down the aisle. “And somewhere out there is the ‘edge,’ the limit of our progress. And if we needed to find a book close to that boundary, we’d have to have someone very senior with access to the current card-based index to come and help us. And if we were in the very outermost sections, right on the edge, then only the head librarian herself would be able to help.”

“Dear gods.” Livira turned round and started heading back to where Meelan was still leafing through the first index he’d taken from the shelf. Jella and Carlotte had joined him, looking through other indexes taken from beside his.

“Where are you going?” Arpix called after her.

Livira looked around at him. “Back to the indexes of course.”

Arpix pulled a slim volume from the shelf before him. “Try this one.” He held it out towards her. “This whole aisle is indexes.”

—

In the face of Livira’s despair, Arpix had explained that the situation wasn’t as dire as it might seem, though it was dire. They knew what language the book was written in, and many indexes specified different sections for different languages. Arpix also said they had a fair chance that Reflections on Solitude was a book of poetry or philosophy, which would place it in a limited number of sections. And finally, the author’s name would position it in an alphabetic ordering within whatever section it lay in.

For someone who had reached the lofty station of librarian, generally with over a decade of training beneath their belt, the black art of finding a book via the sprawling system of index systems was one that could usually be accomplished within hours rather than days.

“There should be an index of indexes,” Livira declared, hefting another heavy volume from the pile to her right and balancing it on her knees as she sat with her back against the shelves.

“There are lots of them,” Meelan grumbled from the other side of the pile.

“And indexes of indexes of indexes,” Arpix added. “A pyramid of them with the mythical master index perched at the very top!”

“How do we know this book even exists?” Livira held up the paper that Master Logaris had given them. She puzzled through the words and then the name. “Reflections on Solitude, by Arqnaxis Lox. Relquian.” Arpix had explained that the title and name were translated from Relquian, a language none of them knew and which used a totally different alphabet. He’d had the foresight to equip himself with a Relquian dictionary from the trainee library.

“It would reflect poorly on Lord Algar if it were later found not to exist,” Arpix said.

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