The Accidental Keyhand (16 page)

“Wait!” A grin spread over Marcus's face. “Why can't we? Just for a little while. Time's more or less stopped out there for now, right? The
History
of
Histories
page is sitting up there in the rack, completely safe until the keyhands decide to go back.”

Together Marcus, Ebba, and Dorrie stared at the rack. A comet of hope ricocheted around inside Dorrie's rib cage.

“I guess that's true,” said Ebba uneasily.

“In the meantime we can think of a foolproof plan to get it back,” said Marcus.

The sound of whistling wafted down the corridor. Dorrie, Marcus, and Ebba all froze as Mr. Gormly came walking around a corner, balancing the end of a billy club on his outstretched flattened palm. Seeing the apprentices, he lost his concentration, and the billy club fell to the ground with an echoing clatter.

“Mr. Gormly,” Dorrie managed to get out.

Mr. Gormly stowed the billy club under his arm. He scratched his head. “I suppose I have to ask you what you're doing wandering around at this time of night.”

“Nothing bad,” said Dorrie, her throat tight.

“Of course not. I'm sorry to even have to ask a fine gentleman and two fine ladies such a question.”

“Dorrie thought she heard our lost mongoose outside the Apprentice Attics,” said Marcus. “We were trying to track him down.”

Ebba slowly lifted the cage they'd brought along.

Mr. Gormly scratched at the stubble on his chin with the end of his billy club. Dorrie could hear her own heart beating.

“I'm supposed to, you know, let Francesco know if I see you out in the corridors after curfew.” Mr. Gormly looked carefully up and down the corridor. “Just go on back to your rooms now, and there'll be no need for me to say anything.”

Dorrie and Ebba beamed with relieved gratitude, while Marcus looked at Mr. Gormly with pitying amazement that the man could possibly believe they were telling the truth.

“Thank you, Mr. Gormly,” said Dorrie. “We'll get right back to our room. You won't regret this.”

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

The next morning, Marcus, Ebba, and Dorrie skipped breakfast. Instead, Ebba brought them to the distant Ghost Library where she'd been keeping the aurochs. It had been a small monastery chamber and only boasted one wooden chest full of books, but it connected to a grown-over walled garden with a stream running through it. Dorrie noticed with no small fear that the aurochs had broken the original latch on the wooden plank door that led from a dust-choked corridor to his quarters. In its place, Ebba had bolted on a massive wooden leg that she had sawn off a table from the corridor.

“Impressively sneaky,” said Marcus, lifting up the edge of the moldering brocade cloth that covered the vandalized table. Ebba had replaced the table leg with seventeen volumes of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
.

Marcus refused to enter the aurochs' quarters until Ebba had lured Roger out into the sunlit garden with an apple plucked from a high branch of the lone skeletal tree that still grew there. She came back in, shutting the door to the garden behind her, and joined them on a splintery window seat.

“Isn't he amazing,” sighed Ebba, handing them each an apple, as they watched the massive creature paw at the ground.

“Yeah, amazing,” said Dorrie weakly. “Like a volcano is amazing.”

“He wouldn't hurt a fly,” crooned Ebba. “Would you, Roger?”

Roger charged the remains of a scarecrow grown over with vines.

“That is no Roger,” pronounced Marcus. “Maybe Vlad or Ghengis or Igor, but definitely not a Roger.”

“He's how I really got that temporary blindness,” said Ebba. “I nibbled some of the leafy spurge with him so he wouldn't feel so alone.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” said Marcus.

Dorrie bit into her apple. “It makes a kind of sense.”

Ebba beamed at her. “You'd do the same for Moe, if he was feeling lonely, right?”

Dorrie thought of the earthworms and raw eggs and dead birds they'd been using to bait the traps for the mongoose. “Uh, well, the things he eats are a little more disgusting. The real question is, how are we going to get that
History
of
Histories
page back?”

Marcus tossed his apple up in the air and caught it. “As soon as we hear that the Lybrariad has its Socrates plan together, Ebba and I guard the hallway outside the Athens archway while you go in, find the right scroll, and bring it back out. Boom.”

Dorrie rolled her eyes. “What are we going to do about clothes? If we wear our own, it'll be the bathrobes all over again.”

Ebba stopped nibbling her apple. “We could—”

“—leave an extra set of clothes for Dorrie outside the archway,” said Marcus lifting his fist high. “Boom.”

Dorrie reared back. “I'm not going to stand there naked looking for the right scroll. What if some Athenian walked in on me?”

Ebba tossed her apple core through the window. “We could—”

“—barricade the door into Athens with the encyclopedias that Ebba didn't use to prop up the table. Boom!”

“Stop saying ‘boom!'” shouted Dorrie. “Stop saying anything!”

“I didn't say ‘anything,'” said Marcus. “I said, ‘Barricade the door…'”

Dorrie felt a vein in her forehead pounding. “Marcus!”

“I think we'd better all go in,” said Ebba.

There was finally silence.

“You?” said Dorrie. “But you never—”

Ebba shrugged slightly, as though she'd been through a hundred archways. “Did you see how many scrolls are in that rack?”

Dorrie nodded, full of gratitude.

“We'll have to pick a time when the lybrarians are at a staff meeting or something,” said Marcus.

“We can check out Athenian clothes from the circulation desk.” Ebba climbed off the window seat. “I've got to get to my escape and concealment practicum now. I guess I'd better pay special attention. Let's meet at the Celsus before lunch, and we can figure out more.”

***

A half hour later, Dorrie found herself carefully polishing scimitar blades while Savi pored over his pages and scritched and scratched with his pen. “I once saw the play
Cyrano
de
Bergerac
,” Dorrie found herself saying, emboldened to interrupt him by sheer boredom.

“And I,” Savi said, turning a page, “have, thankfully, never seen or read it.”

Dorrie looked at him with amazement. “But it's about you! How can you resist? And it's good. It's really good!”

Savi lifted one eyebrow, which Dorrie took as an invitation to continue. “In the play, Cyrano de Bergerac has”—Dorrie paused, feeling as though she were about to grab a cobra—“a largish nose.”

Savi raised his head. “I'm excruciatingly familiar with that aspect of the story.”

“Well, anyway,” Dorrie went on, trying to tear her eyes away from Savi's real-life proboscis, “he's clever and brave and in love with this very smart woman named Roxane, but he thinks that if he tells her he loves her, she'll reject him because he's, er, um, ugly.” She gulped, adding hurriedly, “I mean, he just thinks he's ugly. In the play.”

Savi raised his eyebrow again, higher this time.

Dorrie licked her lips and picked up another scimitar to polish. “But there's this other guy—Christian—who's sort of perfect on the outside. You know, like one of those statues around here, only he's, I don't know, not a quick thinker. A brave soldier and stuff, but not very good with words. He tells Cyrano that he's in love with a woman, and it turns out to be the same woman that Cyrano is in love with.”

Dorrie rubbed the dagger's blade carefully, enjoying the break in the monotony. “So Cyrano has this crazy idea. He'll write love letters to Roxane for Christian. That way he gets to express his love to Roxane, but he won't have to worry that she'll reject him.”

She checked out of the corner of her eye to make sure Savi hadn't drawn his sword. He hadn't. “Okay, and here's where it goes out of control. Christian says he wants to, you know, stand on his own two feet and tell Roxane how he feels about her in his own words. So he stands under her balcony and just starts to fail epically in the beautiful-words department. Roxane has totally fallen in love with the writer of the letters she's been getting. So she keeps begging Christian to impress her with his fancy poetry, but all he can say over and over again is something like: ‘Wow, you're beautiful. I sure love you.'”

Dorrie took a breath and looked over at Savi. His pen had stopped moving. He actually seemed to be listening. She hurried on. “Okay, so Roxane is totally disappointed, but then Cyrano feels sorry for Christian and starts telling him what to say from behind this bush, and Roxane falls madly in love with Christian and—”

Savi gave a little bark of laughter. “A talking bush. Yes, that's about what I need at the moment.”

“Why?”

Savi spoke in the quietest voice Dorrie had ever heard him use. “I myself have things to say to a…woman, and I fear that I may have trouble in the task.”

“Trouble?” Dorrie repeated, imagining Savi facing a dozen swordsmen intent on keeping him away from the woman. “What kind of trouble?”

“Trouble saying what I want to say.”

Dorrie stared at him, her mouth opening wide. “You mean like Christian?”

“I'm nothing like that idiot,” said Savi. “I can write the poetry.” He looked furtively around, as though to make sure no one was listening, and dropped his voice again. “I just can't recite it. I've slipped twenty missives beneath the beautiful M's door in the dead of night, and now I've received a request to show myself and speak in the flesh, but when I try to deliver words in that fashion, my wits flee, and I can remember nothing.”

Dorrie goggled at him, unable to take in the idea that Savi could be defeated by any task.

Savi looked appraisingly at Dorrie, his mouth twitching with recovered good humor. “Something like you with a sword, perhaps.” He stood and stretched. “I suppose it's time to stop cleaning scimitars for the day, and move on to learning how to do something useful with one, or with a rapier at least.” He strode off toward the Gymnasium door.

Dorrie leaped to her feet, blades clattering to the ground, her arms and legs flying in all directions.

“I'm sure I don't need to tell you not to leave the scimitars there,” called Savi over his shoulder. “And if you ever let them go bouncing all over the cobblestones like that again, you'll probably be banned from the Gymnasium.”

Dorrie scrambled to pick them up, her heart beating with dizzy anticipation. Finally, she was going to cross swords with Cyrano de Bergerac. Fifteen minutes later, Dorrie found herself standing across from Savi, holding a rapier aloft. She'd been doing so for at least three minutes, without him saying or doing anything. The muscles in her arm burned. She was embarrassed that the rapier shook in her trembling hand.

“En garde?” said Dorrie tentatively, unsure what else to do.

“That's very sporting of you,” said Savi, his own rapier held out, steady and relaxed. “But people who want to kill you do not tend to warn you of their intentions, by calling out an ‘en garde.'”

Savi took a step forward without moving his rapier. Dorrie didn't move.

“And now you're dead,” said Savi.

Dorrie blinked at him.

“The most dependable way to keep the pointy end of a weapon from being stuck into you is to move away from it.” Savi quickly stepped forward. “Dead, again,” he barked before Dorrie could even lift her foot. “It's no good stepping backward
after
I've stepped toward you!” said Savi. Dorrie nodded vigorously.

“You must sense my movement before I make it. You must step backward before I even fully intend to step forward.” Dorrie began to sweat profusely. She strained to feel when he would take another step. The sounds and smells of the Gymnasium bounced around them. Again Savi stepped forward. Again she stepped backward. A thrill ran through her.

“Again,” said Savi.

For the next hour, Dorrie and Savi circled the Gymnasium like an oddly disjointed pair of dancers, Dorrie trying only to step backward before Savi had stepped forward and to contain her wild, mad happiness.

As Dorrie finally lowered her rapier, her arm aching, she saw Francesco striding along the Gymnasium wall, heading straight for them. Her heart faltered.
The
page
has
been
found
missing,
pounded the words in her head.
They
know
we
did
it.

Her hands began to sweat so much that she lost her grip on the rapier and it clattered to the ground.

“Savi,” called Francesco, coming to a halt, his hand tight on the hilt of his sheathed sword. “I need to speak with you.”

Francesco gave Dorrie a hard look as she fumbled with the rapier on the floor. “Outside, perhaps.”

“You may go to lunch,” said Savi with a nod to Dorrie.

The two men strode out into the courtyard. As she hung her rapier on the wall, Dorrie could hear Francesco's tightly controlled voice through the partially open door. “It's about Kash.”

Dorrie watched a fierce wariness creep into Savi's face.

Francesco cleared his throat briefly. “When last we heard from him, he'd made contact with someone who claimed to know both the history of Petrarch's Library and the Foundation. That person said he knew of a serious threat to Petrarch's Library.”

“I know that,” burst out Savi roughly. “What's happened?”

For a charged moment, Francesco kept silent.

“Perhaps nothing,” said Francesco, his jaw twitching. “But Kash missed his intelligence rendezvous with our field lybrarian in Thebes.”

“How long ago?” Savi demanded.

“Several days.”

“And you didn't tell me!”

Dorrie had never heard Savi sound so angry.

“I'm telling you now as a courtesy because you and Kash are close. I've already sent Tameri out to make inquiries.”

“Inquiries?” Savi almost spat. “We should have a full team out there. I should be out there!”

Dorrie risked a peep through the door.

“Don't get above yourself, Cyrano de Bergerac,” said Francesco. “Kash won't thank us if we come galloping into a delicate situation. We'll wait. I've considered the approach carefully.”

“You'll excuse me if I think your approach not quite adequate,” said Cyrano, his eyes flashing.

Dorrie didn't dare move as Francesco's face went rigid. “Don't let that be the last thing you think,” he said coldly. Francesco and Savi stared hard at one another for a moment.

“My apologies,” said Savi, his mouth hardly moving.