Page 42 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Ah, Aristotle. ‘Memory is the scribe of the soul.’ That’s one of his, and he was not wrong. Where I come from,” Yute said, “we call that one Irad.” He indicated the man with the book. “And his brother is Jaspeth.” He turned towards the second figure. “But we all have our own traditions.”

Kerrol appeared from the aisles. Yute waved a hand at the statues. “Irad and Jaspeth’s grandfather, Cain, killed his brother. He invented murder. The third brother, Seth, failed to stop them. Let us hope you are more successful at finding a peace between your siblings.”

Anne had never had a brother or sister. Her mother had died before Anne could properly fix the woman’s face into her mind, taken by tuberculosis on a sea of coughing and red-stained handkerchiefs. Anne looked down at her fingers. She had touched Kerrol’s hand before she had known that she was going to, finding it warm and slightly bristly, much as she remembered her father’s chin. “Where are they now? Your brothers?”

“He doesn’t know,” Yute replied for him. “But Mayland will have taken them to the vaults. It’s the easiest place from which to locate the book he’s looking for. Something that powerful, that dangerous, would shine through the divide. It would be a star in those dark heavens.”

Kerrol cocked his head, absorbing the news.

“The vaults?” Anne asked.

“The graveyard.” Yute tried to wave an explanation into being. “Where books go to die.”

“Like the genizah,” Anne said. “In the synagogue there’s a room, the genizah, where we put damaged Torah. Anything with the name of God on it, really. It’s forbidden to destroy them. So, we keep them.”

“Like the genizah,” Yute agreed. “I can see you come from a cultured people. And what areanyletters but the name of the divine waiting to be assembled? All alphabets are the bones of something holy. The most powerful tools ever placed in any hand. The library keeps its books: damaged, beyond use, even burned. It keeps them.”

Yute turned to the open book on the lectern. He reached out, touchedit, and recoiled as if he had stuck his fingers into some foulness on the street. “This however—” He shuddered. “This was not well done.”

Anne came to stand beside him. “My Struggle, it’s the chancellor’s book. I think everyone’s supposed to have a copy these days to show their loyalty to the Fatherland.”

“When I was a servant of the library I would have said—if asked—that there were no evil books. Just books. Some which might turn weak men evil. Some written by weak evil men.” He shook his head. “But I am both less and more than I was. More frail. Stronger.” He glanced left then right, then pointed at the lectern. “And here it sits, a book that many might say is begging to be burned. Jaspeth looks down on us and he says we should burn the library down with it, so that there is no place for poison to linger. Irad gazes at us and says that the shelf cannot choose which book sits upon it. He tells us that the option to read this book should be there, for good or ill, that memory is our right and our duty. Surround it with sanity, context, and judgement, but don’t deny it a place.”

“And what does Yute say?” Anne asked mainly to avoid the question being turned her way. In her mind’s eye creamy pages crinkled beneath the fire’s hunger. The covers blackened, the swastika becoming smoke. Justice. Cleansing. And yet…and yet…however vile the crime, she couldn’t be one of the wild-eyed crowd, face lit by the conflagration’s glow, smoke and ashes all around as words burned.

“Yute says that worlds fall to ruin when those who dwell there take into their hands the gates of truth and seek to usher through only what they feel is true or right or proper.” The librarian shook his head. “And worlds burn when Irad has his way. And with Jaspeth’s forgetting also: the path is longer, slower, mired in more primitive killing, but no less awful, and the destination is the same fire.”

Kerrol, who had been silent since Yute had mentioned his brothers, stepped up and directed a growl at the man.

“I know you followed me for a third path. And you have every right to ask where it’s leading us. But I don’t know.” Yute hung his head, the thin veil of his snow-white hair falling around his equally pale face. “I simply don’t know.”

From back among the shelves, hidden from view, something struck theground with extraordinary force. As if a church bell had fallen from a great height. Anne felt the floor tremble beneath her feet.

“A bomb?” It made no sense. Were they bombing now? Out in the streets? But this had not been outside. It was here. With them.

“I don’t—” A second blow cut Yute off.

“We should—” A third buried Kerrol’s opinion.

Something like oil spread out from beneath the nearest shelves, a thin, perfectly black sheet, liquid and flowing.

“What is it?” Anne stepped back.

“The library’s blood,” Yute breathed. “It runs here…I was wrong…this place is more important than I thought.”

“Why is it bleeding?” Anne took another step back and, as she did, the black flow began to withdraw, as if the floor had developed a gradient in the other direction.

“It’s under attack.” Yute shook his head. “Something has happened. Somewhere, some-when the library is dying.”

The black “blood” withdrew beneath the shelves, leaving no stain on the floor tiles.

Slowly, unwillingly, Yute began to follow. Anne couldn’t see anything different about the library, but even so, she sensed it. They were no longer alone. Among the aisles something was moving.

Kerrol growled, a long rumbling growl. For once Yute didn’t translate.

“What did he say?” Anne could hear footsteps now, heavy, unhurried footsteps. Ahead of them among the aisles. Oddly, she almost knew what Kerrol had said. Almost but not quite. And she was almost sure that he’d said something just now that shedidunderstand.

“He said that I’d told him the blood was harmless, a tool to be shaped to a purpose. That I’d said it was only a danger to those who were afraid of it, because then it becomes an Escape. It takes the shape of their fear and hunts them.”

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