The Accidental Keyhand (15 page)

“Callamachus says if they can't find it soon, he's going to have to rat out the Archivist to Francesco. He'll probably take his key away and insist on a new younger archivist.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the tinkling sound of lybrarians hitting pitchers and mugs and glasses lightly with silverware, which Dorrie now knew signaled the beginning of morning announcements. Those with eyeglasses and monocles on chains swung them through the air where their lenses caught and threw the light from the windows. Talking ebbed away and then ceased altogether.

While Mistress Wu made a breathless speech against heedlessness in the Library, citing many recent cases of overturned furniture and bicycles, Dorrie took another long look at the Archivist—remembering his sad, tuneless singing—and then sought out Marcus's eyes to say silently, “We have to return that page!”

As Marcus nodded ever so slightly, a lybrarian in a blue velvet waistcoat stood. He wore a silk scarf around his neck and an elaborate white wig with curls on the sides of his head and the rest of the hair tied back with a blue ribbon. Pockmarks covered his swarthy, wrinkled face. “It's not too soon to be thinking about the Midsummer Lybrarians' Conference and Festival, which takes place in just a few short weeks. The lybrarian training department is in charge of entertainment, and I will be directing a drama in the Greek style for the occasion. I invite all to audition.” He winked boldly at a middle-aged women in a wimple and sat down.

“Who's that?” whispered Dorrie to Mathilde, as another lybrarian began to make an announcement about a shortage of towels in the bathrooms.

“Master Casanova,” hissed Mathilde. “He teaches stealth and deception.”

“He always writes a Greek tragedy for the festival,” Saul explained. “With the chorus and the weird masks, the musicians, the whole deal.”

Kenzo checked to make sure the lybrarians weren't listening. “Nobody wants to be in them.”

“Why not?” said Marcus, as loud voices argued about the towels.

“He writes them himself,” said Mathilde. “And they're well…awful. They're supposed to be tragedies, but you can't watch them or act in them without developing irrepressible hysterics.”

Just then, Millie arrived at the apprentice table, looking thoroughly put out. She was dragging Ebba along by one arm, with Izel trailing behind.

“Ebba!” cried Dorrie softly.

“Hi, Dorrie,” Ebba said, beaming at Kenzo. Dorrie watched Ebba, speechless, as her friend carefully placed her plate on the empty air beside the table and let go. It landed with a crash on the bench. Mathilde had to dive to save the sausages and peas from bouncing away.

Mistress Wu, in the middle of making an announcement about a missing glockenspiel, cleared her throat.

“That didn't land on the table, did it?” whispered Ebba. She felt for the edge of the bench.

Dorrie stared at her, confused. “Ebba, what's wrong?”

“Temporary blindness,” said Ebba cheerfully enough as she climbed carefully over the bench, almost knocking over a water pitcher. “Ursula said it should only last a few hours or so.”

Millie slapped her own plate down farther up the table. “She was trying to show that mangy Sardinian pika rat thing how to eat.”

Ebba felt for her fork. “You don't have to make it sound so ridiculous. She's not well.”

Millie rolled her eyes. “I don't know why the keyhands waste their time bringing you these stupid animals, anyway. So they go extinct. This isn't Noah's ark.”

With great dignity, Ebba spoke to a spot where no one was sitting. “It turns out that leafy spurge is a bit toxic to humans.”

Mistress Wu had gone on to another topic. “The apprentice field trip to thirteenth-century Korea is today. Apprentices should assemble at the Pyongyang, 1220 CE archway at one-thirty p.m. Please don't keep Haneul waiting. If you haven't already checked out appropriate attire, please see Mistress Lovelace at the circulation desk.”

Saul elbowed Marcus. “You don't want to forget that. Try to go into a Spoke Library in clothes that didn't come from that time, and they'll just dissolve.”

Dorrie and Marcus exchanged glances.
Well, that explained the disappearing bathrobes.

As the apprentices began hastily grabbing their satchels and plates and vacating the table in a noisy scrum, Dorrie caught Marcus's eye again, grateful that with the apprentices out of the way for a few hours, it would be easier to talk up in the attics.

Izel put down her water glass and spoke to Ebba in the sugar-laced tone Dorrie had come to hate. “At least you don't have to go on the field trip.”

The jostling stopped and a little silence took over the table. Dorrie looked from face to face, confused.

“You do so like to point things out, Izel,” said Mathilde, standing.

“She probably ate the spurge on purpose,” muttered Millie.

Ebba didn't move.

Mathilde slung her satchel on her back. “Dorrie, will you help Ebba get back up to the attics?”

Dorrie hesitated for the briefest of moments. “Sure. Of course.” For once, Dorrie wasn't happy to have Ebba's company.

Upstairs in the attics, Dorrie and Marcus settled Ebba into a chair by the fire, while Dorrie looked hungrily at their bedroom door.

“Do you want anything?” asked Dorrie.

“Yeah,” said Ebba. “Throw a cushion at my face.”

“Okay,” said Marcus picking up a fat red one with vomit-green tassels on its corners.

“What?” Dorrie snatched it from him. “No!”

Ebba waved her arms slowly in front of herself. “I want to see if I can sense it coming.”

“Okaaaay,” said Dorrie, doubtful about this turning out well for Ebba's nose. “Here it—”

Marcus launched the cushion. It sailed passed Ebba's flailing arms and hit her full in the face. Her head hit the back of the chair.

“Are you all right?” gasped Dorrie.

Ebba rubbed the back of her head and smiled ruefully. “Yes, but I guess I'm still a little spurged.”

Dorrie, Marcus, and Ebba broke into laughter. It rose in volume and simmered back down a half dozen times, refusing to die completely until they were out of breath.

“Millie was wrong about the spurge,” said Ebba when they could speak again. “I didn't eat it on purpose.” She drew her knees up to her chin. “But she and Izel had one thing right—I don't like to go on field trips. I've never gone.”

Marcus threw himself lengthwise on a couch. “Why?”

Ebba tugged on one of the pillow's vomitous tassels. “Because just thinking about stepping through an archway into a Spoke Library makes me feel deathly afraid. It's like I can't believe that I'll actually be able to get through the archway. It always seems like I'm just going to slip in between Petrarch's Library time and the other time and then disappear forever into some horrible place. Sometimes it's a cemetery with gaping holes in front of all the tombstones, and sometimes it's a world inhabited only by Punch and Judy puppets.”

Dorrie wasn't sure what Punch and Judy puppets were, but since she found puppets creepy in general, she got Ebba's point. “So have you ever left the library?”

Ebba sighed. “No. And every time another apprentice field trip comes around, I can feel all the others waiting to see if I'll be able to do it
this
time
and I never can. Then I just feel useless.”

Dorrie frowned. “It was mean of Izel to bring up.”

“I bet you'll be able to do it someday,” said Marcus.

Ebba rested her chin on her knees. “What about you? Are you afraid of anything?”

“Yeah,” said Dorrie. “Being marooned in Outer Mongolia.”

Ebba giggled into her knees. “But Hypatia told you. That's only happened a few times in the Lybrariad's history and only for very good reasons.”

Without thinking, Dorrie said. “Well, now there might be a reason.”

Marcus gave her a warning look.

Ebba stared from Marcus to Dorrie. “What do you mean?”

Dorrie hesitated. Ebba had accepted and trusted Dorrie right from the beginning. “There's something Marcus and I have to tell you.”

Marcus sat up, his eyes narrowed. “
What
do we have to tell her?”

Dorrie licked her lips. “The day we fell into Petrarch's Library, we ended up in the Reference Room, in that little cage room with the
History
of
Histories
books.”

Dorrie paused. Marcus was silently pounding himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand and repeatedly mouthing “No!” She ignored him and went on. “Marcus and I started to look through one of the books, and then the Archivist kind of exploded from under the table and scared us, and Marcus accidentally ripped out a page. We have the missing
History
of
Histories
page.”

Ebba's unseeing eyes grew large.

Dorrie felt a flutter of panic. “I promise, we had no idea what it was!”

“Why didn't you just take it back to the Reference Room and explain?” asked Ebba. “I mean, it was just an accident. Callamachus might want to dip you in hot tar and roll you around in some feathers, but he'd understand.”

Marcus abandoned his attempt to communicate silently. “We sort of forgot it had happened.”

“When we found out how bad it would be for an enemy of the Lybrariad to get ahold of a page from the
History
of
Histories
,” said Dorrie, “we got worried that Francesco would assume we had taken it because we were some kind of horrible Foundation people up to no good.”

Ebba nodded slowly. “Oh, that's true. He might see it that way.” She waved her hand in front of her face. “Hey, I'm seeing again!”

“We tried to return the page secretly,” Dorrie rushed on. “On our second night here, but we got…”—she hesitated, confronted by the choice to tell or not tell Ebba about being chased by the monster cow and inexplicably getting through an archway not their own—“…distracted,” she finished.

Marcus snorted.

“I didn't know that the Archivist was being blamed for taking the page,” said Dorrie, feeling guilty and wrong-footed about not telling Ebba the whole truth. “Marcus and I were going to try to sneak it back into the Reference Room before Callamachus tells Francesco it's gone.”

Ebba tossed Dorrie the ugly pillow and grinned. “I'll help you.”

Relieved, Dorrie grinned back at her, and Marcus, to Ebba's seeming consternation, offered her a high five.

“Tonight,” said Ebba.

A SLIGHT CHANGE OF PLANS

That evening, Dorrie thought the apprentices would never go to bed. Marcus hadn't helped by drawing different-colored circles on the floor with chalk and insisting that everyone had to learn how to play Twister. Only Millie had refused, saying she had some reading to do. After that, Mathilde had brought out a jar of popcorn kernels to roast over the fire in a wire basket with a long handle. Just when people finally began to pick up the pieces of their projects and games, and put down their books, the den door opened a crack and Izel slipped inside, home from the evening meteorology practicum.

She hung her emerald-green cloak on a peg. “Did you hear?” She didn't wait for an answer before hurtling on. “The lybrarians have called all three keyhands back from Athens, 399 BCE.”

Dorrie spilled some of her popcorn at the mention of the archway she'd gone through.

“Why?” said Ebba.

Izel turned to face them, her eyes bright. “Socrates was found guilty.”

There was a general stir in the room, and little gasps and moans.

“Aspasia must feel awful,” said Mathilde. “She's been working so hard to sway public opinion.”

“She couldn't even get them to change the punishment,” said Izel. “The Athenian jury still sentenced him to drink the hemlock.”

Watching Izel, Dorrie couldn't help but feel that the apprentice seemed more pleased with the excitement of bearing the news than bothered by its nature.

“But why call them back?” asked Marcus. “Why can't the lybrarians just pour on a little ninja sauce and break him out of wherever they're holding him?”

“Oh, what a brilliant idea,” Millie muttered, without looking up from where she sat scratching away with a quill. “We should try that.”

Mathilde pulled Sven's fur and leather hat off his head and hurled it so that it caught Millie hard in the chest.

“Hey!” cried Millie.

“So sorry,” said Mathilde. “Meant to land it on a hook.” She turned to Marcus. “I think what Millie meant to say was that the Lybrariad would try to help him escape, only Socrates won't allow it. He'd prefer to die and force his accusers to live with their decision, rather than to let them off the hook by escaping and living as a fugitive.”

Dorrie shivered. “So, it's a pardon or nothing?” It was hard to imagine a person giving up his life just to make a point.

“I bet that's why the Lybrariad called all the keyhands back in,” said Ebba. “To give themselves more time to come up with a last-ditch plan.”

“Because time will stop moving in Athens!” blurted out Dorrie, pleased to have remembered something about the Library's rules.

Sven retrieved his hat from the floor. “I bet they're going to try an aversion.”

“What's an aversion?” asked Dorrie.

Mathilde laid aside her copy of
The
Declaration
of
the
Rights
of
Women
and
the
Female
Citizen
. “It's when the Lybrariad changes something in the past to try to save the life of a person farther along in history.”

Millie stopped writing. “You shouldn't be talking to them about stuff like that.”

“Is this Petrarch's Library or isn't it?” said Mathilde, with as much force as she could manage, given that she'd just stuffed her mouth full of popcorn.

Millie jammed her quill into a tomato as though both items had recently caused her grave personal injury.

“Don't worry—we'll leave you to your secrets,” said Marcus, yawning. “Us Foundation operatives will just head off to bed.” Marcus gave Dorrie a pointed look as he swept from the room.

***

Dorrie tiptoed from her room, the rolled-up
History
of
Histories
page tucked safely inside her satchel. The other apprentices were all asleep in their rooms; they had all shuffled off to bed after Marcus's dramatic exit. Ebba met her and Marcus at the door, an empty cage in hand. If they were caught breaking the apprentice curfew, they intended to use searching for Moe as their excuse.

With Ebba leading them, they managed to evade the few lybrarians they saw and quickly arrived at a little, out-of-the-way stone chamber that adjoined the Reference Room. A pile of musty hay stood in one corner.

Ebba opened one of the doors to the Reference Room a crack and put her eye to it, and then turned back to Dorrie and Marcus, her face glowing. “No one's at the front desk and only the main doors are open. I'll go close and lock them. Dorrie can lock the others, and Marcus, when it's clear, you can put the page on Callamachus' desk. Tuck it in one of his reference books.”

Dorrie pulled the scroll out of her satchel and handed it to Marcus. “But make sure it sticks out. Callamachus has to be able to find it.”

She and Ebba were just about to slip into the Reference Room when Marcus made a funny, little choking sound.

“What?” said Dorrie, sensing trouble.

Marcus let the paper he'd unrolled spring back into its coil and stared at Dorrie. “We don't have the
History
of
Histories
page.”

Dorrie's blood ran cold. “But you got it from that tube thing in the Mission Room—”

“Yeah, well, the thing I got from the tube thing in the Mission Room is this, and
this
isn't a page from
History
of
Histories
.”

Ebba closed the door. “How do you know?

Marcus glanced at the paper in his hand again. “This writing looks Greek or something before it goes English. I mean, it's a whole different alphabet from ours. The page from
History
of
Histories
was written in the same alphabet English uses.” He passed it to Ebba.

“Then where's the
History
of
Histories
page?” demanded Dorrie.

“No idea,” said Marcus.

“Welcome, valued friends,” Ebba read aloud. “If I may quote from” —she hesitated over how to pronounce the next word—“You-bel-us?…in his fine play”—she hesitated again—“Semele: ‘Three bowls do I mix for the temperate: One to health, which they empty first, the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep.'”

Dorrie shook her head with frustration. “It's just some kind of letter or speech or something.” She looked at the page over Ebba's shoulder. As Marcus had described, unfamiliar letters seemed to dance before her eyes for a slice of a second before the figures shifted and twisted so that she saw English written with its familiar ABCs.

Marcus tapped his lips with one finger, looking off into a cobwebby corner. “Uhhhhh. Dorrie, you don't think that maybe after we got…”—he cleared his throat—“
distracted
when we were trying to return the
History
of
Histories
page the first time and I dropped it, I might have maybe possibly picked up a different rolled-up piece of paper off the floor? I mean,
remember,
there were a lot of scrolls on the floor.”

A Technicolor vision of the stampeding monster cow, the upturned table, the spattering inks, and the cascading scrolls on the other side of the Athens archway flashed before Dorrie's eyes. “You didn't check that you had the right one after you dropped it?”

“I refuse to feel guilty,” said Marcus. “My bathrobe was melting!”

“
What!
” said Ebba.

Dorrie looked with alarm at Ebba. If Dorrie told her about going through the Athens archway, would Ebba then feel duty-bound to tell the Lybrariad? Dorrie gazed into Ebba's warm brown eyes. Ebba had trusted Dorrie with her fears about the field trips, and she'd taken Dorrie's word that she and Marcus hadn't meant to rip out the
History
of
Histories
page.

Dorrie came to a decision. Surely she could trust someone who shared her fear of puppets. She took a deep breath, her heart pounding. “Ebba, there's something else we have to tell you.” She sank into the musty pile of hay. “The night we tried to return the page, we sort of accidentally went through the ancient Athens archway.”

Ebba eyes bulged. “But that's impossible! You're not Athens keyhands!”

“I…I…know,” stammered Dorrie. “We don't understand why it happened. We didn't mean to, I promise!” Dorrie watched Ebba's eyes flick to Dorrie's thumbnail. “You have to believe us!” For a moment she was back in the hallway looking over her shoulder as the enormous, steaming creature bore down on them. “I know this is going to be hard to believe, but we got chased through the archway by this monster cow thing.”

Ebba took a step backward. “A monster cow?”

“I know it sounds crazy,” cried Dorrie.

“But it's true,” said Marcus. “It almost flattened us.”

“I just saw an opening,” said Dorrie, “and we jumped through.”

“Our clothes started falling apart—”

“Oh, yeah, that will happen,” said Ebba in a soft, distant voice.

A realization hit Dorrie hard. “If we did drop the
History
of
Histories
page in Athens, then we
have
put the Lybrariad in danger.” She jumped up. “That page is full of the names of lybrarians and dates of rescues and the locations of Spoke Libraries.” Her stomach roiled. “We've got to get it back!”

Ebba seemed to come back to her senses. She sprinted back through the Library's labyrinth with Dorrie and Marcus pelting after her, making little effort at silence.

Skidding to a stop in front of the Athens archway, Dorrie caught her breath. The floor of the little room had been thoroughly cleaned. The potsherds and scrolls had all been picked up, the furniture righted, and the ink mopped away. “Someone's cleaned everything up!”

“Always a mistake,” panted Marcus, expressing a long-held belief.

Dorrie was about to plunge through the archway and search through the scrolls that now neatly filled the rack, when Ebba grabbed her arm. “Wait! You can't!”

“I can!” cried Dorrie. “I did it before.”

Ebba shook her head. “No. I mean the lybrarians wouldn't want you to.” She pointed to the calendar etched in the stone to the right of the archway. In the month marked Gamelion, the number 18 glowed white. “Remember, the Lybrariad called all the keyhands back. So they'd have time to try to think of a way to get Socrates pardoned. If you go through the archway, time will speed up again.”

The memory of Izel's news flooded back through Dorrie's brain. She took a step backward, unsure.

Ebba stared at the rack on the table. “It would take hours to go through all those scrolls.”

“And what if you can't get back out again?” said Marcus. “I couldn't last time. Also, unless the clothes you're wearing were made in ancient Athens, which I highly doubt, they're going to melt. We're already in trouble for the bathrobe and the dressing gown.”

Dorrie looked down at the green dress Mistress Lovelace had sent up in her satchel.

“This is all my fault,” said Ebba softly.

Dorrie felt punched. She supposed she understood how Ebba could feel that way. Maybe if she hadn't been so quick to befriend Dorrie and Marcus, then…

Ebba covered her face with her hands. “I never should have read Roger out of that book.”

Dorrie wondered if Petrarch Library's instant translation was failing her. “Who's Roger?”

Ebba collected herself. “He's an aurochs,” she said reverently. “He's not a monster. Really, he's not!” She looked from Dorrie to Marcus and back again. “It's just I think he's lonely. That's why he wanders! He probably just wanted you to pet him.”

“You read that monster cow thing out of a book?” said Marcus, clearly staggered.

“I know I shouldn't have,” whispered Ebba, pushing back her headband. “But it worked with the boa constrictor and the rats, and the last of his kind gets killed in 1627 in Poland, and they're such magnificent creatures. I couldn't bear to think of them going away forever.” She stared morosely through the archway. “I'm so sorry. I guess we have to tell Hypatia what happened.”

Dorrie swallowed hard. “But what if then the Lybrariad doesn't want Marcus and me here anymore? Things are going so well.”

“Yeah. Let's not get all hasty about telling anyone anything.” Marcus brought his thumb and finger together so that they almost touched. “I'm this close to getting Egeria to go out on a date with me.”

“Is that all you care about?” cried Dorrie.

“No, but it's one thing,” said Marcus.

Dorrie looked at the scrolls again. “We have to think of the Lybrariad. I guess we can't just leave the page out there and not tell them.”