TWO HUNDRED FIVE: Herdcreatures III

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Alden poured what was left of his cup of dried fish mix into a plastic bag that had held one of his disposable ponchos. He couldn’t find anything that looked like a waste receptacle here, and the Artonan boy he’d questioned had already escaped into the library proper.

After belatedly worrying about the safety of his breakfast, Alden had asked the System about it and been informed, via a message that had an unnecessarily amused tone to it, that yovkews were bad for his liver. He wasn’t going to get sick from having a few, but scarfing them like potato chips would mean he needed to take a potion.

They were more okay than delicious, and he liked all of his organs. So why risk it? He didn’t think eating another and trying to interpret the gremlin’s complete lack of concern one more time was going to result in a breakthrough. He could look into something like this and wonder about it when he got back home.

This weekend is too much.

Yesterday, Natalie wanted to date me. This morning I met a bokabv. I’m a few steps away from finding out what the “top library” at the Rapport I school looks like, and I’ve eaten a handful of toxic meat that the gremlin somehow knows is fine and dandy as far as triggering its sacred rites goes.

Any one of those would have been enough to fill his thoughts and occupy him for the rest of the day. If all the shocks, puzzles, and must-dos could just patiently wait their own turn, that would be great.

On top of that, Stuart had been saying some things before Noh-en’s arrival had interrupted him that Alden was going to need to approach with a clear head.

What if there really is a path for me that’s just easier than everything I’m scared of? One where shitty summons don’t happen. One where I never run out of refusals because I get mostly normal jobs.

A path where keeping my head down and being a quiet Rabbit, doing a better job of it than I have been…works.

It felt like a distant possibility without Stuart standing in front of him saying some version of, “Literally, you dumb human, you’re going to have to beg summoners to let you do anything more dangerous than wielding a butter knife from now on.”

What he said made sense. It just doesn’t feel real.

He wondered if he should ask Yenu-pezth to spend some time during his upcoming inward path session focusing on his inability to shake the gnawing sense of doom that had only gotten worse after the Submerger crisis.

He blinked down at his bag of dehydrated fish. “One thing at a time,” he told himself.

He was in a wizard library, unmonitored. How often could he anticipate something like this happening?

He needed to make it count.

Moments later, he was stepping through the doorway into the main room. Not what I was expecting, he thought.

When Quinyeth had said she was bringing him here so that he’d have something interesting to do while he waited on Stuart, Alden had been hoping for a moment alone in a place full of books. If he’d had a wish list for the experience, then learning a little bit about contract magic so that he could make good on his promise to Boe would have been at the top of it. But the library didn’t have any immediately visible books in it at all.

This was one of those places that would never be mistaken for its Earth counterpart beyond the first glance. Rows of shelves curved around the room, and in the center, there were some simple wooden tables and chairs. After that, the differences were more apparent than the similarities.

The shelves were covered in collections of cubes, spheres, and pyramids made out of different materials. Mostly stone.

Alden actually had an educated guess about what they were based on what Kibby had told him big kids got to use at their big kid schools. You did something to activate them, and they gave you a multisensory experience of whatever had been recorded on them.

Neat. For the people who knew how to use them.

Maybe there are books farther in. Or anything I can understand would be fine.

He’d known that reading on tablets and through eye pieces was ubiquitous on the Triplanets, but surely some of the students here liked a book every now and then. The Primary did. Stuart’s house had a whole library floor specifically called ‘the manuscript library.;

Why couldn’t Jeneth-art’h have sparked a fad with the youth? Used his power for bringing printed tomes back in style.

Alden walked quickly between the shelves, hungry for knowledge that was locked away inside carved shapes he dared not touch. Breaking one of them would probably shame him, Alis-art’h, and Stuart. They were tempting, though. Especially when he noticed there were seats built into the shelving units.

They were mostly cubbies for one, with compartments in front of the seated person that were perfectly sized to fit the different recorder shapes. He wondered if the setup might be for people who didn’t want to run the recorders with whatever spell or technique you were supposed to use to activate them. They definitely had a population at the school who would appreciate something like that. Stuart had said even adults came here for classes sometimes, which meant the knights, which meant people who weren’t in the mood to cast.

Focus on finding something that you’re reasonably sure is safe, Alden told himself. You don’t need brain damage to go with the liver damage, and who knows if these thing are human-friendly?

Not long after that, he heard voices coming from the direction of the door. At least three people, he thought.

No. Not yet. He sped up. It’s the weekend. Go sleep in some more. I haven’t found anything good yet.

He’d seen the number of first meal offerings in the entry room, waiting for takers. They wouldn’t be there if the library didn’t regularly receive plenty of visitors even on the students’ weekends.

When he reached the last row of shelves, only more recorders greeted him, and beyond those shelves, he encountered the wall. The boy who’d confirmed for him that he was eating meat earlier was nearby in a window seat. He had a cube in one hand and a tablet in the other. One eye was closed. With so much going on in his head at once, the guy probably wouldn’t notice Alden unless Alden walked right up beside him and spoke into his ear.

He kept his distance anyway, and he stayed quiet.

Should I put on the pezyva to flash the commendation? he wondered. Yet another situation Tuck and Yinuo didn’t cover. When roaming a library in search of a quick wizarding education, which version of my outfit is less suspicious?

He pulled the pezyva out of his messenger bag and put it on. A few steps later, he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflective surfaces of a few metal shields that hung on the wall.

Well, now I definitely can’t risk anything too embarrassing.

He glanced up toward the balcony level that circled the room. That partial second floor might hold something different than the shelves down here did. He could see that there were cabinets up there. And he might have some more privacy to browse if he kept away from the railing.

The voices of the students who’d arrived a short while ago were still chattering away. It seemed this library didn’t come with an expectation of quiet.

He made his way around the edge of the room to one of the ladders that provided access. It was built of woven roots that weren’t connected to anything alive, as far as he could tell. While climbing, he would be visible from almost the whole lower floor. If anyone looked up…

The worst that can happen is someone asking me what I’m doing. It won’t be some sign to everyone here that I have an authority sense and need to be taken into custody to avoid confusing the entire known universe.

He still took a few seconds to invent an excuse he could give as soon as he was questioned about his purpose. He’d say that he was going upstairs to admire this awesome learning space from a different angle. That would have been a strange-sounding reason if he was at Celena North, but he thought it worked here.

His hand fell on a ladder rung, and the feel of rough, knobby root under his palm gave him one more reason to hesitate.

[Climbing this isn’t offensive to the tree that made it, right? It’s not going to be insulted that a human hauled his heavy human body up?] he asked through a text to no one.

He waited for the reply, sure it was taking longer than usual.

[Your questions are so delightful this morning. No tree will be insulted.]

[You could just tell me what’s in the cabinets up there and if it’s useful to me,] he suggested.

[Can you imagine how surprised everyone would be to learn that I had given you the books you already have?] she countered.

Surprised is probably too mild a word for it. He hoped Alis-art’h didn’t come back home and discover that her entire account of stored up favors had been bankrupted by the Artona I kernel taking her request to help Alden not die and running with it in directions she couldn’t possibly have imagined.

[Thank you again for those. I’ll figure out the cabinets on my own.]

It was a short climb, and he made it swiftly. But before he was at the top, the voices stopped. His stomach clenched in anticipation of someone calling out to him in curiosity or alarm, but he pulled himself up onto the upper level smoothly. Then, he made himself turn with a smile to address whoever was about to comment on his presence. Only to discover that he hadn’t been spotted after all.

From up here, the group that had entered the library a couple of minutes ago was easy to see. There were three of them, and they’d gone quiet because they were using one of the stones together. They were all sitting around it, on the floor beside the shelf it must have been taken from. Two of them had both eyes closed, and one was busy drawing something on her tablet.

Lucky, he thought, moving away from the balcony railing so that he wouldn’t be on display. All right. What have we got up here?

Cabinets about the same height as him were arranged so that they formed the walls of short, narrow aisles. Woven rugs on the floor between them were decorated with poems about the duty and pleasure of acquiring knowledge. The railing stood at one end of the cabinet corridors, and at the other, floor cushions were evenly spaced against a wall covered in huge paintings that Alden saw as blurs of uninterpretable color.

He was familiar with that type of magic from Artonan artwork he’d encountered at the same museum where he’d had the realistic volcanic eruption experience on a school trip. They were paintings you wouldn’t be able to see unless you were positioned correctly. It was supposed to increase their impact if you only viewed them from the ideal angle.

Right now, he was more interested in the contents of the cabinets. Each of them had between one and four identifying labels on it, in the form of carved tags of paler wood that were stuck to the fronts of the sliding doors. Unfortunately, they weren’t intended to be helpful to a human looking for information. They just had names on them.

Instructor Cabro-neethe, Instructor Mesuvi-athet, Instructor Yond-waro…

He walked around the entire balcony searching for a tag that would tell him more, but there were only two cabinets that weren’t labeled with specific instructors. Instead, they both said, “Exceptional pursuits.”

Alden stood by one of those, trying to think of what the worst outcome of opening it could be. This is a library for students. The cabinet’s not going to explode in my face.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

He was ninety percent confident that she would have at least hinted at lethal threats up here when he’d asked her about the ladder. So probably it’s nothing more dangerous than the trail mix anyway.

He stood as far back as he could, took his stylus from his bag, and gently pushed the door with the tip of it. He intended to open it just a crack to start with, but it glided aside smoothly, as if he’d given it a firm shove.

In the moment when it slid back faster than he’d expected, he thought of multiple reasons why he shouldn’t have opened it that were better than an explosion but still bad. What if there was an alarm? What if the cabinet was full of something extremely light sensitive that would be damaged if he didn’t cast a protective spell first?

He let out a breath as the contents were revealed. Books!

Six shelves full of them. He stepped closer, sticking the stylus back into his bag as he examined the spines. They were different colors, many of them bright shades. Their heights were all the same, and the range of widths seemed off for them to be a random assortment. They were almost all slim, and instead of names or titles, the spines were covered in an eclectic mix of embellishments. From single lines drawn down the center, to tiny gemstones, to flowers and scrollwork. The effect was a bunch of books that looked like they weren’t sure if they wanted to be part of a set or not.