Scourge Forty-Two - Ker-Chunk

“What’s this place?” I ask

The room’s obviously some sort of office space. There are a few writing tables, a shelf along the back wall with stacks of binders on it, and a workspace in the centre. It looks like someone’s gone around and shuffled through things recently, but nothing’s broken.

Esme sets her lamp down on the worktable, then adjusts the wick to give us a bit more light. “So you see any lights?” she asks.

I glance around, then find a few candle holders up against the wall, with brass cages around them to keep the flames at bay. I use a dark magic disk to get closer to one and pull it down.

Esme lights the candle, then another, and soon the room is bright enough to read in. “Alright,” she says. “We’re looking for... well, missing books.”

“It’s going to be hard to find something that’s not here,” I say.

Esme nods. “You’re right.” She kneels down under the table and after a bit, goes “Ah-hah!” She comes up with a large dossier. Hundreds of pages held in place by loops of metal. Flicking it open, she reveals a long list of titles, one per page with little notations carefully penned beneath them. Dates and names, then a stamped symbol at the end of some of the lines.

“Is that like a library’s index?” I ask.

“That’s exactly what it is,” Emse says. “The stamp is the librarian who took the book back. I had my own once, you know. I didn’t get to do much, but they’d let me take care of the young education books. Anyway. I doubt that Altum’s thieves would have been so kind as to sign out the books they stole.”

“So that’s not too helpful,” I say.

She shakes her head. “No no, we just want the title and category code of the missing books. This is a list of every book in...” she tips the book over to read the cover. “Section two hundred and twelve to section two hundred and fourteen of the vault.” She gestures under the table, and by leaning over, I can tell that there are dozens of similar books.

“Alright,” I say. I tug one out at random. “So, any books about necromancy then?”

“Exactly!”

“And knowing the title will help us how?” I ask.

She grins. “Then we do some forbidden and secret magic.”

“Oh?” I ask.

“You and your mom might have soul magic of some sort, for making your monsters, but you’re not the only ones with your own sort of magic. Semper’s library magic is a deep secret, hidden from all but her loyal Archivists. It runs on a very specific sort of Contempt magic.”

“A hybrid magic then,” I say. “Do you know how to cast with it?”

Esme flushes. “I can muddle through. Enough for this. Now get flipping, we need to find some titles.”

I laugh, then do as she says. Esme’s not usually so bossy. It’s kind of cute to see her all flustered about something she cares about so much.

I get lucky as I flip through some pages. “Here’s one.” The book had been taken out once... maybe twenty years ago. “Dead Exhausted.” I turn the binder so she can see it better.

Esme glances over. “Read out the category code for me. It’s the one here, with the letters and numbers.” She turns to the wall behind up and moves towards one section.

I read out a string of numbers until she interrupts me.

“Just one part at a time. It’s going to narrow things down. Alright, next bit?”

It takes two more segments for her to pick out a binder, then she brings it open and sets it next to us. The entire thing is subdivided even more, with tabs sticking out of the top. Soon enough, Esme has it open to a set of pages about the book. Not just pages though, there’s a card slid into a page that’s been built with a pouch in it.

Esme slips the card out and grins. “This is it,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“The book’s relay card.” Esme runs over to the other end of the room, opens a cupboard, then returns with a big contraption. It had a large handle on one side, a few dials and wires running into a box, and next to that there’s a set of keys with numbers on them. Esme slips the card into a slot at the top, then grabs the handle.

She does nothing.

“Are you oka--”

“Shh, I’m concentrating,” she says.

I back off and wait, watching her frown at nothing with her eyes closed and lips puckered out. Sometimes I forget that Esme has so many little freckles across the brow of her nose. I kind of want to touch them.

“Got it,” she mutters.

The handle comes down with a satisfying ker-chunk! Then the machine starts to click. A panel opens on the top, one side has a compass of sorts which spins around wildly and the other had a bunch of tiny panels with numbers on them that flip around madle with a clatter like someone shaking a jar of bolts around.

It stops with a clack, and Esme and I lean closer.

The compass is pointing to our left somewhere.

“Only about a hundred metres away, and deeper into the vault,” Esme says. She sighs and tugs the card out. “No good. Let’s find another.”

“Wait, it tells you where the book is?”

“Yup! Easiest way to find a book in a big library. Especially when some morons like ruining the sorting with their grubby little hands. Or you can use it to track a late book.”

“That’s really neat,” I say. “I bet there are other uses too. Tracking and such. The machine doesn’t really point to the book, does it?”

“Not the book, there’s an identical card sewn into the back cover of most books here,” Esme says. She replaces everything and returns to the index. “Let’s make a list. Book titles, then the code. We should leave with four or five cards, in case Altum’s people break a card or... or toss a book away.”

I nod. That makes sense. “What’s the range of this thing?”

“It’s not that great. A few kilometres, I think.”

That’s still pretty good. Being given a precise direction and an exact range from even just one kilometre away is excellent. Better than look around manually, at least.

Esme starts to list off books as she finds them, and I get back to searching too. Anything that’s vaguely necromancy-related goes on the list.

Rolling Bones - Greatest Hits, by D. Ceased Raise Dead: A Limpet's Guide to Undeath, by Fenfang Fang Taming the Necromancer - a Romance, by Napoleon Boneapart The Dead and Their Fungi-est Uses, by N/A The Legend of Bonesy, by B. Roccoli Knitting For the Undead, by Maud of Downing Forest

“That should do it,” Esme says as she adds the last book to the list with a flourish. “If we can’t find at least two or three of those in the vault, then they’ve been taken by Altum’s people.”

“Nice work,” I say as I close the index I’ve been looking through. “Can you check the cards?”

Esme nods and moves over to the wall of binders with her list. She goes through them quickly, narrowing down which one she needs before pulling it off the wall. Soon we have a small stack of books on the table, and I start going through them with her, our shoulders bumping against each other sometimes.

“Leave them open on the right page,” she murmurs. “We’ll want to replace those we can’t use.”

“Right,” I say. I don’t really care all that much about leaving things nice and neat, but I guess it’s only polite to leave things as clean as we found them.

The first two books we try are duds. I guess Altum’s people weren’t here looking for romance books or fictional stories at all. The next few though.

The machine ker-chunks again as Esme pulls down its handle, and we both lean in to watch the display flip around. This time it goes on for much longer, the dials spinning until they seem to run out of momentum. The compass, though, locks onto a point somewhere to our right and stays locked that way.

“Is that a good sign?” I ask.

“It is,” she says. She looks up to me, grinning big and silly. “We got one. The range is... more than three kilometres, it ran out of energy.”

“Can we give it a bigger jolt?” I ask.

“And burn it out?” Esme shakes her head. “No, we’d need a special one for that. I think a few exist. But then you’d need an Archivist to work them. A proper, well-trained one. I think this is the best I can do for now.”

“Alright,” I say. A direction is better than nothing. “Let’s check on the next few cards, then... I guess we head out and track them down. Do you think this is pointing towards the capital?”

Esme looks around, and I can almost see the gears in her head clacking as she gets a sense of which direction the compass is pointing towards. “No... I think that’s pointing south. South and maybe a little bit east.”

“Okay,” I say. “We have a direction, that’s a lot already. I’m glad you’re here. You’re a real genius sometimes, you know?”

Esme’s cheeks puff out, and her hair snaps with a static-y discharge. “I know that. Now, let’s go tell the others. Maybe we can catch these thieves before they get too far!”

***