She had taken his hand in hers. She squeezed it hard. “No, Kip, no.”

But he was dead.

Chapter 75

Being dead wasn’t what Kip expected. He was still himself, so he wasn’t in a card, of that much he was certain. He’d triggered a trap Janus Borig had left on the cards, then. She’d certainly loved her lethal-and-easily-tripped-by-her-friends traps.

It was dark in here. Dark as a tomb—dark as if his eyes were closed. Which they were. Little Kipling, not the brightest color in the spectrum. He was lying facing down on a polished hardwood floor. He stood up—that was good. Good that he could move, right?—and found that he was in a library.

No, maybe not a library, more like the Library. Shelves of a curious, luminous red wood marched in lines to the horizon. Leagues of shelves, each five or six times the height of a man. Kip’s eyes traced the lines of a nearby shelf loaded with the new pressed books up, and up. There were ladders on rollers to reach the higher shelves, but there was no ceiling. The night sky itself gleamed high above, undistorted, stars unwinking, clearer than Kip had ever seen them.

Kip was no astrologer, but he didn’t see a single constellation that he recognized. A sudden sense of vertigo swept him, as if he were going to go flying off the ground and out into that void. He slammed his eyes down to the shelves again.

Atasifusta. That was the wood. The wood that burned forever. Except here, it was merely burnished to such a high sheen that it provided warm ambient light for the whole library. Neat trick. Kip took a step forward and looked down an aisle to see how wide it was.

There was no end.

He stepped back to his spot, as if to find safety.

He took a deep breath. Wait, was that the first breath he’d taken since he’d been here? Did he have to breathe, being dead and all? Oh, he was breathing. Odd that he wasn’t scared. Confused, certainly. Curious, of course. But not a crumb of cowardice.

Maybe one crumb.

Is a crumb the unit of measure for cowardice?

He tried stepping into the aisle again. Ah, it wasn’t endless, it was merely so wide that it seemed so. Somewhere in an oceanic distance he could see something that had to be a wall, and to the other side, the same. Looking so far and being made aware of the expanse inspired vertigo again. Kip turned instead to look at what was near at hand.

A flurry of activity burst forth, the moment of creation appearing to only begin because he was there to observe it, the shelves near at hand filling with an explosion of texts, a blunderbuss blast of thought flew through the aether of every language and collided with the medium of its time: vast double-roll scrolls were unrolling, being filled with text by invisible quills, being illuminated whimsically, then advancing; whole pages of text were unrolled from a press, lined up like soldiers, and sliced apart and stitched to a binding before flying to their place on a shelf; papyrus was pounded flat in layers even as intricate glyphs danced across its surface; clay tablets were smoothed to uniform thickness, tiny punch marks of cuneiform wedges barely filling it before the tablets hardened in sun or kiln; bamboo was pounded flat, cured and stitched, script dropping down each column like rain: a thousand kinds of writing, on skin and on stone and on wood and on paper and on material for which he had no name; left to right, and right to left, and top to bottom, and all at once, and in no discernible order at all. Some of them flew to shelves nearby, but some—like the cuneiform—flew to distant shelves, rows back.

Almost at Kip’s feet, he saw scrawling—on a tabletop that looked like those in the lecture halls at the Chromeria. In a child’s awkward penmanship, written by an invisible hand, letters leapt out:

Majister Gold Thorn is a bitch

She went to the chirurjins with a notty itch

Majister they sed you have the pox

The only cure is lots of

The doggerel was never finished before it was whisked off to a shelf somewhere. Ooo, poor bastard. Kip couldn’t imagine Magister Goldthorn had taken the mockery well.

The old styles of writing that no one used anymore flew far away, and doggerel that had to have been written in the last ten years was nearby. So … What if this place held every word ever written? Every word. And every word, as written, was added.

Which meant Kip was standing at the present, facing the past, watching history roll slowly by to the left and right.

He turned around, expecting to be standing at the edge of a precipice or a blank.

But he was wrong. The future rose before him, league after league of shelves, crammed book after book—the scrolls slowly disappearing as the pressed books crowded them out, and were in turn replaced by shining metal or crystal pieces Kip couldn’t begin to identify somewhere in the distance. And there, beyond even those, far, far in the distance, but still visible, was the library’s wall.

The future ended.

Kip looked off to the sides again, and there, dimly could make out walls. To the past—and nothing. The past might be finite, but it went farther back than he could see, and the past was deeper than the future.

I die and go to a library? Sure, it could be worse, but I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries this year. Quite enough time, really. Do I have to stay forever? Where do I go pee?

I suppose the dead don’t pee.

In the same way they don’t breathe?

He was just about to start walking to explore the shelves when a man fell out of the sky. He landed with a sound like a rockslide, right in front of Kip. Somehow, his landing gave the impression that he’d been falling forever, and that the landing wasn’t even a strain on his knees. Sort of like Cruxer landing a jump. Even if Kip had lived to train in the Blackguard for a hundred years, he was pretty certain making a landing look light and easy was a skill he never would have mastered.

The man stood gracefully, fixed the cuffs of a shirt under a three-buttoned black jacket of a cut and shiny fabric Kip had never seen. Over the jacket, he wore a leather greatcoat, black on the outside, white on the inside, slim cut and hanging down to his pointed-toe leather boots. He took off a brimmed hat similar to a petasos and shook back a cascade of platinum-white hair that didn’t quite touch his collar. His features were paler than anyone Kip had ever seen, exotic, unearthly, perfect. He smiled, a genuine smile that touched his mirrored iridescent eyes, and his teeth were not quite white, but instead pearlescent, and the bit of dogtooth that Kip saw in that smile seemed longer and sharper than usual.

This man was not, Kip decided, a man. A shiver of fear ran down his spine, despite the man’s apparent friendliness and beauty, but then Kip thought, I’m already dead. What’s he gonna do to me?

Good thing fear is rational. Good thing you can talk yourself right out of it.

“Hail, Godslayer,” the stranger said. With his pretty face and sharp beard and immaculate coiffure, Kip had expected a tenor, but instead the voice emanating from this being was a bass—crisp, perfectly enunciated, not gravelly or an indistinct rumble, but a bass that sounded too big to be coming from this man-sized creature.

“Hail, scary guy who fell out of the sky.”

The stranger’s eye twitched as if with irritation. He smiled to cover it instantly, but not before a ragged crack shot from the corner of his eye where he’d twitched to his ear. It filled in as fast as it appeared, and left the smile alone on his face. “Hail, Godslayer,” he said again, as if being very patient.