Chapter 3

“How was your morning?” Danel asked Frage. They were sitting on a bench with a small basket between them. In the basket they found two rolls, hunks of hard yellow cheese and two pieces of fruit. They ignored the two stools that were under a sidebar of a small hallway that led to a kitchen, even though they looked more comfortable. They could hear the cooks yelling and banging pots, pans, and other implements Danel could not identify.

“Alphabets were a dud,” she said. “Administrative record keeping was interesting. Cataloging methodology, well, you were there. You?”

Danel took a bite of cheese. “I have a penchant for alphabets. They’ve already decided to drop me from record keeping, which makes me happy. Now, I’m prepared to make my first Librarian decision.”

“Really? Pray tell, what decision do you have in mind?” She tore the roll in half and pressed cheese into the soft center.

“Frage, my decision is to ask you with respect of your skills, to be my study partner for cataloging. Please?”

She swallowed her bite. “Since you ask nicely, yes. I was planning to ask you as well. Do you have a plan of action? I bet you do.”

Danel chuckled at her implied opinion of himself. “Hear me out: we are sitting for forty-five hours of instruction over fifteen weeks, with the exam during the sixteenth week. We will have three one-hour lectures a week. I’m guessing I need three to five passes to memorize an hour’s worth of material, which translates to nine to fifteen hours a week of study. Worse, Fauntel, my Alphabets instructor, warned me twice that there are no shortcuts in this class, meaning I have at least nine hours of study every week and probably closer to the probable fifteen. How many of those study hours do we need together and how many alone?”

“We can’t answer that question yet,” Frage said, absently chewing the last of her roll. “Regena assigned us the first chapter for the next class. We should read the chapter by ourselves and then we sit to review what we read. In truth, we should also read the next chapter ahead but I’m not certain we will have that kind of time.”

“Makes sense. What do we have after this repast?” Danel asked because as far as he was concerned, all the decisions had been made.

“Library geography. For the life of me, I cannot tell you how to get back to anywhere we’ve been this morning.”

Danel pinched a crumb of cheese between his thumb and finger, popping it in his mouth. “Hallways that I think go in one direction surprise me by running in another. Staircases go up and go down and one floor in no manner matches another. It is as if you are stepping into a different building when you take a staircase.”

“Maybe we are,” Frage said. “No one said a library had to be one building.”

“But I saw with my own eyes, one building,” Danel protested.

“God and goddesses, hidden knowledge and suppressed secrets,” Frage counted off with her fingers. “Surely, folding spaces within spaces would be a common godly skill. Think of all the Genie in a Bottle stories; they’re all different but for the first central element, the genie lives in the bottle. I call that folded space.”

“I call that fantastical,” Danel scoffed, biting into the fruit.

Frage laughed at him, pointing with the stem of her fruit. “After twenty-four hours inside the Library of Ibados, how can you not use the term fabulously fantastical?”

“Point taken,” he said. “How will we ever learn this place?”

“Lots and lots of practice,” she said, gnawing the flesh around the seeds. “Never let them see you sweat.”

“Sweat?” Danel said, holding up his arms as a gesture of his sweaty armpits. “Speaking of which, I have only these clothes for dinner, and we are expected to dress appropriately. Whatever appropriate is, it is not what I am wearing.”

“Ask your docent,” Frage suggested. “You mentioned lunch and snap of the fingers, they made it happen. This is a different kitchen from this morning because we’re on a different floor. Don’t you think these docents could be part of the fabulously fantastical?”

Danel called out for Satya, who was sitting on the bench with Frage’s docent further down the hall, nibbling on a biscuit. Leaving her food with her companion, she glided over as if eager to take another command. Danel explained his dilemma to her. She thought about his conundrum for a moment before speaking.

“The seamstresses usually have standard dinner garb at the ready, even if the guest requires a stitch or two. Allow me to escort you to your next orientation. While you are in class, I will seek out the seamstress. As your docent, I promise you will be dressed appropriately this evening.” She bowed.

The geography of the Library could have been as Frage theorized, but his orientation was not delving into the mystery of how and why every hallway runs its own path and every stairwell is more than walking to another floor. Instead, they learned how to read the signs embedded in the walls and framing of the building. Hallways had numbers if one knew where to look. Flat lintels versus fluted lintels were the difference between rooms and hallways, and the sort of hallways were described by the number of flutes, one through five. Stairwells usually gave indications on the cap of the posts and the ligature of the spindles, whether the staircase was wood or stone. Even the baseboards and the crown moldings offered explanation of the room or the run. Danel sighed at the amount of material he had to memorize and had to memorize quickly. He refused to get lost, and he detested the idea of being dependent upon another to get around more than necessary.

He emerged from the class into the hallway rubbing his temples. Looking at the acolytes together for the first time, he saw they were all dressed the same, had the same color cord around their waists and wore the same bracelet on their right arms. Yet, the six docents were as different as day and night, from thin to plump and from different parts of the world. Bello’s docent had black skin that contrasted sharply with her robe, and she was a head taller than most everyone else. Frage’s docent had hair like corn silk; she was slight like a gust of wind could knock her down.

Satya took his hand, leading him away immediately before he could make any goodbyes. When he queried where she was taking him, she replied that the seamstress demanded that she meet him in person to assess what could be done in an afternoon to avert disaster come evening. Clothing a Librarian was a bigger deal than either Satya or Danel understood earlier.

Danel was escorted into a room more akin to a closet with shelves full of cloth on one side and bins on the other. In the back was a strange machine with a thick arm on one side supporting a round tube with a surgical-like needle suspended on two metal spikes on the other side. He was going to make a quip about torture devices, but he was yanked, twirled, and then foisted up upon a box.

The seamstress had her hair in a bun and a pin cushion strapped to her wrist. “He’s a disaster,” she said as she made another circuit around him. “Nice butt though,” she said, patting his derriere. She squeezed his arms and then ran her hands across his chest. “He’s got muscles and definition too. Are you sure he’s a Librarian?”