The Iron Dragon's Daughter (33 page)

As the two swept out, a smattering of applause rose from the floor. The poet was done reading. He stepped down from the stage, and was replaced by another as like to him as two cigarettes in a pack. The replacement cleared his throat into the microphone and began:

Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

Instead of dithering over whether or not la jettatura was beyond her talents, Jane should have challenged Ratsnickle directly. She should have told him she would never steal for him again. Should have said there was nothing in his envelope that could possibly affect her academic standing. That she wasn't afraid of him, not any more.

There were so many things she should have said.

The booksellers in Old Regents Hall served all the City. But since most of Senauden was taken up by the University, many specialized in secondhand texts, works of obscure scholarship, and other books of special interest to students.

The bookstalls were two and three stories high, but so narrow within that two customers could not slide by one another without discomfort. Long ago, plumbing had been retrofitted into the space below the indigo-and-gold-star vaulted ceiling. Steam hissed gently, unrelentingly, from the joints of one set of pipes and water condensed on the undersides of another. A steady drizzle fell onto the green roofs of the stalls and the tiled street between.

"Why are you so anxious to get an orchid book? Can't you think of a name without?" Sirin took an umbrella from the rack by the west door and shook it open. Jane took another.

"Maybe. It's kind of tough, though. It's such a personal thing, you know? I'd hate to decide too quickly and get stuck with something like Lady Fatima." Umbrellas up, Jane and Sirin linked arms. The passage between the stalls was thick with pedestrians.

"Jenny Greenteeth named hers Miss Primsey's Garden."

"Too flowery. That's almost as bad as what Eleanor named hers."

"What? Tell me."

"Bossy."

"Oh, vile! 'Tis the name of a cow! Do you know the bwca down the hall from you? She swears she's decided on Siege Perilous."

"That's a good name."

"And yet not one likely to draw in much traffic." Sirin giggled. "Raven says she's thinking of naming hers the Ineluctable Cavern of Despair."

"She's just sulking over being dumped for a blood-may. You've heard what Nant named hers?"

"What?"

"Trouble." They were both laughing now. "What about you?"

"The Meat-grinder."

"Oh, don't! Really?"

"No, of course not. I named her Courage. Wasn't that a—"

"Quick!" Jane seized her friend's arm and swung her into the nearest bookstall. Gilt lettering over the door proclaimed it to be INGLESOOT'S. "In here!"

Astonished, Sirin craned and gaped out into the passage. "Jane! Whatever can be the—" Puck Aleshire strode by the doorway, grim of face and bareheaded to the rain, looking neither to the right nor left. The bobbing umbrellas swallowed him up. Sirin made an exasperated noise. "Oh, Puck. This thing between you and him is getting out of hand."

Jane's heart skipped. "What thing? What has he been saying about me?"

"He doesn't say anything about you, and do you know
why
? Because you ignore him, you avoid him, you won't have anything to do with him. He can't want what he doesn't know exists."

Jane began poking through a tray of remaindered dream books, crosswords collections, and herbals. "He has the stench of death about him. You can tell at a glance that he's not going to survive the Teind."

"That only makes him the more delightful. It ought to pander to everything that's depraved in you." An angry light danced in Sirin's eyes. "Come on, Jane, it's perfect. You can do anything you want with him and he's not going to come sniffing around to remind you of it next semester. Any normal girl would kill for that kind of opportunity."

"Well, I've been through all that before, thank you. Never again."

Sirin stamped her foot. "Church bells and holy water! You're just fucking impossible. I don't know why I put up with you."

"But I—"

"Forget it! See if I ever—ever!—try to do any more favors for you."

White with fury, Sirin slammed out of the shop. She disappeared into the swirling currents of the crowd.

Jane was stunned. It made no sense at all. One instant Sirin was laughing, and the next in a rage. Her merry mood had evaporated as quickly as the light on a meadow when a cloud passes over the sun. Nothing Jane had said could possibly account for this transformation.

She sighed, turned to the shelves, and put her hand on exactly what she was looking for. It was a slim volume bound in tooled leather and titled
The Name of the Orchid
. Jane flipped through it. There were a dozen hand-colored plates and a dictionary of several hundred names defined, derived, and argued by merit and deficiency. To hold it was to desire it.

She looked up and down the stall. It was empty. She peered upward. The shelves seemed to dwindle and recede toward infinity. A long, slender ladder stretched beyond the hanging electric lights, into faraway realms where the endless ranks of books were lost in obscurity. "Hello?" she called. "Is anybody up there? Master—" What was the name out front? "—Inglesoot?"

There was no reply. She shrugged and made for the door.

The ladder rattled irritably. A cobbly scrambled headfirst down from above. When he reached the eighth rung he leaped off to flip and land at her feet with a thump. "Not for sale." He plucked the book from Jane's hand.

"What?" She stepped back.

"Not for sale, not for sale! Are you feebleminded? Not for sale means you can't buy it." Master Inglesoot stood as high as her waist and his gold half-rims were bright semicircles against his grizzled black face. "Get out. There's nothing for you here."

"Um… this
is
a bookstall, isn't it?"

"Well, and what of it?"

"Most bookstalls sell books."

"Don't chop logic with me." Inglesoot passed the orchid book from hand to foot and stuffed it into the bottommost shelf without even looking at it. Intentionally or not, he was standing between Jane and the door. Otherwise she would simply have left. "I'm wise to your thievish little schemes. These books are mine, d'ye hear? Mine! I'll defend them to the death, and that's no idle boast."

Jane found herself trembling. "This is the craziest store I've ever been in."

"Crazy?" He rounded on her, all angles and motion, and shook a finger under her nose. "I know your type and your pathetic delusions. Oh, yes, I do. You think of a library as being like the mind of a great and noble Scholar—catholic, universally educated, and precisely organized. Every opinion balanced against its opposite, every fact quickly retrievable. The only biases those that exist in the knowledge itself. If a gap exists in the collective omniscience, a horde of servants will scurry to patch it with the best available volumes, each weighed and tasted to make sure the quality and flavor of information is suitably rich. And this puerile construct, this mock-loremaster, you think is a good thing. Get a life, why don't you!"

"If you'll just back up a step or two, I'll leave."

"You sneer at my bookstall because it's more like your mind as it really is—erratically educated, stocked with whatever unexamined assertions chance to pass within reach, crammed with dubious and contradictory information. The volume you need is here somewhere, but misplaced and out of date. Trash and treasure are thoroughly intermingled with no way to easily distinguish which is which." He yanked a volume at random and read the spine. "
Scribbledehob
. Musings on fireplaces? The picaresque adventures of a young demon? The demented scrawls of a disordered maniac? Who is to say?" He put it back, pulled out another. "
Infangthief and Outfangthief
, the merry pranks, doubtless, of a pair of witty and lovable rogues, filed alongside that useful reference work
Unspeakable Cults
. And to serve and order and replenish them? Only I, myself."

"It's okay. I don't want to buy anything. I changed my mind."

"Yet think! Use your head, for once. It is not commonality that we value in others but eccentricity. It is our differences that individuate us. Were you to meet your vaunted Scholar astride down this very corridor, with his perfect features and flawless diction, you would think him knowledgeable but strangely dull, a farrago of facts and citations and nothing more.

"Compare this with the wit and variety, the eternal surprise of my sweet, sweet mistress." Blindly, lovingly, he stroked the books with his piebald old hand. "And would you wish to see her mutilated, reduced—aye, and lobotomized? Oh vile, vile, ten thousand times vile!"

"It was only one book!"

"Excuse me." A mild-faced lizard woman poked her head in the door. "I'll show the young lady out. I think she meant to come into my stall in the first place. Sit you down, gaffer. Take your ease."

"Eh?" Inglesoot started, and swiveled halfway toward the door. A puzzled expression spread over his face. Then his knees bent and in slow collapse he sank down onto a cardboard box overspilling with maps, pamphlets, and commercial throwaways. He put his head in his hands. "Gone, all gone forever," he grieved.

This was Jane's chance. She accepted the lizard woman's hand and delicately stepped over the unheeding cobbly. The way out was clear now.

At the doorway, she opened her umbrella and quietly asked, "What was that all about?"

"It's an occupational hazard." The lizard woman shrugged. She was heavy bodied and her motions were suitably torpid. "You start by reading books, and you end by loving them."

"But all that wild talk! About death and mutilation and lobotomies."

"The notices came three days ago." She fished a yellow flimsy from an apron pocket, unfolded it, looked at it, refolded it, and put it back in. "The authorities will be collecting a tithe of our stock for the Teind-fires. Inglesoot was functioning well enough until then. But when he tried to weed out the redundant books, he found he could not. A few of us came over with cardboard boxes to get him started, dropping into them duplicates, inferior texts, things that would never sell. He scrabbled after us, squeaking, and snatching them back. By the end of the day we had but one carton with a single coverless paperback romance at its bottom, and that he set aside for further consideration. So we gave up."

"What will happen to him?"

"They'll seize all his books, of course, and him with them."

"That's awful. Can't you stop him?"

"Child, what good is a bookseller who won't sell books? It sounds harsh, but he's exactly the sort of misfit the Teind is meant to clear away. We're best off without him." The lizard woman smiled sadly, and ducked into the next door stall.

Jane stood in the rain, hesitating. At last she stepped back inside. "Master Inglesoot."

Without looking up, he said, "Who are you?"

"Nobody. A friend. Listen to me. The City only wants a tenth of your inventory. Consider how many hundreds and thousands of books you have—you can't possibly read them all!"

Master Inglesoot looked up and in his eyes she saw the gnarled toughness of old roots, a fanatical determination that might be killed but never weakened. "It's better this way. Better we should burn together than for me to survive and inhabit the corpse of my beloved, surrounded constantly by reminders of her former beauty."

"Your collection is not a woman. That's only a metaphor—an abstraction! You'll be dying for nothing, for a principle that nobody else can even comprehend."

As she spoke, Jane became convinced that she herself would never willingly die for a principle. She might feel guilty about it, but she'd smile and lie, knuckle under, pretend, anything, in order to survive. It made her feel a little sad to realize this, but also, at the same time, very adult.

"It's not the principles that kill you in the end." Inglesoot hugged an almanac to his chest with both arms. His voice was fading as his interest in her waned. "It's the books."

Entering la jettatura was like walking into a dream. The quietly intrusive background music of the mall stores was replaced by textured layers of quiet. When she squeezed past the pine-tall coat trees, her cheek was brushed by the imperial softness of vicuna. Here was the quiet gleam of brass, there the gentle cry of a hand-held bell. Everything conspired to soothe the senses. Yet the air quivered with tension, as if an elf-lord were just about to enter the room.

From her observations of the customers, Jane had assembled an outfit that might let her pass. She'd ripped her best jeans at the knees and three places up the thighs, fraying the threads so that they stood out white and defiant. Over a black lace bra she wore a sheer silk blouse with a string of pearls in a setting dowdy enough to suggest they were inherited. To top it off she had borrowed from Raven an embroidered jacket acquired for a fraction of its value on an independent study trip to the mountain country of Lyonesse.

A touch of makeup finished the look. Examining the results in the mirror Jane decided that she was the visual embodiment of a Teggish girl with money trying to pass for an elf-brat with an attitude.

The faun gloves were to the front. Jane passed them by without a glance, as was her usual technique. She lingered over a display of spiderweb shifts that clung to her fingertips when she touched them, then followed a long, winding aisle past autumn shawls and handbags the rich brown hue of dried oak leaves. She startled a squirrel, and it scampered away to disappear among the woolen skirts.

Everywhere Jane felt the pressure of small, bright eyes on her. Yet whenever she turned the sales personnel were discreetly distant, heads turned away, fading already into obscurity. Their attentiveness was perfection itself.