The Last Dragon Chronicles: Fire World: Fire World (4 page)

building, convinced that Rosa would be hiding in the heart of it. She wasn’t. In total, he visited eleven more rooms. And the only difference between any of them was that some had windows and some did

not. And in one he found a chair that rocked, and in another an old-fashioned easel. In the twelfth room he thought to glance out of the window and realised, to his surprise, that the daisy horizon was shrinking. In other words he’d actually been going upwards, though he’d had no sense whatsoever of climbing.

“Fed up yet?”

He whipped round. There she was. Leaning against a doorway, grinning.

“I thought I’d be kind,” she said, looking at her fingernails. “It takes for ever if you don’t know what you’re doing.

The   librarium  is   kind  of… spatiallyarranged. I’ll teach you if you’re going tobe here for a while. Did you find abathroom?”

David shook his head.

“Clothing closet?” she asked a little hopefully, clearly not happy with the trousers, shirt and tie he was wearing.

“Just books,” David said. “Hundreds of them.”

“Two million, four hundred and eightytwo thousand and sixty-three to be precise.” She grinned like a katt.

David nodded. It was a tall, tall building. “What do you do here?”

“Store books,” she said with a shrug. “It’s my job to put them in order. I’ll show you.” She stepped into the room, picked up a book from a heap on the floor and

examined its spine. “We do them by author. Duncan,” she read out. “This can go before… ” she scanned the shelves, “… Essinger.” She reached up on tiptoes and attempted to push the book into a space too small for it. So she created a space instead. “This Ringrose shouldn’t be here,” she said, and pulled the book before the Essinger out of its slot, replacing it with her Duncan. The Ringrose she simply dropped onto the floor. “I’ll do that one another time. I wonder if Mr Henry is going to ask you to order them, too. You do know your alph, don’t you?” And circling David with her hands behind her back she chanted, “A B C D E F—”

“G,” David said.

He looked up and saw the firebird prick

its ears. Along its iridescent neck, several of its feathers shimmered blood-red and

orange.

Rosa came to a halt in front of David.

Her pupils dilated as she tilted her headand looked into his eyes. “Why were yousent here?”

“To have an adventure,” David said, desperately wanting to add, in thought,
 
You heard what my father said outside
 
. But he obeyed the librarium rules and felt that the building had warmed to him because of it.

None of this was lost on Rosa. “You

sense it, don’t you?” A hint of excitement glittered in her eyes. She looked to her right, drawing David’s attention to a shelf just above eye level, one of the few that still had a little space on it. Its books had

tilted sideways. Only one, at the open end, was standing upright and free. But only for a moment. David saw it wobble, then lean and fall against the book beside it. Nothing had touched it, and he had certainly not imagineered it, and there was not enough wind in the room to cause it. “How… ?” he asked. But by then Rosa had switched her gaze again, beyond him, to the open window.

“Hhh!” she gasped. “Rain!”

She was there in two secs. Her feet picked out the spaces between the books so fast that she crossed the floor like a

ghost.

“Come and look!” she beckoned him, bouncing on her toes.

David joined her. They were at least twelve floors up, looking west of the

taxicar route but still seeing nothing more than green grass and daisies. A rainbow was arcing through the cloudy sky.

“They love this,” she said.

“The flowers?”

“Mmm.”

And though it was hard to tell from this height, David thought he could sense them stretching their stems and widening their petals. Their colours had changed. From yellow to pink, from white to pale blue. Here and there, orange. He put his hand through the window and turned it, enjoying the caress of the raindrops on his skin. “The rain brings everything together,” she whispered.

David glanced at her, not sure what she meant. “What made the book fall over?”

he asked.

She turned to him and placed her handon his heart. As the wetness seeped intohis shirt she said, “Before we had fain,before we were able to imagineer, webuilt worlds in our heads with words, David. Those words are all here, in thesebooks, in these rooms. The words movedthe book. This building is
 
alive
 
.”

7

“Hmph, well everything is
 
alive
, child.”

Rosa and David turned to see a tall and

slightly frail old man, putting a book onto a shelf on the far side of the room. He was dressed in very simple clothing: loose baggy trousers, a shirt with the cuffs rolled back, and a waistcoat that had a thread or two undone at the button holes. His hair, what there was of it, rose in faint grey wisps around his ears. Liverishcoloured spots could be seen on his scalp. He seemed kindly enough, though the overlarge, black-rimmed spex he wore added a note of austerity to his face. And one of his teeth was chipped.

“This is Mr Henry,” Rosa said to

David.

“Mmm,” went Mr Henry, and continued with his lecture. “Nothing in the universe is ever still, you see. But some things appear more still than others. Everything has auma, from a humble splint of wood to the raindrops falling past that window. Auma is life. And life is never static. It

changes and evolves. It
 
grows
. You must

be David?”

“Yes,” said the boy.

“Welcome to the librarium. Rosa has shown you how to get around?”

“Not really. Can someone tell me where the bathroom is, please?”

Mr Henry extended a hand in the direction of the room next door. “Through there, perhaps?”

David aimed a worried look at Rosa. “I

came in that way. I didn’t see a toilet.”

“Okay, I cheated a bit,” she blushed. “You’re allowed to use your fain to sense your way around. You have to tune your auma to the building to do it. If you want a bathroom, for instance, you put the thought out and the librarium will guide you through the quickest route to one. I’ve found nine so far, but I think they move around. Go on,” she nudged him sideways, “before you wet your pants. Oh, and find something a bit more interesting to wear. You look a bit… retro, if you know what I

mean?”

“All right, that’s quite enough teasing,” said Mr Henry. He brushed a little dust off David’s shoulder. “Join us in my study when you’re done.”

“Your study? Where is that?”

Rosa tapped her head.

Think it. Right.

“Runcey will go with you, till you’reused to it,” she said.

David looked at the perky littlefirebird. It spread its wings and flutteredto a shelf by the door.

“And be polite,” Rosa said, following Mr Henry out of the room. “The librariumdoesn’t like it if you’re disrespectful.”

David rested his hand on the nearest

row of books.
 
Bathroom
, he thought, adding
 
please
 
into the mix. He let his

auma  dissolve  into  the  books   and

immediately felt the slightest of tugs, as if the molecules in the skin of his chest had

been magnetised to those in the air in front of him. The librarium had recognised his request and responded. He strode forward

through the door Mr Henry had pointed to and felt Runcey’s soft claws alight on his shoulder. Confident he wasn’t going to need the bird’s guidance, he marched through two more doors, up a flight of stairs, down a dark and tilting corridor and stepped into – a broom cupboard.

Rrrh!
 
went Runcey. The creature landed on an upturned bucket, shaking its head in a gesture of despair. It spread its wings in a kind of meditative arc.

“You’re telling me to think more clearly?”

Runcey did not seem to understand this. But in a further attempt to be helpful, he rummaged through several books (even here, amongst the brooms, they had found a ledge or two) flipping them open and tossing them aside until he found one with

an illustration. He showed this to David and circled a wing over it.

“You want me to make a picture? In my head?”

Rrrh!
 
went the bird.

David smiled. He understood nowwhere he’d gone wrong. He’d been sloppyin his intent. The librarium must haveheard ‘broom’ instead of ‘bathroom’. So

he closed his eyes and carefully refined his thoughts, picturing a tub and a cistern and a sink. Within twenty seconds, he was there.

He applied the same tech:nique to ‘wardrobe’ and burst through a door into acloset full of shirts and sweaters (making Runcey wince). But he was learningquickly, and by the time he’d strolled into Mr Henry’s study, wearing blue denim

jeans, kicker boots like Rosa’s and a plain khaki combat jacket over a smart maroon T-shirt, he’d also found a bedroom (a hammock slung between two bookshelves) and a room with kitchen implements hooked onto a wall. He was, he thought, beginning to get the hang of it.

“Wow,” said Rosa, sitting cross-legged on a large cushion. “Look at you. All ready for action or what?”

David had been quietly wondering about this, his course of action, his grand adventure. He ignored Rosa’s jibes and spoke up boldly. “Mr Henry, I really like the librarium. But what am I actually doing here? When does my adventure begin?”

Mr Henry thought about the question carefully. He poked around in the drawers

of a desk and found several blunt-nosed pens of different colours. He took them to a flipchart and exposed a large sheet of plain white paper.

David’s mouth fell open in surprise. Was the old man actually going to
 
write
 
something? In these days of :coms, no one ever did that.

But Mr Henry, as Rosa had rightly said, liked words. Without further ado he inscribed one in bright red capitals on the lower part of the paper: ORDER.

“Order?” queried David.

Mr Henry circled it (twice). “Essential in a librarium, boy.”

“I already put the books in order,” Rosa piped.

“Hmm,” said Mr Henry. “But it’s time to move onto another level, child. We’re

double-handed now. Have to make use of the new pair of hands.” He drew a curved arrow away from ‘order’ and wrote a new word, in blue this time: GENRE. “Who knows what that means?”

Rosa’s hand shot up like a daisy stalk. “It means a type of something.”

“Quite,” said Mr Henry. “Imagine the
greater
 
order we would have if we putthe books together not just by author but bytype.”

Rosa’s big brown eyes almost poppedfrom her head.

“Won’t that take a long time?” asked David.

“Oh yes,” said Mr Henry. “A very long time.”

“But won’t we get… erm, bored?” David said. Boredom was a concept so

alien on Co:pern:ica that he’d struggled

for a second or two to find the word.

But Mr Henry understood the conceptwell. “Not if you both do this,” he said. And he drew another line to another

circled word.

“Read?” said David.

Mr Henry smiled. “Read the books, David. Read them as you go.”

“All of them?” asked Rosa. She didn’tseem fazed.

“Any that appeal to you,” Mr Henry

said.

“But won’t that take even
 
longer
?”

asked David.

Mr Henry smiled again and completed the triangle on his chart. “Think of the worlds you will enter, David. Think of the knowledge you will gain, the enjoyment to

be had. This is your adventure – to soak up the librarium and see what you become.”

“Is this what my father wants of me?”

Mr Henry lifted his chin and stared at the boy for a long, long moment. “This is what the
 
librarium
 
wants of you,” he said.

“You may begin.”

8

Two days after leaving his son at the Bushley  librarium,   Harlan  Merrimanreceived a high-priority e:com to hisoffice at the Ragnar Institute for Realismin Phys:ics. The sender was Thorren Strømberg. The message was short: