4.97: The Library

The next video showed mostly the ceiling. My tablet must have been set down on a desk or something.

“So you’re saying that was the spell amalgamate you met during your Initiation?” Max asked.

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Strange.”

“‘Creepy as all fuck’, more like.”

“I mean, that it’s here. That it still exists. I assumed that some spells clumped together temporarily in the Pit, but why are they still together? Has it just been… existing, this whole time?”

“I guess? Does it matter?”

“It’s made of prophecies,” Kylie cut in. “It probably knew that this meeting was coming, and kept existing for it.”

“I’m amazed it had the energy,” Max said.

“Do we even know how much energy it would take, though?” Kylie asked. “Do we know anything about how this kind of thing works?”

“No,” Max admitted. “I suppose not. Kayden, you sure your arm’s okay?”

“It’s not any less okay than the last time you asked,” I said testily. “It’s fine for now, and when we get out of here to Malas, it’ll be even better.”

“Why’d it bite you, though?” Kylie asked.

“It said it was to jog his memory,” Max said. “Did it work?”

“I remember that it’s creepy and terrifying,” I said. “If it was expecting any more specific revelations about our previous conversation during the Initiation… no, I’ve got nothing. Maybe it should’ve just told me what it wanted me to remember.”

“Well, you know prophecies,” Kylie said. “Dramatic, cryptic little shits, all of them.”

“I suppose we should be grateful for the information it did divulge,” Max said, “violent, unsuccessful memory jogging notwithstanding.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s… a lot. Saving the world from some kind of magical monster? What are we supposed to do with that?”

“I suppose we are supposed to save the world from some kind of magical monster. Seems straightforward enough.”

“If you think this is going to be easy – ”

“I did not say easy. I said straightforward. If I understand the admittedly quite vague information we were given, we have most of what we need; we simply need to take the steps. The first step of which is surviving and escaping this place.”

“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled. “You’re not the one who has to haul a school’s worth of magic to the top of the world.”

“You won’t need to carry all the magic, just the heart. And we don’t need to do this until we’re absolutely sure you’re strong enough. “

“How are you this calm about this?”

“Oh, I absolutely am not calm about this. But we need to keep it together long enough to get out of here. We can freak out about this later. So. I’m going to start looking through the maps, seeing what I can find.”

“Before you do that,” Kylie said, “pick out the most relevant-looking books and I’ll start photographing the pages. Might as well get some use out of this library, right?”

“Yes, good idea.”

The camera view changed as I picked up my tablet. “I can do that, too.”

“Your arm – ”

“I can still carry a tablet.”

“Fine. But use mine. Leave the video running on yours in case anything else weird happens.” Max handed me his tablet. “Now then. Let’s get to work.”

What followed next was about thirty minutes of extremely boring video. Kylie and I slowly went through books, photographing each page. I was tempted to fast forward the video, but occasionally, one of us made some side comment about the situation, and if we said something valuable, something containing precious information that we’d since forgotten, I didn’t want to miss it.

We didn’t. The Kayden and Kylie on the video didn’t say anything that we didn’t remember or hadn’t already worked out.

Then, Max came back into view, looking triumphant.

“So,” I asked, “do we have a way out? Besides backtracking, I mean.”

“I’m not sure how successful backtracking would be,” Max said. “And swimming back up through the lake is obviously impossible. But yes, I think this map might hold our answers. Come on.”

On the video, I picked up my tablet again, and we followed him. Soon, we were looking at a map that made absolutely no sense to me.

“This makes absolutely no sense to me,” I said on the video.

“It’s a little mathematical,” Max admitted.

“It’s an optical illusion,” I said. “Look, here’s a tunnel, right? But if you follow the lines, the tunnel becomes part of the wall and the walls are tunnels. It’s like that illusion with the fork. You know, the one with two or three prongs?”

“The impossible trident,” Kylie cut in.

“Yeah, probably that!”

“It only looks like that because you’re looking at it as a two dimensional space,” Max said.

“Yeah. It’s a map. Of course it’s a two dimensional space.”

“It’s four dimensional, possibly five. This will require some translation. You have my tablet?”

I handed it over. He took a picture of the map, and then started tracing lines over the picture on the tablet. Figuring something out, I supposed.

“Uh, okay. We’ll just get back to taking photographs then, shall we?”

“Mhm.”

“Right.”

The video shut off.

Kylie looked at me. “I guess you switched to taking photos there,” she said.

“Ugh, are we going to have to scour through hundreds of images on both of our tablets to find the way out of this place?”

“If we’re lucky, the third video might show the journey. I mean, we know we get picked up by janitors eventually, but it might show enough.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” I played the third, and final, video.

We weren’t in the library any more. We were in a tunnel.

“Are you filming this?” Kylie asked.

“Of course I’m filming this! Anything that happens might be important!” Louder, I called, “Max? You alright?”

“Well, I’m not currently dying,” max’s voice called back, thick with pain.

“Okay, I’m coming down.” The feed moved to show a hole in the wall leading to another path leading very steeply downwards, then went black as I shoved the tablet into my bag. But the video was still playing. There was the sound of careful shuffling, and my own voice quietly swearing.

“Maybe we should’ve held onto your rock climbing equipment,” Kylie said thoughtfully.

“Wouldn’t have helped much. The rope might be alright for balance here, but that stuff was way too water damaged to be safe. You’ve got light on your tablet?”

“Yeah.”

“Shine it this way, and follow me down. I’ll guide your feet to the best footholds.”

After a few minutes of climbing, the tablet was pulled back out to reveal Max sitting with his back against a tunnel wall, breathing heavily through gritted teeth. His face was sickly pale.

“You’re going to hyperventilate,” I told him in a calm voice. “What’s wrong?”

“My legs,” he said in as lighthearted a tone as he could manage. “I think the right one is broken.”

“So we need something for a splint,” Kylie said. “I’ll look around.”

I didn’t respond. I wasn’t visible in the camera feed, so it wasn’t obvious why until I said, “Max. Your left foot. Is that a comfortable angle?”

“Nothing is comfortable right now.”

I crouched down and put my fingers on the top of his left foot, very, very lightly. “Can you wiggle your toes for me?”

After a few seconds I called out, “Kylie, I wouldn’t bother with a splint. We should just let Malas deal with this. A splint would be useful for walking, but Max isn’t walking anywhere.”

“I’m not?” Max asked.

“I think both of your legs are broken.”

He swore in Ido. “Well, if you two can go for help – ”

“If you think,” Kylie said, “that there is any chance at all that we’re leaving you down here then you’re the biggest dumbshit idiot of a mage ever to grace the halls of this school.”

“Then how – ?”

“You’re skinny,” I pointed out, “and I lift weights all the time.” I handed him the tablet. “You’re on cameraman duty. Kylie, you took a photo of Max’s map, right?”

“Yes.”

“Great. You’re our new navigator.” With a grunt of effort, I picked up Max. “Goddammit, you’re still heavy as hell. Must be all that height. Kylie, my measurements are going to be off because my footsteps are going to be way smaller than I’m used to.”

“We’ll manage,” Kylie said. “This looks pretty straightforward, anyway. If we move forward for – ” she stopped talking, and squinted down the passage. “I see someone!”

“Who could possibly be – ?”

“It’s a janitor!” She broke into a run. “Hey! Hey, you!”

“No. don’t – ” I tried to jog after her, but gave up quickly. Presumably, the weight of Max was slowing me down.

“Flagging them down probably is the best idea,” Max pointed out.

“I know it seems like that, but the last time I chased one of those creepy arseholes I nearly got drowned by a lake monster. Kylie?” I called.

“Right here!” she called back. “I lost them. I think we – oh, no.”

“What?”

“Kayden, put him down right – Staffbreaker brings to hidden lair, both scout and vessel – ”

I dropped Max. The video went dark.

In the here and now, Kylie and I stared at the blank screen.

“I didn’t know he broke his legs,” I said. “He didn’t say.”

“Me might not have known,” Kylie pointed out. “Malas would’ve healed them as soon as we arrived, so he wouldn’t have remembered. And you know how good Malas is with bone. More importantly…”

“The map,” I said. “You have a photo of the map.”

“Yes.” She pulled up the photos on her tablet.

“It’s probably the most recent – ”

“Yes, yes, I know.”

And there it was. The map. The way out of the Labyrinth of Dreams.

Our tablets could take absurdly high resolution photographs, which was good, because the picture had a lot of detail crammed into a pretty small space. It looked pretty much how I’d expected; a photo of a map drawn on paper with a route drawn on top digitally, in red. The drawn map itself was completely nonsensical; looking at any small part of it made it look like an ordinary map of a tunnel system, but if you tried to actually follow the tunnels then tunnel became wall and wall became tunnel and parts of it simply disappeared or moved through other parts in ways that didn’t make physical sense. But Max’s route drawn over the top had no such confusion. It started in the very middle and spiralled outward, tracing the shapes of runes I recognised and runes I didn’t in a vast, complex runic circle. We’d walked the rune circle that Max had drawn to get in. Here was the one to get out.

“So,” I said.

“Yeah,” Kylie said.

“We have most of the pieces, now.”

“Yeah.”

We sat in the quiet for a bit.

“Not all of the pieces, though,” Kylie pointed out. “We still don’t understand exactly what we’re doing. We didn’t see the ‘heart’ in there, or if we did, I didn’t recognise it.”

“I think there are some pieces that we’re just not going to be able to get in advance. Some of the stuff, we’re going to have to figure out on the fly.”

“How much, though? We can’t afford to fail. We need as much information as possible before we start. The question is…”

“How much advance information is actually possible. Yeah. How soon is too soon, too reckless? How much more waiting for more information is sensible, and when is it just wasting time, time we might not have?”

“Exactly.”

The world was resting on our shoulders, and the more we learned, the more ready we were. The closer we were to the time when we’d have to bite the bullet and actually do this. We were running out of reasons not to go. We’d have to go soon.

Not quite yet, though. We didn’t have to go quite yet.