Often when she ventured into the heart of the library she was sure she traveled a route she had never known before, a byway between alleys, ankle-deep in paper dust and redolent with the musings of yesteryear. This time a path between stacks led her not only left and right, but up and down as well. There were places where the floor dipped and raised, but she had never seen steps. She glanced at the books to see what strange subject could be stored in such an ambiguous place: needlecraft. Ten thousand books on sewing, knitting, tapestry, darning, skin-melding, hair-braiding and web-weaving.

On she went. And turning a sudden corner, she found him. She stopped and backtracked slowly, not sure whether he had seen her. His song did not falter, his voice unwavering, his mouth moving in rhythm with his hands. He sat amid a pile of books, manuscripts, torn pages and shredded sheets. He was a lump of flesh at the heart of a mountain of paper, a weak and yet terrible-looking man picking through remnants of history. Obviously he had yet to find whatever he sought.

He was in the far corner of the library building, perhaps aboveground, maybe below. The ceiling was low here and adorned with mineral stalactites, water stains mottling the stacked books and promising little but rot within their pages. This section, Alishia knew, was old magic. Hidden magic. Lost magic. Many people had forgotten about that, and so the area was only visited rarely. Those who did still study it often wished they did not.

The man rustled his way through another sheaf of pages, discarding them at random. They fluttered down around him like dying butterflies. He spent very little time on each page, certainly not long enough to read even a tenth of what was written. He must, Alishia knew, have a very definite idea of what he sought.

Lost magic.

But why here? Seeking a truth about his childhood, or that of his parents? Trying to find the route to the missing history of his clan? Or simply curious?

Dust. That was one of the curses of the library. Scraps of paper and the shed skin of those who had written or read the books over the centuries, all existing in an enclosed, still atmosphere. Alishia breathed in and felt the first tickling signs in her nose. At the same time she saw the old man pause in his search, his eyes widen, his hands grip tightly around the book in his lap. Alishia’s nose twitched and itched, pressure built behind her face, her eyes began to water with the strain of withholding the sneeze.

The man stood. Torn papers fell from his lap, the book held out at arm’s length like a carrier of some horrible contagion.

Alishia turned and ran. The sneeze exploded. She tried to keep it muffled behind her hands, she had turned several corners already, the book stacks should have absorbed the sound . . .