‘I don’t think we’ve covered that in my training.’ She shifted uncomfortably. ‘What about you? Is that lizard-fish good for anything?’

‘I can use it to breathe underwater,’ Isaac said. ‘But no, not for fighting.’

‘What about—’

‘I think this is it,’ he interrupted, reaching in front of her and tapping the map. ‘That group there, you see it?’

Alice did see it. A set of ancient bookcases stood in a hexagon, their wooden shelves cracking or rotted away entirely. Light spilled out of the cracks between them, a pale, cold radiance that looked like moonlight. Alice and Isaac walked up to it, and Alice waved her hand experimentally in one of the beams and watched her fingers make huge shadows on the floor.

‘Want me to go through first?’ Isaac said. ‘To make sure it’s safe?’

Alice snorted. She shoved her fingers into the crack between the shelves and pushed, wedging herself little by little into a space that seemed much too small to hold her. As before, she had the feeling the bookcases were bulging out, creating a passage just wide enough for her to pass through. When she thought too hard about that, it made her nervous, so she just kept moving.

From the inside, the ring of shelves looked like enormous monoliths, giant slabs of rock arranged in a circle around a grassy glade. Alice stepped from between two of them, out of a passage full of clammy mist, and found herself standing in bright moonlight under a starry sky. The glade was much larger than the group of shelves had looked from the outside, but after everything she’d seen in the library, Alice was hardly surprised by that now.

Ashes said the books . . . leak. That they make a little bit of our world into a little bit of theirs. If that was true, then the world on the other side of this book was a reasonably pleasant one. The moon gave more than enough light to see, and a refreshing breeze rustled the long, silver grass, blowing away the dust-and-paper smell of the library and replacing it with the smell of soil and growing things.

In the centre of the glade was a small, weathered stone pedestal, a bit like a sundial without the point in the middle. Alice looked over her shoulder and found Isaac emerging from the mist, brushing a few clinging drops of moisture off the sleeves of his coat.

‘No guards so far,’ she said. ‘At least that I can see.’

‘They wouldn’t be out here,’ Isaac said. ‘We’re still inside the library, even if it doesn’t look like it. This is still part of Ending’s labyrinth. If the Dragon book is here, it’s somewhere inside another book – that’d be the only way to hide it.’

‘The best place to hide a book is inside another book?’ Alice shook her head. ‘Sometimes this business makes my eyes cross.’