Authors: Nicholas Kaufmann
I stopped in mid-step. “
What?
”
Thirty-Two
Isaac drove the Escalade through the streets of Manhattan’s East Village. We’d come straight from Bronxville, nearly an hour’s drive that felt like an eternity. My blood was still boiling. Every minute I didn’t have my hands around Arkwright’s neck felt like a minute wasted. Isaac thought the Guardians could help us find him. I hoped he was right, because they were our last hope.
“We should have asked the Guardians for help from the start,” I said. I watched the pedestrians on the sidewalk holding their identical small, black umbrellas, as if they’d all bought them cheap from the same corner bodega. It was pouring and almost midnight, but the bars and restaurants in the East Village were as active as ever. “It would have saved us a lot of time and trouble.”
“It’s not as easy as that,” Isaac said. “There’s a reason people don’t just go to the Guardians any time they need something. There’s a price, and it’s not cheap.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just leave it to me.”
I looked out the window again. I knew Isaac was rich, but something told me this particular price wasn’t measured in dollars. These things rarely were.
He parked the car on Lafayette just south of Astor Place, in front of a big building with a brick-and-brownstone façade. The arched windows glowed from within. I stepped out onto the sidewalk. Banners hung off the front of the building. One read
JOE’S PUB
. The other,
SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK
.
“This is it,” Isaac said, getting out and closing the driver’s-side door behind him.
I knew this place. I’d passed it plenty of times but never paid it much attention. “This is the Public Theater. What are we doing here?”
“We’re not here for the theater, we’re here for what’s underneath,” Isaac said. “Follow me. Stay close.”
We walked into an alley next to the building, skirting around piles of overstuffed garbage bags and through a veritable minefield of cigarette butts. A plain metal door was set into the side of the Public Theater. Isaac knocked on it.
“So what’s under this place?” I asked.
“The Library of Keys,” he said.
The door opened, swinging out toward us. A tall, burly man stood in the doorway. He had a full beard, a black patch over his left eye, and a scar that ran down his cheek. A white ouroboros had been painted on the black patch, only it wasn’t a snake eating its own tail, it was a dragon. The man glanced past us down the alleyway to make sure we were alone.
“Theater entrance is around the front, lads,” he said. His thick Scottish accent did very little to hide the annoyance in his voice. He started to close the door.
“Serapeum,” Isaac said.
The man froze. He looked at us again, his entire demeanor changing. With a nod, he opened the door wider to let us in. “Right this way.”
We entered a narrow, dimly lit hallway with cement walls. The old, bare floorboards creaked under our feet. The man slammed the metal door closed behind us, then squeezed past Isaac and me into the hallway ahead, no easy feat for a man of his size. He led the way deeper into the building.
“Who’s Serapeum?” I asked Isaac.
“Not who, what,” Isaac said. “The Serapeum was a temple in Egypt that housed the books rescued from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. The Library of Keys uses it as a password. It seems appropriate.”
“I’ve never heard of a library needing a password before,” I said.
“This isn’t just any old library, lad,” the man said, glancing over his shoulder at me. “It’s the Library of Keys. Every key to every door, every gate, every lock in the world has a copy here. The doors people know about, and the doors they don’t. Something like that has to be protected. No one gets in without the password.”
“Wait, did you say every lock in the
world
?” I asked.
“Aye, and a few from other worlds,” the man said. “It took the work of many powerful mages to create a library like this.”
“And they put it here, in the East Village?” I shook my head. “I guess all those people who think New York City is the center of the universe are right.”
The man laughed at that. He stopped at the end of the hallway, in front of an open ironwork elevator. He slid open the accordion gate. Isaac and I stepped inside. The man remained in the hallway.
I scanned the elevator walls. “There are no buttons.”
“You don’t control the elevator,” the man said, sliding the gate closed again. “I do.”
The elevator began to descend, though all the man did was watch us with his arms crossed over his barrel chest. We descended into a concrete shaft.
“The Library of Keys has been here since long before there was an East Village, or even a New York City,” Isaac explained. “In the 1850s, John Jacob Astor built the Astor Library on this spot, but not before coming to an agreement with the Library of Keys first. If they let him build here, he would help keep their existence a secret. The Astor Library is long gone. Now it’s the Public Theater, but they still honor Astor’s agreement. In fact, this used to be Astor’s private elevator to his own secret reading room on the top floor. His son, William, extended it down to the Library of Keys when he took over. Rumor has it he was having an affair with one of the librarians.”
“So there’s a key down here that will take us to the Radiant Lands to see the Guardians?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
He smiled. “You’ll see.”
“You’ve done this before,” I said. “Been to see the Guardians, I mean.”
“Yes, once,” he said.
“To be honest, I kind of didn’t think they were real. It all sounds so … New Agey.”
“I assure you the Guardians are quite real,” he said. “When I was younger, I came here to ask them for help. They chose not to interfere. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.”
The elevator stopped. Through the open ironwork, I saw an enormous room with high, vaulted ceilings and electric lights. The walls were polished cherrywood. The floor was marble tile.
“What did you ask the Guardians to do?” I asked.
Isaac slid open the gate and stepped out of the elevator. “Save Morbius’s life.”
Damn. I blew out my breath. I hadn’t been expecting that.
I followed him into the Library of Keys. Before us, tall shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, only instead of books they held keys of all shapes and sizes, each on its own peg. A wide, central aisle ran down the middle of the room. On either side, row after row of shelves seemed to extend into an infinite distance. On any other day, under any other circumstances, I would have been excited to see the place Bethany was always talking about. Today, all I wanted was to get what I needed and get out again. Bethany was hurt because of me. Jordana was dead because of me. Erickson Arkwright had manipulated me—manipulated all of us—to this point. I didn’t just want him stopped. I wanted him dead. For that, I needed the Guardians’ help.
Heavy footsteps came from somewhere deep in the stacks, shaking the floor. A massive creature emerged and started toward us down the central aisle. It was big, and definitely not human. It wore a three-piece tweed suit over its fleshy, misshapen form, its pale skin loose and flabby. Its wide, flat feet were bare, and each had only four toes. Its jowly, triple-chinned face remained slack as it approached. Its lower lip drooped to reveal a row of teeth like square, yellow bricks. In its big, hairy-knuckled hands it carried a water-filled glass cylinder. Unsure what this creature was, I took an involuntary step back.
“Relax, Trent,” Isaac said. “This is the librarian.”
I looked at the creature again, surprised. This was the librarian? Its eyes were as blank and glazed as a frog’s. There was no sign of intelligence or curiosity in them. Then another, far more disturbing thought struck me. If William Astor was rumored to have had an affair with a librarian, did that mean it was with a creature like this one? It wasn’t my place to judge, but good God.
Something moved within the glass cylinder, catching my attention. I immediately wished it hadn’t. Inside the cylinder was a head. It wasn’t human, either. Its hairless flesh was the color of bronze. Eight tentacles sprouted from the head like limbs, waving sinuously in the water. It blinked its slate gray eyes at us.
“May I be of assistance?” the head asked. Somehow, its voice came through the water and glass loud and clear.
I realized my mistake then. I’d misunderstood what Isaac said.
This
was the librarian. The creature carrying it was merely its helper. Though that didn’t make me feel any better about William Astor’s alleged affair.
“We seek an audience with the Guardians,” Isaac said.
The head tipped forward slightly in the cylinder, its version of a nod. “As you wish. You are aware of the price for access to the Guardians?”
“I am,” Isaac said. “I’ve been here before.”
The librarian looked surprised. “The Guardians do not often get repeat visitors. For most, once is enough. You know why, surely.”
“This is an emergency,” Isaac explained.
“Then I will not detain you any longer,” the librarian replied. “Please, follow me.”
The hulking, expressionless creature turned around and started walking down the central aisle, still holding the cylinder. Its footfalls rattled the keys on their pegs. Following it, I looked down every row of shelves we passed. They all stretched into the distance farther than I could see. On the pegs hung every kind of key imaginable, fashioned from metal, plastic, wood, ceramic, and glass. There were long and short keys, thick and thin, toothy and smooth, even plain electronic fobs. Every key to every lock in the world. This library was a thief’s wet dream. But it couldn’t truly hold
every
key in the world … could it? Was there a replica here of the key to Citadel? To Underwood’s fallout shelter? What about the twenty-sided, crystalline sphere that had opened the secret chamber below Bethesda Fountain?
The creature turned a corner into an aisle that was much shorter than the others. This one terminated in a blank, wood-paneled wall. The rectangular outline of a door stood in the wall, but there was no handle to open it. The hulking creature stopped beside two wooden ledges on the wall near the door. One ledge was empty. The other held a plain, metal box. The creature put the cylinder on the empty ledge, turning it so the head inside faced us. Then it picked up the box and turned back to us. A round hole had been cut into one side of the box.
“Only one of you need pay for access to the Guardians,” the librarian said. “Which will it be?”
Isaac stepped forward. “Me.”
The librarian regarded him quizzically. “You offer to pay even though you have paid once before?”
“Yes,” Isaac said.
The librarian nodded. “Very well. Place your hand inside the box.”
The creature held out the box. Isaac reached into the hole, his hand disappearing up to the wrist. I watched nervously. Were they going to take his hand as payment? One of his fingers?
A light flared inside the box, quick as a camera flash. Isaac pulled his hand out of the box and flexed his fingers. There were still five. The creature put the box back on the ledge.
“Payment to the Guardians has been made,” the librarian announced.
“What was that?” I asked Isaac. “What did they take?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“One year,” the librarian said. Isaac shot it an angry look.
“A year?” I asked. “Of what, service?”
“No,” the librarian said. “Of life.”
“You took a year of his
life
?” I demanded, shocked. “What kind of sick bastard—”
“Not I. The Guardians,” the librarian interrupted. “It is not our place to ask why they set this price. Their reasons are their own.”
I turned to Isaac, still reeling from this. “You should have let me do it. One year off my life won’t matter. I’m not like you. I don’t have an end date.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know that. Besides, coming here was my decision. I couldn’t ask you to pay the price. I wouldn’t.”
“You should have told me.”
“Would you have let me do it if I had?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Now you know why I didn’t tell you.”
The door in the wood-paneled wall slid open. I couldn’t see anything beyond it but a bright, white light. I shielded my eyes.
“Step through,” the librarian said. The tweed-suited creature picked up the cylinder again.
Isaac walked into the doorway and was swallowed by the light. I lingered a moment in front of the door, glaring at the librarian.
“You should have told me what the price was,” I said. “He already paid once before. That’s
two
years they’ve taken off his life. It’s not right.”
“The price was not yours to pay, Immortal Storm,” the librarian replied. I was surprised it knew who I was. “Step through. The Guardians do not like to be kept waiting.”
The creature carried the librarian away, its loud, heavy footfalls receding into the stacks. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn what the Guardians liked or didn’t like, but Isaac was waiting. I looked at the bright light blazing through the doorway, shielding my eyes again. I couldn’t see Isaac inside. I sighed and stepped through.
Despite the bright light, my eyes adjusted quickly. I found myself in a square room with glowing white walls. A low, steady hum came from all around me. Floating in the middle of the room was a huge key roughly the length of my forearm.
Isaac was standing before it, studying it. I watched him a moment. How much time did he have left in him? He’d shaved a year off his life to get us into this room. What did that mean for him? If he was destined to die next year, did that mean he would drop dead tomorrow instead?
I pushed the thought away. I didn’t believe in destiny, especially when it came to death. I refused to.
I walked up to join Isaac and examine the key. The blade was long and forged from iron. There were two square teeth with hollow centers at the end. The bow was fashioned into an ouroboros of a dragon, just like on the man’s eye patch upstairs. The key didn’t appear to be resting on anything. It wasn’t hanging on wire, either. It simply floated.