The Wandering Library of MirMarnia: A Series

Part 26: The Vigil at the Amentine Wall

(I drew this with pan pastels, chalk pencils, graphite sticks and a variety of sponges and thought you’d rather have the unglamourous photo, complete with my watermark. - Chaiga T Cheska)
~~~

Being an account of one archivist’s ill-advised afternoon reading, a building’s first attempt at detective work, and the precise hour at which scholarly curiosity became something considerably less comfortable

Compiled by Bramwell Corin, who did try to stop reading aloud before matters got out of hand, and would like that noted, even though nobody was listening at the time, least of all himself
~~~

There are days in this employment that pass without particular event, and after six months of service I have learned not to trust them. They are rare enough that I ought to treasure them, and I do try, but experience has taught me that a quiet morning inside the Wandering Library is generally nothing more than a held breath.

That morning began ordinarily enough. The Library had been wandering for the better part of a week, unhurried, taking the long way through a stretch of MirMarnia thick with birch and standing water, the sort of easy meandering it favours when it has nowhere particular to be and no one in particular to see. I catalogued. Pip shelved, with the specific determined concentration he brings to any task involving heights he would rather not fall from. Thaddeus sat in his usual corner of the archive, annotating something in his small, careful hand, and Lyria moved through the reading room in slow looping steps that I understood, without needing to ask, to mean the Library was still deciding where it wished to settle.

We are all, in our various ways, accustomed to waiting for the Library to make up its mind.

It was Pip who noticed first, though I noticed shortly after, at a different window, in a different part of the building, which I mention only because it will become relevant that neither of us thought it worth remarking upon to the other.

There was a ruin on the hill ahead of us. Old, by the look of it, the stone gone soft and green with moss, the walls collapsed in places to little more than a suggestion of where a building had once stood, roots threaded through the gaps like something had been patiently taking the place apart for a very long time and had not yet finished the job. Here and there, along what remained standing, I noted flat ledges of stone set into the wall itself at intervals, too regular to be accident, too worn to say with any confidence what they had once held.

I looked at it for a moment, the way one looks at any old ruin, with the mild, respectful interest such things deserve, and returned to my ledger.

Pip’s Account

I saw it too! From the window by the maps table, this crumbly old ruin all grown over with moss and roots, and I thought, oh, another ruin, we’ve seen loads of those, and went straight back to sorting the cartography returns. Didn’t think about it again, not even a little bit. Given everything that happened afterwards, that probably should have felt like a bigger moment than it did. It really didn’t. It was just a ruin, and ruins are ten a penny in this job.

Bramwell’s Log

Neither of us thought anything further of it until the Library stopped.

It did not simply arrive and settle, the way it usually does, folding its legs beneath it with the satisfied air of something that has found a good spot for the afternoon. It approached slowly instead, circling the base of the hill at a pace I can only describe as deliberate, and then it began to lean.

I felt it before I saw it, a slow tilt of the floor beneath my desk, gentle enough that I assumed at first we had simply settled at an angle on uneven ground. It was only when my inkpot began a quiet, unhurried migration toward the edge of the table that I understood we were not settling at all. We were peering.

The Library had brought its whole considerable self down close to the ruin, the way one might crouch to examine something small and interesting on the ground, and it was studying the old walls with the sort of close, unblinking attention it usually reserves for things it has decided, without consulting anyone, are important.

This is generally the point at which the inner gravity fails.

I do not fully understand the mechanism, and after six months I have stopped trying, but I can report the pattern with confidence. The Library’s internal gravity holds admirably when it is calm. It becomes decorative, at best, the moment its attention goes somewhere else, and its attention, on this occasion, had gone towards a crumbling stone wall on a hillside.

I caught my inkpot. I did not catch the returns trolley, which set off at a slow, stately roll toward the rear wall, gathering three chairs and a standing lamp along the way like a parade acquiring enthusiastic followers.

Pip’s Account

I was up the Natural Philosophy ladder when it happened, which, looking back, was possibly not the best place to be. The floor tipped, the ladder tipped with it, and about four books came off the shelf above me all at once and introduced themselves to my head and shoulder rather forcefully as I ended up on the floor with the books and the ladder. I definitely yelped. Everyone heard it; there’s no point pretending otherwise.

I sat on the floor for a bit, rubbing my head, and Thaddeus appeared almost instantly, the way he does, and patted the top of my head very gently, like he was checking nothing else was about to come down, and handed me a note. It said, That must have hurt. Are you alright? Which was very kind of him, and also correct; it did hurt.

Then another book came straight for me from the ceiling, and I genuinely thought, oh no, here we go again, but it missed, only just, and landed beside me instead with a sort of guilty little thud. I picked it up. It was called A Sincere and Overdue Apology Regarding Recent Structural Carelessness, With Particular Reference to Falling Objects and the People Beneath Them, which I thought was rather sweet, in a building sort of way.

I told everyone I was fine, and I mostly was; my shoulder had opinions about it for the rest of the day, but I kept those to myself. The Library was noticeably gentler with us after that. I think it felt bad.

Bramwell’s Log

We took our tea break not long after, all four of us standing at the reading room windows with our cups, watching from the Library windows as it went about the slow, careful business of examining the ruin from every side, leaning in close over one section of wall, drawing back, moving to another. It walked, I felt, with unusual delicacy for something its size, and we felt how it was placing each leg with the particular care of someone trying very hard not to disturb whatever it was they had found.

(Being inside a walking structure has developed in myself and my colleagues a specific awareness of how it moves without having to observe it from the outside. It’s as if we are part of its awareness of its physical experience in this world.)

“What do you suppose this ruin was,” Pip said, into his tea, “and how old do you think it is?”

I confess the ruin had been nagging at something in the back of my mind since we first arrived, a familiarity I could not quite place, the way a half-remembered tune sits just out of reach until something jars it loose. I said I would look into it, more out of curiosity than any expectation of finding much, and went to consult the Library’s holdings on the region.

I returned some twenty minutes later with a slim volume titled On the Matter of the Vanished Amentines: A Compilation of Unresolved Local Accounts, and it was somewhere between the third page and the fourth that the recognition finally arrived, sudden and complete, the way these things sometimes do.

I had walked this ground before. Some months ago, when the Library had stationed itself at the edge of a woodland some distance from here, I had taken to walking the tree line on my rest breaks, and I had come upon a stretch of old farm wall, moss thick, stone soft with age. I had not, at the time, connected it to what I was looking at now, and I understood, standing at the window with the book in my hand, precisely why. We had approached from a completely different direction on that occasion, and a ruin looks a different thing from its far side than it does from the woodland path that first led you to it.

I did not say any of this immediately. I sat with it for a moment, the specific discomfort of realising you have been closer to something strange than you knew.

“Bramwell?” said Pip.

“I believe,” I said, “I have seen this place before.”

Pip’s Account

I could tell straight away this was going to be interesting, because Bramwell gets a very specific look when something’s properly interesting! I asked what he meant, obviously, because who wouldn’t, and he told us about the farm and the wall, and I said, right, but what’s actually interesting about a wall, and he went quiet in a way that told me it was going to be a lot more than a wall.

I asked him to go on. I want that clearly on the record because everything that happened afterwards is, at least a little bit, my fault, and I’d rather own up to it now than have Bramwell bring it up later in a certain tone.

Bramwell’s Log

I did elaborate, more than perhaps I ought to have, and I am the first to admit this. My interest, once caught, has a tendency to outrun my better judgement, and having found the book, and remembered the wall, I found myself wanting very much to understand what I had actually seen there, and so I fetched my own diary from that period and read from it, first to myself, and then, at Pip’s continued urging, aloud.

I will not reproduce the entry here in full. Some of it belongs to that afternoon and to me alone. But I told them of the small hole I had found in the standing stone, no larger than a coin, worn smooth at a height comfortable for looking through, and of what lay beyond it when I did, a woodland that was not the woodland I stood in, silvered with moonlight that came from nowhere I could name, music somewhere in waltz time with no visible source for it. I told them of the shapes moving through the trees in a slow, ancient circle, wings catching the light in blue and red and gold, horns curving from bowed heads, the whole company dancing with the patient, unhurried gravity of something that had been dancing since long before anyone thought to count the years. And I told them, more quietly, of the figure at the edge of the clearing, and the eerie stillness that settled over him in the moment before I stepped back from the wall, a stillness that told me, with a certainty that had nothing to do with reason, that he had always known I was there.

There is, I discovered whilst reading, a song. It is not one I know well, but Thaddeus does, and he wrote out the words for me on three separate notes passed across the table in quick succession, which I read aloud in turn, the MirMarnians hereabouts sing it still, or so the book claims, and say it was written by someone who vanished through just such a hole whilst watching just such a thing.

“I saw a moonlight circus
Through a hole in the stone wall
The dancing women all whispered to me
Through a tunnel of clouds
Their voices made my ears bleed
They had angel wings
Feathered blue and red and gold

We danced in a waltz through the trees
A labyrinth of willow branches

The god of this world
And his dark carnival
I was just a mortal boy
Looking through the hole”

It was somewhere around the second verse that I noticed Pip had gone rather quiet, and had drifted, without appearing to decide to, a little closer to Thaddeus’s chair. I noticed, too, that he kept glancing toward the window, as though checking that the ordinary grey afternoon light was still where he had left it.

I ought to have noticed sooner. I will own that freely. But I noticed it then, mid-verse, and it stopped me rather more effectively than the end of the song would have.

“It’s just a story,” I said, closing the book perhaps more briskly than the moment called for. “An old one, and an unproven one, and I’ve no business frightening anyone with it over the tea things. Nothing in that book should be believed until someone stands here and sees it for themselves, and even then, I’d want a second witness. Besides which,” I added, glancing at the window, at the perfectly ordinary daylight still doing its perfectly ordinary work outside it, “it is the middle of the afternoon. Whatever else may or may not be true of that wall, I can say with complete confidence that nothing resembling a midnight circus is likely to trouble us before dinner.”

Pip laughed, a touch too quickly, in the manner of someone glad of the excuse to laugh at all. I sent him off with Thaddeus shortly after to see to the reshelving of the Regional Folklore section, which wanted doing regardless, and which I hoped, correctly as it turned out, would give him something ordinary to occupy his hands whilst the rest of the story settled.

What I had not accounted for, and ought to have, is that the Library hears everything said within it. Not through any effort of eavesdropping, since there is nothing to eavesdrop upon when the people speaking are standing inside your own walls, but simply because that is the nature of living inside something rather than beside it. It had heard every word I read of my diary, every line of the song, and I understood, being aware of its behaviour over the following hours, that it had taken rather more of it to heart than I had intended.

It went, by degrees, into what I can only describe as full detective mode.

I do not say this lightly. The Library, I gathered, had gone looking within itself for guidance, the way it does when it already possesses exactly what it wants somewhere amongst its own considerable holdings, and had turned up, evidently to its own satisfaction, an entire section devoted to detection, one I came across myself later that afternoon, the shelf plate above it lettered, in the looping hand the Library uses for its own signage, “Every Mystery Has a Method (Even When It Doesn’t)”. It began, from that point on, to comport itself accordingly.

Pip noticed before I did, or said so first, at any rate, having stopped shelving and sitting at his desk clearly reading something instead of working and looked up from his desk with the expression he reserves for things he cannot quite believe he is about to say aloud.

“Bramwell,” he said, “the Library is being strange.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said.

“Are we going to do anything about it?”

“I intend to pretend I haven’t noticed,” I said, “for as long as that remains possible.”

It did not remain possible for very long. By the middle of the afternoon, the Library had grown, with no announcement or apparent embarrassment, three additional arms from somewhere along its eastern wall, and was using them, so far as I could tell, exclusively to clasp behind its own back whilst it paced a slow, considering circuit of the ruin, the unmistakable gait of something turning a difficult case over and over, examining it from every angle before committing itself to a theory.

It paused periodically to lean in close at some particular section of wall, straightened, resumed pacing, and I could feel the same slow, deliberate rhythm of it through the floor beneath my desk with every step.

It was some while later, standing at the reading room window on some pretext or other, that I noticed the second thing.

The Library had stopped pacing. It had gone very still instead, the particular stillness of something listening hard, and I could feel, through the floor and the walls and the whole considerable structure around me, a tension gathering that had nothing to do with detection and everything to do with fear, the same coiled readiness of a creature crouched low before a door it doesn’t trust, weight drawn in beneath it, gathered and waiting, prepared, I understood with some alarm, to spring away instantly should anything untoward present itself.

A leaf detached itself from a nearby birch and drifted down across one of the fallen stones.

The whole Library leapt sideways.

It was not a small movement. Every book on every shelf slid a full foot to the left, my inkpot went over completely this time, and somewhere above I heard what I can only assume was Pemberton registering her extreme displeasure at events beyond her comprehension. The Library held itself rigid for a long moment afterwards, and then, by degrees, the tension in it eased, as though it had only now worked out that the terrible threat responsible for its alarm was, in fact, a leaf, now resting harmlessly upon the grass.

A deep, wounded, thoroughly unconvinced suspicion settled over the whole building following this, as though the ruin itself had orchestrated the leaf’s fall purely to catch it off guard, and I felt it in the stillness of the walls around me.

I went to the window, and I did what I have found, over six months, to be the only reliable means of addressing the Library directly. I looked up, toward the ceiling, which is not strictly where its attention lives, but which has become, between us, the accepted shape of the conversation.

“I am sorry,” I said, “if the story frightened you, and I ought to have chosen my moment better. But it is only a story, and an old one, and unproven, and this is only a ruin, half fallen down and thoroughly asleep in the middle of a perfectly ordinary afternoon. There is nothing here to be afraid of. Look at the light. It is barely three o’clock.”

There was a pause of the sort I have learned means the Library is considering how to respond.

A book fell from the ceiling and landed, with what struck me as a degree of pointed emphasis, directly upon my desk.

“I Heard You, and I Am Not Afraid, Unlike Certain Junior Members of Staff. I Shall Be Remaining Beside This Wall Until I Have Seen the Hole For Myself.”

I had not, in fact, mentioned Pip by name in my reassurance, and I have my suspicions as to how the Library arrived at that particular comparison regardless. I did not have long to consider the matter, because Pip himself chose that precise moment to pass the window with an armful of returns, and to read the title over my shoulder before I could do anything useful about it.

Pip’s Account

I would like it known that I was not remotely offended by this! I want that understood clearly, right from the start.

“Excuse me,” I said, to the room in general, since the Library doesn’t have a face and I wasn’t sure who else was meant to hear it, “I am ALSO not afraid. I don’t know who told the Library I was afraid, but I’d like that corrected immediately. I am perfectly willing to stay right here beside this wall all night if that’s what it takes to prove it.”

I said this quite loudly. I’m aware, looking back, that I said it very loudly.

I went straight back to my reshelving afterwards, feeling rather pleased with myself, and it was only some while later that it struck me nobody in the room had actually said anything back.

I stand by the declaration anyway.

Bramwell’s Log

I caught Thaddeus’s eye somewhere in the middle of Pip’s declaration, and neither of us, I think, believed a word of it. Neither of us said so. Some declarations are better left standing on their own, however shakily.

The Library, for its part, was thrilled. There is no other word for it. The floor hummed with something close to delight beneath my feet for a full quarter of an hour afterwards, and I understood, with the sinking of someone who has just watched a colleague talk himself into something, that we would indeed be staying the night.

We did not discuss the matter further, in the sense that no one formally decided it. The Library simply did not move, the afternoon wore on into evening, and by the time the last of the daylight had gone from the sky, it had become clear to all of us that we would be keeping company with the Amentine ruin considerably longer than any of us had planned.

I will pass over the early part of the evening, since little of note occurred beyond the ordinary business of supper and lamplight, except to say that both the Library and Pip grew steadily more watchful as the hours went on, in ways that became increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another. The Library had settled itself directly beside the very stretch of wall I had described in my diary, close enough that I could see, from the reading room window, the section of moss and stone I had once pressed my eye against. Every so often a full-body shudder would pass through the building at some shadow shifting in the trees, some rustle of wind through dry leaves, and each time, a moment later, I would hear a small clatter from Pip’s desk that suggested he had flinched along with it.

He denied this when I asked. I did not press the point.

Pip’s Account

I was NOT jumpy! I’d like that on the record too, right alongside the NOT being afraid!!

I was, perhaps, unusually alert to my surroundings that evening. There’s a difference, and I’d be grateful if whoever’s compiling the official version of events reflected that difference fairly.

Bramwell’s Log

The clock in the reading room struck midnight with its usual composure, completely unaware, as clocks generally are, of the effect its striking might have on a room full of overwrought nerves. I can report, with confidence, that this effect was considerable.

Pip made a sound I will describe, in the interests of kindness, as brief and dignified. It was neither of those things. He went beneath his desk in a single fluid motion, taking a small quantity of pencils and at least one open notebook with him, and from beneath it, in the following silence, I heard him informing no one in particular that he was, in fact, still not afraid.

The Library jolted at the same instant, hard enough that I caught the window frame to keep my footing, and then went very still.

We waited. The moonlight outside had turned silver and thick, pooling across the grass in a way I did not care for. Beneath the ordinary sounds of the night, the wind and the settling creak of the building’s own great frame, there came, faint at first and then unmistakable, the sound of music. Something in waltz time. Something with no visible source.

Thaddeus and I were the only two at the window when the hole appeared in the ruin beyond the window.

It was small, exactly as I remembered, a coin-sized darkness worn into the old stone, and through it, in the moment before either of us could speak, we saw a woodland that was not ours, mist coiling low between silver trunks, and shapes moving through it in a slow, ancient circle, wings, horns, the long, unhurried sway of something that had been dancing since before the world learned to count.

I felt the pull almost immediately. It was not violent. It was gentler than that, and worse for it, a soft insistent tug somewhere behind the breastbone, the sense that the window frame beneath my hand was a considerably less interesting place to be than the clearing on the other side of that wall.

I do not know how long we stood transfixed. Long enough, at any rate, for the Library to notice.

The floor moved so suddenly beneath us that I lost my footing, catching the frame with both hands, Thaddeus catching my shoulder with one of his own, the two of us gripping each other and the window in roughly equal measure as the whole building gathered itself and broke into a full, headlong gallop through the dark.

I have described, elsewhere in this account, the gravity’s tendency to fail whenever the Library’s attention wanders too far from itself. It did not fail on this occasion. It held, absolutely and without flicker, the type of fierce stillness of something concentrating with everything it has on keeping every person inside it exactly where they ought to be, and I understood, gripping the frame with white knuckles as the trees blurred past outside, that this was fear doing precisely what it had done on the mountain all those months ago, anchoring rather than scattering, because this time there was something to protect.

Thaddeus and I looked at each other in the dim light of the reading room, and neither of us said anything for a long moment, because there was nothing sensible to say. We had very nearly gone through that window and would then have felt compelled to be pulled through the hole in the ruined wall. Both of us. And the Library, which cannot be pulled through any such hole itself, having neither the shape nor the need for one, had felt us going and had run.

It slowed, eventually, somewhere deep in a stretch of woodland I did not recognise, the music long since lost behind us, nothing left but the ordinary whistle of wind through branches. I could feel it settling around us afterwards, the slow, uneven creak of something that has frightened itself thoroughly and is only now beginning to notice.

Mistress Spine found us not long after, in her dressing gown, having apparently been attempting an early night after a considerable day of meetings before the Library’s rather dramatic change of location put paid to any such plan. She surveyed the reading room with the particular tired patience of a woman who has seen a great many strange things in six months and has stopped expecting an ordinary explanation for any of them.

She listened to my account first, then to Thaddeus’s, delivered via three folded notes handed across in quick succession, and then she looked toward the desk, beneath which Pip was still, at that point, recounting the evening’s events to anyone who would listen, in a voice not completely steady.

“Why,” said Mistress Spine, “is my junior member of staff under a desk?”

I explained, as best I was able, the ruin, the diary, the song, the hole, the pull, the gallop. She heard me out without interruption, which I have learned to recognise as a worse sign than interruption would have been.

When I had finished, she looked up, past all of us, toward the ceiling.

“You,” she said, “will get some sleep. You have had, by the sound of it, quite enough excitement for one night, and there is no reason a building your age needs to be gallivanting about after midnight chasing moonlight circuses. No further vigils outside frightening ruins.”

There was a pause, the sort I have learned means the Library is listening rather carefully.

“And the rest of you,” Mistress Spine continued, turning her attention to the room at large, Pip included, still crouching beneath his desk, “will go to bed. From this point forward, before anyone in this building embarks on anything remotely frightening, I am to be informed in advance, so that I may determine whether it constitutes an appropriate use of Library time.”

She left the way she had come, unhurried, and we were left blinking at one another in the lamplight, none of us, I think, sure what to say.

I write this now from my own quarters, the day’s excitement settled at last into something closer to ordinary tiredness. I do not know what the Amentine wall truly is, nor what became of the dynasty that once lived within its walls, nor why a hole no larger than a coin should open onto a woodland lit by no moon of ours. I suspect I shall be turning the question over for some while yet.

I am, on the whole, glad it is over.

And yet, as I set down my pen and turn down the lamp, I find I can still hear it, very faintly, somewhere at the edge of hearing, something in waltz time, with no visible source.

I expect it is nothing; it is time I was asleep.

Author’s Note:

I hope you enjoyed this dip back into the mystery of the Amentine ruin! I feel the Amentine are trying to find their way back into MirMarnia, as this was certainly a close call for Bramwell and Thaddeous!
-Chaiga T. Cheska