Imshi took Lirael to the Robing Room, a huge room full of all the equipment, weapons, and miscellaneous items the librarians needed, from climbing ropes to boathooks. And dozens and dozens of the special Library waistcoats, all in different sizes and colors.

“Third Assistant’s yellow, Second Assistant’s red, First Assistant’s blue, Deputy is white, and the Chief wears black,” explained Imshi, as she helped Lirael put on a brand-new yellow waistcoat over her working clothes. “Heavier than it looks, isn’t it? That’s because it’s actually canvas, covered in silk. Much tougher that way. Now, this whistle clips on the lapel loops here, so you can bend your head and blow into it, even if something’s holding your arms. But you should whistle only if you really need help. If you hear a whistle, run towards the sound and do whatever you can to help.”

Lirael took the whistle, which was a simple brass pipe, and put it through the special lapel loops as instructed. As Imshi had said, she could easily blow into it just by lowering her head. But what did Imshi mean? What might be holding her arms?

“Of course, the whistle’s good only when someone can hear it,” continued Imshi, handing Lirael something that at 59

first glance looked like a silver ball. She indicated that it should be placed in the front left pocket of her new waistcoat. “That’s why you have the mouse. It’s part clockwork, so you have to remember to wind it once a month, and the spell has to be renewed every year at Midsummer.”

Lirael looked at the small silver object. It was a mouse with little mechanical legs, two bright chips of ruby for eyes, and a small key in its back. She could feel the warmth of a Charterspell lying dormant inside it. She supposed that this would activate the clockwork mechanism at the right time and send it wherever it was supposed to go.

“What’s it do?” Lirael asked, surprising Imshi a little. The younger girl hadn’t spoken since they’d been introduced, and had stood there with her hair hanging over her face the whole time. Imshi had already written her off as one of the Chief’s eccentric recruitment decisions, but perhaps there was still hope. She sounded interested, anyway.

“It gets help,” replied Imshi. “If you’re in the Old Levels or somewhere you don’t think anyone will hear the whistle, put the mouse on the ground and speak or draw the activating mark, which I’ll show you in a moment. Once it’s activated, it’ll run to the Reading Room and sound the alarm.”

Lirael nodded and flicked back her hair to study the mouse more closely, running her finger over its silver back. When Imshi started to thumb through an index of Charter marks, Lirael shook her head and put the mouse in its special pocket. “I know the mark, thanks,” she said quietly. “I felt it in the spell.”

“Really?” asked Imshi, surprised again. “You must be good. I can hardly manage to light a candle, or warm my toes out on the glacier.”

But you have the Sight, thought Lirael. You are a real Clayr. “Anyway, you have the whistle and the mouse,” said Imshi, getting back to her task. “Here’s your belt and scabbard, and I’ll just see which dagger is sharpest. Ow! That’ll do, I think. Now we have to put the number in the book, and you have to sign for everything.”

Lirael buckled on the broad leather belt and settled the scabbard against her hip and thigh. The dagger that went into it was as long as her forearm, with a thin, sharp blade. It was steel but had been washed in silver, and there were Charter marks on the blade. Lirael touched them lightly with her finger, to see what they were supposed to do. They warmed under her touch, and she recognized them as marks of breaking and unraveling, especially useful against Free Magic creatures. They had been put there some twenty years ago, replacing older marks that had worn out. These too would last only another ten years or so, as they had not been placed with any great power or skill. Lirael thought she could possibly do better herself, though she wasn’t particularly adept at working magic on inanimate objects.

Lirael looked up from the dagger and saw Imshi waiting expectantly, a quill in her hand, hovering above the huge leather-bound ledger that was chained to the desk at the front of the Robing Room.

“The number,” said Imshi. “On the blade.”

“Oh,” said Lirael. She angled the blade till the Charter marks faded out and she could see the bare metal, and the letter and number etched there by conventional means.

“L2713,” Lirael called out; then she slid the dagger home into the scabbard. Imshi wrote the number down, re-inked the quill, and passed it to Lirael to sign.

There in the ledger, in between ruled lines of red ink, was Lirael’s name, the date, her position as Third Assistant Librarian, 61

and a list of all the things she’d been given, neatly written by Imshi. Lirael scanned the list, but didn’t sign.

“It says a key, here,” she said cautiously, tipping up the quill so an incipient blob of ink didn’t fall on the paper. “Oh, a key!” exclaimed Imshi. “I wrote it down and then I forgot!”

She went over to one of the cupboards on the wall, opened it, and rummaged around inside. Finally, she pulled out a broad silver bracelet set with emeralds, the match of the one on her own wrist. Unlocking it, she clasped it around Lirael’s right wrist. “You’ll have to go back to the Chief to have the spell inside woken up,” explained Imshi, showing Lirael how two of the seven emeralds on her own bracelet swarmed with bright Charter marks. “Depending on your work and post, it will then open all the appropriate doors.”

“Thanks,” said Lirael briefly. She could feel the spell in the silver, Charter marks hiding deep within the metal, waiting to flow into the emeralds. There were actually seven spells, she could tell, one for each emerald. But she didn’t know how they could be brought to the surface and made to work. This particular magic was beyond her.

Nor was she much wiser ten minutes later, when Vancelle took her wrist and quickly cast a spell that neither was spoken nor had any other obvious marks, signed or drawn. Whatever it was, the spell lit up only one emerald, leaving the other six dark. That, said Vancelle, was enough to open the common doors, which was more than enough for a new Third Assistant Librarian.

It took Lirael three months to work out how to wake the next four spells in her bracelet, though the secret of the sixth and 62

seventh remained beyond her. But she didn’t wake the extra spells at once, taking another month to create an illusion of the bracelet as it was supposed to be, that would sit over her own and hide the glow of the additional emeralds.

It was mainly curiosity that set her to working out the key spells. Originally she didn’t plan to wake them, and intended to treat her discovery purely as an intellectual exercise. But there were so many interesting doors, hatches, gates, grilles, and locks that she couldn’t help but wonder what was behind them. Once the spells in the bracelet were active, she found it very difficult not to think of using them.

Her daily work also led her into temptation. While there were Charter sendings to do much of the manual labor, ferrying materials to and from the Main Reading Room and the individual studies of scholars, all the checking, recording, and indexing was done by people. Generally, the junior librarians. There were also very special or dangerous items that had to be fetched in person, or even by large parties of armed librarians. Not that Lirael got to go on any of these exciting expeditions to the Old Levels. Nor would she, till she attained the red waistcoat of a Second Assistant, which usually took at least three years.

But in the course of her regular duties, she often passed interesting-looking corridors sealed off with red rope, or doors that beckoned to her, almost saying, “How can you walk past me every day and not want to go in?”

Without exception, any vaguely interesting portal was locked, beyond the original key spell and the sole glowing emerald of Lirael’s bracelet.

Aside from the inaccessibility of the interesting parts, the Great Library met most of Lirael’s hopes. She was given a small study of her own. Barely wider than her outstretched arms, it 63

contained nothing but a narrow desk, a chair, and several shelves. But it was a refuge, somewhere she would be left alone, secure from Aunt Kirrith’s intrusions. It was meant for quiet study, in Lirael’s case, of the set texts of the beginning librarian: The Librarian’s Rules, Basic Bibliography, and The Large Yellow Book: Simple Spells for Third Assistant Librarians. It had taken her only a month to learn everything she needed to from those volumes.

So she quietly “borrowed” any book she could get her hands on, like The Black Book of Bibliomancy, carelessly left off a returning list by a Deputy Librarian. And she spent a great deal of time analyzing the spells in her bracelet, slowly finding her way through the complex chains of Charter marks to find the activating symbols.

Lirael had been driven by curiosity at first, and by the sense of satisfaction she gained from working out magic that was supposed to be beyond her. But somewhere along the way, Lirael realized that she enjoyed learning Charter Magic for its own sake. And when she was learning marks and putting them together into spells, she completely forgot about her troubles and forgot about not having the Sight.

Learning to be a real Charter Mage also gave her something to do, when all the other librarians or her fellows from the Hall of Youth were engaged in more social activities. The other librarians, particularly the dozen or so Third Assistants, had tried to be friendly at first. But they were all older than Lirael, and they all had the Sight. Lirael felt she had nothing to talk about or share with them, so she stayed silent, hiding behind her hair. After a while, they stopped inviting her to sit with them at lunch, or to play a game of tabore in the afternoon, or to gossip about their elders over sweet wine in the evening. 64

So Lirael was once again alone among company. She told herself that she preferred it, but she couldn’t deny the pang in her heart when she saw laughing groups of young Clayr, so effortlessly talking and enjoying one another’s friendship. It was even worse when whole groups were called to join the Nine Day Watch, as happened more and more frequently during Lirael’s first few months of work. Lirael would be stacking books in the Reading Room, or writing in one of the registers, when a Watch messenger would come in, bearing the ivory tokens that summoned the recipient to the Observatory. Sometimes dozens of the Clayr in the huge, domed Reading Room would each receive a token. They would smile, curse, grimace, or take it stoically; then there would be a flurry of activity as they all stopped work, drawing back their chairs, locking away books and papers in their desk drawers, or returning them to shelves or sorting tables before trooping out the doors en masse.

At first Lirael was surprised that so many were called, and she was even more surprised when some of them returned only hours or days later, instead of the usual nine days that gave the Watch its name. She initially thought it must be some peculiarity of the librarians, that so many were called at once and not for the full term. But she didn’t feel like asking anyone about it, so it was some time before she got some sort of answer, when she overheard two Second Assistant Librarians in the Binding Room.

“It’s all very well to have a Ninety-Eight. But to go on to a Hundred and Ninety-Six and on up to yesterday’s Seven Hundred and Eighty-Four is quite ridiculous,” said one of the Second Assistants. “I mean we did all fit in the Observatory. But now there’s talk of a Fifteen Sixty-Eight! That’ll be nearly 65

everybody, I should think—and making the Watch bigger doesn’t seem to make it work any better than the usual Forty—Nine. I couldn’t tell the difference.”

“I don’t mind, myself,” replied the other Second Assistant as she carefully applied glue to the binding of a broken-backed book. “It makes a change from here, and at least it’s over quicker with a larger Watch. But it is tedious when we have to try to focus where we can’t See anything. Why don’t the highups just admit that no one can See anything around that stupid lake and leave it at that?”

“Because it’s not so simple,” interrupted a stern-voiced Deputy, bearing down on them like a huge white cat on two plump mice. “All the possible futures are connected. Not being able to See where futures begin is a significant problem. You should know that, and you also should know not to talk about the business of the Watch!”

The last sentence was said with a general glare about the room. But Lirael, even half-hidden behind a huge press, felt it was particularly aimed at her. After all, everybody else in the room was a full Clayr and eligible to be a member of the Nine Day Watch.

Her cheeks burnt with embarrassment and shame as she threw all her strength into turning the great bronze handles of the screw, tightening the press. Talk slowly resumed around her, but she ignored it, concentrating only on her task.

But that was the moment when she resolved to wake the dormant magic in her bracelet, and use the spell she’d made to hide the glow of the additional emeralds.

She might not be able to join the Watch in the Observatory, but she would explore the Library.
Chapter Seven. Beyond the Doors

Even after she woke the extra spells in her bracelet, Lirael found it hard to explore the areas formerly closed to her. There was always too much work, or there were too many other librarians around. After the first two heartthumping moments of near-discovery in front of forbidden doors, Lirael decided to put off her exploration until there were fewer people around or she could more easily escape from work. Her first real chance came almost five months after she had donned the yellow waistcoat of a Third Assistant. She was in the Reading Room, sorting books to be returned by the sendings, who gathered close around her, their ghostly, Charteretched hands the only visible part of their shrouded forms.