Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

“Grimoires,” continued Molnar, “are firsthand witnesses to every triumph and every shame of their creators. They are left in laboratories, stored haphazardly next to untold powers, exposed to magical materials and energies for years. Their pages are saturated with arcane dust and residue, as well as deliberate sorceries. They are magical artifacts, uniquely infused with what can only be called the divine madness of individuals such as yourselves. They evolve, as many magical artifacts do, a faint quasi-intelligence. A distinct sort of low cunning that your run-of-the mill chair or rock or library book does not possess.

“Individually, this characteristic is harmless. But when you take grimoires…powerful grimoires, from the hands and minds of powerful magicians, and you store them together by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the millions…”

This last word was almost shouted, and Molnar’s arms were raised to the ceiling again, for dramatic effect. This speech had lost the dry tones of lecture and acquired the dark passion of theatrical oration. Whatever Master Molnar might have thought of the aspirants entrusted to his care, he was clearly a believer in his work.

“You need thick walls,” he said, slowly, with a thin smile on his lips. “Thick walls, and rough Librarians to guard them. Millions of grimoires, locked away together. Each one is a mote of quasi-intelligence, a speck of possibility, a particle of magic. Bring them together in a teeming library, in the stacks, and you have…”

“What?” said Laszlo, buying into the drama despite himself.

“Not a mind,” said Molnar, meeting his eyes like a carnival fortune-teller making a sales pitch. “Not quite a mind, not a focused intelligence. But a jungle! A jungle that dreams, and those dreams are currents of deadly strangeness. A Living Library…within our power to contain, but well beyond our power to control.”

Molnar stopped beside a low table, on which were four reinforced leather satchels, each containing a single large book. Pinned to each satchel was a small pile of handwritten notes.

“A collection of thaumaturgical knowledge so vast and so deep,” said Molnar, “is far, far too useful a thing to give up merely because it has become a magical disaster area perfectly capable of killing anyone who enters it unprepared!”

Laszlo felt his sudden good cheer slinking away. All of this, in a much less explicit form, was common knowledge among the aspirants of the High University. The Living Library was a place of weirdness, of mild dangers, sure, but to hear Molnar speak of it…

“You aspirants have reaped the benefit of the library for several years now.” Molnar smiled and brushed a speck of imaginary dust from the cuirass of his Librarian’s armor. “You have filed your requests for certain volumes, and waited the days or weeks required for the library staff to fetch them out. And, in the reading rooms, you have studied them in perfect comfort, because a grimoire safely removed from the Living Library is just another book.

“The masters of the university, as one of their more commendable policies, have decreed that all aspirant magicians need to learn to appreciate the sacrifices of the library staff that make this singular resource available. Before you can proceed to the more advanced studies of your final years, you are required to enter the Living Library, just once, to assist us in the return of a volume to its rightful place in the collection. That is all. That is the extent of your fifth-year exam. On the table beside me you will see four books in protective satchels. Take one, and handle it with care. Until those satchels are empty, your careers at the High University are in the balance.”

Lev passed the satchels out one by one. Laszlo received his and examined the little bundle of notes that came with it. Written in several different hands, they named the borrower of the grimoire as a third-year aspirant he didn’t know, and described the process of hunting the book down, with references to library sections, code phrases, and number sequences that Laszlo couldn’t understand.

“The library is so complex,” said Molnar, “and has grown so strange in its ways that physical surveillance of the collection has been impractical for centuries. We rely on the index enchantments, powerful processes of our most orderly sorcery, to give us the information that the Indexers maintain here. From that information, we plan our expeditions, and map the best ways to go about fetching an item from the stacks, or returning one.”

“Master Molnar, sir, forgive me,” said Casimir. “Is that a focus for the index enchantments over there?”

Laszlo followed Casimir’s pointing hand, and in a deeper niche behind one of the little armories along the walls, he saw a recessed column of black glass, behind which soft pulses of blue light rose and fell.

“Just so,” said Molnar. “Either you’ve made pleasing use of the introductory materials, or that was a good guess.”