He was found days later by a senior librarian, but only because the man was looking for him, a letter from the abbot in the pocket of his robes. Elsewise, Lazlo might have lived down there like a boy in a cave for who knows how long. He might have grown feral: the wild boy of the Great Library, versed in three dead languages and all the tales ever written in them, but ragged as a beggar in the alleys of the Grin.
Instead, he was taken on as an apprentice.
“The library knows its own mind,” old Master Hyrrokkin told him, leading him back up the secret stairs. “When it steals a boy, we let it keep him.”
Lazlo couldn’t have belonged at the library more truly if he were a book himself. In the days that followed—and then the months and years, as he grew into a man—he was rarely to be seen without one open in front of his face. He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn’t sleep at all. On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream. “Strange the dreamer,” they called him. “That dreamer, Strange.” And it didn’t help that he sometimes walked into walls while reading, or that his favorite books hailed from that dusty sublevel where no one else cared to go. He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he loved it all. He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant. His nose was broken by a falling volume of fairy tales his first day on the job, and that, they said, told you everything you needed to know about strange Lazlo Strange: head in the clouds, world of his own, fairy tales and fancy.
That was what they meant when they called him a dreamer, and they weren’t wrong, but they missed the main point. Lazlo was a dreamer in more profound a way than they knew. That is to say, he had a dream—a guiding and abiding one, so much a part of him it was like a second soul inside his skin. The landscape of his mind was all given over to it. It was a deep and ravishing landscape, and a daring and magnificent dream. Too daring, too magnificent for the likes of him. He knew that, but the dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.
“What’s that you’re reading, Strange?” asked Master Hyrrokkin, hobbling up behind him at the Enquiries desk. “Love letter, I hope.”
The old librarian expressed this wish more often than was seemly, undaunted that the answer was always no. Lazlo was on the verge of making his usual response, but paused, considering. “In a way,” he said, and held out the paper, which was brittle and yellowed with age.
A gleam lit Master Hyrrokkin’s faded brown eyes, but when he adjusted his spectacles and looked at the page, the gleam winked out. “This appears to be a receipt,” he observed.
“Ah, but a receipt for what?”
Skeptical, Master Hyrrokkin squinted to read, then gave a crack of a laugh that turned every head in the huge, hushed room. They were in the Pavilion of Thought. Scholars in scarlet robes were hunched at long tables, and they all looked up from their scrolls and tomes, eyes grim with disapproval. Master Hyrrokkin bobbed a nod of apology and handed Lazlo back the paper, which was an old bill for a very large shipment of aphrodisiacs to a long-dead king. “Seems he wasn’t called the Amorous King for his poetry, eh? But what are you doing? Tell me this isn’t what it looks like. For god’s sake, boy. Tell me you aren’t archiving receipts on your free day.”
Lazlo was a boy no longer, no trace remaining—outwardly—of the small bald foundling with cuts on his head. He was tall now, and he’d let his hair grow long once he was free of the monks and their dull razors. It was dark and heavy and he tied it back with bookbinder’s twine and spared it very little thought. His brows were dark and heavy, too, his features strong and broad. “Rough-hewn,” some might have said, or even “thuggish” on account of his broken nose, which made a sharp angle in profile, and from the front skewed distinctly to the left. He had a raw, rugged look—and sound, too: his voice low and masculine and not at all smooth, as though it had been left out in the weather. In all this, his dreamer’s eyes were incongruous: gray and wide and guileless. Just now they weren’t quite meeting Master Hyrrokkin’s gaze. “Of course not,” he said unconvincingly. “What kind of maniac would archive receipts on his free day?”
“Then what are you doing?”
He shrugged. “A steward found an old box of bills in a cellar. I’m just having a look.”
“Well, it’s a shocking waste of youth. How old are you now? Eighteen?”
“Twenty,” Lazlo reminded him, though in truth he couldn’t be certain, having chosen a birthday at random when he was a boy. “And you wasted your youth the same way.”
“And I’m a cautionary tale! Look at me.” Lazlo did. He saw a soft, stooped creature of a man whose dandelion-fluff hair, beard, and brows encroached upon his face to such a degree that only his sharp little nose and round spectacles showed. He looked, Lazlo thought, like an owlet fallen out of its nest. “Do you want to end your days a half-blind troglodyte hobbling through the bowels of the library?” the old man demanded. “Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.”
“What’s a horizon?” Lazlo asked, straight-faced. “Is it like the end of an aisle of books?”
“No,” said Master Hyrrokkin. “Not in any way.”
Lazlo smiled and went back to the receipts. Well, that word made them sound dull, even in his head. They were old cargo manifests, which sounded marginally more thrilling, from a time when the palace had been the royal residence and goods had come from every corner of the world. He wasn’t archiving them. He was skimming them for the telltale flourishes of a particular rare alphabet. He was looking, as he always was on some level, for hints of the Unseen City—which was how he chose to think of it, since Weep still brought the taste of tears. “I’ll go in a moment,” he assured Master Hyrrokkin. It might not have seemed like it, but he took the old man’s words to heart. He had, in fact, no wish to end his days at the library—half blind or otherwise—and every hope of earning his squint lines by looking at the horizon.
The horizon he wished to look at, however, was very far away.
And also, incidentally, forbidden.
Master Hyrrokkin gestured to a window. “You’re at least aware, I hope, that it’s summer out there?” When Lazlo didn’t respond, he added, “Large orange orb in the sky, low necklines on the fairer sex. Any of this ring a bell?” Still nothing. “Strange?”
“What?” Lazlo looked up. He hadn’t heard a word. He’d found what he was looking for—a sheaf of bills from the Unseen City—and it had stolen his attention away.
The old librarian gave a theatrical sigh. “Do as you will,” he said, half doom and half resignation. “Just take care. The books may be immortal, but we are not. You go down to the stacks one morning, and by the time you come up, you’ve a beard down to your belly and have never once composed a poem to a girl you met ice-skating on the Eder.”
“Is that how one meets girls?” asked Lazlo, only half in jest. “Well, the river won’t freeze for months. I have time to rally my courage.”
“Bah! Girls are not a hibernal phenomenon. Go now. Pick some flowers and find one to give them to. It’s as simple as that. Look for kind eyes and wide hips, do you hear me? Hips, boy. You haven’t lived until you’ve laid your head on a nice, soft—”
Mercifully, he was interrupted by the approach of a scholar.
Lazlo could as easily will his skin to turn color as he could approach and speak to a girl, let alone lay his head on a nice, soft anything. Between the abbey and the library, he had hardly known a female person, much less a young female person, and even if he’d had the faintest idea what to say to one, he didn’t imagine that many would welcome the overtures of a penniless junior librarian with a crooked nose and the ignominious name of Strange.
The scholar left, and Master Hyrrokkin resumed his lecture. “Life won’t just happen to you, boy,” he said. “You have to happen to it. Remember: The spirit grows sluggish when you neglect the passions.”
“My spirit is fine.”
“Then you’re going sadly wrong. You’re young. Your spirit shouldn’t be ‘fine.’ It should be effervescent.”
The “spirit” in question wasn’t the soul. Nothing so abstract. It was spirit of the body—the clear fluid pumped by the second heart through its own network of vessels, subtler and more mysterious than the primary vascular system. Its function wasn’t properly understood by science. You could live even if your second heart stopped and the spirit hardened in your veins. But it did have some connection to vitality, or “passion,” as Master Hyrrokkin said, and those without it were emotionless, lethargic. Spiritless.
“Worry about your own spirit,” Lazlo told him. “It’s not too late for you. I’m sure plenty of widows would be delighted to be wooed by such a romantic troglodyte.”
“Don’t be impertinent.”
“Don’t be imperious.”
Master Hyrrokkin sighed. “I miss the days when you lived in fear of me. However short-lived they were.”
Lazlo laughed. “You had the monks to thank for those. They taught me to fear my elders. You taught me not to, and for that, I’ll always be grateful.” He said it warmly, and then—he couldn’t help himself—his eyes flickered toward the papers in his hand.
The old man saw and let out a huff of exasperation. “Fine, fine. Enjoy your receipts. I’m not giving up on you, though. What’s the point of being old if you can’t beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom?”
“And what’s the point of being young if you can’t ignore all advice?”