All I can hear is my quill scratching on the parchment. Short, staccato scratches and long, looping scratches. For a moment, I’m lost in the sound of my letters. That moment is perfect, but it doesn’t last.
Mieklo is bored, and that’s when he’s most likely to start trouble. He makes a soft chittering noise that means he’s hungry.
I pull a few scraps of parchment out of my pocket. I always keep a few in case of just such an emergency,
The xichu takes them in his delicate front paws and retreats to the farthest corner of the desk, as if I might take them back. He munches with his back facing me, his long, tufted tail twitching in contentment. He twists and looks back at me, but I’m already writing again.
It’s getting late, and I want to finish a few more pages.
My eyes flicker too fast over a sentence I’m trying to copy, and I have to read it several more times before I’m able to transcribe it.
Come on, I urge myself. Just a few more pages.
Mieklo finishes his parchment snack and returns to my elbow. He scans the words I’m writing and makes an annoyed squeak.
“I know,” I say. “This book is particularly dry. It’s no fun for me either.” A yawn escapes me.
He scrunches his nose in displeasure, his whiskers twitching. He has words for me. They don’t translate well from xichu squeaks, but I take his meaning.
When Mieklo’s whole body goes rigid, his nose raised, my quill stops. A second later, he drops off the desk and disappears around the closest stack.
“Good evening, miss Lola-Grace,” Madam Maeyv says as she appears from the opposite direction, coming around a leaning stack of tomes as I drop my quill into the ink pot. “You are working late tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m trying to make up for days I missed when I was sick.”
“I’ll leave you to it, but not too much longer. The mind becomes weary, same as the body.” Madam Maeyv turns to leave, and I retrieve my quill. Then she turns back. “You know, xichu used to be referred to as the librarian’s friend.”
I sit in stunned silence, unsure how to answer. My quill drips ink onto the parchment, and I quickly blot it, my face warming. Then, from the corner of my eye, I see one nibbled piece of parchment fluttering on the corner of the desk.
One Mieklo didn’t quite finish.
Madam Maeyv has seen it too.
Though I’m not sure where this is going, I find myself too curious not to ask. “Librarian’s friend? I thought xichu were seen as pests?”
“Yes, now they are. However, it was not always so.” Madam Maeyv turns fully toward me once again. She clasps her hands before her. “It’s said that at one time xichu and people, particularly librarians, worked side by side. Xichu have strong empathy, and some librarians grew bonds with them enough to feel one another’s emotions. Xichu were keepers of books instead of eating them, but those bonds fell away, and the xichu became feral and destructive in the stacks. So the librarians banished them from their great libraries. Most of the xichu never left, they hid and caused chaos for the librarians who no longer tended to them.”
Madam Maeyv gives me a knowing look. “If it were to happen that a librarian, or even a scribe, were to form a bond with a xichu, after all this time. Now that would really be something.”
I blink. Unsure how to answer her.
Madam Maeyv starts to say something else, but she’s cut off by a shout somewhere down the stacks. “Excuse me, miss Lola-Grace.” I don’t even have a chance to reply before she’s gone.
An unconscious yawn escapes me, and I dip my quill to continue my work. Just a couple more pages. I only get one more sentence copied before I start thinking about Madam Maeyv’s words again.
Mieklo peeks his head over the edge of the desk. Certain it’s just me, he pulls himself up and hops over to me. He tilts his head questioningly, and her words echo in my head:
Xichu have strong empathy, and some librarians grew bonds with them enough to feel one another’s emotions.
Mieklo is curious, but I can see that clear on his small fuzzy face. No matter how hard I concentrate, I don’t feel anything. He twitches his nose. Then he straightens until he’s at his tallest height, about a foot and a half. His nose is bobbing, and all I can hear is his sniffing.
No, there’s something else, voices, many of them. I can’t hear words, but I can hear the tension. They're farther down the stacks but getting louder.
Then I smell smoke, acrid but faint.
The first thing an apprentice scribe learns when they come to the library, before even learning their letters, is to respect fire. A scribe’s job is to work amongst dry, crumbly parchment, and the only light to read and copy by is fire.
It’s necessary but dangerous. So the librarians stress caution with fire above all else.
I know how to be careful with candles. Eight years in the library of Northend has taught me that as well as my letters and how to read and write them. I’ve never had an incident, because burning one of the manuscripts would be cut from my pay. That means less money for my family.
I glance at my candle, but I know it’s not the culprit. It flickers as Mieklo steals my attention back. He pulls himself up onto my book, smudging the wet ink of the most recent line.
“Mieklo!” I dab the page, but his tiny paw prints track across half of it.
He makes an irritated squeaking noise, shaking his front paws at me. I assume it’s the ink blackening them, but he starts to throw quite a tantrum with his whole foot-tall rodent body. When Mieklo tries to steal my quill, I scoop him into my off-hand, holding them apart.
“What has come over you?” Pests or friends? I wonder.
His squeaking continues. It turns into a tiny cough.
My throat feels scratchy. I want to cough too, but I suppress it. The smell of smoke is thicker now.
Who could be so careless? How many precious pages burned before they caught it? Or did it still burn?
Mieklo jumps down from my hand, pulls on my finger. His ears and nose twitch with agitation. He lets out a long squeak. I’ve never seen him so worked up.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” I still don’t feel anything from the xichu. The disappointment is almost palatable.
Mieklo continues to pull on my finger.
I push back my chair and stand.
Mieklo jumps up and down. He drops from the edge table and runs in a circle.
I bring my candle. I won’t be the cause of anymore priceless manuscripts from far-off places getting damaged.
I follow the long, tufted xichu tail through the stacks. Instead of the smoke dissipating, it gets thicker. Now, I can’t help but cough.
“We have to go back,” I sputter.
Mieklo keeps running ahead. I don’t want to lose him, but there’s a haze of gray around my head. I duck below it and keep following Mieklo. He trusts me to protect him from the librarians. So I can trust him in this.
Why is there so much smoke? This is more than a clumsy assistant scribe tipping over a candle.
I can hear the crackle of fire now. A stack of books topples somewhere close by. I can hear it but not see it. The distant voices grow more upset, shouting.
Mieklo skitters to a stop, and I have to take wider steps not to catch him under my feet. He hesitates, like he’s not sure which direction to go in a library he’s known his whole life. I almost bend down to pick him up, but I stop myself. He’s leading me somewhere.
More shouts are followed by a growl, not human or animal, something else. It makes my skin prickle. The air feels colder, making me shiver. A distant scream follows. My stomach drops.
Mieklo squeaks and draws my attention back to him. Once I look, he’s moving again, now in a different direction.
A rack of manuscripts to our right rumbles. A tome falls behind me with a thud that puffs dust as the pages splay open. From the far side of the rack, a person screams. It’s hard to tell if the voice is familiar with only that to go on. I can hear panting, like they’ve been running.
I slow, watching the rack.
Mieklo squeaks, a high-pitched noise that hurts my ears, but the wobbling rack has my attention. It’s going to tip, but which way? Parchment and heavy-bound tomes shake and clatter to the floor with noise muffled by the blood surging in my ears.
I want to know what’s on the other side.
The rack explodes into splinters and dust. A great axe blade is lodged in the floor. My eyes travel up the blade, up the handle, to two clawed hands at the end of two muscular red arms tugging at it.
A sudden wave of panic disrupts my focus. I turn, and Mieklo is tugging at the leg of my pants. I follow him, glancing once behind me. The axe rips from the floor, and I hear it fall heavily once more. The panting silences abruptly.
Mieklo leads us deeper into the stacks. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in this part of the library. The racks are ancient, sagging under the years and the weight of old books. Some of the parchments crumble to dust at the corners.
The chaos fades as we go farther back in time.
With a quick check back at me, Mieklo bounds over to the farthest wall. The tomes here are covered with thick dust, and I clear my throat from the tickle that forms at the sight.
Chittering and squeaking, Mieklo points at the wall.
I don’t understand what he’s trying to tell me. We can’t go forward anymore.
“What? There’s nothing here.” I whisper the words, but they come out in a frustrated hiss.
The xichu climbs the rack directly in front of me until he’s at eye level. He bounces and points, chittering. My eyes follow, and I see something stuck in the mess of dusty parchment. At first, I think it’s a hammer or some tool with a wooden handle.
The axe buried in the shattered rack flashes through my mind, making me flinch back from the handle.
Mieklo urges me with a demanding squeak.
“Why are you so interested in this handle?” I pull as I ask, and instead of the handle coming out, it thunks to one side. Several parchment rolls are dislodged and tumble to the floor, but my eyes are riveted on the rack to my left as it swings open, revealing a dark passage roughly cut through stone.
I’m glad to have my candle. It flickers from the stale air the passage breathes out, and I protect its flame with my hand.
The xichu hops down and scampers into the passageway, chittering back at me to follow.
I cough into my shoulder at the thick smoke surrounding us. More screams and growls and crashes come from the direction we left.
My options are few, and for now, the dark unknown looks safer than whatever follows behind us. So I follow Mieklo, tugging the rack closed behind us. The passage becomes quiet as a tomb, and I shake away the comparison as I follow Mieklo and the orange edge of the candlelight ahead of me.
~ * ~
If you’d like to continue this journey, enter your email below to receive future posts directly to your inbox.
If you enjoyed this post, please share it.