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through lack of use—and passed between two tall towers of books.
    She was in Geography. The books reached to the ceiling on both sides, those at the top hardly touched since the day she had started working here ten years ago. It was not that there was nothing of interest up there—Alishia suspected there were accounts of paths long since faded into time, trade routes discovered and discarded—it was simply that people seemed so lethargic that it was far easier to pluck a book from one of the lower shelves. There were six ladders scattered around, but three of these invariably leaned against the stacks of children’s books. These were soft and comfortable, cloth-covered pages, bendy and pliable for young hands to twist and young mouths to gnaw upon. When Alishia was not working, this was where Byran and Magella huddled away to screw and sleep and eat. Their thoughts rarely stretched any further.
    Her footsteps, naturally soft anyway, were completely muffled by the stocked shelves. She breathed in the must of their pages, the musk of decades of damp and heat and damp again. Mold painted great swaths across the spines, interrupted here and there where a book had been removed and replaced in a different place. History nestled around Alishia, slowly moldering away just as the land was fading back into history. There was a certain poetic justice to that.
    She paused, swept her long hair back over her shoulders to free her ears. The singing was still there, though even more muffled now that she had entered the maze of books. That was another thing she loved about the library: whoever had built it had given no consideration to order, arrangement or the need for browsers to be able to find their way out in less than a day. It was more than a maze; it was a conundrum of words.
    Often when she ventured into the heart of the library she was sure she traveled a route she had never known before, a byway between alleys, ankle-deep in paper dust and redolent with the musings of yesteryear. This time a path between stacks led her not only left and right, but up and down as well. There were places where the floor dipped and raised, but she had never seen steps. She glanced at the books to see what strange subject could be stored in such an ambiguous place: needlecraft. Ten thousand books on sewing, knitting, tapestry, darning, skin-melding, hair-braiding and web-weaving.
    On she went. And turning a sudden corner, she found him. She stopped and backtracked slowly, not sure whether he had seen her. His song did not falter, his voice unwavering, his mouth moving in rhythm with his hands. He sat amid a pile of books, manuscripts, torn pages and shredded sheets. He was a lump of flesh at the heart of a mountain of paper, a weak and yet terrible-looking man picking through remnants of history. Obviously he had yet to find whatever he sought.
    He was in the far corner of the library building, perhaps aboveground, maybe below. The ceiling was low here and adorned with mineral stalactites, water stains mottling the stacked books and promising little but rot within their pages. This section, Alishia knew, was old magic. Hidden magic. Lost magic. Many people had forgotten about that, and so the area was only visited rarely. Those who did still study it often wished they did not.
    The man rustled his way through another sheaf of pages, discarding them at random. They fluttered down around him like dying butterflies. He spent very little time on each page, certainly not long enough to read even a tenth of what was written. He must, Alishia knew, have a very definite idea of what he sought.
    Lost magic.
    But why here? Seeking a truth about his childhood, or that of his parents? Trying to find the route to the missing history of his clan? Or simply curious?
    Dust. That was one of the curses of the library. Scraps of paper and the shed skin of those who had written or read the books over the centuries, all existing in an enclosed, still atmosphere.