The tower of the canton's central library grew out of the night air like a small, black-stone Fire of Eden, absorbing light rather than spewing it. Ortahn and Esh-Faya stopped at its base. It was fitting for the library to be a tower; something about it felt archetypally correct.

  "Beautiful," Esh agreed with Ortahn's unspoken thought. "I wonder, by what method will we get inside?"

  "Definitely not through the main entrance," Ort replied, placing his palms on the pavement tiles, polished by the world. "I'd be surprised if it wasn't some meticulous Sphinx."

  He cast spells without gestures and certainly non-verbally, but now he needed to feel the structure of the stone, its geometry and memory. The stones trembled, awakening, as if remembering an old master. An uneven slab rose with a soft crunch, carrying them up to a lower stained-glass window, as if on the palm of a Nephilim.

  "Geomorphy?" Esh marveled, clinging to Ortahn just in case. "You know the applied discipline of the high architects as well!"

  "Actually," Ortahn replied as his improvised lift gently delivered them to their destination. He tried to sound informative, not boastful. "This is only a step more complex than aetherogenesis. The same work with matter, only more stubborn."

  Reaching the window, he paused for a moment, probing the space first with aether, then with his eyes, picking out the outlines of shelves from the darkness within.

  "No traps, at least not offensive ones," he reported.

  They moved into the window opening, and Ortahn carefully returned his lift to its place, then meticulously erased the slightest traces of his intervention from the pavement. This wasn't just a precautionary measure. His inner self, raised by his aunt—a fierce advocate of "neat magic"—would not allow him to commit even the slightest act of vandalism. Esh whistled in admiration, but Ortahn wasn't finished. Glass, that frozen relative of water, yielded to a slight structural edit, and the window transformed into a vertical puddle, through which they stepped into the library.

  "At the school," Esh immediately whispered, "you will tell me whether that's water, glass, or some other kind of magic. With formulas and practical reinforcement."

  Inside, the library revealed itself as a dynamic labyrinth. The floors moved slowly, like accelerated tectonic plates, stairs intersected, disappeared, and reappeared in completely unexpected places, and walls slid over one another, opening new corridors, the bookshelves following the movement of the floor. The library was reassembling its own architecture.

  Ortahn grabbed Esh by the waist and pulled her with him onto the top tier of the nearest shelf. He had spotted two lights, floating smoothly down the newly formed corridor. A Sentinel-model homunculus. The creature moved into a strip of moonlight falling through the stained glass, and Ortahn got a good look at it, staying still in its presence.

  It had a humanoid form, but it was impossible to mistake it for a person. Unclothed, its thin and sinewy body had an extra animal bend at the heels and long, three-fingered hands with claws, undoubtedly for tearing more than just paper. Huge, round, pupilless eyes radiated a blue light, and below its socket-like ears, the face lost interest and ended abruptly in a dangling appendage resembling a proboscis. Two multi-directional funnels protruded from its hump, from which, Ortahn was sure, an alarm would sound at the appearance of uninvited guests.

  The Sentinel passed by, and Ortahn and Esh, after waiting a few more moments, descended to the second floor of the gallery. Ortahn had to dispel the mirror cloak—otherwise, it was impossible to get a grip on the shelves. Standing on the solid floor, Esh looked at him questioningly, still pressed against him for no logical reason. He was about to restore the spell, but out of the corner of his eye, he caught a familiar homunculus glow, gliding between the shelves at the other end of the hall and approaching inexorably.

  They bolted without any spells, but Ortahn reassured himself that the Sentinels surely had means of seeing through such primitive invisibility. Suddenly, the wall along which they were running slid silently upward, revealing a low passage into which they dove like gnawers into a burrow.

  "Where to?" Esh breathed, barely disturbing the air.

  "We need to find a book catalog or something similar," Ortahn answered just as quietly, leading his friend by the hand.

  "So instead of an unknown book in an unknown location, we first look for an unknown book in an unknown location," Esh snorted, a little louder this time, her nerves beginning to fray.

  "Welcome to the library! I am the Librarian!" a thin but incredibly cheerful voice sounded right behind them.

  "Shh..." Esh hissed at the voice.

  Ortahn turned and, following her gaze, discovered a small, organic-type homunculus on the floor, which had apparently been sneaking along with them from the very beginning, almost holding onto the hem of Esh's dress. The creature was covered in short, reddish fur, with enormous (like most homunculi) amber eyes and open cylinders on its limbs, in which flesh was coiled like a spring, ready to extend at any moment to reach any high-up tome. Tiny leather wings protruded from its back, clearly intended for short flights between shelves.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "Correct!" the Librarian chirped with the same irrepressible enthusiasm. "One must maintain silence in the library. It is an important condition for productive thought!"

  "Then don't draw attention to us," Ortahn ground out. "Otherwise those siren-backs will start wailing."

  "Then let's go where you need to go," the homunculus replied serenely, continuing to walk with them as if they had always been together.

  "And you don't want to raise the alarm?" Esh clarified.

  "Don't give it ideas," Ortahn warned, too late.

  "Oh, no," the Librarian waved a little paw. "That's not my function. Everyone has their own; it's more efficient. Your function, I presume, is 'query,' yes? Please state it to optimize the process."

  "We need books that explain the separation of male and female magic," Ortahn said, quickly exchanging a glance with Esh. "Origin, mechanism, purpose."

  "And also," Esh immediately began to rattle off, her eyes lighting up with theoretical madness, "I need records on reverse-aura, something on mag-synthesis, elemental crystals, the theory of resonant circuits in ancient homunculi would be a nice aperitif... Oh, and maybe the uncensored Chancellery documents on the regulation of organic engineering... But that's not urgent," she finished hastily, noticing Ortahn's stern look.

  The Librarian scratched its chin with the edge of a wing, its huge eyes narrowing to a human size.

  "You are, of course, interesting readers. Very," it said. "But access to such topics requires a high rank or special clearance."

  "Let's just say we don't have ranks lower than the highest," Ortahn said without blinking.

  Esh looked at her teacher in silent admiration, struck by the virtuosity with which he had lied with the truth. She hadn't even thought of such a level of conceptual deception. A moment passed, during which it seemed the Librarian recounted every book in the building.

  "You can only be here if you have a rank," the homunculus concluded once its brain had completed its logical processes. "From your awkwardly constructed phrase, by process of elimination, it can be understood that your rank is the highest. Logic confirmed by all logical chains. Follow me."

  It flapped its little wings, but it was more of a hop than a flight, and scurried into the depths of the labyrinth, weaving between the shelves with surprising speed. The walls shifted, and the library, as if acknowledging their right to be there, opened a passage for them—as narrow as a thought you're afraid of losing.

  "Well, then," Ortahn said, walking after the nimble creature. "Maybe you should start studying the minds of homunculi? It seems there's a lot of... free space for improvement there."

  Esh walked behind him, and in her wide-open eyes were already reflected the lines from thousands of books she had not yet had time to read.

  During the time spent in the hall for the high-ranked, the Librarian, despite its phenomenal diligence, found absolutely nothing useful. But after the archive at The Scar, Ortahn wasn't even upset. If anything, he would have been alarmed if the little homunculus had immediately handed him a book titled "All the Answers to Your Questions." That would have meant only one thing—failures await ahead, and the further they went, the worse they would be. And do quick answers even have any value? Truth, like good wine, does not tolerate rapid consumption. As a child, Ortahn had once drunk a whole sphere of his aunt's wine. The experience had not been a pleasant one.

  All they managed to dig up were strange texts that Ortahn had preemptively refuted. A certain Nitsha of Tarrion furiously argued that men didn't use aether at all, and their "magic" was the rudimentary remnant of some hypothetical, unproven pre-aetheric magic of ancient humans. Darva-daughter-Loria, in her opus "Parasitic Resonance," declared male mages to be energy vampires who consciously sucked the power from female mages. And Igga the Clanless went so far as to write that all male magic was unconsciously created by women, and men just happened to be in the situation, creating the illusion of their own sorcery. It was becoming obvious that only madwomen wrote on this topic. This wasn't a scientific debate; it was an ideological taboo.

  "I think that's enough for today," Ortahn announced to the Librarian, who was struggling to carry a new stack of dusty books.

  "Huh?" Esh raised a drowsy gaze to him. Drunk on knowledge. She was reading a book about some long-extinct creatures with primitive intelligence that had nothing to do with their mission. "But we've only just begun."

  "We've been here for several hours," Ortahn gently countered.

  "Four and a half hours," the homunculus helpfully supplied, its furry ears twitching.

  "And this is your seventh book. Off-topic," Ortahn added, almost without reproach.

  "Then I suppose we really should take a break for a while," Esh forced out, not believing herself. But her fingers didn't want to let go of the binding.

  "I had better prepare a thematic selection for your next visit," the Librarian said, and a tone strikingly similar to guilt sounded in its little voice. Anyone would be upset if their sole function failed. "Your topic, I must admit, is slightly unpopular in academic circles. Or too popular in non-academic ones."

  "Can you make it so the Sentinels don't consider us trespassers?" Ortahn asked, getting up from his chair and feeling his muscles ache.

  The Librarian thought, resting its short chin on the tips of its folded wings.

  "Technically, I can enter your phenotypic descriptions into the temporary list of night workers. It's always empty, and I suspect only I know about it. Just don't change your appearance radically, right? Or, if you do decide to change your appearance radically, sneak in here again, as if illegally."

  Ortahn considered the risks. To be put on a list was to leave a trace. But now that the Librarian had already memorized them, hiding was pointless. Ortahn nodded.

  Approaching Esh, he tried to gently pull her away from the table. But she stared into the book with such strength that her fingers would have envied, counting every new letter read as a personal victory. With a slight sigh, Ortahn bent down, wrapped an arm around her back and under her knees, and easily lifted her into his arms. Esh let out a short breath but didn't resist. She reluctantly placed the book on a high stack and followed it with her gaze until the very last moment.

  "Why is everything so mobile in here?" she asked the Librarian as a parting question, while Ortahn carried her toward the exit. "All these moving walls, stairs... What's the point?"

  The homunculus shrugged its spring-loaded shoulders.

  "I don't know. The original design purpose has been lost. I suppose it was some form of preventing stagnation. Now, it's just a tradition."