Captive Magics

35 - Employment

Unreasonably Leander's worries turned, as he hurried through the city, from how they would afford food and lodgings to whether he was letting Lissy down. Her reaction was easy to predict: concern, for a moment, then straight to optimism. She would suggest some other way of getting quick money which would worry him further, then opine that they certainly find work soon. Yes, very soon.

But what if it wasn't soon? By rights he should be sorting out their day-to-day subsistence while she, with her unusual set of skills, should be free to look for a job without pressure. What if she rushed, what if she somehow drew too much attention to herself? What then?

His panic was reaching irrational soaring heights just as he entered Emeritus Square in the heart of the city. To his right, looking across the flagstones and drifts of shoppers and vendors, were three great buildings, shoulder-to-shoulder, making up the most imposing side of the quadrangle. Somehow, he thought, they linked to the vast network of buildings behind, which made up the campus cloistering all the great sorcerers. Where Lissy needed to be.

Quite by chance his eyes fell to a tiny notice in a distant ground floor window, and after a moment his spectacles magnified the distance and clearly picked the letters out as if it were only arms-length away.

"Ha!" he barked near-hysterically when he had read it. The noise made an elderly woman nearby jump, then dart around him skittishly as he mulled it over. Before he could develop second thoughts, he collected himself and marched into the smallest of the three buildings.

"I saw an advert for a librarian...?" he told the woman behind the reception desk. Oddly, he felt slightly out of breath.

"Door at the end of the corridor," she told him, not looking up from her rustling heap of documents. It was a long corridor, and the door she specified led straight onto the street at the opposite side of the building. For a moment he thought there had been some mistake until he saw a grim black door set opposite in a sprawling ancient building of uneven and crumbling brick. There was nothing to suggest what the place was, other than an absurdly small notice beside the tarnished brass door handle proclaiming it the National Library of Runes and Runological Study.

The inside was even gloomier than the frontage suggested. Without any sort of reception desk, Leander hovered in the front hall before steeling himself and heading down another corridor. The oval room at the end of it contained a single sickly-yellow lantern, which struggled to illuminate the dark panelling.

"Gotta pass?" asked someone, as Leander entered.

"Oh. Er," he said, then ran out of words as he looked around for who had spoken. One of the deep alcoves in the wall suddenly produced the balding head of a man, who peered unhappily at Leander from below an impressive set of eyebrows.

"Your library pass?"

"No, I don't have-"

"Well-"

"I'm here about the job. The librarian job?"

There was a long pause as the man stared at him, then left his alcove and crossed to the desk.

"Fine. They'll probably interview you straight away. Happens that Gorstanley's upstairs with Teckirrion. You know runic?"

"Er, passably I think," Leander said, hoping they didn't need an expert.

"We need an expert," the man added, and Leander's heart sank. "It's just me at the moment. You'd work with me. We have over five thousand uncatalogued runic objects and most of these books have never been organised by the reference system. That makes them unusable. Have to know your stuff."