I could also have stayed parked at the desk, except then I still wouldn’t know what the whatever was, and if something really bad had made it into the library, it could just as easily flee from Orion and come for me. Anyway, I’d been looking for an excuse to show off: what more could I ask for? Taking out something big in the reading room would be a great one, as long as Orion didn’t kill it before I got there. Maybe I could even save him.

Filled with all the hazy glory of that vision, I got up and went after him, though at a healthily cautious pace. As soon as I got into the Sanskrit aisle again, I heard the alluring song that had called him: faint screams, traveling from the reading room. I couldn’t tell what was instigating the screaming, but the sheer number of voices suggested it had to be something impressive. I’d been wise to go slowly, though: I was barely in the Vedic era and Orion was already rounding the corner into the main incantations aisle far ahead, disappearing out of sight again, and the lights were dimming on his heels, making a long dark stretch of aisle ahead of me.

I stayed focused on the spine labels and stuck to my deliberate pace, the best way to keep the library from playing any tricks on me. But the aisle was already being unreasonably slow and grudging, and then it got worse: I was looking for familiar books, as landmarks, and I caught sight of two entries from my little catalog, written by the same author in the same decade, with an entire bookcase between them. I had to start deliberately reading the last label on every row out loud and letting my fingers bang into the end of each shelf to force it to let me make any real progress.

Which was extremely odd, because I could hear the screaming from the reading room getting louder. Flashes of red and violet light were appearing at the distant end of the aisle: that was Orion’s combat magic going, which I was starting to be able to recognize just by the rhythm of the spell bursts. There was clearly a huge fight in the offing. Normally the school is more than happy to dump you into a mess like that if you’re stupid enough to go towards it. Unless, it occurred to me, the maleficaria in question had a real chance of taking Orion out. I was going towards the reading room with the intent to help him, after all, and in magic, intentions matter. Of course the school would have liked to be rid of him, seeing how he’s been throwing off the balance and starving the place.

I didn’t like that idea at all, and I even more didn’t like how much I didn’t like it. Getting attached to anyone in here except on practical terms is like sending out an engraved invitation to misery, even if you don’t pick out an idiot who spends all his time hurling himself into danger. But it was too late. I already didn’t like it enough that I had to make a special effort to stop myself from stupidly breaking into a run. I forced myself to slow down even more instead and actively look at every single thing on the shelves. That’s contrary to instinct, but it’s the best way to force the library to let you get through. If an aisle is taking longer to walk, there have to be more bookcases on the same subject, and the more books the library has to dredge up out of the void to fill them. If you’re going slow enough to look at all the spines, you’re almost sure to find a really valuable and rare spellbook among them. So the school is almost sure to let you make progress instead.

Except what actually happened was that scads of unfamiliar books and manuscripts started appearing on the shelves. Many with numbers that I’d never seen before, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the Sanskrit aisle the last two years. Some of the numbers were weirdly gigantic, meaning they’d been cataloged really early on and hadn’t been relabeled since. The school really didn’t want me getting to the end of the aisle. I narrowed my eyes and looked even harder, and three shelves onward, I caught a gleam of gold off the spine of a thin volume, almost completely hidden between two heaped stacks of palm-leaf manuscripts, on a high shelf just at the limit of my arm’s reach, with no label at all.

No labels means a book that has been freshly pulled from the void, never on the shelf before at all, which means it’s valuable enough to hide really aggressively. And a book stuffed among palm-leaf manuscripts meant spells valuable enough that someone had copied it, centuries later, and in this case also bothered to gild the cover. I first noticed the book peeking out while I was two steps away, didn’t take my eyes off it for a second as I got closer, and then I grabbed the edge of the shelf with one hand, jumped, and snagged it off. I could practically feel the whole bookcase lurch under me with resentment as I came down. I wasn’t stupid enough to try and look inside, which would have made it subject to collection. I kept looking straight ahead down the aisle and got it stuffed into my bookbag without even breaking stride. But I could tell just from my fingers sliding over the cover that it was really properly good. It wasn’t just the spine that was gilt, there was some sort of stamped pattern all over, and a folded-over flap to keep it closed.

The aisle did start to move quicker after that. I indulged in feeling smug for a moment, as if I’d beaten the library; I’d made it hand me something good and now it was going to have to let me go, since it didn’t want me collecting any more prizes. And it didn’t, of course, but I was still being an idiot. You don’t ever get anything in here without paying for it. Ever.

I moved at speed through the more modern languages, until at last I got close enough that in the next flash of Orion’s magic, the library couldn’t keep me from getting a glimpse of the distance between me and the main incantations aisle, and I burst into a quick sprint that got me close enough I could still see the end of the aisle even after the spell-light had faded. It had taken me at least twice as long to get there as Orion. The screams were louder, and other noises too: a high-pitched shrilling, vaguely birdlike, and then a lower snarling became audible as I rounded into the main aisle. After a couple of cautious steps further on, a third sound came, like the wind whistling through dead leaves on an early-winter day.

The first two sounds could possibly have gone together. You get all sorts of ridiculous cross-breeds in the bestial or hybrid category, mals created when some excessively clever alchemist stuck together two incompatible creatures for fun and profit—if by profit you mean eventually getting eaten by your own creations, which seems to happen to almost every maleficer who goes off on that particular tangent. Crossing a wolf with a flock of sparrows might sound stupid, but it’s not even unlikely. But the third sound was completely out. It wasn’t precisely like the manifestation that Mum put down on Bardsey Island during the summer that she dragged me the whole width of Wales on foot along the old pilgrim way, that one had sounded more like bells ringing, but it was close enough to be unmistakable.

If a manifestation had somehow formed inside the school, the library was just the sort of place it would like. But I was surprised it had popped into the reading room. Why not stay in the nice dark stacks where it had probably been feeding off the occasional lost student for ages? And why at the same moment as something else—two something elses, I mentally amended, because the shrilling and the snarling were now clearly coming from different parts of the reading room, too far apart for separate heads on one creature. That made no sense, and even less after I heard Orion shout, “Magnus! Put down a slickshield!” Those are only useful against the oozes, which don’t make any sound at all except squelching. That made four mals in the library, all at once. It would be like a pre-graduation party going in there.