Read Online Shadow and claw by Gene Wolfe - Free Book Online Page B

the library of the House Absolute too, for that matter. And many others."
    "Do you mean that the rabble of the city is permitted to enter the Citadel to use your library?"
    "No," said Ultan. "I mean that the library itself extends beyond the walls of the Citadel. Nor, I think, is it the only institution here that does so. It is thus that the contents of our fortress are so much larger than their container." He took me by the shoulder as he spoke, and we began to walk down one of the long, narrow paths between the towering book-cases. Cyby followed us holding up his candelabrum - I suppose more for his benefit than mine, but it permitted me to see well enough to keep from colliding with the dark oak shelves we passed.
    "Your eyes have not yet failed you," Master Ultan said after a time. "Do you apprehend any termination to this aisle?"
    "No, sieur," I said, and in fact I did not. As far as the candlelight flew there was only row upon row of books stretching from the floor to the high ceiling. Some of the shelves were disordered, some straight; once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.
    But always there were books and more books: rows of spines in calf, morocco, binder's cloth, paper, and a hundred other substances I could not identify, some flashing with gilt, many lettered in black, a few with paper labels so old and yellowed that they were as brown as dead leaves.
    " 'Of the trail of ink there is no end,' " Master Ultan told me. "Or so a wise man said. He lived long ago - what would he say if he could see us now? Another said, 'A man will give his life to the turning over of a collection of books,'
    but I would like to meet the man who could turn over this one, on any topic."
    "I was looking at the bindings," I answered, feeling rather foolish.
    "How fortunate for you. Yet I am glad. I can no longer see them, but I remember the pleasure I once had in doing it. That would be just after I had become master librarian. I suppose I was about fifty. I had, you know, been an apprentice for many, many years."
    "Is that so, sieur?"
    "Indeed it is. My master was Gerbold, and for decades it appeared that he would never die. Year followed straggling year for me, and all that time I read - I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure, in time, until I spent most of my hours searching for such books. Then I devised a plan of study for myself, tracing obscure sciences, one after another, from the dawn of knowledge to the present. Eventually I exhausted even that, and beginning at the great ebony case that stands in the center of the room we of the library have maintained for three hundred years against the return of the Autarch Sulpicius (and into which, in consequence, no one ever comes) I read outward for a period of fifteen years, often finishing two books in one day." Behind us, Cyby murmured, "Marvelous, sieur." I suspected that he had heard the story many times.
    "Then the unlooked-for seized me by the coat. Master Gerbold died. Thirty years before I had been ideally suited by reason of predilection, education, experience, youth, family connections, and ambition to succeed him. At the time I actually did so, no one could have been less fit. I had waited so long that waiting was all I understood, and I possessed a mind suffocated beneath the weight of inutile facts. But I forced myself to take charge, and spent more hours than I could expect you to believe now in attempting to recall the plans and maxims I had laid down so many years ago for my eventual succession. He paused, and I knew he was delving again in a mind larger and darker than even his great library. "But my old habit of reading dogged me still. I lost to books days and even weeks, during which I should