The huntmaster stopped, and didn't start again for a long time.
"Allegretti was there. Eckhardt had made him his ... I don't know ... his pet?"
"Did he ...?"
"He died. Lots of them died." His face turned sour. "I should have taken out Eckhardt when I had the chance. I was close enough to take a pot at him with my bow, and he was ... busy."
"Busy."
"They're still alive, afterwards, his victims. Just. What he does to them: it turns them into little old men, starving-thin, no strength to move, speak, breathe. They lie there and blink. Gods only know what's happened to them." His shoulders slumped. "I should have had a go. Nikoleta didn't want me to, so I didn't. I should have ignored her."
"I imagine she thought she was protecting you." Thaler finished his own beer. He set the bottle carefully back in the crate, and collected another.
"She ignored me instead. We were supposed to go together: Eckhardt couldn't sense me, and I was to get close enough to be able to tell her when to strike. She left me like a fucking idiot and just went at him with everything she had. And it worked. She had him beaten. He used a spell to get back to the White Tower, and she chased after him as fast as she could. She was on fire, and I don't think she even noticed. I'd run all the way to the novices' house in time to see Eckhardt vanish, and then I had to run all the way up the fucking mountain, before working out which of the tunnels she'd gone down, and by the time I'd got there it was over." He took a shuddering breath. "One of the caves. It was like an oven. I saw her, Peter. I saw her burning."
"I'm sorry."
"That fucker Eckhardt crawled out of the fire. The flesh had boiled from his bones, and he looked up at me from the floor, with his grinning skull and his eyes all melted away, and he reached out for my leg."
Thaler hung on to the table for support, and Buber looked him in the eye for the first time since they'd sat down.
"Don't worry. He's not coming back after what I did to him."
It was Thaler's turn to nod and be silent.
"What happens now?" asked Buber, reaching for his third beer.
"Whatever it is, it's out of my hands. We have a boy-prince and no earls, and I don't know how that's supposed to work." Thaler contemplated his bottle, and looked up at the high windows that were now the refectory's only illumination. "I do know what I'm going to do, though. That's about the only thing I can control at the moment."
"What's that?"
Thaler couldn't tell if Buber was just making polite noises to humour him, but he carried on regardless. "I'm going to finish cataloguing the books. In fact, I'm going to start again. We're going to go through every book, every scrap of paper, and we're going to work out exactly what each one contains. And then, we're going to shelve each and every one of them so we know where to find them again. We're going to organise them not by how big the book is but by subject; all the maps in one place, all the bestiaries in another, the histories and the geometry and astrology next to each other."
"Is that all?"
"No. No, it's not. We're going to learn from them. We're going to find out how this world works, and we're going to bend it to our will. That is our destination. If we want water that flows, wheels that turn, barges that run, lights in our homes, then we're going to have to do all of that for ourselves."
Buber shook his head. "Frederik, there's no more magic. The days of miracles are over."
Something stirred inside Thaler's chest. It might have been been no more than hubris, but to him it felt like the first sight of land after a long, storm-chased voyage.
"Those days, Peter, have only just begun."
PART 3.
Ember.
50.
It only occurred to her later that she'd been the first woman in the library, not just in living memory, but perhaps forever. That night, when she'd led the men down from the fortress to the town, forced the mob back with swords and spears and clubs, then crossed the threshold to greet her prince.
Neither Jews nor women entered the library. The spell had been as broken as the door by the time she'd entered, if it had ever been anything more substantial than habit and history in the first place; the magic might have gone, but those two forces stayed just as strong.
Sophia walked up the scrubbed steps to the portico, and into its whispering shadows. The rehung door was open, the coat of paint on it fresh and bright, and a newly constituted group of ushers guarded it.
If the library was the most important building in the entire palatinate, possibly the entire continent, then using a bunch of boys to look after it wasn't necessarily the best decision Thaler could have made; habit and history again.
But they knew her, and stood aside for her. She collected a lantern from the rack, had it lit by the librarian on duty, and asked for Master Thaler's whereabouts.
The librarian shrugged good-naturedly. Thaler was never in one place. Thaler was everywhere, all at once, his actual presence only detectable by the trail of harassed note-takers frantically scribbling in his wake.
"I'll find him," she said, "even if I have to stand in one place and wait for him to pass."
"A sound strategy, my lady."
"It's Wess, isn't it?" She had a decent memory for faces. "Now under-librarian?"
"And he has me handing out lanterns." Wess smiled ruefully. "There are still so very few of us, and, as Master Thaler points out, making sure a faulty lantern doesn't burn the library down is a vital task."
"All the same, Mr Wess. I'll have a word with him." Her brows crinkled as she frowned. "No, I'll have more than a word."
She carried on into the library proper. Carpenters were replacing the missing balustrades on the stairs, and in the centre of the dome, a huge scaffold was taking shape. In the dark, high up, there were lights and figures, hammering and augering.
It was hardly silent, yet all around the base of the structure, librarians were hard at work, pulling books off the shelves and placing them on tiered trolleys. In another part was a long table where senior staff were attempting to categorise each book as it came along.
It reminded her of an ant's nest. No one was still.
She took a deep breath, and, despite her given title of Princess Consort, bellowed in a most unladylike way, "Master Thaler?"
A momentary pause in the activity, then everyone who wasn't Thaler got back to work. The one who was peered over the edge of a second-tier balcony. "Mistress Morgenstern?"
She cupped her hands around her mouth. "Stay there. Exactly there, Master Thaler. Do not move. I'll be right up."
She had to negotiate passage with the carpenters, but after that, things became easier. Despite her haste, Thaler was itching to move on by the time she reached him, although the cloud of scribes surrounding him seemed relieved at the prospect of a rest.
"Mistress Morgenstern, surely this can wait. I am a very busy man."
"Yes you are, Master Thaler." She looked left and right. "I'd like to talk to the master librarian alone, please."
His assistants were more than pleased to comply, and Thaler found himself frustrated.
"Really, this is..."
"A moment between friends, where I tell you in all honesty that you cannot carry on this way."
"I don't know what you mean," he blustered, but even by lamp-light, she could see him blush.
"You're exhausting everyone. You have poor Wess handing out lanterns. How many languages does he know?"
"I believe it's about the half-dozen mark."
Sophia put her lantern down on a table, and pushed a chair towards Thaler. "Then you are wasting his talent, and yours. Sit down, Frederik."
"But I..."
"Sit. Down." She dusted off a chair for herself and sat upright on it, hands folded in her lap.
Thaler sighed and sat down. The chair creaked with his weight, though less than it would have done previously.
"You've been eating, of course?" She gazed absently upwards at the growing scaffolding. It had almost reached the top of the dome and the master librarian's eyrie.
"Sometimes. There is a great deal to do, Sophia."
"I know. But it doesn't have to be done by you, does it?"
Thaler was silent for the first time in days, and eventually said: "I suppose not. But I feel responsible for everything. It's all so important."
"You'll have no argument from me about that. Felix asked me to find out how everything is, whether you have what you need."
"If I had twice as many people it'd be too few." Thaler rested his hands on his knees, and visibly sagged. "We don't have enough of anything. We don't have enough craftsmen to make the internal alterations, make trolleys, and knock up new shelves. What will happen when we start to take the roof off is anyone's guess. We don't have enough librarians to read and catalogue the books, classify them, move them to their temporary positions. We don't have enough candles, even. We're working from before dawn to long after sunset, and we don't have enough cooks, nor enough to cook with or cook on. It's all a bit of a mess really."
"It's early days, yet," said Sophia.
"It's getting worse, not better. You're right. We can't I can't keep going like this, yet what alternative do we have?"
"We have lots of alternatives," she said, "which is why I'm here. To talk to you about them. Make you see sense."
"Very well," said Thaler, leaning back. "Convince me."
"Mr Trommler, of blessed memory, kept very detailed accounts. They show we've many thousands, many tens of thousands of florins at our disposal. And that's not all. Teams are being sent into the White Tower each day, and are coming out with more silver and gold than they can carry. We can bathe in the stuff."
"That's beside the point. We can't eat it. Neither can we use it to read a line of Greek or Latin, or make a plank, or hammer in a nail, or render a candle, or anything else good." Thaler saw her expression. "You've got an idea."
"I have lots of ideas," she said, "but specifically one. The food and the lanterns and the carpentry, someone else can see to. Your problem is that you don't have enough librarians."
"Well, yes..."
"So buy them."
Thaler stopped mid-objection. "Buy them. Where from?"
"Everywhere. Wien. Bavaria. The Franks. Venezia. Genova. Byzantium. Alexandria." She waited.
"It'll take too long. And they won't be suitable, anyway. Some of them will be married, they'll have families. We take boys, and we train them in the ways of this library." Thaler wrung his hands together. "It simply won't work."
"Frederik, you're going to have to change the way you do things. Half the Jews in Juvavum can read German, Greek, Latin and Hebrew, yet they're clanking around in armour and lording it over the townspeople. Would you rather they did that, or that they were in here, helping you? It's not like you're going to catch Jewishness from them, are you? Or just take my father." Her even smile slipped. "Please. He's driving me mad."
"But Jews won't work in the library."
"I'm here, aren't I? And by the way, how about returning those sefer you've got?"
"They're library property."
"Give them all back, and one will be returned on loan. You don't need three." She leant forward. "You can't go on with the old ways. So, while everything is up in the air, establish a new way of doing things. Let the librarians get married. Start paying them. Hire the best people from all over Europe. Don't insist they live as though they're members of the Order: you don't have to slavishly imitate what they did, not any more."
Thaler looked out at the scaffold, and the men working on it.
"How much money do I have?" he finally asked.
"All of it, if you want. It has to last though, so I'd like to think you wouldn't spend it all at once. Am I right in thinking the other under-librarians you served with are gone?"
"Grozer died. As for Thomm? Has your father returned those stolen books he bought yet?"
"I'll see to it. I know where he hid them. This is getting off the point, Frederik. Change the way the library is run. Just do it. You don't have to ask anyone's permission, and you don't have an old guard to humour."
"You're right, of course. But there's so much else to do." He looked again at the scaffolding, and went to stand at the edge of the gallery from where he could survey his domain. "I haven't so much as looked at a book in a week."
"Then can I suggest you're doing it wrong?" Sophia came to stand next to him. "The library building is less important than the work going on down there, yet what impression do I get from up here? That the catalogue is running second-best to everything else."
"But..."
"Frederik. You've got Mr Wess handing out lanterns. So this is what we're going to do: I'm going to take charge of the alterations and all of the non-library tasks. You are going to do what Felix has made you master to do."
"But you're a woman!" Thaler blurted.
"Yes," she said. "I had noticed. I can also read and write several languages, add, subtract, and solve geometry problems, run a household, talk to guildsmen and suppliers and haggle for the best price on anything from a book to a broom. I can also, if you'd forgotten, lead an army into battle and be the prince's chosen consort. Anything else you'd like to say?"
Thaler considered his options. "No, Mistress Morgenstern. Nothing at all."
"Good." She patted his arm. "It's better this way, Frederik. If you don't think the men will listen to me and take my instruction, you're wrong. I have the prince's authority and the prince's purse. If they want his coin, they'll have to deal with me."
"Are you ..." asked Thaler, his sudden nervousness making him grip the handrail tightly, "are you all right with this?"
"With overseeing the building, dealing with Germans, or with being Felix's consort?" She looked at him sideways. "Ah."
"I don't mean to speak out of turn, Sophia."
"If I was eight, no one would even blink in surprise." She rested her forearms on the same handrail. "I'm not, of course. I'm twice his age. And I'm Jewish. And not a princess. Completely unsuitable, really, and he'll probably end up marrying someone else. But until then, I intend to use whatever position I have to help him."