Chapter 6 — Worth Checking

The folded scrap waited inside a prayer book in one of Frigg’s outer rooms.

Baldr’s death had changed the traffic through those rooms, and Loki had been watching who came and went.

Loki saw the attendant put it there. The young woman had checked the doorway twice, pushed the scrap well into the binding, and left the book in the middle of a shelf whose other volumes wore dust along their upper edges. She had done everything expected of someone hiding a message except choose a place that no one was watching.

That could mean carelessness. It could also mean Frigg wanted the message found.

Loki left it where it was until the room had emptied. Then he drew it out by one corner and read it without unfolding the paper farther than necessary.

The Midgardian had made a fresh copy of a much older text, one attributed to an ancient sorcerer. It concerned the dead and, perhaps, their restoration. Frigg had taken an interest in it after Baldr’s death. The manuscript was being kept in the Midgardian’s rented room until she decided what should be done with it.

The account offered no proof. It did not even offer the name of the supposed sorcerer.

Loki slid the scrap back into the prayer book.

If Frigg had planted it, she expected him to notice the lack of proof. If the attendant had disobeyed her, the woman had concealed enough to make questions awkward. Either way, the manuscript existed. René had already arrived with knowledge he should not have possessed.

It was worth checking.

He watched the lodging before he approached it. One guard stood at the foot of the stair. A servant carrying a covered bowl tried to pass him and was made to leave the bowl on a bench.

“Only René, Gina, and Frigg,” the guard said. “Those are my orders.”

The servant complained about the food cooling. The guard pointed to the bench again.

Frigg would draw every eye in the street. René was already upstairs. Gina had visited often enough that her return required no story until someone asked why she had come.

Loki had seen her at close range. He borrowed her height, her face, the fall of her hair and the travelling coat she had worn that morning. A brief exchange with a guard required no imitation of the quieter details that betrayed a person over dinner or a long walk.

The guard looked up as he approached.

“Gina.”

Loki answered with a small nod and kept climbing. The guard stepped aside.

René’s door was closed. Loki knocked once.

The Midgardian opened it. He had ink on the side of one finger and a loose thread clinging to his sleeve. Behind him, the room held a bed, a narrow hearth, and the writing table. The fresh manuscript lay open on the writing table.

“Frigg wants the manuscript brought to her,” Loki said.

René did not move out of the doorway at once. His attention passed over Gina’s face, then the stair behind her.

“Now?”

“Before anyone else learns enough to come looking for it.”

The answer was plausible. René still waited a moment before stepping aside.

Loki entered. The door shut behind him.

The manuscript was newly bound. Its leather had not yet softened at the corners, and the pages lay unevenly where hand-cut edges met. No title marked the cover. No author had put a name on it. The open page was dense with René’s writing.

René stayed on the other side of the table.

“How many books have you read that had a way back?” he asked.

Loki looked up from the manuscript. “Had a way back?”

“Never mind.”

It was the sort of remark René made when his own thoughts had moved farther than the conversation. Nothing in his expression turned it into an accusation. He made no attempt to close the manuscript or draw it away.

Loki rested one hand on the table and bent over the open page. If the writing contained what the hidden message suggested, a few lines might be enough to tell him whether Frigg possessed anything dangerous.

His fingertips met the paper.

René’s room vanished.

Loki stood beneath a high pale ceiling. Shelves rose in ordered rows beyond a wide central space, their bindings repeating in dark cloth and plain leather. Tables and chairs occupied the open floor. Rectangular fixtures overhead gave off a steady white light, although there was no flame inside them and no window showing daylight.

He did not move for the first breath.

His feet were on a smooth hard floor. His clothes, knife, and borrowed shape had come with him. René had not. The manuscript was gone as well.

Loki turned once, slowly. No one stood between the shelves. No footstep moved in the adjoining rooms. The air was cool and carried the dry smell of paper, leather and clean wood.

He crossed back over the place where he had arrived. Nothing resisted him. There was no mark on the floor and no thinning in the air. Touching the manuscript had been followed by transport; the manuscript had not arrived with him. It might still be on René’s table, but he could neither see the room nor reach it from here.

The nearest doors opened into smaller reading rooms and individual workrooms. One led to a tiled room with basins and unfamiliar metal fittings. Another opened on shelves of cups, sealed containers, food and a tall white cupboard whose interior was cold. He tested the handles, the walls behind open doors, and the ends of passages. Every door he found connected one part of the building to another.

There were no windows. There was no visible outer door.

The place did not behave like an illusion. A chair had weight when he moved it. A metal fitting above one basin released clear water when he worked its lever. The cold cupboard remained cold after he closed and reopened it. Whatever had happened belonged outside the risks he had considered when he entered René’s room.

In the centre of the main hall stood a pedestal beneath armoured glass.

Loki returned to it.

Four numbered wheels were set into the base of the enclosure. He tried the straight sequence first: one, two, three, four. The lock released.

He raised the glass by its edge.

The book beneath it was familiar. Not this particular copy, perhaps, but the collection itself: common Asgardian stories, copied for households and schools, with a title on the front and repairs along the spine. It looked no more important than the versions he had seen passed between children.

He did not touch its inner pages. The appearance of an ordinary book proved little now. Still, this one advertised its identity, and someone had placed it under protection better suited to a treasury object.

He lowered the glass without locking it and looked across the hall again.

The shelves nearest the pedestal held hundreds of blank spines. Between them, at irregular intervals, stood books made in Asgard: a prayer book with a worn cord, a school text, a household record in scarred boards. None belonged to the same set. They had been carried here separately.

Someone had entered this place before him. Someone had brought objects in, opened the glass, changed what stood beneath it and left again. The familiar book suggested a substitution. An empty pedestal would have made the missing object obvious to anyone who arrived and began with the centre of the room.

So his arrival had been expected.

René’s question returned to him, still without a useful shape. How many books had a way back?

Loki walked between the first two rows. The volumes there were blank. He took one by its covers, pressed the page block apart at the fore-edge and saw clean paper within. Another was the same. Most of the shelves held clean paper ready for someone to write in.

Who had arranged this?

Loki turned the blank book in his hands while he considered Frigg.

Frigg had the authority to place the guard, restrict the room and turn palace servants into a narrow trail of information. She could support the attempt and order silence around it. Yet when Frigg wanted a person stopped, she usually used the powers already in her hands: guards, summons, messengers, obligations. She did not need a Midgardian manuscript to move someone into a building no one in Asgard had seen.

Gina was another matter. She knew the city, carried out errands without making a ceremony of them, and could have moved the scattered Asgardian books onto these shelves. The pedestal’s substitution suited hands-on preparation. If she had done it, then the real Gina had already entered this place and learned how to leave it.

He walked to the next imported volume, a school text, and checked its closed edges before moving on.

René’s question would have been unnecessary for her.

The false Gina had stood at René’s table, and René had asked how many books had a way back. He had then allowed the manuscript to be touched.

Perhaps he had noticed an error in the face or voice. Perhaps the request itself had been wrong. Loki could not tell when the Midgardian’s hesitation had become suspicion, or whether René had known whose face lay underneath Gina’s.

But René had possessed the manuscript. The bait concerned René’s reconstruction. The effect that brought Loki here had begun with René’s writing, and René had made no effort to prevent it.

The central idea was probably his.

René was still mortal, still ignorant of Asgard in ways a child would have found embarrassing, and still capable of giving an armoured case the sequence one-two-three-four. He was also capable of arranging an unfamiliar danger and allowing another person to choose it for himself. Ignoring him in future would be wasteful.

Loki set the blank volume back in its place.

Knowing who had devised the arrangement did not explain what it was for.

No one had met him here. There were no guards behind the doors, no chains on the chairs, no binding marks on the floor. No voice demanded a confession. The rooms contained water, food, places to sit and more blank paper than anyone could use in a short visit.

If René had wanted something done to Loki here, he had neglected to provide anyone to do it.

René’s purpose was probably to keep him somewhere other than Asgard.

The hidden message had concerned the dead. Frigg’s interest had begun after Baldr’s death.

As far as Loki knew, no one had found his part in that. Höðr had loosed the weapon, and grief had filled the hall too quickly for anyone to examine the guiding hand behind the act. René had been in Asgard only days. He should have known less than almost anyone.

Perhaps he knew anyway. René had already shown knowledge that did not fit a newly arrived Midgardian. Or perhaps he suspected Loki for reasons of his own. Neither possibility explained why absence mattered more than accusation.

René might instead be responding to something that followed Baldr’s death, something Loki could affect. The supposed sorcerer’s text might have been only the shape given to the bait.

Loki looked toward the unbroken rows.

René seemed to have expected him to spend his effort here, searching for a way out.

He started with the books. He had touched one written manuscript and arrived in a Library containing thousands of volumes. That connected books to the event. It did not tell him whether another book could reverse it, whether the same action would work, or whether a return had been provided at all.

He inspected the central rows without pulling anything at random.

Whoever had hidden an important object would expect the pedestal to draw the first search. The shelves directly facing it were nearly as exposed. A position beside a door, an intersection, or a distinctive table would be easy to remember and easy for someone else to describe. The farthest corner was less visible, but it was also the first place an unimaginative searcher would call properly hidden.

An ordinary row at a moderate distance offered fewer landmarks and far more neighbours.

That still left a large part of the Library.

Loki returned to one of the worktables and examined the tools laid out there. Most belonged to binding and repair: thread, awls, knives, weights and smooth thin folders for working paper. He took one of the folders.

René’s manuscript supplied the only example he had. It had been new. It had no title on the cover and no author named outside. Its inner pages carried text. When Loki’s skin had touched one of those pages, René’s room had vanished.

That did not make anonymity a law. A familiar story collection might conceal the same effect. A blank book might lead somewhere despite having no words. He had one observation, and the Library had been prepared by people who knew more about it than he did.

Still, the observation was better than choosing at random.

He began with unmarked books in the middle rows.

The first had a stiff spine and pages pressed into a block that resisted the folder. Blank.

The next opened too readily, but its pages were also blank. Someone had handled it before, perhaps checking the stock or moving it by the covers. A third showed a faint crease where leather met board. Blank again.

The marks mattered, but not enough. A worked hinge could mean use. It could also mean poor binding, curious hands, or a book that had been opened once and discarded.

He changed rows.

Several more anonymous books had promising wear and nothing written inside. One had a loose spine and uneven pages, but the folder exposed clean sheet after clean sheet. Loki went back to the pedestal, compared the familiar story book with the imported volumes nearby, and left it under the glass.

Near a workroom door, he found three written Asgardian volumes in quick succession. Each announced itself by title or familiar binding. He checked their covers and edges, then left them. They might matter; he simply had less reason to prefer them over the anonymous books that resembled René’s manuscript.

He moved deeper into the shelves, testing fewer volumes as the signs improved. A rigid book with untouched page edges could wait. So could one placed where it was visible from the central hall. He gave more attention to softened hinges, page blocks that fanned unevenly, and bindings pressed slightly out of line by repeated opening.

Twice those signs led to blank paper.

The third time, they led to a book bound in dark cloth.

It stood halfway along an undistinguished row, between two volumes of nearly the same height. No title marked its spine. The cloth at the hinge had bent often enough to lose the stiffness of the neighbouring books. Its pages did not sit in the perfect block of untouched stock.

Loki drew it partway out by the upper and lower edges of the cover. He did not put a finger between the pages.

The paper folder slipped under the front cover. He opened it a little. The first leaf moved with the cover, exposing another beneath it.

There was writing on the page.

He held the book where it was and read what he could without touching the inner sheet. The text did not announce a destination. The binding offered no author, title, seal or mark that distinguished it from the blank volumes surrounding it.

The book was new, anonymous, written in and visibly used.

It matched the useful features of René’s manuscript more closely than anything else he had examined. It might be the missing object from the pedestal, or it could carry him farther from Asgard. It could do something else entirely.

The only test he had seen was immediate. Touching an inner page had not given him time to decide whether he approved of the result.

He could search another row. He could return to the familiar book under glass, or pull apart the walls, or keep looking for a door René had concealed. Each choice consumed more of whatever interval the Midgardian had wanted.

Baldr was dead, Frigg was acting, and René had found some use for Loki’s absence.

The reason remained hidden in Asgard.

Loki set the paper folder aside. He opened the dark book far enough to reach the written sheet.

Then he touched the page.

The Library disappeared.