Awkward silence, like a bubble around them, seemed to ward off the ambience of whispers and soft flops of books closing and being replaced to their shelves.
“Let’s walk the path to wisdom,” Black offered, having his fill of sentimentality. “Where do we start?”
“Your pamphlet should tell you.”
There were a few stanzas of cleverly put poetry describing the exact process by which one should supposedly come to the fabled room of omniscience. It of course didn’t work. The path took them through each room in the correct zodiacal succession. Black knew too little of astrology to try and discern under which constellation each room was dedicated. Each room was exclusive in architecture and design tailored to their accompanying sign, built by various cultures. The different styles on display, more prominent within than viewed from the central garden, all seemed to compete for his affection.
Each seemed to be bigger on the inside as they were all much larger than what little space was afforded them by the library’s garden. Black commented on this.
“Contrarily,” Evo explained, “the modest structures at the library are just trans-spatial enablers. Each building exists physically in an entirely separate location from the garden room. Each time we cross a new threshold we are in effect warped to the various corresponding points on campus.”
“I think you’ve outdone yourself this time,” unimpressed Black chided. “Could have just said the doors are all just teleports to different buildings around town.”
Either way it was an impressive feat of magical alteration. Black couldn’t decide whether he thought the idea of buildings being bigger on the inside or doorways that transported you to a different structure altogether were more or less high tech than the other.
“You got the point didn’t you?”
Black didn’t have a rebuttal. The pair kept mostly silent as they gawked over the thirteen unique and separately stunning rooms.
Ares, The first house, built of majestic stone and marble it was vast and open. Like a throne room every sound carried a heavy echo. Sterile and strong massive bookshelves stood between thick windows too high to show what lay beyond them. It felt like a trek getting from one end to the other.
The next room was separated from the myriad of entry ways by an unassuming cloister. Simplistic and open, Black saw a very plain courtyard walled in by similar vestibules. A Sparsely watered lawn was dotted by a few dull wildflowers and several boulders were indented slightly from years of somber mediation. The special fold out illustration provided the sign and story behind Taurus, the bull. They only took three steps in that homely foyer, in, around and out.
Dark, cave-like Gemini was adorned with dazzling lights, twinkling and moving across the walls and ceiling. The outer walls bore texture but the slow pulsars were too dim for examination. Coffers and busts and other effigies were tucked into multiple alcoves and corners. Black couldn’t help but feel like he was being watched as arches picked at the roofs and the pillars between held their ground like stalagmatic columns. Braziers lit the way to the bright exits, everything in pairs. One in particular held an emanating green glow that reminded Black of modern commercial exit signs. It was uncertain how many patrons of this grand bibliotheca were perusing the shelves of tomes in this unenduring light.
Cancer the fourth house of the zodiac, tended by the Gothic race was musty and dark. Rectangular and small several staircases gave it an illusionary feel. Sharp contrasts in stone and angles almost felt semi-modern in design. They climbed several flights of stairs passing deep colored wood paneled rooms. Fireplaces tapestries and gunmetal gray suits of armor decorated the different sections all stacked one on another. The top level came to sharp point at the top. Black could see, through the small-paned skinny windows, flying buttresses stabbing into the ground far below. One of the recessed doors in the back of the cathedral like suite was adorned with carvings and runes. It ushered them into the room of Leo.
Overly bright, the house of the lion appeared as though the earth spun between a handful of suns as a distant dusk blazed though every window around the room. It made for faint but confusingly complicated shadows and vivid highlights. Everything seemed to glow.
A crimson aura bled from a knife-edge marble aperture as they shuttled into to the next room. A story was certainly behind why Evo uncomfortably led them quickly through the satin and velvet of Virgo. Black got nothing out of him and by the time they passed from the red candlelight and web of silk veils into an apparent inferno beyond, Black had totally forgotten.
Crossing the threshold of Libra, the whole chamber was laid out n front of them. The only doorways were all on the same end, all looking to the far side of the hall of judgment. A great length of stone led the way to a flat polished island in the middle of the chamber. Kingly red carpet complimented the churning lava that surrounded the massive platform. Black couldn’t fathom how this was possible but they didn’t stop to decipher the magic behind it. They turned around and headed through a doorway right beside the one that connected them to the staircase of Scorpio.
Designed, decorated and maintained by the Persian consulate it was adorned with vibrant blue mosaics and lush contrasts of stone and greenery. A miniature version of the hanging gardens, it blended the feel of Alexandria well with the Mesopotamian pantheon. Neat and tidy everywhere, except on one of the numerous terraces, the flora that marked the next doorway was wild and unkempt.
Among the thick, fern caked forest of Sagittarius the feeling of being followed grew. Black felt that mentioning this here would be the worst possible time, as Evo was a centaur himself and coincidentally born late in the year. He kept looking around the trees and tried to peer through the undergrowth but never discovered anything. High above them in the trees balconied reading areas were warmly decorated with hammocks and tall tables. The room was filled with a natural orchestra as the creaking sound of wood in the wind played against the sound of trickling water and tiny animals rustling the ferns. The various points of egress were hard-to-spot openings in the trunks of seemingly random trees.
Through an oddly out of place and tiny doorway they ducked into the unusual looking stump that gave passage to the thirteenth house, Ophiuchus.
From there the handheld guide directed them through a familiar looking Capricorn, to a noisy Aquarius, laden with simple gears, cogs and waterworks. Black wondered just how fine a line between what technology the gods allowed and what was considered occult, taboo and forbidden.
Built on a sandy island somewhere off the Aquarian pier the room of the fish was built of golden columns and colored by Egyptian hieroglyphs. Boardwalks terraced over the sand and waves that crashed through the stilted glass walls. Pools, dotted between the walkways, displayed an array of multicolored fish. An impossible sandstone staircase led under the sea in the direction of the glass pyramid.
As they waited to be whisked off to a fourteenth room, legendary and dreamlike the moment passed. Nothing changed. Disappointment was not experienced however. Feelings of awe and completeness attached to their very bones. ‘No wonder this is all so readily dismissed as metaphor,’ Black mused. It was just so strange for him to think of something, in a world of so much fantasy and myth, that actually was just a story and nothing more.
“I can’t believe this is all a library, all one library.” Black’s words fumbled from his mouth.
“Now you can see how it made for such a good hideout during the old wars between the worlds.”
They continued their short journey ending once again in the courtyard, the seemingly simple garden in the heart of the library. Not, to Thoth’s room of omniscience.
“Do you see that guy over there? I think he’s been watching us.”
Evo beckoned toward a small reliquary nearby.
Speedily he led Black across the courtyard to a smallish building with stained glass windows. Evo pushed him forward between a large stone table and the wall.
“Go!” he issued with a harsh whisper.
“Wha-“
“Just move, we’re being followed.”
“Lead the way, I’ll tail ya.”
Black stepped aside as Evo squeezed past him. “By the way, that doesn’t mean what you think it means, especially when you say it to someone who actually has a tail.”
“Um, sorry.” Black was not as interested, as he normally would have been, in finding out what it meant while trying to shake off another assassin or mobster.
Evo briskly trotted to the end of the small chamber before it occurred to Black that not too long ago he would have thought it insane to try and escape into a building with one apparent door and only about the size of a typical living room.
“Are we hiding or fighting?” he asked following the train of thought that assumed there wasn’t anywhere to go.
“Running, come on.”
Black had forgotten where he was for a moment and was confused. As they climbed up the gothic stairs of Cancer he grieved over his temporary idiocy, this wasn’t the time to be slowing them down with questions. He gave Evo space and time to think undisturbed by dumb questions, like ‘how are we going to avoid being trapped in this small tomb?’
“Sometimes I really hate being a centaur.” Evo ducked and squirmed his way up the dark spiral staircase.
Black had neither empathy nor wisdom on the subject, he remained silent. He stepped quietly higher as the shadow of a man below them slithered through filtered daylight that jousted through the stained glass kaleidoscope windows. Even without the clumsiness of a centaur on spiral stairs their stalker had the advantage. It was upstairs in a musty gothic undercroft, standing before three stone archways, that Evo issued his next direction.
The arrival of a cloaked figure cut Evo short.
“Go!”
