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It was the small magics that came easily to her. The ones that looked like luck or chance, the ones that no one noticed. Just the right result coming up in the search engine, walking to exactly the right spot in the stacks to find the book she was looking for. The way the lights down in the sub-sub-basement didn't flicker when she walked down the hall but stayed clear and steady.
Today, she had two sets of tasks in mind. It was the lull between semesters, when the library hours shrunk down to something like ordinary business hours. Her usual afternoon and evening shift became a daytime one. She had thought, the first time that happened, that she would be annoyed at having more people around. She vastly preferred the liminal times, when people came in, focused on their particular goal, or hunting for their preferred carrell deep in the library's maze of passages and shelvings.
However, by the time you got down to the sub-sub-basement, there were very few people around, no matter the time of day or the week. Certainly, if she were down here for a while, no one would notice. She was, nominally, on a project to review part of the collection and decide which books, if any, should be removed due to condition or duplication. Some libraries cared about currency, but not here. They were proud of the number of archaic and dated books they had lurking in the basements.
Fortunately, that suited her needs nicely. Getting a job here had taken three moves, a handful of projects designed to make her resume stand out, and of course the bare minimum requirements of an academic librarian position these days, two graduate degrees. In her case, hers was obscure enough that no one ever asked her about what she studied. It was better that way. History of science covered a great many areas of her personal interest, from astronomy to herbalism, alchemy to gemology. As well as the more sedate ones that people actually asked about professionally. There were more than enough great natural history and medical stories to delight anyone who actually was curious, without hinting at all at her particular interests.
(Well, other than her thesis. She had learned, way back in ninth grade, that picking the topic of long term research project was an art form in itself, finding something you wanted to live and breathe for the duration. In the case of her thesis, that had been the better part of two years. On the other hand, pigments used for artworks and how they changed due to particular discoveries also covered a great deal of ground. She had been able to justify the time to read quite a lot of 'background' knowledge and theory in the process. And she'd gotten a conference paper out of it eventually.)
She kept walking down the aisles, into the little dog-leg hallway that connected one underground basement with another. There were two everyone knew about down here, she was aiming for the third, as soon as she was sure no one was about. If she could find it.
It had been the tiniest threads of information that had brought her here. And it had taken her a year. Last summer, she hadn't been able to take advantage of the lull, there were too many projects in the summer, too many times she needed to cover for someone else at one of the desks due to their holiday plans, or a relative's wedding, or some marathon. Not that she begrudged them those things. Not everyone was a witch, not everyone had the same interests.
If they did, it would be even harder to get the rare plants, or the even rarer books than it already was.
The time wasn't wasted, though. It had taken her months of patient study to be certain of where to go, little fragments of research tucked into her workday. Five minutes extra in the reserve stacks one day while evaluating books to be weeded on grounds of condition. Ten minutes stolen from a break, where everyone thought she was reading a novel. Half an hour at the tail end of her day after everyone else but the folks on the reference desk had gone home before a long weekend.
It all added up, along with the hours and days she'd worked at home. So much of her theoretical free time. She didn't begrudge that either, of course. She loved what she was learning, weaving the pieces together, delighting in each new fragment that she'd managed to put together. Hours and days at her jewellery bench, working meticulously on the talisman she could feel hanging heavy and solid against her skin, warming from it.
If she resented anything, it was the time she had to put into remembering to be socially normal. Watching a TV show so she could talk about it with people in the break room, or at least nod and smile and ask an occasional question. Finding ordinary sorts of recipes to bring to a potluck or to make for lunches, when someone else might notice what she was eating. The twice yearly clothes shopping for things no one looked twice at.
And now, her chance was finally here. It was as good an opportunity as she'd get for the next few months. Few people in the building, the planets were aligned reasonably well. You never got a perfect moment, that was for the sort of fantasy book that didn't have to deal with living in her temporal reality. But good enough. Favourable for knowledge, in particular. So if she came down here, and found the tile she was looking for, and aligned things just right, then maybe, just maybe, she'd find the door.
She had known that the floor changed. It wasn't old brick, like she'd almost expected. It wasn't anything that dated back to the founding of the school, in the late 1600s. It wasn't even the next century. Instead, there was a floor that dated to the mid-19th century, a sturdy stone, mildly decorative. But long before the library had been built, she was sure. A good half century, maybe more like seventy-five years.
Not that she was an expert on dating stone floors, but she'd picked up more than a few odd bits of knowledge doing reference desk duty. It certainly wasn't as old as the school. Which begged the question of where the tunnel she was looking for came from, since it wasn't as if the area were known for limestone or sandstone caves. Or at least she didn't think so. She was a librarian, not a geologist.
Anyway, now she was here, at the back of a horribly lit set of stacks, that hadn't been moved since they were set up, it wasn't as if you could get compact stacks down here to install them even if you'd had somewhere to put all the books while you did it. Which they didn't. Every level above this one was, if anything, packed even more densely with books, where they'd settled during the various movements toward making more group work spaces.
She was putting this off. Some distant part of her knew why, this was a pivot point. For so much of her life, she'd been aiming at this one moment. Or rather, the moment just after she put the talisman in the indentation in the floor. She wasn't at all sure what she was supposed to do with herself after that.
Feeling the Scottish play breathing down her neck, the words suddenly a drumbeat in her head, one of the most annoying earworms. "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly." That, at least, broke her out of her dallying, and she lifted the heavy talisman from down her shirt where it had been making an awkward shape, pulling the chain up and over her head. She took it in her right hand, going to one knee and feeling for the indentation in the floor with her left.
There was no flash of light, no sudden rumble of an ancient temple coming to life, breathing again after centuries. Just a sense of space. When she looked up from the floor, there was an archway at the end of the aisle. She took the talisman with her, and the archway stayed there, and she went in. it was entirely dark, other than the glow from the amber stone at the center, and she could see that the passage took a sharp turn, as if running parallel to the wall at the end of the stacks, with a set of stairs that went further down.
The downside of reading far too many books when she wasn't researching properly was that almost all of them had been clear on two facts: going down a mysterious flight of stairs didn't end well, and also, it was where narrative compelled one to go. She did not like the feeling at all, but there was nothing for it but going on.
The stairs took two more turns, going down a flight each time, before the hallway stretched out straight. She kept going, realising there was a glowing light ahead. She got closer and closer, until it opened up into a large bricked-over cavern. It was quite large, surprisingly so. One of her friends, in middle school, had been a serious horse fanatic, and she'd gone out to the barn. This was about the size of the indoor ring there, twenty meters by sixty, she thought. More than enough space.
Or it would be, except that the entire thing was crowded with books. They were stacked everywhere, on shelves, and they were of every size. Not just the more common quartos and folios, but dog-eared distinctive orange and white Penguin paperbacks, lurid pulp novels, and more than one double-elephant folio. She was sure that was one of the original Audubon set, and there weren't many of those left, if she remembered right, certainly not many in private hands.
At the far end of the space, which was lit by some sort of magic she had no idea how to name, never mind do, there was a dais that had the sort of cluttered book-filled existence that was so familiar from any academic housing she'd ever lived in. And on that dais, there was something her eyes didn't make sense of at first.
Then it was as if her eyes focused, and what she saw was a deep crimson - proper crimson, the school's crimson - dragon, who almost blended into the dark wood. The dragon had certainly noticed her. It stood, horse-sized at the shoulders, and then leapt from the dais, spreading its wings, gliding down the long length toward her, landing with a thump that didn't shake the room at all, in the middle of the only spot that was not covered in a carpet of books.
There was heat there, and sulfur, and other chemicals she only knew the names of because they were pigments she'd researched. There was oak gall in there, and lamp oil, she'd never actually smelled lamp oil like that, where it must have come from a whale. It was old, and it wasn't aged at all.
There was an arch of the deep red neck, it stepped forward delicately, then sniffed at her hand, where the talisman was hanging from its chain.
"You used the later grimoire, then? What made you decide on that?"
It was like being launched into an oral examination. While she had no idea what succeeding would bring, failure would definitely be unpleasant. She did her best to think through the design of the talisman, then did what one of her favorite professors had taught her, about always taking a breath and how it made you sound like you knew what you were talking about even if that wasn't precisely true.
The questions went on for what seemed like ages, one after another, no two on quite the same topic. They were mostly in modern English, with the sort of accent and pacing every TV broadcaster had in the 1950s, but every now and then there'd be one in a different language. Latin, regularly, but also French, German, two she couldn't answer at all, Italian, and she thought a dialect of Spanish that she had to muddle through.
In the end, the dragon settled back on its haunches. "You will do."
"Do?" The question slipped out before she could stop herself, it was one thing too many in the uncertainties of the day.
"Someone must bring me books. Just books. None of those magazines. Or newspapers. Or even, what do you call them, journals. You go out, you bring them back."
"Any book?" That seemed baffling.
"We will talk about that." It turned away going over to one of the piles, and then snagging, of all things, a tote bag from a public radio fundraiser ten years ago from behind a pile of leather-bound volumes. "Money. Lists. Go away now. Come back in a week with some of those books. Every week."
She went. There was nothing else to do. She would go. She would figure out what books to bring back. It was a different kind of test, she knew that. Now, she had no idea what succeeding would mean.
And of course, she still had to check on the books on her lists, decide what was getting removed from the shelves. Perhaps some of those could go down to the dragon.