Arm of the Sphinx (The Books of Babel, #2)

by Josiah Bancroft

Inspiration never came to her so long as she was sitting still. Adam accused her of wandering off, but what her brother didn’t understand was that her legs pedaled her thoughts.

Senlin woke up apologizing. He apologized for collapsing at Edith’s feet without a word of notice. He apologized for being a gangly load, which she’d had to drag across the floor and heave onto a bed. He apologized for the chill he’d probably caught when they’d almost drowned, and he apologized one last time when Edith said the apologies were getting out of hand.

He struck the soft moss flat on his back. He’d only fallen a short distance, though it was sufficient to drive the wind from him. Edith came down a moment later, landing deftly on her feet, one on either side of him. Straddling him, she helped him up. “Taking another abrupt nap, Captain?” she asked. He replied in a proud croak: “Do try to keep up, Mister Winters.”

She believed that, unlike fortunes, which could be won and lost, the recompenses of hard work endured.

There are sixty-four versions. One for every ringdom. A gift from the Brick Layer.”

They had ridden the elevating hallway deep into the canyon of hotel doors to reach the library, and all had sunk into their own thoughts along the way.

The tradition among libraries of boasting about the number of volumes in their collection is well established, but surely, it is not aggregation that makes a library; it is dissemination. Perhaps libraries should bang on about how many volumes are on loan, are presently off crowding nightstands, and circulating through piles on the mantel, and weighing down purses. Yes, it is somewhat vexing to thread through the stacks of a library, only to discover an absence rather than the sought-after volume, but once the ire subsides, doesn’t one feel a sense of community? The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand: They show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.

The librarian knows where the traps are, I am convinced, and so the going is absolutely safe so long as I never stray from his shadow. Again. So long as I never do it again.

Ah, this is the devil of writing in ink! A pencil allows one to speculate and retract, to play a card and then renege. But ink immortalizes gestures and moods and muttered truths. If pencils were all we had, I suspect there would be far fewer books.