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There was no reply. She shrugged and made for the door.
The ladder rattled irritably. A cobbly scrambled headfirst down from above. When he reached the eighth rung he leaped off to flip and land at her feet with a thump. "Not for sale." He plucked the book from Jane's hand.
"What?" She stepped back.
"Not for sale, not for sale! Are you feebleminded? Not for sale means you can't buy it." Master Inglesoot stood as high as her waist and his gold half-rims were bright semicircles against his grizzled black face. "Get out. There's nothing for you here."
"Um… this is a bookstall, isn't it?"
"Well, and what of it?"
"Most bookstalls sell books."
"Don't chop logic with me." Inglesoot passed the orchid book from hand to foot and stuffed it into the bottommost shelf without even looking at it. Intentionally or not, he was standing between Jane and the door. Otherwise she would simply have left. "I'm wise to your thievish little schemes. These books are mine, d'ye hear? Mine! I'll defend them to the death, and that's no idle boast."
Jane found herself trembling. "This is the craziest store I've ever been in."
"Crazy?" He rounded on her, all angles and motion, and shook a finger under her nose. "I know your type and your pathetic delusions. Oh, yes, I do. You think of a library as being like the mind of a great and noble Scholar—catholic, universally educated, and precisely organized. Every opinion balanced against its opposite, every fact quickly retrievable. The only biases those that exist in the knowledge itself. If a gap exists in the collective omniscience, a horde of servants will scurry to patch it with the best available volumes, each weighed and tasted to make sure the quality and flavor of information is suitably rich. And this puerile construct, this mock-loremaster, you think is a good thing. Get a life, why don't you!"
"If you'll just back up a step or two, I'll leave."
"You sneer at my bookstall because it's more like your mind as it really is—erratically educated, stocked with whatever unexamined assertions chance to pass within reach, crammed with dubious and contradictory information. The volume you need is here somewhere, but misplaced and out of date. Trash and treasure are thoroughly intermingled with no way to easily distinguish which is which." He yanked a volume at random and read the spine. "Scribbledehob. Musings on fireplaces? The picaresque adventures of a young demon? The demented scrawls of a disordered maniac? Who is to say?" He put it back, pulled out another. "Infangthief and Outfangthief, the merry pranks, doubtless, of a pair of witty and lovable rogues, filed alongside that useful reference work Unspeakable Cults. And to serve and order and replenish them? Only I, myself."
"It's okay. I don't want to buy anything. I changed my mind."
"Yet think! Use your head, for once. It is not commonality that we value in others but eccentricity. It is our differences that individuate us. Were you to meet your vaunted Scholar astride down this very corridor, with his perfect features and flawless diction, you would think him knowledgeable but strangely dull, a farrago of facts and citations and nothing more.
"Compare this with the wit and variety, the eternal surprise of my sweet, sweet mistress." Blindly, lovingly, he stroked the books with his piebald old hand. "And would you wish to see her mutilated, reduced—aye, and lobotomized? Oh vile, vile, ten thousand times vile!"
"It was only one book!"
"Excuse me." A mild-faced lizard woman poked her head in the door. "I'll show the young lady out. I think she meant to come into my stall in the first place. Sit you down, gaffer. Take your ease."
"Eh?" Inglesoot started, and swiveled halfway toward the door. A puzzled expression spread over his face. Then his knees bent and in slow collapse he sank down onto a cardboard box overspilling with maps, pamphlets, and commercial throwaways. He put his head in his hands. "Gone, all gone forever," he grieved.
This was Jane's chance. She accepted the lizard woman's hand and delicately stepped over the unheeding cobbly. The way out was clear now.
At the doorway, she opened her umbrella and quietly asked, "What was that all about?"
"It's an occupational hazard." The lizard woman shrugged. She was heavy bodied and her motions were suitably torpid. "You start by reading books, and you end by loving them."
"But all that wild talk! About death and mutilation and lobotomies."
"The notices came three days ago." She fished a yellow flimsy from an apron pocket, unfolded it, looked at it, refolded it, and put it back in. "The authorities will be collecting a tithe of our stock for the Teind-fires. Inglesoot was functioning well enough until then. But when he tried to weed out the redundant books, he found he could not. A few of us came over with cardboard boxes to get him started, dropping into them duplicates, inferior texts, things that would never sell. He scrabbled after us, squeaking, and snatching them back. By the end of the day we had but one carton with a single coverless paperback romance at its bottom, and that he set aside for further consideration. So we gave up."
"What will happen to him?"
"They'll seize all his books, of course, and him with them."
"That's awful. Can't you stop him?"
"Child, what good is a bookseller who won't sell books? It sounds harsh, but he's exactly the sort of misfit the Teind is meant to clear away. We're best off without him." The lizard woman smiled sadly, and ducked into the next door stall.
Jane stood in the rain, hesitating. At last she stepped back inside. "Master Inglesoot."
Without looking up, he said, "Who are you?"
"Nobody. A friend. Listen to me. The City only wants a tenth of your inventory. Consider how many hundreds and thousands of books you have—you can't possibly read them all!"
Master Inglesoot looked up and in his eyes she saw the gnarled toughness of old roots, a fanatical determination that might be killed but never weakened. "It's better this way. Better we should burn together than for me to survive and inhabit the corpse of my beloved, surrounded constantly by reminders of her former beauty."
"Your collection is not a woman. That's only a metaphor—an abstraction! You'll be dying for nothing, for a principle that nobody else can even comprehend."
As she spoke, Jane became convinced that she herself would never willingly die for a principle. She might feel guilty about it, but she'd smile and lie, knuckle under, pretend, anything, in order to survive. It made her feel a little sad to realize this, but also, at the same time, very adult.
"It's not the principles that kill you in the end." Inglesoot hugged an almanac to his chest with both arms. His voice was fading as his interest in her waned. "It's the books."
Entering la jettatura was like walking into a dream. The quietly intrusive background music of the mall stores was replaced by textured layers of quiet. When she squeezed past the pine-tall coat trees, her cheek was brushed by the imperial softness of vicuna. Here was the quiet gleam of brass, there the gentle cry of a hand-held bell. Everything conspired to soothe the senses. Yet the air quivered with tension, as if an elf-lord were just about to enter the room.
From her observations of the customers, Jane had assembled an outfit that might let her pass. She'd ripped her best jeans at the knees and three places up the thighs, fraying the threads so that they stood out white and defiant. Over a black lace bra she wore a sheer silk blouse with a string of pearls in a setting dowdy enough to suggest they were inherited. To top it off she had borrowed from Raven an embroidered jacket acquired for a fraction of its value on an independent study trip to the mountain country of Lyonesse.