The Reader by Traci Chee Read Free Book Online Page B

them. Maybe they’d never return.
    Down the other path lay the unknown, with the promise of power and danger and the kind of great purpose he’d always imagined for himself . . . and he knew he had to find out what that purpose was.
    He used his meager savings to leave a message for his parents at the main post and left Corabel with Erastis that night.
    The next day, he entered into his new life as the Apprentice Librarian.
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    T he Library itself was more than Lon could have imagined. It had been built into the side of a mountain, overlooking granite peaks and a valley carved by ancient glaciers. The north wall of the Library was made entirely of glass, with doors leading to a terraced greenhouse that refracted light like a prism.
    The Library had a domed ceiling and stained glass windows and balconies guarded by bronze statues of past Librarians. The walls and marble columns were hung with electric lamps that bathed the rooms in plentiful golden light. Electricity! It enthralled him with its mystifying machinery; the rest of the world was still using candles and kerosene lamps.
    A sharp
thwack
brought him out of his reverie, and Lon snapped to attention. Erastis, the Master Librarian, was tapping the chalkboard with the tip of a long stick. Lon had been right, of course: years of poring over manuscripts had given the Librarian severe myopia, and he wore thin half-moon spectacles on the end of his nose. Already, Lon had learned that when he rushed through his lessons, Erastis would glare at him over the rims of his glasses, stern and judgmental.
    Just like now.
    â€œTee,” Erastis prompted.
    Lon was supposed to be working on his letters, though he’dmemorized the alphabet before the end of his first week, and now found these exercises dull.
    T “Tee,” he repeated dutifully. His tongue tapped the backs of his teeth.
    A slow, thin smile spread across Erastis’s face. He tilted his head, as if he were listening to music. “Splendid, and . . . ?”
    H “Aitch.”
    I “Aye.” Lon’s attention wandered again.
    In the center of the main floor was a circle of five curved tables fitted with reading lamps, inkstands, and little drawers for pens, linen bags of pounce and sandarac, blotting papers, lead pencils, gum erasers, magnifying lenses, straightedges—anything you might need for writing or copying. Steps led to more tables at the edges of the room, where caramel-colored wooden shelves reached up to balconies furnished with velvet couches and more alcoves of bookshelves behind.
    There were thousands of manuscripts in this room. Some of the oldest were in desperate need of restoration, their bindings fraying, their pages speckled with mold, and Erastis often spent his afternoons repairing torn pages and reattaching loose spines while the Library’s blind servants dusted the shelves, though they never touched the texts themselves.
    All the servants in the Main Branch, including the ones who served the Library, were blind. To protect the words, Erastis said. To ensure that the power they held would not fall into the wrong hands.
    The manuscripts were divided into Fragments, texts copied out of the Book, word for word in painstaking script, by otherLibrarians, long dead; and Commentaries, interpretations and meditations on the meanings of various passages, indexes and appendices and tomes filled with definitions and etymologies and cross-references. Masters and more advanced Apprentices used the Library’s books to further their studies, to learn from the past, to plan for the future. But Lon wouldn’t be able to examine them until the Master Librarian said he was ready.
    Erastis was working on his own Fragments now, copying sections of the Book no one had read before, to preserve the writings in case the Book was lost—or worse, destroyed. Except for the missing texts that had been lost in the Great Fire, you