The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(6)

“I—”

“The Game will begin soon. You can feel it, can’t you?”

Can I? Nikolai stuck out his tongue, as if he could taste the difference in the air. And in fact, he could. It was like . . . cinnamon. With a dash of death.

Nikolai’s stomach, which was already unsettled from being denied sleep, sank to the bottom of his boots.

Galina carried on as if her announcement about the Game were ordinary news. “There are five books slotted into the wrong spaces on the shelves.”

Nikolai took a deep breath. Don’t think about the Game yet. Focus on this single task. Besides, he was probably wrong about the air, for who’d ever heard of magic tasting like cinnamon? And taste buds that detected death were not to be trusted. Death wasn’t a flavor or even a scent.

“What are the titles of the books?” he asked Galina.

“You don’t need them. This is about concentration, Nikolai, and working under pressure.” She glanced up at the sky, and even though it was still pitch-black but for the streetlamps, she acted as if she could already see the sun’s first rays. “Tick-tock. I estimate three hours, perhaps less, before the underlings of the city begin to scurry about on their errands and someone reports you to the Tsar’s Guard.”

Nikolai’s stomach remained firmly splattered at the soles of his boots. There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of books in the library. And he had to find five that were out of order? In three hours? He sank onto the corner of the street and leaned back against a flickering lamp.

“Don’t be pathetic,” Galina said. “Oh, and don’t let anyone catch you charming anything, of course.”

Nikolai barely nodded. This had been drummed into him every time she gave him a lesson in a public place. He had to protect his identity. Galina was quite certain the other enchanter didn’t know Nikolai existed, but just in case, he had to hide who he was. It would give him the advantage of surprise when the Game commenced.

Of course, Galina hadn’t bothered telling him who the other enchanter was or how she knew in the first place. “I’m a mentor,” she’d said by way of nonexplanatory explanation, invoking again her long bloodline of ancestors whose task it was to train enchanters. “And in any case, it isn’t important who the other enchanter is. It will only distract you from focusing on what is important: making yourself the best enchanter you can be. Moreover, I’m quite sure my teaching is far superior to what the other mentor can offer. As long as you do as you’re told, of course.”

And so it went. Galina would make demands, and Nikolai would comply.

Now she drifted away from the library, down Nevsky Prospect, in the direction from which they had come.

“If only her lessons didn’t take place in the middle of the night.” But Nikolai took a deep breath and cracked his knuckles. Exhaustion could be overcome; he’d done it plenty of times before.

He tossed aside his self-pity and rose from where he’d sat against the streetlamp. He focused on the Imperial Library’s impenetrable walls. Imagine they are transparent, he thought. Imagine the walls are nothing but air.

They held on to their solidness for a moment. And then the walls seemed to shimmer before evaporating from Nikolai’s sight altogether, and he could see straight through them.

At first, everything seemed too airy, too insubstantial, as if he’d entered a dimension inhabited solely by ghosts. But slowly, the rooms began to fill in, first the tables and chairs, then the columns and shelves, and finally, the books themselves.

Nikolai gasped. Seeing the hundreds of thousands of books now, when he had an impossible task to accomplish, was so much more daunting than in the past when he had browsed the shelves. I’ll never be able to sort through all of them. Even if he had been physically inside the library, it would take weeks, perhaps months, to check all the spines to ensure they were in the proper order.

If he were more powerful, he might have been able to command all the books in the library to fly off the shelves at once and direct them to reorder themselves correctly. But that was the sort of dream one had after too many glasses of wine followed by too many shots of cheap vodka.

In his mind, Nikolai walked through the inside of the library, from the more popular reading rooms full of newspapers and magazines, to the rare documents room, which required special permission—at least, permission was required for those who could not see through walls and peruse the holdings in the middle of the night.

If I can isolate the books that have been touched within the last twenty-four hours—maybe not even that long, since Galina likely visited near the end of the day to minimize the risk of the librarians undoing her work—then I can command those books to reshelve themselves in the right places.

He clasped his hands in front of him, as if in prayer, and concentrated on catching the attention of every last book in the library. If you were moved yesterday, I command you to move again, now. Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf.

Nikolai held his breath. Some of the volumes quivered in place. Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf, he willed again. A few books started to move, just an inch. He knit his brow. Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf!

And then all at once, a few hundred books leaped off the shelves and came to a sudden halt, suspended in midair. Nikolai smiled.

Now go back to your places, he commanded the books.