Mort

looking for?”
    “Albert’s biography.”
    “What for? I don’t think he’s got one.”
    “Everyone’s got one.”
    “Well, he doesn’t like people asking personal questions. I looked for it once and I couldn’t find it. Albert by itself isn’t much to go on. Why is he so interesting?” Ysabell lit a couple of candles from the one in her hand and filled the library with dancing shadows.
    “I need a powerful wizard and I think he’s one.”
    “What, Albert?”
    “Yes. Only we’re looking for Alberto Malich. He’s more than two thousand years old, I think.”
    “What, Albert?”
    “Yes. Albert.”
    “He never wears a wizard’s hat,” said Ysabell doubtfully.
    “He lost it. Anyway, the hat isn’t compulsory. Where do we start looking?”
    “Well, if you’re sure…the Stack, I suppose. That’s where father puts all the biographies that are more than five hundred years old. It’s this way.”
    She led the way past the whispering shelves to a door set in a cul-de-sac. It opened with some effort and the groan of the hinges reverberated around the library; Mort fancied for a moment that all the books paused momentarily in their work just to listen.
    Steps led down into the velvet gloom. There were cobwebs and dust, and air that smelled as though it had been locked in a pyramid for a thousand years.
    “People don’t come down here very often,” said Ysabell. “I’ll lead the way.”
    Mort felt something was owed.
    “I must say,” he said, “you’re a real brick.”
    “You mean pink, square and dumpy? You really know how to talk to a girl, my boy.”
    “Mort,” said Mort automatically.
    The Stack was as dark and silent as a cave deep underground. The shelves were barely far enough apart for one person to walk between them, and towered up well beyond the dome of candlelight. They were particularly eerie because they were silent. There were no more lives to write; the books slept. But Mort felt that they slept like cats, with one eye open. They were aware.
    “I came down here once,” said Ysabell, whispering. “If you go far enough along the shelves the books run out and there’s clay tablets and lumps of stone and animal skins and everyone’s called Ug and Zog.”
    The silence was almost tangible. Mort could feel the books watching them as they tramped through the hot, silent passages. Everyone who had ever lived was here somewhere, right back to the first people that the gods had baked out of mud or whatever. They didn’t exactly resent him, they were just wondering about why he was here.
    “Did you get past Ug and Zog?” he hissed. “There’s a lot of people would be very interested to know what’s there.”
    “I got frightened. It’s a long way and I didn’t have enough candles.”
    “Pity.”
    Ysabell stopped so sharply that Mort cannoned into the back of her.
    “This would be about the right area,” she said. “What now?”
    Mort peered at the faded names on the spines.
    “They don’t seem to be in any order!” he moaned.
    They looked up. They wandered down a couple of side alleys. They pulled a few books off the lowest shelves at random, raising pillows of dust.
    “This is silly,” said Mort at last. “There’s millions of lives here. The chances of finding his are worse than—”
    Ysabell laid her hand against his mouth.
    “Listen!”
    Mort mumbled a bit through her fingers and then got the message. He strained his ears, striving to hear anything above the heavy hiss of absolute silence.
    And then he found it. A faint, irritable scratching. High, high overhead, somewhere in the impenetrable darkness on the cliff of shelves, a life was still being written.
    They looked at each other, their eyes widening. Then Ysabell said, “We passed a ladder back there. On wheels.”
    The little casters on the bottom squeaked as Mort rolled it back. The top end moved too, as if it was fixed to another set of wheels somewhere up in the darkness.
    “Right,” he said. “Give me the candle, and—”
    “If the candle’s going up, then so am I,” said Ysabell firmly. “You stop down here and move the ladder when I say. And don’t argue.”
    “It might be dangerous up there,” said Mort gallantly.
    “It might be dangerous down here,” Ysabell pointed out. “So I’ll be up the ladder with the candle, thank you.”
    She set her foot on the bottom rung and was soon no more than a frilly shadow outlined in a halo of candlelight that soon began to shrink.
    Mort