The Power of Five Oblivion

but the end result would be the same. Even if you managed to break it open, you would die. And to be honest with you, I’m not sure how you’d get into the ice fortress to begin with. The King of the Old Ones has all his forces around him. Shape-changers, fly-soldiers, fire-riders…”
    “But there has to be a way! You just sit there as if all this doesn’t mean anything to you. Why won’t you tell me what I want to know? Why can’t you help?” The Librarian said nothing. Matt took a grip of himself. Getting angry wasn’t going to do any good. “Even if I get to this fortress, what am I supposed to do?” he went on. “You say he’s got a whole army there. There are just five of us! And he’s waiting for us. Everything is on his side…”
    “I am not the one who creates the stories,” the Librarian said. “I just look after them. And in this particular story, Matt, I’m not the hero. You are.”
    Matt nodded. He had known all along that it would come to this. As far as he could see, there was no other way. “All right,” he said. “The last time I was here, you showed me the book of my life. You said it contained everything I had ever done and everything I would do. You even said it would tell me how I die.”
    The Librarian nodded slowly.
    “So all the answers I’m looking for must be in there – right? If I do beat the Old Ones, it will tell me how I beat them. And if I make any more mistakes, like I did in Hong Kong, they’ll be in there too.”
    “Yes.”
    “When I was here before, you said I could read it. But I didn’t want to. There were things in it I didn’t want to know. There still are – but now I see I have no choice. So is the offer still on?”
    “Of course you can read it, Matt. It’s your life.”
    “Then I want to read it now. Let’s go…”
    The Librarian looked neither happy nor sad. It was as if he had been expecting the request and was here simply to oblige. He stood up and Matt followed him back into the entrance hall and over to a simple wooden door near the desk where the Librarian had been working. Matt knew that it could lead to any room in the library city. It worked the same way as the twenty-five doors in his own world and would take them wherever they needed to go. The Librarian went through first, with Matt close behind, and they came out in a wide, modern space that might have been built just a few years ago. Matt understood why. He had been born at the very end of the twentieth century and so the architecture – plate-glass windows, metal walkways and platforms – corresponded to that time. If he had wanted to read the life of Julius Caesar, he would probably have been taken to a Roman temple.
    Matt had never seen so many books. They were stacked in mile-long rows that dwindled in the distance until they finally became a blur. The shelves started at floor level and rose all the way to the ceiling, with spiral staircases connecting them and narrow metal walkways and handrails stretching from one end to the other. Some strange artificial light filtered through the room. It couldn’t have been coming in from outside – with the roofs and the spires of the other sections closing in, everything was dark – but there was no sign of any electric lamp. It was as if the room was somehow trapped in perpetual daylight. Matt climbed up after the Librarian, vaguely remembering his last visit. But with so many books, and all of them more or less identical, he wouldn’t have known where to start.
    The Librarian went six levels up, then turned left, trailing his finger along the spines. Finally, he stopped. “This is what you want,” he said, picking out a thin grey volume. He handed it to Matt.
    Matt weighed it in his hands. His first thought was how light it was, how little his life added up to. He thumbed to the back page and for a crazy moment he felt like he was back at school, being given a novel to read in English class. He had never found books easy and it had always been the first thing he had done … look to see how much he would have to struggle through.
    His life lasted one hundred and fifty pages.
    He knew that the book would tell him everything he wanted to know, everything he had ever done, everything he would be. He was the book – and he could feel his heart thumping. His mouth had gone dry. The very thought of opening it, of starting at the beginning, filled him with a sense of unease. But try as he might, he could think of no other