‘I suppose it must look like that.’ He grinned, checked his bearings and walked the short distance to a damp, crumbling wall. ‘This one?’
She nodded. ‘Al Ahiz’s house. Do you want me to start moving the ice out of the way?’
‘No point. It’s not going to be there in a minute. Now, are you sure?’
‘Al Ahiz has a cellar just like this one. He won’t use it to keep books in, because it’ll be as damp as this one.’
‘I really hope you’re right, otherwise we’re about to consign two moons’ worth of sneaking around and spying to oblivion.’ Benzamir fetched out a smooth metal sphere the size of his fist, black and yellow pictograms painted on the surface: a grinning skull, a double circle lying on its side, repeated in a line all the way round. ‘When I say stand back, I do mean it.’
He put the ball on one of the shelves at waist height, shifting one of the ice blocks slightly so that it didn’t roll out. When he was satisfied, he tapped it once and strode away, counting his paces.
‘Three, four, five,’ he said as he moved past Alessandra. He took her by the shoulders and moved her back another two steps. ‘Six, seven. I get nervous using those things. One slip and, well – the results aren’t pretty.’
The ball seemed to expand. Suddenly, violently, without a sound, it became a great bubble of cold fire that turned red, green, blue, like a diamond in the sunlight. Then it vanished with a distinct pop.
Cloth-covered ice slid to the floor with soft concussions. Shelves, suddenly robbed of support at one end, creaked and groaned. The wall itself, cut through with a perfectly circular tunnel, sagged, and loose masonry grated against rotten mortar. Even the floor had been scooped out and smoothed to glass.
‘Ready?’ asked Benzamir.
‘What did you do?’
‘The wall was in the way, so I moved it.’
‘Where?’
‘About three astronomical units away. Things move fast in o-space.’
‘You talk such nonsense.’
‘So everybody keeps on telling me.’ He took a cautious step forward, followed by the light-bees. ‘Careful. It’s slippery.’
They slithered across the glassy floor into the cellar belonging to the house next door. There were shelves similar to the ones recently vanished on the other side of the wall. They were empty except for cobwebs. It looked like Al Ahiz hadn’t been down the crumbling stone steps for years.
Benzamir leaned his head against Alessandra’s. ‘He didn’t hide it down here then.’
‘Is this the time to ask if you have a spell for finding secret rooms?’
‘Spell, no. Knack, hopefully. The Ethiopian commander can’t see infra-red.’ He started up the stairs and felt the trapdoor with his fingertips. ‘It’ll open.’
The light-bees winked out, and Benzamir pushed slowly against the wood. A rug had been thrown over it, and he had to negotiate his way from underneath it. After telling his bees to shine softly, he called Alessandra up.
‘You saw it. Are any of these it?’
The only gaps in the shelves were for a barred window and a thick door. The rest was floor-to-ceiling books.
‘You’re joking,’ she breathed. Her palms became moist at the thought of so much wealth.
‘Actually I am,’ said Benzamir, ignorant of her avaricious lust. ‘The Ethiopians would have gone through this room with a fine-toothed comb. How big is this User book?’
Alessandra took a moment to shame herself into answering. She held out her hands to the width of her body. ‘It’s heavy too. It doesn’t just look like it’s made of metal; it really is.’
‘He’ll have it close to him. There’s no point in paying a fortune for something and not looking at it, surely?’
She ran her fingers along the uneven spines of the books. ‘You don’t know book collectors. Just knowing that no one else in the world has one is enough. You don’t read books; you possess them.’
‘In which case we might have to wake Al Ahiz up and induce him to tell us where he’s put it.’
‘Can we just stick to simple stealing?’
‘You’re right.’ He plucked one of his light-bees out of the air and dropped it in Alessandra’s palm. ‘Start moving some of these around. There could be a hidey-hole. I’m going upstairs.’
‘Be careful.’ She held the bee up, and it fluttered about, getting its bearings.
Benzamir tiptoed to the door, listened carefully and tried the latch. It was only then that he noticed the ingenious lock. ‘Amazing,’ he said, testing the strength of the iron rods that slotted into the door frame. ‘If I wasn’t on this side of the door, and I couldn’t just slice through the hinges with a laser, I’d be completely baffled.’
He gripped the lock mechanism in both hands and heaved it through a quarter turn. The bolts slid out of the frame with a well-oiled click. He tried the latch again, and the door swung open.
The light behind him faded to nothing. He was in a corridor that was dark to normal vision, but not to his; the cool night air made blue streamers where it seeped in around the high window, and the door that led to the courtyard was outlined in azure. A couple of cats prowled in from another room, disturbed by the noise. At least, Benzamir hoped they were cats. It was difficult to tell just from the heat bloom, though they moved with a casual feline assurance.
He knelt down, let them sniff him and butt their sleek heads against his hand. He scratched each one between the ears, then shooed them gently away. He glanced through to where they had come from: a kitchen, with the embers of the evening’s fire still warm in the hearth. Time to try upstairs.
Al Ahiz lived alone. His neighbours had joked, even as they watched a detachment of Ethiopian soldiers turn the collector’s house upside down, that he had no need for the company of people: his many books were his many wives. And Benzamir, standing in the crowd with Wahir, Said and Alessandra, had watched as Al Ahiz simultaneously protested his innocence in the affair of the metal User book and urged great caution over the way rough warrior fingers abused his fragile pages.
Benzamir reached the landing and stopped to listen. Loud snores emanated from one room. The two others were locked, but not for long. They contained nothing but books. The Ethiopians had been in the house from dawn till mid-afternoon. Clearly, what they were looking for wasn’t in plain sight, its metal spine turned outwards on one of the shelves groaning with age and knowledge.
Benzamir thought it a crime that any book be held a prisoner. Al Ahiz was guilty of a far greater offence than handling the emperor of Kenya’s property: those books, sitting unopened, useless, rotting, represented an information abyss, a word hell. He shuddered, closed the doors again and sneaked into Al Ahiz’s bedroom.
He lay on his bed, shrouded by net, like a great white whale caught by a fisherman. Yet more books were mixed in with his few personal items. The light-bee selectively lit up some of the titles, written by long dead hands in long forgotten languages. Benzamir wondered if Al Ahiz even knew what he had.
Resisting the urge to chant from the Necronomicon and translate the mystic symbols of Voynich, he checked the walls, floor and ceiling in infra-red for any telltale signs of hidden doors and secret voids.
Al Ahiz turned over, grunted, and continued sleeping. His snoring diminished to a soft suspiration.
Benzamir was at a loss. The Ethiopians had had hours to search, and had turned up nothing. Without a doubt they would have questioned the collector closely, and might have resorted to a little rough handling when the book didn’t turn up. Either soft, blubbery Al Ahiz was as hard as nails, or he genuinely didn’t have the book.
Where hadn’t the soldiers looked? More importantly, where wouldn’t they look? If there were no hiding places built into the house, where would someone hide something of immense value?
He stalked around the room again, increasingly frustrated. All it would need was for the nightwatch, or a stray Ethiopian patrol, to come across Said, or for Al Ahiz to answer the call of nature, and the game would be up. He was putting them all in danger.