The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

hour, until four when they close, and it may well take that long. I hope our friend Wolfgang won’t be disappointed that it’s not all cut-and-dry facts; quite a lot of background goes with the story, as well as some hearsay and a few surmises of my own. I’ll tell it while the two of you dispose of those dangerous papers—”

“Dispose of the papers!” I choked, tightening my fingers on the bag. Wolfgang seemed shocked as well.

“My dear, be reasonable,” Dacian said. “You can’t take them into the Soviet Union. Their customs officials confiscate, on general principles, whatever cannot be identified—including parking tickets. Nor can you scatter them on the streets of Vienna, nor entrust them to Wolfgang or me, since we’re both leaving the country tomorrow too. Therefore I urge the only solution I myself can think of given such short notice—to hide them in a place where no one is likely to find them soon: among the rare books of the Austrian National Library.”

The Nationalbibliotek, built in the 1730s, is one of the most impressive libraries in the world—not because of its size or grandeur but because of its unearthly, fairylike beauty and the exotic nature of its collection of rare books, from Avicenna to Zeno, which places it second in importance only to that of the Vatican.

I’d been here rarely as a child, but I still recalled vividly the library’s whipped-cream Baroque architecture and the astonishing pastel trompe l’oeil ceiling of the lofty dome. Last but not least—the most wonderful surprise in the world to a child—the bookcases were actually doors, paneled in books on each side, that swung open to reveal secret book-lined chambers beyond, each containing a large table and chairs and big airy windows overlooking the courtyard, where scholars could shut themselves away and work in private for hours. It was one of these that Dacian had reserved for us.

“It’s a good plan,” Wolfgang assured me when we three were ensconced within the room. “I’d never have thought of anything better at such short notice.”

Once I’d thought it over I agreed that, risky as it might be, Dacian had come up with a plausible way to protect the manuscripts. Even if anyone learned they were hidden here, the quick tally I’d made from the placard up front told me the library’s collections of books, folios, manuscripts, maps, periodicals, and incunabula totaled around four million items. That, and the fact that the stacks were closed to public access, made retrieving the scattered pages a project of colossal proportions for anyone so minded.

For ten minutes we filled out cards for dozens of titles, handing them to librarians and waiting for the books to be pulled. When we were alone, I inserted pages of text into books pulled from shelves here in this room. As a further precaution, I proposed that once we were done we destroy all the call cards and keep no list.

“But how will we find them again?” Wolfgang objected. “To find a thousand pages by trial and error among so many books—it would take dozens of people years and years!”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said.

I didn’t feel it essential to mention my photographic memory again, but I could recall a list of five hundred items—such as the author/title of each book where we’d stashed a few pages—for up to about three months. If I couldn’t return in that time, I’d write out the list, recommit it to memory, and destroy it again.

More urgent was the matter of Dacian. As he said at the Schatzkammer, he had to fly back to Paris, so this session at the library was likely to be our last for quite a while, and I had plenty I needed to know before he got away. I’d have to walk and chew gum at the same time—try to split my brain to pay attention to Dacian while committing the book list to memory. I drew up my chair near his beside the window. Wolfgang stayed at the door accepting fresh shuttle-relays of books. He slid each pile down to me, maintaining a watchful eye to be sure we weren’t overheard. As I stuffed the volumes with folded pages of manuscript, I nodded for Dacian to proceed.

“I’ll try to address both your questions,” he began, “the thirteen hallows Wolfgang is interested in, and the meaning of Pandora’s papers in Ariel’s possession. The answer to both centers on a remote part of the world little visited today—and then, little understood. Once this region had the highest culture. But now its past lies buried beneath the dust of centuries. It has been battled over constantly by the great powers, and its lines of demarcation even now are in dispute. But as some have learned to their cost, this is a land so wild and mysterious that its people, like the wild panther, can never be tamed.”

He turned to regard me with those dark purple-green eyes. “I speak of a place—or so I understand—you’ll both be investigating in your journey to Russia. So our meeting today is fortunate. I am one of the few who can recount its history and, more important, the deeper meaning concealed beneath that history—for I was born there myself nearly a century ago.”

“You were born in Central Asia?” I said in surprise.

“Yes. And Sanskrit was the early language of this region, an important key. Let me give you a clearer picture of my homeland.”

Dacian withdrew from his satchel a thin piece of leather rolled up and tied with a chamois thong. He undid it and held it out to me. It seemed so fragile, I was hesitant to touch it, so Dacian spread it on the table. Wolfgang came over and stood beside us, looking down.

It was an antique map, carefully drawn and hand-tinted but without boundary lines. The map I’d just studied all that morning depicted pretty much the same terrain, so I felt topographically acquainted with the turf even without the labels: the inland seas