Overdue : - A Library Trilogy short story by Mark Lawrence

Author:Mark Lawrence [Lawrence, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-26T21:00:00+00:00

***

“I know you!” Nicholas had been surprised to see a man walking towards him from the back of his shop and not only because he was entirely sure that he hadn’t yet had his first customer through the front door. He was more surprised by the fact that he recognised the person now approaching the counter. “You’re… you’re…” He clicked his fingers trying to scare the name out of his subconscious and onto his tongue.

“Yute.”

“Yute! That’s it!” He wanted to say ‘Yute the snowman’ but was now convinced that rather than hailing from the extremities of the north, Yute was in fact afflicted by a rare disease or condition that had sucked almost every trace of colour from him. “How…” He had last seen the man disappearing off into the back of a different shop, and now here he was nearly forty years later emerging from the back of this one. “You haven’t aged a day, sir!”

“Cole, how are you?” Yute stopped before the counter, his garb an outlandish robe of dark grey velvet, touched by dust around the hem.

“Nicholas,” Nicholas said automatically. He’d given up his abbreviated name as a childish pretension. Set it aside with many other things. Perhaps too many things, though his life did now have a certain anaesthetic tranquillity to it as he waited, waiting for nothing in particular and resigned to the waiting. He hadn’t thought he was waiting for anything, but since Miss Pency’s arrival unsettling waves of possibility had started to lap at the shores of his isolation. And now, past expectation or even imagination, here was Mr Yute.

“Nicholas it is.” Yute inclined his head. He really hadn’t aged a day. His face was the kind that offered age no purchase, but even so … forty years!

Nicholas rallied himself, taking shelter in formality. “Welcome to Bee and Hen, how can I be of service today?”

“I’m on a quest,” Yute said as Wobble emerged from the aisles to rub around his legs.

“Still?” There had been a quest before, Nicholas was sure of it.

“Still.” Yute inclined his white head.

Nicholas pointed to the door and the street beyond the wide windows. “Did you…?”

“I came from the Library,” Yute said as if that answered the question. “There’s another circle starting.”

“A circle?” Nicholas had no idea what the man meant but politeness encouraged him to follow on. “And that’s bad?”

“It could be calamitous. I hadn’t known they could happen out here in the peripheries, but it seems that these bookshops are more numerous and more widespread than I had believed. I’m sure I knew more about this once upon a time, but my memory…” He tapped his temple. “Not what it once was.”

“No…” Nicholas wondered if the man’s memory might not be the only faulty part of his thinking apparatus. But then again whether Yute had been this crazy on his previous visit was an answer that his own memory was proving unable to supply.

“The Exchange connects them, you see? Bookshops. Libraries great and small. Who knows where it ends? Perhaps individual bookcases in private homes also touch the Exchange.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.