Bookhound/Booktracker: Name given to a breed of bloodhound peculiar to the Well. With a keen sense of smell and boundless energy, a bookhound can track a PageRunner not only from page to page but from book to book. The finest bookhounds, diligently trained, have also been known to track transgenre PageRunners and, on occasion, to the Outland. They drool and slobber a lot. Not recommended as pets.

CAT FORMERLY KNOWN AS CHESHIRE,
Guide to the Great Library

WE TOOK THE elevator. Miss Havisham told me that it was considered the height of poor breeding and vulgarity to jump all the way to the lobby at the Council of Genres—and it was impossible to jump straight into the Council chambers for security purposes. The chambers were situated on the twenty-sixth floor of the Great Library. Like the seventeenth floor it was almost deserted; authors whose names begin with Q and Z are not that abundant. The doors opened and we stepped out. But it wasn’t like the previous library floors I had visited, all somber dark wood, molded plaster ceilings and busts of long-dead writers—the twenty-sixth floor had a glazed roof. Curved spans of wrought iron arched high above our heads supporting the glass, through which we could see clouds and a blue sky beyond. I had always thought that the library was created conceptually to contain the books and had no use or existence outside that. Miss Havisham noticed me staring up at the sky and drew me towards a large window. Although it was the twenty-sixth floor, it seemed a lot higher—and the library, inwardly shaped like a fine cross many miles in length, was far squatter when seen from the outside. I looked down the rain-streaked exterior and beyond the stone gargoyles to a tropical forest far below us, where wispy clouds flecked the tops of the lush foliage.

“Anything is possible in the BookWorld,” murmured Miss Havisham. “The only barriers are those of the human imagination. See the other libraries?”

Not more than five miles distant, just visible in the aerial haze, was another tower like ours, and beyond that, another—and over to my right, six more. We were just one towering library of hundreds—or perhaps thousands.

“The nearest one to us is German,” said Miss Havisham, “beyond that French and Spanish. Arabic is just beyond them—and that one over there is Welsh.”

“What are they standing on?” I asked, looking at the jungle far below. “Where exactly are we?”

“Getting all philosophical, are we?” murmured Miss Havisham. “The long and short answer is we really don’t know. Some people claim we are just part of a bigger story that we can’t see. Others maintain that we were created by the Great Panjandrum, and still others that we are merely in the mind of the Great Panjandrum.”

“Who,” I asked, my curiosity finally getting the better of me, “is the Great Panjandrum?”

“Come and see the statue.”

We turned from the window and walked along the corridor to where a large lump of marble rested on a plinth in the middle of the lobby. The marble was roped off, and below it was a large and highly polished plaque proclaiming Our Glorious Leader.

“That’s the Great Panjandrum?” I asked, looking at the crude block of stone.

“No, that’s only the statue of the Great P—or at least it will be when we figure out what he or she looks like. Good afternoon, Mr. Price.”

Mr. Price was a stonemason but he wasn’t doing anything; in fact, I don’t think he had ever done anything—his tools were brightly polished, unmarked, and lying in a neat row next to where he was sitting, reading a copy of The Word.

“Good afternoon, Miss Havisham,” he said, politely raising his hat.

Havisham indicated the surroundings. “The Great Panjandrum is meant to be the architect of all this and controls everything we do. I’m a little skeptical myself; no one controls my movements.”

“They wouldn’t dare,” I whispered.

“What did you say?”

“I said, they couldn’t care. Not a great deal, given the violence in books.”

She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps. Come along and see the Council at work.”

She steered me down the corridor to a door that opened into a viewing gallery above the vast Council chamber with desks arranged in concentric circles.

“The main genres are seated at the front,” whispered Miss Havisham. “The subgenres are seated behind and make up a voting group that can be carried forward to the elected head of each genre, although they do have a veto. Behind the subgenres are elected representatives from the Congress of Derivatives, who bring information forward to the subgenres inspectorate—and behind them are the subcommittees who decide on day-to-day issues such as the Book Inspectorate, new words, letter supply and licensing the reworkings of old ideas. The Book Inspectorate also license plot devices, Jurisfiction agents and the supply and training schedules for Generics.”

“Who’s that talking now?” I asked.

“The Thriller delegate. She’s arguing against Detective having a genre all of its own—at present Detective is under Crime, but if they break away, the genres at Thriller will want to split themselves three ways into Adventure, Spy and Thriller.”

“Is it always this boring?” I asked, watching the Thriller delegate drone on.

“Always. We try to avoid any entanglements and let Text Grand Central take all the flak. This way.”

We left the viewing gallery and padded down the corridor to a door that led into the smallest room I had ever seen. It seemed to be mostly filing cabinet and desk. An equally small man was eating biscuits—and most of them were falling down his front.

“Thursday Next to take the pledge,” announced Miss Havisham. “I have the documents all signed and sealed by the Bellman.”

“Work, work, work,” said the small man, taking a swig of tea and looking up at me with small yet oddly intense eyes. “I rarely get any peace—you’re the second pledge this year.” He sighed and wiped his mouth on his tie. “Who seconds the application?”

“Commander Bradshaw.”

“And who vouches for Miss Next?”

“I do.”

“Good. Stand up and repeat the oath of the BookWorld.”

I stood up and, primed by Miss Havisham, repeated:

“I swear by the Great Panjandrum that I shall uphold the rules of Jurisfiction, protect the BookWorld and defend every fictioneer, no matter how poorly written, against oppression. I shall not shirk from my duty, nor use my knowledge or position for personal gain. Secrets entrusted to me by the Council of Genres or Text Grand Central must remain secret within the service, and I will do all I can to maintain the power of storytelling within the minds and hearts of the readers.”

“That’ll do,” said the small man, after another bite of his biscuit. “Sign here, here, and, er, here. And you have to witness it, Miss Havisham.”

I signed where he indicated in the large ledger, noting as I did so that the last Jurisfiction agent to have signed was Beatrice. He snapped the book shut after Miss Havisham had witnessed my signature.

“Good. Here’s your badge.”

He handed over a shiny Jurisfiction badge with my name and number engraved below the colorful logo. It could get me into any book I wanted without question—even Poe if I so chose, although it wasn’t recommended.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” said the bureaucrat, looking at his watch, “I’m very busy. These forms have to be processed in under a month.”

We returned to the elevator and Miss Havisham pressed the twenty-sixth subbasement button. We were going back into the Well.

“Good,” she said, “now that’s out of the way we can get on. Perkins and Mathias we can safely say were murdered; Snell might as well have been. We are still waiting for Godot and someone tried to kill you with an exploding hat. As an apprentice you have limited powers; as a full member of Jurisfiction you can do a lot more. You must be on your guard!”

“But why?”

“Because I don’t want you dead, and if you know what’s good for you, neither do you.”

“No, I mean why is someone trying to kill me?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Let’s suppose,” I said, “that Deane isn’t just missing—that he might have been murdered. Is there a link between Perkins, Deane, Mathias, and myself?”

“None that I can think of,” said Miss Havisham after a great deal of thought, “but if we consider that Mathias might have been killed because he was a witness, and that one of your Outlander friends might be trying to kill you, then that narrows the list to Perkins and Deane. And there is a link between those two.”

“Yes?”

“Harris Tweed, myself, Perkins and Deane were all given an Ultra Word™ book to test.”

“I didn’t know this.”

“No one did. I can only tell you now because you are a full agent—didn’t you hear what was in the pledge?”

“I see,” I said slowly. “What’s Ultra Word™ like?”

“As Libris states: ‘the ultimate reading experience.’ The first thing that hits you is the music and color.”

“What about the new plots?”

“I didn’t see that,” confessed Miss Havisham as the elevator doors opened. “We were all given a copy of The Little Prince updated with the new operating system—but PageGlow™, WordBuddy™, PlotPotPlus™ and ReadZip™ are all quite dazzling in their simplicity.”

“That’s good.”

“But something just doesn’t seem right.”

“That’s not so good.”

The doors of the elevator opened and we walked along the corridor to where the Text Sea opened out in front of us, the roof of the corridor lifting higher and higher until it had no discernible end, just swirling patterns of punctuation forming into angry storm clouds. Scrawltrawlers rode gently at their moorings at the dockside while the day’s wordcatch was auctioned off.

“Like what? A problem with the system?”

“I wish I knew,” said Miss Havisham, “but try as I might I couldn’t make the book do anything it shouldn’t. In BOOK V7.2 you could force an uncommanded translation into Esperanto by subjecting the book to a high-g maneuver. In BOOK V6.3 the verb to eat conflicted with any description of a pangolin and caused utter mayhem with the tenses. I’ve tried everything to get Ultra Word™ to fail, but it’s steady as a rock.”

We walked beyond the harbor to where large pipes spewed jumbled letters back into the Text Sea amidst a strong smell of rubber.¹

“This is where the words end up when you erase them in the Outland,” mentioned Miss Havisham as we strolled past. “Anything the matter?”

“Junkfootnoterphones again,” I muttered, trying to screen the rubbish out, “a scam of some sort, I think. What makes you believe anything is the trouble with Ultra Word™?”

“Well,” said Havisham slowly, “Perkins called me the night before he died. He said he had a surprising discovery but didn’t want to talk over the footnoterphone.”

“Was it about Ultra Word™?”

Havisham shrugged. “To be truthful, I don’t know. It’s possible—but it could have been about Deane just as easily.”

The road petered out into a beach formed by shards of broken letters. This was where novels met their end. Beneath the leaden skies the books—here taking the appearance of seven-story buildings—were cast high upon the shore, any plot devices and settings of any use torn out to be sold as salvage. The remaining hulks were then pulled to pieces by Generics working in teams with nothing more high-tech than crowbars, cutting torches and chains, stripping the old novels back into words, which were tipped into the sea by wheelbarrow gangs, the words dissolving back into letters, their meaning burning off into a slight bluish haze that collected at the foreshore.

We arrived at the copy of The Squire of High Potternews. It looked dark and somber here on the shore of the Text Sea. Anyone trying to find a copy in the Outland would have a great deal of trouble; when Text Grand Central withdraw a book, they really mean it.

The book was resting on its end and was slightly open. A large tape had been run round the outside that read Jurisfiction, Do Not Cross.

“Looking for something?”

It was Harris Tweed and Uriah Hope; they jumped down from the book and looked at us curiously.

“Good evening, Harris,” said Miss Havisham. “We were trying to find Deane.”

“Me, too. Have a look around if you wish, but I’m damned if I can find a single clue as to his whereabouts.”

“Has anyone tried to kill you recently?” I asked.

“Me?” replied Harris. “No. Why, should they?”

I told him about the Ultra Word™ connection.

“It’s possible that there might be a link,” he mused, “but I gave UltraWord™ the fullest test; it seemed to work extremely well no matter what I did! Do you have any idea what Perkins had discovered?”

“We don’t know he found anything wrong at all,” said Havisham.

Harris thought for a moment. “I think we should definitely keep this to ourselves,” he said at last, “and take great care what we do. If Deane is about and had anything to do with Perkins’s death, he might be after you or I next.”

Havisham agreed, told me to go see Professor Plum to see if he could shed any more light on the failed Eject-O-Hat and vanished after telling me she had an urgent appointment to keep.

When she had gone, Harris said to me, “Keep an eye on the old girl, won’t you?”

I promised I would and made my way back towards the elevators, deep in thought.