Josh was standing outside the room which apparently held the deadly, magical summoned swarm. He had expected the castle to be all grey stone flags and stone walls, but the floors were thick with scattered rushes that let off a faint sweet grass smell when people walked on them, and the walls were whitewashed and hung with tapestries.

Mistress Hallon was, of course, the lady who had stolen his room at the inn in High Howe. Josh thought it was likely the book moths had hidden themselves amongst her possessions, and been carried into the castle this way, but he didn’t want to point that out because then it would become obvious that the infestation was his fault. Mistress Hallon stood well back from the door, wringing her hands, and telling her story for the third or fourth time.

“I had the shutters closed against the sun!” she said. “To protect the hangings, you know, because I didn’t want them to become all faded! And I went to retrieve my knitting, but all of a sudden there was a dread voice, and whirr of wings, and a black cloud arose. A soon as I saw it I knew it meant me harm. I ran out and closed the door straightaway, calling for help!”

According to Jann the messenger, calling for help was a euphemism for screaming hysterically until one of the servants found her. Lady Paleyne stood beside Josh, courteously listening to the repetition of Mistress Hallon’s story.

“My dear, how frightening for you!” she said, for the fourth or fifth time. “You were so brave!”

Mistress Hallon perked up at this.

“Yes, I wonder that I didn’t faint. Just think, it might have slain me while I lay insensible!”

Happily, at that point they were interrupted by Jann, bearing the items Josh had asked for. Naturally Lady Paleyne had appealed to Josh to destroy the swarm the moment they had heard the news.

“You are the expert at this sort of thing!” she had said admiringly, and Josh hadn’t felt able to say no.

He’d also got a quest on his character sheet, offering him a measly 50 experience to clear the infestation from the room.

The servant handed him a lantern, glass bottle with a stopper, several sheets of paper, a quill pen, and a bottle of ink. Josh needed to light the lantern, so he looked around for a candle or something that was already lit, but the servant had a little box and was pulling out … matches! Josh needed to get himself some of those.

Latern lit, he faced the door, took a deep breath, and went inside. He heard Mistress Hallon’s squeak of terror as he did so, and then he closed the door and looked around the chamber. It was completely silent. The shutters were closed, with only a narrow crack of daylight filtering through, and if he hadn’t had his lantern, it would have been almost totally dark.

There was no sign of the book moths.

Mistress Hallon had a writing table in one corner, so Josh set the lamp on it, and sat down. This time, the story of Babel the Sheep-Pig was much quicker and easier to write. He made some improvements while he was at it, making Charlotte the spider merely one of the creatures at the farm, who recommended that Babel speak to Josh the Sage for advice. He decided it was better not to have Charlotte as a sidekick, because he didn’t want any of the book moths to think they needed to impersonate spiders. The thought made him shudder.

It took him no more than an hour to write out the story this time, and when he was done, he folded it into a booklet shape, then rolled it up and posted it into the glass bottle. After that, he retreated from the room. Even as he closed the door he thought he heard the sound of moth wings, which made him slam the door shut a little quicker than he meant to.

He looked around to see who had noticed his panic.

Mistress Hallon had gone, but Lady Paleyne was still standing there, looking at him with bright, smiling eyes. For the first time it occurred to Josh to wonder why she had been the one Jann had come running for. So far she had acted shallow and self-centred. Why would anyone turn to her if there was some dangerous magical creature loose in the castle? And why had she waited for an hour in the corridor? It wasn’t as if she could do anything to help if Josh got swarmed and smothered by book moths. Could she?

He eyed her suspiciously, and she returned his gaze with a limpid look.

“Thank you for waiting,” he said. “You didn’t have to.”

She clasped her hands together, in what Josh thought was an over-dramatic way.

“Oh, but I would never forgive myself if anything happened to you!” she said.

“Do you know anything about book moths?” he asked.

She gave him a wide-eyed glance.

“Is that what this is?”

What else would it be? Josh gave up speaking to her and put his ear to the door to see if he could hear moth wings still, but it seemed quiet. He opened the door and slipped back in. His heart was thumping uncomfortably, and he wished had the lantern, but if the trap hadn’t worked the light would just scare the book months into dark corners again. He forced himself to wait until his eyes adjusted to the light. He could see the bottle on the desk now, and the inside was dark and opaque. The trap had worked.

He realised he could also feel something, at faint tickle at the edge of his senses. Was he sensing the magic of the book moths?

As he approached the desk, he saw that there was movement within the bottle, and he could hear the faint scrape of the booklet against the sides of the glass as the moths crawled over it. He shuddered with horror, but he had to make sure they were completely trapped. He made himself carefully take the stopper from the desk and gently push it into the bottle.

There, done. All he needed to do was open the shutters and the light of the sun would destroy the book moths.

They had saved him from Varian’s gang. The moth haunt had killed Shuriken, and attacked the others on the marsh. It had died to keep him alive. These newly hatched moths were the former moth haunt’s children.

He sighed. He was such an idiot.

He picked up the bottle, and shoved it down the front of his shirt, where it would be protected against the light.

Lady Paleyne must have seen the shape of the bottle against the cloth, but if she did, she said nothing. Instead she clasped her hands together and thanked him in a manner that was as effusive as it was irritating.

On his way out, Jann offered him a purse, in which he found another ten silvers, and his resentment towards Lady Paleyne eased. They were paying him for something that was ultimately his fault. He could have confessed that the book moths were from the same swarm he had encountered, but he didn’t know if that would have got him into trouble.

Maybe he was destined for a career as a magical pest exterminator. He could even go around secretly releasing book moths, and then offering to remove them. It could turn out very lucrative.

But he didn’t want to earn money so dishonestly, and in any case Lady Paleyne had seen him take the bottle away. Would she suspect? If more book moths appeared would she accuse him of running a con?

On impulse he turned back to Jann.

“If there are any other outbreaks in the castle,” he said, “Or even in the city, then I will do my best to deal with them, and please tell Lady Paleyne I won’t require any payment.”

Jann gave him an astonished glance.

“Because it means they won’t have been cleared properly the first time,” Josh said. “I think I got them all, but just in case some escaped…”

Josh hoped there wouldn’t be any more outbreaks, because he had just signed himself up for a great deal of hassle if that were the case. Jann’s expression indicated he thought Josh was an idiot, but he bowed.

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“I will convey your message, sir.”

And now, finally, Josh was free to do what he’d been planning to do all day, and break into the library.

When he reached his room, he put the book moth bottle in the space between the eaves. He’d discussed book moths with the Abbot, so he knew they were magical creatures and didn’t breathe, which meant the bottle didn’t need to have air holes in it. They would lay eggs in the booklet, and the paper would then be consumed by the grubs that hatched, after which they spin themselves little paper cocoons, and metamorphose into the moths. At what point they learned to read, or to understand what they were reading enough to build three dimensional talking copies of the subject matter they had consumed, the Abbot hadn’t been able to say.

Josh would have to think of what to do with them, but that was a problem for future Josh.

He took his miniature spell book, and on the blank cover sheets that disguised the spells, he spent a bit of time writing bad poetry and snippets of lines he could remember from real poems, some of which were, admittedly, taken from rap songs. He privately thought that a lot of rap lyrics were more like poetry than most actual modern poetry was.

Then it occurred to him that if he lost the spell book, or if some dishonest guard stole it, he wouldn’t have any spells. He spent a bit of time making tiny little spell scrolls, which he rolled up and tucked into various places in his clothing.

By the time he had done all that, it was getting towards evening, and the library would be closing soon. He was briefly tempted to stall and try tomorrow instead, but made himself retrieve the cloak of invisibility and walk out of the door before he got cold feet.

The moment he arrived at the library, the librarian hurried over to interrogate him, and warn him that they would be closing within half a bell.

“I only need to consult something quickly,” Josh said. He’d disguised the cloak by buying a second, much more colourful cloak on his way over, and then throwing it over his arm, with the fur cloak underneath, so that it looked as if he was just carrying it because it was too hot to wear.

This time, now that he wasn’t accompanied by a noble, he was forced to show his letter of recommendation from the Abbot before he was allowed to browse the shelves. The moment the librarian was distracted, Josh retreated to the back of an alcove, swiftly donned the fur cloak, then activated the invisibility effect.

Now all he had to do was stay still for half an hour.

It was a lot easier said than done. If he’d been waiting at, for example, a bus stop for that length of time he would have been checking his phone, and moving around, or leaning against the bus shelter, or pacing up and down. Staying completely still was excruciating, and the half hour felt like an eternity.

Every so often he would get a prickle on his nose, or the back of his neck, and want to scratch it, but to do so would be to break the invisibility effect. He worked out that if no-one was glancing his way, he could very slowly raise his hand and scratch the itch, and then just as slowly lower it again. His feet began to ache from staying in the same position all the time, and so did his back.

Who knew just standing still was such hard work?

And then, even once the library was closed, the librarians spent another half hour or so pacing around, making sure all the books had been put away and were properly straight on the shelves. Josh hastily checked the shelves near him, to make sure that no-one had stuffed volumes in the wrong places, or rendered the bookshelves untidy, but everything looked straight and in its proper place. What would happen if a librarian came into this alcove and started reshelving books and bumped into him?

A librarian did, in fact, pause at the entrance to the alcove. Josh waited with his heart thundering in his ears, but all the librarian did was glance along the shelves, and he must have been satisfied with what he saw, because he moved on.

After an eternity of agonised waiting, the librarians from the restricted section all filtered out. The last one went around blowing out the lanterns, and Josh heard his footsteps as he left via a side door. There was the click of a key in the lock, and then the library was silent. Although the lamps had been extinguished, there were small windows set high in the atrium which let in the slowly fading daylight. Josh had bought a candle, hidden in his tunic, but he didn’t want to light it just yet, in case it was obvious from the outside.

He stretched, trying to relieve himself of some of his aches, and leant limply against one of the bookshelves, although he didn’t move from his spot, in case one of the librarians had forgotten something and decided to come back for it. He decided he would wait another thirty minutes or so, although he was just guessing at how much time was passing, since he didn’t have a watch or a clock.

That caution saved him, because he was still leaning against the bookshelf when he felt a vibration, and heard a faint scrabbling sound above. He looked up, just in time to see something weirdly thin and pale swinging overhead. His brain couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing for a moment, and then he realised it was a creature with a central body and multiple limbs, like a giant spider, clambering around on top of the bookshelves.

It was huge, the span of its legs about eight feet in diameter.

Josh wanted to gibber in terror. There was a giant spider in the library!

It wasn’t really a spider, he realised, as he took the details in. It didn’t have an exoskeleton. He was looking at something with an internal skeleton and musculature, overlaid with pale skin, but in the shape of a spider. Its eight legs were multi-jointed, covered in thick hairs like boar bristles, and tipped with three claws, which pinched the edge of the bookshelves as it swung overhead. Instead of a spider-like abdomen, its body consisted of a bloated tube, like a worm, swelling to a pallid white belly in the centre of its mass, threaded with a threaded network of blue veins, and narrowing to wrinkled, puckered flesh at one end.

He couldn’t see the front end, where its head would be. It had already clambered past him and the head was out of sight.

There was something horrifyingly, grotesquely wrong about it. A giant spider would have been bad enough, but this was … monstrous.

It hadn’t seen him.

The body dipped and swayed as it crawled over the tops of the shelves, moving onto the next alcove and out of sight.

What the hell was Josh supposed to do? He stayed frozen against the shelf nearest him. For all its size, the creature made almost no sound as it moved. He had heard very little except for the faint clack of its claws on wood. He couldn’t even see where it was now.

He felt certain that if he moved at all, it would see or hear him. It was obviously set to guard the library at night. They must have something extremely valuable here to set such a monstrous guard loose.

Josh didn’t want to steal anything, all he wanted was to find out more about the Dreamer. He’d previously decided that, if the first break-in went well, he could return on successive nights to get the information he needed.

There was no way he was coming back after this.

If he stayed where he was all night, would the creature overlook him? He could sneak out again when the library opened. He didn’t want to stay in the alcove, though. If the creature did find him, he would be backed into a corner with no avenue of escape, easy prey for something that size.

He had to try to sneak past it. The monster hadn’t seen him when it was clambering overhead, which suggested that the camouflage of the cloak worked against it. What if he tried moving very, very slowly and carefully?

The Hide spell functioned the same way as the cloak of invisibility. You could move things around a little, but too far and the spell would be interrupted, until the object was stationary again. It resembled a magical version of a chameleon’s camouflage, by projecting an image of the background behind it onto the surface of the item being hidden.

If Josh moved slowly enough, would the cloak be able to compensate? Why hadn’t he thought to test that before now?

Instead of moving, he found he was rooted to the spot.

Maybe he should put Hide on something and throw it into the centre to see how the monster reacted. Would it chase after movement, like a cat? What if it was intelligent, and decided to investigate the alcoves for the source of the thrown object?

Josh needed to stop thinking up increasingly unlikely what ifs and choose a course of action. He looked at the nearby shelves and picked out a small, thick book that had a cloth cover which he thought would slide well across the floor. He carefully and quietly tore a Hide spell out of his spell book, and cast it on the cloth-covered book, keeping a careful eye out for the monster.

There was no sign of it above him, or in the section of the library he could see from the alcove.

He crept forwards as cautiously as possible, knelt with glacial slowness, and sent the book skittering across the floor towards the centre of the atrium.

He nearly yelled in fright when the monster dropped down from where it had been clinging to the ceiling, just out of his line of sight, and slammed onto the desks. He could see its head, which was bullet shaped, with a prominent ridge sticking out of the back of its skull. On the front it had three pairs of large, insectile eyes, and giant mandibles. It clawed the space where the book now lay with its front legs. The camouflage effect on the book was back in place, now that it wasn’t moving, and the clawed tips of the monster’s feet stabbed down to either side of it, missing the book itself.

That meant the monster couldn’t see through the invisibility effect, and as long as Josh stayed still, it wouldn’t be able to sense him. However, the slightest sign of movement would cause it to pounce. He was further towards the entrance of the alcove, now, and he could see it laboriously clamber up onto the bookshelves opposite, and then leap at the central chandelier, which swung wildly. The monster turned itself upside down and settled into position.

If Josh kept throwing books—he winced at the idea of mistreating them so—then the creature would be distracted and he could quickly dart between alcoves while it was facing away from him.

Perhaps he didn't need to cast Hide on the books first. But he didn’t want the monster tearing them up. What kind of insane idea was it to have a monster of that size loose in a library full of expensive volumes anyway? The Abbot had told him that printing was a recent invention—Josh privately suspected it had been introduced by an outworlder—and most books were hand-crafted works of art, with a commensurately high price.

He only had four more copies of Hide in his spell book, and one tucked into his sleeves. He wished he’d made ten copies of each spell for the spell book, instead of five.

Maybe it would be better not to cast Hide on the book, because the monster might get distracted by it for longer.

Josh slowly pulled out another book, took several deep, slow breaths, mentally apologised to the librarians, and threw it. It flew over the desks, towards the opposite side of the atrium, and landed on the floor with a loud thump. The creature slammed down again, and as soon as its back was turned, Josh bolted to the next alcove.

As soon as he reached it, he flung himself into the farthest corner, and whipped around to look at the monster, his back against the bookshelves.

This time he did yell with fright, because the monster had abandoned the book he’d thrown, and was now charging towards him.