Shadows fall behind

 "Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you,” whispered a quiet voice.  Jerome paused in his reshelving of books and looked around him.  He was standing on the fifth rung of a new wooden ladder, the old one having collapsed under the substantial weight of the vice-librarian which left little space for anyone to be close enough to him for him to hear them whispering.  There was no-one at the foot of the ladder, no-one standing nearby, and (even though he felt ridiculous checking) no-one peering out from between the books on a shelf.  He looked at the book in his hand, which was entitled The memory of thorns and shook it carefully to see if that elicited any further advice.  The book was resolutely mute.

“If you didn’t talk to me, then who did?” he said, pitching his voice deliberately at a normal volume.  He hoped it might encourage the whisperer to speak up, if not actually reveal themselves, but silence was all he heard in return.  Shrugging his shoulders, and wobbling a little on the ladder as result, he returned to shelving, setting The memory of thorns in place and drawing another book up from the carousel at the foot of the ladder.  It was a graceful gesture, made perfect by years of practice, and it lifted the book gently on the unseen currents of magic that flowed through the world and deposited it in his waiting hand.  He checked the spine to ensure that the classification was correct and then located an empty spot on the shelf where it belonged.

If the librarians permitted it he could have reshelved all the books using his magic and it would have taken perhaps an hour at most.  Instead the librarians decreed that too much magic might harm the books and that while magic could be used in small, supportive ways, no larger magics could be employed.  Then they’d put a detector in the centre of the library which sounded an unpleasant alarm and released the Wacken at the library doors if too much magic was detected.

Jerome finished shelving the books and descended the ladder.  He didn’t mind the meditative aspects of his job, and shelving allowed his mind to roam and think about all kinds of things.  As he laid his hand on the carousel, a wheeled wooden structure like a miniature three-storey bookcase that the library staff (who were, naturally distinct from the librarians and therefore not as well paid) used to move the books around, the whisper came again.

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you.”

Jerome had to control himself; the spell of unveiling, which would have revealed any invisible tricksters, would definitely set the alarms off.  The noise was unpleasant but bearable, but the Wacken — a kind of semi-sentient carnivorous plant — were another matter altogether.  He’d already run away from them twice when idiot visitors to the library had attempted magic in there and he was concerned that there weren’t enough places to hide.

“Who would want to face the sunshine?” he asked, his voice clear and intended to carry.  There was no-one close enough to hear him though and the whisperer deigned not to answer.  He sighed, put his hands on the carousel, and started to push.

Four hours later he signed his timecard and placed in a little slot in a gunmetal grey box by the library’s main entrance and walked out of the doors into the darkness of the tunnel complex beyond.  He’d heard no more whispers for the day and though he’d made a point of swinging the carousel around him far more than necessary had failed to strike any invisible pests.  Whoever it was with the sunshine fetish appeared to have left him after the second whisper.

The tunnels stretched from the library to Genton, a small conurbation under an area that had once been called Stonehenge.  There were imprints in the ceiling in the middle of Genton that were rumoured to be the feet of the ancient stones above, but Jerome was properly educated and knew that all of humanity now dwelled nearly a kilometre underground and that no stone monolith, no matter how ancient, reached down that far from the surface.  After Genton it was necessary to take a transport — a magically controlled capsule that the travel-mages directed between Genton and Lincon, the main hub for outward travel — if you wanted to go anywhere else.  And no-one ventured to the surface or shunned the shadows because the shadowed underground was the only thing keeping humanity alive.