"Is this a joke?" Kim asked. "Who would risk their lives to enter a library?"

  "Shut your cakehole!" Fiora said. "You don't understand what is happening."

  "You have failed your first test," the door said. "It was a simple question, and you couldn't answer yes or no. You have two more chances. Walk away now, and you will live. Fail the next two questions, and your brains will be removed from your brainpans. In which case, you will die."

  Kim opened her mouth to say something, but Fiora angrily shook her fist.

  "We are willing to risk our lives for knowledge," Fiora said. "Please ask us the two questions."

  "There is one question and one action. Which do you want first?"

  "The question," Fiora said.

  "So it shall be, my fellow seekers of truth," the door now had a jaunty tone. "I am a number. A powerful religious number. A frightening number. A doubly triangled number. And a number of man. What number am I?"

  Damon jumped up and down, waving his hand. Kim herself did not know what the number could be. Twelve? That was a religious number, but they certainly had different religions here. Or three could be a sacred number. What was a triangled number?

  Fiora's eyes were closed, but she made a shushing noise.

  "Do you know the answer?" the door asked.

  Fiora opened her eyes, gave a frustrated frown and gestured to Damon.

  "It's six six six," he said. "Or six hundred and sixty-six. It's the number of the beast. It's a human number. And it's doubly triangulated. And it's from Iron Maiden's best album."

  "That is correct," the door answered. "You will live. For now."

  "Well, that was a miracle," Fiora whispered.

  "Now," the door said. "An action is required after you hear this riddle: I am the sea. But not the ocean. I am high. But not low. The answer you will bestow to me."

  Fiora had the angry, furrowed brow of someone who didn't have the answer. Damon scratched his temple. This was supposed to be an action, but it was also a riddle. That seemed doubly unfair.

  "Answer now," the door said.

  But Fiora and Damon shook their heads. Kim was stuck on the word sea. Of course, it wasn't an ocean. But the word sea couldn't be the answer. And what was the action?

  "Time is up," the door said. A tentacle snapped out of the door and grabbed her arm. Another clutched Damon, and the thickest tentacle wrapped around Fiora.

  "There are too many tentacles in this world," Kim said.

  As if to mock her words, three more tentacles erupted out of the wall above them. They each swung double-bladed axes.

  "Wait!" Kim said. She had a memory of her voice teacher raising her hand higher. A sign she wanted the note to be higher. "Not the high seas. But a high C," she said. "I solved it. It's a high C. The note."

  The axes swung within a hairsbreadth of each of them. Then paused in mid-air. It was almost as if the door were curious. "It was a riddle," the mouth said. "And an action, too."

  Kim opened her mouth. High C was a note she had never hit consistently. But her lungs felt stronger here in Metaloria. So did her vocal cords. The Notes of Power pulsed inside her. She opened her mouth and sang one note.

  She hit high C as clear as a bell.

  The tentacles swung back into the wall, taking the axes with them. "Now was that so hard?" the door asked. The eye either blinked or winked at them. "Enter and learn. May the metal power of knowledge be with you."

  The door swung open.

  "It was a 10th level Skid Row Demon in the door," Fiora said. "That's a sign of how powerful these librarians are."

  "Would we have died?" Kim asked.

  Fiora shrugged. "Expect no mercy from librarians. Now, let me do the talking." She went through the door, pausing only to say these words over her shoulder: "Thanks for saving me again."

  Kim and Damon looked at each other.

  "Nice singing," he said.

  "Nice numbering," she replied.

  Then they chuckled, perhaps to prove that they were still alive.

  The inside of the library smelled more like leather than it did books. The vast interior was brightly lit by glowing glass balls, all hanging from the ceiling. There were shelves on the left and right and straight ahead that climbed all the way to the ceiling. And it was a tall ceiling, especially if you included the towers in each corner that had even more books and a precarious ladder system for access. There were also rolled-up pieces of paper.

  "Scrolls!" Damon said. "We can buy a spell and transport ourselves all the way to the druid king guy and defeat him with a powerful fireball spell."

  "Be very, very quiet here," Fiora whispered. "Librarians kill first, shush second."

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  All the librarians Kim had known were gentle and kind until you questioned the categorizing power of the Dewey Decimal System or returned a book dog-eared. But when the trio walked around the corner of the nearest shelf, it became immediately clear why Metalorian librarians could also be killers.

  There were three of them, and they were about twice her size and wearing chain-mail, with weapon belts across their chests. One male librarian had a knife in each sheath. And the other two female librarians had throwing axes. On top of that, as a sign that she was getting used to the land of Metaloria, the second-last thing she noticed was that their faces were feathery and they had huge beaks. They reminded her of bald eagles except for finely feathered human hands. The last thing her brain noted was that one of the female librarians had two heads. There were three metal nameplates on the desk that read: Günter, Glieben, and Glauten-Globen. She guessed that last name belonged to the two-headed librarian.

  "They could eviscerate a regiment of paladins," Damon said.

  "The librarians have metal up the gazoo!" Fiora said. "And there is nothing they won't do to consume knowledge. Those minds have studied all the sacred and historical texts, and they draw their power from the source words they have discovered—the deepest, darkest ancient words that are the source of our modern words. Even Blayre fears the librarians. If they found the right source word, they might break all Metaloria into shards, and Rainbow Island would fall into the Deep Purple Ocean."

  "All powerful librarians," Damon said. "One more thing to fear."

  "So be shushed." Fiora slapped him on the back. "Watch and learn how to maneuver around these massively dangerous intellects."

  She walked up to the desk, not showing the slightest trace of fear. "Greetings, great librarians of Poison," Fiora said. "This humble traveler has come seeking knowledge."

  The two-headed librarian, Glauten-Globen, stared at Fiora with all four eyes. Both beaks spoke at the same time: "It's your turn to deal with patrons, Günter.

  The female librarian with a single head sighed and came to the front of the desk; the others continued to file pieces of parchment into open drawers.

  Günter glanced haughtily down at Fiora's feet and up again. "And what knowledge do you seek? How to clean offal from dragonspawn scales?"

  Fiora stiffened. Kim wondered if this was a horrible insult in this world. And the next thought to cross her mind was: there's going to be a fight! A fight in the library between a dragonspawn and an eagle-faced murderous librarian.

  "The road has not rocked us gently," Fiora said. She casually brushed the dust off her shoulders. "We are in your fair town for a short while. To aid in our exit, I am searching for maps that will reveal to us the easiest path to Everyrosehasitsthorn."

  The librarian stared down her beak for several seconds before pointing to her left. "Maps are in section B7. There are maps of the counties, the potato fields, the neighboring realms and one map, which I highly recommend, includes the various bathhouses of Metaloria, if you are so inclined to be civilized."

  Fiora was gritting her teeth so hard that her jaw muscles bulged. She lifted her lips, showing her teeth. "Thank you, honorable librarian of Hair, brave keeper of knowledge," Fiora said. Her tone was neutral as she turned away from the desk. Kim followed her towards where the feathered finger had pointed.

  It wasn't until they'd taken a few steps, she realized Damon was still standing at the desk. Fiora stopped to give him a hurry-along glare.

  But Damon was staring above the librarian's head. He whispered something that sounded like "Ingvay" to Kim. It certainly wasn't English.

  The librarian looked down at him as if seeing Damon for the first time. Her eyes narrowed, and then she asked, "What did you say?"

  Kim took a quick step back, then put her hand on Damon's shoulder. "Uh, he's always muttering. Forgive him."

  "Yes, yes," he said. "I'm the Mutt Lange of muttering."

  The other two librarians had stopped their work to stare at him; their gazes were both hungry and angry. Günter looked up, then back at Damon. "And why are you examining the space above my head?"

  "Uh… uh …" Damon said.

  "He's had bad potato wine," Kim said. The librarian settled her glare on Kim.

  "Here's some free advice," the librarian said. "Associate with a better class of being. The dragonspawn are the most horrid of all flying creatures in Metaloria. That one will only bring you a dark and intellect-deprived destruction." Then the librarian turned her back and filed scrolls as if the patrons had never existed. There were wings on her back, but they didn't look big enough for flight.

  "Let's go," Kim said. But a few steps later she whispered. "What was that about?"

  "There was a word floating above her head along with her Metal Health. It surprised me."

  "What word was it?"

  He looked up, seeing they had joined Fiora. "I'll explain later."

  There were long, narrow tables with several citizens of Hair sitting and perusing scrolls. It was hard not to look at their hair. A tiny man with hair almost twice his size was in the corner staring at a scroll and concentrating as if his life depended on its contents.

  "Was that librarian being rude to you?" Kim whispered.

  "The librarian's rudeness has a historical source: once, many, many eons ago, a regiment of dragonspawn burned down a library in Riff."

  "Well, burning down a library is a rather terrible thing to do," Kim said.

  "I agree." Fiora sounded surprisingly amiable. "But I didn't burn the library down. So I don't deserve the blame."

  Fiora took somewhere around her twentieth scroll off the shelf, opened it, made a huffing noise, then carefully rolled it back up. When she got to the next scroll, though, she didn't huff. Instead, she kept it open and walked over to the nearest table.

  "This is where you arrived in Metaloria." Fiora pointed at the lower left-hand side of the map. It said Rothland. Her finger was over the Blayre Palace which must be the castle on top of the dungeon. "And we went northwards towards Poison." She dragged her finger through the thin Black Metal Realm and into Hair, which, to Kim's surprise, was a land in the shape of a mullet. Fiora stopped on an X that had Poison below it.

  According to the map, they had travelled a short distance. "And all we have to do is take a skiff up the Bretbachneil river to Twistysista and follow the Highway to Hades past Sweet, Child, and o'Mine until we reach Everyrosehasitsthorn. As long as monsters don't devour us and brigands don't slay us, it should only take a week of travelling. Though the moons will cross before then, so I hope Blayre's deadline is malleable." She pointed at a lumpy realm in the middle of the map, careful not to poke a hole in the vellum.

  "We nearly died five times just getting here," Kim said. "How will we get that far?"

  "You exaggerate," Fiora said. "But we will have an arduous journey. So we will purchase a few spells."

  "You said we couldn't buy spells here!" Damon said.

  "Because I knew you'd get overly excited."

  "I am excited! What sort of spells? Invisibility? Transmogrification? Fireballs?"

  "Cooked meat," Fiora said.

  "Cooked meat?" Damon repeated.

  Fiora sighed and leaned on the table. "Yes, the thing you will need most when our rations run out is cooked meat. Now both of you memorize this map in case we get separated." They both stared down.

  "Got it," Damon announced a few seconds later. He rubbed his hands together. "Every name on the map was already familiar to me. Love this world!"

  "Are you done yet?" Fiora asked. Kim stared. And stared. The names in this world were thought up by someone who didn't know how to spell that well. She settled for memorizing a straight line from Poison to the city of Everyrosehasitsthorn which Fiora had said was their destination.

  She was about halfway through jamming the rest of the map in her mind when Fiora said, "That is enough time." She yanked the map away. "I'll buy the spells, and we will be off."

  They waited by the door until Fiora returned. "Let us go; our beds await." Then she opened the door, and they followed her onto the street.