#oh! the police were an english invention! what if i just did ireland where the english never invaded!

[gohard-or-gohomo]

Why has my planning for a fun lesbian detective story turned into researching brehon law. WHAT IS HAPPENING!!!!

[rolcomictranscriptions]

Rivers of London Audio Only Short Stories - A Rare Book of Cunning Device

Thank you so much to the guest contributor who transcribed this.

A Rare Book of Cunning Device

By Ben Aaronovitch

Available from Audible.

Audible Studios presents "A Rare Book of Cunning Device," written by Ben Aaronovitch.  Read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.

***

"Aha!" said the librarian.  "You must be Mamusu's boy."  The librarian was a tiny, round-faced white woman, who appeared to be dressed in several layers of brightly-colored cardigans.

I confirmed that I was that Peter Grant, and she beamed at me.

"I knew your mum back in Freetown when she was just a wee slip of a girl," she said.

"Did you?" I asked, stupidly, because I was having trouble code-shifting from job to family acquaintance.  Especially one who used my mum's Sierra Leonean name.  Most white people that know her call her Rose, even my Dad.

"I came to your christening," she said.  "Enormous party.  Food was brilliant."

"I'll tell her we met," I said.

"I wonder if she'll remember me," she said.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"I haven't said, have I?"

"No."

"Ah.  Yes."  She held out her hand for me to shake.

"Elsie Winstanley.  I'm the specialist collection manager, thank you for coming."

"My pleasure," I said.  "What seems to be the problem?"

"We appear to have acquired a poltergeist," she said.

This seemed unlikely.  According to the massed wisdom of the practitioners who came before me, which was corroborated at least in part by my own research, ghosts, poltergeists, and other incorporeal phenomena fed off the vestigia that accumulates in the fabric of the material world.  This buildup takes time, and while stone, brick, and even concrete retain vestigia well, a building generally had to be at least thirty years old before acquiring any ghosts.  More than a hundred years for a poltergeist, or something more exotic.  The British Library had been built in 1997, and was less than seventeen years old.

It was an odd building, too, a sort of collision between the monumental brick-built bulk of a 1930's power station, and the strange, postmodernist desire to recreate that famous Escher interior.  You know—the one with all the perspective-defying staircases.

Ms. Winstanley and me had met in the foyer, where I was issued with a security pass, because not even a warrant card gets you backstage at the second-largest book collection in the world.

Behind the reception desk rose the King's Library, a six-story glass tower containing 65,000 books, donated by King George the Third during a rare fit of sanity.  There are theories that he feared, in his madness, that they were possessed of unquiet spirits and felt he could not sleep soundly under the same roof.

Or, more likely to my mind, he felt the palace needed the shelf space.

Still, that was a lot of historical material, so I wasn't about to dismiss the claim out of hand.  "What makes you think you've got a poltergeist?" I asked.

"Things have been moved around during the night," she said.  "Doors that should be closed have been left open.  And some books have been found on the wrong shelf."

"You sure it isn't just—"

"Yes, we're sure," she said.  "We're librarians.  We notice that sort of thing.  And in any case, while books may occasionally mislay themselves, priceless sixteenth century globes do not."

"It was stolen?"

"It was moved, from one end of the basement to the other," she said.

"Well, perhaps somebody needed the space," I said.

"This—" began Ms. Winstanley, and then changed her mind.  "I think it will be easier to just show you the basement.  Which she did.

All four sodding floors.

All with very tight security.  Particularly the top-secret sections, where they keep the classified maps from the Ministry of Defense.

"Things don't move of their own accord," said Ms. Winstanley.  "Not in this library."

So I did a preliminary IVA, or Initial Vestigia Assessment, and because it was a sodding big building with four floors of basements, it took me most of the afternoon.

"It mostly manifests itself at night," said Ms. Winstanley when we stopped for coffee.

It certainly wasn't manifesting itself to me.  I noted down all the details, thanked Ms. Winstanley for the tour, and headed back to the Folly.  There, I planned to fill in one of our brand-spanking-new Falcon Incident report forms, and file it until Nightingale came back from hunting big cats in Norfolk.

Only, I got back to find our archivist, Professor Harold Postmartin, D.Phil, F.R.S., enjoying tea in the atrium.  I made the mistake of telling him about the alleged poltergeist in the library, because he might find it of interest, and his face lit up.  I know that look of enthusiasm, and the last time I saw it, I ended up covered in pesticide and wrestling with a tree.

"Not Hatbox Winstanley?" said Postmartin.

I described her as best as I could, and Postmartin confirmed that it was the woman he was thinking of.  So-called, because she was said to have travelled down the Amazon in a hatbox, swum the English Channel wearing nothing but goose fat, and run a library in Kolwezi until she was forcibly evacuated by the French Foreign Legion.

"I'm almost certain that the last two are true," said Postmartin.  "And if old Hatbox says there's something supernatural in her stacks, then I for one would take her very seriously indeed."

So back we went to the British Library, where Ms. Winstanley, upon hearing that Postmartin was staying the night, insisted that she join us in our ghost-hunting exploits.

"Not only am I intensely curious to see what you boys actually get up to," she said, "but you also cannot leave these university types unsupervised amongst your stacks.  They're famously light-fingered, and they don't call Harold 'Postmartin the Pirate' for nothing.

When I asked who called Postmartin a pirate and why, she merely winked and said that, while she'd love to tell me, it was still subject to the thirty-year rule.

"Official secrets act, and all that," she said.

As revenge, I popped back and fetched Toby.

When Ms. Winstanley objected, I told her that Toby was a highly-trained police dog.

She gave Toby a skeptical look.  "Trained in what?" she asked.

"Many strange things," I said, "of which the uninitiated is not meant to know."

"Are," said Ms. Winstanley.  "Are not meant to know, not is."

And that is why I don't normally argue with librarians.

So me and one of the security staff carried gear down to the basement while Ms. Winstanley and Postmartin compared ninja librarian notes.

We were making camp in one of the central work rooms on basement Two.  Underground, the workspace and stacks were as generously proportioned as a billionaire's basement, with high ceilings and wide corridors.  Everything that wasn't painted 1970s sci-fi white was a brilliant red or blue, causing me to have an almost irresistible urge to tattoo my eyeball and parkour my way up the walls.

The ceilings had to be high because not only did the bookshelves go up over two meters, but above them ran the Paternoster Book Delivery System.  Essentially the same as the baggage-handling system in a major airport, only designed not to destroy the packages they were carrying.

Ms. Winstanley explained how it worked on the first tour.  Readers upstairs, in one of the many reading rooms, order a book on the computer.  The book got pulled off one of the 625 kilometers of shelf, put in a box, the box goes on the patented Paternoster Book Delivery System, and is carried upstairs, where … you can guess the rest.

By law, the British Library gets two copies of every book published in the UK and Ireland, which adds up to a lot of books, over fourteen million so far, "Although the vast majority of the Mills & Boone collection is kept at Boston Spa," said Ms. Winstanley.

And that wasn't counting the 260,000 journals, 4 million maps, and 60 million patents.

"Sixty million?"

"Oh yes," said Ms. Winstanley.  "People are extraordinarily inventive."

"Obviously," I said.

"Most of them are complete tosh, of course," she said.

There were specialist bookcases for old, rare, and strangely shaped books, but most of the stock was kept in huge ranks of mechanical bookcases, the kind that closed together to minimize floor space.  When you wanted a book, you found the right section and turned a handle which drove a series of gears that pried two of the shelves apart to form a temporary aisle.  The gearing was high, and the shelves were heavy.  Ms. Winstanley must have spotted me testing the weight with my shoulder.

"Oh, you have to make sure people know you're in there," she said.  "Otherwise, somebody might close it and you'd be squished."

"Whoever knew this job was so dangerous?" I said.

"Ah, yes, librarianship," said Ms. Winstanley.  "It's not for the faint-hearted."

***

By 11 o'clock that evening, we were all set up, so we cracked open one of the industrial-sized thermoses I'd brought from the Folly while we waited for the last of the staff to vacate the basement.  Even the security staff were leaving, so we wouldn't mistake them for a marauding poltergeist.

Since neither our phones or my airwave or my now patent-pending magic detectors would work in the basement, our strategy was to leave at least one person at the base camp while the others went out as a single group and didn't split up under any circumstances.  Team Folly was not at home for Mr. Scooby-Doo.

"Particularly since I am, in fact, the only one of us who knows their way around," said Ms. Winstanley.

So, a little bit before twelve, me, Toby, and Ms. Winstanley went for our first patrol.  Now, what with the sloppy procedure, the size of the basement, the lack of any detection equipment, and the newness of the building, I thought it was pretty unlikely that we were going to discover anything during this or any subsequent night's searching.  So of course, less than half an hour later, we practically tripped over the bloody thing.

There's a particular kind of spookiness about being brightly lit underground.  The constant fluorescent light pushes at your peripheral vision, and the absence of shadows flattens out your perspective.  It also doesn't help that the climate control system is prone to random ticks and hums.

We started with the closest of the caged-in areas set aside for holding rare, valuable, or classified parts of the collection.

"Or, more likely, because these are the last empty shelves available," said Ms. Winstanley as she unlocked the gate and let us into the first one.

The stacks inside have large shelves holding big, leather-bound books that look like props for a fantasy film.  The tan and brown of the covers were brilliant against the sterile gray-white of the shelves.  I wanted to reach out and run my fingers along their spines, to see if some of the history would rub off.  But I'm better trained than that.

I caught Toby eyeing up a corner of the stack, so I tugged on his lead to make him behave.

"This is mainly—" started Ms. Winstanley, but before she could finish her sentence something shot past our feet and skulled out into the open gate.

I didn't get much more than an impression that it was bigger than Toby, angular, brown, and had lots of legs.  By the time I had activated enough neurons to run to the cage door, the thing had gone.

"Tell me that wasn't a spider," said Ms. Winstanley in a deceptively calm tone.

"Can't have been," I said.

"Thank God for that," she said.  "Can't stand spiders."

"It was too big," I said.  "You can't scale an exoskeleton up that far."  The inverse square law can be such a comfort sometimes.  Plus, I definitely remembered something about gas diffusion and box lungs or something like that.

"So, magic can't make things bigger?" asked Ms. Winstanley, and I really wished she hadn't.

"It definitely wasn't a poltergeist," I said.  "That much is certain."  I looked at Toby who hadn't reacted until the thing, whatever it was, ran past him, and I hadn't registered a hint of vestigia either.  Perhaps it wasn't magical at all.  Could it be mechanical, electronic, a machine?  The spider configuration was considered a good shape for autonomous robots.

"I brought the wrong gear," I said.  We should have had cameras, motion detectors, and infrared sensors.  Isn't that always the way?  You set out to hunt a ghost, and you trip over a robot instead.

"Shouldn't we go after it?" asked Ms. Winstanley.

"Let's see if we can find out what it was doing in here," I said.

I found marks on the side of the stacks, and more on one of the posts that supported one of the metal wire cages on the opposite side.  The shelves were full of exactly the books Ms. Winstanley said she expected to be there, some hugely valuable, some historically significant.  "All of them priceless," she said.

"Anything missing?"

Ms. Winstanley said she couldn't tell without checking the catalog on a terminal back at base camp, so we trooped back and I briefed Postmartin and suggested we call it a night.

"Nonsense," said Postmartin.  "Where is your sense of adventure?"

I said it was back at the Folly with my forensic collection kit, motion sensors, and taser.  He literally said "Pish," which I never heard a real person say in my life.

"We should at least give deduction a chance," he said.  "Is it possible it was a book?"

"It had legs," I said.

"There is a long history of extraordinary things being hidden in books," said Postmartin.  "Alcohol, keys, letters, very small heirs to a throne …"

"Hand grenades," said Ms. Winstanley without looking up from her terminal.

"Where was that?" asked Postmartin.

"Bulawayo," she said, "in '75."

"Hand grenades, pistols, radios," said Postmartin.  "Why not a robot?"

A book robot seemed a bit Despicable Me, to me, but why not?

Once Ms. Winstanley had a list, it took us less than five minutes to locate the place on the shelves, above head-height of course, where a book was missing.  

"A Book of Cunning Device," said Ms Winstanley, reading the details off her tablet.  "Attributed to Salman ibn Jabir al-Rashid.  A tenth century scholar from Baghdad."

"Why attributed?" I asked.

There was a theory, explained Ms. Winstanley, that the book didn't originate in the Islamic Near East at all.  That it had been manufactured in the west, probably Venice, in imitation of the works that were being brought home from the Holy Land by pilgrims and crusaders.  "Like a cargo cult object," she said.  "Because if you look at the so-called writing, and you have any Arabic or Farsi at all, it's clear that it's nothing like real Arabic, not even close."

She showed me pictures.  Lines of squiggly text running across a page.  The images were poor, and judging by the color saturation derived from mid-twentieth-century photography, but it looked to me like the writing had been done in gold ink.

"Last catalogued in 1972," said Ms. Winstanley.  "And poorly done, at that.  We were waiting for our Persian specialist to get back from holiday and have a look."

Another image showed what looked like a musical instrument built into the body of the book, like a horizontal harp with pegs to adjust tension, a horizontal dulcimer, what they called a santur in Iran and Iraq.  I recognized it from an album my Dad had by the bloke from Deep Forest.

"Or perhaps a musical instrument disguised as a book," said Ms. Winstanley.  "Intriguing, no?"

I asked why, if it was so intriguing, it hadn't been catalogued yet, which caused Ms. Winstanley to snort.

"There's never enough people to get through your backlog," said Postmartin.  "That's the curse of librarianship.  If your library is of any quality at all, then its collection is going to outpace your manpower."

I spotted Toby sniffing around another corner of the stack, and moved smartly to stop him marking his territory.  But I saw he was sniffing at something at his head height.  It looked like a sort of scuff mark left behind by the foot of a tripod, or the stud of a football boot.  There was a second further up the stack, and a third, and a fourth, making a trail to an empty shelf far up enough for me to need to use a kick-stool to reach it.

"And that's where the book was kept," said Ms. Winstanley.

I put my gloves on just in case, and reached gingerly into the empty shelf.  And there it was.  A vibration, like the wind breaking through the strings of a harp, in a cascade of notes like running water.

It was magical, then.  Which was a bit of a relief, given that the alternative was super-science, and I didn't really want to have to explain that to Nightingale.  "That globe that was moved," I said.  "Where exactly did you find it?"

The uppermost basement was much larger than the ones below, and most of the space was taken up with the kind of heavy engineering required to keep 165 kilometers of shelving at just the right temperature and humidity.  Plus the humans using the building above, of course, but that was pretty much an afterthought.  Unlike the book storage areas below, which had been mainly gray and white with red trimming, the plant rooms were silver, with huge cylinders painted blue connected with yellow pipes.  Definitely the boss-level, I thought, as we crept through it.

Both Ms. Winstanley and Postmartin followed me in because neither wanted to be left behind.  Ms. Winstanley was carrying Toby, because he most definitely had wanted to be left behind.  But fortunately I had a stash of Molly's home-cooked sausages on hand to bribe him with.

The misplaced globe had been found close to the central air conditioning unit that served the six-story tower which housed the King's Collection.  The unit itself was a huge blue metal box, capped with silver, and vanishing upwards into a web of silver struts and pipes at roof level.  A row of chunky green boxes, like the lockers at a gym, festooned with yellow and black warning markers, housed the power regulators.

"I don't want to cramp your style," shouted Postmartin over the roar of the air conditioners, "but I'd be rather careful about using magic just here.  A moment of over-enthusiasm and it's good-bye priceless national treasure."

"Great," I said.  "I'll ask it to come quietly, then."

"Might be worth a try," he said.

Toby growled softly and belched.  I followed his gaze and saw movement just behind a pillar of silver metal pipes and bracing struts.   Judging by the yellow and black hazard flashes, tampering with them could result in electrocution, suffocation, and/or freezing.  Or, more seriously, should you allow books to be damaged, death by librarian.

I told the librarians to stay where they were and advanced, cautiously.  I stopped when I had a good view.

It was hanging off a junction box.  By, I estimated, eight of its ten legs.  These, I saw, were cables made from thinner strands twisted together.  Perhaps a deployment of the dulcimer strings.  The book part was open like a pair of wings or a carapace, and hid how the cables connected to the main body.  It was trembling as it clutched the junction box, and occasionally a twitch would ripple along the gripping legs.  I had the strange impression it was feeding, but off what?  Electricity?  That would be pretty bloody unprecedented, magically speaking, not to mention astonishing in something crafted in Ninth Century Baghdad.  But obviously not impossible.

It had been the leathery book cover that had put me in mind of a huge insect.  But now that it was staying still, I found it a lot less frightening.

Right up to the point where it leapt off the box and went for my face.

I don't like insects.  Never have.

I jumped backwards so hard that I practically landed on my bum, and looked up just in time to see the Cunning Device skittering over the concrete floor towards me.

I ran, and I'm still impressed with the way I managed to flip over and get my legs under me, before the bloody thing reached me.  I went haring down a corridor of silver pipes and blue tanks, towards a chunky-looking fire door.  I didn't dare risk looking behind me, and I doubted I'd hear the pitter-patter of legs over the noise of the industrial air conditioning.

Do you know that moment in a film, when someone on foot is being chased by a car, and instead of veering onto the pavement and hiding in a doorway, or behind a bollard, they keep running straight ahead until they get run down?  I like to learn from the mistakes of fictional characters, so at the next opportunity, I veered left down a corridor formed by rows of storage lockers.  There, freed from the risk of committing treasonable levels of property damage, I turned, took a deep breath, and prepared an impello.  I figured my best bet was to flip it on its back and then pin it down.

I stood ready, keeping my mind clear, and waiting.  And waiting.

Now, the thing is, you need a clear mind to do magic properly.  And the thing about a clear mind is that it allows you to think rationally about your actions.  So when the cunning device walked past my position—quite slowly, I noticed—and blithely continued on its way, I was slightly insulted, to be honest.

So I stepped out after it had gone past to see what it did next.  Which turned out to be 'bang into the door.'  It stepped back, and tried again, harder this time, but the door was designed as serious firebreak and was too heavy.  The Cunning Device skipped half a meter to the left and banged against the wall on that side, and then repeated the maneuver a meter to the right.  Then, it rotated slowly in place, as if having a good look around, before returning up the corridor towards me.

Now that it wasn't chasing me I could see that the Cunning Device didn't move that fast.  The tips of its long, spindly legs skittered on the smooth concrete floors.

What it needed, I decided, was a set of tiny slippers, or, more practically, friction pads, on the ends of its legs.  I considered jumping on it, and snapping its covers shut, the way you're supposed to with an alligator's jaws, but I was getting a handle on its behavior.  So I stepped smartly out of its way and followed behind.

Salman ibn Jabir al-Rashid, I thought. You must have been well chuffed with yourself when you built this.  And we may only know you through your work, but what a piece of work it is!

"What can you tell me about this Salman al-Rashid?" I asked Ms. Winstanley when she and Postmartin joined the parade.

Almost nothing, as it turned out.  He was mentioned in a text from Tenth Century Baghdad, as having been a worthy successor to the Banū Mūsā, the famous trio of inventive brothers.  And as the author of the Book of Cunning Device.  And that was it.

"It's not that unusual," said Postmartin.  "There are many people we only really know from their work."

"Shakespeare, for example," said Ms. Winstanley.  "Came from Stratford, went to London, wrote plays, was a genius, retired back to Stratford with the fruits of his pen.  His will, his grave, the house he used to live in, is just about all we have.  And the plays, of course, the glorious plays."

"You don't think they might have been …?"

"No," said both librarians simultaneously.

"Our Salman is seven hundred years older still," said Ms. Winstanley.  "He could have been the toast of Baghdad in his day, but there's no guarantee we would have heard of him."

I wondered how close we'd come to having a magic-robot-based industrial Revolution in the Tenth Century, and what had happened to prevent it.  I decided that, for the moment, I was going to add that question to the long list of what my cousin Abigail has taken to calling The Big Bumper Fun Book of Unanswered Questions.

So, we trooped after the Cunning Device as best we could, as it worked its way back down to Basement Two, via the paternoster book delivery system, I noticed, and returned itself to its assigned shelf in the book cage.

"What now?" asked Ms. Winstanley.

I didn't think it was a good idea to let an unclassified magical device run around inside the nation's rare book collection, so I asked Postmartin whether the Folly, under one if its many agreements, had the authority to confiscate dangerous magical artifacts.

"As a matter of fact, I think we do," said Postmartin.

"Now see here, Harold," said Ms. Winstanley, but Postmartin held up a placating hand.

"We'll call it a loan, and craft a nice tailor-made storage facility," he said.

Inside a Faraday cage, I thought, inside a room paneled with greenwood and cork boards and other non-magically conducting stuff.

"You can research under controlled conditions, and partake of Molly's growing range of afternoon teas," he said.

I think afternoon tea might have clinched it, because Ms. Winstanley deflated, but only a little.

"I told you he was a pirate, didn't I?" she said.

***

You have been listening to an Audible Studios production of "A Rare Book of Cunning Device," written by Ben Aaronovitch and read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith