I awaken in pain, knowing I am in the wrong underworld. I still feel the cold ache from the iron blade that slipped through my ribs and stilled my heart. My hands tremble; I hold myself tight as the adrenaline of my final struggle drains out of me in wracking sobs.
I should have been greeted by the sound of running water, the soft hands of the attendants of Cmlech, ready to accept me into death. I would share the news of the struggle above: of the strike and massacre at the quarry. Then I would enter anew into the service of the eternal insurrection of Cmlech, secret god of death.
Instead, I am dead and alone in a dry, stone room, surrounded by books.
I exit into an enormous chamber, high-ceilinged, with the muffled atmosphere of a holy place. I pass through rows of stone shelves filled with books.
At the center of the great hall, a woman sits behind a wide, cluttered desk. Her long, grey hair is bound by a silver and turquoise clasp; her gown is the color of a clear winter sky and looks like it took a year’s labor to make.
My fellow dead wait in a line to see her. None will respond to my questions except to insist I be quiet. My feet tap an impatient dance, my hands open and close and I am close to screaming. Cmlech waits upon my news, and I am stuck in a queue.
Yet when I reach the front of the line and the woman looks up at me with eyes the color of wet soil, all my words flee.
“Library card?” she asks with hand held open.
“I... don’t have one.”
“It’s the card you used to enter the library. Have you lost it already?”
She sighs and takes a closer look at me. Her eyes narrow, her back stiffens, and her hand darts below the desk to grasp something I cannot see. I step back, try to look smaller.
What must she think of me? A woman in ripped, sweat-and-blood-stained worker’s clothes, my arms and shoulders wide and strong enough to earn the nickname “The Ox” at the quarry.
“Please. My name is Btta, I just died, and...” I grab the desk to stop my hands from shaking. “I don’t know where I am, and I need help. My god needs me. Can you help me?”
She relaxes, having made some judgment of me. “Oh, you poor thing. You must be so disoriented. This is the local branch of the Great Library, serving the underworld of the Merciful Goat of Epnos. I’m Hillie, the head librarian. I’m sorry, but we don’t do intake for the newly dead.” She gestures to the great door behind her. “You must have wandered in from Epnos reception?”
I shake my head and point to a small door. “I died, and then I woke up in that room.”
“Not possible. That’s the book-return chamber.” She looks me up and down, slowly. “And you, are not a book.”
“I know I’m not a book!” Cmlech forbid. “I’m not supposed to be here at all. Not in a library, not with a goat! I’m in the wrong underworld; I’m supposed to be with... my god.”
“And who is your god?” she asks, and my heart drops.
Why did she have to ask a question I cannot answer? “A god of death...”
Her face closes at my evasion. The patron behind me clears his throat, loudly and intentionally.
Hillie sighs, though I do not know if it is for me or the long line behind me.
“You’re a fascinating mystery, but without a library card I cannot help you.” She points to the line. “I have other clients to serve today.”
“Wait! I’m not just another dead person. I have an urgent message for my god!”
Hillie looks behind me and says, “Next patron, please?”
My face flushes hot in embarrassment and I stifle the urge to grab Hillie by her expensive gown and shake until she aids me. I tried that once on an Iolan clerk and still bear scars from the lashes my anger earned me.
I storm out the enormous front door of the library and into the cave the library was carved from. At the other end of the cave is a narrow passageway—presumably leading to the underworld of Epnos’s goat god—but it is blocked by a checkpoint. The goat-headed guards demand my paperwork and refuse entry when I explain why I have none. When I don’t leave immediately, their hands move to their sword hilts.
I try to re-enter the library, but the doors won’t open without a library card. I am trapped in this interstitial area, with no food or water, and nowhere to sleep but the hard, cold stone of a foreign underworld. I look up to the ceiling and wonder if any of my kin-workers survive miles above.
I should not have thought of them. My hands shake again. With nothing to occupy my mind, my thoughts return to the memory of my death.
It was snowing on the fifth day of the quarry-workers’ strike. The sun rose dim behind pure white snow clouds as my kin-workers and I took turns guarding the quarry entrance.
Gray-eyed Myrna arrived with a hug and the news of our case. She’d been helping us navigate the Iolan’s legal system, fighting the necromancers’ legal claims to our quarry. We sang and drank and played games to pass the time while we waited for the Iolan magistrate to make his decision.
When the cloud-dimmed sun reached its zenith, and the snow was two fingers thick on the ground, the necromancers arrived in their bone-white robes and demanded we leave. Standing death-still behind them were fourteen animated skeletons, befouled with alchemical pitch and inscribed with gold and silver runes. How many of those skeletons were our own dead, turned against us?
Their leader approached us, sword in one hand, paperwork in another.
“Myrna! You should have taken our offer.” He shook his head, mock-rueful. “It’s too late now. The Iolan magistrate has confirmed our claim to this quarry. Your assembly here is now illegal.”
Myrna walked toward him, her gray eyes wide and bright. “The magistrate doesn’t own the quarry. He has never even seen this quarry, has never worked its stone. Why should he decide its fate?”
The necromancer stepped forward. “In one hand I have a verified title document. In the other is a blade. You decide which one is more persuasive.”
“Do you really think the magistrate’s paper is stronger than the bodies that work this quarry? What has your blade ever built?”
It was meant to be the opening of her argument, but the head necromancer responded with a swipe of his sword. The high curve of Myrna’s neck blossomed with blood. I screamed as her body fell.
My world condensed down to my hammer and the crack of my enemies’ bones. We fought with the anger of those who have had too much taken from them, and with the determination of those whose service to the god of revolutions will continue even after death.
The skeletons fought in silence, bound to their creators’ greed. I brought two down with a roar and a lunge and a swing of my hammer and the rest surged upon me, separating me from the group. I was surrounded, but I did not yield. I pushed forward into the forest, hoping to draw enough skeletons away that my kin-workers could prevail.
We fought in the forest, the trees my allies, the skeletons untiring. The skeleton before me lacked half its skull yet it still loped along, sword in hand. I swung my hammer, unaware of the skeleton behind me. The back of my head burst black and white and I fell.
I awoke to the silence of the snowy forest, imprisoned by the iron-strong grip of two skeletons. Above me stood the necromancers’ leader, his white robes stained red, his shaven head tattooed with the symbol of their order. His smile was triumphant, and his sword flashed silver-blue as it descended like the unfurling of a broken promise down into my chest.
I die, and the memory starts anew.
I cannot stop remembering. My breath comes fast and sharp and uncontrolled and I grip the stone beneath me, desperate for something to hold. I feel hunted without my hammer.
This is how the librarian finds me, crying on the steps of her library. I flinch at her hand on my shoulder. She helps me up, and I follow her inside and up the stairs to her living quarters. If she says words, I do not parse them. She places a mug of steaming beef broth in my hands, and I am brought back to my body.
I sit at her kitchen table and watch her cook dinner. She flows from one task to another, like a dancer who has practiced their moves five thousand times before.
It is hard not to admire her, to be grateful for her late-coming mercy. I want to stare at the way her wide hips move beneath the blue of her gown. But I must hold tight to my anger. I must not forget how she dismissed me. She is just like the Iolans, who prioritize their legalities over kin and compassion.
As she cooks, and the scope of the meal becomes apparent, I fear she hopes to trap me with a debt of hospitality. I have nothing to offer in return but myself, and I am bound by other obligations.
“Are you cooking all this for me?” I ask. “You don’t have to do that.” Secretly, I am joyous, my nose intoxicated with the scent of her food, my stomach desperate for sustenance after days of scant meals during the strike.
She turns and smiles and takes a taste of the sauce she is reducing. “Oh! I cook this much every night. What’s the point of being dead if you can’t enjoy yourself?”
I do enjoy myself. There are spices I have never tasted before; everything is smothered in peppers, though not all the dishes are spicy. After the meal, we drip honey on hollow fry-bread. Cmlech have mercy on my stomach—I am stuffed, yet I cannot stop.
She watches me, eyes obscured by the steam rising from her mug. “So, my mysterious Btta. You appear in my library with no card, and no entry record. And there aren’t any passages to the surfaces nearby, so I doubt you walked here still alive.” She raises an eyebrow. “You have no idea how it happened?”
“No.”
“And you follow a death god, but won’t say which one.” She grins. “You’re going to make me guess, aren’t you?”
“I would prefer if you didn’t.”
“Your clothes and your accent make me think you’re from Iolas.”
“Ytarra,” I correct her reflexively with my island’s true name.
“Does anyone still call it that? But if you’re Iolan—sorry, Ytarran—and you worship a death god you won’t talk about...” She taps her chin. “Cmlech!”
A hiss escapes my lips. “Keep that name out of your mouth. My god has enemies, and a bad death comes to those who don’t keep their worship hidden.”
Cmlech is a god of death, but not the death of the individual. The servants of Cmlech work for the death of empire, the death of the systems that press their boots on the necks of the powerless. This is why worship of our god must be done in secret.
She laughs with more sadness than mirth. “Dear, we are already dead. We get to leave all that behind us when we die.” She takes my hand. Her pulse is warm beneath her soft skin. I cannot look up into her eyes. “Feel my hand. Look around you. You are safe here.”
I pull my hand away, as my eyes blur with tears. How can I be safe with this woman who ferrets out my secrets, who tempts me with compassion I so badly want to accept? She is too much like the Iolans, usurper-lords of our island, who hold gold and paper in one hand and a whip in the other, who consort with necromancers that plot not just to steal our wealth but defile our dead.
I surge upward, knocking my chair backwards, and flee to her sitting room.
Unlike the Iolans, Librarian Hillie knows when to stop tugging a thread with pain on the end of it. She lets me be in her sitting room, and when she comes to apologize, she does so without touching or staring. She accepts my stone silence as response, not pressing me for forgiveness.
When she offers her bed, I refuse. In Ytarra, a bed is just a place to sleep—my kin-workers and I all share a bed—but I have heard that foreigners conflate beds with couples and sex. I don’t know what she means with her offer, or how to ask. I refuse her three times before she relents and makes up the couch.
Sleep takes me quickly, but so do dreams of my death. I awaken with a desperate scream, my body sweat-stained and sheet-tangled. Hillie rushes in and envelops me in a hug. She is so soft, and her scent reminds me of huddling beneath a warm quilt on a snowy day.
I want so badly to sink into her embrace; I hate my desire for this woman who is simultaneously enraging and compassionate. My skin is suddenly too hot. I roar and I curse her for invading my privacy. She flees the sitting room with an apology. My pillow is wet with tears before I fall asleep again.
In the morning, she serves fried eggs on a bed of spicy beans and rice. She does not mention the night before. Why should I be grateful for that small mercy? Instead, she explains the difficulties in getting me to Cmlech.
The underworld is a physical place, with real geography. It is full of gods who work against each other, and full of humans who bring their notions of borders and fear of foreigners.
Working out a route to Cmlech’s domain—and acquiring the necessary paperwork for safe passage—will be a difficult and time-consuming task. Librarian Hillie tells me this with a grin, as if the challenge excites her.
In the meantime, I am trapped in the library, surrounded by books and indebted to a woman whose questions I do not wish to answer.
Hillie puts me to work: mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, fighting the book-borer beetle infestation. She instructs me in the fire-prevention protocol, carefully demonstrating the emergency fire-suppression failsafe: a god-stone–powered device that will flood the library with an inert gas—suffocating the flames and anyone not wearing a breathing mask.
When I have learned the routine of the library, she asks me to help shelve books.
I tell her I cannot read, and she gasps like I murdered her goat. Then her face turns joyous. “I can teach you! We’ll do daily lessons after closing time.”
I cringe at the idea. “A kind offer, but no, thank you.”
I try to change the subject, but she is so bewildered by my refusal to learn, so desperate to understand, that she hounds me to explain.
There is a reason Ytarrans keep their history orally. The Iolans weren’t the first to invade our island; they won’t be the last. Books can be burned or altered to suit the invader’s narrative, but the words in our head are beyond their reach. Our children do not learn to read so they cannot be taught false words. We Ytarrans know our true history; we will always resist assimilation and extermination.
As I explain this, horror spreads across her face. She doesn’t argue with me, but our conversations wither down to polite things like, “Would you pass the pepper flakes?” or, “Please tell the young couple in row thirteen to go have sex somewhere else?” Does my illiteracy offend her? Does she think I hate her because she is a librarian? She isn’t Iolan; my unease around reading has nothing to do with her.
A part of me relishes the silence. Yet at night, my mind cannot help but dwell on the idea of Hillie and me on the couch, our thighs touching, her hand guiding mine as I trace out the letters on the book before us. I hate the way the thought slips into my head in the undefended moments before sleep. Yet it is preferable to the dreams of my death, of the falling sword, the silent grin of the skeletons, and the screams of my kin-workers.
When I awaken crying, Hillie does not come to me in her intricately embroidered nightgown. She does not surround me with the softness of a hug, wipe the tears from my eyes, and bring me a cup of something warm and soothing. Why do I even want that?
I must miss my kin-workers, whom I shared a large bed with. If I awoke in the night, it was to the soft sounds of sleep, knowing I was surrounded by love and mutual protection.
Now when I wake, I am utterly alone.
One morning, breaking the silence of breakfast, she says, “Would you mind if I asked how you died?”
“I was murdered. My kin-workers...” I struggle for words, for breath, for respite against the sudden pounding of my heart. She waits for me to say more, and while I still fear the memory of my death, the pressure of holding it in wears on me.
I tell her of the quarry, of Myrna and our legal struggles. When I mention the necromancers, she sucks her breath in.
I ask, “They’re here too?” The back of my neck tingles. I feel the need to check that the door is locked.
Hillie nods. “The Order for the Utilization of the Spirit. I’ve had trouble with them.” Hillie tenses, like she, too, fears they might walk through the door. “We have an original set of The Eight Deaths of the Mantean Hetwoman. I think we’re the only branch that has all eight original volumes.”
“Why do they want it?”
“I haven’t read all eight volumes, but my understanding is that the Hetwoman’s autobiography contradicts their accounts of the founding of their order—and contains several gorgeously illustrated schematics of their bone-rites. They claim it as their property, and want me to either hand it over or destroy it, along with our entire section on bone-lore.”
“Will you?”
She looks like I slapped her. “Of course not! Joal preserve me. I moved the volumes to the restricted reading room. But they kept coming round, threatening me, and vandalizing the library. So I confiscated their library cards and escorted them out. They won’t be coming back.”
I don’t share her confidence. The necromancers have been here, and I am sure they will return. They will come for the book; they will come for me.
I cannot be defenseless again. I flee downstairs to the supply closet. Surely in this mess of janitorial supplies and bookmaking tools there is a weapon?
I search through the bookbinder’s knives; the blades are sharp but short, useless against a sword’s reach. My hands shake and my grip is weak, but I can’t stop to calm myself.
I grin when I see the book-backing hammers. I pick up the largest, an iron head and a nearly two-foot haft. Small compared with my rock-breaking hammer, but it feels achingly familiar in my hands.
When I show up for work, Hillie sees the hammer strapped to my belt. She catches herself before she asks me about it, and I have to hide my smile.
She does not protest when I take the hammer to bed with me. A day later she has—without comment—installed a bracket next to the bed for me to hang the hammer.
At dinner, I ask if she has made progress on a route to Cmlech. She frowns and says, “It would go faster if you could help me, if you learned to read.”
I grunt and look away. It’s good she doesn’t know how tempted I am, how much I hate my own uselessness.
We explore other options.
Hillie asks, “Weren't you a quarry-worker? Why not tunnel upward, back to the surface and the world of the living? Like the legend of Boros Rock-Breaker.”
I try not to laugh. Stone is my expertise—I explain in detail the difficulties involved in traversing a mile of bedrock with nowhere to put the removed stone. She smiles as I talk, basking in the breadth of my knowledge.
The next day, Hillie explains that when a person dies in the underworld, they will return to their god’s domain, just like when they originally died.
She tells me this while making dinner, a knife in one hand and her eyebrow raised. I jump up from the table, eyes locked on the knife. She thinks she is being funny, but I still remember the feeling of the blade that killed me. I am not willing to die again to test her theory. I fear that whatever sent me to this wrong underworld—whether necromancer’s magic or cosmic accident—still clings to me, and could return me somewhere worse.
Despite myself, I fall into a routine. After weeks of nightmares, I sleep through the night for the first time. Every corner of the library is familiar to me now. When did it begin to feel more like a home than a prison?
On the day we have cumin-crusted leg of lamb, Hillie places a large book on the kitchen table. The wooden cover bears an illustration of the Cloister of the Setting Sun, done in gold, silver, and coral. I stay silent; I don’t pick it up. I won’t rise to her bait.
I avoid looking at the book, not wanting to see her smile when I take an interest. Yet how can I resist? Ytarrans still tell stories of the glory of the art held within the Cloister, of the beauty of the building itself, of the way the sun would shine through the god-stone–veined marble. I have only ever known it in its present form: crumbling and blackened by the Iolans’ burning-oil throwers.
I make it three days before I succumb to temptation. The book is full of illustrations of Ytarra the way it used to be. There are people who look like me, but wearing expensive and old-fashioned clothes. On the last page, there is a picture of a massive, marble tower rising from the hill where the Iolans’ brick administrative palace now stands.
There are words, too, but not written in the Iolan script. For the first time in my life, I want to read.
The next morning, I confront Hillie. She must tell me what this book is, what it says. She smiles that damnable smile and I almost throw the book across the room. Instead, I clutch it to my heart. Yes, it is a book, but it contains something precious.
It happens like one of my daydreams. We sit on the couch together, her soft hips touching mine. I struggle between flinching away and pressing myself closer to her.
She guides my hand as I sound out the letters. Her perfume smells like the wind in the pine trees of home, and my heart thumps and my stomach drops. It is too much; I pull my hand away and hold myself tense.
Do I want her to kiss me? I don’t even know how to ask. There are no pine trees here, and Hillie would not understand if I gifted her a sap-smeared branch. What I really want is to stop wanting her.
I can feel her looking at me. Time grinds slow as I stare at the floor until I cannot bear to look away. I bring my head up slowly, trembling at the effort. Our eyes meet and she is full of concern for me; her smile tentative.
“Btta,” she says, then pauses. “You are so strong.” One of her hands grips the muscles of my arm, the other she places on the space just below my neck. I cannot breathe; I quiver with the desire to leap away, but I fear what I will lose if I do.
She dips her head. “I thought that meant I couldn’t hurt you, but...” She bites her lip, searching for words. “I want to know you. To know what you need...”
She moves her hand to my cheek, holds it gently, and pulls me toward her. Her kiss is soft and sweet and far too short. No! Why did she stop?
Hillie jumps up from the couch and stands before me, her face a page I cannot read.
She asks me, “Do you want this?”
I panic. Why did she have to fucking ask? Why is she always so full of questions I can’t answer? I am pinned to the couch, shaking apart with the wanting of her, and with the hating of myself for the wanting. She waits patiently for my answer, no fear or judgment on her face.
I can’t speak, but I nod and she takes my hand and pulls me up and leads me to the bed. She shoves me down onto the mattress and climbs over me and I cannot stop smiling. My tightly wound heart unfolds in the gentle heat of her embrace.
I awaken beside her the next day and I am still smiling. The quilt is warm, the mattress soft, and I am an unrippled pool of joy. She wakes and I look away until I feel her hands on me, her skin on my skin, her warmth to my warmth.
After we emerge from the quilt, I watch as she carefully chooses her outfit.
“Were you very rich before you died?” I ask from the bed, wondering how she could afford such an expensive wardrobe.
She turns, surprised, and I meet her eyes. “Have you never met a librarian before? I suppose not. I read that the last one we sent openly to your island was murdered as a spy.”
“The last one you sent openly?”
“Joal—god of libraries—demands we collect all information everywhere. Even the most inhospitable places or people must be documented.” She shivers at some uncomfortable memory.
“Even if they don’t want to be? Neither my people nor my god want our secrets exposed on the pages of your books.”
She throws her hands up, frustrated. “We aren’t publishing your secrets! Do you really think you’re the only people with a mystery cult? The library would have been burnt long ago if we revealed the secrets of other gods.”
She comes to the bed, sits beside me, and holds my cheek. “We only write down what we see with our eyes.”
She takes my hand in her own. “What we feel with our hands.”
She brings my hand to her round belly. “What we taste with our mouths.”
She draws a finger along my earlobe. “And what we hear with our ears. We only take what is freely given.”
I open my mouth to argue, and she tries to quiet me with a kiss. I push her away. “No! Don’t try to silence me.”
“I just wanted... No. You’re right, I’m sorry.” She draws back, face marred by shame.
She reaches out for a hug, and I’m torn whether or not to accept. What do I do with this mess of contradictions? Her mercy and beauty and skill on one hand, and on the other hand her boundary-crossing obsession with learning and knowing things.
She sees my hesitation and turns away. I curse silently. Perhaps I can teach her, perhaps not, but for now, I need her and I want her and I care for her. I grab her hand and pull her close and in a moment we are whole again.
Over dinner that night, she says, “You asked if I was rich. No. Librarians swear an oath of poverty. I traveled the world studying textiles, yet I only ever wore the uniform of a librarian—or a cheap disguise. Now that I am dead... why not enjoy what I can?”
“Would you mind if I asked how you died?” Perhaps Hillie is rubbing off on me. I never would have asked such a personal question before meeting her.
“A book fell on me.”
I laugh and she bats my shoulder.
“To be fair, the front-board was a lovely mosaic—so it was quite heavy. I was an old fool for trying to get it down by myself.”
“How long has it been? Since you died?”
“A long time. Longer than I was alive. And I was older than you when I died.” She pauses, and pulls away slightly. “Am I your first?”
First what? I don’t know how to explain my relationship with my kin-workers. I never met a Ytarran anything like Hillie. I wonder what she sees in me, even as I am too afraid to ask.
Days pass and we believe we have found a route to Cmlech. Yet, our letters to the intervening gods return unopened, or with tersely worded rejections. I am not surprised, for Cmlech is a pariah god, working at the edges for the destruction of empires that provide other gods with followers and sacrifices.
We keep trying, but it is hard waiting for letters to work their way through the narrow and twisting caverns between underworlds. I am learning to read, and while it’s unclear if I’m helping or hindering, at least I can pretend I am working towards my own departure.
Every night Hillie prepares a feast from one of her many cookbooks. I teach her a few Ytarran dishes, and try not to cringe when she writes them down.
We eat until we are near to bursting, then climb into bed, the frustrations of the day melting under the warmth of the quilt and the heat of our bodies. Perhaps Hillie is right: after a lifetime’s work it is good to rest and enjoy the underworld.
And then I see the man who killed me.
He slips out of the book-return room. The book I am shelving falls from my hands. I freeze, doubting myself. Then I see the faint flash of his death-giving smile, and I am sure. I unstrap my hammer, hands clammy against the wood haft, and pursue him.
I dash across the great hall. He disappears into the stacks; I push myself faster. Hillie steps out in front of me—saying something I do not hear—and I almost tumble to the ground. By the time I catch myself and reach the stacks, he has disappeared.
I turn this way and that, searching for the flash of white robes in my periphery. Nothing. I rush back to Hillie.
“Come with me.” I grab her hand and try to drag her towards our living quarters.
“But—” she says. I pull harder until she starts walking with me. She keeps speaking, not understanding my urgency. “Btta, I just received a letter from my god. They’re going to personally escort you to Cm—to your god—in exchange for a story they’ve never heard before.” She tries to pull away from me. “The contract is back on my desk.”
My stomach lurches. I can’t handle the thought of leaving right now.
When we reach the kitchen, I put my hands on her shoulders and say, “I just saw the man who killed me. He’s inside the library.”
She stiffens her back, head held high, and says, “I'll go kick him out.”
“No!” My hands grip her shoulders, remembering Myrna’s death at the tip of the necromancer’s sword. “Hillie, this isn’t an unruly patron. He killed my kin-workers. I’m not losing you, too!” I struggle not to shake her. “Stay up here, where it’s safe. Lock the door. I’m going to get rid of him.”
She protests at first, still thinking her routine more important than her safety. Yet she chooses to put her faith in my fear, and I hear the click of the lock as I head down the stairs.
I run to the great hall, but I am too late. Smoke occludes the stacks and library patrons flee through the entrance doors, which have been forced open from the inside. White-robed men with torches are burning the books. My killer must have let them in.
I slip into the stacks and bring the first one down with a wet crumpling sound, barely audible under the growing roar of the fire. Thinking the library undefended, they are armed only with torches. They don’t expect me; so I kill or maim four before the rest know I am among them.
Then my killer finds me, his sword in hand. I roar when he sees me, but to him I am just an unknown woman who stands in his way.
He closes the distance between us, and I step back. His sword slices the smoky air and I shudder at the memory of its sharpness. He has reach-advantage on my hammer, and the narrow stacks leave little room to maneuver.
My only hope is to distract him enough to slip beneath his guard and land a crushing blow. “Why did you send me here? What happened to my kin-workers?”
He steps forward, sword held tip up, ready to fall upon me. “Ah, you’re that Ytarran death-cultist.” He steps forward again, driving me back. “I needed to test the targeted-death ritual before performing it on myself. You were a convenient sacrifice. The only thing I ever wanted of you is your death.”
I fake a forward thrust, then turn and run. I weave left and right and lose him in the smoke.
I hide in the stacks, hoping for an opening. My killer and I see Hillie at the same time.
She strides through the smoke, kitchen-knife held aloft. I told her to stay upstairs!
The necromancer whirls and advances toward her. I scream and I run and I am almost upon him when he turns on me and the flashing sword slices jagged-red across my torso. I fall against a bookshelf, the stone burning my back.
The necromancer’s death grin rises above me, but I won’t give up while I still hold my hammer. He lazily blocks my one-handed swipe with the flat of his blade. I am going to die again, and then he is going to kill Hillie. I will never see her again.
“Why do you still struggle? You have nothing left to fight for. Your quarry is ours; its god-stone fuels our great work. Your friends are dead; your nameless god did not aid them.”
I watch Hillie behind him; she puts on a mask and fiddles with something at her desk. Oh. Of course she would prioritize her books over her life. She is going to activate the emergency fire-suppression failsafe.
Wincing at the pain, I speak in an attempt to delay my death. “What ‘great work’ could justify this?”
My ears pop. Wind buffets the necromancer’s robes. I close my mouth; hold my breath tight within me.
He smiles. “We work for your freedom, Ytarran. Neither the living nor the dead exist to serve the gods. The gods exist to serve us. We bound our god with god-stone chains, and now he enacts our will. If you had done the same, you would not be lying bloody on the floor, praying for help from a nameless god who will not answer.”
His sword rises slowly to its apex. He blinks and sways and shakes his head. It is enough of an opening. I grab the haft of my hammer and bring it hard against his knee. He goes down and I rise up and press him against the floor with my bloody hammer.
“My god has a name, killer.” He yelps as I grind the head of the hammer into his chest. “My god’s name is the sound of the death of empires, the sound of the triumph of the weak against the strong.” I lift my hammer. “My god’s name is the sound of your skull breaking beneath the iron of my hammer.”
He is dead.
My vision darkens. I should have kept my mouth shut, but it was worth it to say Cmlech's blessing at the moment of my triumph. At least I will die of suffocation instead of the blade. My body weakens and falls, and I plunge into the ocean of unconsciousness.
I awaken in pain, knowing I am in the right underworld.
My head throbs with the agony of my suffocation. I shudder at the trauma of my almost-death, then I look up into Hillie’s eyes and all is well. She pulls the breathing mask from my face and leans down to kiss me.
She smells of ashes and the destruction of her library. Her tears track channels across her soot-stained cheeks and drip on my face.
“I’m sorry,” I say, knowing words are not enough. I should have been faster, stronger, smarter. How many of her books did I fail to save?
She grips me tight, pulls me closer. “No. You have nothing to be sorry for. Without you, I’d be dead. Or—even if I survived—” She sighs, trying to express her feelings. “Yes, I mourn the lost books. But wisdom isn’t just written down on paper or carved into clay. It lives in our heads and our hearts.” She ruffles my hair, then places her hand on my chest. “People are books, too, and I never want to stop reading you.”
Tears blur my eyes. I want to tell her how much she means to me, but the words don’t come. What could I possibly say that would compare?
She shifts beside me. “I saved your transit-contract.” She hands me the papers.
I stare sightlessly at them. She watches me, waiting.
This is my path to freedom. A long road to walk—alone—and then reunion with Myrna and my kin-workers. My desire to see them is an ache nestled hard against my heart, my duty to Cmlech a searing brand held an inch behind me. And yet.
“I can take you to the checkpoint now, if you like.” She wipes her eyes. “I’ll be... fine here.”
I clutch her arm. “They might come back. I can’t...” But that is a lie. I could leave, if I wanted to.
No.
Hillie is right. I have served my time in the world above and have earned my rest. Perhaps I don’t need words to tell Hillie what she means to me.
I take the contract and begin to rip, but Hillie grabs my hands.
She smiles at me, understanding my intent. “I want to be with you, too.” She puts the contract on the ground and kisses me. “But I don’t need you bound to me. You should have the freedom to leave... or we can go together, or stay here and rebuild, or...” She throws her hands up. “Whatever happens, I want to be with you. Do you...?”
“Yes,” I say. I take her hand and hold it as tight as I can, in the hope that we will never let go.