Mercurio sat in the office of Chronicler Aelius, nose deep in “THE BOOKS.”
That’s how he thought of them in his head now. “THE BOOKS.” Capital letters. A bold, no-nonsense script. Quotation marks, perhaps underscored—he wasn’t quite sure yet. But what he was certain of was this: to think of these things as “some books,” or “Some Books,” or even “SOME BOOKS” was to deny, in every true and real sense, what they actually were.
Incredible books.
Impossible books.
Brain-breaking, mon-fucking-strosities of books.
“THE BOOKS.”
The old man’s scowl had become so permanent a fixture on his face over the past few turns, it actually hurt to change expressions now. His pale blue eyes carefully scanned his current page, every paragraph, every sentence, every word, his gnarled, toxin-stained forefinger tracking the movement of his eyes across the lines.
He was just nearing the end of the second volume, heart beating quick.
And with a final gasp, the Unfallen fell.
A hammerblow to Mia’s spine. A rush of blood in her veins, skin crawling, every nerve ending on fire. She fell to her knees, hair billowing about her as if in some phantom breeze, her shadow scrawled in maddened, jagged lines beneath her, Mister Kindly and Eclipse and a thousand other forms scribbled among the shapes it drew upon the stone. The hunger inside her sated, the longing gone, the emptiness suddenly, violently filled. A severing. An awakening. A communion, painted in red and black. And face upturned to the sky, for a moment, just for a breath, she saw it. Not an endless field of blinding blue, but of bottomless black. Black and whole and perfect.
Filled with tiny stars.
Hanging above her in the heavens, Mia saw a globe of pale light shining. Like a sun almost, but not red or blue or gold or burning with furious heat. The sphere was ghostly white, shedding a pale luminance and casting a long shadow at her feet.
“THE MANY WERE ONE.”
“Crow! Crow! Crow! Crow!”
“AND WILL BE AGAIN.”
Mercurio leaned back in his chair, dragging on his cigarillo.
“This is doing my bloody head in,” he growled.
“Requires some mental contortions, doesn’t it?”
Chronicler Aelius was hard at work, rebinding a few of the library’s more beaten and worn tomes with new covers of hand-tooled leather. Occasionally pausing to take a drag on his own cigarillo and breathe a plume of strawberry-scented gray into the air, he worked with deft fingers and a needle made of gleaming gravebone. Between the pair of them smoking, the air in the office was closer to soup, the ashtray on the chronicler’s graven mahogany desk piled high with lifeless butts.
“Contortions?” Mercurio scoffed. “Contortions are for circus performers and high-priced courtesans, Aelius. This is something else entirely.”
“Known many high-priced courtesans, have you?” Aelius asked.
Mercurio shrugged. “In my youth.”
“Got any good stories? It’s been a while for me…”
“If it’s cheap smut you’re after,” Mercurio sighed, tapping the first of “THE BOOKS,” “the tawdriness starts in volume one, page two hundred and forty-nine.”
“O, I know,” the chronicler chuckled. “Chapter twenty-two.”
Mercurio turned his deepening scowl on Aelius. “You read those pages?”
“Didn’t you?”
“Maw’s fucking teeth, no!” Mercurio almost choked on his smoke, utterly horrified. “She’s like my … I don’t want to think of her getting up to … that.”
The old man slumped in his chair, took a savage drag off his cigarillo. The past few turns, he’d been doing his best to come to grips with the existence of “THE BOOKS,” but he was having a time of it. In order to avoid suspicion from Drusilla and the Hands she had constantly shadowing him through the Quiet Mountain, he had to keep his visits to the library of Our Lady of Blessed Murder short—enough for a few cigarillos with the old chronicler, a chin-wag, then out again. He didn’t dare remove “THE BOOKS” from the Athenaeum in case they tossed his room, and so he’d been reduced to reading them in snippets. He was only just finishing the second.
It felt ghastly strange to be reading about Mia’s exploits, her private thoughts, and oddest of all, his own role in her tale. Reading those pages was like watching himself in a black mirror, but the glass was propped over his shoulder instead of looking at him face-to-face. And as he read about himself, he could almost feel eyes peering over his own shoulder in kind.
“Look, how the ’byss is this even possible?” he asked, turning in his chair to face Aelius. “How can these books exist? They’re telling a story that hasn’t finished yet. And my name’s on them, but I never wrote the fucking things.”
“Exactly,” Aelius replied, nodded to the Athenaeum beyond the black stone walls of his office. “That’s what this place is. A library of the dead. Books that were burned. Or forgotten ages past. Or never got a chance to live at all. These books don’t exist. That’s why they’re here.”
The chronicler shrugged his thin shoulders, puffed on his smoke.
“Funny old place, this.”
Silence descended in the Black Mother’s library, punctuated by the distant roar of a single angry bookworm out in the gloom.
“You read the introduction again?” Aelius asked softly. “Carefully?”
“Aye,” Mercurio muttered in reply.
“Mmm,” the dead man said.
“Look, it doesn’t mean a fucking thing.”
Aelius tilted his head, pity in his milky blue eyes. He flipped back through the red-edged pages to the beginning of the first “BOOK” and started reading aloud.
“‘Be advised now that the pages in your hands speak of a girl who was to murder as maestros are to music. Who did to happy ever afters what a sawblade does to skin. She’s dead herself, now—words both the wicked and the just would give an eyeteeth smile to hear. A republic in ashes behind her. A city of bridges and bones laid at the bottom of the—’”
“I’ve read all that,” Mercurio growled. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“This is her story,” Aelius replied softly. “And that’s how it ends. ‘A republic in ashes.’ That’s a good ending, Mercurio. Better than most get.”
“She’s eighteen years old. She doesn’t deserve any ending yet.”
“Since when did ‘deserve’ have anything to do with it?”
The old man lit a cigarillo with gnarled fingers, adding to the thickening fog of gray in the office. “All right, so where’s the fucking third one, then?”
“Eh?” Aelius asked.
“I’m almost done with the second,” Mercurio said, tapping on the black wolf cover. “And they both mention a third. Birth. Life. And death. So where is it?”
Aelius shrugged. “Buggered if I know.”
“Haven’t you looked for it?”
Aelius blinked. “What for?”
“So we can learn how it ends! How she dies!”
“What good will that do?” the chronicler frowned.
Mercurio stood with a dramatic sigh and, leaning on his walking stick, began pacing the room. “Because if we know what’s coming, maybe we can help her so things don’t turn out the way this”—his cane came down on the first “BOOK” with a dull thwack—“tells us they do.”
“Who says you can change anything?”
“Well, who says we can’t?” the old man snarled.
“You really want to see the future?” Aelius asked. “Sounds a curse to me. Better to weep for what might’ve been than for what you know is to come.”
“We don’t know anything,” Mercurio growled.
“We know all stories end, whippersnapper. Including hers.”
“Not yet.” Mercurio shook his head. “I won’t let it.”
Aelius leaned back on the desk, exhaled a plume of strawberry-gray into the miasma above. Mercurio dragged his shaking hand through his hair.
“Reading about all this,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right … It feels…”
“Too big?” Aelius asked.
“Aye.”
“A little like being a god, maybe?”
Mercurio folded kindling-thin arms across his thinner chest. He couldn’t remember feeling as old in all his life. “Fucking gods…”
“You have a role to play in this,” the dead man said. “The Mother brought you here for a reason. She had me find these books, show them to you, for a reason.”
“Seems a slender fucking thread to put so much weight upon.”
“It’s all she can do from where she is,” Aelius sighed. “A push here. A nudge there. Using what little power she gains from what little faith folk hold for her. And it’s harder for her now. Once, the folk running this place actually believed. To the faithful who created it centuries back, it truly meant something. She had real power here. But now?”
“Hollow words,” Mercurio muttered. “Walls painted gold, not red.”
“The Mother does what little she can with what little she has. But the balance between Light and Night won’t be restored by the hands of the divinities.” The chronicler pointed at Mercurio’s own gnarled, ink-stained hands. “It’ll just be those.”
“I’ll not lift a damned finger if it means hastening Mia’s ending.”
Aelius puffed on his smoke, regarding Mercurio thoughtfully.
“First things last, young’un,” he said. “You don’t need to read her whole biography to know where she’ll be headed now.”
“Aye,” Mercurio said. “Face-first into a world of flaming shit.”
“So when she arrives, we’d best be ready.” Aelius shrugged. “We’ll not need to worry how her story ends otherwise. It’ll end right here. In the halls of this mountain.”
“So what can we do?” Mercurio growled, rubbing his aching arm. “I’m halfway to dead, and you’re dead all the way. You can’t even leave the fucking library. Between the two of us, what good can we do her?”
Aelius leaned over to the second “BOOK” sitting on his desk. Sky-blue edges, wolf on the cover, leather so black light just seemed to fall into it. He licked his thumb and began leafing through the pages. Finally stopping at the place he wanted, he spun the tome toward Mercurio, tapped at the text.
The old man squinted at the words, heartbeat coming quicker.
He looked down at his wizened old hands.
Such a slender thread …
“Righto,” he sighed. “I’ll go talk to them.”
The room stank of blood.
Ancient and cracked to tiny black flakes, so many years between it and bleeding that its scent was just a broken promise. Old and dark, hardened to a rind in the cracks between the flagstones. A few sour splashes here and there, curled and separated like bad cream, wreathed with the stink of rot. But above it all, iron-thick and laced with salt, wafting through the open doors in invisible skeins until it permeated the entire level?
Fresh, new, ripe blood.
The pool was triangular, set deep in the stone, the red within it swaying and rolling like the surface of a tempest sea. Sorcerii glyphs were daubed in crimson on the wall, alongside maps of the major metropolises of the Republic—Godsgrave, Galante, Carrion Hall, Farrow, Elai. Old Mercurio could see other cities there, too. Cities ground by the heel of time into ruin and dust. Cities so old, there were few who even remembered their names. But Speaker Adonai remembered.
He was at the apex of the triangle, down on his knees. Bone-pale skin, tousled white hair, a thin red robe tossed carelessly over his smooth torso. Leather britches riding dangerously low. Barefoot.
A girl stood before him, legs slightly parted, bending backward like a sapling in a storm. Small sighs of pleasure slipped over her lips, her kohled lashes fluttering. She was dressed in a black Hand’s robe, open at the front, plastered to her skin with her own blood. The ruby red spilled from a dark slice between her bare breasts, flowing down her naked belly and then lower still. She held a bloodstained knife in one hand. Her other was wrapped in his hair.
Speaker Adonai was knelt in front of her, hands clutching her buttocks, his face pressed between her thighs. Groans of bliss rose right up from the core of him as he lapped and sucked and licked. His clever tongue flickered, his smooth chest heaved, his lithe body shook. Eyes rolling back so only the pink-not-white showed. His throat moved with every deep swallow, every shivering, red mouthful. Mercurio had seen starving wolves tear apart a lamb when he was a boy. The sounds they made as they killed and the sounds coming from the speaker as he drank were much alike.
Weaver Marielle sat in the corner of the room, watching her brother feed. Dark robes draped over her hunched frame, hood pulled low over her hideous features. Wisps of bone-blond hair spilled from the shadows of her cowl, along with a thin ribbon of drool from her misshapen lips. One twisted hand was pressed to her throat. The other between her legs.
Adonai dragged his mouth away from the girl’s blood-slick petals, gasping like a man near drowned. His face and teeth were smeared with crimson, red rivulets running down his throat. The girl shivered, bloody fingertips caressing Adonai’s face with all the reverence of a priestess before her god. Asking no forgiveness for her sins. Preferring punishment instead.
“More,” she moaned, pulling him back in.
“Am I interrupting?” Mercurio asked.
Adonai’s eyes found a muzzy sort of focus, and he let out a gasping chuckle. Still shaking, swaying as if drunk, he swiveled his head like a blindworm toward the light. Finding Mercurio in the doorway, the smile fell away from his bloody lips. His gaze became a glower, a long spool of ruby spit swinging from his chin.
“Yes,” he and Marielle said.
“Shouldn’t have left the fucking door open, then, I s’pose,” the old man replied.
He hobbled into the room, walking stick beating crisp on the moist black stone. It was uncomfortably warm down here in the sorcerii’s part of the Mountain, and he knew climbing back up those stairs on his shitty knees was going to be agony. He was sweating like an inkfiend with a needle three turns dry. His legs ached like a pair of bastards. His left arm ached even worse.
“Away with you, lass,” he told the bleeding, breathless girl.
Dragging her sodden robe partway closed, the Hand managed to glare at Mercurio despite looking ready to pass out from the blood loss.
“Go on,” he said, waving his cane at the door. “Off with the fuck. There’s at least three more of your fellows skulking on my heels. Maybe one of them has a suggestion about how better to spend your time than in the company of these fucking perverts.”
The girl glanced at Adonai, and the speaker gave a small nod.
“Here, child,” Marielle whispered, beckoning with twisted fingers.
The girl walked toward the weaver, a little unsteady on her feet. As she drew close, Marielle raised one misshapen hand, swayed it in the air before the girl’s bleeding chest. The girl shivered. Sighed. And as she turned, Mercurio saw the bone-deep knife wound had closed as if it’d never been.
He sucked his lip, forced to admire the woman’s handiwork. Despite being unable to manipulate her own hideous flesh, Marielle could mold others’ like a potter with clay. There wasn’t a mark on the Hand’s body.
The weaver knows her work.
“Regain thy strength, sweet child,” Marielle lisped through split and bleeding lips. “Then visit us anon.”
With one last poison glare for the bishop of Godsgrave, the lass pulled her soaking robe closed and made her way from the room. Adonai reached out to her as she walked by, too blood-drunk to say his farewells.
Mercurio looked down the hallway she left by, saw two of the Hands that Drusilla had trailing him lurking in the gloom. Close enough to let him know they were watching. That the Lady of Blades was watching. But not quite brave enough to enter the speaker’s chamber without invitation.
A fellow had to be quite stupid for that.
He raised the knuckles at his shadows, then slammed the door in their faces.
Adonai stood, dragging one bloody hand back through his hair and pulling his head up with it, as if it was too heavy for his neck. His robe had slipped off his shoulders, and Mercurio could see the troughs and valleys of muscle beneath. He looked a statue on a plinth outside the Senate House. Chiseled out of stone by the hands of the Everseeing himself. But Mercurio knew it was his sister’s hands, not Aa’s, that bestowed the blood speaker’s impossible perfection. And despite the power the siblings wielded, he found that thought just about as fucked up as he’d always done.
Adonai finally rediscovered his powers of speech, eyes glinting red. “Desperate thy plight or absent thy wits must be, Bishop, to interrupt a blood speaker at his meal.”
Mercurio stood at the base of the triangle, staring across the blood at Adonai.
“Well?” the speaker demanded. “Nothing to say, hast thou?”
Mercurio waved his cane in the direction of the speaker’s crotch. “Just waiting for the tumescence to diminish a bit. The bulge is impressive, but a touch distracting.”
“Seek ye quarrel with us, good Mercurio?” Marielle rose from her chair and stood beside her brother. “So weary of life’s burden, art thou? For I swear it sure and true, more weary could I make thee afore I lifted burden from thy shoulders.”
“Already thou hast ire well-earned from the Lady of Blades,” Adonai said. “So common are thine enemies, thou art in need of quality? ’Pon the blood of the aged I may sup to fuel my magiks, as easily as upon the young. And I am still hungry, old man.”
“Maw’s teeth, you two talk a lot of shit,” Mercurio growled.
Adonai curled his fingers. The pool surged, and bloody tendrils of liquid gore rose up from the surface, slick and gleaming scarlet. They were pointed like spears, semisolid, sharp as needles. They snaked slowly around the bishop of Godsgrave, blood-stink thick in the air, quivering with anticipation.
“Blood is owed thee, little Crow,” Mercurio said. “And blood shall be repaid.”
The tendrils fell still, poised a few inches from the old man’s skin.
Adonai’s red eyes narrowed to razor cuts in his beautiful face.
“Speak ye those words again?”
“You fucking heard me,” Mercurio said. “That’s what you told Mia, isn’t it? Last time you saw her here in the Mountain? ‘Two lives ye saved, the turn the Luminatii pressed their sunsteel to the Mountain’s throat. Mine, and my sister love’s. Know this, in nevernights to come. As deep and dark as the waters ye swim might turn, on matters of blood, count upon a speaker’s vow, ye may.’”
Adonai glanced at his sister. Back to Mercurio.
“Such words spake I for her ear alone,” he breathed, enraged.
“None were in my chambers when troth was pledged,” the weaver said. “Save I, my brother love, the darkin, and her passengers. How come ye to speak them by rote, good Mercurio, as if thou were sixth among five alone?”
“Doesn’t matter how I know,” Mercurio said. “But I do. You owe her a debt, Adonai. You owe her your miserable, twisted little life. You made a vow. And the water she swims now is deep and dark as it’s ever been.”
“Well do we know it,” Marielle said.
“How?” Mercurio demanded, pupils narrowing to pinpricks.
Adonai gave a lazy shrug. “Scaeva sent a blood missive ordering the Lady of Blades to unleash every chapel in the Republic upon our little darkin’s trail. A son stolen, desired returned. And for she who stole him…”
“Every chapel,” the old man whispered.
Mercurio’s belly sank, thinking about the sheer number of Blades that would now be hunting Mia. Even after the Luminatii purge and Ashlinn Järnheim’s betrayal, it’d still be dozens. All schooled in the arts of death by the finest killers in the world.
“How the fuck can Scaeva afford that?”
“Poor Mercurio,” Marielle cooed. “So silent thy turns must ring in thy room alone.”
“Title of imperator, Scaeva hath claimed,” Adonai said. “And all the coin in the Republic’s war chests besides. ’Pon a pillow of gold, Drusilla soon shall lay her head.”
The old man clenched his jaw. “That conniving bitch…”
“Not through kindness doth a single Blade become Lady of many, old man.”
Mercurio rubbed at his left arm. His chest was aching abominably.
Mia’s in deeper shit than I ever imagined …
“So,” he finally said, meeting Adonai’s scarlet stare. “Mia has the whole Church against her now. Every Blade the Ministry can find. Question is, were your words just that? Or something more? How far does your loyalty to the Church extend, Adonai? In a house of thieves and liars and murderers, how much weight does a promise carry?”
“We are no thieves,” Adonai spat. “Earned, our magiks be. Dredged from the sands of Ashkah Old, verily, and paid for again in anguish, turn by bloody turn.”
“Liars, neither,” Marielle lisped, slipping her hand around her brother’s waist. “Though killers, aye. That we be. Name us the former, find truth in the latter, good Mercurio. Slow and painful truth.”
“As for loyalty, who can say.” The sorcerii placed his arm around his sister, wiping at the gore on his mouth. “Ours be not bought with coin, that much be certain. And these walls place much stock in that since Cassius fell. But there is much danger in crossing the Ministry, Mercurio. And a vow to thy little darkin shall only carry me so far.”
“And I, not at all,” Marielle smiled. “My debt to thy ward be already repaid.”
“We did not drag ourselves through blood and fire to wrest the secrets of the Moon from the dust of Old Ashkah, only see them thrown away on—”
“Wait, wait,” Mercurio frowned. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Adonai’s eyes narrowed. “Blood and fire were—”
“The Moon, you perverted fuck. The part about the Moon.”
“’Twas he who taught the Ashkahi sorcery,” Adonai said, head tilted, eyes glittering in the gloom. “A god dead, ages past, and all magik in this world with him.”
“Our arts are but fragments of larger truths,” Marielle lisped. “Forever taken from this world. Gleaned from scraps long buried beneath the sands of Old Ashkah.”
The old man looked between them, his heart racing. “What if I told you Mia has something to do with this damned Moon thing? Darkin. Her passengers. What if I told you she knows the way to its crown?”
“… What madness is this?” Marielle asked.
“Aye, mad it might just be,” the old man said. “But I swear by the Black Mother, the Everseeing, and all four of their holy daughters that Ashlinn Järnheim has a map to the Moon’s crown branded in arkemical ink on her back. Ink that will fade in the event she gets murdered. Say, for example, while she’s protecting Mia.”
The siblings looked at each other. Back to Mercurio. Red eyes glittering in the low light. The pool of blood at Adonai’s back began swaying like the sea in a storm. Marielle’s breath had grown so thick, she seemed almost to be wheezing.
“What do you say?” Mercurio offered his hand. “You two want to help me keep that pair alive? You’ve still a vow to keep, after all.”
Adonai looked at the man’s upturned palm. Took a deep, shivering breath. But without another word, he grasped Mercurio’s hand in his, fingers slicked with gore. With no hesitation, Marielle placed her hand atop her brother’s, warped and leaking pus.
The old man looked at the sorcerii and nodded.
“All right, then. Seems we’ve got ourselves a conspiracy.”