skin and open sores. Bleeding and seeping and rotting to the core. Perfume layered thick, but not enough to hide the dark sweetness of decay, the ruin of empires in her flesh.
He kissed her eyes. He kissed her cheeks. He kissed her lips.
“Thou art beautiful,” he whispered.
She pressed her palm to the hand that still cupped her face. Smiling soft. And then he turned away, hands behind his back, looking at the faces on the walls. Empty eyes and open mouths, ceramic and glass and pottery and papier-mâché. Death masks and Carnivalé masks and ancient masks of bone and hide. A gallery of faces, beautiful and hideous and everything in between.
“What news?” Marielle lisped.
“Tenhands and her Blades all slain. Our little darkin unscathed.” Adonai shrugged. “Largely, at least. And our imperator shall arrive soon from the Godsgrave, that ye may sculpt another fool to his likeness.”
“Coward,” Marielle sighed.
“Aye,” Adonai nodded.
“That whore Naev is in readiness?”
Adonai raised his eyebrow. “She is ready. But thou hast no need of jealousy, sister mine. It becomes thee not. Naev is but a tool.”
“A tool thou didst use well and often, brother love, in nevernights past.”
“She pleased me.” Adonai sighed. “And then, she bored me.”
“Naev loves thee still.”
“Then she is just as much a fool as the rest of them.”
Marielle smiled darkly, drool on her lips. “Think ye Drusilla suspects us?”
Adonai shrugged. “Soon, it shall matter not. The board be set, the pieces move. The tomes in Aelius’s keeping shall point the way. And when all is done, we shall have black skies and moon above, just as the chronicler promised.”
Adonai ran his fingertips over the lamp on Marielle’s desk—a lithe woman with a lion’s head, globe held in its upturned palms. Ashkahi in origin. Millennia old.
“Think on it, sister love,” he breathed. “Our magiks are but a pale sliver of what they truly knew. What lessons might be ours when he shines in the sky once more? What tortures might be eased, what secrets gleaned, when we leave ever-sunslit shores behind and dwell in balance again?”
Adonai smiled, his fingertips trailing down the statue’s face.
“No dark without light,” Marielle said. “Ever day follows night.”
Adonai nodded. “Between black and white…”
“There is gray,” they both finished.
“When the Dark Mother returns to her place in the sky,” Adonai said, “I wonder what she shall make of the rot in this, her house? And all those who have profited from her without faith?”
“We shall know soon enough, brother.”
Marielle threaded her fingers through Adonai’s, her smile on the verge of splitting. He kissed her knuckles, her wrist. Smiling dark in return.
“Soon enough.”
* * *
Aelius had never found the library’s edges.
He’d looked once. Walking out into the gloom between the shelves, the forest of dark and polished wood, the rustling leaves of vellum and parchment and paper and leather and hide. He found books carved on still-bleeding skin, books written in languages never invented, books that looked back at him as he looked at them. Roaming among the aisles for turns on end, only the occasional bookworm for company, trailing a finger-thin wisp of sugar-sweet smoke behind him.
But he never found the edge. And after seven turns of searching for it, he’d finally realized the things in this library didn’t get found unless they wanted to be. So he’d stopped looking altogether.
He wheeled his empty trolley up to the mezzanine, stopped outside his office to light another smoke. He saw more books piled up under the RETURNS slot, slipped back into his keeping during the nevernight by the new acolytes training within the Mountain.
Aelius sighed gray, stooping down with his creaking back and liver-spotted fingers, scooping up the books and placing them with reverence in his trolley.
“A librarian’s work is never done,” he muttered.
He fished about in his waistcoat for his spectacles, checked the pockets of his britches, then shirt, finally realized they were sitting atop his head. With a wry smile, he wandered into his office, drawing deep on his cigarillo.
“‘A girl who was to murder as maestros are to music’?”
Drusilla looked up from the book she was reading, blood-red edges on the pages, a black crow embossed upon the cover. A mirthless smirk twisted her lips.
“Black Goddess, he really thinks a lot of his own prose, doesn’t he?”
“Everyone’s a critic.” Aelius propped his cigarillo on his lips and shrugged at the book. “But aye, some of the metaphors are perhaps a bit much.”
“Thank the Goddess he doesn’t talk the way he writes. If he sounded this pretentious when he