ear.
“Smoke?”
Chronicler Aelius hung still for a moment, eyes burning with dark flame. Then, with a small chuckle, he unfolded his arms, clapped Mercurio on his thin shoulder. Lighting the cigarillo on his own, he handed it over.
“All right, whippersnapper?”
“Do I look all right, old man?” Mercurio asked.
“You look like shite. But it’s always polite to ask.”
Mercurio leaned against the wall and gazed out over the library, dragging a sweet gray draft into his lungs. The smoke tasted of strawberries, the sugared paper setting his tongue dancing.
“They don’t make them like this anymore,” Mercurio sighed.
“Same might be said of everything in this room,” Aelius replied.
“How’ve you been, you old bastard?”
“Dead.”*
The chronicler settled in beside him.
“You?”
“Much the same.”
Aelius scoffed, breathed a plume of gray. “Still got a pulse in you from what I can see. What the ’byss you sulking about down here for, lad?”
Mercurio drew on his cigarillo. “It’s a long story, old man.”
“A story about your Mia, I take it?”
“… How’d you guess?”
Aelius shrugged his bone-thin shoulders, his eyes twinkling behind his improbable spectacles. “She always struck me as a girl with one to tell.”
“We might be nearing the final page, I fear.”
“You’re too young to be such a pessimist.”
“I’m sixty-fucking-two,” Mercurio growled.
“As I say, far too young.”
Mercurio found himself chuckling, warm gray spilling from his lips. He leaned back against the wall, feeling the smoke buzz in his blood.
“How long have you been down here, Aelius?”
“O, a while,” the chronicler sighed. “Never saw much sense in counting the years, though. It’s not as though I really have a choice about when I leave.”
“The Mother keeps only what she needs,” Mercurio murmured.
“Aye.” Aelius nodded. “She does at that.”
Mercurio tilted his head back, looked out on all those dead books with heavy-lidded eyes. “Do you hate her for it?”
“Blasphemy,” the old ghost scolded.
“Is it?” Mercurio asked. “If she doesn’t care what we say or do?”
“And what makes you say that?”
“Well, look at what this place has become,” Mercurio growled, waving his cane at the dark. “Once, it was a house of wolves. Each murder, an offering to Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Feeding her hunger. Making her stronger. Hastening her return. And now?” He spat on the flagstones. “It’s a whorehouse. The Ministry feed their own coffers, not the Maw. Their hands drip with gold, not red.”
Mercurio shook his head, breathing smoke as he continued.
“O, we say all the words, make all the gestures, aye. ‘This flesh your feast, this blood your wine.’ But still, when all the praying is done, we drop to our knees for the likes of Julius fucking Scaeva. How can you say Niah cares, if she allows this poison to fester in her own halls?”
“Maw’s teeth.” Aelius raised one snow-white brow. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of bed this morn.”
“Fuck off,” the old man spat.
“What do you want her to do?” the chronicler demanded. “She’s been banished from the sky for millennia, boy. Allowed to rule for a handful of turns every two and a half years. How much say over all this do you think she has? How much influence do you think she can exert in the prison her husband made for her?”
“If she’s so powerless, why call her a goddess at all?”
Aelius’s frown deepened into a scowl. “I never said she was powerless.”
“Because you were never one to state the fucking obvious.”
The chronicler looked at Mercurio hard. “I remember when you first arrived here, boy. Green as grass, you were. Soft as baby shite. But you believed. In her. In this. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.”
Mercurio scowled. “I’ve as much need for old Ashkahi proverbs as I have for a second ballsack, old man.”
“You might have more need than you know, with young Drusilla on the prowl,” Aelius smirked. “Point is, you had faith, boy. Where’d it go?”
Mercurio pressed the cigarillo to his lips, thinking long and hard.
“I still believe,” he replied. “The God of Light and Goddess of Night and their Four fucking Daughters. I mean, this place exists. You exist. The Dark Mother obviously still has some small sway.” Mercurio shrugged. “But this is a world ruled by men, not divinities. And for all the blood, all the death, all the lives we’ve taken in her name, she’s still so fucking far away.”
“She’s closer than you think,” Aelius said.
“I swear by all that’s holy, if you tell me she dwells in the temple of my heart, we’re going to find out if folk can return from