Mercurio stood on the mezzanine overlooking the great Athenaeum, cigarillo smoke curling on his tongue.
The Hand made no reply.
She looked to be twenty-one, twenty-two perhaps—from a crop a few years before Mia’s time, at any rate. She was clad as they all were—black robes, head to foot, silent as the grave. After Drusilla’s discovery and subsequent examination of the first two Nevernight Chronicles, the Lady of Blades had ordered the Hands following Mercurio to abandon all subtlety. He had three constantly behind him now—this young lass, never more than a few feet away, an older Itreyan woman perhaps in her thirties, and a Dweymeri lad, tall and silent, who usually kept the greatest distance.
They never spoke. Never responded when he asked questions. They simply followed, like voiceless, soulless shadows. He’d not heard a peep from Adonai or Marielle since Drusilla found the chronicles—the siblings had obviously decided discretion was the better part of valor with the Lady of Blades on the warpath.
He and Aelius were once more alone.
Which basically means Mia is, too …
“How long have they been at it now?” Mercurio asked.
Aelius called out from his office, “Almost three weeks.”
“How many dead?”
“Only the two,” the chronicler replied, wandering out onto the mezzanine, thumbs hooked in his waistcoat pockets. “Not sure what happened there, to be honest. Poor bastards just disappeared. Took by a bookworm, I’m guessing, though they’d have to have been fools to hurt the pages wandering about out there.”
Mercurio nudged the Hand beside him with one bony elbow. “Bet you’re glad Drusilla’s got you dogging me instead of fucking about there in the dark, neh?”
The Hand made no reply.
Mercurio sighed smoke, watched Aelius fish another ’rillo out from behind his ear with ink-stained fingers and light it with a burnished flintbox. The chronicler’s rheumy eyes were fixed out on the forest of shelves and tomes. The little pinpricks of arkemical glow moving out in the gloom. The silhouettes of Hands holding them aloft.
Their search was methodical, marking each examined aisle with a piece of red chalk, expanding out in an ever-broadening swathe. But rather than being arranged in a neat grid, the shelves of the dead library were a twisted labyrinth, more complex and nonsensical than the most fiendish of garden mazes. Where once they’d been tightly packed, the hundred or so Hands Drusilla had tasked to find the third chronicle were now spread thin—tiny lights twinkling in an endless, silent gloom. Only the Mother knew how much ground they’d covered in the last three weeks, but red chalk was certainly in short supply these turns.
“Bugger that for a job,” Mercurio growled.
“Waste of time,” Aelius sighed. “Nothing in this place gets found that doesn’t want to be found. And why the ’byss would the Mother want…”
The chronicler’s voice trailed off, a small frown forming between his snow-white and studiously unkempt eyebrows. Mercurio followed his eyeline out to the library, saw a point of arkemical light bouncing wildly, as if the person carrying it were running.
“What do you make of that?” he wondered.
Sure enough, in a few minutes, a Hand came into view, hood blown back from his head, cheeks flushed from his sprint, breathless. He rounded the shelves and dashed up the ramp to the mezzanine at a full run. Mercurio saw he was carrying a book in his hand. Bound in black leather. Pages edged in black, spattered in white, like stars across a truedark sky.
“’Byss and blood,” Aelius breathed.
“You don’t think that’s…?”
The Hand dashed through the Athenaeum doors without stopping, but Mercurio caught enough of a glimpse to see a shape embossed on the black leather cover.
A cat.
He exchanged glances with Aelius, ice-blue eyes locked with milky-gray ones.
The third chronicle.
“Shit.”
The old man turned to the Hand beside him, smacked the tip of his cane on the floor. “Let’s be off, shall we?”
The Hand made no reply.
Mercurio walked out of the library. Aelius watched him go, hovering on the threshold he could never cross. The old man’s footsteps were swift, pulse pumping hard in his veins. Following the running Hand up the spiral of stairs, his own Hands trailing close behind, one, two, three, Mercurio hurried up into the singing dark. The ghostly choir sounded a little softer, though perhaps that was the blood now pounding in his ears, his heart struggling against his ribs. He was soon out of breath, cursing the countless cigarillos