“They can’t, actually,” the chronicler shrugged. “Not even the Mother has that power. You die once, you might make it back with her blessing. But cross back over to the Abyss once more? You’re gone forever.”
“That threat was supposed to be rhetorical, old man.”
Aelius grinned, smudged his cigarillo out against the wall, and dropped the butt into the pocket of his waistcoat. “Come with me.”
The chronicler leaned on his RETURNS trolley, began wheeling it down the long ramp from the mezzanine to the Athenaeum floor below. Mercurio watched the old man shuffling away, dragging on his own smoke.
“Come on, whippersnapper!” Aelius barked.
The bishop of Godsgrave sighed and, pushing himself off the wall, followed the chronicler down the ramp into the library proper. Side by side, the pair wandered through the maze of shelves, mahogany and parchment and vellum all around. Every now and then, Aelius would stop and place one of his returned tomes back into its allotted place, almost reverently. The shelves were too tall to see over, and each aisle looked much the same. Mercurio was soon hopelessly lost, and a part of him wondered how in the Mother’s name Aelius made sense of this place.
“Where the ’byss are we going?” he grumbled, rubbing his aching knees.
“New section,” Aelius replied. “They pop up all the time in this place. When they want to be found, that is. I stumbled onto this one almost two years ago. Right before your girl arrived here for the first time.”
Out in the dark, Mercurio could hear bookworms shifting their massive bulks among the shelves. Leathery hides scraping along the stone, deep, rumbling growls reverberating through the floor. The air was dry and cool, echoing with the faint song of that beautiful choir. There was a peace to this place, no doubt. But Mercurio wondered if he’d manage an eternity in it with quite as much calm as Aelius.
They turned down a long shelf, twisting off in a gentle curve. As they walked the rows of dusty tomes wrapped in old skins and polished wood, Mercurio realized the curve was slowly tightening—that the shelf was turning in an ever-smaller spiral. And somewhere near the heart of it, out in all that dark, Aelius came to a stop.
The chronicler reached up to the top shelf, pulled down a thick book, and placed it in Mercurio’s hands.
“The Mother keeps only what she needs,” he said. “And she does what she can. In the small ways that she can.”
Mercurio raised an eyebrow, cigarillo still smoldering at his lips as he examined the tome. It was bound in leather, black as a truedark sky. The edges of the pages were stained blood-red, and a crow in flight was embossed in glossy black on the cover.
He opened the book, looked down to the first page.
“Nevernight,” he muttered. “Stupid name for a book.”
“Makes for interesting reading,” Aelius said.
Mercurio opened the book to the prologue, rheumy eyes scanning the text.
CAVEAT EMPTOR
People often shit themselves when they die.
Their muscles slack and their souls flutter free and everything else just … slips out. For all their audience’s love of death, the playwrights seldom—
Mercurio flipped through a few more pages, softly scoffing.
“It has footnotes? What kind of wanker writes a novel with footnotes?”
“It’s not a novel,” Aelius replied, sounding wounded. “It’s a biography.”
“About who?”
The chronicler simply nodded back to the book. Mercurio flicked through a few pages more, scanning the beginning of chapter three.
… dropped him into the path of an oncoming maidservant, who fell with a shriek. Dona Corvere turned on her daughter, regal and furious.
“Mia Corvere, keep that wretched animal out from underfoot or we’ll leave it behind!”
And as simple as that, we have her name.
Mia.
Mercurio faltered. Cigarillo hanging from suddenly bone-dry lips. His blood ran cold as he finally understood what he held in his hands. Glancing up at the shelves around him. The dead books and lost books and books that never were—some burned on the pyres of the faithful, some swallowed by time, and others …
Simply too dangerous to write at all.
Aelius had wandered off down the twisted row, hands in his pockets and muttering to himself, a trail of thin gray smoke left behind him. But Mercurio was rooted to the spot. Utterly mesmerized. He began flipping faster through the pages, eyes scanning the flowing script, snatching only fragments in his haste.