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?”