the second,” Mercurio said, tapping on the black wolf cover. “And they both mention a third. Birth. Life. And death. So where is it?”
Aelius shrugged. “Buggered if I know.”
“Haven’t you looked for it?”
Aelius blinked. “What for?”
“So we can learn how it ends! How she dies!”
“What good will that do?” the chronicler frowned.
Mercurio stood with a dramatic sigh and, leaning on his walking stick, began pacing the room. “Because if we know what’s coming, maybe we can help her so things don’t turn out the way this”—his cane came down on the first “BOOK” with a dull thwack—“tells us they do.”
“Who says you can change anything?”
“Well, who says we can’t?” the old man snarled.
“You really want to see the future?” Aelius asked. “Sounds a curse to me. Better to weep for what might’ve been than for what you know is to come.”
“We don’t know anything,” Mercurio growled.
“We know all stories end, whippersnapper. Including hers.”
“Not yet.” Mercurio shook his head. “I won’t let it.”
Aelius leaned back on the desk, exhaled a plume of strawberry-gray into the miasma above. Mercurio dragged his shaking hand through his hair.
“Reading about all this,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right … It feels…”
“Too big?” Aelius asked.
“Aye.”
“A little like being a god, maybe?”
Mercurio folded kindling-thin arms across his thinner chest. He couldn’t remember feeling as old in all his life. “Fucking gods…”
“You have a role to play in this,” the dead man said. “The Mother brought you here for a reason. She had me find these books, show them to you, for a reason.”
“Seems a slender fucking thread to put so much weight upon.”
“It’s all she can do from where she is,” Aelius sighed. “A push here. A nudge there. Using what little power she gains from what little faith folk hold for her. And it’s harder for her now. Once, the folk running this place actually believed. To the faithful who created it centuries back, it truly meant something. She had real power here. But now?”
“Hollow words,” Mercurio muttered. “Walls painted gold, not red.”
“The Mother does what little she can with what little she has. But the balance between Light and Night won’t be restored by the hands of the divinities.” The chronicler pointed at Mercurio’s own gnarled, ink-stained hands. “It’ll just be those.”
“I’ll not lift a damned finger if it means hastening Mia’s ending.”
Aelius puffed on his smoke, regarding Mercurio thoughtfully.
“First things last, young’un,” he said. “You don’t need to read her whole biography to know where she’ll be headed now.”
“Aye,” Mercurio said. “Face-first into a world of flaming shit.”
“So when she arrives, we’d best be ready.” Aelius shrugged. “We’ll not need to worry how her story ends otherwise. It’ll end right here. In the halls of this mountain.”
“So what can we do?” Mercurio growled, rubbing his aching arm. “I’m halfway to dead, and you’re dead all the way. You can’t even leave the fucking library. Between the two of us, what good can we do her?”
Aelius leaned over to the second “BOOK” sitting on his desk. Sky-blue edges, wolf on the cover, leather so black light just seemed to fall into it. He licked his thumb and began leafing through the pages. Finally stopping at the place he wanted, he spun the tome toward Mercurio, tapped at the text.
The old man squinted at the words, heartbeat coming quicker.
He looked down at his wizened old hands.
Such a slender thread …
“Righto,” he sighed. “I’ll go talk to them.”
* * *
The room stank of blood.
Ancient and cracked to tiny black flakes, so many years between it and bleeding that its scent was just a broken promise. Old and dark, hardened to a rind in the cracks between the flagstones. A few sour splashes here and there, curled and separated like bad cream, wreathed with the stink of rot. But above it all, iron-thick and laced with salt, wafting through the open doors in invisible skeins until it permeated the entire level?
Fresh, new, ripe blood.
The pool was triangular, set deep in the stone, the red within it swaying and rolling like the surface of a tempest sea. Sorcerii glyphs were daubed in crimson on the wall, alongside maps of the major metropolises of the Republic—Godsgrave, Galante, Carrion Hall, Farrow, Elai. Old Mercurio could see other cities there, too. Cities ground by the heel of time into ruin and dust. Cities so old, there were few who even remembered their names. But Speaker Adonai remembered.
He was at the apex of the triangle, down on his knees. Bone-pale skin, tousled white