universe became an ecstatic puzzle to this hunter-me, a magnificent path fingerprinted across the night to some abstract moment of glory: the capture.
I’d been hungering like that for a few weeks. And then Riley explained what exactly the Council had in mind for me, and it sounded like an answer to my prayers. “It’s a bureaucratic disaster, Carlos,” he warned me when he saw that thirst in my eyes. “I’m telling you now so you don’t get to act surprised later. It’s a whole fuckpot of politics and ego and all kindsa bullshit. But it’s gainful employment and some measure of stability with an occasional sense of being useful and doing something right in the world. And you don’t have many options open to you with your chilly gray half-dead ass. No offense.”
I nodded, still thrilled.
“All right, then. Here.” He held a walking stick out to me. It was mahogany and elegant without being bougie. I reached for it. “Wait.” He pulled the handle up and a shiny silver blade appeared, glowing gently. My eyes got wide. “It’ll fuck up a living person too, but the steel’s sanctified and specially designed to deal the Deeper Death to the already dead.”
I nodded. I musta looked like an addict staring down a fix. Still, I willed my fingers not to grab for it again. Riley watched me carefully and then sheathed the blade back into the cane and placed it in my hands.
“When you’re not such a disaster, I’ll start showing you the ropes.”
* * *
Most of these damn books are in languages I don’t know. The one in English is the diary of some monk that went batshit in the sixteenth century. I skim the pages until I get to the parts where Trevor’s scribbled-on Post-its get excited: “Wrath, borne unto me one miraculous and terrible night, now poisons my bosom with such a rage as I cannot describe.” Splendid. I don’t have time for this shit. “’Twas a time I remember not, but had to recatalog the events of my life as described in my own hand, through these many years, to retrace the arc of my own history.”
Now that I can simmer with. “A singular event, a single scrap of memory, is all I possess, and I suspect that without the guidance and support of my fellow Fathers of Christ, I would be lost, a heretic, exiled from myself even and cursed to wander like a Jew from town to town.” Also unpleasantly resonant. “Still, I resign myself to these dark cloisters, like the suddenly empty recesses of my mind, and here I shall stay and dissipate in the waning years of my life. I suspect my end can’t be far, for I am grown gray, deathlike in my countenance even as my energy and virility seem heightened with each passing day. Oh, Lord Father, help me to understand these cruel changes that have settled upon me!”
Another tormented halfie.
There’s another book that Trevor seemed particularly Post-it happy with, but the damn guy went ahead and wrote his notes in Flemish, or whatever the hell language this is.
I pour a glass of orange juice and squint at the ancient pages. Someone went through a lot of trouble to make this book ornate. Its swirling illuminations look like they’ve been encrusted with gold; each page reveals a whole new universe of vivid, monstrous illustrations. Here, right in the middle, is the part that obviously interested Trevor. His handwriting gets more frantic; things are underlined several times and there’re explanation points all over the damn place.
The central motif is a black-robed figure on a horse. A monk kneels before him, his face all torqued with fear, mouth wide open as if begging for his life. Naked bodies lay scattered like fallen leaves around them. Their skin is pale, and most of them have been run through with spears, but all their eyes are wide open. Above them, the text wraps around a giant skull that levitates in the sky. I run my finger along the page, feel the thick texture of the paper, and trace a triangle from the top of the skull to each edge of the picture.
A wildly elegant border runs the perimeter. At first I think it’s just ornate, golden vines snaking up a pillar. Then I notice something in the spiraling vegetation: an eye. I squint and get all close to the page. Then I almost fall backward in my chair. There’s a fucking ngk in there. It’s