He looked around the vast space, forced to admire the grandeur even after all these years. Enormous stone pillars were arranged in a circle, stone gables carved from the Mountain itself soaring above. The names of the Church’s countless victims were scribed on the granite at his feet. Unmarked tombs of the faithful lined the walls.
The space was dominated by a colossal statue of Niah herself. Her black eyes seemed to follow Mercurio as he stepped closer, squinting in the false light. She held a scale and a wicked sword in her hands, her face beautiful and serene and cold. Jewels glittered on her ebony robe like stars in the truedark sky.
She who is All and Nothing.
Mother, Maid, and Matriarch.
Mercurio touched his eyes, his lips, his heart, looking up at his Goddess with clouded eyes. As he stood there in the hall, a knot of young folk entered from the steps below. They regarded the old bishop with wary stares as they passed, meeting his gaze only briefly. Smooth skin and bright eyes and clean hands, teenagers all. New acolytes by the look, just beginning their training.
He stared after them wistfully as they left. Remembering his own tutelage within these walls, his devotion to the Mother of Night. How long ago it all seemed now, how cold he’d grown inside. Once he’d been fire. Breathed it. Bled it. Spat it. But now, the only ember that remained was the one he kept burning for her – that snot-nosed, stuck-up little lordling’s bitch who’d wandered into his shop all those years ago, a silver brooch shaped like a crow in her hand.
He’d never made time for familia. To live as a Blade of the Mother was to live with death – with the knowledge that every turn could be your last. It hadn’t seemed fair to take a wife when she’d likely end a widow, nor make a child who’d probably be raised an orphan. Mercurio never thought he’d a need for children. If you’d asked him why he’d taken that raven-haired waif in all those years ago, he’d have muttered something about her gift, her grit, her guile. He’d have laughed if you’d told him he needed her as much as she needed him. He’d have cut your throat and buried you deep if you’d told him that one turn, he’d love her like the daughter he’d never had.
But in his bones, even as he ended you, he’d have known it true.
And now, here he was. A worm on Drusilla’s hook. For all his bluff, he knew the Lady of Blades spoke truth – Mia loved him like blood. She’d never let him die in here, not if she thought she had a chance to save him. And with those wretched daemons riding her shadow and eating her fear, in Mia’s head there was always a chance.
The old man peered at the granite colossus above him. The sword and scales in her hands. Those pitiless black eyes, boring into his own.
‘Where the fuck are you?’ he whispered.
He left the hall, Drusilla’s Hand lurking at a respectful distance behind as the old bishop shuffled on his way through the Mountain’s maze, his cane beating crisp on the black stone. His knees were aching by the time he reached his destination – he didn’t remember there being quite so many stairs in this place. Two dark wooden doors loomed before him, carved with the same spiral motif as decorated the walls. Each must have weighed a ton, but the old man reached out with one gnarled hand and pushed them open with ease.
Mercurio found himself on a mezzanine overlooking a forest of ornate shelves, laid out like a garden maze. They stretched off into a space too dark and vast to see the edges. On each shelf were piled books of every shape and size and description. Dusty tomes and vellum scrolls and famished notebooks and everything in between. The grand Athenaeum of the Goddess of Death, peopled with the memoirs of kings and conquerors, theorems of heretics, masterpieces of madmen. Dead books and lost books and books that never were – some burned on the pyres of the faithful, some simply swallowed by time, and others simply too dangerous to write at all.
An endless heaven for any reader, and a living hell for any librarian.
‘Well, well,’ said a croaking, hollow voice. ‘Look what the scabdogs dragged in.’
Mercurio turned to see an old Liisian man in a scruffy waistcoat, leaning on a trolley piled with books. Two shocks of white hair sprung from either side of his scalp, and a pair of finger-thick spectacles adorned his hooked nose. His back was so bent, he looked like a walking question mark. A fine cigarillo smouldered on his bloodless lips.
‘Hello, Chronicler,’ Mercurio said.
‘You’re a long way from Godsgrave, Bishop,’ Aelius growled.
The chronicler stepped closer, squared up against Mercurio, and glowered. As they stood there, face-to-face, Aelius seemed to stand taller, his shadow growing longer. The air rippled with some dark current, and Mercurio heard the shapes of colossi moving out between the shelves. Coming closer.
Aelius’s dark eyes burned as he considered Mercurio’s, his voice growing harder and colder with every word.
‘If I can still call you “Bishop” at all, that is,’ he spat. ‘I thought you’d be ashamed to show your face outside your bedchamber after what you pulled. Let alone drag yourself down here. What brings your traitorous hide to the Black Mother’s library?’
Mercurio pointed to the ever-present spare behind the chronicler’s ear.
‘Smoke?’
Chronicler Aelius hung still for a moment, eyes burning with dark flame. Then, with a small chuckle, he unfolded his arms, clapped Mercurio on his thin shoulder. Lighting the cigarillo on his own, he handed it over.
‘All right, whippersnapper?’
‘Do I look all right, old man?’ Mercurio asked.
‘You look like shite. But it’s always polite to ask.’
Mercurio leaned against the wall and gazed out over the library, dragging a sweet grey draught into his lungs. The smoke tasted of strawberries, the sugared paper setting his tongue dancing.
‘They don’t make them like this anymore,’ Mercurio sighed.
‘Same might be said of everything in this room,’ Aelius replied.
‘How’ve you been, you old bastard?’
‘Dead.’[fn3]
The chronicler settled in beside him.
‘You?’
‘Much the same.’
Aelius scoffed, breathed a plume of grey. ‘Still got a pulse in you from what I can see. What the ’byss you sulking about down here for, lad?’
Mercurio drew on his cigarillo. ‘It’s a long story, old man.’
‘A story about your Mia, I take it?’
‘… How’d you guess?’
Aelius shrugged his bone-thin shoulders, his eyes twinkling behind his improbable spectacles. ‘She always struck me as a girl with one to tell.’
‘We might be nearing the final page, I fear.’
‘You’re too young to be such a pessimist.’
‘I’m sixty-fucking-two,’ Mercurio growled.
‘As I say, far too young.’
Mercurio found himself chuckling, warm grey spilling from his lips. He leaned back against the wall, feeling the smoke buzz in his blood.
‘How long have you been down here, Aelius?’
‘O, a while,’ the chronicler sighed. ‘Never saw much sense in counting the years, though. It’s