The Library at Mount Char (31 page)

“Yeah—I mean no. Or maybe. I guess. Do we have another minute? I just…” He nodded at the tequila.

“OK. But hurry.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He knocked off half the tequila at a gulp. “Did you have something to do with that?”

On TV, the woman who had seen the elephant thing held up her hand. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She was screaming. The skin of her arm was pitch-black, as if it had been dipped in ink, and something was wrong with her fingers—they quivered, not like fingers at all anymore. They looked to Steve like tentacles.

“Not really. Well…indirectly. It comes from Barry O'Shea, or maybe one of his people. They're very contagious.”

“Who? Contagious? What?”

“She's got a—it's called a reality virus. It's not actually that dangerous, it just looks bad. The tentacles act like, umm, antennas, sort of. They make her receptive to the underthoughts. If she lets it go untreated she could get possessed.”

“Possessed? You mean, like, by demons?
That
kind of possessed?”

“What? No.” Carolyn laughed. For one horrifying moment Steve thought she might pinch his cheek. “There's no such thing, Steve.”

“What, then?”

“Silent Ones. They're pure thought, but they manifest as big lumbering things, sort of silver. They're a relic of the third age. They can't be killed, but the sun's wide-spectrum radiation was deep enough to make
them inert. With it gone, Barry's decided it's time to make his move. Does that make sense?”

Steve just looked at her. “No. No, it really doesn't.”

“Well…don't worry about it. When things settle down I'll sort that part out. Barry is a lightweight.” She nodded at the tentacle woman. “Anyway, there's an easy cure.”

“An easy cure for having your fingers turn into monster hands?”

“Well…easyish. The best thing, obviously, is just don't touch him in the first place.”

“Oh, obviously.”

“Don't worry so much, Steve. People will adjust.”

“Adjust to
what
, exactly? I still don't understand what all this is about.”

“It's about the Library,” Carolyn said. “Right now the only thing that matters is who takes control of Father's Library.”

“Library? Who gives a damn about a library?”

Carolyn rolled her eyes. “Americans.”

“What?”

“You've seen a little of what we can do—Lisa, me, David. What did you think?”

Steve swallowed. “Some of it was…yeah, it was pretty amazing.”

Carolyn's face was bathed in the red light of the bar lamps, but her eyes were dark. “What you've seen is
nothing
, Steve. Parlor tricks. For all intents and purposes, the power of the Library is infinite. Tonight we're going to settle who inherits control of reality.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said.”

“Carolyn…that's just crazy. I know you can do some weird stuff, but—”

She held up her hand. “We can argue later. But right now we need to go.”

“Go where, exactly?”

“Garrison Oaks,” she said.

“Why would we do that? I just got away from there. It was the exact opposite of fun. And why the hell did you send me in there in the first pl—”

“Later. Now I have to meet David. He'll be done with Erwin soon.”

“Erwin? David's with Erwin?”

She nodded. “Erwin was trying for an ambush. If we don't hurry, David will kill him.”

“When you say ‘meet David,' what exactly do you mean? Are you…you're not, like, conspiring with that guy, are you?”

She didn't answer. Try as he would, she would say nothing else.

SORE, AND IN NEED OF COMFORT

C
arolyn died about five years after the bonfire of the bull. It happened at the very end of winter, during that six weeks or so when the breeze still blows cold but the forest nights are filled with the yowls of rutting cats. She was sixteen or seventeen then.

Mostly when people are resurrected they sleep for a while, but Carolyn came back to life like a match flaring at midnight. There were hands on her; she was being
touched
. She snapped out, caught hold of someone's hair, pulled herself in to bite.

“Fuck! Carol-aagh!” Jennifer's eyes, inches away, terrified.

“Oh…” Carolyn blinked at her for a moment, then let her go. “Sorry.”

Jennifer skittered back a few feet, out of grabbing distance. “Dammit, Carolyn!” She put her hand to her heart. “You scared the
shit
out of me! Sheesh!”

“I'm sorry.” She made an effort to sound calm, mild. It—whatever
it
was, she couldn't quite remember—wasn't Jennifer's fault.

Jennifer eyed her, suspicious. She didn't look stoned. “It's OK. You shouldn't try to move just yet.”

Carolyn nodded.
If she's not high, I must have been pretty bad off
.

“OK, then.” She showed Carolyn her empty hands, then patted the air as if soothing an invisible animal. “Friends, right?”

Carolyn nodded again.

Somewhat reassured, Jennifer moved back in and took her pulse. As she did, Carolyn looked around. Her small room, normally immaculate, was a wreck—half the shelves were overturned, with books and scrolls scattered across the floor. Her desk lay on its side. One drawer was jammed halfway open, crooked, pointing skyward. She wrinkled her nose. “What's that smell?”

“Er…well. Maybe you, a little bit.”

“What do you mean?”

“It happened a couple of days ago. And, you know…it's been warming up.” Jennifer averted her eyes. “I'm sorry, Carolyn. We all just figured you were studying.”

“How long…?”

“Three days, I think. How are your arms?”

“My arms? What do you m—Oh. Right.” Her face clouded a little bit. It was coming back to her.

Looking down, she saw faint white scars on her forearms, where she'd been stabbed with the pens. She glanced at the desk. One of the pens—a gunmetal Mont Blanc, her favorite—was still embedded in the wood. In the center of her new scars were little black ink marks. She flexed her hands, her arms. It didn't hurt at all. “I'm fine, I think. Just a little sore.”

“Sorry. I'm still not perfect at that part. How's your jaw?”

“My jaw?” Then, remembering, “Oh. Right.” She opened her mouth, chewed the empty air for a second, wiggled her jawbone from side to side. “Good. It's fine, really. Thank you, Jennifer. You do good work.”

“Yeah, well. I get lots of practice. I'm glad you're OK. You were pretty—” She cut herself off. “I'm glad you're OK.” Her work done, Jennifer rooted around in her kit, came up with her silver pipe. “You mind?”

“Go ahead. So…I'm confused, Jennifer. What happened?”

Jennifer gave her a professional sort of look. “Do you still not remember it?”

Carolyn furrowed her brow, concentrating. “It's hazy.”

“Give it a minute. I'll wait.” She set the pipe aside for the moment.

Carolyn looked around the room—her chair was overturned behind the desk. Her bed was still neatly made, but a pot of ink had spilled on the
quilt.
Ruined
. One of the books on the floor was open to a page painted with long, broad brush strokes.

That last sparked something. “Oh, wait…while I waited on Alicia, I was studying Quoth.”

“Studying what?”

“Sorry—Quoth. It's the language of storms. They're great poets, some of them.” The open page was a snippet of a decades-old squall from Jupiter, the gloomiest stanza of a larger work.
Now
, she read,
is hell's blackest pit
.

No
, Carolyn thought, eyes widening ever so slightly.
That was only part of it. I was
pretending
to study Quoth
. She looked to the bookshelf in the corner, but from this angle it was hidden behind the desk. Faking a casualness she did not feel, she steadied herself against a shelf and stood—or tried to, anyway. She made it far enough to see that the little brown bookshelf in the corner behind her desk was upright and undisturbed. Seeing this, her relief was such that her legs gave way. She collapsed, graceless, back onto the floor. “Dammit!”

Jennifer blinked. Carolyn was usually very mild. “Take it easy. Your heart probably isn't quite up to speed yet. So…you remember now?”

“It's coming back to me.” Even over the pain there had been his voice, his smile.
Try to scream. Scream for me. If you scream for me, I'll stop. If you scream for me, I'll let you go
.

“Was it David?”

Carolyn didn't trust herself to speak. She looked up at Jennifer, brow knotted, jaw muscles jumping.

“Sorry. Dumb question. What happened?”

“I remember most of it. But not the, you know, the, the end.”

“That's normal,” Jennifer said. “This was the first time you died, right? No one ever remembers the first time. Next time you'll retain a little more, and so on.”

“Oh. I've heard that. Why is it? Do you know?”

“I do, but I shouldn't say. My catalog. Sorry.”

Carolyn shook her head. “It's fine.”

“Go on,” Jennifer said, still gentle. “Tell me what happened.”

Carolyn sat silent for a long time, looking into the middle distance.
When she spoke, her tone was perfectly calm, bored even. She might have been talking about lunch. “Does it matter?”

Jennifer raised her eyebrows a little. She put her pipe back in the bag. “Doesn't it?”

Something in her voice set off alarm bells. Carolyn came back to herself. “Sure! I mean, of course it does. I'm, um, very upset. Obviously.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

The actual answer to that was that she'd rather have gone another round with David.
Almost
. But she couldn't say that, couldn't even think it. If Jennifer thought she was…whatever…it might bring attention on her. She might even say something to Father. “I'd hate to take up too much of your time. I'm sure you've got things to—”

Jennifer reached out and touched her forearm. “I do, but they can wait. It's what friends are for. Anyway, it's sort of my job.”

The door to her room was soundproof, but Jennifer had left it open. Up on the main hall, Peter was practicing his drums. The beats echoed strangely, rolling down the metal hall. Carolyn felt them as much as heard them, a low rumble in her temples, her heart. Trying to channel Asha, she gave her best plaintive look. “All right,” she said in a small voice. “Just give me a second.”

“Of course.”

She concentrated and, after a moment, managed to produce a single tear. She let it roll down her left cheek for an inch or two, then brushed it away.
Perfect
.

Jennifer sat down beside her on the floor, an intimate distance. “You mind?”

She did. “No, of course not. So…the way it started was David came in with a scroll. He said he wanted my help with a translation.” She looked at Jennifer. “But he was naked.”

Jennifer gave a dark little nod. Walking around naked wasn't quite the breach of etiquette for the librarians that it would have been for Americans—among other things, the baths were unisex—but it was unusual. When Michael was just back from the ocean he sometimes forgot to dress. People laughed at him for it.
No one laughs at David, though
. And there was really only one reason he might go naked to Carolyn's room.

“What did you do?”

Carolyn looked at her. “I asked him to leave. He did, and that was the end of it.”

She had intended this as a kind of joke, but when she said it aloud it sounded bitter, petulant. Jennifer said “sorry” again, but she was eyeing Carolyn with a dispassionate, clinical stare that Carolyn didn't like at all.

Focus
. “I started to get nervous when I looked at the scroll. It wasn't anything exotic—just Pelapi, but a little old-timey. ‘Verily' this and ‘forsooth' that, you know?”

“He needed help with that?”

“No. Of course not. It was an excuse.”

“Why'd you let him in?” The dormitory doors had a peephole, and they locked on both sides.

“ ‘Let' might be a little strong. I was expecting Alicia, so I had left the door cracked. We were supposed to practice Swahili. It's everywhere in the twenty-eighth cen—Hey! That reminds me—you said I was, you know, gone for what? Three days?”

“About that, yeah.”

“Alicia didn't show?”

“Nope. She's got called off to the impossible centuries. She's picking up pneumovore teeth or something. Michael was the one who found you.”

“Michael's back?”

Jennifer shook her head. “Later. Right now we're talking about you. What happened next?”

Carolyn fought down a nearly insurmountable urge to glance at the small bookshelf in the corner. David had either found what was hidden there, or he had not. She thought not—if he had, she would have woken up in the bull, or more likely not at all. But it was important to focus. This conversation could still be the end of her.
Try to sound hesitant, like you're feeling your way through a dark room. Like you're avoiding something
.

Thinking that, she flashed on the sound her jaw made, cracking under David's grip.
Try to scream. Scream for me
. But the pulse in her neck barely quickened and when she spoke her tone was just right. She had been practicing. The tremor in her index finger was clearly visible, though.
I need to work on that
. “Well…I translated the piece for David. It was about
the sacking of Megiddo, a couple thousand years ago. The armies of Abla Khan—”

“Who?”

“Abla Khan. It's just another name for Father. Ablakha, Abla Khan, Adam Black?”

“Oh. Sure. Sorry.”

“So, they conquered Megiddo. But—and this was the part David wanted me to read—the victory came at a high price. So…” Carolyn, not completely faking, squeezed her eyes shut at the memory. “And so…seeing that his warriors were downtrodden, sore, and in need of comfort, Abla Khan did say unto them, ‘Go into the cities, and take what spoils you may find there. This place is yours now, and all that dwell within it. Use them, man and woman alike, and do with them what you will.' ” She opened her eyes. “When I got to that part, David started grinning.”

Jennifer winced. “Oh, Carolyn…”

“So, then David said what a coincidence it was. Here
he
was, a warrior of Abla Khan. As it happened, he was also downtrodden—another coincidence—and…”

“And…?”

“And there I was,” she said. “The spoils.”

Jennifer gave a small, furious nod.

“And then…he sort of reached out and grabbed me.” She nodded at her chest.

“Just like that?”

“Yup. Just like that. The weird thing was, he didn't seem cruel about it.”

Jennifer, eyebrows raised, looked around the room.

“Well, not at first. He acted like he thought he was being seductive. Like maybe he was doing me a favor, even.”

She considered. “I can see that. He does have an awfully high opinion of himself. What did you do?”

“Nothing. I just looked at him.”

Jennifer raised her eyebrows again.

“I didn't want to get him, you know, all riled up.”

Jennifer gave her a measuring look. “You know, Carolyn, you're pretty self-possessed, for a bookworm. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“No. You're the first.” Out in the hall the drums were pounding, pounding.