The Library at Mount Char

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The Library at Mount Char Page 28

by Scott Hawkins


  Jennifer looked at her levelly. “He took me up to the bull.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I know. I’ve never been so scared in my life. He didn’t make me get in it or anything, we just went up there. And I got a stern talking-to. Professional responsibility, the patient relies on you, et cetera.”

  Carolyn goggled at her. “That’s it?” The bull was probably a little excessive for this, even by Father’s standards. But she would have expected something like fifty lashes. Fifty minimum. Nothing up to “skinned alive” would have surprised her.

  Jennifer nodded. “That’s it.”

  “Any idea why?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “He’s never been as hard on me as on the rest of you, but for something like this…well, I was as surprised as you are.”

  Carolyn gave her an expectant look.

  “I don’t actually know, but…look, this is just between us, OK?”

  Carolyn nodded.

  “It crossed my mind that if something happened to Father, I might be the only one around who could bring him back.”

  “What about—”

  “Liesel”—one of Father’s courtiers—“is getting on in years and, honestly, she was never much good to begin with. Anyway, I’ve heard rumors that there might be…political issues. That was always an uneasy truce. Liesel was never particularly happy with this iteration of reality, is what they say. So far as I know she and I are the only other ones who’ve studied the white folio.” The white folio, medicine, was where the secret of the resurrection was written down.

  “Interesting.” Carolyn considered. “Have you thought about what you’d do if it came to that?”

  “Came to what?”

  “If Father were dead,” Carolyn said levelly, “and you were the only one left who could bring him back.”

  Jennifer’s eyes went wide. Speaking formally, as if to an audience, she said, “I would resurrect Father, of course.”

  “Of course,” Carolyn said.

  Then, whispering, “I—Carolyn, I don’t know if you know this, but there are things you don’t even want to think about. Not around Father, maybe not anywhere. I mean that literally. Not even think.” She paused, then said, very quietly, “He can hear.”

  “I know,” Carolyn said, also whispering. She did, too. But there’s also such a thing as a calculated risk. She wondered if Jennifer knew about those. Probably not. Gentle, frightened people didn’t think much about calculated risks. “He can’t be everywhere, always. Can he?”

  Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. She looked away, then busied herself with the drawstring on her bag. “I don’t want to hear any more of this. I mean it, Carolyn. Not now, not ever. I won’t say anything about it—I won’t even think anything about it, if I can help it, but don’t ever say anything like that to me again. If you do I’ll go straight to Father. Am I understood?”

  “You are,” she said. The professional part of her mind noticed that Jennifer had used the phrase ‘Am I understood?’—Father’s preferred version—rather than the more colloquial ‘Understand me?’ that the rest of them used among themselves. Must be spending a lot of time with him, Carolyn thought. “I won’t. And I didn’t really mean anything, Jennifer, I just—”

  “Yeah. That’s fine. No problem, really. We’ll pretend it never happened.”

  Carolyn nodded. It seemed safer not to speak.

  Jennifer slipped forceps into her bag and pulled it shut. “OK, look. I need to go. And I imagine you could use some time to yourself.”

  “Also a bath. But thank you, Jennifer. For everything.”

  “You really are welcome.” Jennifer hesitated. “Look…later tonight Rachel and Alicia and I are going to smoke some weed and go up and watch the Milky Way. Just us girls, but Peter made a picnic basket. We’d love to have you come along.”

  “That’s really nice of you, but I can’t. I’m a little behind. I’ve got a test coming up and—”

  Jennifer held up her hand.

  “What?”

  “Forgive me, Carolyn, but that’s bullshit. You’re not behind in anything. The way you work you could be dead for a year and still be two weeks ahead of schedule. Why don’t you come with us? It’ll be fun. You still remember fun, right?”

  Carolyn gave her another smile, noticeably cooler. “I really can’t.”

  “Yeah.” Jennifer drummed her fingers against the door frame. “I wasn’t going to bring this up until later, but—”

  “I really need to—”

  “Just give me a second. OK? I’ll be quick.”

  Carolyn gave a very small nod. She wasn’t smiling at all anymore.

  “Thank you.” Jennifer drew in a breath. “Look…part of my catalog is that they teach you how to talk to people. Some people, you want to talk around the edges of a situation. Others, you want to fluff things up, put the best face on it that you can.”

  “Oh? How interesting.”

  “But with the strong ones, the best approach is to dispense with that sort of thing. You just lay out the facts. That’s what I’m going to do with you.”

  “I appreciate that. You’ve always been a good friend, Jennifer. You’ve always been very—”

  Jennifer held up her hand again. “Spare me. I’m being straight with you, Carolyn. Do me the same courtesy.”

  Carolyn nodded. “All right. If you like. What do you want to tell me?”

  “Thank you. Here’s what I think: There’s a particular species of crazy that people around here are prone to. Margaret has it worse than anyone I’ve ever heard of. David has it as well. They’re both lost causes—I’ll try, but unless things change radically, what they have is not something I’m going to be able to fix.”

  “What’s that got to—”

  “You’re showing signs as well,” Jennifer said soberly. “I was going to bring it up anyway, even before this…business…with David.”

  “Signs?”

  “With this particular species of crazy, you stop trying to make things better. You start trying to maximize the bad. You pretend to like it. Eventually you start working to make everything as bad as possible. It’s an avoidance mechanism.” Jennifer looked Carolyn directly in the eyes. “It can’t actually work. That’s why they call it crazy.”

  “I see,” Carolyn said. “That’s very interesting. Thank you for that information.”

  Sighing, Jennifer leaned back against the door frame. “Yeah. OK. Just think about it, all right?”

  “I will.”

  Jennifer opened the door and, blessedly, stepped out into the hall. “Look, if you don’t want to come tonight, that’s fine. I can’t make you. But I think you should. That’s my professional opinion, and my opinion as your friend. Also, in the unlikely—but welcome—event that you’d like to talk more about, you know, the other stuff, you know where to find me. Lacking that, best of luck to you and you have my condolences.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment. Finally, Carolyn said, “Is that all?”

  Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Yeah. That’s all.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Sure, of course. We’re going to meet at the jade stairs around sunset.”

  Carolyn shut the door.

  II

  When Jennifer was gone, Carolyn went down to the baths. They were communal and unisex, but there was no one there at the moment. She filled one of the tubs with the hottest water and bathed herself. She stood up and dried off.

  She took down a clean robe to dress, looked at it, then hung it back up again. She filled the tub a second time. She felt the filth of him on her even still. She rummaged in the closet until she found a very stiff brush and a caustic soap used to remove tar or certain toxins. She scrubbed herself with these until her skin was raw, scrubbed until her skin was bleeding. She only stopped when she noticed she was sobbing. Then she composed herself and dried off a second time.

  Rachel came in while she was dressing. She gave Carolyn a sympathetic look. “Hey,” she sa
id. “How are you holding up?”

  “Fine. Why?” She busied herself with putting up her hair.

  “I, um…you know. I heard.” Rachel walked over and put her hand on Carolyn’s shoulder. “If you want to come by later, Alicia and I could—”

  Carolyn looked down at Rachel’s hand. “Thank you,” she said, “but I’m fine. Really, it was nothing.”

  “Um…OK. If you say so. But if you change your—”

  “You’re very kind.” Her tone sounded a little bit like David’s. Neither of them recognized this consciously, but Rachel let her hand drop.

  “OK,” Rachel said again.

  Carolyn walked back down the hall to her room. On the way out she passed David and Father walking down the hall. They were both covered head to toe in ballistic armor, and sweating.

  Father didn’t seem to notice her, but David gave her a two-dimple grin. “Hello, Carolyn.”

  She nodded back at him, expressionless. “Hello, David.”

  He tipped her a wink.

  Carolyn didn’t react at all.

  In her room she shut the door behind her, and locked it. She didn’t waste any more time thinking about David. It was the first time he had killed her, true, but he had hurt her before and she’d survived. This was her world. She had adjusted.

  Instead, she cleaned. She was by nature a tidy person, and this business had left her room cluttered. Teeth gritted, she shelved the books first, then turned the desk back over and scraped off the blood. The Mont Blanc he had crucified her with was ruined, but she thought the Montegrappa he used on the other arm would be fine with a new nib. Jaw muscles jumping, knuckles white, she cleaned the pen with a solution of ammonia and water, polished it, and set it back in the coffee cup she used as a holder.

  By sunset, around the time Jennifer and Rachel and Alicia were setting off on their picnic, she had the room back in something like good order. Only then did she return to the scrap of paper she had been holding when David came in. When he shut the door behind him, she used it as a bookmark for the text on Quoth. He hadn’t noticed.

  The bookmark was something she had found three years ago, in a Spanish text. It was a rough draft from a book on various methods of travel. It was not part of her catalog. It had apparently been left in the Spanish text by accident. It described something called the “alshaq urkun” which “maketh the light to pass through.” It was related to something called the “alshaq shabboleth,” which “maketh the slow things swifte” in some deep conceptual way. The alshaq shabboleth apparently had some side effects that rendered it impractical.

  Alshaq urkun, though, was eminently practical. The way alshaq urkun worked was by making physical objects transparent to the electromagnetic spectrum—invisible, among other things. When it was invoked on, say, a person, that person might walk about freely and unobserved, no matter who was watching.

  It had some drawbacks, too. The worst of them was that the rods and cones of the eyes were also transparent to light—that rendered you completely blind for however long the alshaq was invoked. But if you were careful, and if you planned your route in advance, you could get around just fine.

  Carolyn picked up the book that was only slightly hidden on the small corner bookshelf, the book whose presence she had concealed from David at such horrific cost. David would have recognized it immediately, of course—it was bound in red leather, as were all the books of his catalog. Carolyn’s own catalog was green. The title of the red book was Mental Warfare vol. III: The Concealment of Thought and Intention. It was a master-level text. Carolyn had finished it just the night before she died.

  She stood in the doorway of her cloister, then performed the ceremony of the alshaq urkun. She didn’t need to consult the slip of paper, not anymore. Everything she needed was committed to memory. When she was done, the world went dark. Red book in hand, she turned right. There were thirty-seven steps down the hall to the staircase. There were thirteen steps up to the main level of the Library, each of them nine inches high. That brought her to the jade floor. From there, one thousand and eighty-two steps took her to the ruby floor, where all books with red bindings were shelved.

  Still counting her steps, she brought the book she had hidden back to the shelf from which it had come—radial eight, case twenty-three, shelf nine. She returned it to the twelfth slot from the right, just where she had found it the week before. She would not need to consult it again. She had studied diligently. She had mastered the concealment of thought and intention. Now it was time to move on to other things.

  She took down a different book from shelf two of the same case, slot eight. It would be red as well, she knew, with a cover the color of arterial spray.

  Back in her quarters, Carolyn shut the door behind her. She went to her desk, sat down, lit the oil lamp. Even with the blood gone, her desk was scarred with two holes, just under arm’s length apart. She considered filling them, then decided against it. She would look at them from time to time. They would help her focus. Then, with a small smile, she opened the red book she had stolen—well, borrowed—from David’s catalog.

  This was cheating a little bit. She had first happened on the alshaq urkun bookmark about three years ago. She had been studying ever since. She started with Jennifer’s catalog, then bounced around as her plan began to take shape. The course of study she’d laid out wouldn’t have brought her to this volume for another month or two. But it was one she’d been looking forward to very much, and she thought that tonight she deserved a treat. The title and author were printed on the cover in the gold leaf of Western tradition. It was called The Plotting and Execution of Vengeful Murder by Adam Black.

  She opened it to “Chapter 11: Notes on the Subjugation of the Martially Superior Foe.”

  She read until late in the night.

  It was very comforting.

  Chapter 11

  Notes on the Subjugation of the Martially Superior Foe

  I

  “This is far enough,” Carolyn said.

  Steve rolled to a stop about a quarter mile down the road from the entrance to Garrison Oaks. He didn’t bother to pull over onto the shoulder. Carolyn was twitchy, nervous, swaying and rocking in her seat. Steve had never seen her like this. Naga watched from the backseat, fascinated.

  It was around nine p.m. Now even the light of the stars was gone. Is it just cloudy, or did she do something to them, as well? He realized, dimly, that he was in something like shock.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  Carolyn pointed. Not far from the subdivision sign a streetlight shone down, a little island of light in the long sea of black. Steve squinted. Three people stood under the light. His vision wasn’t good enough to make out faces, but one of them was clearly wearing a tutu. Somewhere in his belly fear squirted, bright and cold.

  “Is that David?”

  Carolyn pursed her lips, considering, then nodded. “He’s bleeding. Erwin must be better than I realized. It’s been a long time since anyone made David bleed.”

  “That’s Erwin down there?”

  She nodded.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s angry. He came to ‘fuck a bitch up.’ ”

  “Anybody in particular?”

  “The enemy. Me, David, anyone else who’s left. He figured out that we’d turn up here eventually. He’s very smart.”

  “But what—”

  “Shh!”

  Erwin raised the pistol to David’s face. David grinned. He leaned forward and put his nose right at the tip of the gun’s barrel. Erwin fired. The pistol’s slide slammed down on an empty chamber. David backhanded Erwin across the mouth.

  “OK,” Carolyn said. “Game time.”

  “What?”

  “Later,” she said. “Right now I want you to go to the Library. Do you remember which one it is?”

  “I do but—you’re not going down there, are you?” Steve gestured at the streetlamp, David. In the backseat Naga rumbled.

  “I a
m. And you’re going to go to the Library. You’ll be safe there. I’ll be along when I’ve finished.”

  “What? Are you crazy? Do you have any idea what that guy can—”

  “Steve, you need to listen,” Carolyn said. “There isn’t much time. I need to go down there, and you can’t come.”

  “You’re going there? Alone?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “Maybe I can—”

  “Steve, listen. I’m not saying this to insult you, but if it came to a fight against David, you would have absolutely no chance of winning. None. It could not happen.”

  Steve opened his mouth to reply, but then he remembered how David had come to the jailhouse armed only with his spear, how he had filled the corridors of that place with the corpses of armed men. He shut his mouth. Then, after a moment, “Oh-kay. Point taken. And you do?”

  “More than just a chance.”

  “Carolyn, unless you can fight a lot better than you’ve been letting on—”

  “Steve,” she said. “Go. Just go. I can do this. You’ll be safe inside the reissak. No one that matters can get to you there.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “I just do.” She hesitated. “A long time ago, there was a…sort of homecoming party. A feast. The main course was two deer. That’s the reissak’s trigger. No one who tasted of their flesh can approach the Library. And that’s everyone of consequence. You’ll be safe there.”

  “But—”

  “Just go, Steve. Everything will be fine if you leave it to me.”

  They glared at each other. After a long moment, Steve said, “All right. OK. But what do you want me to do if it doesn’t work out the way you think? Should I come back, or—”

  “No.” Her tone was flat. “Don’t try anything. I could lose. It’s possible. It might happen. We’ll know one way or the other in a few minutes. If I don’t come for you in an hour or so, or if you see David at all, ever—don’t try anything. Find a gun and blow your brains out. Or hang yourself. Or jump off a bridge. Anything. David can’t do the resurrections, not yet. Probably by the time he learns he will have forgotten about you.”

 

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