“Guess not.”
“Thanks for getting us out of there,” she said. She was really rattled, despite her casual tone; her hands shook on the keyboard. I tried not to let on how utterly horrified I was in turn. Whatever had happened in there, she had expected none of it, and they had expected all of it—everything she’d said, everything she did, even me being there.
“What were they doing to you? Us? Just you?”
“Immobility spell, I’d guess; meant to keep me there till they got the answers they wanted. That wouldn’t have worked a week ago. Those fucking liars, they know there’s magic pouring in, they’re even using it. Background my ass.”
“Jesus. It’s like Harry Potter up in here.”
“Nothing so organized, I’m afraid.” She clicked the laptop shut. “The Ancient Ones and all Their servants have senses we don’t have, their consciousness, their bodies work in different ways from ours. When they move They aren’t moving like us. Parts of Them can be places, Their consciousness can be split up, some awake, some asleep, even their memory, even their desires; some of Them can control people, some of Them can’t even control how solid They are, how They interact with our world, our rules, gravity, inertia, time. We can’t understand Them. We never will. We cannot, not if everyone on Earth dedicated the rest of our lives to studying them for a million years. They can’t be understood, even by each other. Only obeyed.” She glanced back at the direction we’d come. “You have to wonder about people who spend all their time thinking about Them. About proximity effects.”
“They said… my name was…”
“No. It might look that way because you’re traveling with me. Layers overlap and blur; things become hard to distinguish. Don’t worry about what he said. Anyway, we’ve been walking in the right direction, at least. Come on, we might be able to get a taxi here.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE LIBRARY TURNED out to be embedded in the middle of a complex of buildings, through which we walked as inconspicuously as possible, dodging the crowds, until finally there was only darkness, silence, us. The mosque reared above everything, cool and symmetrical in white, slightly insubstantial in the dim light, backed by a million stars. I stopped to stare suspiciously at some large, bright ones that I didn’t recall seeing a few nights ago, tinged with blue and green.
“Johnny—”
“I know. Seeing the birth and death of stars is a bad sign, since they’re all millions of light-years away. The time dilation effects of transitory magical particles and the… listen, just don’t look. They’ll pull on you.”
“Pull?”
“Don’t look.”
On either side of us stretched neat brick walls, pierced with round-topped doorways, all shut, many with signs on them that I couldn’t read but could guess what they said: No Trespassing. Or, No Admittance If Not A Student. We’d seen a lot like that so far, Johnny walking blithely past them, hopping gates and picking locks. The mosque looked as big as the Coliseum back home—maybe bigger. How many people had I seen at the hockey games on TV?—no, it had to be bigger than that. The roof was dark green, lit up only here and there from streetlights in the darkness. The annex next to it was covered in fantastic tilework, colours muted, bordered in carved cedarwood and flanked by big black pillars. I inhaled the wood scent deeply, wondering that I could smell it at all. You probably couldn’t during the day, when it was busy with tourists and students and worshipers. “That’s the Medersa el-Attarine,” she whispered. “Not us.”
“What?”
“That’s for tourists. Sorry. This is us.”
“This is... much creepier.”
The door, flanked with UNDER RESTORATION: DO NOT TRESPASS signs in a dozen languages, was big enough to walk an elephant through, but shut so tightly you couldn’t fit a piece of tissue paper between the joints. Johnny ducked under the barricades and pushed anyway, then pulled, to no effect. I ran my fingers gently along the complicated carvings in the dark wood, touched here and there with gold or enamel. Everything was mirrored, balanced, mathematically precise. It looked like the doorway to a very fancy hotel, not a place where you could find books on monsters and mayhem. But how would we get in?
Johnny looked up appraisingly at the roof and said, “Oh man, they are not gonna like this.”
“I haven’t even heard the idea and I don’t like it.”
“You’re gonna like it even less in a minute.”
We circled the annex to a cluster of support buildings, low sheds and quonsets. Johnny stopped at a random—or so it seemed to me—shed and flexed her fingers for a minute. “Boost me up,” she said. “If I can get up and over the roof, then I’ll figure out how to let you in.”
“Are you... no way. I’m almost a foot taller than you, I’ve got way more reach, and what if there’s guards or something inside the wall? I’ll go. You, stay put. I’ll let you in.”
“I’m lighter! You’ll sound like a marching band crashing around up there.”
“And you’ll sound like one when you fall off the roof. We need you alive to save the world or whatever, we don’t need me for anything.”
She glared at me. “If you’re so unqualified, why’d I let you come?”
“Dunno. Guess if we get stuck in the desert you can eat me?”
“Gross. Like that Guy Pearce movie.”
“I’m way more food than Guy Pearce.”
“Look, if I don’t make it, then we can—”
“And if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass hopping.”
“Shush.”
I cupped my hands in front of me, let her step in, and shoved her up onto the roof of the shed, my amulet-stung palm bursting briefly with pain, gone when her weight left it. I heard her scrabbling for purchase for a second, then looked up to see her standing on the roof, arms out. “There’s kind of a dip in it,” she said in a loud whisper. “Ugh. Didn’t figure on that. See you on the other side!”
As she got a running start for the next roof up, I felt my face stretch into an involuntary grimace of horror, like watching the boys dart into the road with their hockey sticks, not watching for cars. But she leapt and landed, dusted herself off, and looked up at the next roof, close but high. It was too dark to see what she was doing, but I heard clinks and thumps, followed by the discreet but highly identifiable sound of plaster crumbling. Then more scrabbling, her worn-down Pumas trying to get purchase on the wall. Then silence. I realized, morbidly, that I was waiting for a thump.
But she had chosen her path well, to coincide with roofs and distances that someone her height could get to—prodigy mode again, I figured, rather than any native athleticism—and in a few minutes I saw her spreadeagled on the shiny tile roof, lit up in moonlight so bright, now that my eyes had adjusted, that I could see the sweatstain on her back, black on the grey t-shirt.
She crawled carefully up the tiles, knocking a few loose that slid rattlingly down to lodge in the gutter—rather than smashing to the floor, thank God—and disappeared over the other side. No one came to investigate, unbelievably; I wondered if there were spells already on this place, spells not of immobility but hiding, veiling, something to protect the books she wanted. Or... guarding, defense. What had we walked into?
I went back to the main door, since she hadn’t told me where else to go, and put my ear to the door to hear the small, measured strides approaching it. Then: “Fuck!”
“Oh my God, you can’t say ‘fuck’ in a mosque.”
“Well, it’s not... fupping locked, but there’s a... furking big wooden bar here across the door and I don’t think I can lift it. Hang on.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen you lift the back end of a Ford Focus six feet in the air. You’re an ant.”
“You’re an ant.”
I listened to her grunt and strain for a minute, faint scraping noises coming from the far side of the ornate door. I hoped she wasn’t damaging any of the carvings. Then I heard her leaving and returning moments later, followed by a loud
er scrape that could only have been the bar she’d described. The door swung slowly open. I walked in and tripped on a long piece of plywood, incongruously bare and raw-looking on the incredibly complex tile floor.
“How did you—”
“Physics, my good sir.”
I picked it up and propped it against the wall. We walked across the moonlit floor, my eyes swimming at the patterns and colours till I realized I was actually becoming dizzy. I focused on Johnny’s back instead, a solid colour, moving quickly towards another door, marked with caution tape and barricaded with more light planks. Building materials—bags of cement, stacks of tiles, cans of paint and epoxy, pallets of lumber, copper coils, solar tiles, and power tools—were locked up in a wire cage next to the door.
“It’s very old,” she whispered as we approached the door, and hesitated. “They’ve been working on the restoration for years. Apparently I actually donated some money for it, Rutger says. Through one of my academic charities, to fund doctoral students studying rare books or something. But there’s…” She frowned. “This isn’t right.”
“Aren’t we in the right place?”
“We should be, but…” She stared around us, visibly evaluating and dismissing each of the other doorways. After a minute, she snorted in frustration and ordered me to turn around, digging in my bag. With the brick of notes she had brought from home, she sat at the corner of the wire cage and began paging slowly through them with a penlight, cursing under her breath.
I walked around while she read, admiring the tile patterns, the lacy work of the doorways. Everything looked impossibly delicate, and yet that wasn’t what the restoration seemed to be working on. How old were these carvings, these patterns, these arched roofs? With a little jolt I wondered whether anyone in my family had ever seen this place, generations before mine. I didn’t know much about my background (“India,” my uncles told me when I asked, “and then Guyana,” as if I had not known that already). So little had been written down both before and after the British had brought our ancestors to South America. What if we had, some of us, one of us, walked in this place a millennium ago, spoken prayers here, read the books…
The tiles were hypnotizing in the moonlight, making me dizzy. I slowed my walk, tried to concentrate on one pattern at a time. Starbusts, whirls, stepped spirals, marching squares and triangles in perfect symmetry.
And there it was.
No. Gone.
I took a few steps, stopped again, baffled. Tired, low blood sugar, eyes unfocusing, nothing more than that. But I knew I had seen something.
Ceramic smooth under my fingers; I started a little, unaware that I had even reached out towards them. Still warm from the heat of the day, they were slick, spotless, absolutely regular… no. Not absolutely. I slowly ran my hands over the spirals of black and white and green and blue, feeling something arise from it, shutting my eyes, trying to let my fingertips read it. Straight lines, curves. Letters? Words?
“…John?”
Even after I had explained it to her, she said she couldn’t feel anything in the tiles, and I had to do it again and again, and finally write down what I had felt on a scrap piece of paper. It still made no sense: six horizontal lines, one straight one piercing them like a spine, and two random rectangles that I was sure I had drawn incorrectly.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, holding the drawing in one hand and absently trying to stuff the wad of notes back into my bag with the other. I took it myself and zipped the bag shut. “It’s… I think it’s the missing part of the floor plan. The Room of Protection for unholy documents. The whole wall’s got natural wards on it. How in the hell did you find it?”
“I don’t know. It kind of… you know, like those Magic Eye things?”
She stared at me appraisingly. “I can’t see it.”
“Yeah, Brent and Cookie can’t see them either. Just me and Chris.” But their names felt like poison in my mouth, and for a moment I almost felt crushed with grief—that I had left them, that they couldn’t see this, that I couldn’t protect them. As if everything were normal until I spoke the words. I looked away, wishing I could have had even one more moment of feeling proud about finding the secret room before it had turned to bitterness.
We followed the map through the door, down the hallway, and to a tile wall that Johnny confidently walked up to and threw her full weight against; it moved perhaps a half-inch. I gestured her aside and leaned on it till it opened its full width. She shut it behind us as we entered, waving her tiny penlight ahead of us in the perfect darkness, counting under her breath as the saucer of white light played over more bright tiles and then thresholds of perfect darkness, doorways that did not lead to where we needed. At six, she turned right and pushed open a set of wooden doors.
I knew it was the right place; a breeze blew from it like a breath, cold and heavy with the odour of old paper and mould. It smelled like the ghost of a library. The darkness was near-absolute here, only the thinnest bars of grey light filtering through gaps in the roof onto shelf after shelf of books and scrolls. They rose in the darkness, intricate shadows, the only brightness from masking-tape labels attached to some of the scaffolding, most labelled with dates—indicating, I supposed, when they had to be moved to continue the restoration project.
“They’re still working in here,” I said. “They’ll have guards.”
“Not sure I care. They’ll have lights too.”
“You have a real authority problem,” I whispered as we tiptoed into the darkness. “Only Child Syndrome.”
“Oh come on, that’s been debunked a hundred times. Where did you learn that, high school?”
“At least I have a high school diploma! What have you got?”
“And you’ve got a problem with authority, too.”
“That’s because you’re a bad influence.”
SHE HAD BEEN working for two hours, with a caged fluorescent worklight dragged from the hallway to her study carrel, when we started hearing the noises. I snapped out of my uncomfortable doze (the indigo water, the dust, silvery dust on all the cities of the world, raining down, some dust, some ashes, some spores, some cells) and looked around. Outside the blinding circle of the worklight, it was pitch black, not even moonlight visible. We had both lost whatever remnants of our night vision remained, whatever handful of rods or cones, I couldn’t remember which, and couldn’t get it back while we crisscrossed from floor to floor, room to room, trying to find the books Johnny wanted in the complicated shelving.
“Hit the light,” I said, knowing it wouldn’t help. “Someone’s coming, we’ll get in trouble.”
“I need it,” she said, pointing at her laptop and the growing pile of notes beside it. “I know when the alignment is and we are going to leave an inch of rubber on the road to make it in time. And I still don’t know how to lock the gate or where it is, exactly. But the way to calculate the coordinates is here. It’s got to be. I can’t stop. Not right now.”
I stood up and wavered for a minute. God dammit. Weren’t you not supposed to split up in horror movies? Finally I headed back to the entrance, wriggled a two-by-four loose from the hastily-made barricade, making sure it still had a nail in it, and set off to find the source of the sound, hoping it was just a stray cat that had gotten in. I didn’t want to smack it or anything, even one of the Society’s nark cats, but I was so jittery that anything seemed possible.
My feet sounded very loud on the slick tile, tempting me to take my shoes off and walk in my socks. But whoever was in the library with us was at least as loud, though it sounded like they were heading away from the Room of Protection. They wouldn’t know how to get in there anyway.
I stalked towards the noises, board raised over my shoulder like a baseball bat. Never split up in a horror movie. Something is always going to get you. Who didn’t know that? Even the kids had already watched movies where that lesson was taught. It didn’t have to be Evil Dead or whatever. Like, this was Land Before Time territory.
Worse yet, while I was bumbling around in the pitch blackness, following whatever I should have been running away from, Johnny was alone, head down, not listening for danger, surrounded by those weird books and scrolls, some of which had seemed to be faintly flickering or not really there, or had hissed at her from their chains, or were definitely moving slightly. Dammit.
Maybe it was a decoy, meant to lure me away from her, as if she were not the one compared to a dog and a snake and an ant, all things that could defend themselves. As if I had ever been able to defend either of us.
I wavered. Still. Still. She was the thing we had to protect, not me. Finally I turned away from the noises and walked swiftly back to the room—just in time to spot a shadow emerging from a corridor, heading for the secret door. Though briefly silhouetted in the moonlight, I knew who it was at once—the face was blinding in its whiteness now, as white as a mushroom, as if not even a trace of blood could be persuaded to move in the veins.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Get away from there!”
He growled, a prolonged, deep-throated noise that made the hair on my neck stand up. And then he was shambling towards me so fast I barely had time to get a hand up in front of my face, feeling his fist sink into my stomach. He hadn’t hit quite low enough to wind me, but I staggered back and—well, you swung first, pal—tagged him with the two-by-four, aiming for his head, managing a glancing blow off his shoulder instead.
He screeched, an inhuman noise of insult and pain; thick, clotted drops of something spill to the floor. I must have caught him with the nail. But he was coming at me again, roaring. I backed up, swinging the board in warning. “We don’t want trouble!” I shouted. “Just leave! Leave us alone!”
Beneath the Rising Page 17