“I’m here for the book.”
A long silence. The smooth face turned to me. Every moment that passed, I seemed to see the countdown on Johnny’s computer. The clock in the corner like any other clock, but heading towards death and disaster.
“What will you give me for it?” Namru said, pulling it closer.
“The... the owner of the library said we could take it.”
“He is not its owner. I am.”
“I don’t have anything I can give you for it.”
I waited for Namru to counter, to tell me what it wanted so that I could hedge and negotiate and maybe talk my way out of it, but it simply said, “Then you cannot have it.”
We both stalled out. My neck was hurting from turning my head away from the poisonous light. I glanced back to make sure it was still there. When it wasn’t speaking, it was utterly silent. More silent than death, with its chemical gurgling and maggot chomping and gases bubbling. More silent than the desert. No real desert was so still. Johnny and I had watched documentaries about it. Thousands of things live in deserts. Quietly but not silently.
“I don’t want to take away the only thing you’ve got,” I said.
“You speak truth. You have a good heart.”
“But… but I will if I have to. We need it. Terrible things are about to happen.”
“Do not. It will break your heart. Trade me. Trade.”
“Time,” I said. “I... I could...”
It was impossible to gauge the thing’s reaction. But time was the only currency Johnny said she’d ever heard of them asking. And time was all I had to give. I could not offer my life.
“I need not time here,” the thing said, and this time the stone of its face moved slowly, as if something squirmed beneath it. I quickly looked away again, kneading the scarf in my hands. “There is no time there. But there are... other things...”
Something was approaching in the distance, hesitantly, slipping on the sand. In the starlight it was impossible to see what it was until he had come within the radius of the book’s unnatural illumination. We stared hungrily at each other. I felt my vision narrow to a pinprick.
The thing chuckled. Actually laughed, as if it were human. “This knowledge is not yours to have,” it hissed. “And the world not yours to save. But you could have this.”
“This,” I croaked. “What... what are you... what is this offer? How...?”
“That you stay,” it said, finally extending its front limbs with the book on them. It was absurdly small. If I’d had my jacket with me, it would have fit in the pocket. Tears blurred my vision. What if I was wrong? What if Johnny was wrong—wrong about everything? She had admitted as such earlier. That she was wrong about something. About…
But no. The way the world had become, I felt more certain about some things. It must have been like this in the old days, I thought suddenly. When magic poured through for us and our enemies to use alike. When the end was near. When everyone knew the end was near. When they could feel it in their marrow, smell it in the air. When deals could be made and broken. “If I stay, you’re saying... he can go.”
“Go?”
“Back to the world. In my place.”
“Better.” It made a complicated gesture with something that wasn’t an arm, and a door opened, a rip, ragged at the edges as if the dark desert was a torn piece of cloth. I shut my eyes against the sudden brightness, but not before I saw what lay on the other side: blue sky, green grass, the pale trunks and golden coin-like leaves of aspen in the fall. A breeze cut through the creature’s stench with the sweet smell of leaf litter and clean air. “This one. Do you see it? I still have power left... to do this thing.”
“Nice try,” I said through a throat suddenly so dry with want that I almost fell to my knees at the bottom of the pit. I clutched the scarf. “Back to a world you’ll destroy.”
“A different world. One where the walls have not been breached between us by something that should never have been made. One where it was never made. Never even conceived.”
“They say…” I swallowed, my throat clicking again. Desert dry. Not like the other world, with its damp leaves, its blue sky. “They say the universe is a certain shape because it was made to be so. It is a shape because it is made to do a certain thing. Like a tool.”
“Yes. This is not that universe. This was shaped a different way.” It held the book up higher, flaring the many-coloured light across my clenched face. “Only agree to take this from me, and agree to stay. Be custodian of the knowledge in my place. Guard it from thieves and villains. Forever.”
“And where will you go?”
“To be again with my kind. Just as he will be.”
I looked at the other Nick, silhouetted uncertainly at the hole in the world. Sunlight spilled across the sand at our feet, showing how matte and absolutely black it was, without a single sparkle of quartz or mica. The shadows of leaves moved easily on the dark dunes, dappled and brisk.
Why was it always me who was tempted, who was offered these things? Why me, who constantly had to pretend to be Jesus on the mount, resisting the Devil, and not her, goddammit? Fucking why?
Because she had already been tempted with all they had, I thought. And she’d said yes. They had no more to give her.
But to tempt me, there was still so much. So much. This Nick, and the kids, and Mom, and their quiet life.
The other Nick, in the other universe, looked good. Healthy, scared but calm, clean-shaven, cowlick tamed, the disproportionate features—wide mouth, big nose, huge eyes, no different. The same face I’d seen in mirrors and windows and puddles all my life, not one molecule different. I wanted to talk to him—didn’t even know what to address him as. Nick? Me, I? He looked into the rip, the whispering aspens, then back at me. I couldn’t read his face. But there was no love there. I didn’t blame him. Are you real? I wanted to ask. Are you real enough for me to swap? Is it enough?
In my head I heard Johnny’s voice, clear and far away: Do you trust me?
No, I thought. But. We were running out of time. I had already paid him more time than the book was worth.
No you didn’t. He said you had a good heart. Now you will not pay his price.
No. I will not.
And I darted forward, slapped the book out of Namru’s grip, and wrapped it in my scarf. Both custodian and book screamed so piercingly that it seemed impossible to bear, and I screamed too as my ears buzzed in agony. Something crashed into me—the other Nick?—but when I opened my eyes I realized it was cold clay, the floor of the library, and I had fallen heavily to the ground, wrapped around the scarf and the howling book, unmuffled by my weight on top of it.
I scrambled to my feet, took two steps, and saw Johnny sprinting around a corner, knocking books aside in her haste. Black tentacles swirled at the edges of my vision.
I thrust the bundle at her, not wanting to touch it an instant longer. The fall had cut the inside of my cheek on my teeth, and my heart was beating so hard I thought I would faint. I swallowed blood and braced myself on a pile of books, uncaring whether I touched them now. Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint, I told myself. My shoes were heavy with gathered sand.
Her mouth was moving but I could barely hear her over the screams of the book. As she unwrapped it and pressed her illustrated hands to the front and back covers, holding it awkwardly like that, the sound droned away to a buzz, mixed with the ringing in my ears.
“What the fuck, Nick! I told you to fucking call me when you found it! Jesus Christ! Are you taking this fucking seriously? Are you? After everything we’ve seen?”
I looked back to where I had crossed into the desert, seeing nothing but the clay paths bordered by the labyrinth of books. Then I rolled blood in my mouth and spat crimson into the corner. Onto the floor, not near the books, in case they ate it. The blob gleamed for a second, then sank into the clay and dried to a flat, dull stain. I hoped it would be there forever. I didn’t know what I had given up, or w
hat I had gained, or what had happened to the other Nick, if he was real.
The blue sky, the gold of the aspen. The round leaves like coins in the sun.
“I called for you,” I said, unsurprised that my voice rasped in my dry throat. “You didn’t come.”
“Bull-fucking-shit. Bullshit. I would have heard you even in the other corner of the room.”
“Not from where I was.” I toed off one shoe and tipped it over with my foot, not daring to lean down. We both watched the black sand pool on the floor. After a moment, when it seemed clear that she had nothing to say, I put it back on. I’d empty them out properly later, when we weren’t about to have an army of Ancient Ones called down upon us.
She stared up at me in the dim light, her mouth half-open. “Where... did you...?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where I was. But come on. Like you said, too late to do anything about it now. Whatever it called, it called. Whatever’s coming’s coming.”
There was nothing else to say; the damage had been done. I followed her slowly back to the two desks and slumped into the free chair, watching her through heavy eyes until sleep pulled me down, swallowing my own blood like a baby nuzzling a bottle to drift off. At the last moment I thought: Breached the walls. Breached. It said… she had…
we are
the heart that beats
still
in the corpses of dead worlds
and it is your heartbeat
we desire to eat now
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I AWOKE TO thumping, and a thin fall of dust on my face, like fingertips. My eyelids felt as if they had tried to stick together the moment they closed. Next to me, Johnny was writing fast in one of her notepads with one hand, typing with the other. Her face was as hard as a skull, white and harsh in the light from the lamp, carrying around it a halo of gold. So much magic in the world. Like dust. Had it been a dream? One of those scary, real dreams she said they could give you?
Another thump put paid to that. No, I was awake.
I got up, heart hammering. “What’s that?”
“They’re trying to get in,” she said.
“What? They’re trying to—but there are spells here, to protect the books, you said, Akhmetov said—”
“Yep.” She hadn’t looked up; I wondered what minuscule portion of her conscious mind was having a conversation with me, and what percent was still frenziedly working on the code, the key, or the map that she had hoped to find in here. The stack of books next to her had grown while I slept, and she had built a jointed cylinder out of cardboard and paper, covered in dense writing in blue ballpoint. For decryption?
The next thump was louder, and this time a dinner-plate sized chunk of the clay ceiling joined the falling dust, landing with a sound like bells on the books next to me. I yelped involuntarily. “Jesus! Come on, we gotta go.”
“Can’t. Need to finish this.”
I hesitated, physically twisted between chair and doorway, unable to leave her. She was right, I was right. For a moment I heard only my wavering breath, and then the room shook again and more chunks of the ceiling leapt free. This was worse than the library in Fes, far worse.
I covered my head with my arms as fist-sized pieces of clay hit them, coating us both with fine white powder. Johnny paused only to tilt the notebook, clearing the page, then began to write again. I half-expected to see the pen nib smoking. Full prodigy mode. Time off the end.
Time. That was all I could buy her. They were coming in over us, so if she wasn’t there, they’d have to find her again. I panicked for a second—why on earth was I, the sidekick, the non-genius, having to come up with a plan? I was terrible at thinking on my feet—and said, “Okay, you’re not going to be able to work in a minute. Can you touch those books?”
“Yep.”
“All right, grab ’em, come on.”
She didn’t move.
I grabbed the notebook away from her, leaving her with the pen, and then seized the laptop when she didn’t move; finally she looked up, dazed, her face red and hectic under the white clay like a china doll. “The light—”
“Fuck the light! Come on!”
Finally she took the cardboard cylinder, the top three books from the pile, and the still faintly yelling one I’d taken from the monster in the black desert, and followed me at a twitchy sprint through the stacks, retreating into the darkness. The thumping and crashing receded behind us—supplemented now, terrifyingly, by an occasional gurgling scream. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up. It was like being in the zoo and having the tiger stop and make eye contact with you: a much older part of you than your conscious mind is responding to being prey. How long had They been teaching us how to fear?
“I can’t work here, I can’t see, and I need to break the code, I need—”
I shut my eyes, opened them to a darkness not too different from the inside of my eyelids. Just... yes, the computer in my hands, smash her skull in, keep pounding till it was done, till the deed was done. Circuitry embedded in the greatest brain the human race had ever seen. The brain got by illicit means, by dealing with monsters, pulling them as close to us as if we were waltzing at a party. The brain of...
She was still talking. I snapped back to myself, gasping, looking down at her in the last of the light. Books toppled gently around us, making me dance back to avoid them.
“The spells,” I said. “You saw hundreds of them today. And I know you didn’t try to memorize the ones you didn’t need, but I know you did anyway, because that’s how your memory works. Can any of them get us out of here?”
She stared at me, the whites of her eyes wild. “Yes, but they would take us to—”
“Don’t care. Does it have light? Can you work? Can you get us back?”
“Yes, maybe, if there’s enough magic—”
“Do it. You just need to squeeze what you need out of those books and then you can bring us back. It’s either that or try to fight in here, and you know we can’t win that.”
“It’s dangerous!”
“And this isn’t? Do you know what’s coming through the ceiling onto us?”
“No—”
“Me neither. You need the time. Quick!”
She grabbed the Sharpie, juggling the books awkwardly to her chest, and started drawing on the floor. The initial circles showed up on the clay as strong black marks, but they grew progressively fainter as the clay sucked out the ink. My stomach somersaulted. She was working feverishly, her arm a blur. It glowed faintly blue when she was done, but the last marks couldn’t be seen at all. I hoped she had dug them into the clay or something. I didn’t want to know what an incomplete spell would do.
Behind us, in the darkness, something growled.
“Get in!” she cried, and I stepped onto the circle, colliding with her just as a claw swiped at my back, missed.
And we were surrounded in a wash of light that was not light.
WE LANDED HARD; I tucked and rolled instinctively, protecting the notepad and computer, feeling something slash at my jeans. When I finally stopped and creakily rose, ankles aching, Johnny was a dozen yards away, curled over the books she’d grabbed. I hoped she’d taken the right ones.
My jeans had been cut by a glossy, slaty looking black surface, ridged with sharp edges. Cooled lava, maybe? I’d seen something like it in a textbook. And there was light, cold and pale as a winter day, from a greenish-grey, tornado sky. There was no sun. The back of my neck burned and prickled.
“John,” I said as she got up and limped towards me, “where are we?”
“You know where we are,” she said quietly, sitting down on the cool stone and spreading out the cylinder and books, the screaming one last. I resisted an urge to kick it.
I handed her the notebook and computer, and looked around—nothing but stone and silence as far as I could see in any direction. But the sunless sky worried me, the shapes of the clouds roiling like a thick liquid, occasional hints of... someth
ing sharp, something curved, something straight, something dark. It was better to not look right at it. I felt completely exposed, standing out there under that sky. Sweat broke out under my shirt.
“We’re where They sleep.”
“One of the places. Yes.”
“Did you pick this on purpose?”
“No.” She wasn’t paying attention to me any more, so I let her work and started walking. My heart was still pounding from the escape, unburned adrenaline eating away at me like acid. I wanted to run for miles, jump, scream. Instead I just sped up, occasionally looking back to make sure I still had Johnny in my sights. The sand spilling from my shoes made faint scratching sounds on the stone. My God, she’d taken us into the belly of the beast. Escaped the monster in the lake only to run right into the Balrog. I laughed into my cupped hand, still scented with death and book dust. Good one. Should go back and tell her that one.
I turned again: still there, a small lump in the distance, kneeling over her books. Knowledge is our only power, she’d said. The only thing we had. A tiny fragment, chipped off the tremendous knowledge They’d accumulated in Their millions of years of existence.
And in all those millions of years, had They been evolving too, like us? Had They been getting worse? Surely not entirely. Not all of Them. Nothing could evolve all in the same direction like that. Some of Them must have been getting... better, kinder, must have split off from the angry, vengeful ones the way we’d split off from chimps. Maybe some of the Lesser Angels were secretly on our side, and presumably those were waking up too. Maybe when They all came through the gate, I could ally myself with those ones, the good ones, the ones that Johnny kept denying existed. How could the entire population of any one race, albeit a race of monsters, be exactly the same? Logically, it wasn’t possible.
They’d make me something important, raise me up. Let me live. And not just live. Live in glory, like a king.
All I had to do was fulfill my half of the deal. I had said no again and again and again, but now, I could do one thing to show them that I had really meant yes…
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