by Rich Horton
Palwick nodded politely towards it, then gestured at Essa’s hands. “You have something under those mitts?”
She hesitated, then shook her head.
“Ah. Right.” Palwick dug through his pockets. He wasn’t loaning out his good liners, but he had a decent enough pair left in his coat from summer that’d do. He held them out to her and she tucked them in the crook of her elbow as she peeled the mittens off one at a time.
He wasn’t trying to stare, but she wasn’t shy about her hands and he couldn’t help but notice the lines and dots along her thumb, close cousin to the mark on her face. They weren’t raised as lichen might be; they looked like her veins had grown strange and pooled beneath the skin.
He’d seen tattoos on some of the people who surrendered themselves to the library, but those were usually pictures of something, or trying to be.
Essa tugged the liners on, then the mitts. The bird at her feet let out a grackling rumble, and she bent down to pick it up, tucked it into her overcloak where it nestled above her belt.
Palwick started to ask if she’d had the bird long, but Essa interrupted. “You’re the one who found the body?” she said. “Out in the north garden. Is that right?”
“That was me.” He knew gossip could carry, but—oh, Mattish had made mention of his name as she’d introduced him. “It doesn’t happen often,” he added. Palwick wasn’t entirely sure what people outside the library said about them, but he guessed that bodies dropping around the place would unnerve anyone. He’d been unnerved, and he knew it didn’t happen often. “I guess people try to get in sometimes, but the gatestaff mostly keep ’em out.”
“He came in over the wall, then?”
“Must’ve,” Palwick said, shrugging and picking up a spade. Essa did the same. “He wasn’t one of us—I mean, he didn’t work here or inside—and he wasn’t a guest.”
“He wasn’t?”
“If he had been, the pages would’ve known.” That was what the pages were for, really. The library and its guests.
Essa nodded stiffly. “What happened to him?”
“We thought he froze to death,” Palwick said. “After whatever was done to him outside that had him climb the wall—did you mean what happened to the body?”
“I guessed he was buried.”
“Not yet.” Palwick jabbed his spade into the dirt. It went in with a crunching noise, like biting down on a raw onion. The earth he turned up glittered with ice. “The ground’s been too frozen for a grave.” It was hard enough to dig the midden-pit, which would be the size of a garden plot but only knee-deep, but that had to get done so the waste the library had sloughed off during the winter could be burned and the ashes used for the rest of the garden. A grave would be deeper, and for someone who hadn’t even been from the library, the work could wait until it was easier. “They’ll probably bury him in a fortnight’r so.”
Essa put one hand to her mouth, hiding half her face behind the rough felt of her mitten.
“Can anyone go?”
• • •
The page of key came out to find Palwick in the garden a week later, clearing the land near the pale well. The midden-pit had been dug, and the kitchen staff was using it; Palwick was glad of the change in duties. The ground by the pale well grew stones before every spring, and if you didn’t root them out, they sprouted thin bone-colored fingers in whose shadows nothing ever grew. Digging them up was easy work, as long as you did it before they burgeoned. Pemberly used them to floor her cold cellars.
The page came moving across the grim dead grass as if all the winter-dirt and tangles of it were only a shadow over a carpet. Palwick straightened up, barely remembering to knock the dirt off his gloves before he wiped the sweat from his face. He didn’t care to have mud on himself in front of a page.
It was the same page of key. Palwick wasn’t sure that mattered. Pages had quirks, but no-one was sure they were still people. Trees and bushes had quirks too, and so did a couple of the older garden spades.
Her hands were still bare, and he noticed her nails were unnaturally clean before he pulled his gaze to her face.
“Was there anything odd,” she said slowly, “about the dead man you found?”
Palwick blinked. He hadn’t thought further than the oddness of finding a corpse in the garden at all. “Howso, milady?”
“At all,” she said. “Was there anything left on the ground about him? Has the grass withered where he lay, or does anything of note grow there in another season?”
“I don’t think so, milady,” he said. “I don’t . . . ” He looked to the ground as he thought. “Out in this part of the north,” he said, “it’s just the wall. The gatestaff watch it, and the bayberries grow out from it. There’re other plants, but . . . ” He shrugged and glanced back up. “Nothing grows where he was found that you can’t find two or three of in an hour’s walk.”
The page nodded. “We have a guest,” she said, “that has been with us a while, now. He arrived at midwinter. And he goes into the rooms of books and he does his research, and that is fine and well.” Palwick nodded. “But of late he has been going into different rooms, and calling for different books. And I have been there when he comes and goes, but I have not seen him.”
“ . . . milady?” The pages didn’t put as much weight on sight as men or women did—no great wonder, with their eyes fogged white—but they knew the library, from moment to living moment. If a library guest was where he ought to be as far as a page was concerned, and yet not there to be seen . . .
Palwick didn’t know how to make sense of that.
She shrugged, gazing into the distance of the garden. Her hair was the color of the moss creeping along the tree branches after winter, rich brown and slightly silvered. “I know he’s there,” she said. “As a page, I am sure of it. But I have not seen him. I have walked into a room where he is working, and he is nowhere in sight.”
Palwick frowned. “Can anyone else see him?”
She shook her head. “There have been other people in the rooms with him, and they don’t see him either. I’ve asked—Slinder, Marrabay, Quipperling. They each swear there is no-one in the room but myself and however many of them there are. And I asked another of the pages; it is the same for her. The guest has cloaked himself from sight in a manner I do not understand. I was wondering if . . . perhaps the man you found had been used in some way, before his remains were discarded.”
“He. Ah. Was skinned,” Palwick said, and the page’s mouth grew narrow. Palwick swallowed. “You think he might have been . . . ” He trailed off. Everyone who worked in the garden knew there were some nights and some places where you turned your coat inside-out; things that couldn’t see the inside of you got confused and left you in peace. He guessed you could do something close if you had the inside of someone’s skin, instead, and perhaps even that wouldn’t be strong enough to keep a page of the library from knowing where a guest was.
“Perhaps,” the page murmured.
“When did you last see him?” Palwick said. “The guest?”
It took her no time to answer; Palwick wasn’t sure if that meant she’d thought about it, or just that pages had a good memory for guests. “Two weeks and threeday back,” she said. “Six days before you found the dead man in the garden.”
“Well . . . ” Palwick looked away from her hands. “What are you going to do about it, milady?”
The page gazed at him for a moment, her eyes not-quite-frowning, and then her arm reached up and around her neck and hooked up the ribbon that held her key and drew it over her head.
Palwick’s jaw dropped a little. He guessed that pages could take off their badges; he could throw down his tools, after all. But he’d never seen one do it; no-one that he knew had ever seen it, or ever spoken of it if they had.
The key pirouetted on its ribbon, and swayed towards her like a lodestone. She didn’t pay attention. Her face had a new animation; it was rabbit-alive, eyebrows drawn down and mouth curled
in frustration.
“I can’t find him,” she said. “I’ve looked in his rooms; there’s nothing in them but his books and his notes. It’s not as if I’ve found a bloody knife or a flensed cloak—and if I did find such a thing, I could probably see him, as he wouldn’t be wearing it at the moment. If I did find him, if I could prove what he’d done, then perhaps I could have him gone. If he killed the outsider, then if nothing else, he’s interfering with the duty of the gatestaff to keep the walls safe and find the ways a stranger might get in. But he’s a guest, you understand?”
“Who maybe killed a man.”
“Maybe,” she said. Palwick was glad to see her anger, that human reaction she hadn’t had to the pale thin corpse in the bayberry bushes. “But a guest who attracts an unproven suspicion about what he may have done to an outsider is not going to be thrown out of the library.”
“No matter what you’d like to see done?” It felt oddly daring to ask a page—if she was a page, now, without the key around her neck—about what she might want. There was a frown-line between her eyebrows, and they slanted like reeds in a storm.
“No matter,” she said, and hesitated, and then slipped the key’s ribbon back around her neck. Her face smoothed out, and Palwick looked away again.
“If I hear anything, milady,” he said politely, “sure I’ll tell you. I’ll . . . I’ll ask about, and see if anyone’s got a word of anything peculiar on the matter.”
She nodded, and turned, and left him to digging stones.
• • •
The tiny lizards that lived on the library’s outer walls came out to play in the meltwater before turning back into stone for another year, and the sun went from silver to white gold. The ground thawed well enough to dig a grave, and Pemberly was ready to scream bloody murder about the corpse being in her cold cellars a day longer than it needed to be, so the burial was the next day. It was a sparse event; the man Palwick had found by the bayberry bushes wasn’t groundstaff, so most of them didn’t come.
Palwick went, since he’d found the man and felt he ought. So did Mattish, raw-eyed from lack of sleep. Palwick guessed she’d gotten up early to finish her morning’s work and make time for the funeral. Funerals for strangers were always at midday, so the ghosts could find their way on out from the body.
A few gatestaff came, either out of guilt for the man getting over the walls and dying or from needing to be sure a troublemaker was dead. And Essa was there, with her bird.
The page of key was there as well. The key lay against the pale grey of her sleeveless dress, the darkest thing about her. All else was the untrammelled cloud of her hair and the mist-colored edges of thread rising up from her dress and her bare hands laced loosely together in front of her.
Bemberwhist was the sexton, which most days only meant that he tended the graveyard and terrorized the younger groundskeepers who were sent his way. He’d been there long enough that no-one ever spoke of his predecessor, something of a feat in the back-a-day tissue of talk the groundskeepers spun. He was jut-jawed and tea-eyed, paler than anyone there save Essa and the shrouded corpse.
He had a dark and steady voice, a welcome counterpoint to the tugging wind. It crept down Palwick’s spine, taking root from the air, and Palwick thought of the timeless calm that would come when he was held close by all the dirt pressing in on his shroud, and the silence waiting in earth too deep to freeze. He would lie there, one day, and the garden would grow above him, and its roots would reach blindly down towards his peaceful bones, and the earth would roll on with the seasons.
He was smiling. So were Mattish and the gatestaff. Essa was crying, but softly, and held a hand over her nose. He hoped she’d have the sense not to wipe her tears; her mittens were still new and raw, and she’d likely get lint in her eyes if she did.
Bemberwhist’s voice could take you like that, when he was reading to the dead.
Essa huddled her other arm ’round herself, and Palwick saw the bird’s shifting weight under her cloak. It was always around her; either she carried it or it trundled and hopped after her like a slow rabbit or a mumbling cloud. It could fly—Palwick had seen it make clumsy leaps from the ground to tree branches, and by beating its wings it was able to turn in mid-air or rise up a little before falling—but not long nor well.
He glanced at the page of key, and Bemberwhist’s voice grew irritated. Palwick dragged his attention back to the ceremony of cerements, trying not to look at the page again and doing his best to ignore Essa’s muffled sniffling. It seemed polite.
The page of key was watching Essa well enough for both of them, anyways.
• • •
Palwick asked the other groundskeepers if they’d noticed anything strange to speak of—easy enough to couch it as unease over the corpse making him worry—and heard nothing unexpected. The rabbits that pestered the garden had started hunting mice, but they did that before every spring. One of the plum trees in the orchard was turning slowly silvery, and the birds that nested in it sang in sad human voices in their sleep. The vines of ivy that crept up the library wall had plucked up two small trowels and a whetstone, and carried them up to the roof. But nothing strange, except that Hilwiss wasn’t usually so careless as to leave his tools within reach of the ivy towards winter’s end.
Finally he took his gloves in hand and went to Mattish. She’d been born at the library and knew little enough of what use anyone might have for a man’s skin; but she’d been born at the library, and he thought she was a good place to start asking about whosoever in it might be studying the matter.
She thought it over and gave him a name, and so Palwick found himself going into the library at a time when Mattish said he might find Slinder in the nearest dining room.
Palwick had never actually gone in by the front doors of the library proper and saw no reason to start; he went through the garden patch and past the well and into the kitchen, along its grease-worn wooden boards and through the high smoky cooking room and up through the indoor herb garden with its great glassed window and the age-clouded skylights through which you could just make out the rest of the library stretching to the sky and then up the wide flat stairs and into what he thought was among the smallest of the library’s dining rooms proper. It wasn’t set for dining, but it had a constellation of small tables in the room’s centre.
Lamps studded the tables, and burned what looked like a clear and smokeless oil. The several dozen petals of their flames moved gently in the breeze of his shutting the door behind him, and a squat man with hair the grimy black-red of foxpaws looked up towards him.
“Slinder?” Palwick said. “Sir?”
“I didn’t ask for anything,” the man said bluntly.
Oh. He was one of those, then.
“No, sir,” Palwick said. “Heard you were a learned man, is all. Wondered if I might have a moment of your time.” That seemed to work. The man straightened up, smiling faintly. He wore gloves as well; he was drinking some kind of tea, but reading a library book as he did so. They were indoor gloves, thin and close-fitted as skin.
“I flatter myself that I’m one of the learned, certainly,” he said. “I suppose I can grant you a few minutes.”
Palwick smiled back, politely. “Well, sir,” he said, “some of us were wondering. Is there any kind of hiding charm you know of, that’s maybe a little stronger than turning a coat inside out or soaking it in water under a new moon?”
Slinder’s eyebrows shot up at that, and the smile vanished. “I am not in the business of helping people defy the gatestaff.”
“Oh, no, nothing like that! Sir.” Palwick hesitated. “I mean, it’s only that there was a body found in the garden, last month. And . . . it had pieces missing, and the gatestaff aren’t sure how he got in.” They hadn’t mentioned having any idea how he got in, at least. “And we . . . we were worrying, in the garden, if whoever had done it might be around.”
Slinder was silent for a moment. “I am sure that if whoever did it was around
, the gatestaff or the pages would know.”
“Well. Yes, sir. Only one of the pages was . . . curious?” His voice faltered.
“Why wouldn’t she ask another page?”
Probably, Palwick thought, because suspicions of a guest murdering someone in the library needed some kind of foundation. But he only shrugged. “Well, they know the library, but they don’t know everything in the library,” he said. “So I suppose they’d start by asking us if we’d noticed anything. And that only got me to wondering, sir, so I thought of course I should see to asking someone who might know.”
“And why me in particular?”
“Well. Mattish said that last year, you were asking about things from the garden that might be of use to that, for your own curiosity about the matter . . . ”
Slinder got slowly to his feet, and Palwick trailed off.
“I have no interest,” Slinder said coldly, “in spending my hard-earned research on assuaging the hysterical fears of groundstaff who are seeing ghosts lurking in the shadows because an indigent climbed the wall and expired on the grass. I am sure that anyone of consequence who wishes to speak with me about the matter will know where to find me.”
“Sir, I only—”
“Good day, groundstaff.” Slinder’s mouth was drawn thin as a thorn-scratch. He stayed standing, glaring at Palwick, until Palwick dipped his head and, embarrassed, hurried back towards the kitchens.
• • •
The spring cleaning of the lawn was underway, raking the sodden debris of winter into cold crackling piles and setting them on fire. Essa and Palwick met at the midden-pit they’d dug; now that the kitchen staff was done using it for the inside waste, the lawn’s cleaning would be the pit’s last use before it was turned into a mulch bed. Early spring mornings brought dense and seeping mist, but at least the fire kept off a bit of the damp.
Essa had belted her overcloak, and the bird huddled in its folds, grumbling softly. It looked awkward to work around, but she didn’t complain.