by Jenn Stark
I grinned wryly, recalling my Indiana Jones logic. “What would the scroll of a magus look like?” I murmured to the nearest gerbil.
“Shh—eek!” The angry, insistent hushing quickly became a startled yip, and a moment later, the creature at my hip took off at a blinding speed, zipping across the floor and into a hole in the shelf, which was made visible only by the fact that I was so low to the ground.
I heard the pounding of boots immediately after, which set off another flurry of movement, more of the pint-sized gerbils fleeing in all directions, leaping behind scrolls, diving past shelves, squeezing their white-and-brown bodies into tiny openings that riddled the walls like Swiss cheese.
For my part, I’d managed to work my way almost up into a sitting position by the time the tall, lean figure rounded the corner and stalked into the room.
“Dammit, Jimmy,” Death muttered.
I winced, pulling myself up a little more. I vaguely remembered Atlantis hurting like this too, even before my unfortunate skewering upon all the weapons. Didn’t mean I liked it, though.
Death drew to a stop in front of me, scowling down. Her platinum-blonde hair spiked up in silent outrage as her cold blue eyes raked over me, and she was dressed in her usual head-to-toe leather, down to the heavy black boots. She fisted ice-white hands at her hips. “You break anything?” she asked, and while her voice wasn’t exactly solicitous, she did sound worried.
“Pride mostly, I think,” I managed. “Which, arguably, was compromised a long time ago.”
“Might want to keep your voice down.” She squatted beside me, pulling my arm up, then shoving back the wide sleeve to expose my skin past my elbow. It only hurt a little, so I only winced a little.
“Why?” I asked as she turned my arm over, inspecting Jimmy’s most recent handiwork. There were so many possible answers she could give me to that one-word question, I didn’t even care where she began.
So of course, she ignored the question. “He did a good job, anyway. What’d he say when he did this to you? Had to hurt.”
“I blacked out,” I answered truthfully. “And he said something along the lines that it was something you’d intended to do but hadn’t gotten around to.”
That earned me another derisive cough. “That so? Well, it worked, so good for him. You know where you were going to, or did you simply want to find me?” She narrowed her eyes. “Has it started?”
Has what started? I was beginning to suspect I’d hit my head a little harder than I’d realized. “Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “First things first. What were the gerbils running from?”
She stared at me. “Ger—oh. Those are hamsters, I think. They were here when I got here.”
“Hamsters.”
“Early warning system,” she said, still distracted by the ink on my arm. “Let’s me know when the librarian is coming so I can get out of the way in time.”
That made me sit up more abruptly. “Out of the way? You’re Death.”
“I’m a trespasser in another dimension. I don’t hold sway here. The librarian does.” She waved around the room. “You know what this place is?”
“The Arcanum Library?”
She slanted a glance at me. “Yes. Which means it was Kreios who sent you here, not Armaeus.”
Once again, I thought it was entirely likely that I’d hit my head too hard. I seemed to be missing entire swaths of Death’s conversation, or she believed I was way faster on the uptake than I actually was. “Um, maybe we should start from the beginning.”
She started to laugh, then jerked upright, turning slightly to listen to a new sound that emanated through the hallways. It was a…remarkably squishy sound.
Without another word, Death turned and hauled me to my feet. I gasped in pain, my legs still not quite working, and she cursed in a language I wasn’t familiar with but sounded like something a druid might have muttered two thousand years ago. That made a certain amount of sense.
Never one not to do my part, I staggered forward a half step, despite the waves of dizziness breaking over me. Death scowled, then bent at the waist, and a moment later had swung me over her shoulder, fireman style.
“Don’t flail,” she bit out when I tried to move, and I obligingly went limp as she headed out. She was wearing shit kickers, but that did nothing to blunt her speed as she left the room, raced down the hallway a short distance, then entered another room immediately adjacent to the first. This didn’t seem anywhere near far enough as an escape option, but Death didn’t ask my opinion. She merely slid me off her shoulders and against the wall, her hand over my mouth.
“Stay quiet?” she asked, and it was a question more than an order. I nodded quickly, and she sprang away from me, bolting the door to our safe room shut, then flipping a latch on a panel on the wall beside me, which bared a small opening.
She gestured me forward. “It’s lined in lead. We’re safe here.”
Oh-kay…
Peeling myself off the wall, I edged forward until I took my position next to Death. She pointed at the grate, and I peered through it. I realized with some surprise that I had a clear view into the room we’d just vacated.
As I watched, a greenish, hazy mist started leaking into that chamber from the hallway, coalescing into…something foul.
“You want to know why people don’t talk in the library?” Death asked, her face an inch from mine. Her ice-blue eyes were filled with humor, for all that her face was grim.
“Because they don’t want to disturb other patrons?”
“That’s what they tell each other now, yeah. But it started with not wanting to disturb her.”
I frowned, then looked back into the grate. The mist had taken more shape, and there was now a very distinct tentacle that was forming, slithering along the floor and sliding up the nearest shelf. As I watched, the tentacle tapped each of the scrolls in turn, then undulated over the floor. More tentacles appeared, and the creature hove into view. Hove was about the right word for it, too. The librarian looked like the love child of Cthulhu and an octopus, with a bulbous head featuring easily twenty eyes, a gaping mouth that opened, shut, pursed, and frowned in an unending stream of grimaces, and tentacles that seemed to emerge from every square inch of her lower body, like a flower bursting into full and radiantly slimy bloom. Surprisingly, she left no viscous residue on the cases, no trail of goo, but instead, her touch left a small reflective patch, brilliantly illuminated in the strange glow of the crystals high above her.
I stared hard, mostly at the tentacles. I’d seen a creature sort of like her before, I realized, hovering over the Sea of Japan. It’d come in response to a disturbance of ancient artifacts off the coast of that country, a lost city so old, it could have dated back to the time of Atlantis. Were these creatures related?
“Who is she?” I whispered.
“I haven’t had the pleasure of making her acquaintance. When I got here, the creatures you saw were rolling around in excitement, eager for a new playmate, but they vanished like a shot when she showed up. Since then, I’ve used them as a homegrown alarm system.” She eyed me. “They detected your entry quickly enough, but you’d already made too much noise.”
“Is she dangerous?”
“Oh, yeah,” Death said, peering over my shoulder at the creature as she painstakingly returned the scrolls to their shelves. “She kills with a combination of poison and crushing force. She has an entire room dedicated to the bones of the intruders who’ve been so unlucky to cross her path, all of them carefully articulated. Far too many of them human.” She touched the wall beside the door. “There are lead-lined reading rooms like this one throughout the library, though. If you come in, get what you need, review it, and leave, you may never run across her.”
“But you have.”
She shrugged. “I’ve had to cover a lot of ground. And clean up a lot of messes. More people than you might have imagined have broken into this place over time. But, we’re safe for the moment, safe and pretty much in l
ockdown until she finishes cleanup in there. I tried leaving a reading room too early, just to see what would happen, and it didn’t turn out so well.”
I frowned, looking back at her. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged off her jacket and held up her arm. “Sucker punch.” She grinned. “Literally.”
Along the bone-white skin of Death’s arm was an angry stripe of suction marks, still bright red. “Three days ago, by my count,” she said.
I stared. “You can’t heal yourself?” I’d never even considered that possibility. “You’re not immortal?”
“Immortal, yes. Self-healing, no. I can be killed, I can feel pain, I can even feel loss after a fashion.” She shrugged. “After so many millennia, it’s admittedly blunted. But it’s there.”
“But—why? I would think the whole pain-and-destruction avoidance would be the top benefit of being on the Council.”
“Hazard of the job,” she said. “If I don’t feel the pain of those who die, if I don’t understand their suffering and emotional torment, then I might as well be raking up leaves. But the souls that have consented to walk among the living deserve better than that. And so I hear them. I feel them. And when a great many of them die at once, I suffer with them.” She gave me a wry smile. “In fact, that suffering can become overwhelming on occasion. The death of my own people on the swords of the Roman centurions was the first time I lost touch with earth. That I ascended to the Council didn’t stop the agony of losing so many souls at once. The plagues were another time I blanked out. By the time of the World Wars of the twentieth century, I’d learned how to manage myself in times of great loss. I hear the harbingers’ call and know I must listen to their tale, so I retreat to a place away from the carnage that’s to come. That way, I don’t tip the future to those who must live it.”
I nodded vaguely, still distracted by the creature in the room beyond. She was methodically putting all the scroll cases back onto the shelves, but for every ten or twelve she put away, she left others out. A case of jade and one of amber, exactly the description Kreios had given me, as well as one of gold. Was this a test? A trap?
Suddenly, Death’s words penetrated my mind.
“Retreat,” I said. “You mean here? You’ve been here before?” And more of her comments came back to me as well. “You said Kreios would send me but not Armaeus, not here. Why?”
“Yes, I’ve been here, and yes, Kreios knows of this place. To my knowledge, he’s the only other member of the Council who does, although it’s difficult to know whether or not the Hierophant is aware. He is old…older than any of us by a long shot. With age does not always come compassion.”
I frowned. Of all the Council members, Michael was one of the few I believed who actually did have humanity’s best interests at heart. He seemed…enchanted by the race, in a way. Definitely not someone who would damage us.
But Death had been my ally before, whereas I’d barely exchanged words with the Hierophant. “So, what’re you here for now?” I asked, looking at her. “Kreios didn’t seem surprised you were here when I pulled your card, but even he didn’t know why you’d buried yourself down here. He apparently doesn’t know how to get in here himself.”
“She’s retreated,” Death said, helpfully not answering my question either. “And she’s left you your items to check out.”
I looked out at the empty chamber again, watching as several of the hamsters rolled out of their hiding places, sniffing the air, scurrying through the room. They chittered quietly but with an almost frantic excitement, before all of them stood on their hindquarters for an electric moment, then scattered again.
“Why are they doing that? Is she coming back?”
“No,” Death sighed. “Not her, anyway.”
“More tribbles?”
“Regrettably, no. I told you of the harbingers,” Death said grimly. “Well, they’re back. Again. They’re here to tell me who is going to die.”
Chapter Seven
Death reached up and relatched the panel on the wall of our safe room. Then she crossed to the door and opened it. Beyond, a faint scent of cedar hung in the hallway, not at all the aroma of ocean water or rot I expected.
“Cedar?”
“She rocks it old school.” Death led the way past the room where I’d crash landed, with its gleaming scroll cases newly situated on one of the center tables, sparing them only the shortest glance. “You’re not going to want to leave with those.”
I grimaced. I’d been afraid of this since I’d realized Death was involved on this job. “You’re going to stop me?” I asked, not sure how one actually opposed Death in anything. She sort of had the checkmate advantage at the end of any conflict.
“No,” she said, to my intense—if short-lived—relief, because of course she kept talking. “I don’t keep anyone from making whatever choices they will upon their paths. But I can tell you the anticipated results of those paths, and once I do…” She shrugged. “You’re not going to want to leave with those. They were kept out of mortal hands for a reason.”
“I’m not giving them to mortals. I’m giving them to Kreios. Very much a different thing.” Of course, even as I said this, I remembered Kreios’s words. He cared less about receiving the scrolls and more that they were out in the world again. Had he anticipated Death’s resistance? Probably.
“And Kreios is, above all else, most interested in Kreios and his unique desires to manipulate the mortal world,” she said. “Those desires are not yours, for all that you often find yourself allied to him. Ultimately, you are better suited to the interests of the Magician than the Devil.”
I opened my mouth to counter her words, then shut it again. I’d never considered the interests of the Magician and the Devil to be mutually exclusive. They were friends. Allies on the Council. They had each other’s backs.
Then again, Kreios had decided to go float somewhere in the middle of the ocean in order to send me on this little side trip, and he of all people knew that Armaeus couldn’t track as well over large bodies of water.
“What does Kreios want with the scrolls?” I asked. Might as well get it over with.
To my surprise, though, Death merely held up a hand. “First, the harbingers. Then the scrolls.”
“But…” I frowned as she strode past me down the hall, reaching a chamber that looked completely blacked out. She stepped through, and nothing happened. I frowned, slowing to a stop. A few hamsters crept out of the shadows to fidget at the doorway of the chamber, their whiskers quivering like spastic antennae. Death hadn’t left the building, merely the hallway. But why? It was dark in that room, and it seemed empty. How bad could it be?
“You wanna come with?” I asked the nearest hamster. It looked up at me with huge, soulful eyes, then backpedaled into the shadows, its eyes never leaving me.
“Chicken,” I muttered, and a chorus of hamster chittering sounded down the hallway, sounding almost like laughter.
Then I stepped through the portal—and slapped my hands to my ears.
The sound was…devastating. Leveling. The rising wail of a thousand women, voices layering over the other, each more haunting than the last. Even as I listened, I could hear separate threads of their lament, specific words. These creatures weren’t merely howling the same litany over and over again; they had unique grievances to share. Loudly.
I forced myself to move forward, blinking hard to peer into pitch-blackness. Gradually, so gradually it seemed merely part of the warp and weft of the noise surrounding me, a dim light began to flicker at the center of the room. It was…a fire, I realized belatedly. A fire that gave off no smoke, and that glowed a virulent green. As I watched, drawing closer, it extended across the room, rising ever higher.
Beyond it were the screamers. Tall, short, fat, thin, haggard, beautiful, they were to a one female, and it looked like there were representatives from every race on earth. Death’s form finally became clear in front of me, silhouetted against them. As I drew even with her
, I glanced sideways and took in her fierce glare, her face set into a snarl, her erect back and tightly crossed arms.
She hurled a question at the women in a language that once again sounded vaguely Celtic, and the women raged back. Death flicked a glance to me, then reached out with an almost impatient gesture to brush my arm, and I was overwhelmed with a flood of information.
Death, death—all around us, coming fast. Death to the children of the Connecteds, death to their leaders, but not only would they die. And not only would they be the ones affected. The collateral damage would be too great to contain, with gods and man rushing into an attack without discernment. Great swaths of humanity would perish in the fire and pain of storms they could not weather, explosions they could not survive. And the worst damage would fall not only to the Connecteds but to those with even the slightest magic within them, by careful design. The lines of those with abilities would wither and die, and so would those who might take their place, leaving nothing but dust, dust, dust.
I stared at the women in horror, wondering how Death could be drawing anything of value from their crazed screaming. They tore their hair and reached toward the flames with bony, clawed hands, beseeching, begging, wailing, as if Death could do something about the parade of destruction they foresaw. Death, for her part, stood silently, her gaze jumping from woman to woman, absorbing their pain and horror, their pleas and demands, but never once moving her head, her mouth, her arm, other than her initial touch to allow me to listen in to the wild chorus. And the fire between us and the wailing women continued to spit and sputter, its green flames leaping higher only to settle back into themselves, embers flying high on an unseen breeze.
Only…they weren’t exactly embers, I realized with a start.