Darkdawn

The old man peered at the granite colossus above him. The sword and scales in her hands. Those pitiless black eyes, boring into his own.

“Where the fuck are you?” he whispered.

He left the hall, Drusilla’s Hand lurking at a respectful distance behind as the old bishop shuffled on his way through the Mountain’s maze, his cane beating crisp on the black stone. His knees were aching by the time he reached his destination—he didn’t remember there being quite so many stairs in this place. Two dark wooden doors loomed before him, carved with the same spiral motif as decorated the walls. Each must have weighed a ton, but the old man reached out with one gnarled hand and pushed them open with ease.

Mercurio found himself on a mezzanine overlooking a forest of ornate shelves, laid out like a garden maze. They stretched off into a space too dark and vast to see the edges. On each shelf were piled books of every shape and size and description. Dusty tomes and vellum scrolls and famished notebooks and everything in between. The grand Athenaeum of the Goddess of Death, peopled with the memoirs of kings and conquerors, theorems of heretics, masterpieces of madmen. Dead books and lost books and books that never were—some burned on the pyres of the faithful, some simply swallowed by time, and others simply too dangerous to write at all.

An endless heaven for any reader, and a living hell for any librarian.

“Well, well,” said a croaking, hollow voice. “Look what the scabdogs dragged in.”

Mercurio turned to see an old Liisian man in a scruffy waistcoat, leaning on a trolley piled with books. Two shocks of white hair sprung from either side of his scalp, and a pair of finger-thick spectacles adorned his hooked nose. His back was so bent, he looked like a walking question mark. A fine cigarillo smoldered on his bloodless lips.

“Hello, Chronicler,” Mercurio said.

“You’re a long way from Godsgrave, Bishop,” Aelius growled.

The chronicler stepped closer, squared up against Mercurio, and glowered. As they stood there, face-to-face, Aelius seemed to stand taller, his shadow growing longer. The air rippled with some dark current, and Mercurio heard the shapes of colossi moving out between the shelves. Coming closer.

Aelius’s dark eyes burned as he considered Mercurio’s, his voice growing harder and colder with every word.

“If I can still call you ‘Bishop’ at all, that is,” he spat. “I thought you’d be ashamed to show your face outside your bedchamber after what you pulled. Let alone drag yourself down here. What brings your traitorous hide to the Black Mother’s library?”

Mercurio pointed to the ever-present spare behind the chronicler’s ear.

“Smoke?”

Chronicler Aelius hung still for a moment, eyes burning with dark flame. Then, with a small chuckle, he unfolded his arms, clapped Mercurio on his thin shoulder. Lighting the cigarillo on his own, he handed it over.

“All right, whippersnapper?”

“Do I look all right, old man?” Mercurio asked.

“You look like shite. But it’s always polite to ask.”

Mercurio leaned against the wall and gazed out over the library, dragging a sweet gray draft into his lungs. The smoke tasted of strawberries, the sugared paper setting his tongue dancing.

“They don’t make them like this anymore,” Mercurio sighed.

“Same might be said of everything in this room,” Aelius replied.

“How’ve you been, you old bastard?”

“Dead.”

The chronicler settled in beside him.

“You?”

“Much the same.”

Aelius scoffed, breathed a plume of gray. “Still got a pulse in you from what I can see. What the ’byss you sulking about down here for, lad?”

Mercurio drew on his cigarillo. “It’s a long story, old man.”

“A story about your Mia, I take it?”

“… How’d you guess?”

Aelius shrugged his bone-thin shoulders, his eyes twinkling behind his improbable spectacles. “She always struck me as a girl with one to tell.”

“We might be nearing the final page, I fear.”

“You’re too young to be such a pessimist.”

“I’m sixty-fucking-two,” Mercurio growled.

“As I say, far too young.”

Mercurio found himself chuckling, warm gray spilling from his lips. He leaned back against the wall, feeling the smoke buzz in his blood.

“How long have you been down here, Aelius?”

“O, a while,” the chronicler sighed. “Never saw much sense in counting the years, though. It’s not as though I really have a choice about when I leave.”

“The Mother keeps only what she needs,” Mercurio murmured.

“Aye.” Aelius nodded. “She does at that.”

Mercurio tilted his head back, looked out on all those dead books with heavy-lidded eyes. “Do you hate her for it?”

“Blasphemy,” the old ghost scolded.

“Is it?” Mercurio asked. “If she doesn’t care what we say or do?”

“And what makes you say that?”

“Well, look at what this place has become,” Mercurio growled, waving his cane at the dark. “Once, it was a house of wolves. Each murder, an offering to Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Feeding her hunger. Making her stronger. Hastening her return. And now?” He spat on the flagstones. “It’s a whorehouse. The Ministry feed their own coffers, not the Maw. Their hands drip with gold, not red.”

Mercurio shook his head, breathing smoke as he continued.

“O, we say all the words, make all the gestures, aye. ‘This flesh your feast, this blood your wine.’ But still, when all the praying is done, we drop to our knees for the likes of Julius fucking Scaeva. How can you say Niah cares, if she allows this poison to fester in her own halls?”

“Maw’s teeth.” Aelius raised one snow-white brow. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of bed this morn.”

“Fuck off,” the old man spat.

“What do you want her to do?” the chronicler demanded. “She’s been banished from the sky for millennia, boy. Allowed to rule for a handful of turns every two and a half years. How much say over all this do you think she has? How much influence do you think she can exert in the prison her husband made for her?”