“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Jenkins, Thompson, McKennon, with me!”
He strode off, his leather coat swinging out impressively out behind him, and Emma and I watched him go. I shifted back down to her after a minute, when it was clear that he wasn’t coming back. She sighed.
“They are dear boys,” she told me. “But a bit . . . overly enthusiastic . . . at times. If you would come with me, Lady?”
I came with her.
We passed her office, where I thought I saw a pair of blue eyes peeking at me from under the desk. And then wove our way through a pleasant reading area with leather armchairs bearing the impressions of thousands of butts, and comfy, overstuffed sofas. We finally came to a small room off to the side which the librarian opened with a key taken from a bunch at her waist.
“Take a seat anywhere you like,” she told me. “I’ll bring it out to you.”
She disappeared through a small side door, which I guessed was to the archive, and I sat down at a small table.
The room was small, too, with bare brick walls and eight little wooden carrels crammed close together. Each had its own chair and an old-fashioned task lamp with a green glass shade, I guessed to help with tiny print. I found myself staring at them. I’d seen them before, or ones just like them, melted into little clumps in a mountain of broken and burnt f
urniture. It was hard to believe, standing in the quiet, pedestrian surroundings, that this whole area would soon be a battleground.
It struck me as an odd place for it. Why would anybody attack a library? In fact, why would anybody be in this part of the complex at all? From what I’d understood from Pritkin, the main point of the attack had been to liberate some fell beast from the holding cells in the high security levels below. So why come here?
I supposed the attack could have been as a distraction, as a way to pull war mages from the main area of focus to other parts of the complex. But it still seemed like a weird choice. There weren’t that many people here, even now, with barely a dozen scattered across the large area outside. Wouldn’t it have been better to go after a more populated area, to ramp up the threat?
Of course, maybe they had. The main hub for this section wasn’t far off, after all. And yet it hadn’t been nearly so damaged. In fact, other than for a few blackened marks on the buildings, I hadn’t seen much of an aftermath out there at all.
Yet this place had been gutted.
“Here we are,” Emma said, bustling back in. She had a huge old tome with her, leather bound with massive old buckles. She plopped it down with a relieved grunt on the table instead of in one of the carrels, as I wasn’t sure it would have fit in those.
She opened it up, and inside was . . . not what I’d expected. There weren’t any uniform pages like in a regular book, where everything was uniform and all fit together nicely. Instead, there was a hodgepodge of colors and shapes and sizes, everything from tiny pieces the size of my hand, which had had to be mounted on large blank pages so as not to get lost entirely, to medieval manuscript leaves with elaborate decorations and gold lettering, to old hand written vellum, to woodblock prints that looked like Johannes Gutenberg might have cranked them out himself. It was a mess.
“A compendium of forbidden spells,” Emma explained. “Removed from a number of other grimoires, when one was found that was considered . . . problematic. The collection covers quite a large span of time, but what you’re looking for would be in the Renaissance section.”
I didn’t know how she could tell what section was what, as I didn’t see any dividers. But she didn’t seem to have a problem, pulling out a dainty white glove and putting it on, before flipping quickly through the pages. And then continuing to flip through them. And then continuing . . .
“Is there a problem?” I finally asked.
She frowned. “I apologize, Lady. It should be right here.” She flipped back to the front, to where there was a hand lettered contents page. “Number one-ninety-one, as I thought.”
I waited while she flipped back again, a knot of unease forming in my stomach. Stop it, I told myself. You’re just being paranoid.
Which was true, as it was basically my default these days, but it didn’t mean that I was wrong.Definitely didn’t, I thought, a moment later, when she flipped over one-eighty-eight, one-eight-nine, and one-ninety. And then—
“I don’t understand,” Emma said, staring at the blank page in front of her, where a very familiar energy was playing over the now missing words. “I don’t understand at all.”
I do, I thought, and shifted.
~~~
The line at the coffee shop was longer today, and the crowd in the big open square was thicker. It looked like more war mages had arrived to bulk up the army before the imminent invasion. A lot more.
Which made sense considering that the invasion was of Faerie.
It wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good time, but we didn’t have a choice. The supernatural world was at war, and our enemies had taken refuge in the lands of the fey. To be more precise, they were bunking with the Svarestri, who normally detested humans, but who were making an exception in this case. Because their coalition was trying to bring back the old gods the Svarestri worshipped, and which they were convinced were going to hand them the world—maybe even two of them.
Anyway, the spearpoint of the invasion was the vamp army, because Earth magic didn’t work too well in Faerie, but vampire bodies functioned the same anywhere. Especially demon possessed vampire bodies, which were like vamps on steroids. But the Circle had insisted on sending in an army of its own as well, I wasn’t sure why.
Maybe they didn’t trust the vamps.