Ink Blood Sister Scribe, page 35
It was terrible and incredible and if he’d had time, he would’ve started to panic—but he’d taken a step and the step ended. As his foot landed on the other side of the frame, the roaring darkness was gone, and he was in the world again. First his head, then his other foot came out of the mirror, and finally he was standing in Maram’s bedroom, as naturally as if he’d gone through a door.
He put a hand to his jacket to check the inner pocket where Richard’s book was tucked and a second later, he watched, fascinated, as Esther came through the glass. It was like watching someone emerge perfectly dry out of a vertical pool, and his head swam at the sight.
“Bizarre” was Esther’s assessment of the experience. She tightened her curly ponytail and flicked her eyes around the room. Nicholas followed her gaze: the four-poster mahogany bed, the enormous Louis XV armoire, the silk carpet. He remembered lying on that carpet on one of the rare occasions Maram had granted him entry when he was a child, staying quiet so she wouldn’t regret inviting him in.
Her bedroom door was locked from the outside and he fumbled with the three inside locks until he found the correct configuration of bolts, Esther hovering behind him, her wish to take over tangible. Finally, the door clicked open. He pushed it very slowly in case any domestic staff were nearby, but Maram’s antechamber was as empty as her bedroom and Esther followed him through it into the hallway.
After Esther’s revelation, they had waited an hour or so to ensure that Maram’s assurances would be true, that she and Richard would indeed have left the house, and the Library would be empty. It had been nine o’clock in Vermont and was two in the morning here in England, the halls lit low, the huge windows black and nearly as reflective as the mirror they’d just come through. The marble floors shone under the light of the wall sconces.
“People really live here?” Esther whispered. “You really live here?”
Nicholas looked around for the source of her wonder. It was true that compared to Esther’s shabby childhood home the Library was palatial, but recent understanding had so warped his memories that his eye, too, had changed. He’d spent the majority of his life in this house and until recently had felt he’d known it in the same alert, instinctive way he knew his own body; knew its coldest stones and softest sofas, knew the best place to find midafternoon sun, knew which rooms the staff cleaned at which hours and which rooms were rarely cleaned at all, knew every hallway, every painting. Turning a corner was like bending an elbow. Opening a door like blinking an eye.
Or it had been.
Now Nicholas felt he’d stepped through that looking glass and emerged into a parallel world. Physically everything was as he remembered, but his perception had changed so irrevocably that the physical surroundings themselves appeared altered. The height of the soaring ceilings felt cruel rather than grand, built to a scale not meant for human comfort, and the carpets sat rich and bright over the floor like they were hiding stains.
“It’s like a museum,” Esther said.
“Yes, and like a museum, you mustn’t touch,” Nicholas said, and Esther set down the thousand-year-old vase she’d picked up off its stand. Then, checking himself, he said, “Actually, touch away.”
“Because fuck them?” Esther said, picking up the vase again and turning it in her hands.
“Fuck them,” Nicholas confirmed. “I’d say we ought to smash it ceremonially, but it hasn’t done anything wrong. Unfair to punish it for the Library’s sins.”
“Plus, it’s really pretty.”
“’Tis. Come on.”
It was unaccountably strange to walk these halls feeling like a fugitive and he had to forcibly shake off the skulking slouch to his shoulders. It was too late at night for anyone to be about, but if anyone did see him, he wanted to look as natural as he always had, master of the domain, not to be questioned or bothered. He had no idea what Maram and Richard had told the staff about his disappearance; probably they’d been told nothing at all.
The two passed through the portrait gallery on the stairs and Esther slowed, examining all the austere, shadowed faces staring down at her. She pointed. “This looks like you.”
“Well spotted,” he said. “That was my father.”
“And this woman?”
“My mother.” He glanced around nervously.
“Do you think your uncle killed them?”
Nicholas swallowed. “Probably. Now come on.”
They were headed to the Library, to the secret passage that led to Richard’s study, though it was unclear how, exactly, they were going to get through the bookshelf, seeing as neither of them could read the spell.
When Nicholas had explained this conundrum earlier, back at Joanna’s house, Esther had suggested ripping the bookshelf out of the wall.
“It’s covered in books!” Nicholas had said, aghast at the suggestion.
“We can take the books out.”
“And then what?” Nicholas said, working himself up. “Pile them on the floor? These are priceless volumes, irreplaceable, they—”
“The floor’s not made of lava,” Esther said. “They’ll be fine.”
“Worse comes to worse,” Collins had put in, “you can go down and wake up Sofie, she’ll read the spell for you. She’s a good egg, I trust her.”
“Who’s Sofie?”
“Jesus, really? Sofie. She works in the kitchen. Probably baked literally every piece of bread you’ve ever shoved in your mouth.”
“Oh, right, yes, Sofie,” Nicholas said.
“You still have no idea who I’m talking about.”
No, because Nicholas had always been discouraged from fraternizing with the staff, but he didn’t think it would go over terribly well if he announced that.
But it turned out they did not need Sofie after all.
Esther and Nicholas reached the end of the hall where the Library’s enormous electronic doors loomed, and Esther watched with interest as Nicholas put his eye to the scanner. They both winced as the loud whirring gears turned and the doors moaned open, but no one appeared in the hallway to investigate and soon enough they’d made their way inside and shut the doors behind them.
Nicholas started moving forward immediately and then noticed Esther wasn’t following. When he looked back, he found her staring up at the soaring filigreed ceiling, the maze of shelves, the enormous windows draped in luxurious curtains.
“These can’t all be . . .”
“Spell books? Yes.”
Esther shook her head. “I wish Joanna could see this. She’d lose her mind.”
“Maybe someday she’ll visit,” Nicholas said lightly, though he had trouble envisioning a future in which he was allowed to do anything so mundane as invite people to his home. He did not know what it would mean for his life or for the Library if this plan worked and Richard was . . . out of the picture, to put it delicately, which was the only way Nicholas felt capable of putting it. He’d always assumed the house and the books within it were deeded to him, but he realized now it was equally, if not more likely, that in the event of Richard’s death, they’d be left to Maram.
Or perhaps there was no will in the first place. After all, it seemed Richard did not ever expect to die.
Nicholas was so distracted by his own looping thoughts that he took a wrong turn in the stacks and had to double back. When finally he did lead Esther below the oak-beamed ceiling of the section that had once been the chapel, and began to mount the dais, he had to work to understand what he was seeing.
The outline of the bookshelf and the spines of the books upon it were already hazy and insubstantial, and behind the vague mist of them he could see the stone wall and the wood of the secret door.
Nicholas flung out an arm and Esther thumped against it. “What?” she said, then noticed the shelf. “Oh! Problem solved?”
“Shh,” Nicholas hissed. It was the only noise he could manage. His voice felt frozen in his throat and his lungs felt suddenly weak, wheezing for air that wouldn’t come, the spell’s placard looming in his mind’s eye.
Duration: Max six minutes per reading.
Which meant someone had read this spell in the past six minutes. Someone had been here. Someone was here.
Slowly, very slowly, he began to turn around, eyes skimming the shelves for a hint of Richard’s gray hair or a flicker of Maram’s silk blouse, ears straining for the sound of breath, footsteps on the carpet, the creak of a door—anything. Esther, picking up on his tension, was perfectly still at his side. The tall shelves gleamed beneath their brass lights, the humidifying system hummed distantly, the books sat in motionless rows, and the red wingback chairs on either side of Seshat’s display case hadn’t moved. But the display case itself . . .
Nicholas sucked in a breath.
The hinged front of the case was hanging open ever so slightly, and when Nicholas crept forward, he saw that the limestone slab was off-center on its metal stand, and there was a dark smear in one corner that he didn’t remember ever seeing before. But the most jarring—and anachronistic—change was the yellow Post-it stuck over Seshat’s carved face.
It read, Until 3:54 a.m.
All at once, Nicholas understood. He let out a sigh of pure relief and turned to where Esther was still standing stock-still, one foot on the dais step.
“It’s all right,” he told her, unsticking the Post-it. “Maram read the spell for us before she left.”
She’d read two spells, in fact. One was the spell to fade the bookcase. The other was the four-thousand-year-old companion spell, priceless and rare and prized, which she had read to keep the way open for them.
When Nicholas spoke again, he did so around a lump in his throat. “Come on,” he said, reaching for the doorknob.
“It’s all right?” Esther said.
“It’s all right.” He slipped into the darkness of the passageway. Esther close behind. He took one squinting step up and a bright little light came on over his shoulder. When he glanced back, he found Esther holding a tiny flashlight.
“Where on earth did you get that?”
“Collins said we’d need it.”
For some reason this smoothed the last of Nicholas’s ruffled nerves and he moved up the stairs feeling distinctly calmer. Esther said, “Secret passageways, English country houses, malevolent old men. When I was a kid, this is what I thought magic should be like. Not hidden away in a basement, being used only to keep hiding itself.”
“And? Is this everything you dreamed of?”
Esther let out a sound that, under different circumstances, might have been laughter. “Um, it’s scarier in practice.”
“You didn’t dream about someone wanting to skin you alive and turn you into a book?”
“Weirdly, no.”
They reached the narrow wooden hall at the top of the stairs and Esther beamed her meager light over Nicholas’s shoulder. It lit a few feet in front of them and then was swallowed by the dark. “How long is it?”
“A few minutes’ walk, I think.” He trailed one hand along the wall as they moved forward. “I’ve only done it once.”
“How many other secret passages are in this place?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. There are a few I’m familiar with from the staff kitchen—one goes to the banqueting hall. But they’re not secret so much as discreet.” His middle finger caught on a snag in the wood and he snatched his hand from the wall, wincing. “Passages like this, though, truly hidden? Could be hundreds. Could be none. No one told me either way.”
“But you got along with him, with Richard?” Esther said, and when Nicholas didn’t respond right away, “I’m still trying to get a handle on the nature of your relationship.”
“So am I,” Nicholas said.
He couldn’t let himself focus on anything other than action, because if he began to consider the implication, he might not be able to do what he’d ostensibly come here to do. Implication would lead to questions like: Would it be murder, the act that Nicholas had committed himself to committing? He wished, briefly but entirely, that he could see Richard again, give him a chance to explain himself before Nicholas made a choice he couldn’t go back from.
“Could you pick up the pace a smidge?” Esther said, poking him in the back. “Walking this slow makes me nervous.”
He’d done what he’d just decided not to do and started thinking.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You’re literally dragging your feet,” she said. “Is it figurative, too?”
That made him smile despite his nerves. “I suppose it is.”
“You’re okay to keep going, though? To do this?”
“Yes,” he said, and was glad that his voice sounded much firmer than his wobbling resolve. Maybe he could convince himself as well as Esther.
His vision seemed to be adjusting to the dark, the wooden walls of the passage growing clearer. Then he became aware that it wasn’t his vision but actual light. They were at the end of the hallway, the wall suddenly visible in front of them, the trapdoor at their feet outlined with light. When Nicholas reached down to open it, the staircase below was illuminated.
Maram again, preparing their way?
He and Esther stood at the top of the stairs, both extremely still and quiet, listening, waiting. The silence grew around them, the narrow walls holding it like pressure building in a bottle, no sound but Nicholas’s heart in his ears and Esther’s breath at his shoulder. When they started down, their movements were painstaking and quiet, their feet barely audible on the steps.
The door opened easily beneath Nicholas’s hand and swung inward without a sound, and they stepped from the stairwell into that mirror-glimmered room. This time the glass reflected only Esther and Nicholas, many iterations of them, all looking shadowy and tired—though Nicholas’s vanity flickered to life at how tall he appeared compared to the very small woman at his side. The vain thought made him feel almost like himself for a moment. Whatever victory looked like, he hoped it allowed for pockets of comfortable shallowness. The forced introspection of the past week had unmoored him.
Esther paused in front of one of the mirrors and crouched, fingers hovering above the floor, and Nicholas saw there was still a faint bloodstain on the carpet. “Is this where Trev came through?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper.
“Yes.”
“He wasn’t going to kill me after all, was he?” Esther said. “He was going to shove me through the mirror and let Richard kill me while you wrote a book with my blood.”
“Very probably.”
She stood and turned to him, eyes glinting in the low light, looking suddenly like the person he’d watched take down an armed man twice her size. “Would you have done it?” she said. “Taken my blood and done whatever Richard told you to, no questions asked?”
“I like to think I would’ve asked at least one question,” Nicholas said, rummaging around for some indignation.
“But you’d have done it, in the end.”
“I don’t know,” he said, feeling so tired, suddenly, that he nearly sat down. Instead, he leaned against a mirrorless patch of wall. “Richard and Maram, they always had explanations, good ones, sound and rational. Even if things felt . . . wrong . . . I didn’t see an alternative that was right.”
Esther folded her arms and stared at the mirror through which Tretheway’s crumpled, broken body had come. Nicholas waited, feeling miserable and uncertain. Maybe he should apologize for the version of himself that would’ve accepted the loss of her life and filled a pen with her blood. But how exactly did one apologize for theoretical monstrosity? He wasn’t even good at apologizing for things he had done.
“Well,” said Esther. “Thank you.”
That gave him pause. “For what?”
“You haven’t had many choices,” she said. “And now that you do, you’re choosing to help me. Which I appreciate.”
“Oh.” He could feel heat come into his face. “I’m helping myself just as much.”
“You could turn me over to your uncle and resume your life of fine footwear and blissful ignorance.”
Nicholas looked down. “I’m honestly delighted you noticed the quality of my footwear. They’re custom made, these boots.”
“Thank you,” Esther said again.
You’re welcome did not feel like a response he could give. He moved toward the door of Richard’s study with a rush of nerves that was a poor substitute for energy but would have to do. He didn’t hesitate in front of the doorway, or at least not physically, though he steeled himself for the sight of his eye still floating in its jar. His body felt like it was moving faster than his mind, which was probably for the best, and he let it carry him, his hand on the doorknob, lungs filling with air, feet moving as his brain scrambled to catch up. Richard’s life, and the end of it, a turn of the knob away.
Nicholas turned the knob.
The study was dark, all the lights off. He took a few steps, hand groping along the wall for the light switch, then stopped. Esther stumbled into him, fingers closing around his arm.
“What?” she said.
Nicholas couldn’t say what. A feeling: a prickle across his skin like a change in temperature, a barometric shift in the air. Even as his fingers found the switch and the overhead came on, he was flinching away from what he might find.
Richard and Maram, their eyes narrowed in the sudden light.
At his side, Nicholas heard Esther’s intake of breath, but his own lungs had entirely ceased to function. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink, could only stand frozen and staring. Maram was seated in a high-backed chair by Richard’s desk and Richard was on his feet beside her, one hand resting possessively on her shoulder. In that tall chair, with tall Richard at her side, surrounded by the towering shelves packed with relics and curiosities, Maram appeared very small. Nicholas looked to her wrists, to her ankles—was she tied?—but she didn’t appear to be restrained in any visible way.
