Chapter 4
Four
Kyrith
The Rotunda is cold.
Icy.
The ceiling is missing, I note with absent curiosity. Yet, the shelves are arranged the same way, and the chairs are all neatly tucked beneath the reading tables. I can smell the Arcanaeum’s unique scent of fresh paper and ink, comfort and home.
The hush is the same familiar one that descends just after closing. Like the building and I can finally drop a little of our guard.
Only…who’s that behind my desk?
I glide forward, only to stop as the other woman retreats, but…doesn’t. Her original form stays in place as two new women step back, blurring out from her body until they flank her on both sides. It’s disorienting.
One woman has become three, and swiftly they multiply again, becoming five, then nine, then fifteen. All young. All female. All wearing clothes from my era or earlier. More and more of their silhouettes appear in the fog, their faces lost in shadow.
I jolt as my hand touches my lips, but no sensation accompanies it.
“You’re the liminals before me,” I whisper, half afraid that my voice won’t work.
And I just joined their ranks.
Whatever brief escape I attained from this fate when the ritual went wrong the first time is over.
I’m dead. Bound to the Library.
Separated from my heirs.
They’re still alive, I console myself. They’re safe for now. Or as safe as I could make them.
The women before me glitch, folding forward. Before I can blink, there’s only one standing behind the desk. Wisps of her dark hair escape from beneath a hood that speaks of a time centuries before I was born.
Papers swirl on the leather top, and her hands blur as she brushes her fingertips over them.
“We tried,” she says, at last. “We tried so hard to spare you.”
The words are stilted, slow. Her face switches every few words, a new woman taking the place of the first. A Cockney accent becomes a smooth posh one, then drops an octave into a brogue.
Oh. My. Stars.
The Arcanaeum was never just a building, but even I couldn’t have conceived that it was a Gestalt intelligence, formed from every sacrifice prior.
“You cast the time loop,” I realise. “You gave me a body and—”
“Wanted to free you. Wanted to give you everything we couldn’t have.”
The candlelit baths. The romance. The decorations at Halloween and then at Christmas. Even the endless invisible hands doting on Westley and rolling around cat toys for him to play with.
Suddenly, those seem less like the actions of a rebellious building and more like the wistful longings of women cut down before they were old enough to live.
Was I the only one reading romance novels, clinging to the escapism they brought? The only woman desperately aching to remember the way touch sang across her skin? The only betrayed girl desperately wishing that men existed who would burn down the world for me?
No. I don’t think I was.
A sense of kinship, of sisterhood, hits me square in the chest, and my vision blurs slightly.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “I…I argued with you, but…I am grateful.”
She nods. “Now we wait.”
“Wait? For what?”
“Ackland has drained us,” she explains. “Will continue to drain us. But there are other sources—”
I gasp as sensation lights up my right palm. Warmth, like someone has taken my hand in both of theirs, floods it. A second later, a lighter touch brushes over my knuckles…almost like…a kiss?
“Carlton.” Her form solidifies a fraction. The details of the desk around us sharpen. The fog recedes until I can make out the brass signs on the edges of the shelves around us.
Wait…
I’m still connected to the six heirs. When they touch me, that bond solidifies, allowing them to drain me…and vice versa.
Magic breezes up my arm, settling in my chest. It’s so subtle I wouldn’t have noticed it if I wasn’t already focused on the connection. Behind the desk, the Arcanaeum smiles.
“What are you doing?” I ask, taking a step closer.
Her eyes narrow, a hundred different colours flashing through the irises. “We are Librarians. We will protect the Library.”