Chapter 53
It’s a daring suggestion, yet just the thought of carrying it out lifts my spirits.
I’ve spent my time here trying not to feel utterly helpless, not to give in to resignation and despair. Learning how to read and write the Swarm’s language offers me a small sense of control. But the guards clearly don’t care if I can read the signs or not.
This, though…this is the rebellion of prisoners against their captors.
During the war, I’d occasionally wonder what I’d do if taken prisoner by the Germans. Would I set to whatever work they put before me—harvesting fields, repairing roads, whatever required the strong backs they’d sent to the front? Or try to escape back to the bleak battlefields of France?
I couldn’t say, to be perfectly honest with myself. Here there’s no chance of escape, but breaking into an archive…
Well, I didn’t become a bookseller for nothing. “Bianca’s right. We need to see what’s in that archive.”
Khephnes withdraws, trunk flashing red and white. “They’ll lock you away for the rest of your time here. And if your bodies die, what then? Will you stay confined alone for decades? Longer, depending on how many seasons these bodies live?”
I don’t blame him for his caution. He’s truly trapped here, with no hope of ever leaving.
“So you’re content with being their pet?” Bianca demands, much less sympathetic than I. “Doing as you’re told out of fear?”
Khephnes turns his back on us. “Do as you wish, but I won’t be a part of it.”
“You aren’t being fair to him,” I tell Bianca. “Khephnes, of course we don’t want you to risk more than you’re able.”
Bianca gets the hint. “Of course. I’m sorry. I just…we have to do something. But Sterling and I don’t have to stay here forever.” She reaches out with her trunk, but doesn’t quite touch him. “I’d like to hear your ideas, if you have any. But you shouldn’t risk yourself.”
Khephnes seems only slightly mollified. “This is your scheme. Perhaps there is something I can do, however. Whether it will be helpful or not, I can’t say.”
“Anything would be appreciated,” she replies, relief in her mind-voice.
“I was tutored by the greatest magicians in Kemet, at the Fane of Nyarlathotep, where the god himself walked in the shape of a faceless man. I was still early in my studies when I was taken, but I will teach Sterling what I can.”
The part of my mind that still clings to rationality tries to balk at the idea of learning magic.
But the world isn’t what I believed it to be, not an orderly, predictable place, but a thin skin over a void of howling madness.
I’m in the body of a creature utterly foreign to me; why not become a sorcerer as well?
“Then I’ll do my best to learn,” I tell him.