Chapter Twenty-Two
CHAPTER
Twenty-Two
IT’S NEARLY MIDNIGHT.
Cassandra closes the shop early, and sends Byron home.
She doesn’t want Byron to be here for what she’s about to do, just in case anything goes wrong.
She double-checks the locks on the door, then pulls every curtain shut, so the only light comes from the weak bulbs pouring a warm orange glow into the shop’s recesses.
Errata looks on from the top of the staircase, with watchful yellow eyes.
The shadows seem thicker tonight, as if they know exactly what she’s up to, and how easily this could turn into her biggest and last mistake.
She takes a deep breath, and then sits cross-legged on the floor.
Ink to her left, needle to her right, the book in the centre.
Some eighteenth-century nonsense on the supernatural, but with enough belief poured into it to make it viable.
It buzzes unpleasantly close to her, whispering a litany in the long-buried language of the river.
Cassandra rolls up her sleeves and reaches for the ink. Tonight, she’s going into the bookshop below. But if the bookshop wishes to remove her, she’s not going down without a fight.
It’s been a long time, though, since she’s read onto herself: a risky endeavour, somewhere in that grey line between recklessness and stupidity.
She’d almost asked Lowell to read for her, but in the end, she’d decided against it.
She can’t stand to ask him for anything more than what he’s already offered, and he would inevitably see fault with her plan, so she would inevitably bicker with him, and that would inevitably lead her to do something even stupider than what she’s already planned.
If she’s successful, she’ll let him know.
If she’s unsuccessful, well, Lowell might be getting his bookshop a lot sooner than he’d thought.
The salty tang of ink hits the tip of her tongue immediately. Then the pinprick of blood—sharp pain in her index finger—and its metallic taste against her lips.
She takes a deep breath, feeling something richer than oxygen hit the bottom of her lungs. Then she reads.
The words slither up her arm, ink twining itself around her fingers. Her skin tingles briefly as the letters sink in. And there’s that dizzying freefall, the cordite lick of magic, the world tilting around her as she rewrites its rules.
The reading isn’t a fail-safe—it won’t save her outright—but it’ll buy her extra time. Clarity to perceive hidden dangers, and a little extra speed to get away from said dangers. She would read more onto herself, but the after-effects aren’t pleasant—and that’s if it goes well.
Finally, she stands back, the reading done.
Every sense burns, the world dialled up and almost unbearable to process.
She can hear dust sizzling on the electric lamps above their persistent buzzing, the creak of every floorboard, the whistle of the wind finding its way into the bookshop’s gaps.
She blinks and the room wobbles horribly, too bright and hyper-saturated. Nausea rises in her throat.
Underneath everything, the river, its current pounding like a heartbeat.
Fighting the nausea, she stands in front of the archway. She adjusts the only knife she could find in the reading room, sticking out of her pocket—it’s not a sword, but it’ll do—and readies herself. Then, she descends.
The first difference is that Cassandra can finally see through some of the gloom, clarity lending itself to her vision. The second difference is the sound of the river. No longer a quiet murmur, easy to ignore, but a roar.
“Okay,” she mutters, just to hear herself above the noise. “I’m here.”
The knife handle is slippery in her grip as she walks through the corridor.
With the reading, she can see the way the hallway stretches and shrinks around her, its time made pliable and playful.
A phenomenon probably not meant for uncomprehending, mortal eyes.
Twice, she has to stop and breathe deeply, letting the nausea pass.
She’s always known that Chiron’s bookshop, like the other tributary bookshops of the river, has no real regard for the concepts of a fixed location or defined space.
Though the reading room has remained more or less the same, Cassandra’s already noted the appearance and disappearance of several surrounding rooms, most of them ranging from the size of a master bedroom to a utilities cupboard.
The bookshop’s own natural rhythms, tied to a seasonality she can never quite track.
But this is different. This space feels untethered, as though it could simply vanish at any moment, taking her with it.
Tightening her hold on the knife, she walks faster, towards the glimmer of archway at the end of the hallway. A whisper teases at the edge of her hearing. Music?
No, not quite music, but the low hum of activity. Footsteps, the jangling of keys or type.
She steps underneath the archway she’d so admired, and into the red-carpeted atrium.
Before, it had been a dark, musty room, long disused.
This room is alive. Figures browse the shelves, no longer spider-webbed and empty, but brimming with books in every size and shape imaginable.
The desk, before furred with dust and collapsing under its own rot, now sits gleaming and proud in the centre of the room.
Above, chandelier lights sparkle against a glass ceiling, where strange aquatic shadows roil and shiver.
And all around her, underneath the footsteps, the low murmuring of other languages, is the sound, the feeling of the river.
Without even realising, her shoulders ease and her nervous, tight breaths slow.
The figures, for all their apparent solidity, only resolve themselves when she looks at them directly.
The second she glances away, distracted by a movement or a noise, they dissolve again.
For an entire five minutes, she watches someone browse the shelves, walk up to the desk with a book in their hands and leave through a pair of double doors—only for their features to vanish with them.
It’s as though something is overwriting her thoughts, making it impossible for her to hold on to any particular face.
A prickle rolls over her—the ink from the reading shivers on her skin, reminding her that she’s on borrowed time.
“Cassandra Fairfax,” a voice says clearly.
She squints, and the person at the front of the desk resolves into a woman. Her features shapeshift—Cassandra catches dark skin, then tawny; blonde hair transmuting to auburn—but the woman’s eyes remain a steady black. The black of ink.
Then she says, “Cass Holt.” A wry, knowing tone. “Yes, I know of that, too.”
Cassandra tenses. Every instinct in her is telling her to run, reminding her of all the reasons she doesn’t belong down here.
That if this… person knows who Cass Holt is, then they know she’s a fraud, and probably unworthy of the secrets she already possesses.
Then she thinks about returning upstairs empty-handed, with nothing but the taste of stale ink in her mouth and no answers in front of her.
She settles for tilting her head, just a little defiantly. “So you know who I am.”
“Book thief. Liar. And now owner.” The woman observes her carefully. “It’s been a long time since you last visited us.”
“I—”
Cassandra is about to say that she’s never visited this part of the bookshop before, or at least not in this state of activity. But at the same time, it all feels so familiar. As though she’s slipped into that hazy dream-state between waking and sleeping.
“Where is this?” she asks, not sure whether she means in space, time, or something else entirely.
The woman smiles a little wryly, as if this is a question she’s well used to.
“This is the bookshop below.” The woman tilts her head in acknowledgement. “And I am its Keeper.”
Another bookshop, at the very heart of the river.
Cassandra glances at the shelves again, and to her surprise, she only recognises a few books.
Those that she does recognise are rare: frail first editions, bound manuscripts, deluxe volumes with intricate foil stamped on the spines.
But the hum of power is unmistakable, as is the river’s influence.
The honeyed language of the books, the potential of story itself thick in the air, the urge to mouth once upon a time—
Just because she’s curious—just because she can—she murmurs a line of poetry.
Almost before the words have left her mouth, a light bursts between her fingertips, pooling warm in her hand.
Despite herself, a deep thrill goes through her.
Reading has always come easy to her, but if reading is the middle man between a reader and the river, then he’s stepped aside entirely in these underground halls.
Although she still can’t focus on them, the figures edge closer to her, as if drawn to the light. She lets the story fade in her head, but the light lingers between her fingers for a moment longer before it vanishes.
“We are the bridge between the source of the river and the world above.” The Keeper pats her desk with something that could be interpreted as fondness. “Every book is cared for and accounted here, from a fragmented pamphlet to Fate’s compendium itself. As you work above, so do I below.”
Cassandra’s thoughts keep snagging on that phrase: Fate’s compendium.
Every past and future, weighed and judged and sometimes altered by Lady Fate, to be recorded forever.
Indelible. Cassandra had—well, she’d hoped it was a fairy tale, in the way of most childhood stories.
She can’t say she likes the idea of her past irreversibly printed somewhere, for anyone to find.
“And you’ve been here this entire time?” she asks.
“We tried to get your attention,” the Keeper says, a little reproachfully.
The bookshop’s behaviour. The stuck doors, the irritable books, the constant low-level havoc it’s wrought for the last few weeks.
A stab of irritation washes over Cassandra, mainly directed at herself.
If she’d come down here weeks ago, instead of fretting over the potential danger, she might have saved herself a lot of grief.
She takes a deep breath. She’s here now—that’s all that matters.
“Then you must know who Chiron is. That he would have come down here,” she says. “Did he ask you anything?”
“Chiron asked me many things,” the Keeper says.
“Anything important. Anything about—about taking books, or about the river,” Cassandra says, frustration creeping into the edge of her words. “He must have asked you something.” An idea occurs to her. “If you have access to Fate’s compendium—if such a thing exists—then you could—”
It’s the wrong thing to say. The Keeper’s eyes turn cold and flinty, and underneath her tone, Cassandra hears a deeper, more powerful inflection. The ink on her skin burns hot, and she gasps.
“Careful, Cassandra Fairfax. You come to this sacred space bearing weaponry—as though the river can be used against itself. You have walked through its sanctuaries freely and stolen, with no regard for the consequences. But it has borne no ill will towards you, and protected you from those who would cause you harm.” The Keeper’s voice is sharp.
“The river is infinite possibility, but it’s not infinite power.
It gives, but it also takes away. Remember that, in your bookshop above. ”
The burn on Cassandra’s skin fades, and when she glances down, there’s no sign that she’d read so much as a word onto herself. Not washed away—but stripped.
Chiron should have told her about all of this. He should have warned her about the bookshop below, and its effect on the bookshop above. He should have warned her about the people pursuing the bookshop, and the difficulties of running it, and what it had really meant when she’d signed herself away.
Maybe he would have done, if he’d had time.
“Someone killed him,” she says quietly. “In this bookshop.”
It’s the first time she’s acknowledged it out loud.
The words hang in the air, and even though she wishes she could take them back, she can’t. Chiron is dead, and someone murdered him; whether she says it out loud or not doesn’t make it any less true.
“I just… I need to know who.”
She’s probably pushing her luck, but if there’s a way to know—to understand—
“I cannot tell you who killed him or how,” the Keeper says. “Only that I felt his death, as I feel all such things that affect the bookshop.”
Cassandra’s shoulders slump. Another dead end, and no closer to knowing anything about who might have killed Chiron, or why. Maybe it would be better for her to simply acknowledge that some deaths are more unfortunate than others, and move on.
But he charged her with the bookshop. And Chiron deserved many things, but not murder.
“However,” the Keeper adds, “we recognise our own. We always recognise our own.”
It takes Cassandra a second to parse the Keeper’s meaning before it hits her.
The bookshop is selective about its clients, and even more so about who can walk through it without fear of consequence.
If Chiron really was murdered, then it was by someone the river recognised.
Not an irate buyer or collector, or an opportunistic passer-by, but another bookseller.
Another owner.