CHAPTER 38
Firework flashes filtered through the Library windows, staining the stacks pink and green.
“You probably don’t know this. We’re actually on top of the very source of the Power.”
Richard, Emma reflected grimly, never seemed happier than when explaining something.
She was thankful, at least, that this had distracted him from knife fondling and outlining her death in detail.
But if he was going to murder her, he might at least have had the decency not to lecture her on the way.
Richard seemed to take her silence for dumbstruck awe.
As he tugged her through the stacks, his voice rose with a true historian’s fervor.
“Yes, this very library. The texts say that it was originally the site of a holy spring. A pagan temple to the Power. The founders of the University recognized what it was and built over it. This is where those early members of the Turnbull Society brought their sacrifices. Just imagine.”
The quiet was shattered by a smash. It could not have come from one of the windows around them, which were all intact. Sound traveled strangely in the Library.
Richard dragged Emma on more quickly, pulling her into a windowless corridor. He used the knife hilt to flick the light switch. Emma saw chipped tiles and noticeboards crowded with flyers for typing services and language exchange partners. It was a distinctly unmagical place to die.
Then the tiniest plishing sound drew her attention to the wall beside them.
Set into an alcove was a stone drinking fountain, the kind Emma associated dimly with pictures of Rome.
There was a face carved into it, one whose beard and hair fanned out as though drifting in a current.
A stream of water poured from his lips into the basin below.
The stone itself was curiously smooth and glass-like.
Emma had the opportunity to notice this detail, since Richard had forced her down until she was bent over the basin.
“Yes,” Richard crooned, breath hot on her ear.
“When your blood drains into this fountain, it will wash straight back to the Power. That’s how it used to be done, in the ancient times.
Through your sacrifice, your pain, the bargain will be fulfilled.
And everything will be back to how it should be. ”
He twisted a hand into Emma’s hair and pulled, exposing her throat to the knife.
Even resisting the pressure he exerted was enough to send pain singing through her skull. But Emma readied for one last desperate attack, pain be damned—
“—AND I CARED, YOU BASTARD.”
The sound came all at once, as though someone had turned the dial on a muted radio. Jasper stood in the doorway, purple-faced, mid-roar. Sound did, indeed, seem to travel strangely in the Library.
Richard pulled Emma in front of him and pressed the knife to her throat.
The purple drained from Jasper’s face. He looked like a lost little boy. “Come on, Rich. Let her go. Please.”
“This isn’t what you think. I found her here. She must have been hiding, all this time. I was stopping her for you—”
“Liar. I could hear you all the way here, as soon as I got in. Saying weird things about powers, threatening her—”
Richard changed tack. “I had to, Jasper. She was a danger to the Society. She was going to ruin us all, our fathers—”
“Danger to…? The Society’s only a bit of fun, Rich. Come on, it doesn’t really matter.”
“The Turnbull Society is the single most important reason this nation still exists,” Richard screamed, in a high voice Emma had never heard him use. Behind her, he was shuddering with emotion. The blade at her throat trembled viciously.
Jasper took an unconscious step back.
“Rich, mate. You’ve been part of my family since we were ten. I love you like a brother, you know that. But I can’t let you hurt her. My father wouldn’t want you to—”
“Your father? What do you know about your father?” Richard hissed. “I am more his son than you could ever be.”
His face was transformed, rigid and white.
“He trusts me with things. Things he’s never told you. I used to wonder why. After all, you’re his ‘real’ son. And then I saw. It’s wasted on you. All you want to do is run away on your little boat. Play with your camera. Maybe that’s why he never told you.”
“Told me what?”
“He told me when I was ten. After my dad’s funeral, when he was driving me back to school. About our ritual, and what we owe to the Society. He said my father wanted me to know. But it had to be a secret, because you weren’t ready yet.
“I would have told you. I waited years. Every term at school. Every holiday I spent at your house. For you to ask a single question. But you never did. You just take everything your father’s built for you, and never once asked where it all came from.”
“Where what came from? Why are you saying this?”
Richard laughed, a bitter, mirthless thing.
And as he told Jasper the truth of what the Turnbulls were and what they did, it struck Emma then that there were two types of evil, among these boys raised to have everything.
It was easy to hate Richard’s type. Wielding the knife, plotting the Society’s rise to power, sacrifice by sacrifice.
But what of Jasper, and the others like him?
Coasting through life on golden waves of luck.
Enjoying privileges without the pain of interrogating them.
Because it was fun, being rich. Being sought after.
It was convenient to think that this was the natural order of things: a little unfair, perhaps, but out of one’s control.
And that, in itself, was an evil. To be able to look away, to avoid seeing where your joy had been sucked from someone else’s marrow.
Emma felt a prickling of guilt: She wasn’t sure she’d been all that innocent of that herself, in her mortal life.
Jasper shrank from Richard, shielding his face as if to ward off the words. “No. I don’t want any of this.”
“It’s not about what you want,” Richard said, implacable. “It’s about the country, and what’s best for it. We’ve spent generations, centuries, keeping it stable. We have to do what it takes to protect it. You and me. We’re meant for it.”
“But killing people—” Jasper looked sick.
“Look, that’s an extreme—oh, you should hear your father explain it. Like he says, you have to make tough decisions when you’re the ruling class—” Emma twitched, and Richard smiled.
“‘Ruling class.’ It’s become such a dirty term, hasn’t it? We pretend it doesn’t exist anymore. But who’s in charge, Emma? Who is it, in your Parliament and your news reports and your boardrooms, hmm? What do they have in common?”
He tapped Emma on the nose with the knife, and she flinched.
He turned back to Jasper. “We’re still there for a reason.
We rule because we know how to. We’re brought up for it.
We give up so much, to run the country for people who’d rather spend their time watching reality TV than make a single difficult choice to keep the economy going.
We’re the only ones willing to do what it takes. To make the necessary sacrifices.”
Emma held still. She only needed Richard’s attention to slip, just a little. If she got out of his hold, she was quick enough to outrun him.
“I don’t know, Rich. It doesn’t sound quite, like—fair.”
“Fair? What’s fair? Maybe it’s unfair we get the best schooling because our parents can pay for it.
But that has still made us the best. The most qualified.
What are we meant to do at the top, hand things off to people who aren’t as prepared, aren’t as good, just because it would be nicer? History isn’t nice.”
But history had always been written from their perspective.
The Turnbulls, and people like them. So whose fault was that?
Emma never got to finish the thought. Because Richard dropped the knife.
Because crashes rippled through the air.
Because framed in the doorway were three figures with axes in their hands. And boars’ heads.
But the Boars were never allowed in the Library. The Night City would not permit it. Which meant that something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong.
Richard went slack. Emma ripped herself from his grasp and plunged blindly into a dark reading room. Behind her, someone started to scream.