I ended up in the library, because I doubted Pritkin would actually be back all that soon, based on prior experience. And because I had some research to do. The place wasn’t hard to find, being just down from the caf, with four stories opening onto a cavernous lobby and a big, half-moon desk right inside the front entrance. It was a little surprising, though.
I belatedly remembered hearing that one of the main fights in the battle for HQ had taken place here, with war mages getting cut off from the civilian employees, who’d had to make a stand on their own. And while they were all magical beings, of one type or another, they weren’t trained troops. It had been a slaughter.
It still looked like it.
There were blackened sunbursts on the lobby walls, a stark contrast to the lighter, reddish stone, where major spells had hit. They were random, like they’d bounced off wards and ricocheted, with glass striations glittering in the centers and radiating outward, like dark stars. I guessed they might have been hard to clean up, with the fused sand making them basically permanent features, but the barricades of shelving were also still in place in some areas, from the librarians’ last stand.
I stared at them, feeling a little off kilter. Outside, people were hustling and bustling, laughing and talking, and generally getting on with their lives. Inside there were huge holes in the shelving, with ragged black edges where spells had burned through the wood and books, and probably people, too.
I wondered if it had been deliberate, leaving them like that. A sort of memorial to the fallen, made up of the things they’d loved best and had died defending. I didn’t know.
There were more big burnt marks on the carpet, I noticed as I walked further in. Big pieces had b
een cut away; I wasn’t sure why. And then I figured it out when I spied the outline of a hand on one of the remaining bits, the carpet below fresh and clean and new looking, but that surrounding the imprint black and bubbly.
I suddenly had to sit down in a wooden chair that had been left by a support column, my knees weak.
It caught me like that sometimes, out of the blue. Not the reality of war—that had hit a long time ago—but the fact that I had somehow ended up as one of the main people fighting it. And that, if I failed, a lot more people were going to end up like the guy whose hand was now burned into carpet.
Maybe all of them.
The room grew swimmy, and I put my head down, my forehead touching my knees. I was physically nauseous, but mentally angry and impatient because I didn’t have time for this today. I didn’t have time for it any day!
Get a grip, I told myself. And if you lose that butter chicken, you will eat salad tonight, and for the rest of the damned week!
My stomach decided to behave after that dire threat, and in a moment, the weakness began to fade. That was about the time I noticed another hand, this one on my arm. And looked up to see a terribly old man in a three-piece suit, complete with a pocket watch and chain, like an old-fashioned banker.
But bankers, even old timey ones, didn’t wear what looked like a hundred little watch fobs that glimmered or, in some cases, boiled with power. Charms and hexes, I realized, a crap ton of them, because I guessed if you survived something like this, you didn’t take chances. Although how he’d survived, I didn’t know, because he looked like he could have given Horatiu a run for his money in the longevity department.
“Do you require assistance, Lady?” he asked.
“Uh, no. No, I’m fine.” And then I remembered why I’d come. “Uh, actually, I was looking for information on a spell. Could you help me with that?”
“I could try. It is not my area of expertise, but I am afraid that Mrs. Lantham . . . is no longer with us.”
“I see.” I actually hoped I didn’t, and that Mrs. Lantham had died old, content, and in her bed. “I’m looking for information on a spell called Lover’s Knot, or Nodo D’Amore in Italian. Do you know it?”
“I’m afraid not. But if you’ll come this way, I will attempt to look it up for you.”
I got up, thankful to be steady on my feet again, and followed him through mountains of books—rescues from the ruined stacks, I guessed; the broken remains of the stacks themselves, piled up to form an alley through the clutter on either side of us; and jury rigged lighting overhead in the form of festoons of the pale spheres some mages liked to use instead of flashlights. They reflected the ambient light in an area, magnifying it many times over, although there wasn’t much in here to work with.
That became truer as we went further in, which was probably why there were so many of the lights, each suspended in a bag of netting from ropes that seemed to scrawl all over everything.
They laced the shelving, hung suspended over the alleyways, and highlighted mounds of junk: broken tables, half burnt books, task lights that had somehow ended up as melted sculptures after a spell came too close, and which I wouldn’t have even been able to identify except that some of their shades were bizarrely still intact. There were paintings, too, half burnt like the rest, of people I didn’t know but probably should have. There was one with just the top half of a face left, inside a melted frame, the serene eyes of some now long dead woman seeming to follow me as we moved along.
I was starting to understand why this place was so empty.
“—the Pythian library, such a wonderful resource, such a tragic loss,” the man was saying.
“Yes,” I said, because I hadn’t been listening.
“I had a chance to see it once, you know, when I was a boy,” he confided. “My mother visited the court and I, being a little scamp, ran off and found my way into the basement. I have to admit, I did not understand half of what I saw, but it was a formative event in my life. I think it was when I first decided to become a librarian.”
“Really. That’s . . . interesting.”
“Yes, indeed. A veritable treasure trove!” he enthused. And then kept talking, although if he was jonesing for another look, he was going to be disappointed. The library at the old Pythian Court had gone up in flames along with the rest of the place, in another attack a couple months back.
But maybe he already knew that; he’d been saying something about its loss earlier. I didn’t know. I was having a hard time paying attention. This place didn’t just feel weird, it smelled it, too. I was being assailed by everything from the mustiness of old books to the staticky scent of spent magic, from the old campfire reek of dead ashes to the sizzle of roast pork—