“That’d be unpleasant for all concerned, I’ d bet.”
The old man smiled. “The late fees are rather exorbitant in a library like this.”
The chronicler had left the book in Mia’s room, right before she was posted to Galante. In the intervening months, she’ d pored over the pages more times than she could count. The pity of it was, she still didn’t understand the half of it, and truth told, in recent turns, she’ d become more than a little disillusioned about it. But her encounter in the Galante necropolis had renewed her interest tenfold.
The book was written by a woman named Cleo—a darkin like Mia, who spoke to the shadows just as she did. Cleo lived in a time before the Republic, and the book was a diary of sorts, detailing her journey through Itreya and beyond. It spoke of meetings between her and other darkin—meetings that ended with Cleo apparently eating her fellows. The strange thing was, from Cleo’s writing, she’ d encountered dozens of other darkin in her travels. And from the look of the woman’s scribbled self-portraits, she was accompanied by dozens of passengers, wearing a multitude of different shapes—foxes, birds, serpents, and the like. An entire shadow menagerie at her command.
In all her life, the only darkin Mia had met was Lord Cassius. And the only two daemons were Mister Kindly and Eclipse.
So where the ’byss were the rest of them?
Amid nonsense scrawl and pictograms that spoke of her ever-growing madness, the latter half of the book concerned Cleo’s search for something she called “the Crown of the Moon”—just as that shadowthing in the Galante necropolis had told Mia to do. And flipping through the illustrations after her encounter, Mia had seen several that bore an uncanny resemblance to the figure that had saved her life.
Sadly, Cleo made no mention of who or what this “Moon” might be.
The book was written in an arcane language Mia had never seen, but Mister Kindly and Eclipse were both able to read it. Strangest of all, it contained a map of the world in the time before the Republic, but the bay of Godsgrave was missing entirely. Instead, a landmass filled the sea where the Itreyan capital now stood. This peninsula was marked with an X, and an unsettling declaration:
Here he fell.
“Did you read this before you gave it to me?” Mia asked.
The old man shook his head. “Couldn’t make out a bloody word. Only thing that made me think of you was the pictures. Make any sense to you?”
“… Not half as much as I’ d like.”
Aelius shrugged. “You asked me to look for books on darkin, and so I did. Didn’t promise you’d be any more enlightened when you were done.”
“No need to rub it in, good Chronicler.”
Aelius smirked. “I’m always on the lookout for more. If I find anything else of interest down here, I’ ll send it to your chambers. But I’ d not hold my breath.”
Mia nodded, dragging on her smoke. Niah’s athenaeum was actually a library of the dead. It contained a copy of every book that had ever been destroyed in the history of the written language. Moreover, it also held other tomes that had never been written in the first place. Memoirs of murdered tyrants. Theorems of crucified heretics. Masterpieces of geniuses who ended before their time.
Chronicler Aelius had told her new books were appearing constantly, that the shelves were always shifting. And though Niah’s athenaeum was a wondrous place as a result, the downside was plain: finding a particular book in here was like trying to find a particular louse in a dockside sweetboy’s crotch.
“Chronicler, have you heard of the Moon? Or any crowns said Moon might be partial to?”
Aelius’s stare turned wary.
“Why?”
“You answer questions with questions an awful lot,” Mia sighed. “Why is that?”
“Do you remember what I said that turn you first came down here?”
“See, there you go again.”
“Do you remember?”
“You said I was a girl with a story to tell.”
“And what else?”
Smoke drifted from the girl’s lips as the old man stared her down.
“You said maybe here’s not where I’m supposed to be,” she finally replied. “Which stank like horseshit at the time, and smells even worse now. I proved myself. The Ministry would all be nailed to crosses in the ’Grave if not for me. And I’m sick and bloody tired of everybody around here seeming to forget that.”
“You don’t find any irony in earning your place in a cult of assassins by saving half a dozen lives?”
“I killed almost a hundred men in the process, Aelius.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“What are you, my nursemaid?” Mia snapped. “A killer is what I am. The wolf doesn’t pity the lamb. And the—”
“Aye, aye, I know the tune.”
“And you know why I’m here. My father was executed as a traitor to entertain a mob. My mother died in a prison, and my baby brother beside her. And the men responsible need a fucking killing. That’s how I feel about it.”
The old man hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat. “Problem with being a librarian is there’s some lessons you just can’t learn from books. And the problem with being an assassin is there’s some mysteries you just can’t solve by stabbing fuck out of them.”
“Always riddles with you,” Mia growled. “Do you know about this Moon or no?”
The old man sucked on his cigarillo, looked her up and down. “I know this much. Some answers are learned. But the important ones are earned.”
“O, Black Goddess, now you’re a poet, too?”
The chronicler frowned, crushed his cigarillo out against the wall.
“Poets are wankers.”
Aelius dropped the murdered butt of his smoke into his waistcoat. He looked down at the book in Mia’s hand. Back up into her eyes.
“You can keep that. Nobody else can read it anyways.”
With a small nod, he took hold of his RETURNS trolley.
“What, that’s all the explanation I get?” Mia asked.
Aelius shrugged. “Too many books. Too few centuries.”
The old man wheeled his trolley off into the dark. Watching him fade into the shadows, the girl took a savage drag of her cigarillo, jaw clenched.
“… well, that was enlightening …”
“… AELIUS HAS ALWAYS BEEN THAT WAY. BEING CRYPTIC MAKES HIM FEEL IMPORTANT …”
Mia scowled at the shadowwolf materializing beside her.
“Are you sure Lord Cassius never learned anything of this, Eclipse? He was head of the entire congregation.