does at that.’
Mercurio tilted his head back, looked out on all those dead books with heavy-lidded eyes. ‘Do you hate her for it?’
‘Blasphemy,’ the old ghost scolded.
‘Is it?’ Mercurio asked. ‘If she doesn’t care what we say or do?’
‘And what makes you say that?’
‘Well, look at what this place has become,’ Mercurio growled, waving his cane at the dark. ‘Once, it was a house of wolves. Each murder, an offering to Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Feeding her hunger. Making her stronger. Hastening her return. And now?’ He spat on the flagstones. ‘It’s a whorehouse. The Ministry feed their own coffers, not the Maw. Their hands drip with gold, not red.’
Mercurio shook his head, breathing smoke as he continued.
‘O, we say all the words, make all the gestures, aye. “This flesh your feast, this blood your wine.” But still, when all the praying is done, we drop to our knees for the likes of Julius fucking Scaeva. How can you say Niah cares, if she allows this poison to fester in her own halls?’
‘Maw’s teeth.’ Aelius raised one snow-white brow. ‘Someone woke up on the wrong side of bed this morn.’
‘Fuck off,’ the old man spat.
‘What do you want her to do?’ the chronicler demanded. ‘She’s been banished from the sky for millennia, boy. Allowed to rule for a handful of turns every two and a half years. How much say over all this do you think she has? How much influence do you think she can exert in the prison her husband made for her?’
‘If she’s so powerless, why call her a goddess at all?’
Aelius’s frown deepened into a scowl. ‘I never said she was powerless.’
‘Because you were never one to state the fucking obvious.’
The chronicler looked at Mercurio hard. ‘I remember when you first arrived here, boy. Green as grass, you were. Soft as baby shite. But you believed. In her. In this. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.’
Mercurio scowled. ‘I’ve as much need for old Ashkahi proverbs as I have for a second ballsack, old man.’
‘You might have more need than you know, with young Drusilla on the prowl,’ Aelius smirked. ‘Point is, you had faith, boy. Where’d it go?’
Mercurio pressed the cigarillo to his lips, thinking long and hard.
‘I still believe,’ he replied. ‘The God of Light and Goddess of Night and their Four fucking Daughters. I mean, this place exists. You exist. The Dark Mother obviously still has some small sway.’ Mercurio shrugged. ‘But this is a world ruled by men, not divinities. And for all the blood, all the death, all the lives we’ve taken in her name, she’s still so fucking far away.’
‘She’s closer than you think,’ Aelius said.
‘I swear by all that’s holy, if you tell me she dwells in the temple of my heart, we’re going to find out if folk can return from the dead twice.’
‘They can’t, actually,’ the chronicler shrugged. ‘Not even the Mother has that power. You die once, you might make it back with her blessing. But cross back over to the Abyss once more? You’re gone forever.’
‘That threat was supposed to be rhetorical, old man.’
Aelius grinned, smudged his cigarillo out against the wall, and dropped the butt into the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘Come with me.’
The chronicler leaned on his RETURNS trolley, began wheeling it down the long ramp from the mezzanine to the Athenaeum floor below. Mercurio watched the old man shuffling away, dragging on his own smoke.
‘Come on, whippersnapper!’ Aelius barked.
The bishop of Godsgrave sighed and, pushing himself off the wall, followed the chronicler down the ramp into the library proper. Side by side, the pair wandered through the maze of shelves, mahogany and parchment and vellum all around. Every now and then, Aelius would stop and place one of his returned tomes back into its allotted place, almost reverently. The shelves were too tall to see over, and each aisle looked much the same. Mercurio was soon hopelessly lost, and a part of him wondered how in the Mother’s name Aelius made sense of this place.
‘Where the ’byss are we going?’ he grumbled, rubbing his aching knees.
‘New section,’ Aelius replied. ‘They pop up all the time in this place. When they want to be found, that is. I stumbled onto this one almost two years ago. Right before your girl arrived here for the first time.’
Out in the dark, Mercurio could hear bookworms shifting their massive bulks among the shelves. Leathery hides scraping along the stone, deep, rumbling growls reverberating through the floor. The air was dry and cool, echoing with the faint song of that beautiful choir. There was a peace to this place, no doubt. But Mercurio wondered if he’d manage an eternity in it with quite as much calm as Aelius.
They turned down a long shelf, twisting off in a gentle curve. As they walked the rows of dusty tomes wrapped in old skins and polished wood, Mercurio realized the curve was slowly tightening – that the shelf was turning in an ever-smaller spiral. And somewhere near the heart of it, out in all that dark, Aelius came to a stop.
The chronicler reached up to the top shelf, pulled down a thick book, and placed it in Mercurio’s hands.
‘The Mother keeps only what she needs,’ he said. ‘And she does what she can. In the small ways that she can.’
Mercurio raised an eyebrow, cigarillo still smouldering at his lips as he examined the tome. It was bound in leather, black as a truedark sky. The edges of the pages were stained blood-red, and a crow in flight was embossed in glossy black on the cover.
He opened the book, looked down to the first page.
‘Nevernight,’ he muttered. ‘Stupid name for a book.’
‘Makes for interesting reading,’ Aelius said.
Mercurio opened the book to the prologue, rheumy eyes scanning the text.
CAVEAT EMPTOR
People often shit themselves when they die.
Their muscles slack and their souls flutter free and everything else just … slips out. For all their audience’s love of death, the playwrights seldom—
Mercurio flipped through a few more pages, softly scoffing.
‘It has footnotes? What kind of wanker writes a novel with footnotes?’
‘It’s not a novel,’ Aelius replied, sounding wounded. ‘It’s a biography.’
‘About who?’
The chronicler simply nodded back to the book. Mercurio flicked through a few pages more, scanning the beginning of chapter three.
… dropped him into the path of an oncoming maidservant, who fell with a shriek. Dona Corvere turned on her daughter, regal and furious.
‘Mia Corvere, keep that wretched animal out from underfoot or we’ll leave it behind!’
And as simple as that, we have her name.
Mia.
Mercurio faltered. Cigarillo hanging from suddenly bone-dry lips. His blood ran cold as he finally understood what he held in his hands. Glancing up at the shelves around him. The dead books and lost books and books that never were – some burned on the pyres of the faithful, some swallowed by time, and others …
Simply too dangerous to write at all.
Aelius had wandered off down the twisted row, hands in his pockets and muttering to himself, a trail of thin grey smoke left behind him. But Mercurio was rooted to the spot. Utterly mesmerized.