by Joanne Rixon
When she first heard the shouts, Celilia thought a fight had broken out among the students studying for exams. She wanted to seek out her boss and ask him to break it up, but she flinched from the memory of the lecture she’d gotten her second day on the job when she’d asked Holenden to help her shoo out a gray-haired professor snoring loudly in the History stacks. “This is the only reason I hired an assistant, Celilia, to wave away the pesky flies that distract me from the real work of running a library as prestigious as the Ursiden.”
She was too thaumborn to work in a factory and too poor to swan around the fashion district taking three hours to drink a cup of tea, so she steeled herself and strode down the corridor that led to the Alessio Swallowtail Special Collections room. It was probably only undergrads worried about exams or the attention of a girl. A sharp, “Who’s your advisor?” would break it up.
She rounded the corner. Lights flashed through smoke billowing from the Swallowtail Room’s arched doorway, and a pair of students fled toward the exit. She wished Prosopite were beside her. Prosopite wasn’t scared of anything, or at least its stone-sprite face never showed fear, and it never hesitated to act. But it was in the basement archives, working through the long queue of preservations on the old manuscripts down in the damp.
Celilia forced her back straight. She wasn’t much of a thaumaturgist, she was short and female and none of the university students ever thought they needed to obey her. But she was the Ursiden Library’s only Clerk Assistant, and students were Not Allowed to duel in the library.
Inside the Swallowtail Room the smoke was so thick she could barely see. Purple-green lights pulsed in the smoke; elongated shadows throbbed in and out of existence, distorting the bookshelves and carrels. Ducking low, she darted forward and huddled in the lee of an overturned oak tabletop.
She couldn’t see any students. The light came from one point at the far end of the room, where, if her memory was correct, shelves of Oversize tomes met study tables. She wished she’d stopped those students who were running away—they must have seen what set this off.
She wasn’t sure what ‘this’ was. Not a fight after all. Some kind of thaumaturgical accident? Crouching, she inched toward the light. Her ears felt full of cotton. Giant bestial figures coalesced out of the smoke and then melted back into shadow.
Belatedly, she scrabbled for her wand. If Prosopite were here it would know what to do.
Halfway into the room, the light itself was silent and blinding. When she held up a hand to block it, around the edges she saw the diagramming table on the left and a study table on the right. The study table was piled with books, a chair tumbled on its side in front of it, and at the table’s foot a crumpled body. Not dead, she hoped.
Celilia took a deep breath and forced herself to ignore the panic bubbling in her stomach. Less haste, more speed. She visualized the glyph clearly, then drew it in the air as she enunciated each syllable of the spell. The last flick of her wand sent a glimmering sepi over the student on the floor. Her carefulness was rewarded with a sturdy spell that at least looked like it was reflecting the poisonous-looking beams of light.
Of course, she wasn’t powerful enough to cast more than one shield at a time. She really hoped there weren’t any other students in the room, or if there were, she hoped they were conscious enough to cast their own shields. She hoped the boy on the ground wasn’t dead. If she was using her one shield to protect a dead body while she herself was thaumaturgically naked, she was going to be so angry.
“Prosopite!” She yelled for help even though Prosopite was too far away to hear. Even if it had been beside her, it might not have heard her. The room was ghostly quiet and her voice was swallowed up by a strange dullness in the air, like she’d shouted into a pot full of mud.
On her knees and one hand, the other hand holding her wand in front of her, Celilia scooted toward the table, her skirts and petticoat strangling her legs. A shadowy beak whistled past her cheek, smashed into the floor and cracked the wood. She flinched away, then dodged a mouthful of shadow teeth in the shadow mouth of a blackfish swimming up through the floorboards.
She launched herself a handful of meters forward, lunged at the center of the light—painfully bright through her closed eyelids—and slammed the book shut. The magic dowsed itself like a plunge into cold water.
Celilia collapsed to the floor, shaking. Either she was blind now or the room was midnight dark. No, not blind. A thin rectangle of light glowed faintly in the doorway; the lights in the hall must be out as well.
She felt like she was going to vomit so she put her head between her knees. In just a second she would reach over to see if the boy on the floor was alive. In just one more second.
A sharp thump between her and the door; as her head was lifting to see what the noise was, a gentle honey-tinged light rose in the air above Prosopite’s head.
“Oh, good luck to see you.” Her stomach calmed nearly immediately as her words poured out. Prosopite was a much stronger thaumaturgist than she, not to mention its centuries of wisdom; she could rely on it. “I don’t know what’s happened, there were lights exploding out of this book and these huge shadowy—" Celilia gestured, the sudden stream of words giving out.
Prosopite’s many eyes gleamed like flecks of mica in granite. It ignored her briefly, surveying the room, and then click-clacked over to her, small stone feet sharp on the hardwood floors except in places where the wood was crushed and splintered into softness. The repair bill would be extravagant. Her boss would be furious.
That was trouble to deal with later. “Is it over?” she asked. The muffled feeling in the air was diminishing.
Prosopite nodded in that deliberate way hearthfolk had, like they were only mimicking a foreign human gesture. “You are safe.” It turned several eyes on the half-globe of the shield, which shimmered like a pearl. “What is beneath the sepi?”
“Oh depths.” Celilia rushed to draw the undoing glyph in the air. The shield flickered and disappeared.
The crumpled form on the floor was a student, of course. The university half-cape around his shoulders confirmed he was of age to attend the university, but his insensate face looked far too young. His thick brows and cheeks covered in acne reminded Celilia of her brother. Robbie would always be nineteen in her memories.
Prosopite knelt, then touched the boy’s face. Its voice was as level as always, but she thought she saw worry in its posture. “Do you recognize the condition?”
“Magical exhaustion?” Celilia wasn’t certain. In secondary school, she’d always been the one who fainted the few times they tried spells that were beyond her natural ability. She’d never seen it from the outside, and had always recovered her senses after just a few moments. “Unless the shadows struck him in the head.” Celilia patted the boy’s face gently. He turned his head away from her hand, groaning, and her heart leapt. “Oh, he’s coming around!”
She’d spoken too soon. The boy opened his eyes, green-brown as a pond in summer just like her brother’s, but his gaze failed to focus. “…cause too sea…” he mumbled. His brows clenched like he was in pain.
“What’s that?” Celilia leaned down to put her ear closer to his mouth. “You’re in the library, in the Swallowtail Room. Do you remember what happened?”
The boy coughed wetly. “Strenuous if required,” he said clearly.
“Thaum, we must transport him to the Royal Hospital,” Prosopite said, then corrected itself. “The Lighthouse Hospital, forgive me.” It had only been eleven years since the king was deposed; Celilia supposed that for a hearthfolk a decade wasn’t long enough to get used to a name change.
“Yes, of course. Would you?” Technically she didn’t have to phrase it as a question. Sprites weren’t people, so thaumborn children naturally grew up ordering them around, or at least the rich ones did; her family was too poor to have a hearth, so they hadn’t had hearthfolk thaumaturgically bound to their service, but of course once she went away to school there’d been hearthfolk who cleaned and cooked. Prosopite was bound to the Ursiden’s hearth—but she wasn’t stupid enough to think she knew better than someone who had lived centuries longer than she’d been alive.
Prosopite nodded and gathered the boy up in its small arms. His long legs dragged on the ground for a second before Prosopite cast transice and both blinked away.
Celilia, left alone in the Swallowtail Room, studied the mess. Books and papers littered the floor, chairs were knocked around and tables pushed over. Maps had been torn out of the map cabinet and shredded. She tried to get her thoughts in order. Nothing like this had ever happened when she was in secondary—Beatrix had turned herself into a doe when they’d been learning to use ablue to clean windows, but this felt different. Like an attack.
She dragged herself to her feet and walked up to the book on the table. She’d touched it to slam it closed, but now hesitated. Summation, by Bayram Sawali and Sahuaraura, et al. A text on thaumaturgical mathematics, quite possibly the most boring book in the room. So what had happened? A prank gone wrong?
Too savage for a prank. Celilia poked the book with a finger. Nothing happened. It sat on the table as innocent as a book could be, like it hadn’t just tried to murder one of the library’s patrons.
The injured student had looked so much like her brother. Her heart hurt. If that boy had family, she’d want them to know that someone had tried to protect him from… She didn’t know what. From whatever had just happened here.
#
Celilia dragged her feet through the staff entrance into the Ursiden the next morning. She’d cleaned the Swallowtail Room as best she could but found nothing pointing to a cause of the destruction. She was missing something, and she was afraid it was inside Summation. She didn’t want to crack that cover.
Instead, she’d spent the rest of yesterday ruthlessly interrogating every student she’d spotted in the library. The injured student’s name was Dannis d Gales, and he was in his third year of university, older than he looked. He had a reputation for academic seriousness, friends in the sailing club, and no one thought he’d been the target of bullies. None of his fellow students had a single bad thing to say about him; in fact, some of them were as upset as she was that he was in the hospital.
In the foyer, between the tall oak doors that led outside to Martyrs’ Square and the central marble staircase that spiraled upward from the first floor to the sixth, Holenden stood smiling at a stranger, an elegant woman. Celilia didn’t recognize her, but did recognize the quality of her clothing. Her silk jacket was a demure dove gray with white embroidery, but her skirts were white as fresh snow even though they trailed along the floor, a casual flaunting of thaumaturgical power.
Holenden said something, then kissed the woman’s hand. Celilia paused before stepping into the foyer, curious. Holenden was so often distracted, or out of his office. Was this woman the reason? Who was she?
The answer came immediately. A much plainer woman appeared at the first woman’s elbow. An attendant, clearly, and dressed in gray with the emblem of a thaumborn house on her half-cape: house Kentisporth. By her age Celilia figured the lady in white was Vivianya d Kentisporth, the wife of the second highest Parliamentarian in the Enterprise faction and one of the wealthiest philanthropists in the country.
It was hard to believe that Holenden could be involved with a woman of that status, even harder to believe that a Kentisporth would take to someone like Alen d Holenden, who was thaumborn but still had to work for a living. Maybe it was a business relationship—a philanthropist might donate money to a library on her way to visit her husband as he crafted new shipping regulations at the Parliament building next door. But then Holenden leaned in to say a few quiet words into Kentisporth’s ear, and Celilia doubted her doubts. They certainly knew each other well.
She stepped onto the marble of the foyer and Holenden glanced at her with narrowed eyes, like he wouldn’t have been just as irritated if she were late. Kentisporth excused herself and her attendant, and Celilia took advantage of the opportunity for a few questions while Holenden was on his way to his office for a nap—or whatever he usually did. “Have you learned anything more about yesterday’s incident? Is Gales still in the hospital?”
Holenden glanced at her. “Gales?”
“The student who was injured.” He didn’t know Dannis’s name?
Holenden’s steps sped up. “I haven’t even been in my office yet this morning, Celilia.”
Celilia hurried after, ignoring his tone. She had one long hallway to ask him questions before he disappeared behind his oak door. “The university must be investigating. Or the city police? Have you spoken with the investigator?”
Holenden’s frown colored his voice. “Why all the questions? Let the experts take care of it.”
Celilia nodded, arranging herself into the best picture of compliance she could while chasing after him, two of her steps to each of his one. “But what should I tell the patrons who ask me? Gales is well liked—”
Holenden turned, his hand on the latch of his office door. “Tell them to trust the university administration.” He closed the door in her face.
Celilia chewed on her lip. Holenden was a snob who didn’t think much of her or her rural, royalist family, but his abruptness was peculiar. Was he worried the investigation would fail? Or—was there some reason he didn’t want her asking questions?
When Robbie died, the news didn’t arrive at her family’s house for two months, and then only two lines tied to a raven’s ankle saying that he’d been killed. They never found out what happened to him. In the chaos of the Deposition, her brother was just another young man vanished in the fog of violence and unstable loyalties. She remembered being fourteen and wondering what Robbie had seen. What he’d felt. Dannis’s family must be feeling something similar now. Her stomach ached just thinking about it.
Celilia hurried through her routine tasks, casting salli mechanically on broken-spined book after moldy manuscript. Some of these would need re-protecting in a few years, but she saved enough time that by midafternoon she could scribble out a quick message to the University admin office. Who is the investigator assigned to yesterday’s incident? I’d like to speak to him.
Even if Holenden—or anyone—was stalling the investigation, surely such a message would pique an investigator’s curiosity. She sent off the library’s raven with the message and steered a cart of reshelving out to the library floor, eyes sharp for any students she hadn’t yet questioned about Dannis d Gales.
#
Two days after the incident in the Swallowtail Room, carpenters arrived to repair the floors at the same time as a raven fluttered in with word that Dannis d Gales had died in the hospital. Celilia bit her cheek until it bled and forced herself to open Summation. Where she’d been expecting pure mathematics she found long, dense exposition on international trade, banking, insurance and permits. There was a whole chapter on currency markets and how fluctuations in value could impact thaumaturgy done using the value of a currency as an element. And then there was the section of pages that were unreadable because they’d been scorched black and crumbling.
Prosopite transiced to the library at the Capitoli Universitato in Gauli and found a second copy of the same printing of Summation so they could look at the missing pages, which turned out to be about calculating taxes as goods passed from one jurisdiction to another.
Celilia didn’t believe it at first. Tax calculations? It didn’t make any sense. She bent over Prosopite’s shoulder while it combed through each sentence and diagram letter by letter. Nothing.
“Every day,” she said, straightening, “students read spell diagrams and copy them down. They memorize rituals and practice sigils, all without manifesting storms in the Library. Why was this different?” She pulled her own hair to keep from screaming with frustration.
Prosopite considered. “In the sub-basement storage room there is a book of thaumaturgical mathematics I would like to re-read. It may illuminate our situation. If you would be willing to take over my duties on the main floor?”
“Of course.” She’d never been ordered about by a hearthfolk before, but she only felt relief. If a sprite three hundred years old needed to do research, she could show students how to use the cataloguing system. She was just glad she wasn’t lost trying to understand the mathematics by herself. “Let me know the instant you find anything?”
Prosopite gave her a deliberate nod and disappeared with a pop.
#
Every morning when Celilia got off the tram at Martyrs’ Square, she walked by the bronze statue of Lumin Drakeare in front of the Parliamentary conference hall. Dark and gleaming, with the occasional streak of white left by a gull, as tall as a house—taller, if you counted the marble plinth it stood on. Celilia had no idea how accurately it depicted Drakeare. Since the Deposition, his face was everywhere, but the paintings portrayed him as various degrees of handsome.
Statue Drakeare rode a stallion three times life-size, and Drakeare himself was even larger. He wore a pristine uniform, his wand lifted high in an attack on the pathetic royalists who lay crumpled under the horse’s hooves.
Every time she passed it, Celilia wondered what Lumin Drakeare thought of seeing himself like that on his way to Parliament. It must be very strange to see one’s own face in bronze.
The morning three days after the—attack, she’d started thinking of it—in the Swallowtail Room, Celilia passed Drakeare’s statue and then had to wade through a group of people eddying around the front of the Ursiden Library, admiring the architecture. Or, no, not the architecture: they were whispering because the serene face of Queen Margwyn was beaming out at Martyrs’ Square from the great stained-glass window over the doors.
That window was supposed to show Lumin Drakeare victorious, just like the statue—that very victory that had spread his face everywhere had also relegated all paintings of monarchs to basements or beneath. Queen Margwyn only remained in the window over the Poetry stacks because she’d been queen several hundred years ago and was barely remembered. Her portrait lacked a crown, but if Parliamentarians on the way to their special session in the conference hall next door saw her where the Lumin’s portrait ought to be, Celilia figured Queen Margwyn's days of obscurity were short.
She didn’t have a chance to ask Prosopite what to do, though. She went directly to the Poetry stacks and confirmed that, yes, Drakeare now shone in colored glass down on shelves of dusty poetry, then went to the staffroom to hang up her coat and hat and figure out what to do about wandering stained-glass windows. There, she found that the fire elemental bound to the kettle had escaped the Library’s thaumaturgic architecture in the night and burned up all her biscuits and tea and also Holenden’s stash of expensive mallow chocolates.
Holenden discovered the fire at the same time, and to stop his red-faced cursing, Celilia wasted a whole morning at the shops on Constellation Street replacing his sweets. By the time she got back, the washrooms had started existing only in alternating minutes, which she discovered when Lady Kentisporth, who she was startled to realize was visiting Holenden again, sent her attendant to complain that the doors wouldn’t open even for aperi.
Running from mess to mess left no time at all for investigating what had killed Dannis d Gales. She kept thinking about him, of course; she was wildly frustrated to not be able to sit down and get her thoughts together. She kept trying to remember his face. Had he really looked so much like Robbie or was her memory playing tricks on her, putting her brother’s face on Dannis’?
Prosopite found her a few minutes before the end of the day and hurried through a confusing explanation about how impossible it was to dislocate a washroom in time without a lake of thaumaturgical power. “If a thaumaturgist had specialized training and a choir to perform the rite…” it trailed off with a grumble-crunching noise.
Celilia didn’t know anything about it. Maybe they covered time skipping in Advanced Rites at the Rose d Damerel Secondary School for Girls, but she’d only placed into Rites and Ceremonies, and by her senior year she’d cared more about writing for the school’s student newsletter. At least people enjoyed reading gossip.
“What if it’s another book?” she asked, not even sure what she was asking. She tried to recall the Swallowtail Room, the lights and the shadow figures. “When Summation went off, it seemed like the power was coming from the book—the thaumaturgy was disrupted when I closed it. Could this be the same? Another book somewhere in the library, that needs to be closed?”
Prosopite tilted its head ninety degrees to the side then slowly, tick-tick-tick, righted itself. Was it thinking? Was this what thinking looked like on a hearthfolk when it wasn’t putting on a face for humans? “Perhaps. Perhaps there is something to that idea. I must calculate the amplification of power to find whether this is possible. There is a geometurgy manuscript… we will read it tomorrow morning.”
“First thing,” she agreed.
#
“First thing” was impossible. Holenden left her a message that he would be meeting with the university administration all morning and that she was to captain the castle in his absence. The administration had still not sent an investigator or responded to her repeated requests for information, but she had little hope that Holenden would be able to sort that out. Holenden was her superior, but she had no illusions about his actual status at the university. He wasn’t from one of the Five Families; he was likely doing little more than listening while the administrators expressed their displeasure. If he was the one responsible for the chaos, maybe that was why: some scheme to get ahead?
He came back in a wicked mood, snapping and scowling at her and Prosopite, and without a word of thanks for the running around she’d done all morning, he set her to planning a dinner for library donors. His upset went some way to convincing her that he wasn’t responsible for anything that had happened. At the least, if he had some scheme, it wasn’t going how he wanted.
Prosopite was luckier, or more skilled at avoiding their boss. At the end of business, she found it in the basement, in front of a low, hearthfolk-height table covered in open books and loose papers crawling with mathematical formulas. But—
“Not a book,” it said. “There are structures that can store or amplify thaumaturgical power, but time-shifting requires a more complex source.”
“Depths,” Celilia cursed. “What would be more complex? Several books?”
It was a bad attempt at a joke, but Prosopite frowned like it was taking her seriously. “More than several. If I’m calculating correctly, a tome like Summation could amplify a thaumaturgist’s power, but not more than double. Time-shifting would still require half a choir.”
“A choir, or—a library? I suppose the Ursiden’s thaumaturgical architecture is complex,” Celilia offered, half understanding. “And the books are all hooked into it. They have to be so they’ll reshelve themselves correctly.”
Prosopite made a startling popping sound, like a rock breaking. “Yes. They are.”
“Wait, the library itself? Really?”
“I don’t know,” Prosopite said, but quickly began outlining a sigil. “But I can examine the lattice.”
She didn’t know why it was so interested in finding answers—surely hearthfolk didn’t have long-dead brothers to haunt them. But she was glad of it.
#
Six days after Dannis’ death, the Library’s washrooms only existed for one minute out of four and Celilia could no longer remember if the stained-glass mural of invertebrates belonged on the east side of the Natural History section or the west. Prosopite had been crafting a spell for thirty-six hours while she scrambled to cover its absence from Holenden.
If she could just get a minute to stop and think…Her mind spun through questions without finding any way to answer them: where was the university’s investigator? Had Dannis’ last words meant anything? What was “strenuous if required”? Why Summation, why the calculation of taxes on imports? Why the shadowy animal figures in the Swallowtail Room? Why Dannis? Maybe he’d had an enemy she hadn’t been able to uncover. But then, what connected him and the wandering stained-glass windows and the disappearing washrooms? What was Holenden’s involvement in all this? He had better access to the Ursiden than anyone. And, the part of her that loved gossip wondered: was Holenden having an affair with one of the most powerful women in the country?
A university student taking out a stack of journals on thaumaturgical mathematics caught her eye. She asked him about his studies, but his enthusiasm wasn’t thaumaturgical or academic. He, like the crowds in the Square, was following Lady Kentisporth’s husband’s taxation plan, currently in the final days of debate in Parliament, and the controversial inclusion of Clause Two, which would exempt certain thaumborn houses from the new taxes on importation of thaumaturgical items and creatures, for service to Parliament. A much duller subject than library books murdering students.
She cared about her country, but only in the abstract, bitter way of a woman whose father, when drunk, would weep about old King Walten being forced off his rightful throne by a pack of upstart pigs in expensive clothes. She didn’t think Parliament was as bad as her father said—Robbie had fought for the king, and look what it earned him. But she wasn’t interested in the methods the government used to determine how to apply taxes or whatever the student was going on about.
He was explaining, tediously, the differences between tariffs and taxes—she’d never been to university, true, but why did he think she didn’t know what tariffs were?—when he was interrupted by a tremendous horrible noise right outside, followed by rhythmic sounds like a giant hammer smashing boulders. The student, startled, turned toward the front doors just in time to see them cave in, spraying shards of glass and splinters of wood, chased by stone blocks and wooden beams and—
The statue of Drakeare from the Square. Mottled brown-black and gleaming, moving as fluidly as if it were living, it crashed through the broken arch of the doorway. Celilia could feel the impact in her feet. The whole building shook and in her mind’s eye she saw the upper levels of the building over the front wall. The front wall that now had a large hole in it where the load-bearing arch had been.
“Get out,” she said.
The student twitched. He’d heard her, maybe, but his eyes stayed glued to the statue.
Drakeare’s horse took one, two, three steps into the Library, then reared. Drakeare’s hat sailed perilously close to the ceiling.
“We need to get out,” Celilia repeated.
The student didn’t seem to be breathing. He stared, frozen.
Celilia turned half away from the statue. She couldn’t make herself turn her back on it. But she tried to make her voice carry across the stacks. “Please evacuate the library through the rear doors.”
She pulled her wand out of her skirt, took a deep breath, and when her lungs emptied she made herself slowly, carefully draw the sigil for the Ursiden’s fire alarm. Got it right on the first try. Light bloomed from her wand and drew a pulsing, singing stream in the air over the stacks to the back entrance, pointing the way.
Celilia grabbed the student by the shoulders and forcefully turned him so he could see the light. “Run!” she yelled in his ear.
It was enough to break the spell of fear and get him to move his feet. He shuffled, following the light, and after a few steps he picked up his feet and ran.
There were other students in the stacks; she could hear them moving. Someone was crying. Holenden came out of his office, saw the warhorse in the foyer, and immediately cast transice. He blinked away like he’d never existed, leaving the door to his office hanging open. There was no sign of anyone else in there.
The statue pawed at the stone floor, cracking it and sending tremors through the building. Slate fragments chimed like bells against the horse’s bronze legs.
Celilia’s mind was a perfect clear void. The events of the last week had been strange and terrifying but she hadn’t anticipated anything this… massive. Capable of smashing her like an ant. Smashing her, the library, and any chance of finding answers for Dannis’ family.
“Kentisporth!” The voice creaked like an ancient door on the first syllable and by the end of the name it was hissing. “Kentisporth!”
It was the statue. Drakeare, calling for which Kentisporth? The one who had been his lieutenant, or the royalist general who had been his enemy? Both dead in the Deposition. Lady Kentisporth wouldn’t be his target, being only a lady, but if she was in the building…
“I heard your call, Kentisporth, and I’m coming for you!”
Coming for, or to? Celilia doubted her ears. The statue’s voice was uncanny and too loud to hear properly. If Drakeare was drawn to lady Kentisporth by some thaumaturgical echo, he’d knock the whole building down.
Prosopite appeared beside her and reached for her hand. It had realized, then, that she wasn’t powerful enough to cast transice. She’d waste time being embarrassed later. But—
“Is Kentisporth here? She wasn’t in Holenden’s office!” Her blood was loud in her ears, and her own voice sounded strange.
“Kentisporth! Come out!” the statue sounded agitated.
“The lady’s carriage is waiting for her outside.” Prosopite always sounded calm.
Celilia took a deep breath. Calm. “So she’s in the library. Where—”
“As well as many students in the stacks and study rooms,” Prosopite said. “And I fear I made an error in my seeking spell; it’s targeted Drakeare’s statue.”
Celilia felt sick. “This is our fault?”
Prosopite lifted its hand. “Come.”
She dropped her hand into its hand and the room blinked around them, the statue in mid-shout. The silence in the stairwell rang in her ears.
“I will sweep out students studying on the fifth floor,” Prosopite offered. “When you are finished on the sixth floor, meet here on the landing and I will transice us all out to safety.”
“I’ll be fast.”
Prosopite was already turning down the stairs. Celilia hurried up to the sixth floor and burst through the doors. The hall was brightly lit, though shadows lurked in the high ceiling arches, and students milled confusedly in the doorways of study rooms.
“Emergency!” She re-cast the charm for the fire alarm, lighting up the path to the stairs. “Leave the library through the back doors!” A mad statue was too complicated to explain.
Not all the study room doors were open, though she knew they were all booked. Students were on the verge of exams; were some of them ignoring the alarms? She ran up the hallway, banging open doors as she went. “Danger!” she shouted, “Evacuate!”
By the time she’d finished banging open the doors on the first branch of the hallway, the students milling in the doorways had reached critical mass and started to either transice away or head for the stairs. But where was Kentisporth?
The first study room on the return trip down the next hall was locked tight. There was no time for polite knocking; she cast aperi. The door creaked open on a dim room full of flickering shadows. Celilia flinched back into the hall, her whole body buzzing even though she’d only been struck by memories. If this was the Swallowtail Room all over again, she didn’t know what she would do.
A distant thud shook the building. She didn’t have time for fear. She forced herself to step through the doorway.
Inside, Kentisporth stood, hands clasped in the air, silhouetted against a window that rose to the arched stone ceiling. A desk stacked with books stood off to one side, pushed messily out of the way of the sigil on the floor.
It wasn’t marked in blood, for which Celilia was thankful. The sigil was marked in some kind of bright white paint and stretched from one side of the window to the other so the light fell on it. Kentisporth’s shadow cut across it, sharp and dark, pointed at five small figurines in the center. The flickers of light Celilia had seen from the doorway churned like the arms of a purple jellyfish, swarming around Kentisporth’s hands.
She froze. This was too powerful, too complicated. If even Vivianya d Kentisporth could be overcome by it, Celilia had no chance. She must run.
Her feet wouldn’t move. If she left Kentisporth alone under the control of this spell, she’d be killed, either by the stones of the building or the statue shouting her name. My fault.
The sigil looked familiar. The thaumaturgical balancing, the directionality of the arcane letters—she did recognize it. Not this exactly, but something like it. And not from her classes at Damerel Secondary. Celilia recognized it from the back pages of the magazines she and her friends had passed around at Damerel: arde, a love spell, which was deeply frowned upon at best, and illegal to cast on fellow thaumborn. The love potions advertised in the backs of the gossip magazines were understood by everyone to be completely fake. But the sigils used in the advertisements were real.
“Emergency!” she blurted. She didn’t know what arde was doing on the floor, but she knew the building was coming down. “Evacuate!”
“I am occupied with an important matter.” Kentisporth’s voice was perfectly composed.
“Thaum, a thaumaturgical emergency is threatening the structure of the building.” Celilia was impressed with her ability to speak in coherent sentences while her mind was jumping from one thought to another so quickly. “Evacuation is necessary. I—I can help. I’m at your disposal.”
“Am I a student?” Kentisporth coughed delicately. “Don’t bother answering that. I assure you I can take care of myself. Now please excuse me.”
A thought flashed through Celilia’s mind like a fox with a burning rag tied to its tail: the five figurines on the floors. They were small, rough carvings, but all too familiar: dragon, bear, pelican, heron, and blackfish. The emblems of the Five Families. Since the Deposition, the new government had plastered their emblems everywhere, as well as their images on statues and paintings and stained-glass windows.
“Someone is casting arde on the five families.” The words came out before she had a chance to think them through. “Wait—you’re not—”
Kentisporth’s small mouth twisted. The magic in her hands—under her control, not binding her, Celilia realized belatedly—separated from her wand and tangled above her head. Kentisporth’s wand came down.
Celilia barely had time to duck before a blaze of light crackled through the air. Her knee smacked against the floor and her foot went numb as she tumbled to the side, trying to fumble her own wand out of her skirt. She was awful at dueling. Most dueling thaumaturgy was powerful enough that she could only cast once or twice before she was exhausted.
Kentisporth laughed, a wild sound that belied her reserved exterior. It was her this whole time, Celilia realized, feeling stupid. She’s cast arde on…who? Using the Ursiden to power it. That’s what’s caused all this disruption.
Poor Dannis.
Another crackling bolt caught Celilia’s left shoulder as she squirmed away from it. The pain was as clear as ice. It was the white sound of ice cracking: the cold panic right before death. This was ferve; it didn’t maim. Her junior-year Casting teacher loved that spell, thought the way it activated the nervous system was elegant and clean. “No blood!” he’d crowed, and made them practice over and over.
Celilia had always thought that if she were ever angry enough to use ferve on someone she would want there to be blood. Hate like that should leave a mark.
Her wand was in her hand. Right hand, so she could still feel it. The pain that far from the impact site was merely the pain of the worst menstrual cramps she’d ever had, of a broken bone or the news that her brother was dead.
All Kentisporth’s magic was pure white. Celilia saw the light gathering on her wand, a spot of brightness that lit up the whole room like all other light was darkness. She had half a second left, and there was only one spell she could think of in time.
No air in her lungs to speak, she rushed her wand through the pattern, the spell she’d used every day for the last six months: salli, to preserve aging canvas and leather and paper against handling and damp.
Stupid. Not the right spell and even if it were, it wasn’t powerf—
#
Celilia blinked. She’d heard a sound. She couldn’t move anything but her eyelids. Was she dead? No, there was noise. There was vibration and dust falling into her open eyes, depths.
“Fini!” Prosopite’s voice had never been so welcome. Her salli fell off her like a shell of water icing cracked off the top of a pastry.
As soon as her ribs could move she coughed, and wiped her eyes, and then she couldn’t stop coughing. She felt like she’d been kicked by a horse, a drastic improvement she was deeply grateful for. “Prosopite? What—why aren’t I dead?”
“I apologize.” Prosopite’s voice ticked and clacked. “I should have realized sooner that you weren’t coming to our meeting point.”
It took several more coughs before she could spin her mind back to before she entered this room. Right: a mad statue, evacuating students, splitting up with Prosopite. Then Kentisporth. “It was lady Kentisporth,” she spit out. “Not Holenden, although—maybe he’s helping her? But, Kentisporth, she’s up to something. Something awful, there’s a sigil on the floor over there that looks like arde although I’m such an awful thaumaturgist I couldn’t tell you exactly what it does, and she was casting it—” Representatives from each of the five families would be in the Parliament committee building right now, she realized. “She was casting it next door, at Parliament. She was influencing their minds.”
“That explains the sigil structure,” Prosopite said thoughtfully. They both looked over toward the window. The figurines were gone but the white sigil remained. “Now that you point it out, it does have a strong similarity with arde. It clearly draws on dominion and control properties. If the crafter tapped into the Library’s thaumaturgical architecture and then overextended herself when using a new design, that could explain the leakage we’ve been experiencing.”
Celilia trusted Prosopite’s knowledge of thaumaturgical theory. As for why…Parliament was in the middle of a special session revising the country’s tax laws, and Kentisporth’s husband owned a shipping empire. Maybe this was all for love. “The statue is still rampaging through the building, isn’t it?”
Prosopite cocked its head, listening. “I hear its footsteps, yes.”
She lifted her hands pathetically. “Will you transice us out of here? Please?”
It took both her hands. “Of course.”
#
Prosopite blinked them out of the Ursiden just as a crack appeared in the ceiling and poured down dust, so they appeared at the police station looking very bedraggled. The police officers believed Celilia when she told them a statue had come to life and was tearing its way through the university library looking for a long-dead soldier. It certainly helped that she was at the end of a line of thirty university students, all male and from good families, who had also appeared, shouting and crying.
The police shuffled both her and Prosopite into a sitting room equipped with a self-heating kettle and plenty of tea and pastries to wait for a detective’s questions. Rather, they put her in a sitting room and barely noticed when Prosopite followed her.
If Kentisporth was responsible for everything, all the strange happenings, she was responsible for Dannis’ death, too. Celilia felt like she was having a hard time wrapping her head around it. Everything had turned so quickly. It was barely early afternoon.
“Do you think she paid the university not to investigate her?” Celilia’s questions were all snarled up and she couldn’t seem to untangle them. “Or do you think she winked at Holenden and asked him to stonewall them?”
Prosopite made a low rumbling noise. “I do not know.”
“The animals in the smoke,” she realized suddenly. “In the Swallowtail Room—blackfish and heron.” Had she seen a bear, a pelican? “The Five Families again.”
“We know she was targeting the special session,” Prosopite said. “If Kentisporth was aiming for a certain section of the law—”
“And Dannis was reading Summation at just the wrong time.” Celilia said. “What he said—it wasn’t ‘cause too sea,’ it was ‘Clause Two C!’ That Clause Two.”
“Kentisporth’s husband hopes for an exemption,” Prosopite said. “It would make their house even richer.”
“Isn’t Parliament voting on it today? Maybe you didn’t make an error with your seeking spell. Maybe Kentisporth’s casting went wrong again.” Maybe none of it was her fault, or Prosopite’s fault, at all. Parliament had probably already voted—it was afternoon.
Prosopite tcked. She still felt guilty, anyway, too.
“We should tell the police what Kentisporth was doing,” she said finally. “Votes in Parliament are… important.” Although—were they? Taxes on imports and exports mattered to oligarchs; people like her would pay high prices regardless.
“If you think so, thaum.” Prosopite’s eyes spun as opaquely as ever.
“Do you think we should keep it a secret?” That kind of favor would never be reliable. Lady Kentisporth had already tried to murder her once.
“You are the only one who saw Kentisporth,” Prosopite said. “She was gone by the time I arrived. That makes it a question for your future.”
“It’s your future, too.” Celilia frowned. “It’s your country, too.”
“No, it isn’t.” Prosopite’s calm was impenetrable.
Well, just so; she didn’t get a vote, not in Parliament or anywhere else, but Prosopite—Prosopite was one of the goods Parliament had just voted to exempt, or not, from taxation.
Taxes might not matter to Dannis d Gales, not anymore, but Kentisporth’s scheming had killed him. That shouldn’t be secret. “Dannis’ family deserve to know, at least.” She glanced sideways at Prosopite. “We could send them a letter from Gauli.”
Prosopite shifted, its joints clicking. “We?”
“Of course.” Celilia understood its hesitation, but—“Holenden must be in tremendously hot water with the university now that the library is a pile of rubble. He won’t have time to track you down. And… it would be good to have a friend.” Although, “I don’t know about your—um. Your binding. But Holenden won’t want to admit he lost you.”
Prosopite paused. “In Carihrad… in Carihrad, hearthfolk may be unbound.”
Celilia felt a weight lifting from her spine. “I’ve heard Carihrad is nice this time of year. Yes. Let’s.”
Prosopite nodded, deliberate as always, and then extended its hand. She took it and held tightly, frightened but determined, glad for something solid to grasp on to.
END
© Copyright 2025 Joanne Rixon
About the Author
Joanne Rixon’s short stories have appeared in Analog and Strange Horizons, among other venues. They are a member of STEW and the Dreamcrashers, and organize the North Seattle Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup, an always-free, always-open-to-the-public writers group. You can find their book blog on their website, joannerixon.com.