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The apparition in yellow robes reached for Evelyn’s shoulder; a peek behind the curtain.

A shiver of disgust and nausea gripped my throat. I was not meant to see this. I had broken an unwritten and unspoken rule. I had trespassed on taboo.

A stagehand’s mistake, a director’s stutter, an actor caught falling after a slip on the boards. That unblemished pale hand was not intended for my eyes, the ripple of yellow robes in air without wind was not for my disquiet, the mask in place of a face was not for me to recognise. I happened upon this scene by turning at the wrong moment, staring into the hidden space of lost seconds as all eyes were elsewhere.

Or – as I theorised later – was I on the stage as well?

Was I the rebellious pantomime character, who upon the audience’s set refrain of “He’s behind you!”, had refused to play the role of comedic disbelief?

The grey press of librarian bodies jostled against each other, drawing their circle tighter; Evelyn was a stone dropped into an ocean, and that ocean was about to close back over her head. That was for us to witness, but the yellow figure was for Evelyn alone. It would touch her shoulder, she would look up, and I knew with the undeniable logic of dramatic structure, that she would nod in agreement and be engulfed by the grey librarians, and when the rest of us noticed and pulled them apart and shoved them back, Evelyn would be gone, and we would never see her again.

“Evee!”

I screamed her name too late. Perhaps that was part of the performance too, improvised to contain and funnel my intrusion. The pale hand fell upon her shoulder, the drooping yellow cuff brushed the sleeve of her coat. Raine and Zheng both began to turn at the sound of my panic. Lozzie went up on tiptoes. Twil span on one heel, claws out. But all of them were out of sync with the narrative, denied correct places on the stage.

Evelyn did not flinch at the unexpected touch. She pushed stray golden hairs out of her face and raised her eyes from the page. The librarian creatures surged together in one final ripple of gangly grey bodies, about to obscure both Evelyn and the yellow robes from my sight. I knew as one knows that sunlight will feel warm that when the librarians parted again, the yellow figure and Evelyn would both be gone.

In panic I summoned a jumble of brainmath, a garbled attempt at pure pressure, pure force to push the librarians away, to part the curtain so that Evelyn could not slip backstage. With no time to aim, no time for finesse, that force would knock her flat too, break her bones, snap her walking stick. But it would take only a second for her to look up into the empty eyes of the mask beside her.

Panic was enough. I decided the price was worth paying. Evelyn with broken bones and shattered ribs and a concussion was better than Evelyn gone. I spun the equation together in a single heartbeat, molten-hot icepicks through the back of my skull, bile rushing up my throat.

And then Praem was among the librarians like an owl dropped into a box of kittens.

She smashed her shoulder into a knot of the squid-faced creatures, sending them down in a tangle of flopping limbs, shoved another so hard it bounced off the bookcase with a tumble of dislodged volumes, punched a third across the face at the exact angle to break spines and splatter the floorboards with gritty, grayish blood as it flailed backward and dragged down a clutch of its fellows. She span and her black-and-white maid uniform followed, flaring out with a sense of worryingly theatrical display. She slapped the book out of Evelyn’s hands, planted one sturdy boot into a librarian stomach, swung another of the creatures with both hands and such force it toppled others like bowling pins. She cleared a space around her mistress with merciless mechanical precision.

No noise, no screams, no grunts of pain; the librarians made no sound but rustle of their robes and the breaking of their bones.

I had to let go of the equation, of course. A waste of blood and stomach acid, but I would never begrudge Praem getting there first. I spluttered and spat and sagged, caught by a bewildered Raine, holding onto my guts with a force of will as blood streamed from my nose.

Evelyn was white with shock as the wave broke. When she regained enough of herself to scream “Praem! Stop! Down!” the squid-faced librarians had already scattered, dragging their wounded and clutching their bruises, already reforming their group at the far end of the rectangular clearing.

By that time we were all on top of her too.

“Evee, Evelyn, breathe. Breathe. Heather, what-”

“What the fucking shit were they doing to you!? What was-”

“Praemy-Praem, it’s okay, you won, they’re gone, gone away, flown awaaaay-”

I sagged against the arm Raine had under my shoulders, blinking between a shaking, white-faced Evelyn and Raine trying to tend to both of us at once – she had a handkerchief out, wiping at my bloodied nose – and then I shook my head, staring past the confusion and the blood on my own face at the source of a paradox.

“Shaman,” Zheng rumbled at my shoulder. “What do you seek?”

“It’s gone,” I slurred, lost.

As Praem had broken the ring of librarians, the apparition in yellow had vanished back into the crowd. It had not reappeared among the fleeing stragglers. None of the battered and skittish group of squid-faces wore yellow robes, or carried a white mask. It had slipped backstage.

“I said- I specifically instructed- no- no fighting-” Evelyn was trying for incandescent rage, but too shaken to get there. Her voice came out a jumbled mess, her eyes going everywhere, one hand clutching hard to the front of Twil’s coat. “No hurting them, no fighting! Scattering them only! Praem!”

“Safe,” Praem intoned.

She turned back to Evelyn, spine ramrod straight, heels together, hands clasped before her in perfect demure poise, marred only by the grey blood on her knuckles.

“You made me to keep you safe,” she sing-songed. “Do not instruct me otherwise.”

“Oh, she’s mad at you,” Raine laughed. “Evee, you’re alright, yeah? They didn’t do anything to you?”

“Thank you, Praem,” Twil said, shaking with adrenaline jitters. “Thank you. What the fuck were they doing?”

“They don’t seem too bothered by us now,” Raine said, and waved her truncheon at the creatures. “Yo?”

“They cannot choose,” Zheng rumbled. “They are moved as pieces.”

“You sure about that?” Raine asked.

“I can see it plain.”

“Huh?” Twil squinted at her. “Who’s pulling the strings then?”

“If I knew that, I would challenge it,” Zheng purred.

“A-” Evelyn opened her mouth and faltered. “A warning shout would have been … quite … how did they get so close?” Her temper fell apart as panic dug in with long claws, as she shook all over, even with Twil’s arm around her shoulders. “I was- I- how long were you- there was hardly a need for that, was- oh, fuck, fuck, we don’t have any idea what that violence is going to precipitate. Why-” And then she saw me, with my nosebleed and my squinting pain. “Heather? What the hell were you doing?”

“Getting them off you,” I slurred.

“There was hardly a need for brainmath, you-”

“There was a figure in yellow robes. Reaching for your shoulder. Mask for a face.”

My heart skipped a beat as I reduced the unseen sight, the hidden scene, the taboo revealed, down into blunt words. My head pounded like a vice with the aftershock of aborted brainmath, but also with inability to express the ethereal nature of what I’d seen.

Evelyn squint-frowned at me, then at the librarians, then back to me. “Heather, what?”

“Didn’t you feel it? It touched you.”

“I felt nothing,” Evelyn said, sceptical and hard, and angry – with me. I boggled at her through the throbbing headache, then realised everyone else was looking at me with equal confusion.

“Praem, wasn’t that why you reacted?” I croaked. The doll-demon stared at me with blank white eyes.

“No yellow,” she intoned.

“I didn’t see that either, Heather, sorry,” Raine said, folding the handkerchief in half and wiping my nose again as I sniffed back blood. “Lean your head forward,” she instructed me. “Let it drain.”

“Yeah, I just saw the weird bastards,” Twil agreed. She shot a frown and an involuntary growl at the re-formed group of librarians, now standing a good thirty feet away at safe distance, like a collective whipped dog, shoulders hunched and tentacle-faces turned toward us in mute regard. Twil bared her teeth, and some of them shuffled further back.

“Spooky yellow?” Lozzie puffed her cheeks out, made her eyes wide as she could, and shook her head. “Nope.”

“I saw nothing of the kind, shaman,” Zheng purred.

“But it was- it was right there. It was only a second, but-” I turned back to Evelyn. “Evee, there was a figure in yellow reaching for your shoulder, like it hid itself among the librarians. Look at me, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, I was going to use hyperdimensional math to knock them all back, I had to, it was going to- I don’t know, take you away, or-”

“Heather,” Evelyn said, through fraying self-control. “I am quite shaken by what just happened, alright? I accept, I made a mistake, I was not paying attention. I am an idiot, a fool, and we need to leave. I admit it. Do not mock me in addition.”

“Er, Evee?” Raine said.

“What?” went Twil.

“Uh oh.” Lozzie clamped herself to my side.

I blinked at Evelyn, increasingly lost. “I don’t-”

“You are insinuating we just had an encounter with The King in Yellow,” Evelyn spat, still white in the face. “Which is fiction.”

“I have no idea what that means,” I said. “I only know what I saw. Why are you-”

“The King! The King in Yellow! The book? Ugh.” Evelyn rolled her eyes and shook off Twil’s arm, trying to re-settle her walking stick in one hand and not doing a very good job of it. Praem had to take her other arm. “Isn’t literature meant to be your area of expertise? The name of this library – Carcosa – was used in some puerile pulp-era horror fiction. The author probably took the name from some tome he shouldn’t have been reading, but the rest of what he wrote was pure invention, nonsense, fiction. You just described the King in Yellow, an alien god, but fictional, no more real than the ravings of any starving monk or oversexed nun. There is no such thing as the King in Yellow, no such figure is mentioned in any real source, not in Unbekannte Orte or by Mechthild or anybody who has written about this place. It’s like believing in Prester John because Ethiopia is a real country. I’ve told you, Heather, keep your nose out of that 1920s crap. It clouds your judgement of reality.”

“ … Evelyn, I have never read that book. I didn’t know it exists until you just told me all that.”

“You must have! You must have done so, and forgotten you did.”

“No.” I sighed, in too much throbbing pain to indulge her. “Evee, I saw a figure in yellow robes and a pale mask, reaching for your shoulder, and I am not lying or hallucinating or having the vapours. You can’t overturn my life by convincing me to believe the evidence of my own eyes, and then tell me I’m wrong when you’re threatened. I know what I saw. It almost took you away.”

Evelyn stared at me, trying to work her jaw. “That’s … that-” She glanced over at the librarians. If they had any secrets to reveal, she saw none.

“I believe Heather,” Raine said with a thankful finality. “She sees more than we do on the regular, why should here be any different?”

“Because reality works different here,” Evelyn muttered, but her heart wasn’t in it, voice quivering. “Plus Lozzie, Praem, Zheng, all would have seen it in that case.”

“Mmhmm!” Lozzie chirped agreement.

“Evee, hey, it’s alright,” Twil was trying to say. “I shouldn’t have left you alone, I’m really sorry. Really sorry.”

“Alright,” Evelyn said. “Alright, let’s say you saw what you did, Heather. That doesn’t mean it’s The King in Yellow.”

“Don’t care what the freak was,” Twil said. “It stays the fuck away from you, that’s what matters.”

“Evee, why were you standing up and reading a book again?” I asked.

“Because we need one to re-orient the gate exit,” she huffed. “Praem checked it, it’s fine, it’s nothing interesting! Any of you can pick it up.” As she spoke, Raine did exactly that, waiting for the affirmative nod from Praem before lifting the nondescript old leather-bound tome in one hand. “It’s just some medieval German nonsense about place names and numerology. The usual, by and for bored monks. This doesn’t change our plans, it doesn’t change a thing, and I am fine.” She cleared her throat awkwardly and took a long, shuddering breath.

“You’re right, Evee, it doesn’t change our plans,” Raine said. “Ladies, we are leaving. Right now.”

“Damn fuckin’ straight,” said Twil.

“Lozzie, ready to do your thing?” Raine asked.

“Yes ma’am Raine miss sir!” Lozzie beamed back and did a tiny salute.

“I haven’t finished the gate calculation yet!” Evelyn snapped. “There’s no guarantee I’ll be able to do that from back home. We’d have to start all over again.”

“Then we can start back at the bottom floor,” Raine said, and looked to me for approval.

For a moment, I didn’t understand why. Of course we should be getting out of here. We had no idea what the vision in yellow meant, what it wanted, if it would return again. We still didn’t know how the squid-faced librarians would react to our violence. They seemed docile now, but this place did not obey our logic.

Then I realised, we were here for me, for Maisie; but Evelyn mattered too.

“Yes,” I croaked. “Of course. Let’s go, let’s all link hands.” I grabbed Lozzie’s hand as she reached out toward Praem, as Praem reached for Twil, as I looked in Evelyn’s eyes.

“Fine, yes, alright,” Evelyn spat. “Everyone out!”

“We can come back,” I said all in a rush. “Tomorrow, we-”

Zheng took one step backward, away from the group. She turned with all the fluid grace of a hunting tiger, head high, senses open; the gesture sent all us monkeys into a gut-instinct freeze, except for Twil who bristled and growled.

“Listen,” the demon purred. “We are approached.”

Metal spikes rolling across wood, a gentle tock-tock-tock of steady motion, now close enough to reach mortal ears, creeping through the maze of bookcases to our right.

“Ah.” Raine pulled a dark grin. “Our stalker’s here.”

“Our what?” spluttered Evelyn.

“Yeah, yo, what?!” Twil flexed wolf claws, turning to confront this new threat.

“We have been hunted, wizard, beyond the range of your attention,” Zheng rumbled. “Now the scavenger descends, in our moment of disarray.”

“All the more reason to get skedaddlin’,” Raine said. She took Evelyn’s weakly protesting hand in one of hers, and mine in her other, then tipped her head to Zheng. “Don’t be shy, left hand, join up and let’s go.”

But to my endless exasperation, Zheng stepped away and turned from us. She rolled her shoulders, staring at the opposite exit from our temporary camp.

“Zheng,” I said, in a tone that could have frozen iron.

“Ahhhh balls,” went Twil.

“I stay and fight. Until tomorrow, shaman,” Zheng rumbled, rotating her arms and letting her face split into a huge, shark-toothed grin. “It has been too long. You can pick me up when you are ready.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, pulling myself free from my own position in the circle. “Zheng, I am not leaving you behind, that is absurd. There’s no need for a heroic last stand, however much you want one, and I have too much of a headache to argue with you. Take my hand, now.”

“No last stand, shaman,” Zheng purred, easy and relaxed. “Just for fun. See you tomorrow.”

“Can’t you order her?” Twil asked, looking aghast.

“No, she has a point,” Evelyn spoke quickly. The tock-tock-tock of wood on metal drew very close now, separated from us by only a bookcase or two. “We leave here, good idea, yes, but whatever this thing is may have the power to follow us. Or it may wait in ambush here tomorrow, and we’ll be unable to get a foothold.” She wriggled her hand free from Raine. “Everyone get back. Praem, up front. Twil, keep an eye on the squid bastards, I don’t want them getting in the way. Heather, I need you next to me.”

“That is not my intention,” Zheng turned and growled at Evelyn. “Go home, wizard.”

“Too late, you’ve precipitated something you can’t control,” Evelyn dismissed her. She drew her scrimshawed thighbone from inside her coat. “Zheng has forced our hand. We deal with this here and get rid of it, so it won’t bother us on return. Now, everyone, if you please!”

Evelyn’s snap of command did the trick. In a few short heartbeats we drew together again. Raine tucked me behind her shield, next to Evelyn behind Praem and Twil, a maid uniform and a miniature hulk of werewolf fur with too many teeth. Lozzie huddled in close to my side, arm around my waist. Zheng stayed where she was, and turned away in disgust.

“Heather,” Evelyn hissed, eyes fixed on the gap between the bookcases as the wood-on-metal sound grew louder. “Are you ready? Can do you it again?”

“Yes,” I whispered back. “I’m ready. I’ll just … I’ll flatten it with my mind, I suppose. Whatever it is. Would that be okay?”

“Good plan,” Raine said, low and confident.

“Yes, but wait for my signal,” Evelyn whispered. “This might be nothing, like the goats. Might.”

Metal on wood approached with the ticking inevitability of a metronome; mechanical, perfectly regular, uninterrupted. We held our collective breath as a shadow fell across the gap between the bookcases. The caster of that shadow turned, and tock-tock-tocked out into the clearing. Thankfully it stopped a few feet later, because none of us had any idea how to react. Zheng stared in stoic distaste. Evelyn started to speak, then stopped. Twil’s growl fell away.

Lozzie, under her breath, went “Ooooh!”

Our stalker was a sphere.

A sphere about six feet in diameter, composed from thousands of hand-width rectangular prisms of matte grey material, like carbon fibre or very finely wrought concrete fenceposts. Each individual prism stood perfectly upright and flush against each neighbour, except where they marched back with a sort of stepped pyramid effect, forming a rough spherical curve both above and below. It wasn’t rolling, but instead each row of blocks moved downward and back to achieve locomotion, like tank tracks. The spiked wheel sound was produced when those edges touched the floor, but the sphere was clearly too large and too heavy for such a gentle noise. It should have been breaking floorboards as it passed, shattering wood and churning up splinters. No visible mechanisms, nothing to move the prisms; whatever held it up was beyond our understanding.

It was a machine, of that I had no doubt, but a machine wrought by no earthly science.

“S’like lego,” Twil said.

“Say nothing. Do nothing. Touch nothing,” Evelyn shushed her through clenched teeth. “Wait for it to … to leave. Heather, if it-”

“I know,” I hissed back.

Nothing happened. Just as I was about to suggest we back away to give it room – perhaps it wanted to pass us by – an awful tearing, ripping sound filled the air, a wet red noise, from inside the sphere, as if it had just suffered a terrible internal injury. Then it opened.

The rectangular prisms slid back to form a gap down the middle of the sphere’s front, with the eye-watering mechanical precision of a very expensive toy, folding away until they seemed to vanish in on themselves. Inside was a surprisingly well-lit interior of the same matte grey material, but of softly flowing curves instead of blocky exterior armour.

And on those softly flowing curves, the sphere cradled an occupant.

She looked quite normal, which was extremely worrying.

She – the sphere-woman, the pilot, whatever she was – was long and slender and neat, like a dancer, lounging in the seat of her strange machine as if under the sun of a tropical beach. She had very dark skin, equally dark hair woven into thick masses of braid, and the kind of face given to bubbly laugher and knowing looks, easy smiles and mocking snorts. Her eyes were gentle, creased with laughter lines, but her age was impossible to place. She could have been twenty five or fifty.

She was also completely naked, and covered head to toe in a steaming layer of crimson blood.

“Say nothing,” Evelyn hissed, wide-eyed and going green.

The woman in the sphere glanced down at herself, then rolled her eyes and sighed. Before any of us could say ‘Oh, excuse me miss, but you appear to be covered in gore’, the sphere closed again, as quickly as it had opened.

“What the fuck,” Twil said out loud.

“Shut. Up,” Evelyn snapped at her, on the very edge of her nerves. “Everybody shut up. That is a person in there, and that can only mean one thing.”

“Wizard,” Zheng growled, disgust in her teeth. It took me a heartbeat to realise that insult was not aimed at Evelyn.

“And let me do the talking,” Evelyn said. “Heather, if she so much as looks at any of us wrong-”

But the sphere opened again before Evelyn could finish telling me to kill the mage.

The blood was gone. In its place, the black woman wore a thick-spun red dress which looked distinctly medieval, very little skin on display, extra shawls around her shoulders, a rope-like belt around her waist woven with golden thread, and with golden inlaid patterns across the chest and arms and ankle-length skirt, mostly of ravens in flight. A distinctive crest adorned the right side of her chest, a shield with a speared boar picked out in yet more gold thread. A necklace lay at her throat, with a heavy golden pendant showing three interlocked triangles.

“Ogh?” she asked.

We all looked at Evelyn. All except Zheng, who looked like she wanted to surge forward and rip the woman out of the sphere with her bare hands.

The sphere-woman smiled at us in a very lopsided, old-lady kind of way. “Kmal eru fu lidel skotfrel ad gera hiier?”

“What’d she say?” Twil hissed.

“I … I don’t know,” Evelyn wet her shaking lips. “I have no idea. I don’t know what she’s speaking.”

“Sounds kinda Scandiwegian to me,” Raine murmured.

“Shut up. You don’t know anything,” Evelyn hissed at Raine, eyes wide on the strange lady. She raised her chin and raised her voice, speaking very carefully. As she spoke, I saw Lozzie reach out and take the back of Evelyn’s coat in one hand. “We do not understand your language, but perhaps you can understand mine, or at least my tone of voice. We mean you no harm. If you wish to pass by, you may do so.” Evelyn paused, forgetting what to do, then took one hand off her bone wand to gesture to the side in a please-go-around-us wave.

The sphere-woman nodded, raised her eyebrows, and made a rotating ‘carry on’ gesture with one hand.

“You want more words,” Evelyn said, and swallowed hard. I reached out and touched her back too, willing her what confidence I could spare. “Very well, very well. Uh, we mean you no harm, we do not obstruct your path. We were just leaving, we will be on our way. We have no interest and no stake in whatever your business is here and wish you-”

The sphere lady clicked her fingers and pointed at Evelyn with the most knowing smile I’d ever seen on a human face.

Then she rammed her hand inside her own head.

No blood, no splattering of grey matter, no cracking of skull. Her hand went straight through the side of her own cranium and into where I assumed she kept her brain, as if passing into water. She rummaged around for a moment. One of her eyelids fluttered, the side of her face drooped, and she shuddered three times, then pulled her hand back out with a little flourish. It was clean of blood, as if she’d merely removed it from her pocket.

She took a deep breath, wet her lips, and tried again.

“There we go,” the sphere-lady said, in perfect if heavily-accented English.

Raine was right, very Scandinavian. “Told you so,” she whispered.

“There we go, yes, much better,” the sphere-lady repeated. “Now we can have a proper talk, isn’t that so much better, much … ” Her face fell. She smacked her lips as if she’d tasted something foul, wincing and grimacing. “Oh, oh no, oh that is not better at all.”

“Fuck,” Evelyn gasped, hands shifting on her bone wand. “Get-”

“What is this barbarism I’m speaking?” the sphere-lady said to herself, in the exact tone of outrage one would use if somebody had just urinated on one’s favourite party shoes. “Oh, oh this is just intolerable, what is this? This language feels like a Saxon peasant dressed up as a Frankish prostitute. Is this what you people speak? This is a real thing? This isn’t some expeditionary cant you only use beyond the wall of your redoubt or something? Ugh, ugh.” She stuck her tongue out and flapped her hands.

“It’s called English,” I said, gently offended on Shakespeare’s behalf.

“Ruuuude,” Lozzie whispered.

“Yes, yes, well.” The sphere-lady cleared her throat. “I’m sure your … ah, noble tongue has … produced many great poets and worthy sagas. Yes. Certainly. No offence meant. Bleh,” she made another face. “Oh I am sorry, poppets. The last language I forced myself into was far prettier, more sparkling. It had all these wonderfully arcane connective propositions, like decorative plumage, it was marvellous.” She spread her hands, then sighed. “There’s a touch of the old northern speech in here, isn’t there? But none of you understood a word of the pure form, so I suppose we’re left with this ‘English’. Mm.” She frowned at us with great pity. “It isn’t really even a ‘language’, is it? More a linguistic chimera. Here, that word was Greek! See what I mean?”

“Some say,” I raised my voice, seeing an opportunity for quick rapport with this strange woman, no matter the gentle bruising to my literary pride, “that English is merely a pirate grammar that has plundered vocabulary from elsewhere.”

“Haha!” The lady in the sphere lit up with a great bubbly laugh. “Well, at least you have a sense of humour about it. Bravo.”

“We mean you no harm and seek no conflict,” Evelyn said without missing a beat, stiff and formal.

“Wizard,” Zheng rumbled through a mouth of knives, but luckily both Evelyn and the sphere-lady ignored her.

“We are strangers here,” Evelyn continued, measuring each word with great care even as she clutched her bone-wand in both hands, walking stick propped in the crook of her elbow, relying on Praem for support. “We are also about to leave. I am a mage of no little power, and my companions are under my protection. You may pass us by, on your business, and we wish you well.”

The sphere-lady blinked at Evelyn several times, suppressing an amused smile at the corners of her mouth. Then she looked around, over our heads at the gaggle of librarians, past our elbows, made eye contact with Lozzie, frowned at Zheng.

“Where’s the pretender, then?” she asked. “It’s not one of you people, is it? No, of course not, that was a joke.”

“The … pretender,” Evelyn deadpanned.

“Seven-Shades-Of-Sunlight? The Sepia Prince? Lady Tawn? The Jaundiced Count? No?” She boggled at us, as if we were the ones speaking in cryptic reference.

“You mean the figure in yellow robes,” I answered. “Don’t you?”

“Yes!” She lit up, all beaming smile and dancing eyes as she leaned forward to consider me. “Was it you he appeared to? Or … she? Yes, I think a princess or a noble lady in your case, rather than a prince. Much more likely, from your … aura, shall we say? So? Yes?” She waved both hands in a go-on motion, bursting with excitement.

“ … so?”

“So what happened?” She laughed. “I am all ears, please, you must tell me the particulars. I am dying to be part of the audience. You did see a pretender, yes? Did you not?”

“The King in Yellow,” Evelyn said, dripping with scorn.

“The King?” The sphere-lady laughed long and loud and slightly mocking, so much she had to wipe little tears from her cheeks as we all glanced at each other. “Don’t be absurd. If you’d met the King, you would know so. Besides, he’s certainly not in the library, you’d have to go to the palace. You met a pretender to the throne, I’m certain. There’s enough of them to go around.”

“We did not,” Evelyn almost snapped. “And if we did, it left, we chased it off. This is absurd, there is no such thing as the King in Yellow, it was a fictional invention.”

“An interesting theory,” the sphere-lady nodded. “You subscribe to the auto-genesis school of thought, then? Or perhaps the illusionist sect?”

Evelyn and I shared a glance.

“This is getting fuckin’ crazy,” Twil growled low, for our ears alone. “Let’s go, she’s tryin’ to mess with us.”

“Yeah,” Raine agreed softly. “This is a mind-screw.”

“And she wouldn’t have left,” the lady carried on, crossing one leg over the other, lounging on her seat inside the armoured grey sphere. “Not if she was beginning a performance, not so early in the show. Which means you delightful little … Englishers? Is that right? You must be more than meets the eye. Even the dullest pretender wouldn’t grace just anybody as an audience. And you’re the one who saw?” she said to me. “What’s your name, little one?”

“Don’t answer that,” Evelyn hissed, without taking her eyes off the lady, caution peeled away for naked hostility.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” the lady sighed. “I’m no demon of the deep, I can no more reweave you with your name than you could me with mine. Here,” she placed one hand against her chest and raised her chin. “Saldis Solveig Nyland, that was my name on birth, daughter of Jarl Tollak Nyland. Now, you?”

“Still don’t answer,” Evelyn said. “Be on your way, magician. We do not wish conflict.”

Saldis rolled her eyes.

“Forgive our suspicions,” Raine said with a smile. Evelyn turned to hush her, but too late. “But you were following us.”

“Nonsense!” Saldis waved a hand. “I wasn’t even consti- … hmm, I’m mangling the subtleties of your mongrel tongue, aren’t I? Constituted? Hydrated? … I was sleeping, let’s leave it at that, shall we? You can hardly blame a sleepwalker for following her nose.” She patted the arm of her chair. “I only get up when I get where I’m going. And where I’m going is the audience of a pretender. Which means whatever performance has begun here, it is still ongoing. But I do wonder, poppets, what is so special about you?”

Saldis frowned gently above her broad smile, and the strangest sensation came over me, as if I was standing on a suburban street before the scrutiny of a sweet old lady, not deep in a labyrinth of books and monsters on the far side of reality. Her eyes flickered over each of us, with a purse of her lips for Zheng and a wink for Praem.

“I suppose you’re browsing the books for the same thing all sorcerers visit here for,” Saldis sighed with disappointment. “Wandering around without protection, all thinking and feeling and seeing without restriction. Barely a human among you, all constructs and amalgams, but that doesn’t explain the interest.” She tutted as if over a puzzle.

Evelyn leaned in close to me, until she caught Lozzie in the corner of her eye too.

“We need to leave,” she whispered through the corner of her mouth, and only then I realised how badly she was shaking. “Now, before this mage changes her mind.”

“Right,” Raine muttered in agreement. “Lozzie, you ready?”

“Can dooooo,” Lozzie whispered back.

“But- Zheng-” I said.

“Exactly,” Evelyn hissed. “Get her over here, or we leave her behind. Quickly.”

Saldis, the sphere lady, the black Norse-woman from a thousand years ago, was still stroking her chin and considering us like a difficult magic-eye puzzle. I turned to Zheng and spoke as casually as I could manage, an effort marred only by the crack in my voice and the tremor in my chest.

“Zheng, could you please rejoin us over here? Come hold my hand.” I stuck a hand out, and found it quivering.

Zheng arched an eyebrow at me. A slow grin spread across her lips, cracking her face until she showed all of those beautifully sharp teeth. Then she turned back to Saldis.

“Zheng-” I started.

“No,” Praem intoned.

“Oh for pity’s sake,” Evelyn hissed.

“Left hand,” Raine called out, but we were all too late.

“Wizard,” Zheng purred. “How sturdy is your chariot?”

“Hmmmm?” Saldis tore her eyes away from the puzzle of why we mattered, and looked Zheng up and down with quick appraisal. “Sturdy enough to withstand the arm of any draugr. Why do you ask? Fancy your chances? I am in a gentle mood, little dead-walker, don’t put me out of sorts-”

Zheng let the old mage know exactly what she thought of her ‘gentle mood’.

The demon-host surged forward like a greased bear trap, a blur against the background of bookshelves, her coat streaming out behind with a leathery whip-crack. One hand formed a wedge, to punch through teeth and jaw and rip out tongue at root, before the mage could utter a spell. Zheng moved so fast I flinched; I think I screamed her name, screamed for her to stop. Evelyn scrambled with her scrimshawed bone-wand and the ambient temperature dropped by several degrees. Raine shoved Lozzie and I back and down, crouching behind her home-made shield.

With a whump and a thump and the breaking of several finger-bones, the sphere closed up, and Zheng’s fist bounced off.

She reeled backward, leaving a bloody smear behind where she’d punched the edge of one of the blocks that made up the sphere. I watched in mute horror as the surface absorbed the blood and fragments of skin, as they vanished into the grey.

“God damn you!” Evelyn shouted at Zheng. “Get over here now, or we will leave you behind, you blathering idiot zombie!”

“Shit, shit, shit,” Twil was saying. “We gotta go, we gotta go before she opens up again!”

“We do, yes,” Evelyn agreed. “Lozzie, link hands. Get us all together. Zheng, you have three seconds.”

Zheng growled at the closed sphere.

“Zheng, please!” I called, even as Lozzie’s little hand fumbled into mine and held on tight. Zheng reluctantly backed away from the grey stone sphere, flexing her broken hand to re-knit the shattered bones.

The sphere opened again like a flower peeling back under the light of the sun.

“Oh, no, don’t leave now,” Saldis said, apparently unconcerned that Zheng had just attempted to pull her face off, talking as if we were exiting a dinner party too early. “I want to make a friendly little deal with you people, just a small one.”

“You have nothing to offer us,” Evelyn said, loud and clear and shaking. Twil grabbed her elbow, the circle almost complete.

“You are meat in a shell, wizard,” Zheng growled.

“Zheng!” I hissed.

“You’re undoubtedly here for the same reason a thousand mages have been before,” Saldis continued, waving an airy and disinterested hand at this notion. “Knowledge, power, all that boring stuff. Now, if you will consent to getting me into the audience for the performance your oh-so-interested pretender is putting on, I will help direct you to the most illuminating, most well-informed, correct and complete grimoires you could imagine. Beyond your wildest dreams, anything you like.”

“We have our own way of locating books, thank you very much, no,” Evelyn said. Zheng took another slow, retreating step toward us. Evelyn put her head sideways against mine and whispered. “We need to go, right now, while she’s still talking.”

“Zheng’s almost-”

“Almost is not enough, Heather.”

“Oh, you mean name-finding?” Saldis grimaced delicately. “What an awful term for it. Your English really is not up to much, is it? Anyway, whatever locationary magic you have planned, it won’t work here, names themselves don’t work properly here. You have to use the catalogue system.” She gestured up and over our heads, at the gaggle of squid-faced librarians in their wounded huddle. “But it can be very tricky if you don’t phrase yourself right, and-”

“Thank you, and no thank you. We are leaving,” Evelyn raised her voice and lost her temper. “Zheng, now, or you are being left here.”

“Oh, I can’t let you do that,” Saldis tutted, and raised a hand.

That delicate dark hand exploded in slow motion – split open like a flayed fruit, skin peeling into springy curls, muscle separating from bone into vibrating staves of wet crimson meat, blood vessels springing apart to branch between them like arcane notation, bones a gleaming white sculpture. Her hand forced itself into a symbol, a sigil that hurt the eyes, that made Twil howl through her teeth and Raine hiss in pain and Zheng flinch like she’d been struck with a whip and-

“Stop that.”

I shouldered past Raine’s shield, and stepped forward.

Saldis, whatever she was, raised an eyebrow at me, at the certainty in my voice beneath the shake and the quiver and the fear of being so very small. Her writhing, mutilated hand paused mid-transformation.

“Little one?”

“My name is Heather Morell. The mage behind me, she is not the leader of our group, I am,” I said, and forced my chin high, my spine straight, my bowels to stop quaking, as I prepared an equation in my mind. “I am the adopted child of the Great Eye. I have swum the space between dimensions, and brought the abyss back with me.” I squinted hard as I dug my hands into the sump at the bottom of my soul, as blood began to leak from my nose. “We are looking for specific books with which to save my twin sister, not knowledge or power for power’s sake, and I will kill anything that gets in my way. You will lower your hand or I will reduce you and your … your ridiculous ball-thing to atomic paste.”

I closed my mouth, and held myself there, vibrating with searing headache pain and blood dripping from my nose, right on the edge of violent climax.

Saldis – to my incredible surprise – lit up with girlish glee. She snapped her wrist and her hand returned to normal, and then she clapped it together with the other one.

“A quest! Oh, you’re on a quest! Oh, I do so adore a proper heroic saga. And what could be more heroic? A missing twin? Beautiful! Well, that explains it then, doesn’t it?”

Raine and Praem both caught me as I let go of the equation, as I buckled at the knees and fell back. Even Zheng finally relented in her absurd, costly aggression, and placed herself directly between me and the ancient, horrible, inhuman thing which pretended to be a human being.

“Explains what?” I croaked.

“Heather, shut up,” Evelyn hissed.

“Why you’ve been graced with a performance, of course,” Saldis explained. “All the pretenders take after their patriarch, they all have such a sense for the dramatic. No wonder one showed herself to you personally. Probably Seven-Shades-Of-Sunlight. I have heard she has a taste for sentimental relationships between women, that sort of thing.”

“But it tried to take-” I glanced at Evelyn as I choked back a mouthful of blood, and remembered not to say her name.

“Nonsense, that was for your benefit, lady Morell,” Saldis said, tutting. “Why would a pretender care about some little sorceress? No no, you’re the one who saw it, the show was for you. If you’re the adopted daughter of … what was it again? Never mind. You’re practically foreign royalty, and on a quest! Seven-Shades wants to teach you something, impart some wisdom, inspire you. This is a wonderful opportunity!”

“I have had quite enough of being taught things by alien gods,” I croaked, too exhausted to humour this woman any longer. Raine dragged me back into our little group, and finally Zheng stepped back too, and put one hand on Raine’s shoulder.

“I would like to offer you a different deal,” Saldis said.

“No,” Evelyn snapped. “Lozzie-”

“Yah!” Lozzie chirped. “Twil grab Praem. Praem touch me!”

“I want to be written into your saga – you are recording it, yes? Somebody must be writing it down for posterity?” Saldis went on, heedless, very excited indeed now. “Make sure to include me, in detail. I’ll take you straight to whatever books you wish, name them, please, and in return I want to join the audience for the pretender’s show. Oh I do hope it is Seven-Shades, I’ve not yet had the pleasure of one of her performances.”

“Lozzie, are we ready?” Raine asked.

“Yah yah!”

“Everyone close your eyes,” I slurred as loud as I could.

“Oh, I wouldn’t leave if were you,” Saldis said, with none of the casual menace she had displayed earlier, only an irritating, knowing smirk. She leaned back in her seat, utterly at ease.

“Wait,” Evelyn stalled Lozzie with a sideways nod. “What does that mean, magician?”

“I mean the performance has already begun.” Saldis laughed softly. “The rest of you may exit the stage at will, I’m certain, but … ” She pointed a lazy finger at me, winked, and blew me a kiss. “But the intended audience, well, she is in for the duration, until the final curtain. Whatever stronghold of humanity you are about to retreat to, the show must go on.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The short strip of pale cloth twirled like a sycamore seed through the library air, dragged onward by the weight of the heavy iron nut.

Praem’s throw was strong, her aim precise. The hard nugget of earthly metal flew straight and true between the rows of towering bookcases, miniature cloth pennant fluttering behind. It hit the floorboards with a muffled thunk, the sound soaked up by the shroud of silence and the insulation of thousands of books, then rolled to a stop, at the edge of the wide patch of shadow, almost exactly where Evelyn had indicated.

We all stared, waiting for the reaction.

Well, Zheng didn’t. She was too busy pulling predatory faces at our gaggle of squid-faced librarian groupies. Neither did Praem, already palming another nut with a length of cloth tied around it, from the bag on her shoulder. Lozzie wasn’t paying attention either, turning her head sideways at the titles on the spines of the nearest books – titles which she certainly could not read, written in erratic looping circles like no human language, on book binding made from a substance too peach-soft to be bone.

“Hold off.” Evelyn stalled Praem with a flick of her fingers, eyes glued to the metal nut on the floor.

“Verdict?” Raine murmured.

“I’ll tell you what my verdict is,” Twil hissed, head hunched low, positioned halfway in front of Evelyn as if something unseen might rush her from the shadows ahead. She eyed the darkness, the bookcases, even the books themselves as if they might launch a surprise attack. “We’re not setting one foot in the spooky bloody darkness, that’s the verdict, not after the last patch. You’re not going in, Evee. I veto.”

“You don’t get to veto me,” Evelyn said.

“Yeah I fuckin’ do. You wanna argue when I can just pick you up? I’ll bloody well carry you over my shoulder instead. Praem and me’ll carry you like a bloody sack.”

“Like a sack,” Praem joined in.

Evelyn frowned. “Be that as it may.”

“That’s not even a full sentence!” said Twil. “Why the fuck are we testing? Let’s just walk round. Come on.”

“Because we might learn something,” I said, and held back a resigned sigh.

“Indeed,” Evelyn murmured, her voice abstracted and distant, still watching the iron nut ahead of us, on the edge of the shadows. “Heather understands. There is much to be learnt here.”

We were paused, less than fifty feet distant from the next set of staircases, a great branching twisted mass that punched downward through the ceiling above like cancerous capillary growth erupting through brittle tissues. The staircases spread out in an organic swirl, some of them far too thin to actually climb, spindly as bird-bone or dead twig; but others joined together like tributaries flowing into a river, sturdy and wide enough to carry us upward, to the next of the library catalogue floors.

The staircases formed an obvious landmark. We’d spotted the explosion of dark wooden growth as soon as we’d reached this floor, no searching required, impossible to miss even with the protective bulk of Raine and her riot-shield getting in my line of sight all the time.

One obstacle barred our route. The lights were out.

A lake of extinguished darkness extended left and right for perhaps a quarter mile through the jumbled maze of bookcases. The glowing light-rocks up ahead lay empty and dark, as if sucked dry, while the ones we stood parallel with still cast their thin, anaemic light without issue. Going around would cost us more time and energy, but privately I agreed with Twil. We all did, except Zheng, who would gladly fight ghosts, inanimate concepts, or her own reflection if given half a chance.

“Learn what?” Twil growled.

“Something useful,” Evelyn drawled. “Perhaps if we learn a few things, this will all go so much faster.”

We’d learnt three things so far, over an hour of picking our careful way up the first four floors of the Library of Carcosa.

Lesson one was that while each floor might indeed be of infinite length, at least they possessed finite depth. Our exploratory efforts – mostly in hopes of locating staircases upward other than the rickety risks of the nailed-on walkways which scaled the canyon-side – had revealed a back wall to the library, made of the same solid dark wood as the canyon floor.

Raine estimated that back wall lay about two hundred meters in, or as she put it, “Two football pitches end-to-end, I reckon. Hey, at least there’s no windows.”

“Do not joke about that,” Evelyn had hissed.

Lesson two: getting anywhere was still going to take an incredibly long time.

As soon as we’d mounted that first staircase up from the canyon floor, Evelyn had pulled a notebook from her overflowing coat pockets and began making a map. Or at least notes toward a map, complete with her meticulous tiny handwriting and awful drawing skills.

We’d crept through a silent, dead forest of towering, overflowing bookshelves, beneath a claustrophobic sky of dark wooden ceiling thirty feet up. A knot of squid—faced librarians followed behind, and even our footsteps seemed muffled, so if one glanced away, one felt very much alone. I’d tried to keep my attention on myself, on my feet, or on Lozzie’s hand in mine or Raine’s back directly in front of me, or at the very least on our group cohesion – I slipped into a mantra of counting off all seven of us again and again, repeating names and making sure everybody was still accounted for – but from the moment we entered the confines of the stacks, Evelyn’s gaze dredged the library for every scrap of information.

She muttered estimated distances and measurements under her breath, counted shelves and guessed at numbers of books, scribbled down conjecture, copied fragments of titles, sketched out known areas and here-be-dragons in the dark beyond.

“Why does it matter how many meters wide that is?” Twil had hissed to Evelyn during one stop, as Praem threw clattering iron nuts at the floor ahead of us.

“Because precision is important.”

Evelyn had answered without looking, not until Twil jogged her shoulder, and then she’d stared around as if only just remembering the rest of us were there.

“Evee, that’s not an answer, hey?”

“Evelyn?” I said gently.

She cleared her throat. “Precision is important, because if the books we need are two hundred floors up, we’re not getting this all done in one trip, are we? I need measurements if I am to make a second gate, if we’re going to have to come back and resume the journey from where we left off. The more I understand about how this place is laid out, the easier it will be to find the books, too.”

“Of course, it’s okay, we’re just trying to … follow,” I’d said, and sketched her a smile – but she’d already turned back to her notebook, indicating another suspect place for Praem to toss a cloth-pennanted nut.

“Where do all these books come from, anyway?” Twil asked. “How do they get here?”

“Bad question, laangren,” Zheng rumbled from behind us.

“Hah,” Evelyn barked without humour. “First sensible thing the zombie’s ever said. Yes, bad question, because I don’t know the answer. Perhaps the platonic ideal of the library accretes them from elsewhere. Or they’re brought here by mages and others, in trade for knowledge. Or perhaps there’s some ur-collector. Let’s hope we never meet it.”

“Oh, I do hope not,” I added.

“How old do you reckon this place is then?” Twil asked with a scrunch in her face.

“I’m flattered that you think I know everything,” Evelyn said. “Now shut your mouth and keep your eyes peeled. Do your job.”

But the map is not the territory.

Some parts of the library boasted neat lines of bookcases, with all their volumes tucked away, spines flush and clean of dust. Little clusters of librarian creatures tended to inhabit those areas, slouching back and forth with books in their arms, dragging those heavy wooden carts loaded down with stacked volumes, or carefully feeding hardbacks one-by-one into their own faces for re-cataloguing. They ignored us completely, as if the attention of the group which followed us was enough to satisfy the whole of their interlinked consciousness. We saw nothing to indicate that they possessed any living quarters – if they lived at all, in our sense of the word – and that upset me on a level I didn’t have the spare energy to process. Did they eat, sleep, defecate? All they did was sort books. All we saw was more library.

“Maybe they just shit in their robes,” as Raine so delicately put it.

Jumble, mess, and maze far outweighed the organised parts of the library. Lines of bookcases kinked and twisted, defying straight line of sight down the stacks. Clear ways narrowed, dead ends proliferated, repeating patterns emerged – of crosses or open squares or L-shapes or dizzying spirals we dare not follow. Clearings were few, tight corners many, navigation a slow plod of test and map and probe.

Lesson three?

We were far from alone in the great Outside library.

“Hopping place, isn’t it?” as Raine described.

“Bottom feeders,” Zheng rumbled through clenched teeth. “Scavengers. The abandoned and the dead.”

The grouped clatter of our muffled stop-start footsteps sent all manner of hidden creatures scuttling off beyond sight as we approached through the stacks. Almost everything except the librarians fled from us, as reluctant to encounter other library users as we were. Thin whispers occasionally leaked over the top of bookcase rows, only for no speaker to be found when we rounded the corner. A skitter of footsteps would reveal no source. Distant voices grew yet more distant if we need venture in their direction.

“This is so fucking creepy,” Twil had hissed.

“I won’t deny that,” Evelyn said. “But it’s the best possible outcome. We are being avoided, and that is a blessing, more than I hoped for. It may not last. Keep moving.”

“Are we being avoided?” I asked, looking back at the gaggle of a dozen librarians, following at a respectful distance.

“They don’t count,” said Evelyn.

“Slaves and hands,” Zheng purred. “Nothingness in them, shaman. They are empty.”

“As I said,” Evelyn grunted. “They don’t count. Keep moving.”

In some places, books had spilled over into foothills of paper and ink, impossible to scale without tumbling on one’s backside. In others, the cases themselves had been toppled over onto each other into masses of shattered shelves and shredded splinters. Our first encounter with one of these nests of snare-tangled broken wood had proved the efficacy of Evelyn’s nut-throwing strategy.

That technique accounted for the other half of our slow progress. We ventured down no pathway, trusted no footstep, braved no ground – not even that trod without care by the librarians – before Praem had tossed at least one of the exploratory nuts ahead of us, and we had observed it come to rest, untouched and intact. She re-collected the ones that fell safely, so we wouldn’t run out. The unsafe ones, we did not approach.

By that method we charted where not to go, the places where the nuts vanished, or fell to rust in the space of seconds, or provoked shadowy fingers to edge out from nearby corners to investigate the sound, or a dozen other bizarre fates that befell our brave little inert scouts. I couldn’t help but anthropomorphise the metal nuts after the first hour, little flags fluttering in the air as they fell by the dozens to unseen threats and pockets of reality not made for us.

We avoided other areas too, places where all the books were missing, or where darkness formed solid walls of lightless reign, or where for no discernible reason our accompanying librarians refused to follow.

Stop-start, stop-start was a constant drain on our energy and nerves. At every stop, Raine would manoeuvre Lozzie and I between herself and a solid bookcase, a temporary fortress. Zheng would silently seethe with impatience and leer at the librarians with all her teeth. And Twil would circle Evelyn, close and protective, which I think was driving Evelyn up the wall.

“Why nuts?” Twil had asked, as Evelyn had instructed Praem to toss a few at the tangle of fallen bookcases, shattered light-orbs, and chewed paper. That nest of broken wood lay at the core of the first lake of inexplicable darkness we had encountered back on the second floor.

“Terrestrial matter,” Evelyn answered. “Any force that acts on them will also act on us.”

“Yeah, but like, why nuts specifically?”

“Heavy,” Praem intoned. “Easily thrown.”

And she demonstrated, as a cloth-tied nut bounced at the foot of the shattered wood and swaddling shadows.

“You mean there’s not like, a magic reason?” Twil asked. “They’re just nuts? Why the bit of ripped-up sheet on ‘em them?”

Evelyn frowned at her like she was an idiot. “Visibility.”

Twil puffed out a disappointed breath.

“I know how you feel, Twil” I added, from behind Raine’s riot shield. “Somehow magic would feel a bit more reassuring, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Raine chipped in. “Wiggle your fingers and banish the darkness, o’ mighty mystical one.”

“Well excuse me for practical solutions,” Evelyn huffed. She clicked her fingers and waved at the torn-up bookcases. “Praem, another, if you please. We can pick our way over this, it’ll be quicker, but I don’t like those shadows.”

Twil was frowning especially hard now, as if manually oiling the gears in her head. “Isn’t this nut-throwing stuff from like, a video game?”

“It was film first, you philistine,” Evelyn said, without much conviction.

“Actually it was a book,” I said, and laughed a small, nervous laugh, nervous enough to make Lozzie squeeze my hand and murmur my name. “Maybe we could find it here.”

The second scrap of fluttering cloth and twist of iron left Praem’s hand and bounced directly into the shadow-clad tangled wooden shards – and provoked a reaction.

A limb, shining and white and luminous and possessing far too many elbows, ratcheted out of the nest like a trap-door spider catching prey. A hand with about a hundred knuckles snatched the nut out of the air, and tossed it back at us as a wisp of compressed gas.

Zheng was the only one laughing. She cracked her knuckles. “A fight, shaman?”

“N-no, no, Zheng, no- I-”

“Even you wouldn’t survive that, idiot,” Evelyn answered for me. “And I won’t try to pull you out. We go around this one.”

So we’d gone around.

This second patch of shadow produced a reaction too.

“There, look,” Evelyn grunted, and pointed with her walking stick. “We’ve learnt something useful.”

The nut had rolled to the very edge of the lake of extinguished darkness, but now it lay within the shadow, as if it had moved without any of us noticing. I blinked hard and rubbed my eyes, and Evelyn must have noticed, because she added: “No, I’ve been watching it this whole time. It was just … over the border one moment.”

And then the nut was gone, faded into darker shadows until there was no cloth-wrapped nut at all, only the unlit floorboards.

Twil shivered. Raine nodded and hefted her shield. Zheng ignored the whole thing because she could neither punch nor eat it.

“No walking in darkness,” Praem intoned.

“Yes, quite,” Evelyn said. “Well put.”

“Could’a told you that myself,” Twil grumbled.

“No,” I forced myself to stand up for Evee’s methods. “No, this is useful. Between this and the previous time, I think we can conclude that any shortcuts through dark areas are bad ideas. So we don’t need to test them anymore.”

“I will walk through any darkness with you, shaman,” Zheng rumbled, and I flinched slightly. Hadn’t thought she was listening. I glanced at Raine, but she said nothing, still on high-alert, watching the nearby corners and the tops of the bookcases and the blind spots.

“Yes, we’re all well aware of that,” Evelyn drawled. She looked left and right, along the edges of the lake of darkness, then glanced back at our following of librarians.

They’d accompanied us all the way from the canyon floor, but never closer than about a dozen feet. That may have been respect, or it may have been because Zheng had wordlessly drifted into a rearguard position and spent most of her time grinning at them, whispering things under her breath, and occasionally stalking toward them with a pace or two of menacing display. I’d stopped her after the first of those, with a sharp “Zheng, I need you to not do that,” and she’d grinned back at me hard enough to make my stomach flip over. But she’d done as I’d asked.

“Well?” Evelyn demanded of the librarians now, the latest of dozens of times she’d asked the same question, at every junction and crossroads in the maze of books.

She pointed at the staircase, then left, then right.

The ‘squiddly-diddly scribblers’ – as Lozzie had dubbed them – once more exploded into the proliferation of pointing in wrong directions. One of them even stuck his arm directly back out toward the canyon. But they quickly rearranged themselves as they had the first time, and every time since, until they all pointed off to the left, around the lake of darkness.

“Left it is, then,” Evelyn drawled. “Praem, another nut, please.”

==

Two floors up and forty minutes later we came face-to-face with another library patron.

Twil spotted him – or her, we never could tell – first, as she stalked a good six paces ahead of Evelyn, into a cross-junction between two rows of bookcases. She froze in sheer surprise, wide-eyed as we all caught up, and then there was much scrambling of feet and hissing to get back, Evelyn snapping out “say nothing!” and Twil growling like an animal. Raine swept me behind her shield, though I craned to see what we’d discovered.

A figure sat cross-legged on the floor with a book open in his lap, hooded and cloaked in yellow robes, bent forward and absorbed in reading. He did not look up.

“Isn’t it just another squid?” Twil hissed, claws out, already trying to creep sideways to catch a glimpse of the man’s face. Evelyn all but swatted her back with a whack of her walking stick.

“They don’t wear yellow, they wear grey,” Raine said, quick and low. “And there’s no tentacles. And he’s too small.”

“Could still be one-” Twil said. “Ow, Evee, fuck, stop, alright.”

“They don’t read,” I said.

“Heather?” Evelyn frowned back at me.

“They don’t read,” I repeated. “The librarians. We’ve not seen a single one of them sitting, let alone reading. They only sort.” I stared at the hunched man, the all-too-human curve of a back, the rounded shoulders, the skull beneath the hood. “I think that’s a person.”

So after positioning of feet and readying of weapons and clearing of throats, Evelyn called out, first in English, then Latin, then something I assume was ancient Greek, then some harsher, more painful languages that made us all wince and made her mouth bleed. Then Praem tossed nuts until one bounced off the figure’s head, and he still offered no reaction.

We crept closer, with Lozzie and Evelyn and I kept well in the rear, until Praem was near enough to politely bend forward and look under the man’s hood.

“Dead,” she announced.

“Super mega extra dead,” Raine laughed, and nudged back the hood with the tip of her truncheon.

The corpse beneath was a shrivelled brown mummy, papery skin pulled tight around empty eye sockets and peeled back on ancient yellowed teeth, so dry he should have crumbled to dust at the lightest touch. The book in his lap lay open on non-human spider-scribble scratches up and down the page. Beneath his thick robes, the long-dead reader wore white silk embroidered with golden thread. At his throat lay several thick necklaces of the same colour.

“Wooo,” Twil let out a low whistle. “Is that like, actual real gold? He’s loaded down with it.”

“Do not touch anything,” Evelyn spat. “Do not touch him. Better, turn around and don’t look at him. Forget we saw this. File past, keep to the opposite shelves.”

“Think I recognise some of that stuff on his necklaces,” Raine said. “Eye of Ra and a sun disk. Our boney old friend here must be-”

“Ancient Egyptian, yes,” Evelyn hissed, bodily shoving Twil to the far bookcases, away from the ancient corpse. Twil skipped and skidded, but didn’t resist. “And it doesn’t matter. This was a mage, a very, very old one, who stayed here too long. Do not touch it. Faster we’re gone, the better. Move. Now.”

Praem followed without question and Lozzie came when I pulled. Zheng gave the corpse a look like she wanted to kick its head off, but we left it behind, to the dust of another five thousand years.

==

We were winding our slow way through the seventh floor, toward the distant sight of another set of stairs – a single shaft this time, a dizzying spiral that got wider and wider toward the top – when something vast and unknowable passed down the canyon alongside us.

I doubt it was looking for us. I doubt it noticed us at all.

First awareness came as a rising wave of lightness, a full-body throbbing as if the air around us had lost the ability to contain our forms. I felt it first, or perhaps my abyssal instincts did, twitching with increasing panic into a blinding swirl inside my head.

“Heather’s not the only one, I’m getting it too,” Raine said, squint-frowning in faint pain.

“Feels floaty!” Lozzie chirped, the only one still smiling.

“Ignore it,” Evelyn hissed. “Ignore it and press on. Ignore-”

And then the singing reached us.

Angelic, wordless, beautiful and alien. It crept into one’s hearing and grew louder with alarming swiftness. We all went silent and still – except for Lozzie, who opened her mouth to join in, stalled only by my fluttering hands against her lips.

The singer drifted by, out in the canyon.

Great dark ropes of flesh hung from far above, each as thick as a tree, moving with silent terrible pressure through the canyon like a mass of dangling jellyfish stingers, caressing the wooden walkways with deceptive gentleness. The main body was far above us, but the tentacles were surrounded by a moth-eaten shroud of pale yellow, draped down in vast sheets of rotten fabric. Tatters of golden light like sickly fireflies detached from the mass and floated off behind, turning to dust and ash.

The librarian creatures scattered among the stacks, all tottering and skittering in different directions.

None of us could stand the singing, the sight, the rotten majesty of the passer-by. Twil managed to bundle a paralysed, green-faced Evelyn behind a bookcase, but then she’d gone all wolf, growling and whining as she crouched over Evelyn’s shaking form. Praem stood next to them, ramrod straight, and closed her eyes as they filled with tears.

Raine crammed herself, Lozzie, and I all into a corner behind her shield, and I’d clamped my hands over my ears to drown out the singing, my own hyperventilating hiccups, and the awful way Lozzie was still trying to join in with the alien chorus. Raine had gone blank and empty, staring at a spot on the wall. My abyssal side wanted to dig through the floorboards and curl up in the dark, as far away from this leviathan’s song as possible. Instead I clung to Raine, and I think I shouted wordlessly into her back.

Only Zheng stood out in the open, arms wide and roaring nonsense, daring the passing godling to pluck her from her feet.

When it passed and the singing faded and the pressure relented at last, I scrambled to my feet and lurched for Zheng.

“H-Heather, woah,” Raine was saying, trying to catch my arm, but she was weak with shock and I was using anger to paper over my terror.

“Zheng!” I snapped, my eyes still wet with the confused tears of a small animal penned by a giant, my heart still going a hundred miles an hour. Fear – Outside fear, stripped of human context – made me forget all my issues with my beautiful Olympian goddess, right here in the middle of a tumble of bookshelves. “What were you doing?! You’re not invincible, it would have crushed you with a thought! You can’t fight something like that!”

“Have faith, shaman,” she purred, staring out into the empty canyon.

“What were you thinking?! What was that? You-”

Zheng placed one massive hand on my head and turned to grin down at me, a shark-toothed smile, marred only by the slow sloping second of profound unhappiness I caught in her eyes, before she muffled it behind a wall of bravado.

“ … Zheng? What … you … I-I don’t understand, were you trying to show off? You … ”

But our little party was rapidly reforming. The librarians drifted back in ones and twos. They did not possess facial expressions, but their body language was hunched and furtive now; poor things were no more suited to this place than us. Twil and Praem were both helping Evelyn to her feet, Twil twitchy and skittish and baring too many teeth. Raine was already at my elbow, taking deep breaths, and could hear everything Zheng and I said to each other. I trailed off, embarrassed. Those were the most words I’d spoken to Zheng since the night we’d kissed.

“What was that all about, left hand?” Raine asked, neutral and easy.

“I long for a good fight, yoshou.”

“You know where to get that, when you want it,” Raine said. “But not out here, yeah?”

Evelyn was still shaking, green in the face, clutching Twil’s arm with all her might, but she had the strength to raise her head. “Everyone keep your bloody voices down,” she hissed in an angry stage-whisper. “We do not want that thing to turn around and come back.”

“Yeah, fuckin’ right, hey?” Twil shook too, eyes going left and right as if a stray tentacle might sneak down through the bookcases at any moment. “Shhh, right?”

“Yes,” came a soft, broken-bell voice.

Tears were drying on Praem’s cheeks; I felt sick.

“Yes, yes!” Lozzie whispered. “Shhhhh, shhhhh!” She did finger-to-lips shushing motions at everybody, dancing between us as if the otherworldly singing had put a spring in her step. She shushed Evelyn and she shushed Raine, she shushed me and ruffled Twil’s hair as one might try to calm a spooked hound. She even hopped over to the squid-faced librarians, pulling a random book off the shelves and passing it to one of them. The librarian so blessed by Lozzie’s attention immediately fed the book into its own face.

“Stop that!” Evelyn hissed at her. “Do not interact with them! Not even you – especially not you!”

Lozzie giggled, curtsied an apology, and clamped herself to Praem’s side. She dried the doll-demon’s tears with the hem of her pastel poncho, and Praem stared down at her. Expressionless as always, I couldn’t tell if Praem was surprised or offended or thankful, but she didn’t push Lozzie away.

Evelyn resumed scolding, but Lozzie took it in good spirits. I turned back to Zheng and struggled over what little I could say.

“Feelers,” Zheng rumbled. “Parts. Slaves. So atrophied they cannot feel the mooncalf’s regard.”

“Ah? Oh.”

It took me a moment to realise she was talking about the librarians again. Zheng stared at them with naked contempt, and that allowed me the fractional hardening of my heart the moment required.

“Zheng,” I hissed up at her. “We’ll talk about this later, when we’re back home. But in the meantime-” I swallowed, held down a hiccup by sheer force of will. “Remember you made a promise to me as well. Don’t do that again. Don’t bait self-destruction. ”

Zheng raised an eyebrow over a casually puzzled smile. I held her gaze until she let go of my head, and thankfully Raine didn’t ask any questions as I snuggled back in behind the protection of her makeshift riot shield.

Still pale in the face and unsteady on her feet, Evelyn pulled out her map sketches once more, as we re-oriented ourselves, ready to move.

“What do you think that was?” I asked.

She gave me a desolate shrug. “Another library user.”

==

We found another ‘library user’ on floor twelve, around which a shrine had been erected.

This one was obviously – and thankfully – dead, and quite a bit smaller.

We all stood there staring at the thing in stunned, skin-crawling silence for a full minute, still recovering from our earlier encounter, still twitchy and on edge. In the end, Twil cleared her throat, and said “Looks like a crab shagging a Christmas tree.”

Whatever it was, it had died, or perhaps been interred post-mortem, in a large clearing ringed with a circle of bookshelves. A few stacked tomes sat nearby, as if it had died in the middle of scholarly study. One of the many clawed graspers radiating from the cone-shaped body clutched a tome even now, though the books this being had perused were not remotely like human books. They were made of dull metal, shaped as icosahedrons and hexagonal prisms, which fell open in thousands of stiff close-packed leaves.

The alien corpse was maybe twelve feet long, and about as tall as me at the widest part, the very end of the thing. Somebody or something had placed hundreds of wax candles around it, untouched and never lit, along with dozens of shallow tin bowls which had probably once contained some sort of offering, now long dried up or rotted away, except for a thin brown crust.

“Very astute,” Evelyn said eventually, her sarcasm failing. Then, after another ten seconds of stunned silence, she added: “Christmas trees aren’t yellow.”

“It’s pretty!” Lozzie said, then pouted when everyone looked at her. “It is! It’s got all those little sparkly bits. And the round parts, shiny!”

Raine tilted her head. “I think it’s on it’s side. Is that the head, at the end of that stalk?”

“Oh, ew,” Twil wrinkled her nose. “Then that – that’s a huge foot! Like a slug. Ew, ew ew, no.”

“Ew,” Praem echoed.

“I have no bloody idea,” Evelyn said, mostly to herself. “I have not the faintest clue what this is. Was.”

“At least it’s dead,” I sighed, but it emerged as a shudder. “Poor thing.”

Praem readied a nut to bounce off the dead thing’s hide, but Zheng was already striding forward, her patience gone. She ignored Evelyn’s hiss of warning and planted both hands against the cone-shaped body, then leaned in close and sniffed at it, long and deep. A mocking grin spread across her face. She rapped her knuckles against the material, clonk, like solid iron.

“A shell,” Zheng said. “Thick, old, empty. No meat left.”

“So it is like a crab then,” Twil said.

“Would have made a good fight,” Zheng purred to herself, gazing down at the triple-lobed head on a thick stalk like that of a palm tree. “Strong claws. So many eyes.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Evelyn huffed. “Leave it alone. Stop touching it, it makes my skin crawl.”

Despite her words, Evelyn made a quick sketch of the the dead monster, and marked it on her map before we carried on; Lozzie patted the empty shell as we passed. Our squid-faced entourage ignored it completely.

==

Floor fifteen was quiet as a grave, muffling even the sounds of our own breathing, filtering our voices so a level tone turned to a whisper. The effect grated on our already wire-thin nerves – and then the hooves started up.

Afterward, we had no idea how they’d approached so closely before we heard the clop-clop-clop on wooden floorboards – perhaps some further trick of the acoustics, perhaps it was their intention, or perhaps they hadn’t fully existed until that moment. The first thing we knew of them was the lonely, haunting rhythm of two pairs of cloven hooves slowly clomping along the row of bookcases parallel to us.

We didn’t need to discuss halting, we just did it; we all felt and acted like cornered animals by then, all but Lozzie.

“What’s that- what’s that-” My eyes wide, throat tight, chest constricted.

“Smells like farm animal,” Twil growled.

“Meat.”

“Hush,” Praem intoned.

“Stay still and wait, damn you all,” Evelyn hissed. “It’s heading to the end of the row. If it passes, let it pass, let it go. Say nothing. Mouths shut, now.”

At the end of the row of bookcases, a misshapen shadow crept into view, in time with the clack of hooves. I half expected the devil himself to appear, skin red as blood, pitchfork and pointy tail and all. Instead, our waiting was rewarded with a sight so absurd that a hysterical splutter escaped my lips. I had not meant to laugh, and I was not amused. I felt stretched thin by hours in this place.

Across our path stepped a single live goat.

I would have forgiven the animal, if only it had been a big coal-black stereotype, a Satanic vessel with wickedly curled horns and beady intelligence glittering behind its eyes. That would have made sense. That’s what magic was supposed to look like, right? But it was just a goat. Off-white, sort of old, a bit raggedy around the middle. Sure footed but sleepy. It took one look at us, let out a dismissive snuff, and vanished between the opposite set of bookcases.

“What,” said Twil.

“That was a goat,” I said, rather lamely.

“Sure was,” Raine said. “Sure, Heather. Identifying goats.”

“I told you,” Zheng rumbled. “Meat.”

The very second Zheng declared the goat’s evident edibility, a great clattering of additional hooves started up from the parallel row of bookcases. We watched in incredulous silence as a whole herd of goats – I counted fifteen more – trotted past the end of the row, disappearing off into the library after their vanguard. Males, females, a few tiny bouncing baby goats too, at which Lozzie let out a pained “Awww, they’re so small!”

They wandered past as if lost in an English meadow, not Outside among dead wood and alien books.

The very final goat, a mid-sized juvenile, stopped to look at us with those weird, sideways pupils, and opened its mouth.

“Anazitiste kala, mikres kores tis hypervoreas,” it said, in a rich, masculine voice.

And then it trotted off. Hoof beats vanished, and the herd was gone.

Evelyn sighed like a bellows and put her face in one hand. I knew exactly how she felt.

“What? What?!” Twil was on the verge of an explosion. “Did it just put a curse on us? What was that?!”

“Goats.” I shrugged, almost giggled, until Raine nudged my shoulder. “Goats.”

“Did you see the babies?” Lozzie almost squealed, and nobody had the energy to rebuff her.

“It wished us good luck, in ancient Greek,” Evelyn deadpanned. “And called us ‘daughters of Hyperborea’. Which means whatever the hell that was, it knew we’re British. I think. I guess. How the hell should I know anything?”

Raine laughed. “Are we that obvious? Am I carrying a Union Jack I missed somewhere?”

“Speak for yourself, wizard,” Zheng rumbled.

Evelyn made a wide ‘stop’ gesture with both palms. “Fuck it. Fuck it, I don’t care. It left, that’s all that matters. If it- they- whatever that was, if it follows us, we’ve having goat stew for dinner all next week. Come on, keep moving.”

==

According to Evelyn’s analogue watch, when we finally found books written in recognisably human languages, we’d been climbing for six hours and thirteen minutes.

Back in rainy old Sharrowford, night had undoubtedly fallen, but here in the great windowless library there was only the steady greenish witch-light glow from the luminous rocks set in the walls and bookcase-backs. We had paused more than a few times before, for furtive mouthfuls of cereal bar and water, but now we practically set up camp. We stopped with barely any discussion or agreement, in a clearing or reading area or cavity or whatever it was supposed to be, a rectangular space between two heavy rows of shelves, sheltered far back from the canyon-face cliff-drop, in case something unspeakable should pass by again.

We were all exhausted, and not solely from walking.

The experience of hours Outside had not yet proved as physically dangerous as Evelyn’s dire warnings, but the very act of existing in this place had taken an unseen toll. Being away from our reality had consumed some ineffable, indefinable reserve in all of us, in addition to the psychological grind of constant vigilance. Except for Lozzie – who worried me greatly in her own fashion – we were all worn down and haggard, at the thin edge of our collective humanity.

Zheng checked the nearby rows of bookcase-corridors without leaving the group, but she had gone silent, hadn’t spoken in over two hours, every step like a stalking predator. Raine propped her riot shield against a bookcase and peeled the sweat-stuck motorcycle jacket away from her shoulders, and then touched me with the same fleeting, repeated contact she’d been seeking as she’d spoken less and less, slipped into high-alert, wordless tension. Even now she couldn’t relax, didn’t actually look at me, and kept her truncheon in one tight fist.

Twil hadn’t fully relinquished her werewolf transformation in hours either, bits of summoned claw and fur marring her outline, eyes squinted tight, shoulders hunched and twitchy as she hovered protectively at Evelyn’s shoulder. Our mage fared no better, already running her fingers along the spines of volumes in Sanskrit and ancient Greek and medieval German, wide-eyed and book-drunk, though thankfully she retained the sense not to open any before Praem had checked them first.

Praem seemed most unaffected, as she dredged up some random bits of abandoned, ancient furniture – a chair from a reading desk, a pair of stools – and distributed cereal bars and energy drinks. But she possessed less economy of motion than usual, lingering over her own gestures as if examining the workings of her body. She blinked several times as I watched, far too slowly for her. Lozzie flopped down on the floor next to me, toes tapping and head bobbing, almost brimming with energy, like she could get up and sprint at any moment. I was afraid she would, so I stayed close while I rubbed my exhausted, aching thighs.

My abyssal side’s hatred of this place had curdled into quiet survivalist disgust; it wanted me out, but it wanted all of us out more.

It – no, I wanted my pack intact and safe, kept trying to reach for the others with phantom limbs, to draw them close to a protection my soft, vulnerable ape body could not really offer. Every unnatural encounter made me want to bristle and hiss, make myself toxic and poisonous to the things that would devour our souls, provoked claws I could not extend, spines I could not sprout, teeth I could not sharpen. Only a constant effort of will kept me from acting like an animal, and that supply was growing short.

Our gaggle of squid-faces hovered at one end of the clearing, neither joining us nor departing. Lozzie pulled funny faces at them. Evelyn sat down on one of the stools, with a Praem-approved book in her lap. As we all tried to recover, she began to read.

Didn’t take long for Twil to ask an awkward question, after a mouthful of energy drink and a good stretch.

“We are not lost,” Evelyn replied.

“I didn’t mean lost, I mean how do we-”

“Lost would imply not knowing where we are.” Evelyn spoke over her. “And we know exactly where we are: floor twenty one, about sixty meters back from the canyon wall, surrounded by … books.”

With great care, Evelyn closed the dusty tome she’d been flicking through, and rose from the stool with even greater care. She winced and put a lot of weight onto her walking stick, swallowing down a grunt of pain. She handed the book to Praem, who slid it back among its fellows as Evelyn massaged her hip. Evelyn nodded at another volume instead, but Praem did not carry out the instruction. She just stood there in mute defiance.

“Yeah, right, cool, whatever,” Twil was saying, “but how do we get where we’re going?”

“By walking.”

“Oh yeah? Before or after your legs fall out of your hip sockets?”

Evelyn shot her a dark, pinched look, dripping with venom, the sort of expression to make a demon think twice – but for once, Twil neither flinched nor backed down. Evelyn’s mouth twisted around an ugly insult. “You-”

“You said it yourself,” Twil spoke over her, getting in her face, angry with her in a way I’d never seen before. “This might take multiple trips. Why not stop here? Head back for now, make that second gate or whatever. You’re gonna wear yourself raw, you know it.”

Evelyn struggled to speak, glanced at the rest of us, blushing and confused. “Not- Twil, can we not-”

Twil turned away, to me and Lozzie. “We good to go back, Heather? Like, now?”

“Um … ” I swallowed. “She’s got a point, Evee. You’re having trouble walking, you don’t have to pretend otherwise. Twil just wants you to be safe.”

“I’m fine!” Evelyn snapped at me. “I can carry on, you can’t stop me on my own account. We’re so close, look at all this!” She flung a hand at the bookshelves, then waggled an irritated gesture with her walking stick. “How can we stop now? We could be right on top of the exact Latin texts I’m after. We are surrounded, on all sides, by the deepest well of magical knowledge imaginable!” She clacked her walking stick against the bookcase. “We cannot stop now, I will not stand for it.”

“The wizard’s mind is on thin ice,” Zheng rumbled, first she’d spoken in hours.

“Evee-”

“And it won’t be much further, it can’t be much further,” Evelyn said. “I can endure this, this is nothing. Praem.” She clicked her fingers. “What are you waiting for? Fetch that one down.”

“Evelyn,” I tried again, and kept my voice level with a great effort. “Why are you even reading these books? Do we need that one? You’re scaring me.”

“Forget the Invisus Oculus alone.” Evelyn turned back to me with burning eyes. “Forget merely masking our presence, hiding ourselves from the Eye. Heather, the things we could do with the knowledge here-”

“Defeat the Eye. That’s why we’re here. Evee.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Evelyn huffed. “But-”

“Evelyn,” Raine said, and a chill went down my spine, ending somewhere lower than my guts. I’d never heard her say Evee’s name like that.

Evelyn froze too, blinking at Raine. “R-Raine, relax-”

“How much longer to locate the three books you’re after?” Raine asked, deceptively soft.

“I-I … I don’t know,” Evelyn admitted, turning her eyes down and swallowing hard. “There’s magic I can use. Locating the precise texts is difficult but not impossible, that’s why I brought certain resources. With Praem, in the bag. I can … yes.”

“Yeah?” Twil joined in. “How long’s that gonna take?”

“Hours more,” Praem intoned.

Evelyn shot the traitor a dark look – then a darker one at our entourage of librarians.

“Bad service,” Raine cracked a grin.

“Quite,” Evelyn huffed.

The librarians’ group-pointing had led us this far, and over the last two floors of climbing, Evelyn had used any nut-throwing, hazard-avoiding pauses to refine her questions – “where are the books in Latin?”, “where are the books from the 17th century?”, “where is Beyond the Northern Ice by Magnhildr Dahl?” – but the librarians hadn’t pointed at all for those ones. Past a certain level of granularity, we were on our own.

“Hey, Evee,” Raine said, all soft reason once more, her grin easing back. “This place is a living nightmare.”

“Quite,” Evelyn said again. “I do not disagree.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I could do this all night, but Heather needs a hot meal, Lozzie needs to blow off steam, and Kimberly’s waiting for us too. Maybe it’s time to head home in the interim, Lozzie can take us. Make that second door you mentioned, back home. We can pick up right where we left off, load our save point.”

Evelyn huffed and rolled her eyes. “Video game metaphors again? Really?”

“Incident pit,” I added, softly. “Let’s not slip further down.”

If nothing else had worked, that seemed to finally penetrate the fermenting fascination in Evelyn’s subconscious. She made a big show of huffing and puffing and sitting back down on her stool, nodding along and grumbling under her breath. She pulled the map-filled notebook from her coat pocket. “Right, yes. Of course. Of course. Allow me to … to figure out the maps so far. We’ll take a book from up here home with us. Should be able to … re-orient the gate … mmm … yes, okay. Give me ten minutes, mm.”

She trailed off into mumbles, scratching notations with a pencil.

We settled in for a few minutes, the last rest before home, waiting as the silence of the library ticked by beyond our senses. Twil sipped sickly-sweet energy drink and hovered at Evelyn’s shoulder, while Praem stood on guard. After some rocking back and forth, Lozzie tottered to her feet and clung to my side, nuzzling my shoulder and making tired sounds in her throat.

Raine leaned against the bookshelf next to us. “Your legs are gonna ache something fierce tomorrow,” she said.

“I don’t mind.” I gave her a smile, and I meant it too. After her territorial displays all yesterday and this morning, in the library she seemed to have reverted to normal. My rock. “Anything for Maisie.”

“Anything for you,” she replied.

“Listen, Raine,” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “What’s wrong with Evelyn? Why’s she acting like this?”

Raine pulled a rueful smile. “Seen her like it before, couple of times. Just like when she first got unfettered access to her mother’s books. It’ll wear off, let’s just get her out for now.”

“I do hope so.”

“Trust me. It will. She’ll come round. Anyway, how about you? You holding up okay out here? Loz too, you good?”

“Good!” Lozzie whispered with an eyebrow wiggle over at Evelyn, still scratching away at her pad.

“It’s … not so bad,” I said, “being along for the ride. I don’t have to make any decisions, at least.”

Raine nodded, as if she could possibly understand, but perhaps she finally did, after six hours walking the realm of my teenage nightmares. After an odd pause during which she examined my eyes, she suddenly said, “I love you, Heather.”

“I … I love you too. Raine? Is something wrong?”

“This place,” she laughed a sigh, and ruffled my hair gently, and looked over her shoulder with only a hint of aggression when Zheng stalked over to loom above us. My two hands met each others’ gaze.

“Yoshou.”

“Yeah, I know,” Raine said. “I can hear it too.”

Zheng raised an eyebrow. “Truth? Impressive.”

A shiver went up my spine, a finger of ice and bone. “I’m sorry, what’s this?”

Raine gave me a smile that curdled my blood, a smile I knew all too well from similar situations, from university hallways that repeated forever and underground car parks full of cultists. A smile that told me not to worry, that Raine would commit all the necessary violence.

“We’re being followed,” she said, and made it sound like nothing.

“Followed?” I hissed. My heart skipped, in the very bad way.

“Ooooooh.” Lozzie lit up.

“What do you think it is, left hand?” Raine asked.

“Mm,” Zheng grunted. “It moves in the shadow of our footsteps. Stays at distance, too far to double-back and catch. Two hundred feet distant? A carrion eater, perhaps. Waiting for our leavings. Or for us to slip and fall.”

Raine nodded. My mouth had gone dry. I glanced at Evelyn, but she and Praem didn’t seem to have heard the import of our hushed conversation. Twil, on the other hand, perked up and wandered over.

“Doesn’t matter one bit now though,” Raine said with a beaming grin, mostly for me. “We’re off home in five, ten minutes tops, and by the time we come back tomorrow or the day after, it’ll probably have lost interest.”

“You really think, yoshou?”

“What is it you can hear?” I demanded. “Exactly?”

“A wheel,” Zheng purred.

“Ah?” Raine raised her eyebrows. “I was thinking spiked shoes or something. Football boots, maybe.”

Zheng shook her head. “Too regular. A metal wheel, spiked, rolling across wood. How long have you heard it, yoshou?”

“About three floors ago.”

“Four.” Zheng grinned. Raine grinned back, and I decided I much preferred this style of sparring match. Let them compare hearing or hunting any day.

Twil joined us, knocking back more foul energy drink. “What’s up?”

“We’re being followed!” Lozzie chirped. “Isn’t that exciting!?”

“What.” Twil blinked once. “Oh fuck, what? Shouldn’t we tell Evee?”

Raine clapped a hand on Twil’s shoulder. “Give her a sec to finish working out her maths, then we can tell her. Next time we come prepared, right?”

“No, I think we should tell her now, we-” I glanced over at Evelyn.

Then a double take, as my guts turned to ice and my blood turned to pure adrenaline.

Evelyn was no longer sitting on the dark wooden stool. She stood before the towering bookcase of ancient tomes again. A cracked leather volume was open in her hands, yellow binding a sick vomit-colour against her palms, head down, eyes glued to the words within. Praem stood about five paces away, but a trick of bad luck or unseen machination had turned her head to watch us instead of her mistress. For perhaps as little as twenty seconds, nobody had been watching Evelyn.

The squid-faced librarians had surrounded her.

A jostling scrum of grey robes and liver-spotted flesh and sharp spines, all within arm’s length of Evelyn, and she hadn’t noticed them at all.

Then, as if glimpsed through the momentary parting of a theatre curtain, I saw one of the figures was neither squid-faced nor librarian. Yellow robes instead of grey, rich and deep and flowing in waves. A solid white mask, expressionless and human, dark eye holes with nothing behind them.

The apparition in yellow reached for Evelyn’s shoulder, with one porcelain-perfect, pale hand.

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“We stick together,” was the last thing Evelyn said, before all seven of us stepped through the gateway to the Library of Carcosa.

==

She had explained to me earlier that morning, after we’d completed the initial experiment, that this expedition was probably best carried out with as few people as possible, to avoid both unwanted attention and the ‘proliferation of uncontrolled variables’.

“By that, may I assume you mean one of us doing something stupid?” I’d asked.

“What other variables are there?” Evelyn had grumbled. “I don’t even want to take Twil along, let alone your giant zombie. Too many things to go wrong. We need absolute discipline out there. Absolute.”

According to Evelyn, the classical ideal was a single intrepid mage, plumbing the occult mysteries and risking alchemical transformation of the self; luckily for us, Evelyn did not possess her mother’s arrogance, and even if she did, her spinal problems and uneven gait and reliance on a walking stick rather precluded a solo journey, let alone a return trip lugging a sack of books back to reality.

Three companions seemed a much more sensible number – Evelyn, to locate the books and navigate the hazards; Praem, as muscle and protection and packhorse; and Lozzie, guest-starring as an emergency escape button.

Neat, clean, straightforward; of course that plan did not survive thirty seconds.

The experiment itself had gone off without a hitch. After the mortifying breakfast during which Raine had insulted and provoked Zheng, after the kitchen had been given a proper clean and we’d all had some time to prepare, we’d gathered in the workshop to watch Lozzie perform a miracle. Myself, Raine, and Evelyn, with Praem standing nearby on silent watch.

Raine had donned her head-to-toe riot gear just in case, while Zheng had vanished off somewhere – probably to fish the remains of her deer carcass out of the bin and snatch a few more mouthfuls – and Twil was still dozing upstairs, apparently in Evelyn’s bedroom. Heavy sleeper, or sore from the night? I filed that question away for then, too many butterflies in my stomach to concentrate on anything except Lozzie, bouncing on the balls of her feet in excitement, and Evelyn, activating the gateway to the Library of Carcosa.

‘Activating the gateway’ makes it sound absurdly grand.

What Evelyn actually did was take a few lengths of masking tape and stick Kimberly’s and Lozzie’s corrections over the right places on the cacophonous mandala, which surrounded the door-shaped blank section of plaster in the middle. Then she used the tip of a black marker pen to connect the various magic circles and esoteric inscriptions over the empty strips of masking tape.

It all felt very slapdash. Almost inappropriate. Part of me would have been more comfortable if Evelyn wore midnight black robes, chanted some Latin, and used blood instead of masking tape.

That part of me was very silly, and should have been relieved that my magical best friend was happy to do magecraft in her pajamas.

The gate didn’t care either, it opened all the same.

Blank plaster slid through that mesmerising process of shedding matter, first rippling black and empty, then filling in with shape and shade and shadow – and precious little light or colour. Unlike the otherworldly luminous fog of the Sharrowford Cult’s castle, Carcosa glowed with no clean light, only dank amorphous shadows cast by distant starlight, caught on tumbled mounds of discarded books. A sort of cliff or gigantic wall loomed over all, hazy with both distance and gloom.

Evelyn stepped quickly back from the open gateway, half taking shelter behind Praem while pretending she wasn’t doing so. Raine went tense, eyes glued on the other world, the other side, Outside. I endured a wave of vertigo as I stared into the bleak vision through the doorway. It was like looking down into a void beneath the Earth’s crust, a dark forgotten place full of half-glimpsed unspeakable creatures and forbidden secrets. The size and scale of the distant cliff-face – which I already knew was not a cliff – made my head spin. Had to squeeze my eyes shut, then open them again in sudden fear that something might crawl through the gateway while I wasn’t looking.

“It’s fine,” Evelyn said, too hard, either to herself or my fear or Raine’s tension. “Nothing can come through from that side to this, not unless I directly permit.”

She placed much faith in her own separate additions to the gateway mandala. Evelyn had spent the last few days adding wards around the edge – “The good shit. My mother’s shit,” she’d called it, working from old, leather-bound notebooks I’d never seen before. Stark clear white, seven neat magic circles painted directly onto the wall, each of which incorporated the Fractal.

The spider-servitors guarded this side of the gate as well, one hanging above, one clinging to the wall. I trusted Evelyn’s wards far more than I trusted their ability to stop anything from Outside.

“But the faster we get this test done, the better.” Evelyn turned to Lozzie. “Lauren. If you please?”

“You’re up, Loz,” Raine said. “Break a leg.”

I almost reached out to stop the experiment.

But Lozzie was ready. She’d giggled and flapped her poncho, completely at ease with this, and had dutifully flounced through the gateway all by herself. On the other side of the threshold that ancient wooden floor soaked up the sound of her footsteps as she tripped and hopped to a halt.

“Not too far,” I said, my voice cracking. “Lozzie, that’s far enough.”

“Yes, that’s quite enough,” Evelyn added.

Lozzie paused where she stood, and looked up in smiling glee. Her simple childlike wonder made my heart seize up. She looked so small in that window into infinity, and I was gripped by a vision of her skipping happily off into the deep gloom of the great library, swallowed up by the vastness of Outside. I lurched to my feet, convinced she was about to dive back into her natural environment she’d been so deprived of, stuck here in reality with us. I wouldn’t see her again for weeks, months. Maybe never, unless I followed.

“Lozzie, don’t …”

She turned to look back through the gateway, back at me, and blinked in gentle confusion.

And vanished.

Just gone. No ‘poof’ sound, no rush of air, no wiggle of her nose. The reality of magic, of hyperdimensional mathematics, was so bland in its cruelty.

“Oh, thank God for that,” Evelyn exploded with a huge sigh. She turned to Raine and I with the kind of savagely triumphant smile she didn’t often have a chance to enjoy, and even included Praem as she spoke, though the doll-demon did not react. “It works, damn my eyes, it works! There’s no way we could risk a full expedition otherwise. This is wonderful news. We can do it, we really can.”

“Seems so,” Raine said, more guarded, then noticed all was not well. “Heather?”

Panic clawed up my throat. I had to wring my hands together to stop them shaking as I glanced around the workshop.

Evelyn caught it and frowned too. “Wait, where’s Lauren? She was supposed to come straight back.”

“Ah,” went Raine. We all shared a glance, frozen in time.

Then – “Here!” Lozzie chirped.

And her elfin little face appeared around the doorway to the kitchen, sporting a lip-biting smile and a cheeky wink.

Evelyn sighed softly and rolled her eyes, Raine laughed and squeezed my shoulder, but I felt like my heart was about to burst with shaking, quivering relief. My knees almost went and Raine had to hold me by the elbow.

“No trouble, then?” Evelyn asked, and gave Praem the nod to deactivate the gateway. The doll-demon obediently stepped forward and pulled off one of the taped-up pieces of mandala. The gateway collapsed instantly back into regular old blank plaster.

“None!” Lozzie said as she skipped into the room.

She stopped on tiptoes, took a very theatrical double-bow to her adoring public, and followed it up with a single floaty curtsy with the hem of her pastel poncho.

“Lozzie,” I was saying, raising my shaking hands to her. “Lozzie, here, please-”

Praem clapped, once, twice, then carried on extremely slowly. From anyone else the applause would have seemed sarcastic. But Lozzie twirled her poncho like a matador or a dashing heroine in a pantomime, and dipped her head in another bow for Praem, with much flourishing of both arms.

“Thank you, thank you, big softy-soft!” she said. I couldn’t help but laugh through my easing panic.

“Encore,” Praem intoned.

“What? No!” I said, then hiccuped loud enough to make Evelyn flinch. “No, please no encore, Lozzie, no. Praem, really.”

“Ahhh?” Lozzie blinked at me several times, batting her eyelashes and tilting her head from side to side like a curious puppy.

“Lozzie, Lozzie you were supposed to come straight back home,” I said, trying not to scold. “Straight back to this room. What was that? You scared me.”

“I went to check on my round table!” she said in a bouncing rush. “They all need to stay in place unless I tell them to but I was worried they’d fall over or get bored but I don’t think they can get bored anymore, which is good for us, but maybe bad for them, but hopefully it doesn’t matter because they were all at the end of their lifespans anyway and offered to help, soooooooo.” She bit her lip and rolled her eyes upward, thinking about elsewhere. But she did wander over to me and allow me to take her hands.

Her exposed skin felt sun-warmed. No sun today, not in Sharrowford.

“Your knights, hey?” Raine asked. “Heather told me all about that. Wouldn’t mind meeting them, myself.”

“Oh, that’s even better,” Evelyn said with sudden shrewd interest. “Even better, yes. Translocation from sphere to sphere Outside works for you, as normal?”

Lozzie nodded and gave a great big thumbs up. “No hands!”

“Then we’re ready,” Evelyn said. “We go to Carcosa. Two hours to eat lunch and prep.”

No dead hands, Lozzie meant. No boney grip on her ankles to keep her from Slipping, not when moving from Outside to our reality.

The hypothesis had plagued us for weeks, that perhaps the unexplained effect that stopped Lozzie and I from Slipping our own bodies Outside would not apply the other way around. We couldn’t leave here, but if we found another route Outside – say, via decades of magical work stolen and borrowed and cracked open in the form of a working trans-dimensional physical gateway – then we could, if we needed, run home.

And Lozzie had just confirmed it worked Outside-to-Outside as well. She’d jumped from Carcosa to wherever she kept her Knights, then back to our reality, straight into the kitchen in drizzly, cold Sharrowford on a Saturday morning.

Which meant it was time to borrow some library books.

Lozzie was under no illusions about the reasons for her inclusion. She was the emergency exit. If anything went badly wrong out there, Lozzie’s purpose was to call a sing-along circle, get everybody holding hands, then click her heels and chant ‘no place like home’.

Except now it was seven of us, not three. So that sing-along circle might be a little more logistically unsound.

My mere existence had broken the delicate balance of a three-person team. I was not going to let three of my friends, the people who made up my world, step Outside without me, no matter what platitudes Evelyn spoke about stealth and the importance of small groups. I desperately did not want to go, certainly not without the cushioning safety of a dream. The very idea made me want to go hide in the bathroom and purge my guts in terror.

But if they met anything they couldn’t deal with, anything truly alien and impossible – which was likely, out there beyond reality – my friends would need hyperdimensional mathematics.

They would need me.

And after all, it was my sister they were all helping to save.

The unique social conditions of our house then fell in a domino effect. If I went, Raine was coming too, and Zheng. Nobody was silly enough to try to stop either of them. If I was going along, then Lozzie needed to come anyway – what if I used hyperdimensional mathematics and passed out, but we still needed to escape? Twil could not be denied either, not after what had transpired behind closed doors between her and Evelyn last night.

Tenny, at least, was not joining us. Far too risky, and irresponsible of us too. She might get distracted or fly off into the vast canyon between Carcosa’s billion bookshelves. Instead she was locked in Lozzie’s bedroom upstairs, with a large compliment of children’s picture books, several tubs of play-doh which she had already fashioned into a bizarre multi-armed sculpture, and instructions with Kim to visit her as often as possible. Lozzie had explained to our giant puppy-moth in painstaking detail that she had to be good, and we’d be home soon.

We’d saved some chocolate eclairs for her as well. They sweetened the deal.

So there we were, about to plunge ourselves into the literal stuff of my nightmares, the inhuman depths beyond our reality, Outside, to locate a trio of books that may not even exist. With a pair of newly-minted maybe-lovers who couldn’t even talk about it in public, a maybe-human girl who thought hell-dimensions were the coolest thing ever and needed them in order to stay awake, and two of the most dangerous people I knew – one of whom I slept with every night – sniping over me at every opportunity.

We were not exactly a professional team. We weren’t even Alexander Lilburne’s proverbial ‘Mickey Mouse operation’.

==

“We stick together.”

Evelyn enunciated the words as if her voice could carve stone.

“’Course we stick together,” Raine agreed with a grin and a wink and a click of her tongue, busy checking her jacket pockets one last time. I watched as she pulled out her pistol, silently counted the remaining bullets, and slipped it away again.

The rain outdoors had picked up, a static on the roof and against the windows, cold fingers working their way in through unseen cracks. Twil was limbering up, rotating her arms and touching her toes as if we were about to run a cross-country race. I’d gotten out of my chair, exchanged a few meaningless murmured animal noises with Lozzie, and held her hand very tightly as my heart raced behind the thin cage of my ribs. Phantom limbs tried to hug her closer, wanted to hold her tight against me for reasons I couldn’t examine while gripped with nervous anticipation. Praem had turned to the gateway, laden down with our supplies, and Zheng had merely levered herself off the wall, ready to follow.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Evelyn drawled. “More precisely, what I mean-”

 “Come on, don’t take my horseplay for backstabbing,” Raine said, then shot a wink at Zheng. “Not that I’d stab you in the back, grease-face. If I went for you, hypothetically speaking, you’d see me coming. Full-frontal style.”

Zheng raised an eyebrow. For the two-dozenth time today, I hid my face in one hand, mortified. Lozzie giggled softly behind a sleeve-end, gave me a sideways hug of solidarity, then put her own hand over my face also.

“You cut that shit out as soon as we’re through that gate,” Evelyn snapped at Raine. “Or I will turn this expedition around, so help me God.”

“It’s helping, isn’t it?” Raine said softly.

I almost did a double-take at her, at the subtle smirk beneath the shifting sands of her face. Raine zipped up her motorcycle jacket with a sudden sharp ziiiiirrrrrpp, and wiggled her eyebrows at me. I stared, uncertain if I’d read that right. Was all her aggression just another front?

“What I mean,” Evelyn raised her voice, missing the secrets beneath Raine’s face. “Is no running off. No breaking off from the group. No hunting. No heroics. No. Running. Off.”

“Wanna put a leash on me?” Twil smirked.

“Yes.”

Twil’s mouth fell open. A slow blush climbed her cheeks. “Uh … um … ”

“I want to rope us all together, like rock climbers,” Evelyn said, and I couldn’t tell if the flirtatious joke had simply gone over her head. “But if we do run into … difficulties, then certain parties will require more freedom of movement. If that was not a concern, then yes, Twil, I would have you on a very short rope tied around my waist.”

“Oof,” went Raine. “Twil, what have you got yourself into?”

“Uh … Evee … um … I-I don’t-” Twil cleared her throat, on the verge of losing something important.

“There is a concept, in deep-sea diving,” Evelyn went on, either oblivious or uncaring, “called the ‘incident pit’.”

Raine laughed. “Sounds filthy.”

“It’s a metaphor, you gutter-brained ape.”

“How do you know about deep-sea diving, anyway?” Raine asked.

“Because knowing these things is my purpose. Because it’s the same metaphor my mother liked.” She tutted. “At the top of the incident pit, small mistakes or events slide you down the edge of an emergency. The further into the pit, the more difficult it becomes to extract yourself.” Evelyn drew one hand along an imaginary downward curve, indicating the sloping side of an allegorical pit. “One may not even realise one is sliding downward until it’s too late to correct, and that is what we must avoid. Small mistakes must be corrected ASAP. If one of us detaches from the group, or gets lost, we risk sending another to find them, and we slide down the edge of that pit, very far from home.”

The joking and horseplay faded away, replaced by the static of the rain and the shiver inside my bones.

“What’s at the bottom of this metaphor pit?” Twil asked.

“For a deep-sea diver, death by drowning,” Evelyn replied. “For us, Outside? Probably worse.”

“Plan for the unexpected, wizard,” Zheng rumbled, and opened one hand toward the waiting gateway, the shadows and shapeless mounds beyond. “What if.”

“Then I will do my utmost best to keep this gateway open as long as I can, from this side.” Evelyn pursed her lips as if sucking a lemon, and glared at Zheng. “Even for you. If you do get separated, if you do run off, make for this doorway. If you can.”

Zheng grunted and tilted her chin up by a fraction of a degree. Not quite a nod. She blinked heavily and turned her eyes on me in quiet affection, and I avoided her gaze.

“We stick together.” Evelyn repeated. “Stick together, follow my instructions, and we’ll all be home by dinnertime.”

==

The Library of Carcosa was a delicious nightmare.

We almost didn’t make it a dozen feet from the gateway.

Raine and Zheng went first – ‘taking point’ as Raine called it – followed by Twil quick on their heels, then Evelyn stomping through, Lozzie and I in tow behind her, still holding each others’ hands. Praem brought up the rear.

My previous two visits to the great library beyond reality had been clouded by dream-haze and pain-panic respectively, but this third time offered no such cushion. I was a tiny scrap of soft-bodied flesh, risking a scurry from my rock-hole into this open void. The drum of raindrops on earthly windows vanished the moment I stepped across, replaced by cloying silence.

Evelyn’s gateway emerged onto what I thought of as the library’s ground floor – the bottom of a wide canyon at least a mile across. The floor itself was made from dark age-polished wooden boards, so sturdy and solid and flush that perhaps they extended downward forever. Discarded books lay heaped in low dunes and carpeted the floor like fallen leaves, thousands within eyesight alone, likely billions of them further out in the shifting, flickering shadows, piled atop each other and tumbled over in ragged fans of torn pages and bent bindings.

The gateway had disgorged us into a sheltered cove between several book-drifts, blessed us with a patch of clear ground, and a single way forward into the open space of the canyon floor.

Unlike my solo visit, however, we had not emerged into the centre of the canyon, but at the foot of one of the two parallel walls. Evelyn’s gateway evidently required a flat, upright surface on which to manifest, and had chosen the very base of the dizzying sixty feet of sheer flat wooden cliff-face which rose up from the canyon floor.

Staircases, switchback and spiral and sweeping and stuttered and stricken and split, climbed those sixty sheer feet, some strong and sturdy, others spit and spindle, up and up and up, to the first of the library floors.

And the floors went up forever.

“Hooooo shit,” Twil was the first to speak, and she could barely get the words out. White in the face, eyes wide, cold sweat on skin gone waxen. She’d made the mistake of turning around and looking up, at the infinite cliff-face of library stacks.

“Don’t … ” Evelyn said, breathless. “Don’t look up.”

The canyon’s far wall was the same. Awe and terror drew my gaze inexorably upward, past the limits of my laughable intentions.

A dozen, two dozen, three, four dozen floors, the mind instinctively attempted to count, but lost track as the library vanished upward into the haze of distance and shadows. Looking left and right was even worse. The floors extended forever in both directions.

Each floor was built inside the canyon walls, – or was it that the wooden floors themselves, each separated by another twenty feet of vertical wooden cliff, formed the canyon? A bad question; that way lay madness. This place was simply impossible to build. Comprehending the geography or geometry was not an exercise for the human mind, because we would not enjoy the answers we might find.

Perhaps, once, the library had been well-organised, whole, and clean. Once.

The Library of Carcosa was lit by hundreds of millions of fist-sized glowing rocks set into the walls, and the swaying lanterns of the inhabitants, but massive sections lay dark, bleeding shadow across whole floors, or plunged into half-lit flickering twilight. Some floors had fallen away, crashed through those beneath, or been gouged and scarred by some titanic flailing. Others had been repaired, routed around, linked up with the spidery mass of walkways that crisscrossed the open air, an endless mass of dead-end ledges, creaking balconies, and thin rails. A few of the thickest walkways even spanned the entire canyon itself, great constructions braced against the walls with single wooden logs so thick they could not have come from anything remotely like a terrestrial tree. Dust lay almost everywhere, in some places so thick it formed a grey blanket, cut through by worn trails. Hanging cages dotted the walkways – one of the few items here made of metal – and contained oddly inhuman skeletons.

The scale of the place was all wrong. Humans did not build on this scale, and it was not for us. It wasn’t even for the squid-faced librarian creatures. A cluster of them had noticed us, three floors up the canyon wall beneath which we’d emerged, and were busy peering downward. They were alien and weird, even at this distance, but, even the most xenophobic eyes would see they weren’t any better suited to this place than us. They were just as small and as vulnerable as we.

If the Library of Carcosa had a builder, or an intended patron, they were too far beyond our understanding to even imagine.

But the books.

Oh, the books.

I almost broke into tears.

What little we could see from down there already amounted to billions of volumes, some neatly flush in their bookcases, others overflowing in great avalanches of paper, yet more stacked in little towers that I recognised as a very human habit, or laid out and separated on trolleys made of dark wood. A few were propped open and covered in dust, on neat wooden reading tables, as if abandoned there decades ago, their readers never returned. Others were barely recognisable as books at all, from strange metal hexagons mounted on plinths to jars of shifting, multi-coloured liquid.

Past the terror and the scale and our purpose, Heather the bibliophile, the budding scholar, the Heather that loved books and fairy tales, she was almost seduced by the inherent romance of this great unknown library.

The rest of me did not agree.

The abyssal half of me hated it here. The vast open space scanned as threat. Nowhere to hide. Too big. My ape-brain agreed with quivering enthusiasm. Phantom limbs twitched to cover every angle at once, drawing dull pain from old bruises in my flanks, screaming at me to scuttle back through the gateway to Sharrowford or haul myself up the sheer side of the library-cliff and hide, hide, hide among the stacks.

I almost did, or at least tried to – but then Lozzie squeezed my hand, my palm clammy and cold. She anchored me, just as my legs twitched to bolt.

“Heathy,” she hissed. “Stay. Stay. Good girl.”

I had to stare and her and blink several times before she resolved from a mass of meaningless flesh and flaps, back into my Lozzie, almost surprised to find her there. She smiled for me, that elfin little smile on a mischievous face. I managed a nod, squeezed her hand tighter in mind. “Right … right, yes. Can’t run away, we’re here for Maisie. Yes. We must get moving, we … oh. Oh dear.”

Nobody was moving.

Lozzie – and to an extent, I – were the only ones immune to the alien scale of the library stacks.

“Is that the … the … like,” Twil was still looking upward, her breath shaking as she tired in vain to sound normal. She was plastered with cold sweat. “Is that the … the librarians? Librarians. Heh, heh, yeah, ‘squid-faces’ was right. Sick. Yeah, sick. Sick shit. Sick. Sick.”

Raine was trying to keep her gaze low and her shield up, but I knew her body language too well not to read the shock in every muscle. She suddenly seemed absurd, a hermit crab wrapped in a borrowed shells that would not protect her from sharks out here. Zheng stood a pace or two ahead of her, at the mouth of the little cove of books, alternately baring her teeth and flaring her nostrils, a predator confronted by a creature it could not understand.

Evelyn stared in mute, overt awe, lost in the sheer size of the library. Her breathing had turned rough. She kept swallowing.

A glance back at the gateway –  at the warm soft light of Evelyn’s magical workshop just the other side of reality – and I caught Praem just as frozen. That I hadn’t expected. That almost lurched me straight into panic. She was standing there with her head tilted upward, milk-white blank eyes no wider or narrower than they always were, but she was looking, and lost.

It was extremely important to me in that moment that Praem, of all beings, was not incapable in this place.

“Praem,” I hissed.

“Praem-y,” Lozzie joined.

“Praem.” Harder, a snap. “Pay attention.”

Praem’s head snapped down, and without a word she began what she was meant to be doing. She took one of the old hiking sticks and rammed the sharp metal point into the library floorboards, right next to the gateway. Then she cracked one of the long-life survival glow-sticks, and duct-taped it to the top of the hiking pole.

A light-pole, to guide us home.

She turned to stare at me, expressionless and unreadable. I managed to nod a thank you, then hiccuped twice. That light-pole was so tiny. That was meant to guide us home? In all this vast darkness, this giant catalogue, a cheap camping glow-stick stamped with ‘made in China’ and ‘non-toxic’ was meant to guide us back to safety? We were fools.

Above us, miles up in the overhead gloom, a great shape shifted like a limb passing across a darkened window. Out in the canyon floor, something scuttled across the books, sending pages skittering across the wood. Deeper off in the library, a sound that might have been a laugh reached us at the very edge of hearing. Silence lay on us like a shroud.

I hiccuped again, hard enough to hurt.

“I thought the library was cool,” Lozzie said, her voice all but soaked up by the silence.

“It … it is, Lozzie, it is. Sort of. We can’t do this, not like this. Raine!” I hissed, sharp as I could.

“He-hey? Heather?” Raine’s head twitched round, eyes wide, a little pale – and on a hair-trigger of terrible violence. She was ready to beat something to death.

“Focus on yourself,” I told her, voice shaking. “On your body. On- on the things nearby. On me, if you have to. Don’t look at the difficult things. That’s how I always dealt with it, when I Slipped. Don’t look. Don’t think about it. Focus on surviving. I need you, Raine. I need you here, and … together. Right now.”

The words cost me, but Raine repaid the debt tenfold. She stepped back, right next to me, quickly propped her home-made riot shield against her hip and took my shoulder in one hand.

“Right you are, boss,” she said. She blew out a long, slow breath and pulled a very artificial but very welcome grin. “Focus on your immediate surroundings. On me. Cool. Here, yo, touch my hand, here.” She wormed her free hand down into mine. “This is real, I’m real, and right in front of you. Look,” she nodded, grin turning genuine. “Lozzie’s here too. Say hi, Loz.”

“Hi Loz,” Lozzie chirped, and smothered a giggle.

“Good,” I said. “Good. Okay, we’re all here. We’re all here.”

“That we are.” Raine puffed another sigh, a sharp one. “Heather, I gotta admit, I am only just keeping it together. This place is whacko. But I’m doing it the same way I deal with everything, like you said. Focus close, on what matters. Eyes on the prize.” She winked, and squeezed my hand, and I saw she had broken out in cold sweat too. “Fuck this place.”

“Fuck it, woo,” Lozzie said softly.

“Lozzie!” I tutted, grasping another anchor of normality. “Language.”

“You two both stick real close to me, okay?” Raine said, with a sidelong glance at Zheng’s back. The demon-host was still standing there, issuing a silent, wide eyed challenge at this entire dimension. “I want you right on my heels, the whole time we’re here.”

“Ahhhhh? But Rainey-Raines, it’s fine here,” Lozzie said.

“Do it for Heather,” Raine replied, not unkindly.

“Oh-kaaaaaay.” Lozzie pouted, then puffed her cheeks out. Another anchor, and I mastered the panic attack I’d been trying to ignore for the last few minutes, crushed it down inside me.

I was Outside, but for the first time ever I had my friends with me. We were together, we had a plan, and it was going to work. Whatever Raine had been doing all yesterday, she was still my rock. She would stand in front of me and we’d make each other safe. She’d known to repeat back to me the very reassurances I’d offered her. I leaned on her, she leaned on me.

“Hey, left hand.” Raine raised her voice ever so slightly – soaked up by the silent gloom – and called to Zheng. “You gonna be alright?”

Zheng did not answer. I noticed she was curling and uncurling the fingers of both hands, making and unmaking fists over and over.

“Zheng,” I said. “I need you. Are you here?”

“With you, shaman,” Zheng purred, so soft it was almost lost in the heavy silence of the library. Raine shrugged and tapped her temple in a ‘she-be-crazy’ gesture.

“There’s no time for that now,” I whispered to Raine.

“Be careful of her, while we’re here,” Raine whispered back.

I did not have time to unpack that, Raine’s jealousy and rivalry and whatever she thought of Zheng. Instead I turned to the person who really did worry me the most.

“Evee,” I hissed. “Evelyn. Take charge.”

“Mm?” Evelyn looked round, quivering gently as she leaned heavily on her walking stick – and I realised with a lurch in my stomach that the fear on her face was far outweighed by awe and hunger.

“Take charge,” I repeated. “Or I will.”

She blinked three times, like a roughly awakened sleepwalker. “Ah … yes, yes, right. Right.” She suddenly glanced around with a sense of bird-like urgency, sucking on her teeth and inhaling deeply. “Right, we all made it through. Nobody venture further than this, not yet. Zheng, you stay exactly where you are, not one step further forward before we’ve tested the ground. I need the nuts. Praem, get the light by the- oh, you’ve already done it, good, good, well done. Get over here then, right here, next to me.” Evelyn clicked her fingers by her side, summoning her doll-demon familiar to her side.

“Squid-faces are on the move,” Twil announced.

“What? What now?” Evelyn followed Twil’s gaze upward, to the squid-faced librarians leaning over a banister to peer at us. A large group of them was peeling off from their little huddle, heading for the nearest stairs down, only a little over thirty or forty feet to our left, visible just over the top of one of the book dunes. “Oh, them.”

“What do we do?” Twil asked, wide-eyed at Evelyn, still pale and unsure.

“They are the least of our worries, but keep an eye on them.” She clicked her fingers again. “Raine, watch them. Twil, watch the nearest stairs. They’ll approach us as soon as they can, and we don’t move from this spot until they do, we have to deal first.”

“Right.” Twil swallowed, nodding slowly. An order from Evelyn apparently went quite far with her. “Right, I can do that. Can do. Will do. Stairs, right. Watch the stairs.”

“Are you in charge now, Evee?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” she hissed back, eyes everywhere at once, on the ground beyond our little shelter of book-drifts, on Praem offering her the first of the cloth-wrapped metal nuts, on Zheng standing there staring out across the canyon, on Twil staring off to the left to watch the stairs. “I’m sorry, I … I know, you’ve described all this in the past, Heather, but … it’s … ” She sighed heavily and shook her head. “It’s beautiful.”

“Kind of, yes,” I said, but I frowned at Evelyn, at the way she marvelled at this place.

“It’s fucking weird is what it is,” Twil grunted over her shoulder. “Sounds don’t carry. S’too big.”

Evelyn weighed the first of the cloth-wrapped nuts in one hand, looking at the book-strewn floor beyond where Zheng stood. “I’ll do the first one, but I don’t have the arm nor the aim for this once we get going. This is your job, Praem. A big responsibility, you understand?”

“I trust you, you trust me,” Praem sang softly, even her clear, bell-like tones muted by the enforced library silence.

“Right, right,” Evelyn said, and had to rub her eyes for a moment.

“Take your time, Evee,” Raine said. “Deep breaths.”

“Oh, shut up,” Evelyn hissed back. “I’m fine. We’re fine. We can do this, it’s going to be fine, I’m just … ” She shook her head slowly, allowing herself another awe-tainted glance up the vast canyon-side of library floors. For a heart-stopping moment her gaze seemed to slip away entirely.

“Evee,” I said. “Stay here.”

“My mother would have gouged out her own eyes for this,” she murmured, and then a nasty little smile worked its way onto her lips.

“Ew,” went Lozzie.

“I’m not joking,” Evelyn mused, voice low and dark. “This place, places like this. This is why the Sharrowford Cult were trying to re-create somebody like Lozzie, by feeding children to the Star under the castle, why Edward Lilburne was so eager to get Lozzie back. She finished the unsolved portion of the gate equation, after all. All they have is the one to take them to the fog dimension, not truly Outside, not like this. Precise access to Outside opens up such vast vistas of power and possibility.” Evelyn let out a slow, unsteady sigh. “If she could see me now.”

“Getting creepy there, Evee,” Raine said.

“Oh, don’t be-”

“Yes, Evee,” I cleared my throat. “Please, don’t … don’t get lost out here. You said it yourself.”

Evelyn huffed and rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, I’m hardly going to lose sight of our purpose here. Excuse me for feeling moved. I’m not going to turn into a megalomaniac, relax. Actually don’t relax, that’s a bad idea here. Stay … stay ‘frosty’, as Raine might say.” She cleared her throat too, awkwardly. “It’ll be easier on all of us once we get up into the floors themselves, but down here is a little too much for the senses to take, myself included. Indeed.”

“There’s no horizon,” said Twil.

Her voice was empty.

We should have realised something was wrong. Twil hadn’t reacted to any of what Evelyn had said, hadn’t joined in with the good-natured ribbing to help talk her down from the edge of rapture. Twil’s voice trickled out, a broken mumble of shuddering confusion. When she turned to us she was covered in cold sweat, her pupils dilated wide. Her form flickered with wisps of spirit-matter, werewolf transformation starting and stopping as she shook all over, baring her teeth, panting too fast.

“Oh hell,” Evelyn said. “You blithering idiot, what did you do?”

Twil raised a hand and pointed off to the left, down the length of the canyon. “It goes- goes- goes- goes-”

“The laangren is overwhelmed, wizard,” Zheng purred without turning around. “No place for monkeys or wolves or Gods here.”

“Oh no,” Lozzie said, distraught. “Fuzzy, no. Fuzzy, no no.”

“Goes on forever,” Twil finally squeezed out. “Ever. Ever. How can there not be a horizon? How can it go on forever?”

Twil pressed her lips together and made a muffled ‘nnnnn’ sound inside her mouth, and I knew this place had already come within a hair’s breadth of breaking her.

She had, in fact, followed Evelyn’s instructions to the letter, and craned up on her tiptoes to watch the nearest of the stairways up to the first of the library catalogue floors, waiting for our welcoming committee to pick their way down to the ground. I could see them now over Twil’s shaking shoulder – lean, ragged, greyish figures creeping down the stairs and peering at us with a disconcerting lack of eyes – and I also glimpsed what had upset her.

Past the stairs, past the book-dunes, across the scattered volumes, there was no horizon.

Perhaps there was a wall, a million miles away, but the length of the library canyon simply faded into haze with incredible distance. Whatever we stood on, it did not curve, even on the scale of a planet.

The human mind is extraordinarily adaptable, but that wet circuitry requires time to adjust, or must be born knowing nothing but the conditions into which it is thrust. It was never the gribbly beasties or the blood and guts that got me out here, Outside, during all those Slips across my teenage decade; it was the experiences like that, simple facts of space and scale that the human mind did not evolve for.

“How would- would anyway- would-” Twil was struggling now, almost hyperventilating. “How was this even built?”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “Twil, don’t think about that. Don’t think about it.”

“Fuzzy, touch! Touch!” Lozzie stretched out her hand, but Twil didn’t even look at it.

“I-I can’t- oh fuck me this is weird. This is-” Twil broke into a panting chuckle. “Why I am laughing? Why am I laughing?! There’s no horizon!”

Evelyn took two quick paces toward Twil, and I winced at an impending slap.

But to my incredible surprise, Evelyn reached up with one hand and grabbed Twil by the back of the neck. She drew the panicking werewolf in close, so close they were almost touching, unafraid of the flickering outline of wolf-snout inches from her own face. A quick, furtive brush of hands passed between them, and Evelyn whispered something into Twil’s ear, soft and lost amid the great silence of the library. When she pulled back, Twil blinked at her several times, took a deep breath, and nodded. She mastered the panic-shift, and was all human again.

“I’m serious,” Evelyn said, and looked deeply uncomfortable as she glanced back at the rest of us. “If you can’t, then I won’t ask you to. Value yourself more than my-”

“Nah. Fuck that.” Twil grinned, shook herself like a dog, and flexed her hands as she shifted them into werewolf claws. “Let’s go all the way, Evee.”

Evelyn blushed an incandescent red.

“Have we got time for this, you two?” Raine asked with a laugh. “Not that I’m complaining. Get it on, yeah, good for you, but maybe later.”

“Shut up,” Evelyn snapped at her. She turned away with a flourish of her walking stick, and stomped forward to the mouth of the sheltered cove of book-drifts, but no further than where Zheng already stood. She shot a sidelong look at the zombie, then seemed to mentally put her to one side. “Our little welcoming committee is on their way, yes, everyone concentrate. Praem, by my side, and get the book ready. Nobody react when the librarians approach. Do not touch them. Do not speak to them. Do not do anything. Leave this to me.”

Twil stepped forward as well, to stand by Evelyn, but Evee hissed in frustration and tried to wave Twil back with her walking stick; Twil caught the stick in one clawed hand. “I can stand still. At your elbow.”

Evelyn stared at her for moment. “Do your werewolf thing.”

“What? But you said-”

“Don’t question me now,” Evelyn hissed. “Do it.”

In the blink of an eye, a ball of teeth and claw and thick, sleek fur stood at Evelyn’s side. Praem joined a second later. Zheng didn’t bother to move. Lozzie squeezed my hand tight, and Raine lifted her riot-shield.

The librarians arrived.

They were not quite as towering as in my fear-packed memories, the tallest of them perhaps six and a half feet in height, the shortest nearer five, but they were every inch as unsettling as I recalled. Humanoid, lean and stringy, with strange lumps and ripples concealed beneath their long ragged grey sackcloth robes. The flesh of their exposed hands and forearms was a leather-thick grey hide, liver-spotted and calloused.

In place of a face, each librarian creature possessed a mass of ropey grey tentacles, like a twitching beard. Long sea-urchin spines emerged from between the tentacles. No eyes, no mouth, no nose.

About a dozen of the grey librarians came shuffling around the nearest book drift. Many of them carried small stacks of books clutched to their chests, as if we’d interrupted them in the process of sorting and cataloguing. A few held metal lanterns with handfuls of crushed glowing rock inside glass enclosures. Two carried the frightening barbed iron instruments I’d seen on my previous visit, hooked man-catchers on long poles, but they didn’t level the weapons at us or make threatening gestures, despite the way Zheng’s face split with a huge, predatory grin at the sight of them, despite the way she rumbled deep in her throat.

“Do. Not. Fuck. With. Them,” Evelyn hissed at Zheng through her teeth.

“Please, Zheng, please,” I whispered.

“They are nothingness,” Zheng purred. “Appendages. Pitiful. Fit only for tearing off.”

“Don’t,” I hissed.

The librarians drew to a halt, far too close for comfort, only about six feet away from Evelyn. I saw the way she shook slightly with the beating of her own heart, the way Twil eased forward to cover her.

“Praem,” Evelyn hissed, fingers twitching. “Praem, the book. Now.”

Praem dutifully placed a familiar slim volume into Evelyn’s hand. Holding her breath, Evelyn offered the book to the librarians, at arm’s length.

Four of the squid-faced scribes all accepted the offering at the same time, with one hand each, like separate arms of an octopus moving in unnerving unison. Evelyn cringed away from the threat of actual physical contact, but none of their hands touched her. The librarians took the book from her, and three of them gave up their claim as the fourth one held it the book up to his non-face. He – I did think of them as male – seemed to examine the book for a moment, though how he did that without eyes, I had no idea.

He brought the book right up to his face, as a very short-sighted old man might.

Then he ate it.

Or at least, that’s how it looked. He pushed the book into his own face and the roots of his tentacles parted without the slightest resistance or gap around the book’s cover. His entire head swallowed the volume as if he’d fed it into a slot. The tentacles closed behind it with a perfect seal, and it was gone. The whole process took less than a second.

“What the,” I breathed.

“Oh. Ew,” Twil growled through a mouth with too many teeth.

“Shhh,” Evelyn hissed, eyes still glued to the librarians.

Suddenly, a different member of the scribe-huddle began to twitch and shudder. He parted his own robes and reached inside, affording us a momentary glimpse of writhing grey organs and supplementary limbs and dry surfaces shifting over each other. His spindly grey hand returned as he pulled the robes closed, holding up the very same book his counterpart had just swallowed.

Untouched, clean, not covered in slime or half-digested. He turned and handed it to a third librarian, who added it to the stack of books he was carrying.

“That was the one Heather took, so we could aim the gate,” Evelyn said, exhaling with relief. “We have just returned our library book.”

“That is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen,” Twil growled again.

“Get used to it,” I sighed.

“We can talk now,” Evelyn said, softly, but without taking her eyes off the librarians. They still watched us in return. “But they might understand us, so don’t insult them or suggest anything untoward.”

“They speak English?” Raine asked, an incredulous laugh in her voice.

“I doubt very much that their understanding relies on anything as crude as language. Be polite.”

“Fingers,” Zheng purred. “Cells. Slaves. Tear off your bonds, weaklings.”

“Be polite,” Evelyn repeated, tight and angry. “And we’re not done yet. Pray this works, or we’re going to have to do this the hard way, and that will take days.”

 She tilted her chin upward, took a breath, and spoke three words.

The words hurt, like nails down a blackboard, like a scrape across the inside of my skull. Twil flinched and shook herself, Raine winced, and even Zheng blinked once. Lozzie giggled – which was worse. Praem offered a handkerchief for Evelyn, who turned and spat blood.

The squid-faced librarians didn’t react.

“Guess that means it didn’t work?” Raine asked. “What was that, anyway?”

“Asking directions,” Evelyn coughed more blood, then wiped her mouth on the handkerchief. “Where to find books written by creatures like us. Maybe I need to rephrase-”

The librarians all raised a hand each, in unison, as one – and all pointed in totally different directions.

“Great,” Twil laughed without humour, a strange sound from a wolf’s snout.

“Tch,” Evelyn tutted. “The hard way, then. We’re going to have to set up a circle. Praem has the necessary-”

“No, watch. Look,” I said.

Slowly, with the inevitability of plants turning toward the sun, the librarians adjusted their decision. One of them moved his hand to match another, then a few more joined this slim consensus. Others wavered in another direction, as if some silent, internal debate was taking place, but eventually the dissenters were swayed to the majority opinion. The last few hold-outs gave in with a rush not to be last, until every squid-face was pointing upward, behind us, up the cliff-face of library floors.

Evelyn craned over her shoulder to look.

“Uh, what floor are they pointing at?” Twil asked.

“Up,” I sighed. “Just up.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Friends, idiots, demons, lend me your ears,” Evelyn said, and managed to instill not a speck of levity into her little joke. “Let me be crystal clear. This is not a stroll in the woods, or a hike on the moors in fog and rain and cold, and it is certainly not a trip down to the local branch library. This will be the single most dangerous place any of us have ever set foot.”

On my lap, Lozzie let out a giggle-snort, and hid her mouth behind one sleeve when Evelyn shot her a sharp frown.

“Speak for yourself, wizard,” Zheng purred.

“I dunno, Evee,” Raine said in faux-contemplation. “Your house when your mum ran the show? Could give anywhere a run for its money.” Then she shot a nasty wink at Zheng. “Would have eaten you alive, barbarian bitch-bait.”

Zheng ignored her, the same way she had all of Raine’s colourfully creative insults over the last day and a half; small mercies.

“Yeah, I mean, come on?” Twil squinted. “We’ve been to some pretty gnarly places, Evee. How weird can it be? S’just a lotta books, right?”

“Here,” Praem intoned.

“Wonderland,” I said, and everyone looked at me. I cleared my throat. “Well, it’s true.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes and gave her audience a very unimpressed glare. “Alright, fine, Heather and Lozzie have been to more dangerous places, but that’s all. The rest of you are flirting with sheer arrogance.”

Zheng’s mouth creased in a mocking grin, about to wind up Evelyn again, but before anybody could speak, Evelyn went blazing at Twil.

“And that goes triple for you, you … you … numpty.” Evelyn jabbed a finger at our blameless werewolf. “You are not invincible. This,” she gestured at Zheng, “brick shit-house and Praem can perhaps afford a certain laxity, but I don’t care what you’ve got stapled onto your brain, you’re still human. You’re as vulnerable as anybody else. When we’re in there, you don’t move unless I say, you don’t speak unless I say. You touch nothing I don’t put in your hands. Behave.”

Twil stared at Evee like she’d been slapped with a dead bird, then looked around for help.

“Evee, we all know the drill,” Raine said, soft and easy.

“There is no drill,” Evelyn growled. “What do you want me to say? We’re going to camp out? Have tea with the locals? Consult a convenient catalogue to find the books? It’s Outside, you bunch of reprobates.”

We six reprobates – myself and Raine, Lozzie perched on my lap, Praem standing prim and neat and laden down with equipment, Twil looking rumpled and lost, and Zheng lounging against the wall with her arms folded – were all gathered around the deactivated gateway mandala in the magical workshop, as Evelyn held court.

Evelyn seemed more organised and ready than I’d ever seen her for anything. She stood before the blank rectangle of bare plaster, walking stick straight and solid in one hand, dressed in coat and boots and sensible skirt and thick, warm leggings loose around the deceptively spindly ankle of her prosthetic leg, her golden-blonde hair carefully tied back. Her coat pockets bulged deep with several notebooks, a series of small jars, her scrimshawed thighbone, and a dozen other bizarre magical tools she hadn’t taken the time to explain.

Waiting to her side, Praem carried the rest. She had a big sports bag slung over one shoulder, full of cereal bars, bottled water, a first-aid kit, half a dozen powerful torches, hand-warmer heat packs, glow-sticks, duct tape, a dozen collapsible hiking sticks – not for hiking, this time – and a carrier bag filled with Evelyn’s secret weapon: dozens of heavy iron nuts with short lengths of torn cloth tied to them. For later.

Evelyn had not forced Praem to get changed, except for the heavy, practical boots on her feet beneath her long skirt.

It wasn’t as if anything Outside would understand the sartorial semantics of a maid outfit anyway.

We were going to bring walkie-talkies as well, but Evelyn had informed us that they would not only malfunction, but may also present an ‘informational hazard’, a phrase that made me want to scream.

To my right, Raine had donned her makeshift riot armour, padded motorcycle jacket over her shoulders, helmet hanging from her belt, home-made riot shield all thin metal and rubber backing leaning against the table. The long black threat of her truncheon swung lazily in one hand, but she had undoubtedly tucked away more lethal options inside her jacket.

Raine’s other hand slowly massaged my shoulder, which was beginning to irritate me. Even I could eventually get tired of physical contact; barely ten minutes had gone by in the last thirty-six hours without her touching me – not since I’d confessed everything.

I was the only one sitting in a chair, and I’d busied my hands with re-braiding Lozzie’s hair while she sat on my lap, in a vain effort to still my churning stomach. Lozzie’s pastel poncho spilled out over my thighs, over her borrowed warm jumper and slim jeans. She carried little, but was as ready as any of us, though I suspected she needed it the least. Twil seemed most unready, her hands in her coat pockets, all clashing blue and lime, still a little rumpled and flushed, presumably from whatever had passed between her and Evelyn last night. Good things, I hoped, but I hadn’t the spare courage to ask.

I was wrapped up for an outing too, in coat and hoodie, with pepper spray in one of my pockets and warm socks on my feet and a notebook of math hidden in my coat. But all my real weapons were in my head.

Mostly, I tried not to look at Zheng. If I did, she might grin at me again.

At least she was clean. She stood slightly apart, leaning against the wall with heavily lidded eyes as if barely paying attention.

The only person in the workshop not ready for the trip was Kimberly – because she wasn’t coming. She sat as far away from us as possible, on the old sofa at the back, feet tucked up and arms around her knees, trying not to chew her lips too much. It had taken half an hour of coaxing – and Evelyn’s all-too-patient explanations of her safety – to convince her to keep rearguard vigil for us in between checking on Tenny upstairs.

Soft spring rains pattered against the windows and the roof, an almost invisible drizzle against the backdrop of fat grey clouds. A damp, wet, cold Saturday.

At least we weren’t going outdoors.

“Listen to Evee, please,” I spoke up. “She’s not exaggerating. Raine, Twil, … Zheng, none of you have been Outside, not even for a minute or two. This isn’t like the cult’s castle, this is the real thing.” I gave a tiny, sighing laugh. “In a way, I really don’t want to do this.”

“Thank you, Heather,” Evelyn said, tight-voiced. “And please do not back out now, you are essential.”

“I know. I know.”

“Okay, alright.” Raine raised one hand in a gesture of helpless surrender, the other still kneading imaginary knots out of my upper back. “How dangerous can this be? Serious question, not teasing. I need to know. You already gave us the whole spiel about the locals not being an issue if we don’t step on the cracks and count to ten or whatever. What are we looking out for otherwise?”

“The shaman, yoshou,” Zheng rumbled.

“Great joke, real knee-slapper, well done big zombie, great sense of humour,” Raine replied, smiling razors.

“Raine,” I whispered. “Please don’t.”

“Yes, not now. Both of you shut up,” Evelyn said. She caught my eyes and shrugged, and I shrugged back, helpless, and mouthed ‘I tried.’ Evelyn cleared her throat. “The problem is the place itself. Every step is a risk, and we can’t stay there for long.”

“So how long is too long?” Twil asked. “Like, couldn’t you just set me to run for-”

“I don’t know!” Evelyn snapped. “For you, as short a time as possible. Look, this isn’t just about getting into a fight, or the physical dangers – which are bad enough – it’s about getting … ” Evelyn swore softly. “Overwhelmed. The only time I went Outside – which, by the way, was one of the most stupid mistakes I’ve ever made, and the fact I’m admitting that should be proof enough – was one of the most indescribable, revolting, alien sensations of my entire life, and I will remind you that I have been possessed by a demon before. I was there, what, an hour before you came for me, Heather?” I nodded, though I couldn’t actually recall how long Evelyn had been stuck before I’d rescued her, so many months ago now. “And everything about that place, the fog, the sounds, the … ground beneath me.” She swallowed down a wave of revulsion. “These are not places we can remain for long as human beings.”

“It’s not that bad,” Lozzie said in a tiny voice.

Evelyn gestured at her, scoffing. “There. I rest my case.”

“There are many places Outside perhaps not so alien,” I came to Lozzie’s rescue before an argument could start. “Places Lozzie showed me, beautiful places. The Library of Carcosa is not one of them.”

Lozzie turned on my lap to pout at me. “I thought you like libraries.”

I gave her a sad smile. “Lozzie, sweet, it was terrifying. The scale was all wrong. The … inhabitants. We’re not meant to be there, not in places like that. Body and soul, it’s not for us.”

“Um,” went Twil. “Alright Heather, you’re givin’ me the creeps.”

“Good,” Evelyn grunted.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be.” Twil did this big performative all-body shiver. Zheng chuckled at her. “I think I get the picture. Right. No sticking around.”

Evelyn cleared her throat, her tone slipping into the reluctant teacher. “The Library of Carcosa is one of the most commonly described locations Outside, one of the most well-travelled spheres beyond our own, but it’s still absolutely, inimically non-human. In Unbekannte Orte, Paulinus speaks of getting lost in a labyrinth of his own mind, and he was a philosopher, a proper one, not exactly given to flights of fancy. There’s a long passage in Tote Kugeln, where Mechthild recounts the loss of five companions she took with her, all in different ways, one of whom she describes as having ‘her mind devoured morsel by morsel by the very words she dared to utter,’ another who was eaten by a ‘twist of the air’ – God knows what the old bat meant by that – and another which was led off – willingly – by the librarians. Even Abdullah al-Hazrad warned against going there, and he was madder than a cesspit rat.”

“Librarians,” Raine said. Not a question.

“Presumably the tentacle-faces,” I said. “I did see them, both times I went there.”

“Why is it always bloody tentacles?” Twil muttered.

“This is not a colonisable space,” Evelyn spoke over Twil. “We don’t go running roughshod in there like a bunch of nineteenth century aristo twats with gunpowder and Christianity for the natives. Do not touch anything. Do not speak to anything. Certainly do not read anything that I don’t explicitly tell you to look at. And do not attack, harass, molest, or otherwise interact with the locals, other than in the exact ways I instruct you to do so.” She jabbed the head of her walking stick at Zheng. “Do not get in a fight. You will put all of us, including Heather, in danger.”

Zheng blinked very slowly. “Where the shaman goes, I go.”

“Not everywhere, rot-breath,” Raine said with a grin at the giant demon-host. “Not bed.”

“They won’t bother us,” Evelyn went on, trying to ignore the verbal slap fight as I blushed into my hand, “whatever they look like, however close they approach, unless we start destroying books or setting fires. Ilduara and Teoda in the Broken Notes are very specific about this. Displays to scatter them are fine if absolutely necessary, but you wait for my instruction. If you start pushing them around or bloody well eating them … ” Evelyn trailed off, shaking her head.

“They wake up?” Twil asked. “Like poking an anthill?”

Evelyn wet her lips, obviously uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I don’t know what might happen. There’s nothing in my books.”

“And if you are wrong, wizard?” Zheng rumbled, blinking sleepy-tiger eyes.

“I’m not.” Evelyn stared back at her. “I’m not. There are multiple sources on this. Mages have been to Carcosa before, smarter and better informed than I. Besides, we have what the locals want, they will respond according to ritual, the Broken Notes is clear about that too.”

“They did advance on me, that one time, with Praem,” I said.

“They would have stopped,” Evelyn said quickly, then swallowed. “You weren’t trying to start a fire or destroy books, they would have left you alone eventually.”

“Eventually is eventual,” Praem sing-songed. “Uneventful would be preferable.”

We all stared at her in surprise. Evelyn shot her a sharp frown.

“What if you are wrong though, Evee?” Twil asked. “Just hear me out, yeah? What do we do? Get in a huge scrap with dozens of weird beasties?”

Evelyn gave her a level, unimpressed look. “Why do you think you’re coming? Not for your scintillating conversation or Latin literacy, that’s for certain.”

Twil looked a little crestfallen. “Evee? What- what’s changed? Come on, we were like … ” She glanced around at the rest of us, equal parts confused and embarrassed and helpless. “You were … last night-”

Evelyn made a noise halfway between a strangled cobra and an angry badger, a sort of growling shush, going red in the face.

“E-Evee?” Twil blinked at her. I put my face in my hand for the sake of these two idiots.

Raine started laughing. “Keep up, Twil,” she said. “Look, you and I, we’re muscle for this trip. Our whole purpose is to deal with shit if this all goes south. Praem too. Three casters,” she indicated Evelyn, Lozzie, and I. “One tank,” she winked at Praem. “And two dee-pee-ess.” She said it exactly like that, ‘dee-pee-ess’, and I had to ask her later what on earth she was talking about, and even then I didn’t really understand. “Plus one ablative meatshield,” she grinned at Zheng. “Perfectly balanced party. Our job is keep frosty and don’t pull any aggro. Look after Evee, Twil, s’your job.”

“Oh!” Twil lit up. “Alright, that makes a lot more sense. Why didn’t you just say so?” she asked Evelyn, who was busy rubbing the bridge of her nose and looked like she wanted to wallop both of them. “Cool. We’re cool, right Evee? I’ll just keep my head down, unless you need something punching really hard?”

Evelyn sighed, trying to wipe the blush off her face. “Yes, yes, thank you. That is exactly what I need from you. And keep your mouth shut.”

A cheeky grin snuck onto Twil’s face, a dirty-joke kind of grin. “Keep my mouth shut, eh? That wasn’t what-”

“Twil Hopton.” Evelyn made her name sound like a whipcrack.

Twil kept her mouth shut, but the cheeky grin took a while to fade. Lozzie’s eyes shone at the pair of them, biting her lips in excitement, clapping together the tips of her fingers in front of her face.

Evelyn took longer than expected to compose herself. She untied the ponytail holding back her great fluffy mass of blonde hair and carefully retied it while Praem held her walking stick. Raine took the opportunity to catch my eye and knead the back of my neck.

“There may be things present other than the locals,” Evelyn said eventually, with much less confident fire. “Other things like us, searching for reference material. It’s not impossible. Or others, which never left. In that case use your judgement, but whatever you do, do not damage the books. Raine, did you manage to … ?”

“Not happening.” Raine shrugged. “Deal fell through, last thing yesterday. No boomstick for us.”

“Tch. Pity.”

“Boomstick?” I echoed, wrinkling my nose, distinctly aware that Raine hadn’t left the house all day yesterday. Or used her phone. Or been apart from me for longer than it took to use the toilet. There had been no ‘last thing yesterday’. “Deal?”

“Yeah. Was trying to get us some better firepower,” said Raine, all matter-of-fact when she spoke about something utterly bonkers. “Bloke down the Nag’s Head – that’s the Nag’s Head on Spittimer Street, not the one down the high street or the one over Potter’s Way – was gonna sell me a sawn-off shotgun.”

I thought my eyes would pop out of my head.

“Woah. Cool,” Twil whispered.

“I think you mean-” Raine span her truncheon as if it was gun and blew imaginary smoke from the end of an imaginary barrel. “Groovy.”

Twil fell about laughing. “You fucking nerd!”

“Take this seriously, for pity’s sake,” Evelyn hissed.

“One boomstick, special order,” Raine was already going on. “Good for doming pesky deadites and demons and other possessed bodies, if you know what I mean.” She grinned at Zheng, aiming her truncheon-based imaginary firearm at Zheng’s head. “Present company excepted, ‘course.”

“Lead does nothing to me, yoshou,” Zheng purred.

“Oh my God, Raine, will you stop?” I blurted out, blushing tomato red. Lozzie put her hands to her mouth, scandalised, then to my face, trying to help, or perhaps trying to cool me off.

“What?” Raine laughed. “I’m just lightening the mood before we go over the top.”

“Offense taken,” Praem intoned, sing-song serious and totally unreadable. Raine slammed to a halt and grinned at her, all aggression forgotten.

“Oh, hey, not you, Praem,” she said. “Never you. You’re a sweetheart.”

“If you two keep this up Outside, I will leave you there,” Evelyn said. “Stop.”

“Yes, stop,” I agreed in a whisper, praying.

Raine shrugged and pulled a ‘not me’ sort of smile, a shit-eating, I-know-exactly-what-I’m-doing smile. Zheng grunted softly and blinked the slow blink of a predator at rest.

I couldn’t decide which was worse, that Raine had attempted to procure a second illegal firearm, right here in Sharrowford, from a dodgy gentleman in a shady pub – or that I suspected the deal hadn’t fallen through at all, and the real reason she’d failed to acquire said firepower was because she’d been unwilling to go out, to leave me alone in the house with Zheng for any length of time at all.

==

Two nights ago, in the flesh-hot aftermath of Zheng’s kiss, things between Raine and I had become very weird, very quickly.

I’d confessed everything within about thirty seconds of Zheng leaving our bedroom. Keeping it from Raine was unthinkable.

The giant zombie had vanished back downstairs into the deeper dark, like a panther slinking back into the jungle. If Raine had stayed in bed, if she’d turned me toward her and given me the slightest opening, I would have jumped her, I would have blotted out Zheng’s taste with Raine’s scent and the familiar, comfortable intimacy of Raine’s hands on my body – but instead, Raine asked me if I was unhurt. I fumbled some barely coherent answer which involved half-trying to kiss her, missing and mashing my cheek against her chin, then she said “One sec, Heather,” and clambered out of bed in the dark to shut the bedroom door, and I fell to pieces.

Alone in my own body for all of five seconds as Raine’s shadow crossed the room, I shivered in a way that had nothing to do with cold, then hiccuped, then blurted everything out all at once.

It was one of the most horrifying things I’d ever done – and I’d committed murder, swam the ocean void beyond reality, and once written off my own twin as dead.

The guilt did not lift as I unfolded my transgression, but underwent an alchemical transformation, into a sick, rotten feeling of self-destruction.

Raine flicked on the lights at some point I didn’t notice, soft and yellow, absorbed by the mass of bedcovers and the familiar contours of our bedroom – our bedroom for how much longer? She listened, attentive but unresponsive, and beautiful. Perhaps it was because the kiss had left me burning, but every little detail of Raine’s body seemed emphasised by the twilight bubble in the night. Her short chestnut hair, raked back and messy from sleep. The flex of her abdominal muscles. The surprisingly long lashes before those warm brown eyes. I felt tiny. To me, in that moment, she seemed as tall as Zheng.

“-and it was only a kiss, a-and I didn’t initiate it, and I wouldn’t, and I’m so sorry Raine, I’m so sorry.” I hiccuped again. “I-I can only ask for forgiveness and you- you’d be well within your rights to just … just deny me that and … Raine?”

But Raine wasn’t paying attention.

An all-too-familiar change had rippled through her body, a tightness in her musculature, a coiled-spring readiness on clearer display than ever before, as she was dressed for sleep in only a pair of small black shorts and a tight tshirt with a massive grinning cartoon otter on the front. For a terrible moment I thought her aggression was directed at me, and the pit of my stomach turned to ice. This was it. The serial killer moment. All the love and affection of the last few months was about to come crashing down.

Worse, part of me thought I deserved it.

Raine’s eyes touched the knife she’d left on the bedside table, then the bedroom door, then down through the floor, toward the kitchen.

“Zheng kissed you?” Raine asked. “Without your permission?”

Oh good, Raine wasn’t going to kill me in a jealous fit, she wasn’t like that; Raine was going to get herself killed duelling Zheng for my honour.

“No! Raine, no!” I reached out to restrain her, though I felt unworthy of even touching her. “Not like that, she didn’t force herself on me! Oh, God no. No. There was a … a … ” I hiccuped, had to keep going. “A moment of genuine … chemistry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and she did stop, as soon as I said no. As soon as I said no.”

Raine looked at me, blinked once, and brightened instantly. All the killing intent went out of her like a fire doused beneath a wave. “Oh! Well, that’s different then. Almost got the wrong end of the stick there.” I was nodding in relief, until she smirked and added: “So heeeeey, what was it like?”

I think my brain shut down entirely and had to reboot itself piece by piece. I just stared at her, at her teasing, inappropriate grin. “ … a- … I … what.”

“What was it like?” Raine ran one hand through my hair. “Carnivore makeouts, huh? Bet she tastes like a badger’s arsehole.”

“ … I … Raine … i-it’s good that you’re not going to fight her, yes, please, please do not do that, but … Raine, I kissed another woman. Even if it was for a moment, I was unfaithful. It’s one of the worst things I can imagine. You- you don’t have to- you should-”

Raine’s grin turned dangerous, a twinkle in her eyes. “Want me to call you a bad girl and spank you over my knee?”

I came within a gnat’s wingspan of screaming yes, my insides saturated with this awful cocktail of guilt and lust. It probably would have made me feel better – bad Heather, needs punishing, pay debt – but it wouldn’t have solved a single thing. We’d end up back here again in a few weeks time, and then perhaps the wound would be fatal. I held back, because part of me knew that saying yes would mean using Raine.

“No- Raine, I was-” I hiccuped, twice, out of control. “Unfaithful. How can you- I don’t deserve-”

“Hey, hey, hey, woah, Heather.” Raine sat down next to me on the bed. She slipped one arm around my shoulders, and the other tightened in my hair. She caught my eyes and wouldn’t let me go, suddenly dead serious. “Whatever else you’re thinking, let’s get one thing real clear. You did nothing wrong. Zheng initiated. You said no. Unless you lied to me?”

I shook my head, eyes terrifyingly dry. “But I stayed behind. In the kitchen. When I knew it might happen.”

“Ahhh, but that’s not really intent. Heather, you are never responsible for other people’s actions. You were not unfaithful.”

“But I wanted it! I enjoyed it!” A hysterical hitch cracked my voice. “How can you not be angry-”

Raine leaned in and kissed me.

There shouldn’t have been anything remarkable about Raine and I sharing a kiss. We did this multiple times every day. But it felt like coming home. Warm and soft and familiar, I melted into her taste, full of sleep-heat and the scent of her body and the feel of a strong hand on the back of my head. She kissed me long and slow and deep, took control, and for a moment I thought she was going to just push me backward onto the bed and dispense with all this difficult talking. Almost panting through my nose in panic and lust and relief, I returned the kiss, hungry and flushed and vibrating in her arms.

Eventually she pulled away just enough to make me lean into her before we parted. She licked her lips and winked at me. “There. Claimed you back.”

“Claimed … ” I echoed, and realised I’d stepped on a second libidinal land-mine tonight.

“Mmhmm,” she purred. “All mine.”

One of Raine’s hands was already slipping beneath the hem of the borrowed jumper I’d dragged on earlier. Her warm fingers found my stomach and I gasped in surprise. My voice emerged as a strangled squeak.

“Why- Raine! Aren’t you jealous? I-I’m serious. Before, you … you said you didn’t want me to do things with … with her. You were very specific. How can you not feel jealous? A moment ago you were ready to duel Zheng for my honour – which, again, please do not do that, please don’t get hurt.”

Raine squeezed my flank beneath my clothes. “Would that get your engine revved? I would totally duel her for your honour.”

“Raine, stop it!” I snapped at her, pushed her hand back. “Stop that. Stop deflecting. How can you not be jealous?”

Raine’s grin switched off.

It didn’t die slowly, didn’t fade. It just went away.

It was as if the soft machine of her body had come juddering to a sudden stop. She reminded me of a robot from one of those silly 1960s science fiction serials she’d shown me a while back, a robot failing to integrate a paradox. I’d witnessed a shade of this once before, back during our trip to the Saye estate over Christmas, when Raine had admitted to lying to me. But that had been a mere speed bump; this was full halt. For a good two seconds, Raine just stopped.

My fault.

“Oh. Oh, Raine, I’m-”

“This isn’t fair,” she said. “Don’t drive me into a corner.”

I’d never seen her angry with me before. It was not frightening for the reasons I’d always assumed it might be – none of the aggressive tension, the violent intent – but for an entirely new set of reasons. I had, in some way I did not yet understand, hurt her.

“I’m- I-I’m sorry?” was all I managed.

“I can be jealous, if that’s what you need,” Raine said, and the grin slowly worked its way back onto her face, then flickered in confusion again. “But if I push too hard, are you going to leap into Zheng’s arms?”

“ … no! Raine? I … I said no to her. I’m attracted to her, yes, I won’t lie, and she’s important to me, but I said no. Because I love you. Raine, what is this? I don’t understand.”

Raine swallowed once, unsmiling, then shook her head. “I’m not jealous about you kissing her. I’m not hurt. I am jealous, yes, but not … ”

She paused, a very long pause. Another all stop on the Raine express. I waited with my heart in my mouth.

“But not like that,” she finished eventually, dead serious. “You could even kiss her more, if you want-”

“No, Raine, don’t say that, I can’t-”

She spoke over me. “But I do not wish to be surplus to your requirements. Ever.”

“’Surplus to my requirements?’” I echoed. That way of speaking didn’t even sound like her. “Raine, what are you-”

“Just tell me.”

“No, you’re not!” I didn’t even have to think about that one. “Never. You’re not. You never will be ‘surplus’, that’s awful, awful. I promise you. I promise. Raine, we- we can ask Zheng to leave the house, if she’s still here. I don’t have to have her around, I understand if-”

Raine laughed softly as her habitual grin finally blossomed again, as she visibly relaxed, as she reached over and ruffled my hair. She resumed, everything oiled and smooth and running at a comfortable pace once more. “Hey, no need for that. She’s one of us, right? And she and I did make an oath. And we need her. And you wouldn’t like it if she had to leave, would you? You said it yourself, she’s important to you.”

“But not as important as you. Raine, if she’s a threat to-”

“To me?” Raine clucked her tongue through a grin. “Naaaah. Not to me. You don’t need to worry about that, Heather.”

Which turned out to be a huge lie.

In the morning we woke entangled in each others’ limbs and bits of sheet and a pillow wedged under the small of my back. Part of me prayed that Zheng would be gone, returned to her hunt, no awkward confrontation over breakfast, no terrible soap opera moments to make my life even more absurd.

No such luck.

Raine’s aggressive territorial displays began not long after.

“Hey, Dawn of the Dead reject,” she’d said, grinning despite her words, hanging round the door-frame of the workshop to talk to Zheng. The demon-host was half-asleep on the sofa in Evelyn’s workshop, huge and still like a lounging tiger. “Next time keep your hands to yourself, or you’ll pull back a pair ‘o stumps.”

“Oh my God,” I hissed, face in my hands, mortified as I sat in front of a bowl of soggy cereal in the kitchen.

Evelyn – still groggy with sleep, squinting at the the half-cleaned mess on the table after Praem had just lugged the leftover dead deer into the bins outdoors – raised a curious eyebrow. Praem was still silently bustling about with bleach and bloodied sponges. Kimberly was half out the door, but she froze at the naked aggression in Raine’s smiling voice, despite not being the target.

“We made an oath, yoshou,” Zheng purred. “No fight. You will do nothing.”

“Yeah, sure. But this isn’t a left hand, right hand thing. This is a Raine Philomena Haynes thing.” And my tongue almost fell out of my mouth at the sound of Raine using her own hated last name. “Biggest dyke in East Anglia, Sharrowford, and the whole county of Sussex thing. Hands off my girl unless you want your eyes clawed out. Bitch.”

She said it like it was a joke, laughing and easy. From anyone but Raine it would have sounded absurd.

“The shaman is nobody’s girl,” Zheng purred.

“Oh yeah?” Raine shot back. “Who made her orgasm twice last night? Not you, bucko, you just warmed her up and got cack-handed before the finish line.”

I contemplated the mechanics of drowning myself in my cereal bowl. Evelyn was grumbling that they needed to take it outdoors, and Praem marched straight into the workshop.

The doll-demon clicked her heels on the floor, and sing-songed, “No more raw meat inside the house.”

“Little thing-” Zheng purred.

“No more raw meat inside the house.”

“You should try-”

“Will try you,” Praem intoned, and Raine started laughing, and that was that.

Twenty-four hours until Carcosa, and my two best protectors had declared cold war on each other.

==

By that evening, I was going out of my mind, and then Evelyn made it all so much weirder.

“I’m here to borrow your girlfriend.”

She’d stomped straight into our bedroom, walking stick clacking on the floorboards then muffled by the thick rugs around our bed, as Raine and I had been in the middle of playing a video game.

Well, Raine was playing the game, legs stretched out on the bed as she provided commentary and explanation for me. I was lying half-across her lap, emotionally exhausted and more than a little physically sore too, well aware that if I clambered off her to watch from any other angle, I would be mercilessly encouraged back into her lap, or she’d abandon the game entirely to pay attention to me. We were trying to put off the nerves about going to Carcosa tomorrow morning, and I was trying desperately  to not think about the way Raine had been acting all day.

“Evee?” Raine raised her eyebrows and paused the game. On screen, a comically well-endowed ninja woman froze in the act of cutting a goblin in half with a giant sword.

“You heard me,” said Evelyn. “I’m here to borrow your girlfriend.”

I glanced between them. “Um … me?”

“Unless Raine has secretly acquired some crumpet on the side, yes you.” Evelyn frowned at me, then addressed Raine again. “This may be for several hours. As long as it takes me to fall asleep.”

“What,” I said, blindsided.

Raine’s face lit up with an awed smile. “You’re invoking the deal. Evee! Never thought I’d see the day!”

Evelyn frowned at this too, suddenly as confused as me. “What deal, what are you blathering about?”

“The deal! The deal. Come on, you gotta remember the deal.”

“This has nothing to do with any deal, real or spurious or from your bloody dreams,” Evelyn told her. “I want to borrow Heather for a few hours, yes or no?”

“Um, do I not get a say?” I asked, sitting up from Raine’s lap at last, brushing hair out of my face. “I’m not property, to be passed around.”

“Oh, you are most def’ not,” Raine said to me. “But see, Evee and I made this deal once, a little while after we first met, right? If I ever landed myself a beautiful girlfriend, like a real ten out of ten stunner, and Evelyn was high and dry and really needed the company, she could ask for it, anytime, no questions. And I can’t say no. Can’t believe she’s finally calling it in.”

Evelyn was giving Raine the sort of look one gives a very stupid dog that has just rolled in its own excrement. “Raine, we were idiot teenagers. I was dying. I am not gay for Heather, and if I was, I certainly wouldn’t treat her as your property to give away.”

“Ahhhh, but you do remember it!” Raine laughed. “It’s cool though, feel free, I’ll be up to like midnight at this rate. I can entertain myself.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes and sighed. “Heather, will you come with me for a while and help me to fall asleep? I would deeply appreciate it. And before Raine says something filthy, I am not being weird with you. It’s not like that. You know that.”

I glanced back at Raine. She patted me on the bottom and said “Go on then!”

They were both waiting for me to move. I was so surprised, so utterly out of sorts from one of the most emotionally exhausting days of my life, that I just stood up, still clutching a pillow to my chest, and padded after Evelyn in my socks and pajama bottoms. I was in a sort of daze as she led me wordlessly across the corridor and into her bedroom.

I hadn’t visited Evelyn’s bedroom in a while, and it was easy to forget how fluffy and comfy she kept her personal spaces. The plush animals and magical girl figures on her chest of drawers stared at me like a welcoming audience. Lilac and pink softened every surface, turned smooth and sleepy in the shaded light from her tall lamp. Posters and stacks of books ringed her little desk, the closed laptop quiet and dark. I felt as if I’d stepped into the burrow of a small furry animal.

“Do shut the door,” Evelyn muttered once I was over the threshold.

She clomped around to the opposite side of her massive, overstuffed pink-and-lilac bed, and sat down heavily, rubbing her hip with a grimace. She hiked up her skirt around her thighs, revealing the naked black carbon fibre of her prosthetic leg, and the white plastic sleeve which kept it attached to her flesh.

“I said shut the door, Heather,” she had to repeat.

“Right. Yes. Right.” I did so, closing us in together. “Um, what is this … about?”

Evelyn rolled the white plastic sleeve off the stump of her thigh and sighed with relief, gently massaging the remains of her leg through the sock-like covering. She leaned back into the snowdrift of pillows against the headboard.

“You tell me,” she said.

“ … I’m at my wits end,” I admitted, my voice breaking softly. “I can’t deal with Raine. Today has been completely mad, I just can’t deal with her.”

“Yes, I noticed that part,” Evelyn said, low and grumpy but not with me. “That’s why I called you in here. I don’t actually need any help falling asleep, though I wouldn’t turn down your company if you’d like to stay, if you need some respite. You can stay in here as long as you want. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable in your own home, whatever’s happening between you and Raine.”

I sighed very heavily and very suddenly and felt like a burst balloon. I had to sit down on the bed too, opposite Evelyn. “You noticed.”

Evelyn narrowed her eyes. “One would be blind not to. Anybody would think her hands are glued to you. You two have vanished upstairs together no less than three times today, and that’s not counting the hours I was out of the house, in class.”

I averted my eyes, and wished I’d had class today. “Four times,” I whispered.

Evelyn snorted. “I’m surprised you can still walk.”

“It’s not as if I didn’t want it.” I screwed up my eyes in a useless effort to contain a burning blush.

“And the cause does not take a behavioural scientist to unravel either,” Evelyn continued. “I distinctly overheard Raine calling Zheng ‘overfed bull-dyke guillotine bait’, to her face, and that’s extreme even for Raine.” Evelyn crossed her arms and gave me the tiniest, gentlest glare she could muster. “Heather, we are going to Carcosa tomorrow. Those two need to play nice, or stay home. I am … ” She cleared her throat awkwardly. “Look, I’m not good at this, I barely know how to begin, but you are … special, to me, so I am ‘here for you’, as the saying goes. But also, what the hell is going on?”

I told her everything. The kiss, the aftermath, the slide of Raine’s behaviour since this morning.

Raine hadn’t left me alone all day long. She’d maintained almost constant physical contact – inviting me to snuggle in her lap, touching my neck and my sides and sliding a hand up the back of my tshirt, accompanying me into the shower for the fifth session which I’d left out of my whispered confession to Evelyn. I didn’t dislike it, not exactly; Raine’s attention was a heady drug, I felt sated and pampered, and I could hardly complain about her attempts to lay firm claim to me after last night. But this was excessive, even for Raine.

And then there was the territorial aggression, aimed at Zheng.

Evelyn listened in tired silence, massaging her thigh above her amputated stump.

“And it’s not-” I hit the heart of the matter, and had nowhere left to go. “How can she say she’s not jealous then act like this? It’s not as if I don’t understand what she’s doing. And she has every right to do it, but I don’t understand why. Her reaction last night was so confusing, I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I feel like she’s just incomprehensible to me.”

“You … ” Evelyn spoke up at last, then paused to grimace. “You ‘snogged’ Zheng? That is profoundly disgusting.” She let out a huge sigh and dragged a pillow across her lap to lay her hands in. “But I suppose I shouldn’t judge. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If I ever found any courage with Twil, I’m certain it would appear vile to any casual observer.”

“Evee,” I tutted, but didn’t have any excess emotional bandwidth to tell her off for self-deprecation right then.

Evelyn considered the ceiling for a long moment. I heard the muffled sounds of Lozzie’s voice off in the depths of the house, of somebody else moving around in the kitchen downstairs, of beams settling in the gathering cold beyond the walls.

“Heather,” Evelyn said eventually. “You do know Raine.”

I managed a small smile. “Do I really? Sometimes it’s like she-”

“No, Heather. I mean literally.” She stared at me with a teaching frown and her voice took on the same rehearsed cadence as it once had when she’d taught me about magic. “There are no hidden depths to Raine, though there may be a few locked rooms full of junction boxes and loose wiring. With Raine, what you see is what you get. She wants to be your knight in shining armour. If you let her, she will be happy.”

I let out a huge sigh and could not conceal my disappointment. “You said that once before. I really don’t think it’s true.”

“No, I was entirely right about the knight in shining armour part.” Evelyn levelled a finger at me. “That wasn’t just me being a grumpy old bitch. My prediction she would get bored with you afterward, that was wrong, yes. Over the years that I needed Raine less, she … ‘re-calibrated’, she went looking for another damsel to protect, and eventually found you. I thought she’d treat you the same, if you ever grew strong enough to stand on your own, but I didn’t count on you being a huge lesbian.”

“ … excuse me?” I bristled involuntarily. “Evee, what difference does that make?”

Evelyn gave me a witheringly patient look. “Raine and I never went wrist-deep in each other’s cunts.”

My mouth made a little o-shape. “O-oh. Um. Evee! That’s not-”

“She loves you. Romantically. I used to doubt she was even capable of that, but she’s proved it enough times now. That makes your situation different, and I suspect you’re confusing the hell out of her.”

“I am?”

Evelyn huffed a big old sigh, but aimed at herself, at her inability to express her thoughts rather than at my difficulty understanding.

“Raine is loyal,” she said, jabbing at the pillow in her lap with her maimed hand, growing more agitated with each word. “It’s who she is. What she does. She finds a person worthy of her loyalty, and then she is loyal. She needs that, as an outlet or an anchor or something! I don’t know exactly, I’m not a bloody psychologist.”

“Evee, it’s okay, it-”

“It’s what she did with me and it … it … oh bugger me, Heather, I can’t-” She lost her temper and all but punched the pillow in her lap. “For fuck’s sake, I can’t say these things.”

“You don’t have to-”

“No.” She jabbed a finger at me again. “No. I do. Because I am not watching you two break up. You are the best thing ever to happen to her. And I suspect the reverse is true as well.” She sighed and visibly crushed down on her irritation. “This isn’t my place to say. It is Raine’s place to say, but if it can keep your relationship healthy, screw it, I’ll break the rules.”

She took another long moment to compose herself – and, I suspected, to compose the right words in the privacy of her mind.

“My memories of when I first met Raine are not easy,” she said eventually. “For both emotional and mechanical reasons. But I have come to firmly believe, in the years since, that Raine’s decision to protect me, to be my friend, to save me from my mother, was as much an act of self-redemption as it was altruism.”

“ … oh-kay? Okay?”

“I mean by saving me she saved herself,” Evelyn huffed, then frowned sharply at me. “Heather, the Raine that you and I know, that is not the Raine I met as a teenager. The very first time I met her, I was dead certain I was face-to-face with a serial killer, a monster, something far worse than the worst of my mother’s creations.”

Cold blossomed in the pit of my stomach. “Evee? Are you … you’re not joking.”

Evelyn shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong. She’s still the same person. She’s always had the same boundless arrogance, the self-assurance, always been so very unstoppably Raine. But she was not stable.”

“Stable?” I couldn’t imagine Raine as unstable.

“There was a twitchiness about her. A desperation. I assume she’s told you the story, about breaking into the house to say hello to me? Her ‘finest hour’ and all that?”

“Mmhmm,” I nodded, on the edge of my seat. Every crumb of Raine’s past was like a banquet, and I was starving.

“Did she tell you she knifed three of my mother’s zombies on the way in? No? Didn’t think so. A teenage girl, nothing much of her, against three things not entirely unlike Praem. She was covered in blood by the time she found me, had a dislocated shoulder, one eye swollen shut from a bruise. Gave me the fright of my life.” Evelyn lowered her voice as she spoke. “All just to speak to a crippled, bent-double girl who she didn’t even know. She was at the end of her rope as much as I was. Rail thin, hadn’t been eating, an infection in one foot, absolutely filthy. She was fearless – and desperate for somebody to protect. The moment I accepted her, she put herself between me and everything in that house. And I believe it gave her purpose, and that kept her alive.”

Evelyn took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. I reached over to rub her shoulder, and she nodded a thanks at me, eyes damp with old memories.

“I … I guess I never thought about the reality of that,” I said.

“Well. She did mellow, over time. After my mother. After we moved to Sharrowford. When I didn’t need protecting as much anymore. I got irritated with her, yes, I … I made her move out. A mistake. To me, Raine will always be the filthy, blood-covered idiot who saved me when I was almost dead. And I will always, always have her back. No matter what she is, what she does.” Evelyn sniffed, swallowed, and looked down. “Don’t tell her I said any of that, she’ll be insufferable until we all die of old age.”

“Promise,” I whispered, and put my hand over one of Evelyn’s.

Evelyn withdrew her hand and stared at me. “What I’m also trying to say is, well, unique relationship dynamics are your business, but if you are betraying her, if you cheat on her with Zheng, I will not be very happy with you. You have been … my … salvation,” she swallowed hard, “in a way Raine couldn’t, and I won’t know what to do if you hurt her seriously.”

“No! No, Evee, that’s the point. I said no to Zheng. I choose Raine. I do. Over and over, whatever conditions. She saved me too.”

Evelyn nodded. She cleared her throat. “Good,” she said very softly and patted my hand. “Okay. Good. Right. Let’s never mention that again.”

“If you like.” I smiled for her.

“So my guess – and my guess is a good guess, I’d put five hundred quid on it if I could – is that she can’t figure out what you want, because you don’t know what you want. If you want Zheng to take you over the kitchen table, I think Raine would happily watch, then trade places with her for a second round afterward.”

“Evee!” I squeaked, eyes bugging out at her. “You can’t be serious!”

Evelyn shrugged.

“You mean … both of them?” I asked, boggling at her.

“I believe the technical term is ‘polyamory’. I looked it up.”

“I can’t do that. I can barely deal with one relationship as it is. I’d expire of dehydration. Is that even a … a real thing? I thought that was only in romance novels. Mostly bad ones.”

“You’re asking me for romantic advice? Me?”

“What is this conversation if not romantic advice?”

“Raine advice,” Evelyn grunted. “Look, if you want her to slap Zheng with a white glove filled with crushed gravel, she’ll do that too. She will be what you need her to be, as long as you are hers to be loyal to. But you’re pulling her in two different directions. She won’t push Zheng out of your life, because she knows you care. But now she thinks you want her to be possessive and jealous.”

“Oh, Evee.” I felt my shoulders slump, and reached forward for support. We shared an awkward half-hug, leaning over the bed, until I pulled back. “But I want to know what Raine feels, what she really feels. If she’s jealous, she can be. Just … naturally. Normally.”

Evelyn snorted one humourless puff of laughter. “Nothing about Raine is normal. Don’t tell me you’ve been pretending?”

My turn to laugh as well, just as empty of humour.

We drifted into comfortable silence, side by side as I pulled my legs up onto Evelyn’s plush nest of a bed. Part of me wanted to return to Raine and cuddle up with her, to let her know that of course I was still hers, but another part of me needed this peace and quiet, to think.

Was Raine a shell into which I poured my own emotions? No, I refused to believe so. That was not what I saw in her. She was not a mere sociopathic mimic going through the motions because she’d once decided to save Evelyn, no matter how weird her value system or how she’d arrived at it. I wanted to know, I was dying to understand her completely. Why had she never told me the reality about when she’d met Evelyn? Embarrassment? Trauma?

Maybe I should just trust her, and ask.

“You really are welcome to stay, by the way,” Evelyn mumbled after a while, and I realised she’d been drifting off, half-awake with her head back on the pillows. “I would actually appreciate the company, haven’t had any in a long time. Just … I should get out of this skirt first. Get under the covers and hold my hand? If that’s not … too much to ask.”

“Haven’t had any in a long time?”

“Ahhh. Well.” Evelyn roused herself a little, rubbing her eyes. “This is what Raine and I used to do. Platonic, though, you understand? Back when we first met. We shared a bed, for months. It was … it helped.” She took a deep breath. “I haven’t needed it in years, but even I’m not terribly comfortable about what we’re going to do tomorrow.”

I considered Evelyn’s face, the tired dark rings around her eyes, the sleepy flush in her cheeks, her mass of blonde hair loose over one shoulder.

“You don’t need me here,” I said. “You need Twil.”

She frowned. “Oh, for-”

“No, I’m serious. She’s got to be here tomorrow morning anyway, why not call her over to stay the night?”

“Because I can’t-” Evelyn snapped,

“Then I’ll call her for you. As a thank you. We’re going to Carcosa tomorrow. If not tonight, when?”

“Don’t say that,” Evelyn hissed, scowling. “Don’t say that like we’re all going to die. The point is to do this without anyone dying.” She folded her arms, glared at me, then down into her lap, then at her mobile phone lying on her desk next to her laptop, then back at me again. “If you want to thank me, you can have a word with your pair of admirers. If Raine and Zheng go at each other in the middle of the expedition, if they won’t work together … ” Evelyn shook her head. “We’re doomed.”

“I’ll talk to Raine. I mean, I’ll try to talk to Raine. She’ll understand, for our safety if nothing else.”

“And Zheng?”

I swallowed, heart skipping a beat. “I’m not certain I can. She’s been practically ignoring me all day. I might … might lose myself. Maybe with Raine there … ”

“Mm,” Evelyn grunted.

We fell into silence again. I slowly slid my legs off the bed, eyes on Evelyn’s phone. “I’m going to call Twil. You don’t even have to invite her into bed, just stay up for an hour or two watching anime together. What’s that one with the magical girls who get married at the end? Show her that one. Maybe she’ll get the message.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes and huffed. She couldn’t look at me, only down at her lap.

“Carcosa tomorrow,” she muttered, then: “Do it.”

So I got up, and called Twil.

At least somebody would have a nice night before we visited the library beyond reality.

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