Blood in the Library
62 Searing 121
The book closes with a dull, victorious thump. Motes of dust join the general constellation around Petra’s head as the pages close – carefully, of course, so very carefully, to spare the ancient paper from yet more damage.
“You are… feral, today.”
“Of course I am. I can smell blood.”
Yesod’s voice rumbles through the library, a deep bass tremor that runs along the shelves and through the stacks of ancient wisdom. It is a noise made to push down roots and seat itself in the mind. It is the noise of funeral bells, and of the grinding ocean plates. Petra’s answers, light and sharp. Atop the pool of molten metal, sheet-glass spreads; she is a struck soprano bell that glides over the dying echoes of the Main Stacks.
She stands, and with the same care she would give to a newborn baby, cradles the volume back to its rest. It is almost painful to part with it, but she has what she needs from it.
“I’m on my answer’s tracks. I’m in its warren. I can hear its heartbeat. I can taste its fear.”
When Yesod first made the comparison, Petra had found it laughable. What is digging through old tomes compared to the hunt? What sort of predator lurks through cut-down forests and neatly-stacked words? The more time she spent in her warren of ancient thought, the more she found the comparison apt.
She had started with Yue Jian’s Arcane Lessons from the War of Four Apprentices. A ponderous tome, its banal subject matter was made worse by the mediocrity of the translation. Petra had nearly abandoned it, before she found hints of more efficient ways of using blood as a fund for Abyssal summoning contracts. A promising enough morsel to whet the appetite, and get her mind racing.
Yue Jian mentioned, derisively, the work of his contemporary, Feng Hua-Lao, and so Petra sought him out. She followed his life through his Biography of the Great Lin Pao, into Opiates as Trans-Dimensional Summoning Catalyzers, and finally found his death referenced in a legal record of narcotic-corpse autopsies which existed, fragmentary, in the sheaves of papers donated by a heirless noble lawmaker.
She didn’t mourn his death, but nor did she condemn him. The Gods knew her sins, and while she might prefer them to the pipe, she understands they will likely cut her life just as short.
But while she found an interesting soul and a brilliant, if truncated, summoning career, she found no clue as to the method of pact-forging. So she dug deeper. Looked into his contemporaries, searched spell compendiums, perused records. She found evidence of duels, and accusations of plagiarism. If he stole from someone, that means someone else knew the answer.
Petra remembers the sleepless nights – the days spent lurking in the library, pulling on the multifarious strings found in her research. She found the scent of her answer in the ruins of an old scroll, and used it to direct her to a history with real evidence of the accounting of the human sacrifices used. She found a name of the sacrificer, but could not find the name. So she perused scrolls on naming conventions, and learned that the man might have changed his name to his wife’s upon a second marriage that was referenced in a social history of the court of the day.
Onwards, and onwards. Up the stairs to birth records, down the flights to marriage certificates, over to debtor-prison scrolls and trial accounts. She found a tome of recorded summoning circles, which credited a powerful mage from the north, Iver Half-Blooded, and then found a plate of runes which (after she conscripted some help in translation), credited his apprentice, whose records were destroyed in a fire whose only evidence was a sheet of building damages lost.
“But I have a name,” she murmured, with only Yesod to hear. He cared, at least. Any endeavor pleased him. Lurking in the shadows of the stacks, his heavy footfalls shaking the floor, he somehow blended in. Alien, ancient, and silent as the grave. Petra spared him one of her tiny smiles, as she appreciated the aesthetic match. “I have a name.”
The name was a rabbit, alabaster and fast. She was the wolf – hungry and indefatigable. Leod Horneater. Killed another mage in a duel. Fled the town of his birth. Made a name for himself as a pirate, related through the stories of fishermen and merchants. Wound up in the south, became a purveyor of spices, running ships to ports rich in cloves and saffron and selling it for brass and silver.
Court records of falsity in trading. Magically creating fake spices and passing them as real. Inferior product, brought to court.
Now she digs through parchment for what she needs. Procedure, correspondence, accounting… and then, at last, what she needs.
“Oh, yes. Finally.”
Petra can only truly smile when she is alone. In the shadows of the stacks, with the high shelves shadowing her and the windows glowing with the light of the moon, she grins. She feels blood fill her mouth, and the mystery twitch its last. Days of work, with only Yesod’s expressionless mask of a face to keep her company. The demon cannot laugh, not exactly, but she knows when he is pleased. Looking down on a dirty, hungry, unkempt scholar as she unrolls the records of Leod’s procedural torture, and his recorded confessions, he shudders with what Petra knows is delight.
“This is it.”
Her voice is barely more than a murmur. In the silence of the library, it might as well be the horn that will call the judgment. Triumph, incarnate.
She can almost feel the knife sliding into his skin, all those centuries ago. She wonders how much pain she would have to endure, to give up her secrets to her captors. It is the ultimate submission – death, at least, offers the chance to win that final victory over the world, and take your knowledge to the grave. Confession… Petra shudders at the thought. Though perhaps that is the nighttime chill of the empty library.
The answer seems almost comically simple, for three days of frenzied work. But she tries it nonetheless. She finds willing blood donors and spends her research grant drawing pints from them. She sets up a brass cauldron and polishes it clean. She lets the blood simmer on so slow a boil as to be almost non-existent. She mixes in gelatin, thickening the product. She watches fragments calcify, and she dices more meager offerings in – cut nails and hair, mostly. Her little workshop smells foul. It is more an abattoir than a laboratory, but Petra is undisturbed. She breathes through her mouth and keeps her mind from the foul realities of what she is offering, and continues on.
Life is a battle. In battle, to hesitate is folly. Worse, to hesitate is cowardice. Petra is many things, but she refuses to be a coward ever again.
The Numismator is her most reliable means of exchange. A petty abyssal-moneychanger who somehow gathers aggregate data for deeds done by the lunatic gods and petty horrors of the world. She fears he might have been lying, saying anything to stop his slow, unjustified, evil flaying. Petra might even have forgiven him.
But he was right. Two pints, mixed properly with modest offerings and prepared according to the alchemic instructions – fungible as twenty-two pounds of everwarm brass.
Two pints alone, Sixteen pounds four ounces. Add in fuel, and the other offerings given separately? Twenty pounds, two ounces, and three drams. Petra repeats the process, cutting deeper into her research grant. It hurts her to part with money in any case, but she refuses to risk a freak result. The silver leaves her hand, and she feels the heat on it. She can only see it as bread and shelter passing away in fearful, terrible quantities. She knows how many of the homeless poor she could feed, if only she traded everything for them.
But I made my contract. Nothing will hold me back. I have sacrificed the good of the poor at the altar of my ambition. How they would loathe me, if they knew.
That is the sword of Damocles over her head, the weight of her crown. She has sacrificed for her ambition – it must be worth it, in the end. It must.
Petra laughs, a shy and private giggle that she saves for the most special occasion. It is the giggle she let out when she earned her robe, and when she found Yesod standing beside her after her trial. It is the laugh she lets out when she sinks into a hot bath, that most precious and formerly-unimaginable luxury.
“How does it taste?” Yesod’s voice shudders out, roiling like the brass cauldrons. He looms over her, and even without his face, she can tell he is hungry. Envy lingers on his voice, the envy of the unimaginable for the mundane.
“…the blood-sacrifice?”
Petra isn’t at her sharpest, after three days of sleeping beneath desks with her books in her arms.
“…the triumph.”
Petra leans back, and her aidolon supports her weight, meager as it is.
“Yesod, my friend. It tastes divine.”
It’s hard to tell what a faceless demon is thinking, but right then?
Petra almost thinks she can see him smile.
