He stopped. Del was backed up all the way against a bookcase, staring at him wide-eyed. “What?” he asked: “Did you think Eve would pay us a quarter of a million to retrieve it if it was just a simple matter of waltzing in and picking a book off the shelf?”
“No, but—”
“Imp?” He startled, then spun round and aimed his flashlight at the doorway. “It’s me! We need to talk.”
Caught square in the beam, his sister raised one hand to shield her eyes.
“Who’s—” Wendy raised her bow and arrow and began to draw—“this—” as Eve raised her other hand and began to open it, a palmful of glass spheres catching the light—
“Stand down, everybody chill! This is my sister, the one who’s paying us! Eve, what the fuck?” Imp’s heart tried to climb out through his throat.
“You haven’t taken the book yet?” Eve demanded anxiously.
“No, we only just got here—”
“Great! I mean stop, wait. The book—”
“It’s cursed, isn’t it?” Imp guessed.
Eve nodded vigorously. “Yes! But that’s not why I’m here. When I told you there wasn’t any chance of pursuit I think I spoke too soon.” She turned round. “This place—I wasn’t expecting the decor, I must say—I came to say you can expect unfriendly company if you hang around too long. And there’s a problem with the curse on the book, too.”
“Unfriendly company.” Game Boy stepped out of the shadows and walked up to Eve. His attempt at an intimidating approach foundered on the fact that she was taller than he. “What kind of unfriendly? Like those nutters from the bank? Or is it some other kind of asshole?”
“My boss likes to big himself up in front of his friends. The snatch squad at the bank is just one possibility—they’re dead, but there are worse people out there. I brought a bodyguard—he’s covering the front door—but we don’t have much time.” She looked at Rebecca. “You can find things, right? Can you locate it, please? Don’t touch it—just go to wherever it is on the shelves and point to it?”
“I’m not a fucking dowsing rod,” Del grumbled. “Say I can find it. What then? You’re just going to take it and not pay us for our work?”
Eve shook her head. “No! It’s not like that. I can’t take it. It’s protected by an anti-theft ward—if you try to steal it, it kills you.”
“Well that’s just peachy.” Game Boy pouted. “You were going to tell us about this when?”
“Oh, it’s perfectly safe to handle if somebody else has triggered the curse and you took it from their still-smoking body.” Eve paused. “Or if they sold it to you.”
“You bought it, didn’t you?” Imp walked towards her. “Didn’t you?”
“I think so. I may have screwed up that side of things,” Eve admitted. “It’s unclear.”
“What’s unclear?”
“It was up for auction: obvs, right? But it’s not clear that the person auctioning the location of the manuscript actually owned what they were selling, that’s the thing. Also, ancient death spells and intellectual property law don’t always play nice together. I, uh, my boss has a standard procedure he has me follow in cases of handling blackmail and extortion. We pay the ransom, then once we’ve destroyed the threat I repossess the payment from the blackmailer’s bank account. Via a Transnistrian mafiya underwriter—”
This time it was Wendy who interrupted: “The Russian mafiya has underwriters?”
“Transnistrian, please, and yes, criminal business models are inherently expensive because they have to pay for their own guard labor—there are no tax overheads, but no police protection for carrying out business, either—so of course they evolved parallel structures for risk management, mostly by embedding the risk in a concrete slab and dumping it in the harbor—anyway. At what stage does the book consider itself to have been legitimately acquired? And by whom? Is it safe for you to handle it, as my employee? What about as an independent freelance contractor not subject to the HMRC IR35 regulations? Am I an acceptable proxy for Bigge Enterprises, a Scottish Limited Liability Partnership domiciled in the Channel Islands, in the view of a particularly dim-witted nineteenth-century death spell attached to a codex bound in human skin by a mad inquisitor? It’s like digital rights management magic, only worse.”
She took a deep breath and turned to Imp: “Anyway, it’s probably safe for either of us to take it off the shelf and look at it, as long as we don’t try to read past the flyleaf or remove it from the library. We’ve got a degree of immunity to cursed spell books, at least the ordinary kind. But if we try to make a withdrawal—bang.”
“Huh.” Del strolled over to the far wall and ran her fingertip along a shelf. “Prove it.” She half-turned and smiled proudly at Eve, baring her teeth.
“Crap,” Eve muttered under her breath. “That’s it? That’s the lost concordance?”
Rebecca’s fingertip rested on a dusty shelf of bone, almost touching the cracked spine of a volume bound in a stiff, almost golden-hued leather quite at odds with the volumes to either side of it (which had the boring uniformity of a bound run of law gazettes or dirty magazines). “I think this is it. Mind you, it could be a compilation of tax records from the Duchy of Cornwall in 1688—how would I know? I’m not taking it.”
“Sis—” Imp took her shoulder—“you don’t have to. It’s your boss’s problem, isn’t it? If there’s some risk it’s going to do that … don’t do it if you don’t have to, is what I’m saying?”
“Oh, but I do have to. Because how else do
