Sparks of red light flickered as the wall of fire threatened the structural integrity of the shielding spell. I held my breath, my teeth grinding to powder as I focused ever more energy, as I waited for the horrible, inevitable shattering of glass that signaled a force field’s destruction. But over the roar of fire and the peals of Dantaleon’s laughter, I heard nothing but the pounding of my own heart.
“Dantaleon,” I shouted. “Stop this. Now.”
He only laughed more as he turned in a slow, deliberate circle, spraying fire across the room from within his pages, laying down an even spread of horrific demonfire. I could feel the shielding splinter, sense the spiderweb cracks in its surface as it gave under the weight of Dantaleon’s terrible power.
“I give up,” I yelled. “Enough. I yield. You win.”
The assault halted immediately. The room returned to its former comfortable temperature as the fires winked out, and it was as if nothing had even changed in the Repository, as if a sentient book with an educational agenda and an axe to grind hadn’t just threatened to utterly obliterate my life’s work. I glowered at him, my arms trembling from the strain of my magic, tasting the salt of my own sweat as it trickled past my lips. The sheath of red light slipped from the shelves just as my hold on the barrier magic did, and I fell to my knees.
Dantaleon flapped his pages indignantly, like an irritated owl, then he harrumphed. “As long as you know that you were wrong, young Master Quilliam.”
My fingernails dug uselessly into the black and gold marble of the library floor. I watched as a bead of my own sweat dripped to the ground, making the marble blacker than black. Somehow it matched how I felt on the inside.
“I was wrong,” I muttered. “I won’t skip my lessons again.”
“Excellent,” Dantaleon purred, finally satisfied. “Then I shall see you for class tomorrow morning. It’s only three hours on weekdays, Quilliam.” He sniffed derisively. “I really don’t see all the fuss. There’s really no need for us to go through this song and dance every time.”
“I understand,” I murmured, waiting for the sound of the doors to open and shut as Dantaleon left the Repository.
What did that all matter? Three hours felt like nothing to someone who’d lived thousands of years, but they meant everything to me, when you multiplied them by the countless weeks I’d already spent listening to him babble about the histories of the prime hells, when I recounted the rise and fall of their myriad demon princes. How much more of my life did I have to give up to information that would prove useless, and had always proved useless to my existence? Call me a brat, but it wasn’t about the three hours. It was the knowledge that I would be at the mercy of my own heritage forever, at the beck and call of my royal mother.
And if Mother and Dantaleon were to be believed, my life was going to last a long, long time. I’d spent twenty-four years trying to figure out who I was, and I still didn’t know everything. But despite my bravado, I had a pretty good feeling that becoming who my mother wanted me to be, that spending two hundred years on wanton murder and destruction wouldn’t weigh well on my conscience.
Raze the world, she said, like a daily mantra. Burn it to ashes. I didn’t want all that. But was it something I could tell anyone? No. Hell, no. Not if I didn’t want to be ridiculed.
But at least my books were safe. I turned in a slow circle as I took in the books around me, each one another stepping stone on my long and arduous path to arcane supremacy, each representing a savored memory of victory and gratification.
“It’s good to be home,” I murmured, half to myself, and half to my collection.
Shifting among the shelves, the books rustled in answer.
6
That was the thing about me and books. My understanding of the place of magic in human society was that on rare occasions, one would be born with an affinity for the arcane arts. Oh, everyone has a capacity to learn magic if they try hard enough, if they study long enough. But some come out of the womb already wielding bizarre powers or some other link to the supernatural.
Up on the surface I knew an extremely talented seamstress who could manipulate cloth, thread, and needles with only her mind, using her abilities to craft or to kill. The human half of me was equally endowed with a little something extra in the arcane department, as the shuddering dozens of books in the Repository lovingly reminded me.
I lifted the Testament from the table with both hands, holding it to eye level, then removed my fingers from contact with the tome completely. It floated of its own accord to a vacant spot among the bookshelves, finding a place with its brothers and sisters. A shuddering rasp went up from the books, as if my collection itself was giving the newest member of our family a warm, whispering welcome.
“Play nice, everybody,” I said, continuing in my slow rotation as I studied the spines secreted along the walls. They ceased shuddering, returning to peaceful quiet.
That was the nature of my gift. Call it bibliomancy, call it libromancy. Maybe even call it an obsession. We preferred to call it Inscription. I had a strange affinity for books, enabling me to tap into their raw energies. For as long as my essence was attuned to my collection, I could call almost any of the books and they would answer my summons near-instantaneously, allowing me to consult their magics and expand my arcane knowledge in, as Dantaleon put it himself, “monstrously unprecedented directions.” How flattering. Knowledge is power, or something like that. That was the very nature of Inscription: each book that entered my collection inscribed its essence upon my
