“-off on the power, I think, bullies. Knowing you’re driving the rest of us into ruin. You want a fucking pizza?”
“I changed my mind a while ago, remember?”
“Fuck you. Fuck yourself! I already talked to the other pizza place. Don’t expect a thing, until you’ve sold that place. Fuck you.”
“Fine,” I said. “It’s just pizza.”
But he’d already hung up.
It’s just pizza, I told myself.
“Fuck,” I said, as my annoyance bubbled to the surface.
“You can’t be surprised. I mean, you knew people hated you here.”
“The woman at the coffee place was surprisingly respectful of the idea that I might be in mourning,” I said.
“Being a decent person and hating our guts isn’t mutually exclusive,” Rose said.
“Fuck,” I said again, still annoyed.
“It can’t be that big a deal, compared to what just happened outside.”
“You took a shower just a bit ago,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Sorry to ask, but do you even get dirty, on that side?”
“No,” she said. “Pretty sure I don’t. Some dust, but I don’t sweat.”
“I’m guessing you needed to shower to enjoy a mundane comfort,” I said. “Feel a bit more human.”
“Alright,” Rose said. “Point taken. Sorry about your pizza.”
I shrugged.
“I could do with more human comforts myself,” she said.
I nodded, “Something to figure out. I’ll help any way I can. But first-”
“Awakening,” Rose said.
I nodded. “Meet you in the study.”
I took the stairs two at a time.
I’d opened the second secret door on the second floor, which made for a quicker arrival at the lower floor. The room was far darker without the sunlight from above.
I twisted the knobs of the two lamps that sat on and beside the desk, respectively. When the room was still too dark around the edges, I lit the oil lamps at the edges. Each lamp illuminated a slice of the bookcases, cabinets or shelves to either side of them. Where the lettering on books had been done in foil or a reflective material, the lamplight caught it, highlighting the scripts in a soft orange-yellow, while the books themselves remained dark.
By the time I’d finished, Rose had lit up the room on her side. The light from behind her made the edges of her clothes and hair glow.
She held a wrought-iron compass, with a spike in one end and chalk embedded in the other. I watched as she stabbed the floor, then walked in a circle, using the other arm to draw the wide circle in chalk.
She had the curved ruler that she used to measure the distance, then erased a spot. She was reaching for the compass again when she looked at me.
“Blake?”
“You’re doing the ritual too?”
“If I can,” she said. “Aren’t you starting?”
“I said there were two things I needed to do first,” I said.
“Phoning the pizza place and…”
I crossed the room, lifting a book free of a shelf, then walked back into Rose’s field of view.
“No, Blake.”
I hefted the book. Diabolatry, R.D.T. The black cover was surprisingly flexible and soft, the lettering on the spine and cover were done in gold, catching the lamplight.
“No,” she said again, as if saying it over and over again with increasing intensity might drive it into my head.
“What was it you said?” I asked. “Stupid knee-jerk assumptions are going to get us killed?”
“I’m all for stupid knee-jerk assumptions when we’re dealing with that. Laird said they were the mystical equivalent of nuclear missiles.”
“I’m not proposing we use them. But I want to know what we’re dealing with.”
“Blake. You know that moment in the horror movies, where you’re screaming at the actors? ‘Don’t go up the stairs’, ‘don’t touch the glowing skull’? Don’t read the book.”
I frowned.
“What are you even thinking?”
“That the things outside were horrifying, the faceless woman, the pseudo-faerie we ran into. So… why are these things so much worse? What makes them ‘nuclear’? We’re walking into that meeting, and I can’t help but think that everyone there is going to know exactly what’s going on here, and we’re going to be in the dark. We can’t afford to look weak or stupid.”
“We are weak and stupid,” Rose said. “We’re untrained, ignorant, out of the loop, and we don’t have any of the good stuff that practitioners bring to the table. No tools, no familiars, no demesnes, no tricks or any of that.
“We can’t afford to let on how badly off we are. Having one tidbit of info we can allude to, to scare the pants off them if we need it-”
“-Is liable to get us killed,” Rose finished for me. “I get it, wanting to know just what we’re sitting on, but handling the dangerous goods is not the way to find out.”
I hefted the book, feeling its weight.
“Come on,” she said, lowering her voice to be gentler, “I compromised earlier. Can you do the same?”
“Damn it,” I said.
“Is that a ‘yes’ damn it or a ‘no’ damn it?”
“Yes,” I said.
I moved to put the book on the bookshelf. A flap of paper caught on the shelf, keeping me from sliding it into place.
When I pulled the book back, the paper dropped. Fragments of dry wax and a small key danced across the floor.
Folded into thirds, it had been sealed into an envelope of sorts by wax. The key had apparently been melted into the wax, only to be freed by the impact.
“Leave it,” Rose said. “Nothing good comes of that. Sweep it under the desk, ignore it. Please?”
“I would,” I said, “But wax makes a seal, and that seal just broke.”
“That’s reaching,” Rose said.
“Okay, maybe,” I said. “But tell me you can’t imagine a drawing of something coming to life and crawling free of that page.”
“Now you’re being manipulative,” Rose said, “Playing to my paranoia.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“Yes, I can imagine it. Yes, are you happy?”
I wasn’t. I picked up the page. On the backside, there were only two words.
My heiress.
I turned it around.
My heiress,
If you’ve come this far, there must be a pressing need. You’ve been driven into a corner, or the situation is otherwise dire. I imagine time may well be paramount. Remember that haste makes waste, and you must step with utmost care from this point on.
I’ve left you something, or perhaps it is more correct to say I’ve left you someone. I refer to him as Barbatorem, making a small joke, as I tend to do, but he is an older one, bearing some status and a few stories from years past, with no name of any meaning that has survived the passage of time. You should be able to find those stories and notes on that status in Dark Names, p. 38.
You’ll find him waiting in the tower room, which you will need the key to enter. Staying outside the circle is first in your list of things to keep in mind, which I list here because there are no better places to put the warning. I should hope such obvious things don’t need to be stated.