Tonight’s chants began in Latin, a soothing, gentle recitation that filled Beinecke, floating up, up, past shelf after shelf encased in the glass cube at the library’s center. Darlington let himself listen with one ear as he scanned the perimeter of the circle and kept one eye on Alex. He supposed it was a good sign that she was so tense. It at least meant she cared about doing a good job.
The chants shifted, breaking from Latin and shifting into vernacular Italian, sliding from antiquity to modernity. Zeb’s voice was the loudest, beseeching, echoing off the stone, and Darlington could feel his desperation. He would have to be desperate given what came next.
Zeb held out his arms. The Aurelians to his right and his left drew their knives and, as the chants continued, drew two long lines from Zeb’s wrists up his forearms.
The blood ran slowly at first, welling to the surface in red slits like eyes opening.
Zeb settled his hands on the edge of the paper before him and his blood spread over it, staining the paper. As if the paper had a taste for it, the blood started to flow faster, a tide that crawled down the scroll as Zeb continued to chant in Italian.
As Darlington had known they would, the Grays began to appear, drifting through the walls, drawn by blood and hope.
When at last the blood tide reached the end of the parchment, the Aurelians each lowered their sleeves, letting them brush the soaked paper. Zeb’s blood seemed to climb up the fabric as the sound of the chanting rose—not a single language now but all languages, words drawn from the books surrounding them, above them, tucked away in climate-controlled vaults beneath them. Thousands upon thousands of volumes. Memoirs and children’s stories, postcards and menus, poetry and travelogues, soft, rounded Italian speared by the spiky sounds of English, the chugging of German, whispery threads of Cantonese.
As one, the Aurelians slammed their hands down on the blood-soaked parchment. The sound ruptured the air like thunder and black spread from their palms, a new tide as blood became ink and flowed back up the table, coursing along the paper to where Zeb’s hands rested. He screamed when the ink entered him, zigzagging up his arms in a scrawl, line upon line, word upon word, a palimpsest that blackened his skin, slowly crawling in looping cursive up to his elbows. He wept and shuddered and wailed his anguish—but kept his hands flat to the paper.
The ink climbed higher, to his bent shoulders, up his neck, over his chest, and in the same instant entered his head and his heart.
This was the most dangerous part of the ritual, when all of Aurelian would be most vulnerable and the Grays would be most eager. They came faster through the walls and sealed windows, rounding the circle, looking for the gateways Alex and Darlington had left open, drawn by Yarrowman’s need and the iron-filing pungence of fresh blood. Whatever worry had plagued Alex, she was enjoying herself now, hurling handfuls of graveyard dirt at Grays with unnecessarily elaborate gestures that made her look like a professional wrestler trying to psych up an invisible crowd. Darlington turned his attention to his own compass points, cast clouds of bone dust at approaching Grays, murmuring the old death words when one of them tried to rush past. His favorite Orphic hymn began O spirit of the unripe fruit, but it was almost too long to be worth diving into.
He heard Alex grunt and glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see her engaged in a particularly acrobatic banishing maneuver. Instead, she was on the ground, scrabbling backward, terror in her eyes—and Grays were walking straight through the circle of protection. It took him a bare moment to understand what had happened: The markings of the southern gateway were smudged. Alex had been so busy enjoying herself, she’d stepped on the markings and ruptured the southern side of the circle. What had been a narrow door to allow the flow of magic had become a gaping hole with no barrier to entry. The Grays advanced, their attention focused on the pull of blood and longing, drawing nearer to the unsuspecting Aurelians.
Darlington threw himself into their path, barking the quickest, cruelest death words he knew: “Unwept!” he shouted. “Unhonored, and unsung!” Some checked their steps, some even fled. “Unwept, unhonored, and unsung!” he repeated. But they had momentum now, a mass of Grays that only he and Alex could see, dressed in clothes of every period, some young, some old, some wounded and maimed, others whole.
If they reached the table, the ritual would be disrupted. Yarrowman would certainly die and he might well take half of Aurelian with him. The magic would spring wild.
But if Beinecke was a living house of words, then it was one grand memorial to the end of everything. Thornton Wilder’s death mask. Ezra Pound’s teeth. Elegiac poems by the hundreds. Darlington reached for the words… Hart Crane on Melville, Ben Jonson on the death of his son. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem.” His mind scrambled for purchase. Start somewhere. Start anywhere.
Good Lord. When taxed with staving off the uncanny, how did he somehow resort to Foley’s poem about a skeleton having sex?
A few of the Grays peeled off, but he needed something with some damn gravitas.
Horace.
Now they slowed, some covered their ears.
“See, in the white of the winter air,” he cried. “The day hangs like a rose. It droops down to the reaching hand. Take it before it goes!”
He lifted his hands before him as if he could somehow push them back. Why couldn’t he remember the first verse of the poem? Because it hadn’t interested him. Why try to know the future, which cannot be known?
“Winter will come on!” he repeated. But even as Darlington pushed the Grays back through the ruptured gate and reached for the chalk, he looked through the glass walls of the library. A horde was assembling—a tide of Grays visible through the glass walls, surrounding the building. He was not going to be able to fix the markings in time.
Alex was still on the ground, shaking so hard he could see her trembling even from a distance. When the magic got free, it might kill them both first.
“Take courage,” she said again and again. “Take courage.”
“That’s not enough!”
The Grays rushed toward the library.
“Mors vincit omnia!” Darlington cried, falling back on the words printed in every Lethe manual. The Emperor and the Aurelians had looked up from the table; only Zeb Yarrowman was still lost to the agonies of the ritual, deaf to the chaos that had entered the circle.
Then a voice pierced the air, high and wobbling, not speaking but singing… “Pariome mi madre en una noche oscura.”
Alex was singing, the melody hitching on her sobs. “Ponime por nombre niña y sin fortuna.”
My mother gave birth to me on a dark night and called me the girl with no fortune.
Spanish, but slanted. Some kind of dialect.