“Did anyone look at the barber?” I asked.
Something behind the bookcase moved. Books rocked in place, and a candle flame went out.
That movement got people’s attention more than my question had. I wondered for a long second if anyone had heard me speak.
What was there to be said? Even if they had, would they tell the truth?
Well, yes. It was one of the rules. Even the Barber was bound to keep to his word.
Except the Library strongly discouraged communication, apparently.
I could see the restlessness of the others. The fear. They were on their last legs, and the Abyss was getting to them.
Not knowing where the goddamned demon was was a pretty good reason to be afraid.
“Go,” Rose whispered.
She led the way.
The others climbed stairs with socks on. They weren’t running anymore, and that meant our progress was slower.
A stair creaked. Large black birds flew up between the individual stairs, pecking, scratching.
Then they were gone.
Even elsewhere in the Library, it felt like things were settling down.
The ones who hadn’t gotten the point were starting to get picked off.
I was at the tail end of the group, letting my wing mend from the fall with Ellie. I looked out over the railing, watching for any sign of the Barber. Blood, smells, movement, violence…
I looked at the group, searching for signs. Possession? Was the Barber occupying one of them?
I looked at Evan, even, sitting on my shoulder. Not the most obvious target, but if I was doomed to have an ally turn on me…
The faint shuffle of feet on steps changed in tone. My head snapped around, looking up.
Rose and Alister had rounded a corner, and now they were out of sight.
It was a good twenty seconds before I reached that same place.
The pillar stopped. We’d reached the top. The roof of it. As though it were simply a narrow, horribly tall building, with books on every face. A library turned inside out.
The roof was flat. Just the open space Alister wanted.
At the far end, I could make out a stairway. It led over and outward, to a tangle of tree roots. At a certain point, the stairs stopped, and the tree roots became the path.
There was snow, there were trees, dense and twisted, joining ruined walls and spiked railing. There was ice, and here, where they wasn’t taken apart by the heat of the candles and the entropic nature of the abyss, there were falling snowflakes.
What had been the base of the hill, now the edge of a crater. The path out of the Library.
The ‘roof’ was like the cover of an oversized book, bound in something tougher than paper, harder than leather.
Sitting dead in the center, spearing that cover, was a scuffed pair of shears
“No,” Tiff said. “No. No. No.”
Ellie had her hands clenched into fists. She was trembling.
I could see the look of complete and utter defeat on Johannes’ face.
The Barber had beat us here. Now he waited between us and the way out. Waiting for us to come to him.
15.03
The top of the pillar was bright compared to the rest of the library. Smoke rose from innumerable candles, lighting up the surroundings below us like a distant, quiet, grim little city.
Up here, on a largely featureless square of land atop a great book-covered pillar, faces were comparatively easy to make out. The bells that were audible were distant, closer to the ground. The snow that came down was light, a layer of snow just thin enough that one could leave a footprint in it, but a breath of air might have scattered it.
The pillar was akin to a building, and the dimensions were similar, albeit a little narrow for the building’s height, but we were limited to the outside. Only Abyssal things lay within, just past the relatively thin veneer of shelves and books and stairways.
As though we were fighting on the surface of an egg.
There were no signs of the demon’s footsteps.
For a moment, I wondered if it were a trick. A deception. I’d nearly been fooled twice tonight, after all.
But the shears that impaled the center of the rooftop had a weight to them. Everyone present seemed to sense it. We were deer in headlights. Frozen, afraid to move. Afraid to make a sound. I didn’t even feel fear in the conventional sense, and I was virtually paralyzed.
Escape was only a short distance away. A hundred feet, if that, to reach the bridge to the real world.
Rose’s eyes, I noted, were on the stairs. She was frozen, just like me, but unlike me, she wasn’t immune to the fear and panic. She dealt with it all the same.
Alister stood right at her side, his arm touching her shoulder. She shared a glance with him.
It wasn’t a pairing of love. It was a pairing, all the same. He’d helped her make the first step in reaching out to me. That counted for something. Helping her on her way to being better.
She was improving by building something, while I only made headway by tearing things down. Ultimately the reason I was deferring to her. Because even if the tables were turned, I wasn’t sure I could trust her to make the sacrifice.
She met my eyes.
Now, in this moment, were we supposed to coordinate without communicating? Even the addition of one Other to this tableau could be catastrophic. A distraction for our side, an opening for the Barber.
We’d been created to destroy one another, and our interactions had frequently been poisoned ones, more so as time went on. Now we were face to face with every Practitioner’s worst nightmare, and we had to swim against the current.
Rose reached out, touching Nick’s gun. She steered him around, pointing the gun at the stairs. She pointed to other Knights, and directed them to do the same.
She gestured to the Behaims, then pointed.
Spreading them out to either side.
Leaving her, Alister, the High Priest, Johannes, and my friends all at the top of the stairs.
I was reminded of a chessboard. The rooftop was square, and the way things were spread out, we had Behaims in the rook positions, my friends, Johannes, and the High Priest as the knights and bishops, admittedly odd-numbered, and Alister and Rose as the king and queen. The Knights and my cousins weren’t on the board, but instead lurked at the edges along the rear and one side of it, guarding or otherwise watching the stairs. Many of the Knights had knives or machetes on hand. Ellie and Christoff were only an extra set of eyes.
The Barber sat in the middle, yet to take form.
I saw Rose take in a deep breath, exhaling without noise.
There were no pawns. No Others, satyrs or maenads had survived this trip to the Abyss. Too fragile, perhaps.
No pawns. Only me.
Ty had dropped to one knee, and had a pad of papers out, which he was scribbling on.
Still, the Barber didn’t move.
The Library maneuvered itself. Not on our side, nor the Barber’s, it still made its small play. A rumble, a shift, a distortion in surroundings. A set of low groans, as if the Library were alive, and it wasn’t content.