Elizabeth Bear - Book of Iron

Four

Maledysaunte glanced at Kaulas and touched her throat with two fingers, shaking her head lightly.

“She can’t speak now,” Riordan translated unnecessarily. “Not until her voice grows back.”

“Grows…back?”

The bard spoke as mildly as butter. “She is an immortal, Wizard Kaulas. She will heal.”

Bijou would have given anything to see the expression on Kaulas’ face behind the veil. Just a glimpse of the thin band of nakedness revealing his eyes showed her awe and avarice.

He glanced quickly aside, as if he did not care to see her reading him. “It wasn’t this bad last time,” he said, voice still muffled by his veil.

“Indeed.” Prince Salih pulled a fold of cloth across his face as if in unconscious imitation of the necromancer. “Would you say that something has their guard up?”

“I’d say,” said Salamander. She reached to take Maledysaunte’s arm. The necromancer shook her off and stepped forward, making a hooking gesture with her left hand. Follow.

She led them across the trampled sand, down into the center of Ancient Erem. The ghuls drew back before her. They lined the path, enormous eyes staring. Bijou found herself walking with the others, three abreast in two ranks. They measured their strides. The stamping, undead stallion followed them, shying and switching his tail as if the flies had not long ago had their way with him. Ambrosias lay flat and scrunched its forelegs into the cushion of Bijou’s hair.

A line of cold froze her spine straight and stiff. She had made such a promenade before, down lines of hostile observers, at the beginning of the long walk that had brought her to Messaline as a girl.

She hoped this time the pejorative gazes would not be reinforced with hurled stones.

One ghul, gray and starveling as the others, pushed through to the front rank and prostrated itself before Maledysaunte. It hissed; it glibbered. Prince Salih moved forward, ready to intervene, but the ghul came no closer as Maledysaunte checked her step. Her lips formed words; no sound emerged. But its eyes watched the shapes her mouth made avidly, and it answered.

“It wants to know,” said Kaulas, who spoke the language of ghuls, “if we seek the treasure-hunter. If we do, it says she went beyond the water.”

“Do you trust a ghul?” Salamander said.

Kaulas and Maledysaunte, as one, shook their heads.

The ghul retreated, scuttling backwards on all fours. Bijou started forward again as if it had not accosted them. Out of the corner of her mouth, she spoke to Salamander and Maledysaunte as they came up beside her. “So, what say you tell us exactly what it was that Dr. Liebelos did , in Avalon? And what the results were?”

Maledysaunte just shook her head. No sound from her lips: not yet anyway. Bijou kept an ear on the footsteps of the men close behind them, but she wouldn’t turn her head to see them. Instead she cleared her throat, a sound meant for encouragement. With some urging—it was heavy, being made of stone and metal and bone—Ambrosias slid back down Bijou’s body and twined through the sand beside her.

From beyond Maledysaunte, the Wizard Salamander spoke reluctantly. “You’ve heard of the Glass Book of Erem?”

Despite herself, Bijou could not quite hold back the chuckle. “It figures prominently in the history of Messaline.”

“There’s another such text.”

The moonlight was so bright that Bijou could see the color rise in Maledysaunte’s white cheeks. It stood out in stark, discrete spots like the rouge on a porcelain doll from the outermost East. Her eyes flicked again, following some movement that Bijou could not. This time, Bijou understood it, and wondered how long one could endure, aware of things no one else could perceive, before it drove one mad.

“I see,” Bijou said.

“The Iron Book of Erem. Also called the Black Book of Erem.”

“Where is it?”

“Nowhere in the world, any more.”

“Destroyed?”

“No,” Salamander said.

From the set of Maledysaunte’s chin, Bijou imagined she understood what the Hag of Wolf Wood was feeling. Bijou knew what exile felt like, the repudiation of one’s family. But Maledysaunte’s pride and distress were clues, and Bijou could not afford to pass those up, currently.

“I think,” Bijou said, as they passed the last rank of ghuls, who turned to watch their backs retreating as they walked deeper into Ancient Erem, “that we’ve earned a few answers.”

“When the Black Book has been read, it translates itself.”

“Into…another language?”

The footsteps of the men grew ragged as they began to climb a slope to the lowest terrace of stone houses. The undead stallion’s hooves slid in sand.

“Into the soul of whoever read it. It ceases to exist in the external world. In a very real sense, that reader becomes the book. And there it remains until that reader dies.”

Bijou actually blinked, understanding running hot and habituating through her veins. The rush cleared her of the pall of sorrow and cobwebs Maledysaunte’s incantation had left behind. She drew a deeper breath in reaction, thinking of rotten teeth and withered skin. “Which usually happens quite quickly, I imagine.”

“I imagine,” Salamander agreed.

“But Maledysaunte is immortal.”

“She is.”

Behind them, Kaulas cleared his throat. “That doesn’t explain what brings your mother here , however.”

Finally, a dim smile flickered across Salamander’s face. Bijou caught it from the corner of her eye. “It’s said that the one way to win the Book free of its…host…is to summon it back to the anvil where it was forged.”

“Here in Erem,” Kaulas said.

“Here in Erem.”

Prince Salih asked, “What would that do to the host?”

Maledysaunte turned over her shoulder and smiled, a terrible grin that showed the gaps in her teeth and her blackened tongue.

“I see,” said Salih.

“You could have warned us in advance,” Kaulas said dryly. “Instead of spinning tales—”

“Spinning tales is what I do. Besides, would you have helped us then?” Riordan asked.

“We’re heroes,” Salih said.

Bijou shot Kaulas a sharp glare when he laughed.

They came to a funnel-shaped depression in the ground. Bijou turned left to skirt it.

“Watch out for that,” said Prince Salih to the newcomers, interposing himself, one hand on the hilt of his scimitar. Gently, he laid the other fingertips on Maledysaunte’s arm to guide her away. She turned to him, eyes wide with surprise, and Bijou did not think it was offense. She was just shocked that anyone would touch her so informally, so without thought.

The flesh around her mouth was already plumping again.

“Myrmecoleon pit-trap,” he explained gently. “If you fall in, you slide to the bottom—”

“Oh,” she said, her voice rusty and worn—but present, and that was something. She swallowed wincingly. “That’s not in the book.”

Wordlessly, Bijou held out her water-bottle, and watched as the Hag of Wolf Wood took a painful sip.

“Maybe they’re new,” said the prince.

She rinsed the water around her mouth, swallowed, and said, “So. I suppose we’re looking for the blacksmith’s shop.”

“Of course,” the prince answered. “Where else would you keep your anvil?”

Logic led them, along with the memories of Bijou and Prince Salih. An anvil would be on the ground floor; a forge would be well-vented. They decided rapidly that neither was likely to be located in the terraced houses stacked one tier on the next in the sandstone hills, turning instead to the largest excavations—the ones with pillared facades stretching up into the cliff-heights. But poking among them at random proved unhelpful, and every one of the adventurers was too aware of the lurking ghuls and of the remaining duration of the night wearing thin.