Page 2 of Enslaved

Too late for such questions now. I take in the rest of the debris Sis has gathered from across the palace with such care. Broken stone and trash, along with personal items stolen from various members of the household. A guardsman’s boot hangs from one delicate string close by, twisting gently in the midair.

I shake my head. I’m probably mad for even attempting this, but . . . An image passes across my mind’s eye: a humanoid face with a distended, snapping jaw, all tangled up in a vastgubdagog. It shouldn’t be possible. Yet I’d seen it with my own eyes. I’d felt the potency of the magic at work, magic so unlike any I’d ever before encountered.

I must bring Sis to the low priestess. She must be trained and taught to hone this skill of hers. Umog Grush agreed to meet her, to speak with her, and to decide whether she would take her on as a pupil. Perhaps if I bring a sample of Sis’s work, I might be able to sway the old priestess’s decision in our favor.

“Well, Sis?” I say as the girl bellycrawls underneath her creation toward me. “Is it done?”

The child pops upright in front of me, grinning broadly. Today she has conceded to wear clothing and is clad in a little slip of a gown over a pair of comically voluminous pantaloons. While not, perhaps, the most fashionable combination, Sis nonetheless contrives to look ethereally beautiful, with her delicate features, large eyes, and moon-white skin and hair. Perhaps my wild child is beginning to gentle.

The thought no sooner crosses my mind than she springs to her feet and barks a stream of harsh trollish at her brothers, all three of whom freeze in place across the room. Their awkward, stone-hided bodies are not built for nimbly slipping under and aroundgubdagogthreads like their sister. They blink uncertainly, their gazes flicking from Sis to me.

“Sis, they can’t stay there while we test your work,” I tell the girl sternly. “It isn’t safe.” I motion for the boys to do as I did and sidle along the wall. Sis sighs petulantly, then dives through the snarl to fix a thread Har’s elbow pulled from place. She pouts and sulks, but eventually her brothers make it to the door, and thegubdagogdoesn’t seem unduly disturbed. Not that I could tell a difference, to be honest. “You two had best leave as well,” I say to Lir and Sis.

Lir’s eyes widen as I pull the slim volume from my satchel. “Is it a bad one?” she asks, meaning, of course, the monster contained within these pages.

The answer to her question is, of course,yes.They’re all bad ones. Every last one of these horrors wrought from ink and paper and twisted minds. But I offer an encouraging smile. “Quite small, I assure you. Nothing to worry about.”

She doesn’t believe me. I can’t blame her. Chewing her lip, Lir ushers Sis to the open door where the three boys wait. Then she looks back with a sort of desperate urgency and says, “Mistress, are you sure about this? Really, truly sure?”

I’m not. Purposefully unleashing a Noswraith goes against all the rules of Vespre Library. I don’t know what penalty I’ll face if my actions are discovered. Neither can I predict what damage this little nightmare might cause should it escape. But I’ve come this far. And it’s not just Sis’s future at stake. It’s all of us, this whole blasted, doomed city.

“It’ll be fine, Lir,” I say with another too-bright smile. “Go on now. Take the children.”

Sis utters another stream of protests, ending with an emphatic, “Gubdagogismine!” In the end Dig gathers her up in his strong arms and carries her kicking and screaming from the room while Har and Calx follow, trying to soothe her in their deep, growling voices. Lir casts me a final, worried look, her pretty brows puckered tight.

Then she shuts the door behind her. Leaving me alone with thegubdagog. And the Noswraith.

I look at the book in my hand. To call it a grimoire is an insult to grimoires. It’s just a floppy bit of leather with onion-skin pages on the very brink of disintegration. The Noswraith inside would scarcely need to flex its being to shatter the binding spell completely. It must be a very lazy nightmare indeed not to have done so by now. Why anyone would try to contain even a minor wraith in such a flimsy volume, I cannot guess.

I rest the book in my left palm and carefully open the cover. The handwriting scrawled across the first page is hurried and blotchy. Not a hand I recognize; some librarian from before my time wrote this. The story itself is quite short, though I immediately recognize the simmering force of life in the words. While this Noswraith isn’t particularly powerful, it was strong enough to manifest, which is saying something.

I turn the pages quickly to the end of the spell where the wraith’s name is written in bold, capital letters to secure the binding: BHELUPHNU. A shudder creeps down the back of my neck. Andreas told me something about this one during our drills. It was created by one of the former Vespre librarians. Fonroy, I believe his name was. He’d been a struggling playwright for many years, but never wrote anything of note until at last, in a fit of despair—and most likely influenced by strong substances—he produced this little one-man sketch. It tells the grim tale of a man whose great-grandmother’s dying wish is for him to take care of her beloved pet. Only the pet, as it turns out, plays host to a demon. A voracious demon, who proceeds to terrorize the man, ultimately driving him mad.

The sketch was a hit . . . and the power of Fonroy’s written words spawned magic in the minds of his audience. Enough magic that Bheluphnu sprang into existence here in Eledria and proceeded to work his small terrors on the inhabitants. The Prince hunted him down at last and caught him in a binding spell. For the crime of inadvertently practicing forbidden magic Fonroy was sentenced to life serving in Vespre Library.

He was killed by an altogether different Noswraith long before I arrived. The eventual fate of all librarians in Doomed City.

Hastily, I shake that thought away. Before I can talk myself out of what I’m about to do, I turn the book to its first page again and deliberately rip it straight down the middle.

The spell breaks.

The chamber darkens.

My gaze darts this way and that, searching among the tangled threads highlighted strangely by the small moonfire wall sconces. All is still and quiet save for my own too-loud breathing. I inhale deeply three times, holding each breath for as long as possible before exhaling—

Prrrrlt.

My heart jumps to my throat. Turning sharply, I duck my head to peer beneath a particularly dense snarl of threads. There. There it is, on the far side of the room. Seated just beneath one of the sconces. Pale moonfire light gleams on its fur. A large, fluffy black cat.

It blinks enormous green eyes at me.

My heart drops back to my chest, thudding painfully against my breastbone. It doesn’t matter that Bheluphnu is small and inconsequential. Now that I see it, I’m all too aware that it is still aNoswraith.Panic thrills in my veins, but I keep every motion purposeful and slow as I slip the broken grimoire back into my satchel. My fingers find the feathery quill of my pen. I draw it out, slowly, slowly.

The cat continues to stare at me through half-closed eyes. The tip of its tail twitches.

I swallow hard. Then easing into a crouch, I hold out one hand. “Kitty-kitty,” I call softly, rubbing my fingers together.

The cat’s eyes widen. If looks could kill, I’d drop dead on the spot.

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