Page 58 of Court of Shadows
“Yes.” Mr. Morningside snorted, tucking his handkerchief away. “That was his copy, from better days when he actually visited. The shepherd has apparently had him chasing this book of Bennu’s all over creation. Old boy will be furious when he realizes it was all a wild-goose chase.”
We both fell silent, sitting amid the crackling of the hearth flames and the distant voices above us that echoed through the house. I enjoyed it, in fact, simply sitting there being, as I had come to like that hidden library, and it was a rare moment that he treated me like a friend and not a fool to be manipulated. It was hard to imagine him being friends with one of the Adjudicators, but then I had learned far stranger things in recent hours.
“This book,” I said, tapping the cover of Bennu’s journal, “why does it matter so much? I’m not just blindly translating this for you; Ihavebeen paying attention. You and the shepherd, the Dark One and Roeh, you were rivals, but you were also fighting this Mother and Father, weren’t you?”
He gave me a gentle but snobbish smile, one that clearly communicated how little he thought of my investigative skills.Oh, I know so much more, sir, just you wait.
“That’s why there’s an empty table at the Court. If the table is vacant and the flag is black that means they must be gone or dead. You have a book, the shepherd has one, and now you want theirs. Why?”
That drew his eyebrows up in surprise and his smug smilefaded away. He was looking at me differently now, as if he was only really seeing me for the first time. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he said flatly.
“No, it isn’t,” I scoffed. “When have you ever been principled?”
“Ha! Very droll. All right, but the answer might surprise you,” he said, wagging his finger at me.
“Try me.”
“I don’t like what we did,” Mr. Morningside told me, a haunted shadow darkening his normally vibrant yellow eyes. “It was a bloody business, brutal, and I listened to the shepherd when I shouldn’t have. They were first, you know, the Mother and Father, they were old, old beings by the time he and I appeared. They had many names, many incarnations, but their true followers just called them Mother and Father. At first I thought we might all get along. I didn’t need their worshippers and they didn’t need mine.”
“So what changed?” I asked, leaning onto the desk.
“What changed? Everything. The shepherd wanted more, more followers, more praise, more power. That was when our rivalry began, when it all became Satan or God, Hell or Heaven. We were both collecting worshippers so quickly, and we stopped caring about what they called us or what they did in our names. It... made something snap in the Father, I think. He was a god of tricks and trouble, the embodiment of nature’s chaos. And while we bickered and settled our differences hegrew and spread, unchecked. Something had to be done. There were disagreements, of course; I thought it was cruel to unite against him, but what could be done?”
I swiveled in the chair and nodded toward the painting. “But there are four of you. What happened to the Mother?”
Mr. Morningside drew himself up and shrugged, shaking his head quickly and running his hand over his face. “I wish I knew. She was the only sensible one among us, I think. One day she just... vanished. Bennu must have taken her from Egypt to wherever he wound up, but there was no trace of her after that. Things with the Father only got worse. He went mad. So the shepherd and I made an alliance of convenience.” His voice lowered to nothing but a choked whisper, his eyes wide and staring as if a flood of awful memories had taken hold. “It was a bloodbath. We gave him no choice but to surrender.”
He glanced up at me then, and it was the most honest, the most vulnerable I had ever seen him. His hand shook a little as he passed it over his face again. “That’s why there are so few of you left, and why I’ve tried so hard to chronicle the Dark Fae and, well, take in any that I find.”
“Guilty conscience,” I murmured, using Mrs. Haylam’s phrase.
“Guilt is not a strong enough word for what I feel, Louisa.” Mr. Morningside stood and jerked on the bottom of his coat, sucking in his cheeks as he watched me. “Does that answer your question?”
He did not rush me as I came to my own conclusion, one that startled me even as I said it. “You don’t want to destroy the book. You want to protect it from the shepherd.”
A slow, wan smile spread across his face, chasing away the haunted shadow in his eyes. “It gladdens me to know you at least think that much of me.”
“But then, why this?” I asked, running my palm over the journal. “You’re handing him the key to destroying my people forever.”
The Devil’s smile deepened and he leaned toward me, eyes dodging toward the journal under my hand. “Clever, Louisa. Always too clever. That’s why I came to see you. I know you’re about to finish the translation, and I need you to make a few small...adjustments.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Year Two
Journal of Bennu, Who Runs
We arrived at the fortress at dawn, descending through a skylight surrounded on all sides by twining, reaching branches. It looked as if we were landing in a great wicker basket with the bottom cut out, but as we neared the ground I saw that the fortress went deep underground, too, a wide, stone spiraling staircase disappearing into the earth. Outside the walls stood a forest so denseand green that it looked like a single, unbroken sea of emerald.
I rolled from the back of the Sky Snake drenched from the rain, but that did not matter. At once, I tended to Khent, pulling him down, helping him limp, bloodied and sagging, toward... Well, I did not know where we were expected to go or whether we were expected at all. The Sky Snake departed before I could give it so much as a single pat of thanks, and soon its long black tail was again whipping along among the clouds.
The courtyard seemed deserted, silent but for an incredible racket of frogs. There must have been a swamp or river nearby, for it sounded as if we stood in the chorus of a million singing creatures. I had not noticed that a heavy bronze gate guarded the descent into the earth, and with a noisy clanging it began to move, receding into the wall and opening the way.
“Can you walk?” I asked Khent, but he had long since lost the ability to speak and simply moaned and rolled his head against my shoulder.
I had dragged him but a pace or two when two figures appeared, climbing up out of the depths of the inner fortress. Too tired to temper my response, I stood in openmouthed surprise at the sight of them, for they, like so many things I had seen on my journey, were utterly new to my eyes. They were human from the waist up, young women, each armored in what looked like smoothed wood chased with leaves, the straps of which were secured around their necks and arms with thick white webbing. Their skin was pale pink, and though they had big, pretty eyesas any maiden might, each had six more than they should, four smaller purple eyes curving up toward their white hair. Long plumes in every color were tucked into their braids and they had pieces of bone lodged in their ears and noses. That was all strange, but stranger still were their lower halves, not humanlike but jutting out far behind them to accommodate eight legs. Eight massive, furred legs striped in pink and purple bands.
It was as if some twisted alchemist had taken the top of a woman and mingled it precisely with the body of a tarantula, and where woman met spider hung a long woven cloth painted with an elaborate deer skull with eight eyes. The strange design reminded me of the very book I had carried so far.
