Page 34 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Yes,” Nicholas said, then regretted admitting it. It was easy to see where this was going.

“Your uncle and Dr. Ebla are at the top of the chain here. So, much like you yourself, I can’t do anything without their say-so.”

“Where am I in the chain, then?” Nicholas said.

“Oh, that’s complicated,” said the cook, picking up his knife again. “There are a few things you can order me to do. For example, if you came in here demanding I give you one of the chocolate biscuits I just baked, those big ones cooling over there, well...”

Nicholas recognized a distraction when he heard one—but also, he wanted a chocolate biscuit. He demanded one, received it, and left to eat it at his desk upstairs. As he nibbled, he stared at the book he’d worked so hard on, filled with weeks of research and days of writing and several ounces of blood. He thought about how biscuits tasted very good while you were eating one, but as soon as you’d swallowed the last bite, the pleasure was over. Probably riding a magic carpet would be the same; wonderful while it was happening, but then it would end and the wonder would be gone. So, who cared, anyway? Magic was stupid and pointless. His talents were stupid and pointless. Probably he, Nicholas, was also stupid and pointless.

Now, much older, he sat at the very same desk, though sans biscuit. He looked from the draft of his truth spell, which hardly differed from the same wearisome spell he’d written many times over, to Maram’s odd note.PR1500tt.An English-language book, transformational magic.

Curious indeed.

10

At eight o’clock, Nicholas dragged himself up from a nap and set off for the Library, Collins dogging his steps down the grand staircase and through the Great Hall.

The collection had once been contained only within the home’s original library, which had been a modest space adjacent to the chapel and the formal dining room. In the late 1800s, however, Nick’s great-grandfather had knocked down the walls and expanded the Library into the other two rooms, and it now took up fully half of the ground floor, temperature and moisture control minutely set to archival specifications. The entryway was a metal door that demanded both a retinal scan anda thumbprint, and only Richard, Maram, and Nicholas had access, though supervised staff came in regularly to clean.

Collins stood to one side, arms crossed, as Nicholas aligned his seeing eye with the scanner. “What are we doing down here?”

“I’m looking for something,” said Nicholas. “You don’t need to come in with me.”

Collins nodded, and Nicholas hadn’t been aware his bodyguard was tense until he saw his shoulders relax.

“Why do you hate books so much?” Nicholas said, curious. He’d always taken Collins’s blatant dislike of magic as part and parcel of his nature, but wondered suddenly if there was more to it than simple surliness.

Collins cleared his throat. He seemed about to say something, lips moving soundlessly, then stopped, cleared his throat again, and swallowed hard. He let out a harsh, rasping cough and shook his head.

Nicholas looked at him, taken aback. He knew Collins was under anNDA, of course, and he recognized the unmistakable hallmarks of trying to speak around the magical gag order. He did not understand, however, why the NDA should stop Collins from explaining an opinion. He wrote all the NDAs himself, though it was Richard and Maram who read them aloud, and they were a tricky bit of magic that allowed for the reader to fill in the exact terms of the enforced silence. For all he knew, employees might be prohibited from saying the word “whimsical,” a word Nicholas knew for a fact Maram did not like.

Finally, Collins said, “All the books are written in blood.”

Well, that was certainly true. Nicholas forgot sometimes that not everyone was as intimately familiar with blood in all its many forms as he was. “Fair enough,” he said. A press of thumb to touchpad, and the metal door hummed open. He stepped through and thumbed the door closed again, then took a pair of white cotton gloves off the high round table standing right inside and pulled them on as the gears began to groan shut. At the last second, he glanced back at Collins and got a glimpse of his bodyguard’s unhappy face before the thick metal separated them.

The lights in the Library were motion sensitive, and flickered to life as Nicholas moved into the room, illuminating the bookshelves one by one until he clapped loudly and the three enormous hanging crystal chandeliers blazed away the lingering darkness. The walls were many-angled, curved where the original library had been, straight through the old dining room, then swerving and peaked in the part that was once the chapel, and every inch of wall was lined with bookshelves.

Some had glass doors, and some did not, but all were richly carved dark English oak, the intricate wooden twists of blossoms and ivy shining beneath the brass lamps affixed to the top of each shelf. There were double-sided freestanding shelves as well, just as high and carved in the same fashion, some arranged in straight lines and some spiraling to match the curve of the walls, giving the place a tight, labyrinthine feel. Here and there were movable sets of spiral mahogany stairs tipped with brass finials, the underside of each step painted a glossy carmine that winked inand out of view as Nicholas walked the aisles, like a cardinal taking flight out of the corner of his eye.

The books themselves were organized according to a classification system devised by Nicholas’s great-grandfather that separated them by age, place of origin, and function. There were over ten thousand, and not all of them were books in the strictest sense; some of the glass-doored shelves held scrolls, some folios, and the oldest “book” in the collection was actually fragments of a three-thousand-year-old papyrus written in Aramaic, the letters so faded by use that they were legible only with a specialized microscope. Once, it had been a spell to make a donkey double its strength for an entire day.

“What’s the point of having it?” Nicholas had asked, peering at the flimsy, yellowed fragments, preserved behind glass. He was perhaps nine. “If it doesn’t do anything anymore, you can’t lend it out. Why do we keep books that don’t do anything?”

“Everything we can learn about a book is valuable, not only what it can do,” Maram had said. “The traces of ink. The methods of binding. The composition of paper. The Library is the sole carrier of a very ancient line of knowledge—how to make this special ink, make these special books. We have a great responsibility, both to preserve this knowledge and to keep it safe. In the wrong hands...”

“But I’m the only one who can make the ink,” said Nicholas.

“Exactly,” said Maram. She had turned her dark, lucent eyes on him. “So you mustn’t fall into the wrong hands, either.”

But he had.

It had been the last day of October when he was thirteen, in San Francisco, back when he’d been allowed outside the UK more often. He and Richard had been walking down the street, arguing. That year was the angriest Nicholas had ever been, a red haze of puberty in which he’d wanted any life other than the one being shaped for him, and on that particular day he’d been recovering from a challenging commission: a volume that had called a two-day hailstorm complete with lightning,which had been purchased by a billionaire in Sonoma County for the sole purposes of ruining his ex-wife’s outdoor wedding.

Nicholas had wanted the argument they’d been having. He’d started it on purpose, by jamming the hailstorm book so roughly into his coat pocket that he knew Richard would not be able to stop himself from chastising him, and then Nicholas could start shouting, which he had. So heated was his fight with Richard that at first neither one of them had paid much attention to the van rolling down the street beside them, a garish vehicle advertising a local plumbing company.

Then Richard had said “They’re keeping pace with us” in an odd tone Nicholas had never heard him use, and a second later he was grabbing Nicholas’s arm and yanking him away from the street, but it was too late. The van door had already rolled open and several figures in black masks leaped out, metal glinting in their hands. Days later Nicholas had found bruises still livid on his arm in the shape of Richard’s fingerprints where he’d clung to him, though by then those were the least of his injuries.

They’d knocked Richard out and grabbed Nicholas and driven him blindfolded and terrified for what felt like hours, then tied him to a chair and left him there—wherever “there” had been. Alone. He didn’t know for how long. Long enough that he’d pissed himself several times. Then, finally, his kidnappers had returned. Multiple sets of footsteps. He had asked if they were the people who’d killed his parents and someone had laughed and told him yes.

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