Page 43 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

This was accurate. They were standing in a room full of mirrors.

Or, not full, exactly: the small room itself was empty save for two heavy wooden chairs pulled up to a round table. It was the walls that were filled, lined with full-length mirrors, ten of them in total and identical. They were wider than normal, wide enough for two people to stand side-by-side, framed simply in dark wood and hung with no embellishment on the white walls. In each one of their forty corners was a dried, reddish-brown smear of blood.

Each mirror also had a handwritten label tacked atop it, in what Nicholas recognized as Richard’s handwriting. He began reading the labels automatically—Kitchen, Gym, Bathroom North, Bathroom West, Clinic—but then he glanced again at the glass itself and all his attention focused laser-sharp.

“There’s another door over here,” Collins said, but Nicholas wasn’t listening.

The mirrors did not reflect the room he and Collins were in. They did not even reflect Nicholas himself. Or not exactly. It was like looking into a clear pond: Nicholas could see the suggestion of his own reflection on the surface, the refraction of light, but he could see through,as well, to different rooms entirely. Many of them appeared to be bathrooms, but the mirror labeledKitchenshowed, yes, a kitchen, a large one from the looks of it, with stainless-steel tubs and gigantic ten-gallon pots and a man with his hair held back in a tie-dyed bandana bent over an enormous frying pan. TheGymmirror showed several weight benches, and, in the background, what looked like a row of treadmills. There was someone here, too, a bearded man doing squats, sweat rolling down his forehead.

Nicholas had written the spell that linked these mirrors. Could this be the reason Maram had sent him here? So he could see the results of his hard work?

“Check this out, it’s a whole other room,” Collins said, and Nicholas looked up to find him leaning out of a door, beckoning.

Nicholas glanced back at the mirrors and then reluctantly draggedhimself toward Collins. His reluctance turned to wonder, however, when he stepped through the door and found himself, unmistakably, in Richard’s study.

He’d only been in this room once, right after he’d successfully written his very first book, but he’d been aware the visit would be a rare one and so his memory of it was sharpened with particular attention. From what he could see now, not much had changed. Like most of the rooms in the house it had expansive windows and high ceilings, not so different from Nicholas’s own study though larger and more opulent, the marble fireplace ornate in a way that was impressive as well as functional. Shelves crowded most of the wall space, towers of gleaming wood that held not books but objects, artifacts that had hypnotized Nicholas when he’d sat here as a child: a fist-sized dog of red clay, a meticulously painted Cypriot amphora, a stuffed capuchin monkey with glassy obsidian eyes, an enormous sterling bell. It was like the back room of a museum. He knew most of these objects must be attached to a spell somewhere or had been once.

“Don’t touch anything,” he told Collins.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Collins said.

“I cannot stress how very much we shouldn’t be here,” Nicholas said.

“You want to leave?”

Nicholas certainly did not. He understood now why Maram had been so uncharacteristically secretive—she’d be in even more trouble than Nicholas if Richard learned she’d told him how to get in, yet she had told him. She knew how curious he had always been about this place, the one room in the house that was stubbornly closed to him, so perhaps this was a gift to soften an otherwise dreadful week. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d so directly gone against Richard’s wishes and the gesture warmed him even as he worried they’d be caught.

Collins had stopped in front of Richard’s vast walnut desk and was staring at the painting of Nicholas’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on the wall behind it. The ivory-framed portrait gazed down at them, the surgeon austere in his blood-crusted apron, the oil paint shining thick anddarkly red. There was even blood beneath the nails of the man’s hands, a delicate detail that Nicholas noticed with some measure of respect.

“Is that a leg bone?” Collins said, pointing to the bottom section of the frame.

“It is,” Nicholas said.

“Is that some British shit? Putting human bones on picture frames?”

“He was a surgeon,” said Nicholas. “Famous for his speedy amputations, which I imagine must have included plenty of legs.”

“And what, he kept them after he’d sawed them off? To make furniture, like a serial killer?”

“He kept one, at least,” Nicholas said, not wishing to give Collins the satisfaction of his own discomfiture, but in truth he did find it off-putting to imagine someone strapped to a table in an old surgical theater, screaming as his ancestor hacked through bone and tendon while curious medical students scribbled notes.

Nicholas turned away, shaking his head, to examine the rest of the room. There were a few other frames on the wall but instead of art they held more objects: a mummified bat who’d been pinned behind glass, a Victorian brooch of knotted human hair, a woolen blanket embroidered with gray moths.

On Richard’s desk were two things that appeared interesting. One was a leather binder full of old yellowing pages, each individually laminated to delay the aging process. A quick perusal of the first few pages suggested they were the drafted text of a book Nicholas had neither seen nor written, and the drama of the opening lines alone convinced him it deserved a closer look.Flesh of my flesh,it began.Bone of my bone. Only mine own blood can end me.

The other thing that drew his attention was a cloth-bound book nearly as thick as a novel, and he found himself drawn to it despite the twinge of fear and disgust the depth suggested. A book of this thickness would take at least an hour to read aloud, which meant, for the second time that day, he was looking at a book a Scribe had given their life for—somebody likeNicholas had given all their blood to supply the ink to write this book. He turned the front cover and looked down at the neat, cramped handwriting, then flipped to the back.

The spell was rechargeable, though not endlessly so like the wards or the spell that had faded the bookcase for those few minutes. It could only be recharged once a year on the anniversary of its first reading, and as he noticed this, he realized at what spell he must be looking. He read the first few pages to get a sense of the text and confirm his suspicions that yes, it was the spell that located Scribes. The same spell Richard performed every year only to tell Nicholas, every year, that he was still the only one.

It was a complicated piece of writing, and despite the unease Nicholas felt with the amount of blood necessary, he found himself reading it with interest. It was the kind of spell his father referred to as “crystal ball” magic in his notes and what Maram called “intuitive divination”—an object-connected spell that delivered a specific piece of information directly into the reader’s mind. The Library’s expiration date was the only other such spell Nicholas had ever encountered, connected over and over again to the books and to Richard’s mind.

Nicholas had written object-connected spells before, such as the one that linked the mirrors in the other room, but he’d never written this kind of “crystal ball” spell. Nor would he ever. Intuitive divination demanded more blood than a single body could provide.

Still, it was fascinating to see the choices this anonymous Scribe had made, particularly the clocklike structure of the paragraphs and the way they used rhyme to double down on the cognitive connection. He could learn a lot from a spell this powerfully specific and wondered why Richard had never shown him before. Curious about the nature of the linked object, he carefully turned the pages, searching to see what the spell had been fastened to.

He found it in the middle of the spell: a directive to connect the reader’s cognition to “the view from the body that gives life to power.”

What on earth did that mean?

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