Chapter 10 - The Tome Decides

The first thing I noticed when I came to was the cold.

A breeze moving through stone corridors and across every inch of me, which was a significant number of inches, because I was completely naked. I registered that second. The cold first, then the naked, then the fact that I was horizontal and moving and hadn't decided to be any of those things.

I lifted my head.

There was that girl in front of me pulling the board by a rope handle, torch in her other hand, pulling me through the corridor. She had put on that little linen thing again, and it barely covered her mid-thigh. Fine ass. I was strapped naked to a board in an evil fortress being wheeled toward something bad, and the first coherent thought my brain produced was fine ass. She had a great ass. She had great tits. I'd had my hands on both not so long ago, and the memory held up.

I watched her for longer than I should have given my circumstances.

Then my circumstances arrived all at once, as they tend to do when you let your attention wander.

I took inventory, because Mistress Ashara had drilled it into me until it was the first thing I did every time I woke up in a bad place. Where are you, what do you have, what can you do. She usually followed that with the riding crop, so the lesson stuck.

Where: an evil fortress. Still. Apparently.

What I had: nothing. I did a full accounting of the situation below my waist and arrived at the conclusion that the wine and the Pit and whatever had happened in that storeroom had collectively left me without a single useful thing going on down there. Completely, thoroughly, embarrassingly limp. Shackled wrist and ankle to a flat board with iron that had no flex in it, bare as the day I was born, being pulled through a cold stone corridor in full torchlight by the girl who had arranged all of this. If I was going to die tonight, I wanted it noted for the record that I had been better-presented at other moments.

What I could do: nothing, currently.

The corridor was narrow, black rock, the same as the whole keep, and it smelled of damp stone and blood and something underneath both of those I didn't have a name for yet.

"Hey," I said.

She didn't look at me. The board rolled on.

"Hey. Slave girl."

Nothing.

Which, fine. Slave girl. I don't know why I said that.

I was getting distracted.

"I know you can hear me. I'm right here. On the board. That you're pulling."

She glanced back over her shoulder. Her eyes found my face and the corner of her mouth did something warm, I thought, good, progress, and then her eyes moved south, and the warm thing in the corner of her mouth disappeared, and she looked faintly disappointed, and then she turned around and kept walking.

"It's cold," I tried to explain.

It was cold. I needed her to understand that it was cold. The corridor was a meat-locker and I had spent six hours in a pit and before that I had been drugged and none of this was representative and I would very much like a second opinion under different conditions, and I opened my mouth to explain all of this and what came out was:

The wheel squeaked.

"What's your name?" I said.

"I'm Samuel. You probably knew that. I don't know your name. That feels like an oversight given what we've been through together. What we did back there was top three. Possibly top two. The point is you set a very high bar and then immediately drugged me, which I feel is relevant to any ongoing relationship."

She didn't even slow down.

"I'm going to keep talking until you talk back. I have a lot of time. Not like I can do much."

"The storeroom," I said. "That was a setup, wasn't it?"

The board stopped.

She put the torch against the wall and turned around. Standing directly above me. That little linen thing was short and I was flat on my back and the viewing angle was doing me no favors in the thinking department.

"Slave girls don't last here," she said. Like she'd been waiting to say it. "I needed a way out. You are my ticket out."

"And now I'm on a board."

"And now you're on a board." The corner of her mouth did the thing. "The warlock doesn't know about this."

"Are those mutually exclusive?"

She almost laughed. Not quite. I watched it happen and then not happen.

"You don't know what he is," she said. "What he does to people here. I've watched it happen." Her jaw set. "That's why."

"I'm not even mad about it," I said. "Evil fortress, warlock overlord, mysterious ritual sacrifice. Very standard situation. I get it. I just wanted you to know that back there was real for me. For what that's worth."

She looked at me. At the broader situation, because there was a significant amount of situation spread out right in front of her. Then back at my face.

"For what it's worth," she said. Like she meant it and wished she didn't. "I had to drug you. You wouldn't have gone quietly."

"I'm very quiet."

"You haven't stopped talking since you woke up."

She picked up the rope and turned back around. The view remained exceptional. I want that on the record.

"That was nice for me too," she said, already walking. "First time."

I stared at the ceiling and let that sit for a moment.

"Any chance," I said, "you have a cloth or something? A strip of linen? Even a large leaf. I'm not asking for much."

The board kept rolling.

"A hat, maybe. A small hat?"

The wheel squeaked. That was the only reply I got.

---

She wheeled me through two more corridors and down a ramp and I stopped talking and started paying attention to where we were going. Down was bad. Down was where the Pit was, and I'd already done that, and I didn't think I had another round of it in me tonight. But the smell was different down here. Old stone and old paper and something sealed for a very long time underneath both.

The corridor opened into something larger.

She stopped.

I wish she hadn't. Her ass had kept me more or less sane for the last two corridors.

The room was circular, vaulted high enough that the ceiling disappeared into the dark. The walls curved upward smooth and old, worn in the way that comes from centuries of the same air moving through the same space. The floor was stone, dark stone, and the center of the room was lit by a lamp.

The lectern looked heavy and was made of metal, the old kind, bolted to the floor and chained to what it held. What it held was a large book. Brass fittings at each corner, the kind with faces in them if you caught them at the right angle, and the faces were grinning with small pointed teeth.

In the center of the cover was that one large, creepy eye. Unblinking.

The eye was looking at me.

It had been looking at me since the door.

---

Then the book laughed.

It was loud and obnoxious. A genuine, full-throated bark that bounced off the curved walls. The eye crinkled at the corners in a way I wouldn't have thought possible for something with no eyelids.

"THERE he is." The voice filled the room, loud and grating and carrying, clearly not calibrated for close quarters. "Six hours in the warden's pit. SIX. I counted. Every man thrown to the old warden, I count. The usual time before the noise stops is somewhere between ten and fifteen seconds. YOU come out, horizontal, shackled, naked, and limp as a wet rope, and you have THAT FACE." The eye swept over me in a head-to-toe inspection that paused in several places and had no shame about any of them. "Spent. Comprehensively, magnificently spent. In the WARDEN'S PIT. Eight hundred years of records. Never once had to write 'survived a warden in this particular condition.' What a miraculous disaster. I cannot decide."

I stared at it.

"Wonder what you had that they didn't." The eye swept over me again. "So what happened down there? Polite conversation?"

"Something like that."

"It fucked you, didn't it."

The silence that followed was longer than I would have liked.

"I will need a full account. I DEMAND SATISFACTION!" It said, then added after a pause. "For the records."

Behind me, the girl was moving. Barefoot on damp stone, the soft press of each step. Something set on the floor. The creak of leather, the clink of something small and metal. I couldn't turn far enough to see.

The eye moved from me to her. Then back.

"She gave you the wine," it said. "Did you figure that out before, or after?"

"After."

"AFTER." The eye held this at arm's length, turned it over with contempt. "You're not stupid. I'll give you distracted. Understandable cause." The eye moved to the girl and conducted a slow, entirely conscious inventory that would have been scandalous anywhere with better lighting. "She is, I should say, considerably more distracting than she has any PRACTICAL right to be. In the Crimson Empire we had a formal classification for this sort of quality. Category One. Someone with her particular inventory of gifts should be ending dynasties. Bringing minor gods to their knees. At least she had a plan, and you wandered into it."

"Criminal WASTE."

"I was occupied."

"With her ass. Yes. I watched." The eye narrowed in a way that read as deeply entertained.

Behind me, the girl said nothing. She kept at whatever she was doing. Then she came around the board and crouched beside me.

She put both hands on my chest. Palms flat, like she was taking a reading. Then she started moving them, slow, no particular destination. Down my sternum, across my ribs, back up. Looking at what her hands were doing the way you look at something you're trying to memorize before you put it down for good.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi," she said. She did not stop.

She leaned in close and I felt her breath on my neck first, then her lips, then her tongue, a slow drag from my collarbone up toward my jaw. She was saying goodbye to a specific place and she was doing it thoroughly.

"He takes things from people," she said, against my neck, not quite looking at me. "The warlock. Not all at once. A piece at a time, over months. First the memories you care about. Then the things you want. Then the things you feel." She pulled back and looked at my face. "Eight months. I've been here eight months. Three girls before me didn't make it."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't think of anything worth saying to that.

"I watch his rituals," she said. "I carry his wine. I clean the blood off the floors. And every night I go back to my room and I check." She tapped her temple. "I check if I still remember my name. If I still want things. If I still feel things." Her hand was on my ribs, still. "Some mornings it takes longer than it should."

She looked at me. That same sad warmth from before, except now I understood what was underneath it.

"I wasn't supposed to actually like you," she said. Like it had ruined something she'd been planning carefully. "You were the way out. The Tome said bring someone and I'd be free." Her fingers pressed into my ribs, light but deliberate. "And then you walked in, and you were funny, and you touched me like I was a person, and now I have to do this part knowing what your face looks like when you're being honest." Her jaw set. "That's worse. That's so much worse than if you'd been nobody."

"I like looking at you," she said. "Before."

That word landed funny.

"Before what?" I said.

She didn't answer that. "I think you're cute," she said. Like it was making her life considerably more difficult. "That's not helping."

"Happy to complicate your evening."

Her mouth did the corner thing. Sad and warm at the same time, which I had not previously known was something a mouth could do.

She kissed me then, a wonderful and exciting kiss, almost like the kind you give someone when you're not going to get another one. When she pulled back there was color in her face that had not been there before.

"Don't move," she said.

She moved past me carrying a small shallow ritual dish, like the one from Malkor's chapel. Nothing good happened near that kind of dish.

She set it by the lectern and opened the Tome.

The eye disappeared as its cover swung forward, and whatever had been watching was now facing the wrong direction entirely.

I craned my neck as far as the board allowed, which wasn't far. She was bent over the pages, lips moving. Mumbling to herself, the way you recite something that's been beaten into you. I couldn't see much from this angle.

"Second syllable," the Tome said. "On the secondary incantation. Don't rush it."

She looked up.

"You're a liar. You always have been." She looked back down and kept mumbling.

"She cannot read," the Tome said, aimed at me, presumably, since it was currently blind. "Memorized from the illustrations. Isn't that something?"

I stared at the ceiling for a moment.

A gorgeous illiterate girl was about to cast a spell from a blood warlock's grimoire, using a page she'd memorized from the pictures. On me.

I had a real shot at becoming a toad.

I wasn't going to mention I wasn't great at reading either. That would have been the wrong moment.

She crouched beside the dish and pulled a small blade from somewhere in that little linen thing, and she cut her palm. A clean line. Blood dripped into the dish.

She stood. Looked at me.

"You should at least tell me your name," I said, "if you're planning to stab me."

"Mm," she said.

I looked at the blade. I looked at the shallow dish. I looked at my sternum, which was bare and exposed and not at all interested in being cut.

"Slice or a stab?" I said. "Slice, I can manage. A full stab is a different kind of evening."

She tilted her head, looking down at me.

I glanced down.

There had been a time, roughly three minutes into this situation, when I had been comprehensively and entirely limp. That time had apparently passed.

"Impeccable timing," I said, to no one in particular.

From the lectern, the Tome had gone still. Then: "Oh." Quietly. Then considerably louder: "OH. Eight hundred years. EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS. I need a new category. I need it written TONIGHT."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then her hand came to rest on my dick, just her palm, not the blade, and she said:

"Pity." Her voice was softer than I'd heard it all night. "I liked you."

She picked the blade back up.

"Surface blood," the Tome said, clipping its own delight into practical advice. "Just enough to anchor the circle."

Something went out of my shoulders that I hadn't known I'd been holding.

She put the tip of it against my chest. The cut was maybe an inch. I made a short, sharp, undignified noise that came out before I could stop it. Surface blood. I was not going to die from it. None of that stopped the noise from happening.

She drew the line and then she leaned down and pressed her lips to my cheek, light and quick, and whispered right against my ear: "Guess I don't have to kill you."

When she pulled back she was smiling. Not the corner-of-the-mouth thing. An actual smile, warm and a little relieved. I, too, was rather relieved and was quite hoping I'd be able to get out of this nightmare.

I stared at the ceiling and decided nineteen years old was a very strange age to be.

She added my blood to the dish and mixed it with the knife.

She crouched and began tracing the blood circle around the board. Then she stood at the foot of it and began to speak.

I didn't know the words, but they sounded old. Heavy in a way I couldn't explain, like the air got a little thicker with each one. Magical for sure.

"I could walk you through it," the Tome said in a helpful tone. "Word by word. You'd get it right."

She ignored it and kept going. From memory, looking at the pictures. She reached the end of the incantation and stopped.

Silence settled over the room.

I had not turned into a toad. I did not glow, spark, shrink, or sprout anything new. The cut on my chest stung a little, but that was it.

She waited, but nothing happened.

She looked at the Tome. Made a short, sharp sound through her teeth. Her eyes cut to me. She was reconsidering the surface blood decision.

"Nothing happened," she said.

The Tome's eye moved to her. Then to me. Slowly. Then back to her.

"Something certainly happened," it said. "It just didn't happen to you."

She opened her mouth.