Aliyah

She stepped through the gate, and for a moment, it felt as though ten hundred thousand tonnes of water were bearing down upon her. The air was knocked out of her lungs. Then it eased a little and she could breathe, but only just—each inhale felt tight and shallow, and every exhale took just a little too much. It felt oddly familiar, like the shattered breaths she took while she fought with her pain.

She wasn’t in pain now, but she was disorientated. She could see the shadowy shape of Jackal in front of her and the shape of her own hand latched onto his wrist, but nothing else beyond. The air was just a little too thick and just a little too warm. The floor swirled and turned spongy beneath her feet. What if she got stuck in this horrible in-between space? She fought to breathe through heavy lungs, strained her eyes and ears against the crushing dark.

Then, they emerged. She spluttered and blinked against the sudden light. Something warm and wet dribbled down over her lips; she swiped at it with her fingers. Blood.

She stared down at her boots, at the now-solid ground. Library ground. No vomit-coloured carpet here; the floor was a field of flat, unbroken stone with no visible magic to it. Still, she could feel magic throughout the air if she shut her eyes and concentrated. It was thick and heavy, and it had a slow and watchful pulse to it.

No fire, no blood, she recalled dimly. She glanced at the spell-slip still clutched in her hand as she raised her arm to wipe her face on the sleeve. One side of the paper was blank now, wiped clean of ink. She shoved it into her empty pocket, away from the bundle of unused ones.

“Clean that off,” Jackal hissed, his voice hushed but sharp. He was eyeing the blood dripping down her face. “Don’t let it fall onto the ground.”

She made a mess of her sleeves in catching the rest of the nosebleed. “What…what happens if it does?” she asked, echoing his quietness. It seemed the done thing, given their state of trespass.

“Nothing, hopefully. It takes a lot more than that for the alarms to set off, but best to be careful. It’s less of an issue the further out you are, but we’re not, so…” he trailed off and glanced around. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”

For the first time, she looked up and around to properly evaluate their surroundings. A moment ago, she’d been most concerned with the blood on her face, the blankness of the floor, the cool, bluish light pooling around them. Now, she saw that they were standing in a small patch of open ground at the edge of a circular intersection, a crossroads of sorts. Dozens of shelves radiated out and away from where they stood like the spokes of a giant wheel. Odd shapes sat behind panes of runed glass, illuminated by softly glowing runes. There wasn’t a book in sight.

Where the Lower Library had merely smothered her into sleepiness with its mismatched, stuffy environment, the Higher Library shocked her into a state of startling, unwanted wakefulness. Everything had an oddly dusky, indigo cast to it, but that wasn’t the concerning thing, exactly. Instead, there was an invisible constant, prickling awareness of something not being quite right. She turned around to look for the backdoor, the gateway back to safety; there was nothing but the blank end of a shelf to greet her.

“That little idiot,” Jackal snarled. “I’m going to kick his sorry ass when I get back.”

“What’s wrong?” She could think of many things that were wrong, and the anxiety brought on by the absence of the gateway sat at the top of that list. But her spell-paper still had a side left, didn’t it? Jackal seemed angry at something else.

“We’re on the periphery,” he said, as if that was supposed to make any sense at all to her.

She paused and thought about it; sure, it made sense. The Higher Library probably had ‘more inwards’ and ‘more outwards’ directions. It had an entrance, after all. Maybe this one went sideways instead of up. The Lower Library’s ground floor had been bustling, but the other levels got quieter the further up they stretched. It was pretty quiet here. She vaguely recalled him saying something about blood not being an issue further out. Wasn’t that a good thing?

“So…the blood doesn’t matter?”

“Sure, the blood doesn’t matter. But we’re fucking lost, that’s what matters.”

“I have the spell-slip—”

“The slip isn’t going to work this far out, alright?” He indicated the looming shelves with a wave of his hand. “Anything past the far seventh zone, it’s a one-way trip with these kinds of tickets—which are the best thing that folks like me can get, mind,” he added, glancing at the look on her face. “We need to get back to where there are more books than not-books, if we want the bloody paper to get us out. How do you not know this? You’re such a shitty spy. I’m starting to think you really are just a dumb maid.”

“Excuse me?”

“Go on, try it if you don’t believe me.”

She glared at him and fished the paper from her pocket. She slapped it against the wall and said the word.

Nothing happened.

Her tongue tasted a little bloodier, but the paper remained intact.

They were stuck.

It hit her like a wet sack of rocks: they were well and truly stuck. Lifeline severed, stranded in a gloomy, extradimensional domain bursting to the seams with ominous silence and forbidden knowledge.

“Okay,” she said, starting to hyperventilate. “So now what? Are you just going to stand here and whisper-yell at me? Didn’t your brother tell you about an alternate route, or—”

“Hakim,” he said, “was a mistake.”

She blinked at him, uncomprehending, as she tried to slow her breathing. Deep breaths, she reminded herself. You made it in, now you just have to get out. Another part of her inner monologue chortled hysterically in a back corner of her brain: a lot easier to say than to do, wasn’t it? The sound of Jackal’s voice, sharp and low, yanked her thoughts back into focus.

“Hakim wasn’t ever meant to come here, okay?” He ran a distracted hand through his hair and began to rant. “He wasn’t in on it, all the blackmarket stuff. He must’ve seen me with the wrong book or something and thought it’d impress the girls to take a trip on over to one of the worst places in the whole fucking kingdom—” He paused to take a breath as the torrent of words tripped over one another, “—and to my complete fucking shock, he did it. He actually did it. He and his little pea-brain wrangled a new way into the Library. So I kept his spares after ma shipped him over to the new place for his own good, gods hope he hasn’t burned it down yet—what I’m wondering now is: how the hells did he ever find his way back out?”

“M-maybe…maybe he had a map. What do we do?”

“Here’s a thought. If you have any secret spy knowledge, now would be a good time to drop the act and tell me. It’s not like I’ll be able to snitch on you if we both die out here.”

“I—I’m not a spy,” she blurted out. “I’m only here because I have a medical condition. I couldn’t find a Healer who’d help and I just wanted to fix it, that’s all. I swear.”

She broke into a cold sweat. Jackal was staring her down, not even scowling anymore. His expression had gone spine-chillingly blank.

“…maybe your brother left a mark on one of the shelves, to um, remind himself? Like an arrow, or something, saying ‘go this way’?”

“Hm. Maybe.”

He stalked away from her and started peering at the next shelf along. She hesitated, then hurried after him. At least he was here, right? He knew things about the Library. If she’d gone through by herself, she’d be lost and stuck with no idea what to do. Then again, it was entirely possible that he could take the opportunity to kill her and thoroughly neutralize the threat of her breaking her silence. She swallowed; her throat felt tight.

Well, blackmail really isn’t that easy after all, she thought bitterly. He could just leave her corpse in the depths of the Library and find his own way home. She grit her teeth and ran through her short repertoire of spells: she knew nothing that could hope to seriously injure a fit, healthy kite-handler like him. She was so stupid. This was a horrible mistake. She should’ve listened to Rana.

She peered down the rows of shelves they passed to distract herself. Some held pots of bubbling mud and racks of what looked like human spines. She was glad that they were behind warded glass. There were less disturbing items, though, things which elicited pangs of wonder in her: finely-woven tapestries of dragons and unicorns, slices of lavender-coloured crystal as long as her arm. Most enchanting was a set of miniature trees rooted in shallow clay dishes. They had wizened, knotty branches that were heavy with golden figs.

She wondered if any of these friendlier-looking periphery artefacts had medicinal uses. Then she shook her head at herself in disgust. No, she had to focus on finding books. There was a reason why these items were sitting in the depths of a highly-restricted dimensional wellspring that pretended to be mere storage for books; that glistening golden fruit would be more likely to melt her tongue and shred her throat to ribbons than it was to heal her.

“No mark,” Jackal said, startling her from her thoughts.

“Oh,” she said stupidly. They’d circled round the whole clearing. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. Her blood ran ice-cold once more; she took a faltering step backwards.

He stared at her. His brow furrowed quizzically.

“Oh, wipe that look off your face,” he finally said, lip curling as she flinched. “I may be a thief and an idiot, but I’m not a fucking murderer. No mark just means we’ll have to do this the hard way. Probably not gonna die, just maybe get caught by a Librarian and wish that we maybe did.”

She swallowed. “What’s the hard way?”

“Walk in a random direction. If it gets worse, go back and walk in the other direction.” He went over to a row of shelves and scratched marks at the foot of both shelves with his runequill.

“What do you mean, ‘worse’? Less like real bookshelves? Fire and blood and all that?” she asked, following as he walked down the corridor of not-books.

“Mhmm,” he said, and offered no further comment.

She eyed the contents of the shelves as they walked and watched the reflection of her own miserable, still-bloodstained face in the runed glass. Oh hells, did she really look that exhausted?

The glass-paneling disappeared and reappeared in chunks as they rounded a corner. Books were popping up, too, many of them splayed open on their faces or piled into untidy stacks. She spotted the skeletons of desiccated scrolls, and an encyclopedia that oozed pink foam from its embossed spine.

“Books,” Jackal muttered. “Not sure if they’re the right kind, but they’re books, at least.”

The shelf-corridor started kinking and curling around in knots. A sense of unreality washed over her. She felt as though she were a fish being tumbled down the big mountain river, funneling into a pocket of mesh, a thick glass bowl closing over her head. She blinked, and the world bulged. Not a straight line in sight—the squareness of the shelves warping, the shapes in the distance growing wavy.

She blinked again, reflexively, and her vision cleared. Back to normal. A cold finger of unease traced over the back of her neck. She hadn’t imagined that, right? It had only been for a fraction of a second, and yet…

Jackal came to a dead stop. “You feel that too?”

“Y—” A fruity, sugary taste tingled on the tip of her tongue. She shut her mouth with a snap. She tried again. “Yeah, I—”

Sticky, saccharine sweetness flooded into her open mouth. She coughed; it didn’t help. It wasn’t the air. There was no scent; parting her lips simply led to her choking on the taste. It reminded her a little of sugar candy—but far too sweet, far too much.

“What—” Jackal started, then raised his hand to his mouth. “Bait,” he gritted out through clenched teeth. “Back, now.”

He pushed at her shoulder as they raced back the way they came. A cold flush of fear roared through her. Her heart was pounding so hard it felt that it might burst through her chest. He moved like the kite-runner he was, all fluid grace and fierce motion. She didn’t have a chance of keeping up. She sucked in breaths as she followed; lingering hints of sweetness remained and spurred her onwards.

She made it back to the crossroads clearing, gasping for breath. Her muscles burned and her lungs felt like chewed-up sponges. Jackal had beaten her there by several lengths. She panted for mercifully-unflavoured air, staring back the way they came.

Bait, he had said. What kind of monstrosity twisted at one’s own senses? Environmental illusion-magic was one thing, but bait implied intelligence, intent. The overpowering sweetness was like a child’s idea of what someone would wish to seek out. A fanciful, sugar-rich illusion, bait made with an inhuman understanding of human thoughts and wants. What nightmare of a creature lay at the end of that reality-warping corridor? She could feel herself trembling.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

“What was that?” she asked.

Jackal shrugged, more nonchalantly than she would have expected. “The Librarians call them daemons. Part of the ‘ecosystem’ or something, but I don’t know about that. Don’t think they’re properly alive, don’t think they even need to eat, only that they like to.” He hesitated. “Well, I don’t know for sure, I just read it in a book. Not the worst thing you could find here—can’t get up and follow, see. But then, most can’t, even the really dangerous parts; it’s the territory you really gotta look out for. Looks like mister daemon wasn’t old enough to be smart about its lures too. Lucky us.” He walked back to the mouth of the bait-corridor and scribbled crosses over his initial marks. “Let’s go opposite.”

They went; she had to jog every now and again to keep up with his swift stride. The corridor did not bend so sharply this time; she kept an eye out for books and saw only jars filled with mushrooms and sculptures of nude women posed suggestively with an array of fruits. The sculptor had a fine eye for detail, she decided as she traced the shape of one with a guilty eye. Then she blanched and looked away as she realised that nestled among the fruits were sculpted hearts and eyes and tongues—wet-glazed, too-detailed, and textured with fine papillae.

The artefacts didn’t seem organised into any sort of recognisable system; one of the books she’d read back in the Lower Library had said the depths of true Libraries held both wondrous and useless items, lost things that trickled through the cracks of reality and aggregated in clusters. Still, seeing them now, they looked as though there was something special about them.

Jackal strode ahead of her, seemingly uninterested in examining the shelves.

“Do you know what all this stuff’s for?” she asked timidly. “I mean, that is, do they have any use?”

Jackal shrugged and kept walking. “No idea. They say that’s the real job of the Librarians, figuring out how to sort the useful stuff from all this crap. Never seen any of them while I was this far out, though.”

“Have you been further out than this?” she asked. Despite herself, her mind was racing with wonder. The Library—and its daemons—was clearly dangerous, but it was also the most thrilling place she’d ever seen. Deep down, beneath the Library-induced shivery wakefulness that overlaid her consciousness, she ached to sink her teeth into the true measure of it, to understand. “You said something about…layers, or something, earlier.”

“Layers?” He tilted his head in recall. “Yeah, zones. Kinda rough mapping order that the staff uses, but the Library ain’t a real shape, so it doesn’t always make sense. First zone’s the reception, second’s the start of the books and card catalogue. All safe and tidy there, or so I’ve been told. I’ve never been on account of all the scribes and Librarians.” He snuck a glance back at her, frowning. “Fishing for information, are we?”

“I need to come back later. You’re helping me already.” She hesitated. “Please?”

He snorted and turned his attention back to the corridor. “Stick to the fifth or sixth zone if you’re looking for actual books,” he rattled off. “Maybe fourth, if it’s quiet enough. Fourth is as far as normal patrons’ll go and they follow the safe paths, so you’d best avoid those if you don’t want to get caught—marked in red rope, you’ll know it when you see it. Shallows of the sixth zone, the not-books start appearing. Anything out past the periphery, that’s deep-eighth, shallow-ninth—think we almost hit tenth back there with mister sugar-daemon—it’s a wreck. Nothing natural out there.”

“I take it you’ve seen one before?”

“Seen? No, if you ever seen a daemon—that’s if it’s even seeable at all—you’re probably already done for. I tripped into the shallows of a few dens, is all. Smell of your favourite roast wafts up and you start feeling like you’re starving, well. Best run like you stole it. Some of them do voices too, really good ones. Always copying people you care about, or telling you everything you wanna hear, treasure this way and all that.” As he said so, a shadow of rage bled into his tone. “Real bastards, they are. Anyway. Early on, I was stupid and went way out to the edge of thirteenth. Big no-no for us simple jaunters. No good profit to be had out there. Past the thirteenth, the whole concept of zones break down…that far out, roof starts looking like a sky. Past that, it’s like a…a patch quilt, you know, like with the different coloured squares. Surprised it didn’t kill me. Got a couple of wicked scars, though.”

“From what?” she asked, then regretted it immediately. “Wait, sorry. Sorry, you don’t, uh, have to talk about it if you don’t want to—”

He interrupted her with a sharp bark of laughter. “From falling down a hill of knives, that’s what. Thirteenth’s a junkpile. Great big bloody hills of things taller than these shelves, swords and battleaxes mixed with thrones the size of houses. Plenty of room for someone to fall into the gaps and be buried whole. Idiot me, I climbed one of the tallest hills to see what was beyond and when I saw, I got dizzy and slipped. Like I said, lucky not to have brought the whole thing down on top of me. Oh, look—I reckon we’re almost at seventh.”

They were passing through a section filled to the brim with paintings now; the shelf-heights had increased to accommodate big sheets of yellowed canvas stretched over cracking wooden frames. There was no runed glass anymore and yet, the contents of the shelves were unmarred by dust. She spotted a sketch of the mountain river next to an aquarelle rendition of a sand-ray migration. A little jar of clay marbles was propped up against a set of frayed brushes. Recognizably Songian things, worn and familiar. She turned her gaze back to Jackal.

“What did you see in the thirteenth?”

“Uh. Stuff. Give me a minute. I know I remember, I definitely did remember. But it comes slowly. Think I was out there for too long.”

He was silent for a long while. They walked past broken glass and grease-stained maps, taxidermied lizards and piles of rusted coronets. Just as Aliyah thought he had given up on answering, he spoke.

“There was a bit that was just wasteland,” he said slowly. “Real ugly, that wasteland. Another part was…it looked like a bunch of big sooty thorns smashed into the ground and around the thorns were little coloured shapes on the floor. It was far away, so I couldn’t see them properly, but I knew—I knew they were doors. Isn’t that odd, the knowing? Don’t like this place messing with my head. Us jaunters are already a bit fucked up to even try, but—well. Get out while you can, even if you are a foreign spy.”

“I’m not.” She replied reflexively, then hesitated. “That uh, it does sound disturbing. But the memory stuff, it could just be like a daemon, with the voices…?”

“‘Just’ like a daemon?” He snorted. “You say that like a daemon’s a small thing. Maybe. Anyway, it’s all coming back now, like a trailing four-line—no, wait, I guess you wouldn’t understand that, eh? Maybe like a paper bunting then, the ones you maid-people string up for festivals. One part after another, all on the same string. There were other bits. A red field, tall grasses like the patches in the foothills, or maybe sharper looking, like river reeds, but the real thing I remember is that it was red.”

He paused and shuddered visibly. When he continued, his voice took on a slower, dreamlike cadence.

“It was red. Richer than blood, and it moved like wine. There were other things moving inside it too, but I didn’t bring a spyglass. I’m glad of that now. And past the field was…I thought they were houses at first, but they didn’t have windows or doors or chimneys or the slope-y thatch parts of roofs. Actually, I think they were just blocks of stone, a big grid of ugly stone blocks all the way to the horizon. And if I squinted and tilted my head just right, I saw other things. Different layers, places I’d have had to go another route to get to. See, I don’t like that I knew that. It wasn’t something that I sat down and figured out; I just knew. It must’ve made me know it. The other layers…shelves that moved on metal roads. Roads to nowhere. And a big maze, with even more doors in it than the thorn garden. See? Again. It made me call it a garden, even though it wasn’t.”

Aliyah swallowed. “You…seem to remember it well.”

“Uh huh. Don’t think I’ll ever forget. Hey look, books. Think we’re here; try the paper.”

Sure enough, chunks of books had started appearing between all of the paintings and miscellaneous artefacts. A few metres forward, and now they were surrounded almost entirely by real books, solid and papery, none of them leaking unidentifiable substances.

“Wait,” Jackal said as she moved to place the paper against the wall. “Hand me the others.”

She froze and stared at him. “Why?”

“You don’t want to get dumped into the periphery the next time you use one, right?” He jerked his chin back at the way they’d come. “I can change the little idiot’s spellwork so it’ll drop you here instead.”

She hesitated. It was a tempting offer; for one thing, it seemed vastly safer back here than out where the daemon lurked. It would cut down on her travel time; half-walking, half-hurrying all this way had taken a third of an hour, at the very least. On the other hand, he could write anything he wanted to on the paper. He could send her hurtling down the throat of the daemon, or change it so that the papers stranded her completely. Or—well okay, maybe not. He hadn’t left her to the periphery and he’d given her credible-sounding advice. Still, he could make it so that the new entrance point was in the middle of a Librarian’s office. That could certainly neutralize the knowledge she held over him without leaving a lasting stain on his conscience.

“I don’t trust you,” she said.

“I wouldn’t either, if I were you. But I’m just trying to help, is all.”

She racked her brain for a possible solution. “What if…what if you change it, and then go through another doorway with me? And show me you’re doing the same thing to each paper, so I know it’s not a trap?”

He frowned, then let out a sharp sigh. “Alright. Give ‘em here.”

She watched over his shoulder as he knelt and wrote; he didn’t snap at her this time. He showed her each marking as he made it, copied over on every sheet. Part of her envied the artistry with which he wielded the runequill. He would have made an excellent scribe if he had been a fresh scion like her and not the child of a lowborn cook. Perhaps she could have been a scribe, if she’d tried hard enough. She swallowed down a lump of guilt as he handed the fixed papers back to her.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Let’s get back first. Put a hand over your nose, we’re close enough to reception that it could matter.” He grabbed the crook of her elbow. “Probably not. It’d need more blood. But it could matter; you never know.”

She held the original paper against the shelf and said the word of power, felt the paper crumbled to ashes under her fingers. Jackal pulled her through and the feeling of warm water closed in over her head.

When they emerged back into the bathroom, she crumpled to her knees. She felt blood pool into the palm she had kept cupped over her nose. A headache was beginning to make itself known, throbbing at her temples—the sort of headache she only got when she tried to control a dozen needles at once.

“Yeah,” Jackal said as he leaned against the sink. He betrayed no obvious signs of discomfort, which itched at her on a petty, vindictive level. “Always worse on the way out. Also worse the longer you stay in, but sometimes it can’t be helped. You get used to it.”

“Again,” she said, staggering to her feet. She pulled a fresh slip out of her pocket.

“Woah, cool it. Just take a minute. You look like you need one.”

She did. Her headache lightened, just a little, as she rested her forehead against the wall. She walked over to the sink. Jackal stepped aside as she splashed water over her bloodied face.

“Okay,” she said. “Trying again now. Just quickly, to check. You first.”

He held out an arm; she grabbed him by the wrist.

“Ready when you are,” he said.

They went. It felt even worse than the first trip. She caught more blood with the end of her sleeve. Her legs shook. She toppled. Jackal caught her, and she steadied. They had arrived exactly where they’d left off, near safe and normal-looking bookshelves. Her head hurt so much.

“Okay, cool. Cool. Back now,” she gasped out. She set the paper against the wall again.

“Wait,” said Jackal just as she said the word of power.

A burst of pain lanced through her head; white-hot and blue-cold at the same time. Too soon, she thought through the haze of pain. Damn it—should have listened, should have waited for it to stop hurting. The pain wasn’t drowned out by the heavy water-feeling, either. If anything, the pressure made it worse. Her vision blacked out and she stumbled blindly through the gate. It took a few seconds to recover once she was back in the bathroom. She crumpled, threw out a clumsy hand to catch herself, only partially succeeded at cushioning the fall as the joint of her elbow folded and her shoulder thwacked against the tile. She groaned and let herself lay there, cheek pressed against the cold tile. Her face was slippery with blood once more.

Then she realised that Jackal wasn’t with her.

“Oh,” she whimpered aloud. She hadn’t been holding onto him. He’d been about to say so.

You idiot. She dreaded saying the word of power again, dreaded the visit back. Her throat felt raw and her bones felt squashed. The aching in her limbs highlighted the existence of several muscles of which she had been previously, blissfully unaware. It would be so much easier to lie here and let her eyes tear up as her bloody nose drained onto the tile.

With a monumental effort, she hauled herself into a sitting position. She gave herself a moment to breathe in a deep lungful of cool, clean air. Then, an ugly thought wormed itself into her mind.

Why not just leave him there?

Everything ached so much. It would feel worse if she went to retrieve him. Give it a few days. Stuck in the Library with no backdoor papers in his possession, he’d either turn himself in to the Librarians or trip over a daemon and die. His mother, his relatives, they wouldn’t suspect anything but overambition if he was caught, or an accident if he got himself killed. And that would tie up a loose end very nicely for her, wouldn’t it?

She grimaced and clenched her hands into fists.

No, it wouldn’t. It wasn’t a loose end: here she was, bloody-nosed and sitting on in a stranger’s bathroom floor, telling fanciful, heartless lies to herself. Whether leaving him would be useful depended on whether or not any given Librarian would listen to an accusation from him, and whether or not he was able to survive in the depths of the Library, to scavenge food and a weapon and wait for her to come back.

Her stomach lurched with anxiety and revulsion. She shouldn’t be thinking like this in the first place. Jackal had been helpful and not unkind, despite her blackmailing him. Even so, she shouldn’t—wouldn’t? She hoped that she wouldn’t—abandon anyone to the Higher Library. She gritted her teeth against the aching, full-body discomfort that gripped her. Jackal hadn’t harmed her. He’d probably thought about it though, given it consideration like she had just now. And he’d decided not to. Now, it was her time to decide, her choice to make.

It wasn’t a terribly difficult choice. She took out another paper and opened another door.

More pain. Bloody, bruising, pain—she only just remembered to clap a hand over her nose and mouth to catch the inevitable stream of blood as she stepped into the deep, dark shadow of the doorway.

The water-feeling pressed down on her with a greater weight than ever before, forced her to hunch over as she slogged her way forwards over squishy, invisible ground. One foot in front of the other, walking slowly. So slowly. Her head felt as though it were being hulled like a walnut, her shoulders as though iron weights were pressing down upon them. She lurched forwards, step by step. She had dealt with worse. She didn’t know why she was faltering now.

The worst pain was whatever you were feeling at that very moment.

She made it. Only just; rough hands dragged her the rest of the way out, moments before the doorway dissolved. Her vision shivered with colourful bursts of light, mocking starry pinpricks. Her legs collapsed out from under her.

“So it was an accident, huh?” Jackal asked as he saved her from breaking her nose upon stone.

She groaned as she shook herself loose and lowered herself to the floor. How much of a nosebleed was too much? Her entire head throbbed in tune with her racing pulse. Her hand was slick with blood.

“Yes. Accident,” she mumbled as she mopped up more blood with her sleeves, a fresh red layer over the dried splotches already crusted there. Oh hells, she was going to need a lot of enzyme paste once she got back. “Just stupid, not…not…”

“Uh huh. Easy there. I can say the spellword this time.”

“Thank you,” she managed.

“You know, I was so sure that you were a spy just a minute ago. Pulled the wool right over my eyes, you did.”

“…convinced not now?”

“Don’t know about that,” he said with the barest hint of a scoff. “But I’ll say it’s less likely.”

She sniffed and wobbled to her feet; he offered her a hand and she took it. She passed him the slip and made sure they were tethered, this time.

He used the word and pulled her through; she shuffled and stumbled over lumpy, invisible ground and puddles of incorporeal slush, nothing more than a trailing passenger. The water-feeling engulfed her, but being towed along made it a little easier. Mostly. Her head still throbbed in time with her pulse. They emerged, Jackal looking only slightly worse for wear. She sank to the ground and supposed that it came with practice after all.

“I’ll clean up,” he said, nodding at the blood she’d left on the ground. “Ma’ll be back soon, yeah? We were gone too long.”

“S-sorry,” she said. Whether sorry for the blackmail or the blood on the floor or for forgetting him in the Library, she didn’t know. But it only felt fair to say, regardless.

He scowled. “Got what you wanted, didn’t you? Leave now.”

“Thank you,” she said, staggering to her feet. The bundle of spell-slips rustled in her pocket. She hoped they would be enough.

He hesitated. “You too. For fetching me. But don’t come back.”

===

She’d ended up missing a shift in the laundry hall and needed half a jar of enzyme paste to scrub the dried blood out of her uniform. Goodbye to her day’s wages and to her threadbare reputation. In exchange, she’d gotten a fistful of papers and a Library to raid.

It hadn’t been a terrible deal, all things considered.