Page 80

Soon Amrita drifted off to her own dreams of places and events that felt so far away now, they were also lost in time. A lecture hall in Baltimore where she’d first encountered Will and Zani. She’d been little more than a child then and they had seemed so old and wise to her. The Mudpuddle bookshop and cafe, when she’d come to Primrose Court to perform an absolute truth ceremony, to solve the mystery that made the bookshop disappear. That was the start of her reconciliation with Buffalo Westabrook. An opening at the Museum for the Protection of Natural Magic. Thunder and lightning split the sky, but no rain fell from the ceiling.

She woke with a start. In the bed beside her, Raya was waking too.

The pirate surfaced slowly, rising through the mist and clouds that were the aftermath of such a high fever. At first Raya was confused, but this faded to being present and, at last, after drinking more of the tea with honey, she slowly became aware of who and where she was. She turned her head and found Amrita sitting beside her. Her hazel eyes widened with recognition and the hint of a memory. Raya pushed herself up onto her forearms and looked down at her own body. She saw the torn tunic lying beneath her and took in the camphor infused damp rags clinging to her bare chest. She flopped back onto her pillows and breathed out a long, resigned sigh.

“So, you know the truth now.” Raya’s voice had changed. She’d dropped the act.

Without the glamor that had made her sound so compelling, resonant and male, she sounded so different. And yet, she was still compelling. Her natural voice was lyrical, rich and silky as spun honey. The sort of voice that stuck with you.

Amrita nodded but said nothing. She waited.

Raya looked at the ceiling. Then she began to talk.

“My real name is not Raya Tufan. It is Soraya, and I come from a place where books are not the property of scholars, and knowledge is not the sole domain of men.”

“That,” Amrita said sincerely, “sounds like a lovely place indeed.”

Soraya’s story came out over tea and an impromptu breakfast of cold porridge. She described her people first, in the sparsest of details. Very old. Very magical. A tradition that had kept its books and its knowledge alive across centuries when other traditions had not.

“I cannot name the place easily,” she said. “It is not found on any map. This is intentional, to keep the library’s thieving agents away. But it still exists and Fortune informs me from time to time that my people are well.” Something in her voice shifted on the word “well”, as if she was reassuring herself as much as Amrita. “They are managing. Though it can never be the same without their books. Their written history. Their magic.” She paused. “And the atlas.”

Amrita set down her spoon. “Callimachus took the atlas.”

“He knew what it was. He had been looking for it for years before he found it.” Soraya stared at the ceiling. “I and a dozen others took to the sea with what we could carry. I was entrusted with the atlas and some of the most important texts. I thought if I kept moving—” She stopped. A shadow crossed her eyes. “I was wrong. He had more ships than I had speed. They boarded us. Took the atlas and half of what remained in the hold before I could get away. After that I applied myself to my studies. I learned how to use wards, how to cast illusions and spin storms. “

“How long ago did you leave?”

“Eleven years. It’s been seven since the atlas was taken. I sacrificed everything to save it. I left my own daughter behind. “

Amrita was quiet. The ship rocked beneath them, the slow reliable rhythm of open water.

“You have a daughter?” she gasped.

Soraya’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “She was an infant when I left. She is in Etruria now with her guardians. Safe.” A pause. “But she will not be a girl forever.”

“No,” Amrita said. “She won’t.”

Amrita ate a spoonful of porridge. Soraya sipped her tea and stared out at the ocean, lost in her thoughts.

“The warehouses by the port,” Amrita said. “I overheard the scholars complaining. Whole collections have gone missing.”

Soraya turned her head. “And I’m sure if they’ve looked, they will have seen. What remains on the shelves are nothing but blank scrolls and empty codices. He has been feeding it all into the atlas.” She looked at Amrita, waiting for a moment to gauge her reaction.

“Go on, I believe you,” Amrita reassured her.

“For years, Callimachus has been transferring texts directly into it. He discovered the method in one of the texts he took from another of the sailors in my fleet. I am the only one of us left.”

A silence settled between them as this information sank in. Amrita could feel the despair trailing in its wake. It almost made her forget to ask the question she’d been meaning to ask.

“What do you mean transferring?” Amrita asked.

“There is a way to distill the written word,” Soraya said, “and feed it into the atlas. It can absorb more than any physical library could hold. But Callimachus planned to use it to hoard entire libraries for his own exclusive use. It was never meant to be used that way.” She paused.

“It didn’t work, did it?” Amrita already knew the answer. Historical events would have happened differently if the ancient librarian’s plan had been successful.

“No. He could not control it. It has its own will. Its own sense of purpose. It decides what it shows and to whom.” A pause. “He could not find the key to unlock it. But he kept trying. Kept feeding it more dark magic. More corrupted texts. Another few years, perhaps the right one, and he might have.” She looked at Amrita steadily. “When I found you in Alexandria holding it⁠—”

“You thought I was like him,” Amrita said.