The Night Country

22

What did Finch think they’d find through the door?

A goblin market. The wood between the worlds. An underworld of smoke and fire.

Not this: a few rippingly painful seconds spent falling through an icy fog. Then his body tipped onto dusty stone, hard through the patched-over knees of his jeans. He was certain he was upside down, clinging like a spider, till the world righted itself. Iolanthe was already standing, swatting the dust away, as Finch rose slowly to his feet.

They stood in a cracked courtyard circled with crumbling pillars, under a blank gray sky. But courtyard didn’t feel like an old enough word. It was an agora, then, vast and ancient and empty. Finch couldn’t tell if it was night or day, or whether those words had any meaning here. The pillars were neatly spaced, flanking wide stone roads, each angling steeply upward toward the broken teeth of the city encircling them.

This world was dead. Finch thought he understood what that could mean, having watched the disintegration of the Hinterland. But that was a bleeding world, running with life and rage and sentient stars, bucking against the insult of its own collapse.

He hadn’t understood what death could look like when the corpse was made of stone and wind and dust and all the million, million elements that sifted and slept the big sleep under a voided-out sky. The weight of it was unimaginable.

Iolanthe’s hand was friendly on his shoulder. Her calm was a lifeline, and the casual lilt of her voice. “Scary, isn’t it? We can’t stay too long without shelter—it gets under your skin out here. In your head. But look around while you can, hardly anyone gets to see a fossil world.”

Finch found his words at last. “What happened here?”

She was turning in place, looking at each road. Something about the one directly to Finch’s right must’ve appealed to her, and she started toward it. Far, far above them—though it was hard to say how far, because of the place’s surreal flatness—stood a palace of high gray towers, edgeless against the sky.

“A parasite happened,” she said. “Now follow me, and save your breath. It’s a long walk.”

The city seemed distant till suddenly they were in it, among the falling-down slabs of walls and shops and houses. They walked in silence, but inside Finch’s head was a rising fire. A building whose windows were great black eyes had on its roof a stone symbol like a thumbless hand, clearly some kind of long-fallen temple. There was a moment when he thought he saw a sign of life—an undulation in his vision, like the flicker of distant light—but Iolanthe didn’t seem to notice it, and then he wasn’t sure.

The towered palace, when they reached it, was surrounded by an expanse of open pavement cracked into gray mosaic. They picked their way across it, toward the structure’s arched, iron-girded doors. There, Iolanthe looked again at the blank face of her pocket watch. She replaced it and pulled a key from her bag—bronze, ridiculously oversized, straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

“Skeleton key,” she said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Finch replied.

She looked at him to see if he was kidding. He was not. “Now you ask me?” Her face was half in shadow and half in gray light. Tramping in her cloak through this hollow land, she looked more like the progeny of Prospero than the grungy wanderer he’d pegged her for.

“I’m a traveler,” she told him. “A survivor. Most of all, I’m the person who got you into this gray fart of a world, and I’m the person who’s going to get you out. Good enough?”

“For now.”

“Oh, good. Now stay close, it’s gonna be dark for a while.” She cranked the door open with her outlandish key, and they slipped through. Finch hadn’t noticed the enervating breeze soughing in his ears till they stepped inside and it was gone. Immediately his head felt clearer.

Iolanthe slid through the dark. Her cloak had metallic stitching on the back, too; Finch followed its faint radiance. Through a series of connected rooms like the sections of a centipede, down a long corridor, and into the sudden gray light of a window-paneled atrium, where, at last, the air was filled with the scent of something familiar.

Books. The drowsy odor of paper and leather and dust and age, and none of the scents you’d expect: of mildew and water damage, pages gone to rot. They stood in a library.

Finch darted ahead. The books climbed up and up, shelves alternating with windows through which he could see scraps of the building’s towers. He hadn’t seen this many books in one place since before the Hinterland. Janet had a yellowing collection she cherished, and the refugees a teeny lending library that boasted the pooled resources of Earth’s displaced travelers—Wuthering Heights, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a Turkish translation of A Wrinkle in Time—but that was fifty titles at most. These brimming shelves tugged him in like a moon. He almost didn’t hear Iolanthe’s mild “Careful” as he pulled down a book.

It was gray as the rest of the room before he touched it, but once it was in his hands he could see that it was bound in pale blue, embossed, front and back, with an intricate spiderweb. Tiny women were caught in its net in various attitudes of peril: arms up, heads thrown back, hands to mouths. They looked like a pack of Fay Wrays. It was creepy enough that he paused, before opening it anyway.

The print was made up of intensely black, closely clustered characters. Though he couldn’t read them, he could feel their inherent narrative thrust: they wanted to be read. They wanted to tell him a story. Staring at the text was like staring at churned-up water, slowly clearing, till he could see what lay on the seabed below.

What came into slow focus was a cautionary tale. A tale of silver scissors and red fruit, of green leaves and dark earth, of dangerous and endangered girls. It was, if he had to guess, a fairy tale.

He peered into the deep water of the book till he could hear the wheedling bite of the scissors and feel the sweet give of poisoned fruit and the leaves circling his brow were cool and wet like they’d been plucked just after a rain and—

“Hey, now.” Iolanthe stood over him. The book was in her hands, firmly shut. Finch blinked, trying to remember when he’d gotten to his knees. “This isn’t the book we’re looking for.”

Finch breathed to steady himself. “What was that? What the hell was that?”

“I had to let you do it once,” she said, unapologetic. “So you won’t do it again.”

A card catalog stood between the double helix staircases. She chose a drawer near the bottom, flicking through it for a minute before emerging with a card. The book she wanted was two stories up, and she made Finch fetch it. He scurried up a wet dream of a library ladder, all sturdy wood and metal fittings. His perspective shifted as he climbed, books altering their size and height and sparking with roving flares of color, like optical illusions.

“Stop!” Iolanthe called when Finch had reached the second landing. The book she directed him toward gained heft and density in his hands, like one of those little Bibles made up of a zillion onionskin pages. He tucked it under an arm and took the staircase down.

“What now?” he said, a little breathless. Iolanthe had pushed her sleeves back again; Finch was worried she’d slice up the other arm.

“Now I show you a less bloody way of walking through a door.”

“Jesus,” Finch breathed. “Are all these books doors?”

“A book is always a door.”

“Sure, yeah, but not a—usually not a literal door. Have you done this before? Have you gone into these books?”

An odd look flashed over Iolanthe’s face, sharp as a sunbeam caught in a hand mirror. “I came out of one of these books.”

The air in Finch’s lungs went fizzy. He’d suspected she wasn’t from Earth, but it was different to hear it confirmed. This girl with the ice-colored braids and the wanderlust might have more secrets than he did. “Which one?”

She climbed up a few steps, leaned far over, and stuck a finger in the empty space between two books. “This one.”

“What happened to it?”

Her face was still turned away. “It’s been checked out.”

“I’m sorry,” Finch said softly. When she didn’t respond, he went on. “Whose library was this? What was this place?”

“It belonged to a magician. A powerful one.”

“All these books—all these worlds—were his?”

“Hers. Only one world is hers.”

“Is? She’s still alive? Who is she?”

“Shh. Come here.” She walked back down and extended a hand. Finch took it. With her free hand Iolanthe fumbled open the book, and began to read.

The words weren’t the fleet, wild-winged things that opened the blood door out of the Hinterland. They were slower, sweeter. They beguiled. Finch wanted to see when it happened, when the door appeared, but he couldn’t keep his lids from closing.

“Keep them closed,” Iolanthe said, her voice wobbling toward Finch’s ear like sun through water. Her fingers tightened around his, and the pair of them stepped forward into something that felt like Finch once imagined a cloud would feel, back when he was a little kid looking out the window of an airplane. It was soft and giving and it smelled like the sweet wood of a cigar box. Then the air cleared, went thin and smoky and cool.

When he opened his eyes they were standing uneven on a cobblestone street, the cutout square of a doorway hanging in the air behind them.