Arcanum by Simon Morden Read Free Book Online Page A

possibly unknowable: a niggling feeling that she was being built up, not for greatness, but for destruction. Eckhardt wasn’t the Master of the Order, and yet he seemed to have assumed that position. The others, on paper just as powerful as him, appeared to take a subordinate role.
    Nikoleta remembered their pawing hands, and swallowed bile. She picked up a shrivelled brown chestnut case from the ground by her side. The spines were brittle with age, sharp but easily broken. She shifted the ink on her exposed forearms, threw the seed pod lazily into the air and set it alight with a tiny fireball before it hit the ground.
    It sizzled and crisped, a thread of black smoke lifted into the branches above her.
    For the first time since she’d turned up at the novices’ house – cold, all but naked, hammering on the door because, of all the places in the world, that place was the one where they understood people like her – she felt ambivalent.
    The Order had recognised her abilities, taught her how to use them, scraped symbols on her skin and shown her power beyond reckoning. None of that came for free. She had paid, and paid dearly.
    She dragged herself up and carried on down the path. Back in Byzantium, she knew she hadn’t belonged. Here in Carinthia, she’d never felt that old unease until now.

5
    Thaler sat at his desk in the library, the satchel burning a hole in the floor between his feet. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t even string one thought after the other. He fidgeted and moved scraps of paper around, and stared off into the distance across the cold, empty space between the balconies to the far side of the reading room.
    He was surrounded on three sides by shelves, giving him a little alcove to work in, and a view of the rest of the library. Such were the privileges granted to an under-librarian. He had his own room in the dormitory, an allowance of a few shillings a week, and all the books he could want.
    Lights – burnished globes of brass, glowing like suns – hung from the distant ceiling on great chains. He could read all day and all night under their perpetual light if he wanted, and he sometimes did. He was, he considered, the most fortunate of men.
    To risk throwing such a life away was not a trifling matter. He hoped one day to contend for the position of master librarian, when the old master died. There would be fierce, but coolly polite, competition for that honour. And if he was caught abusing his position to secretly help a friend – against the hexmasters, no less – he could kiss that hope goodbye. Probably along with his flabby arse.
    Even now they were preparing the pressing pit in the main square: not for him, nor Büber, but for some barbarian lord who’d stupidly threatened the prince. He’d rather avoid that fate.
    He looked out to the opposite balcony, where one of the other under-librarians had their desk. Thomm wasn’t there. In fact, Thomm was rarely there, and that merely added to the general malaise that had descended over the library of late. The last decade at least.
    As far as he knew, the master librarian was in his eyrie, on the balcony one floor up that sat directly beneath the library’s dome, while the apprentice master was one floor down with his half-dozen inky-fingered pupils. He’d counted seven other librarians moving listlessly between the shelves in the reading room. He pursed his lips, bent down to collect the satchel, and tucked it inside his black librarian’s gown.
    He listened. Nothing but the slight moan of a draught and the creak of a chain. He pushed his chair back, deliberately making its legs rasp against the dark oak planks. He listened again. No footsteps, no coughs, no squeak of a trolley.
    Thaler moved into the next bay, and bent on aching knees to the very bottom shelf where the folio- and larger-sized books were kept. He dragged three of them out, piling them on the floor beside him, then eased a fourth a little way from the back of the