Aliyah

She came to with a jolt.

She’d been perhaps a quarter-awake for a while, nestled within that comfortable twilight edge of awareness as people bustled around her. Her eyes felt too heavy to open; that was fine; everything smelled clean and not like blood. The surface she laid upon was soft and she felt dreamy and mellow and she didn’t want to move. She was pretty sure that she couldn’t, anyways. For some reason, this didn’t alarm her. Complex particulars like who and what and where and how didn’t matter right now.

They’d wheeled her into a different room, smaller and windowless, where a man in a red robe had started casting spells and muttering to himself. Wedges of spell-light washed over her; she didn’t feel any of that, either. Then he put a hand to her forehead, and she was forcibly yanked back to full consciousness.

Realisation washed over her like hot poison: the Library, the spell, her failure. Her thoughts churned even as her body felt comfortable, if somewhat limp. Her magic pulsed uncomfortably against the inside of her skin, restless but muffled. Her cloak and satchel were nowhere to be seen, but she was still dressed in her own clothing. It was conspicuously clean for an outfit that had been subjected to what had felt like several litres of blood-vomit. She shuddered inwardly.

“Sober up, sunshine,” the Healer said. His tone was light, his expression neutral. Perhaps this was normal for him; just another day of dredging the life back into fools who tangled with the wrong spells.

The narrow room jostled into focus: silver runelights on the ceiling, messy workbench squashed against the wall, a cart by her bedside laden with an array of coloured bottles. The Healer looked vaguely highborn, with sharp features and dark hair swept back in a courtly, if somewhat rumpled, wave. She tried to move her hand to her face, to bat his fingers away from where they still rested her forehead; her arm felt leaden. It rose a fraction of an inch before flopping back down onto the bed. Something clinked: a slender, metal chain. One end was fastened to a cuff around her arm—the other trailed over to the side of her bed.

They’d cuffed her to the bed? Ah. She’d been caught intruding, after all. She squinted; the chain was swarming with runes—vaguely recognisable ones for binding and holding. Her awareness of her own magic prickled once more, the flow of it stoppered up. Not that there was much in store at the moment; she wouldn’t be able to pilot a single needle if she tried pouring every drop of herself into the thing.

So she’d been caught and now she was chained up. Though judging from how comfortable, if immobile, she felt, the Healer had fixed whatever damage she’d done to herself with the excision spell. Now what? Would they interrogate her? Rob her of her coin and kick her out of the castle? Torture her? Her stomach lurched as she remembered the ungodly amount of blood that had poured out of her mouth. There had been no way to stem it, the choking iron-taste, the pain—

“Looks like you had quite the ordeal,” the Healer said, snapping her out of the horrible memory. He moved his hand from her forehead to her cheek and a surge of magic unfurled from the point of contact, lapping over her skin like the ripples in a pond. “Very lucky. No lingering damage, too. Not many people get rescued halfway down a daemon’s gullet.”

Daemon? She tried to speak, and her jaw refused to cooperate—all that came out was an indistinct mumble.

“Whoops.” The Healer withdrew his hand and clicked his fingers; an unpleasantly effervescent sensation bubbled over her lips and jaw. “Try now. What is the matter?”

“Who are you?” she asked thickly. Her tongue was swollen and her jaw felt wired stiff. “Where am I?”

“Healer Saar-Salai,” he said with a trace of exasperation. “Assigned to fix your injuries and not getting paid for it. This is a medical room in a guardhouse.”

She opened her mouth and licked her cracked lips, tasting traces of blood. “And…a daemon, you said? What daemon?”

“A daemon tried to consume you.” He shook his head, sounding unimpressed. “Bad way to get caught. Incongruous smells or tastes, visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations, anything compelling you forwards, usually a clear sign. Though I suppose you’d lost a lot of blood by then. And they did say it was a dangerous one, older—more subtle. You’re lucky you were still alive enough to patch up.”

Her heart sank as she’d remembered: that encouraging voice, that warming, cheerful sensation guarding against the horrid, biting pain. That had been a daemon.

I believe in you, it had said. Prove them wrong, it had goaded. She’d probably been stumbling in the wrong direction entirely. Jackal had even warned her; a daemon would tell her anything that she wanted to hear. A hard bubble of sorrow welled up in her throat. But of course it had been a daemon. What had she been thinking, that it could have been a friend? A fanciful, magical companion coming to her rescue, like in the storybooks? She blinked back tears and fought the urge to laugh in despair.

“It spoke to me,” she said. It had spoken using her name. It had reached into her head and pulled her name out, somehow.

“You hallucinated it speaking to you,” Healer Saar-Salai corrected as he took a dropper of something and mixed it into a glass of water with brisk, practiced movements. “Relax. You’re fine now—medically speaking. Just have to drink this before I hand you off to the guards.”

“Guards?” she asked, alarmed.

“Guards,” Saar-Salai agreed. “Why else would we be in a guardhouse? Here, drink up.”

“What guards? Why?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You were found in the Higher Library without prior access.” He spoke in the exact tone of a world-weary supervisor explaining to fresh recruits that mixing different cleaning chemicals together would not, in fact, provide twice the cleaning power. “From what I hear, they found your satchel with you, and illegal spell-papers inside. I’m sure they’ll tell you as such at trial. Anyhow–drink.”

“I can’t move properly,” she mumbled. Her thoughts scrambled over the implications of trial.

Saar-Salai frowned. “Ah. Give it a minute. Librarian’s dosage must’ve been off.” He stepped a pace backwards and placed the full glass back down onto the workbench as his tone turned conversational. “Usually it’s some upstart young man, early-to-mid twenties, a couple of hands taller than you. Never a maidservant. The adjudicator’ll be confused, I suspect.”

“What are they going to do to me?” she managed, the question tangled with a note of fear. Her heart thudded in her chest and a wave of vertigo passed over her; the ceiling seemed to spin.

“Take you to trial, I suppose.”

“After the trial?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She realised with a jolt that he didn’t look particularly old and entrenched with court just yet; he likely didn’t know much more than she did. Her heart sank.

“What—what do I do?” she asked, all the same.

Her voice sounded small and frightened, a meek little sacrificial rabbit’s voice, curled up and waiting to die. She winced as she shifted her head; her neck felt like a nest of rusted springs. She didn’t know why she was asking this. It was practically an entreaty to someone who didn’t even seem overly sympathetic—but he’d stopped her from dying, even if it was his job to do so. She suspected, with a sinking feeling, that it was the closest to friendliness she’d get for a while.

He regarded her silently for several moments. Then he said, “don’t tell them that you did that to yourself.”

She paused as it sank in. “…what?”

He crossed his arms and leaned back against his workbench. “All that blood you lost—from what I hear, the Librarians assume it’s because you touched the wrong artefact. But what I saw, when I was busy patching up your insides, well, it looked like a spell backfiring. Also looked like you tried and failed to fix it. I’m at a loss for words as to why you would attempt an unfamiliar spell lifted from the Library, but the penalty for deliberately implementing that type of information is heavy. They’re already going to hit you with anything that can stick. So don’t tell them anything that they don’t already know.”

She blinked, thoughts simultaneously alarmed and sluggish. She hadn’t really expected actual, actionable advice—there had to be a catch.

“And…you’re not going to say anything?” This sounded like the beginning of a subtly-worded blackmail if she’d ever heard one.

Saar Salai scowled faintly. “It’s none of my business. I’m just the Healer—I mind my own work.” He frowned down at her. “Which I’m hoping to finish up, by the way. Try sitting up. You need to drink this before I send you off.”

“What is it?”

“A mild magic suppressant.”

She winced as she pushed herself upright; the chain clinked with the movement. Saar-Salai handed her the glass and she drank, because what else could she do? It tasted bitter. She had no doubt they could forcibly suppress her magic some other way if she didn’t cooperate. He unfastened her from the medical bed—a fleeting notion of escape skipped through her head and she squashed it: he was a fully-qualified Healer and that they were in the middle of a guardhouse. Even if she slipped out of the guardhouse, well, it wasn’t like there was anywhere she could run to.

Healer Saar-Salai handed her over to a pair of guards waiting outside—a pair of tall, well-muscled women with thoroughly unsympathetic looks on their faces. From the looks of the half-finished card game on one of the waiting chairs, they’d been there a while. They ignored her wavering questions as they dragged her through harshly-lit corridors, past an empty mess hall, through more unremarkable corridors, and into a drab office with attached holding cells. She was shoved unceremoniously into one; the door slammed behind her.

A leaden weight settled into her stomach as the lock clicked; this was it, then. She was a criminal now. Would the sewing circle have already heard of it? What would Rana think? The picture was palpable: her colleagues sneering, and Rana’s disappointment and disgust—her eyebrows drawn together and the corners of her mouth held tight. You idiot, she imagined Rana saying, and her stomach twisted itself into a hard knot.

She paced around the room; it had four solid brick walls and tiny viewing window set into the door, through which she saw nothing but the plain wall opposite. There was a bare cot in the corner, bolted to the floor.

When she got tired of pacing, she sat on the cot and counted the bricks on each wall. If she squinted, she could see the barely-visible ward-signs that coated their surfaces. She lost count as her thoughts drifted into visions of blood and daemon-induced hallucinations and the process of bleeding out. Time crawled by like worms through thickened mud.

Eventually, she slept. She dreamed in fractured snippets, of sky-fish and spring meadows and trials, judges and juries and a Magician waiting at the very end. He was polishing a blade, one that flashed silver-bright in the sun.

===

Morning came, heralded by the flare of bleary grey runelight and a guard shaking her awake.

For a moment, her heart jolted and she flinched away. What was this strange woman, with her close-cropped hair and weathered leather armour, doing in her room? Then she blinked the grit from her eyes and the solidity of the holding cell hit her like a bucket of used mop-water, drenching and ice-cold, cloudy with muck. Coming to her senses was starting to be an uncomfortably familiar experience; no more normal life now, she thought. You’ve really gone and screwed it up this time.

Another guard stood at the door, tapping his foot impatiently. They allowed her to drink from a half-filled waterskin before they bound her hands in front of her body with a fresh set of runed cuffs. The guards led her through yet more bleak, featureless corridors. Her head felt foggy and numb. The rest of her felt weak and shaky; hunger clutched at the backs of her ribs.

When would she be able to eat? She’d missed dinner and breakfast both. Whatever medicines Saar-Salai had given her hadn’t numbed her appetite at all. At some point—she wasn’t sure when, exactly, distracted by her longing for a pot of hot lentil soup with plenty of turmeric and cumin and parsley and hunks of fresh bread to go with it—they left the guardhouse by way of some restricted passage and entered what must be the court hall.

It was about half the size of the laundry hall, though twice as opulent. Golden sun-lamps dangled from the high, vaulted ceiling. The ground was carpeted and a long row of chairs lined each side, with breaks where doors were set into the walls. None of the waiting-chairs were occupied. A lone doorway, tall and oak-dark, loomed on the far wall.

They marched her up to the portentous doorway; her heart thudded, frantic with dread—what were they going to do with her? Lock her up for years, to rot away in a lightless cell? Kill her? Surely not. Surely they would not go that far, not for anything short of murder or treason. She glanced fearfully at the stationed clerk as they drew nearer. He was middle-aged, plump and greying at the temples, perched comfortably like a sleepy pheasant behind a roll-top desk. He peered up at them over the rim of his glasses and a slight frown spread over his face.

“Name?” he asked, running a finger down the page of an open ledger that looked about as thick as the length of her hand.

She swallowed around the lump in her throat. “Uh. It’s Aliy—“

“Scionsong,” the female guard interrupted, her voice low and disgruntled. “We’re a little early.”

“Yes,” the clerk said. “Scionsong, that’s right. In you go.” He pushed a crystalline button at his desk and the great doors swung slowly inwards, whispering against the carpet.

One guard pulled her through as the other strode close at her heels; down a short, carpeted corridor and to another door, this one smaller and less ostentatious. The frontmost guard pushed her through without warning and let go of the trailing chain of her handcuffs. She stumbled, head bowed and almost tripping over her own feet. The floor was wooden here, pale and polished. She raised her gaze to meet five sets of eyes looking down at her.

Her skin prickled. The five were seated at high desks, forming a half-circle. Behind the highest desk—the central one—sat a stooped man with glasses and a long beard—the adjudicator, she guessed. Off to both sides were what looked to be Higher Librarians, dressed in gold and grey. The only exception was an, unmasked Magician delegate leaning against the wall to her right, a man cloaked in lapis blue.

“Scionsong,” the adjudicator intoned, startling her attention back to him. “Miss. Eight and ten years of age. Vocation: maidservant.”

His voice was deep and sharp, at odds with his frail appearance. He looked like someone in need of convalescing in a quiet garden somewhere, not a man practiced in meting out justice. But she saw that his chin was held high despite his hunched back, and that his eyes were bright and alert behind his thick spectacles, darting from her face down to the cuffs still locked tight around her wrists. Her spine crawled. There would be no serendipitous mercy here, she realized. He was not like the clerk at the door; not a mere pheasant, no—instead, a hawk.

“As is the right of the Higher Library, interference with the collections is punishable by methods agreed upon by the offended party.” The adjudicator’s lip curled into a frown. “It is known that you have entered illegally by way of veiled gateway. To this, Librarian Errai will testify.”

A spindly Librarian cleared his throat and held something up. Her heart sank as she recognised it immediately: her satchel.

“This pack and associated gateway parchments was found in your possession upon retrieval from the Library,” he said. “My esteemed colleagues also noted the presence of a fixed steel blade measuring six inches in length, uncharmed. Both pieces of evidence have been verified by his honour.”

Then came a barrage of questions from the adjudicator and from Librarian Errai, so thick and so fast that her head spun. The adjudicator penned notes onto the papers in front of him as she spoke. The thought of those papers itched in the far-shadows of her mind as she answered, conscious of each word that came out of her mouth: yes, she did own the knife. No, she didn’t buy it within the castle. Here was the name of the shop she’d bought it from, a couple of years ago. Why? For peeling potatoes on surprise kitchen duty. No, she didn’t intend to harm anyone with it. No, she didn’t have any friends or enemies within the Higher Library. Yes, she did own the spell-slips. Yes, she was just a maidservant. No, she didn’t make the spells. No, she didn’t know anything about the source of the spell-slips.

That last answer sounded suspicious, even to herself. But something stopped her from revealing the real source—she thought of Jackal, with his disgruntled compliance, brow furrowed as the symbols came to life beneath his runequill. Part of her restraint was how repulsed he’d sounded when she’d insinuated, more than once, that he might kill her. The rest of it was because he’d actually helped her. She didn’t know how far the Librarians would go, even if he’d left the city. Perhaps he’d want to return one day, or perhaps not. Who was she to ruin the measure of safety he’d worked so hard for? She could feel herself starting to sweat.

Librarian Errai pursed his lips and frowned deeply at her. “Are you quite sure about this?” he demanded. “The Higher Library has cracked down on the distribution of such…” He grimaced. “…paraphernalia, with a large degree of success. Your statements are both imprecise and difficult to believe.”

She swallowed thickly. “I bought the spell-slips off someone in a back-alley market, yes. I don’t know who they were.”

“Where was this back-alley market?”

“Uh, somewhere East of market square. I got lost, I really don’t remember the route.”

“Why were you in a back-alley market?” he demanded. “What kind of goods were you seeking?”

“I got lost. They said they had interesting goods for sale and that I should take a look. I, uh, wasn’t looking for them on purpose.”

“Yet you bought the gateway papers regardless. Why?”

She wracked her brain desperately for answers. She couldn’t feign naivety here, not when the forbidden nature of the library was written on it’s front door. A visage of Jackal popped into her head, pacing and ranting about his younger brother out in the Library’s periphery. “I…wanted to impress a girl,” she blurted out, feeling her face flush.

Errai paused, contempt rippling over his face. “Who was the seller?”

“I told you, I don’t know. They didn’t tell me their name.”

“They?” Errai latched onto her words like a starved leech. “Not ‘he’, or ‘she’? One wonders whether you hope to obfuscate the identity of this seller.”

“They were wearing a cloak with a hood, and the location was dark,” she said. “I couldn’t see any distinguishing features.”

“And the voice? What about that, hm?”

“They used a spell,” she hazarded. “It wasn’t their real voice. It made it hard to tell.” Her heart pounded. It was just speculation, but that was plausible. Illusions were a thing, right? She knew magic had its limits and she’d never actually visited a back-alley market, but surely that wasn’t unheard of.

Errai grunted his acquiescence and leaned back. Her relief was cut short as the Librarian seated along rose to her feet, a tall woman with dark tattoos on the backs of both hands. She produced a clear sleeve containing a single spell slip—it had been retrieved from the stash in her bag, Aliyah realised.

“Librarian Taif will now perform a simple test to determine if you produced this working,” the adjudicator said as Taif stepped towards her, heels clicking against the floorboards. “Present your hands, palms-upward.”

Aliyah obeyed clumsily, her wrists still stiff within the cuffs. She watched with her heart in her mouth as Taif removed the spell-slip and placed it onto her hands. The inked pictures on the backs of Taif’s own hands displayed a motif of open roses, coiled snakes, and undoubtedly magical markings looping around the edges. Was this going to hurt?

“Do not move,” Taif said. “There may be some mild discomfort.”

Her stomach sank as Taif took a breath and spoke; the string of syllables that emerged was a slithering, sibilant, snake-like sonnet. A wretchedly cold feeling encased her hands and she almost yelped; it felt like her hands were trapped inside the mouth of a dead animal, gummy and defanged, overflowing with congealed mucus. Her stomach lurched. Then, her hands began to burn—not unbearably so, akin to being splashed with diluted cleaning solution—but it still burnt in a way that screamed ‘take your hands away and wash them in a basin of clear water’ to anyone with a shred of self-preservation.

“Do not move,” Taif repeated coolly, as if sensing her thoughts. “The spell will conclude shortly.”

Aliyah watched the spell-slip in her hands and tried not to jerk her hand away as it smouldered and began to leak pale smoke, the colour of old linen. From up on his desk, Librarian Errai let out an angry snort.

“She is not the maker,” Taif said.

“It can’t be,” Errai insisted.

“It is,” Taif said, and then her tone hardened. “Unless you are saying that I did not perform the spell correctly?”

Errai scowled. “Of course not, esteemed colleague Taif. I have great faith in your abilities, which you have proven. Proven to excess, one might say. But it is clear that the nature of these gateway papers is highly suspicious.”

“And yet,” Taif said as she plucked the paper from Aliyah’s palms. The sensations ceased abruptly and she tried not to visibly sag with relief. “She is not the maker.”

“Then we must test potential contacts of hers—”

“I have already done so. Have you no consideration for—”

The adjudicator cleared his throat and interrupted. “Thank you, Librarian Taif. Librarian Errai.”

Taif dipped her head and returned to her seat. The adjudicator turned to address the two Librarians opposite.

“The accused was found in the fifth zone of the Higher Library, bordering the sixth. Her position was within the catchment area of a daemon of significant age and size. Her condition was described as conscious and semi-responsive. Is this correct, Librarian Osorin?”

“Yes, that’s right.” The woman nodded. She was sinewy and middle-aged, skin wrinkled and scarred over one corner of her whiskery lip. Her voice seemed familiar, tickling at the edges of a memory. “Though it was Librarian Shahriyar who arrived first.” She gestured at her companion, a burly man leaning back in his chair, arms crossed and looking as if he were on the verge of falling asleep.

“You were the first to provide medical treatment, Librarian Osorin?”

“That’s right.” Librarian Osorin twisted her hands together, rubbing at the rings on her knobbly fingers. “She’d lost a lot of blood. I applied stasis and anaesthetic.”

It washed over her, then; the grave realisation that this was the person who had saved her life, the kindly voice that had called her ‘poppet’ and had said ‘it will be alright’. The adjudicator’s gaze swept back to Aliyah once more and she felt her stomach lurch as if she had swallowed something rancid.

“Scionsong, what caused the bleeding?”

A chill swept over her as she recalled Saar-Salai leaning against the workbench, brow furrowed as he told her that he knew what she had done. “I touched something,” she hedged. It wasn’t even technically a lie. “I’m not sure what.”

“Why did you touch an artefact?” Librarian Errai jumped in, a hungry gleam entering his eyes.

She grasped around for the least incriminating answer, her thoughts a blur. “I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was inside the daemon area at that point.”

“Describe the artefact,” Errai ordered.

“It was…blue,” she said, feeling like a beetle being pinned to archival cardstock, an insect squirming for any way out. “Or maybe green? I don’t know. It was getting hard to see at that point. I was seeing things that didn’t exist.” There, let him make sense of that. At least the daemon-induced hallucinations proved a comforting mask for whatever lie they were trying to catch her in.

“No,” Errai snapped, “You were after an artefact, so the daemon would have shown it to you in great detail. You are lying and this is the most rubbish I’ve heard in years—”

“That will be all, Librarian Errai,” the adjudicator said. “Please refrain from using uncourtly language during trial. The credibility of the offender’s claims should be evaluated at the discretion of those present while retrieving the offender. Librarians Shahriyar and Osorin?”

Shahriyar blinked several times and uncrossed his arms before he spoke. “Well, she was a right mess. The daemon sure was there too.”

“Did either of you see artefacts of note around the location?”

“There were some things that she knocked down,” Shahriyar said. “Covered in blood. But no, I didn’t find anything volatile enough to cause such injuries. Right, Zaina?” He paused and looked over to Librarian Osorin, continuing when she nodded. “The daemon, though. Big enough. Could have shifted something in temporarily. Can never tell with those bas—buggers.” He coughed self-consciously. “Apologies, your honour.”

“And Librarian Osorin?” asked the adjudicator.

“My colleague is correct,” Osorin said, still wringing her hands. “There have been…incidents. It isn’t unprecedented.”

“Understood,” the adjudicator said as he wrote something onto his papers. “Your inputs have been noted and are appreciated, delegates.” He cleared his throat and drew himself up, straightening some of the stoop about his shoulders. “Miss Scionsong, you are hereby found guilty of illegal patronage, unauthorised entry into the Higher Library, possession of unauthorised items within the Higher Library, and unauthorised interaction with Higher artefacts of the fifth zone. Do you maintain that you acted alone in your trespass?”

“Yes,” she answered, mouth dry.

“You are sentenced to thirty lashes of the whip,” proclaimed the adjudicator.