“Trust no one,” I repeated, feeling like I was in an episode of the X-Files. I looked up at Anyan. “Is that it?”
“Nope. You might also have to save the world.”
“Oh?” I said, trying not to show my fear.
It’s not going to happen, I told myself. We’ll stop Morrigan and Jarl way before they got anywhere near resurrecting the Red and the White. We’ll get back whatever bones they’ve managed to run off with, and we’ll hand them some whoop ass on a plate.
I’m never going to have to play hero.
Bolstered by those thoughts, I managed to laugh at Anyan. “Gotcha. Trust no one and be prepared to save the world. Anything else?”
“Keep nudging the creature. See if it wakes up, ever. I know it wants to sleep, and it’s obviously not engaged with this world the way it was when Blondie was champion. But we’re going to need it. In the meantime, we’ll get Blondie to help train you with the labrys—maybe she knows more than just how to make it light up.”
“You bet she does,” came a voice behind us. It was Blondie, looking muzzy as she sipped from a steaming mug.
“There’s coffee inside,” she said, gesturing towards the kitchen. “Then we gotta go.”
“Where to?” Anyan asked, hoisting himself to his feet before giving me his hand to help me up.
“The British Museum,” the Original replied, as she walked in the house.
I couldn’t help it. The part of me that would much rather be a tourist than a champion flushed with anticipation.
I got to go to the British Museum. I just hope no one there wanted to kill any of us.
“Wow,” I said, as I walked through the gates.
The British Museum was the sort of outrageously imperial building that was all the more impressive for its age. The great stone pile before me, a monument to empire and cultural commerce, was the inspiration, the architectural Platonic ideal, for the places of civic pride with which I’d grown up.
The outside of the building was all pillars and long low stairs leading up to the main floor. A huge courtyard, partially flanked by the museum’s huge wings, was already full of tourists. Armies of Italian school children milled around, steadily encroaching on my personal space, and I wondered what on earth we were doing here. There were too many normal humans, surely, for anything of supernatural interest to be in the British Museum.
That said, Blondie had warned us to mute our mojo, so there had to be something or someone we were avoiding.
We pushed forward through the crowd, heading towards the bronze-and-glass doors into the entryway of the museum. I half-expected the doors to lead us into some magical realm the humans couldn’t see. Upon pushing our way inside, I was instead greeted by a security guard who asked to look in our bags. Luckily I’d left the labrys in Magog’s van, which Gog and the raven were guarding, as that would have been awkward to explain.
Hiral ignored the guard entirely, striding boldly forward. Still, even though I felt no magic coming off of him and he was, for all intents and purposes, a tiny blue-and-green monster, no one paid him the least bit of attention. I wondered what gwyllion were, with magic so infused in their blood and body that they used such powerful mojo without actually using it.
Once the guard was done with the rest of us, Blondie strode forward through what had been another, interior courtyard of the building, but had been glassed in to make an enormous covered square.
A vast floor of white stone flowed toward a round structure in the center of the square, with a soaring net of glass-and-steel serving as its roof. At the center of the square stood what had been the original Reading Room of the British Library, before the library had moved to its new digs near King’s Cross. There had always been a circular structure standing there, even when this was an open-air court, but now it was multistoried and gleaming white, rather than the weathered stone it had been.
An actual thrill flowed up my spine as we moved towards the old Reading Room. It no longer remotely resembled the space where the likes of Virginia Woolf and Karl Marx had sat, but those walls had still housed the finest minds of multiple generations laboring at their great works.
The respectful hush in the Reading Room told me I wasn’t the only one left a bit verklempt by my surroundings, and I knew the gaze I was casting about was probably a ridiculously reverent one. That said, the room deserved some reverence. A vast, intricately decorated domed ceiling lorded over a room full of exhibition items in glass cases. While I was a bit disappointed that it was more museum than library, by this point, it was still gorgeous.
And for a second, I tried to imagine myself in a lady’s day dress, rather than my jeans and long black sweater. The fantasy ended, however, when I was unable to get rid of my new red Converse, even if it were only in my imagination.
Virginia Woolf would totally have rocked Converse, I told myself, wondering whether the others would let me nose around just a little.
Unfortunately, Blondie was all business as she strode purposefully towards the back of the room. Hiral was already waiting for us, picking his teeth with a long fingernail, his expression bored. Anyan followed sharpish, but I trailed behind, peering greedily into cases. Eventually, Blondie sent the barghest to fetch me. He did so sweetly, taking my hand with a caress of his thumb on my palm that made me want to follow him anywhere.
That said, I did wonder if I’d ever get a chance to see any real sites before I had to leave Britain.
Blondie paused at a back wall of the Reading Room. She peered up at the ceiling, which was dotted around its edges with plaster moldings that resembled the enormous plastic molding in the center of the dome. Then she began herding us together, staring the whole time at the ceiling and lining us up with something only she could see. Anyan ended up crowding right behind me, while Blondie pressed in from the side. Hiral was standing between our legs, an uncomfortable fact I did my best to ignore. Eventually, the Original looked around surreptitiously, and I felt the faintest of glamours waft off of her, her power a gentle supernatural wind against the hairs on my arms as she camouflaged all four of us.
Only then did Blondie lean forward and breathe on the wall. A glyph appeared, similar to the one I’d seen when we were hunting the creature, except this one was smaller and looked more modern. It also wasn’t touch activated, as Blondie used only a soft puff of breath and a few whispered words before it started glowing.
I’d been expecting the wall to open, revealing a secret corridor. Instead, I nearly screeched when I felt the floor move. Belatedly, I realized why Blondie had bunched us up the way she had.
Instead of there being a secret door, we were standing on a secret platform that began to descend, very slowly. Light still filtered in from the hole in the floor above us, but soon that was blotted out as either another floor or a glamour covered up the entrance. I felt a moment of panic and I clutched Anyan’s hand, not knowing if I was allowed to create a mage light or not. But Blondie did it for us a second later, and we descended in silence, Hiral’s mad blue hair tickling my bare forearms. Eventually, I had to ask.
“Where the hell are we going?”
Anyan opened his mouth, about to answer me, when Blondie stopped him with a finger on his lips.
“Let her see it for herself,” she said. “It’s more impressive that way.”
For a second it looked like he was going to protest, and I definitely wanted to protest. But then he smiled, and nodded.
“You’re going to love it,” he told me, and that was all he’d say.
I grumbled, wondering what the hell was awaiting me as we crawled downward at a ridiculously slow pace. Any irritation at how slow we were going ended however, as the platform emerged from the tunnel we’d been in into a vast room of books.
A frightening sense of vertigo hit me at the same time as did awe at my surroundings. I realized only then that we must have been standing on magic, for there was no apparatus under or above us that I could see. Despite the slightly braver part of me that wanted to look around, the scared-shitless part of me squeezed shut my eyes until I felt Anyan’s hands steadying my shoulders and, even more comforting, his Air magic wrap around me, binding me tightly to him in a security blanket of mojo.
My eyes opened and I smiled at him gratefully, only then daring to indulge my curious side by looking around, albeit carefully.
If I’d been a bit disappointed at the only moderately library nature of the former Reading Room-turned-exhibit, this room more than made up for it. Typically Alfar in that its design seemed to ignore the laws of physics, we descended past stories of books. There were so many, in fact, that they were soon towering above us, bending with the roof into entire arches of shelves, multicolored leather book spines defying gravity by being shelved normally, if apparently upside down. Huge ladders on complicated tracks crisscrossed not only the walls but the ceiling, as well, and I shuddered at the thought of climbing all the way up one of those to get a book on the ceiling.
When we were finally at ground level, the magical platform dissolved, leaving us standing on a lush burgundy carpet. More low carrels of books dotted the vast space before us, creating natural little divisions between clusters of seating options. The time range of the furniture ranged from modern, if very chic, sofas to the little leather and wood chair-hammock thingies I imagined had been the thrones of Celtic kings. There were also low tables, desks, and conference tables, offering different options for working or reading. Sconces holding mage balls lined the room, bathing everything in their warm and welcoming light, and at the very center of the room there was a fire pit, around which were low couches lined with pillows.