The Lost Book of the White

* * *

THIS TIME HE FELL FOR only a few seconds, and when he stopped, he didn’t land, really. He was floating in the air above the ruins of Xujiahui Cathedral, then he was falling, and then he was standing somewhere else.

He looked around. Magnus was here, and Ragnor, and—looking a little puzzled—Shinyun. And Sammael, of course, who had thankfully returned to human size.

As abandoned and broken-down as the rest of Diyu was, this place seemed to have been forgotten entirely. It had the silence of a tomb that had been sealed for thousands of years and was never intended to be opened again. In a realm of abandoned chasms, Alec knew, felt in his body, that this was the deepest and most lonesome.

Up close, Shinyun really was looking very spidery, Alec thought—her limbs elongated and multiply jointed, her face narrowed, sharpened. Her lack of expression was always uncanny, but now that her movements seemed less human, it gave her the look of an alien creature studying them, trying to decide whether to crush them. Her lambent eyes peered at them in the dark, her head tilting back and forth like a snake examining its prey.

Not that Magnus was looking much better. His eyes were larger than normal and seemed to glow of their own accord. The chains that bound him were starkly clear on his arms, and the spiked circles harsh on his palms. He seemed elongated too, in almost serpentine fashion, taller and skinnier than he’d been.

It was remarkable, Alec thought, that Ragnor was by far the most human-seeming person here other than himself, and he had actual horns on his head.

Alec had no further time for observations, because Shinyun starting yelling. “The Svefnthorn cried out!” she called into the echo of the vast empty space they found themselves in. “It told me—it has been insulted. Disrespected. Injured.” Her gaze found Ragnor, who gazed at her with loathing. “Ragnor. Why would you do this? Why would you reject the greatest of gifts?”

“If I recall,” Ragnor said, as if the effort to speak was almost too much for him, “I turned down your gift, and it was given to me anyway, without my consent. I think you’ll find that isn’t what most people mean when they say ‘gift.’ ”

“Now, now. Welcome!” interrupted Sammael. His constant ebullient tone was starting to fray Alec’s nerves. “Welcome to Avici.”

Alec looked at Magnus. Magnus nodded slightly, as though this was what he’d expected.

It wasn’t what Alec had expected at all. What he knew of Avici was that it was Diyu’s lowest hell, the one reserved for only the worst offenders. Given what he knew of hell dimensions, he’d expected fire, molten lava, the screams of sinners burning in the purifying flames. Or ice, perhaps, an endless expanse, with souls frozen, unmoving, for all time.

Avici was just… empty. They were standing on something, surely, but that something was black and featureless, indistinguishable as any particular material. It was nothing: not rough, not smooth, not level, not undulating. In all directions around them it stretched on and on, forever. At the horizon only the faintest of blurry haze marked the change from land to sky, the same empty sky that surrounded all of Diyu.

Perhaps the punishment of Avici was just to be here, alone, with no sounds, no sights, no wind blowing, only bare floor and bare sky. Just you and your mind, until your mind inevitably fizzed and burned and melted.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Sammael said. He threw out his arms and adopted a look of puzzlement. “Where’s all the stuff?”

Alec exchanged a glance with Magnus.

“When I got here, I thought that too,” Sammael went on. “I thought, ooh, very clever, very good, the worst punishment for the worst sinners isn’t”—he gestured upward, presumably indicating all the other hells—“having your tongue ripped out, or being run over with wagons or boiled in cauldrons. It’s just to be here with yourself and nothing else, right? But then,” he continued, “I got to talking to some of the locals, and I learned that that wasn’t it at all. This was Yanluo’s… workshop. This was his atelier. He made it empty so he could bring to it anything he wanted, because those who came here had earned customized tortures.”

He laughed, that grating, false laugh. “That’s right, for the VIP clients, Yanluo believed in getting in there and getting his hands dirty himself. Some of the demons say that he made it such a lightless black so that no matter what he did here, how much he dismantled human bodies, how much he maimed and lacerated and butchered, nothing would ever stain Avici.”

He threw his arms out again. “It’s all stain, you see,” he said with pleasure.

Alec said, “So it doesn’t… stay empty? You bring things in? Like… torture things.”

Sammael looked offended. “I don’t do anything,” he said. “Or at least I haven’t. I didn’t make this realm, you know. Blame Yanluo for how it works. Do I seem like I would make my deepest hell a big blank space? I’m really much more the waterfalls-of-blood, abstract-sculpture-of-viscera type. But to answer your question, yes, the excellent thing about Avici is that I can bring in whatever I want. For instance, I can stick this quisling in a cage, where he belongs.”

A theatrical wave of his hands, and spikes of wrought iron shot up around Ragnor. It was fast, but Alec was surprised that Ragnor didn’t even move as the cage closed around him.

“Ragnor!” Magnus said. “You’re still a warlock, come on. You don’t have to let him just… capture you.”

Ragnor tilted his eyes toward Magnus, and Alec was astonished by the depth of self-loathing he saw reflected there. “I can’t,” he said. “I deserve this, Magnus.”

“That’s not the way things work,” Magnus said, clearly frustrated. “You can make up for what you’ve done, but not like this. Not by letting yourself be trapped.”

“I told you,” said Ragnor. “I’ve betrayed myself too much now. Gone too far, done too many things that can’t be undone.”

Sammael looked back and forth between them, visibly entertained.

The iron bars closed over Ragnor’s head with a clanging sound. He barely seemed to even register their presence, looking purposelessly into the middle distance.

“All right,” said Sammael, as though he’d been waiting for the Ragnor situation to be dealt with. “The Book, if you please, Shinyun.”

Shinyun looked around as if unsure of herself. “Ragnor had it.”

Sammael rubbed his forehead with his hand. “In other words,” he said, “now Magnus has it.”

“Maybe not,” Magnus suggested. “Maybe it’s still back at Ragnor’s place.” Sammael gave him a withering look, and Magnus shrugged. “Worth a try.”

“Please,” Sammael said to Shinyun, “go get my Book back.”

Her dragonfly’s wings quivering on her back, Shinyun walked toward them. Magnus held up one hand, scarlet light blossoming from its center. “I’m not giving you the Book, Shinyun.”

Shinyun kept approaching. “Magnus, I know you. I know both of you,” she added, nodding to Alec. “You believe in mercy. You believe in forgiveness. You believe in not doing things that you can’t take back.”

Alec was watching Sammael, who stood a little apart from the rest of them, his arms folded, watching with keen interest. It was strange: Alec was sure Sammael could do any number of terrible things to them, or just turn Magnus upside down and shake him until the Book fell out. But he didn’t; he was happy to let Shinyun do the work, even though she was much less powerful than him.

It occurred to Alec that most of the powerful people he’d fought were at pains to demonstrate that power. Valentine, Sebastian, Shinyun herself, Lilith… They wanted respect. They wanted fear.

Sammael didn’t seem to care about any of that. As if his power was so great that he didn’t care if it was disrespected. As if in his mind, his victory was so inevitable, so assured, that the question of the Book of the White was only of minor interest.

“You won’t attack me,” said Shinyun, “unless I attack you first. So what will you do when I close the distance between us”—she was staring at Magnus—“and try to take the Book? Will you run? There’s nowhere to run. Or will you let me take it, like you let me pierce your heart with the thorn?”

Magnus looked at Shinyun unhappily. Then a bolt of crimson lightning burst from his palm, and Shinyun flew backward, struck by the force of his magic.

“Wow!” said Sammael. “Did you see that?”

* * *

SHINYUN WAS RIGHT: MAGNUS DIDN’T want to attack her. He wanted her to understand that there were ways of making things happen other than violence and its threat. He had given her a chance. He had given her, he thought, probably too many chances. Shinyun didn’t want to learn. She didn’t want to change.

He was heartbroken at how lost she was, filled with compassion for this warlock who had learned too early that the world only pays attention to brute strength, that empathy was weakness.

But that didn’t mean he was going to let her get close enough to him to take the Book. Or stab him with the Svefnthorn again.

She wasn’t expecting the first burst from his hand, and fell back. Alec charged toward her, reaching for his seraph blade, but she quickly regained her footing and shot up into the air. She flung her magic at Alec, and a huge blast of it drove him to one knee. Shinyun came screaming down at Alec, the Svefnthorn drawn like a rapier, ready to strike.

Magnus knocked the thorn aside with his own wave of energy, and Alec rolled out of the way. Magnus reached out to summon something—anything—from elsewhere in Diyu. A sword from a fallen Baigujing warrior. The chair from Ragnor’s temple. A chunk of masonry from a crumbled hell court.

Nothing came. Apparently the power to summon things to Avici was Sammael’s alone—Magnus was sure that if Shinyun could, she would be summoning demons and lava and who could guess what else. Sammael had picked an excellent place to leave Magnus at a disadvantage. Most warlock magic wasn’t about channeling raw power into violent force, but about manipulating the world to your own advantage. But here there was no world to manipulate. And unlike him, Shinyun had a weapon.