The Paper Magician

A surge of blood from the river at her feet pushed against her rump, shoving her through the valve. Her hand touched open air. Digging her heel into flesh, Ceony pulled herself into the second chamber of Thane’s heart, gasping and choking, spitting and wheezing.

She bit down hard on her own teeth, sucking in mouthfuls of hot air, trying to calm her own trembling. Trying to prevent a sob. It’s over, it’s over, she told herself, and it helped somewhat. I chose to do this. I can do this.

I have to do this.

She had barely caught her breath when she heard a suctioning sound from the valve behind her.

Ceony looked over her shoulder. The river that had pushed her out of the valve—and into a chamber almost identical to the first—continued to flow after her, filling the gutters around the edges of the heart and beyond. Flooding them . . .

“No, no,” Ceony said, shooting up with a renewed vigor. Her clothes, sticky from the bloody valve, clung to her clammy skin. “Stop, stop. Please stop.”

But the blood—thin blood, watery blood—continued to gush from the valve and overflow the rivers, inching closer and closer to Ceony’s feet.

Ceony backstepped to the center of the chamber, the highest ground. The first tides of blood touched her shoe.

Her skin turned to ice. Her lips numbed. “Thane!” she shouted, hugging her bag tightly to her. “Let me out of here!”

She took another step, the blood up to her ankles. At this rate it would fill the entire chamber in minutes. Ceony couldn’t swim. She had nowhere to go.

She really was going to drown.

“Thane!” she screamed, trembling from chin to ankle. Even her cry shook.

Anything but this. Anything but drowning.

The blood continued to flow, the heart’s thumping deafening. She squeezed her eyes shut, released her bag, and pressed her palms to her ears. Too much.

“Please, please, please . . .”

The lapping blood around her feet vanished, leaving her socks dry, albeit stiff. Biting her lip, Ceony opened her eyes to shelves of familiar books and a ray of dust-filled light. She released a long breath and offered a silent thanks to both God and the paper magician.

Images flickered around her: Thane in a gray coat instead of indigo, Folding on the floor, a blond man she didn’t know studying at the desk, another Thane in scarlet thumbing through books. The people flashed for half a second, sometimes a whole second, and then dissolved. Someone or something had pulled Ceony from the flooding chamber and stuck her here, but the heart itself seemed unsure as to what to show her.

She spied over her shoulder, but the tight valve she had just passed through no longer throbbed behind her. It had been replaced by a tall shelf of books, all as they had been in Thane’s true library, though she noted these had been arranged by color across the entire wall, from shelf start to shelf end. She gaped at them. Red books, dark and light, lined the left shelf closest to the door, and following them sat a few orange books, then tawny and yellow books, and then white. On the right shelf the colors continued—green, blue, violet, gray, and black. Incredibly aesthetic, but entirely absurd. Thane’s library didn’t look like this at all. Was this a past arrangement, or a future one?

Quick to her feet—which still wavered just a bit from her unpleasant traveling between chambers—Ceony took a moment to unfold and reanimate Fennel before picking through the titles, searching for something that might help her should Lira catch up to her. Something to fight with, to defend herself with. Even a heavy book for melee would do her better than nothing.

Her index finger passed over Mating Habits of Crocodiles, A Living Paper Garden, and Frankenstein.

“Ah,” she said, her hand pausing on a short, fawn-colored volume where the orange covers shifted to the yellow spectrum: Basic Chain Spells. To her relief, the book felt solid beneath her fingers. Perhaps in a heart, knowledge was more stable than memory or thought. Judging by the window in his office, it was clear Thane knew paper chains well.

She opened Basic Chain Spells to the table of contents, the constant PUM-Pom-poom in the distance reminding her of the need for swiftness. Lira could have warped out of Thane’s heart and be throwing it into the ocean right now for all Ceony knew, and Thane’s time was ticking away besides.

Skipping the table of contents, Ceony began thumbing through pages illustrated with black-and-white diagrams of different chains from basic to complex. She spied the vitality chain Thane had used on both the birthing woman and himself, but kept turning the pages.

The word shield popped out at her, and she paused just past the book’s midway point. She read quickly.

   The three-fold shield chain is the most basic of the defense chains. The breadth of its links does not matter, so long as their length is enough to encircle the item one wishes to protect.