She tapped her fingers again. “Tell me what you find. It may be of interest to us.”
I ducked my head. “Thank you.” I thought of something else. “Great One, do you know where I might find a chapel on campus?”
“The campus church is ostensibly nondenominational; in fact it is extremely Christian. But there is a shrine in the back that is … discreet.” She said the last word with some distaste.
After getting directions, I drifted forward and touched Caleb’s elbow. He turned from his conversation with Neko.
“Professor Trumbull says there’s a shrine on campus. Come with me?”
“Why would—” He swallowed, and then more gently. “Aphra, you know I don’t—”
“Believe in the gods. I know. We’ve been”—I switched to R’lyehn—“surrounded by the flesh and minds of strangers, and I wish to speak with my sibling.” In English again: “Come anyway?”
His face darkened, and I thought for a moment that his grasp of the tongue was too meager and too distant. But then he nodded fractionally. Neko, of course, caught the nuances if not the words, and let us go off on our own. I would talk with Charlie later.
Crowds of young men passed us, boisterous in the cold night. To my relief, they gave us a wide berth.
“We need to get our books back,” he told me once the others were out of sight. He pulled out his cigarette pack. I kept my reaction in check.
“I know,” I said. “This agreement where they ration them out … but I don’t have a good idea for how to get them back. I don’t think Miskatonic would take payment, even if we had it, and there’s no trade I’m willing to offer that they’d be interested in.”
“Payment! We should take the books—it’s no crime to steal from a thief.”
“Keep your voice down. It’s no crime, but they’d lock us up all the same. And we’d get Professor Trumbull in trouble for giving us access in the first place.”
He waved long fingers dismissively. “We’d be careful. And what of it if she gets in trouble? She’s just a mortal, and a rude one at that.”
I started to answer, took a deep breath, saw the steeple peeking from behind a low brick building. “Let’s talk inside.”
We made our way to the church. From the outside it was Christian in its entirety, though very gothic. It was not suited to its own scale, but looked rather like the childhood form of a cathedral. The doors, solidly built from plain dark wood, were closed against the cold but unlocked.
We slipped in. I kept a wary eye out for priests who might waylay visitors, but the interior was still, lit only by flickering gas lamps. Columns like great petrified trees lined the center aisle, branches entwined in the shadows above. Above the altar hung a grotesque statue of their god, bleeding. Caleb stared at it a long moment, expression unreadable.
At the outskirts of the room, we found the shrines: alcoves filled with saints and mythic images. Some appeared to be perishing in worrisomely imaginative ways, but others laid gentle hands on sick supplicants, or stood alone against soldiers and monsters. Winged figures hovered over all, bearing silent witness.
As promised, one shrine was more discreet. A stone altar stood empty except for a single candle. If I let my eyes unfocus, the half-abstract carvings resolved into great tentacles reaching from the altar to enfold the little grotto. The artist, I realized, had placed those who knelt there within the god’s embrace, while making the god invisible to any who did not know to look.
I settled before the altar. I wanted to compose myself, as I might before ritual. But Caleb hovered at the edge of the space, a lightning jag of impatience at the edge of my attention.
“Aphra, if you came here to beg favors of the void, I don’t want to watch.”
I turned with a sigh. “I’m not begging anything of anyone. I’m trying to calm myself. It would do you some good as well.”
“I have reason enough to be angry.”
When I found myself endlessly circling my own bitterness, the old litanies and prayers still brought me comfort. They were stark reminders of entropy’s even hand. But Caleb had given them up long ago. “You can be angry. You should be angry. I’m angry. But I think we’ll do better by being angry and patient, and calm enough to plan. Please sit.”
He sat, leaning against the organic curve of the wall. He looked at me narrow-eyed. “Do you want to plan, or do you want to avoid upsetting your government friend?”
I took deep breaths, several of them. “Do you want to plan, or do you want to mock me for every choice I’ve made in the past two years?”
He turned his head, giving that same doubtful and disappointed gaze to the altar. “I want our books back.”
I let out a breath that turned into a cough. Caleb waited unmoving while I recovered. “Good,” I said when I could talk again. “So do I. But I also want to protect the Kotos. And yes, Trumbull. It’s not right to speak as you did out there, to dismiss someone’s pain just because it’s briefer than ours. We’re mortal too.”
“I never dismissed the Kotos.” His shoulders slumped. “You know I love them. But they can’t understand, they haven’t lost as much as we have—”
“They lost what they had to lose. You just did exactly what I said. You think the gods are judging some contest of loss?”
“If they existed, I doubt they’d care. No one cares but us!”
Footsteps cut through our rising voices, and we both stilled. I pushed myself, silently, to the shrine’s edge. I balanced, half kneeling, on the balls of my feet, ready to attack or flee as our tracker’s identity dictated.
A querulous, half-familiar tenor called, “Miss Marsh, is that you?” I said nothing.
A young man came into sight, tall and thin and well-dressed. After a moment, I recognized Jesse Sadler from the bookstore. He spotted me and smiled. “Hey. I’ve been looking around for you, since you said you were doing research at the library. This is a great spot, isn’t it? You seemed like someone who didn’t just study the old ways.”
I stood and pulled away from the wall, hoping he hadn’t seen us prepared for a fight. “Mr. Sadler. Hello.”
I had been about to introduce Caleb, when Sadler saw him and blinked. He stuck out his hand. “Hello. Are you Miss Marsh’s, um, fiancé?”
Caleb ignored the hand. “Sister dear, have you become engaged without telling me?”
I gave him what our mother would have called a fish-eye. “Caleb, allow me to introduce Jesse Sadler. We met in town earlier. Mr. Sadler, my brother, Caleb Marsh.”
“Ah.” He let his hand drop, as Caleb still had not taken it. “Pleasure to meet you.” He glanced between us. Clearly he had expected to find me alone, if he found me at all, and I wondered what he’d hoped to gain from the encounter.