I?, Shub-Nigaroth, tell my grandfather …
And then the light started to shrink—or to pull into itself, retreating and compressing into lightning-bright pinpricks. I forced my lids closed over huge, dry eyes. The light flared painfully even through that protection and then, at last, vanished. I rubbed my eyes, felt my tear ducts loose a little precious fluid to soothe them. I opened them cautiously.
Illumination bloomed, pale and painless: Audrey’s flashlight. She shone it around, found Trumbull on the floor beside Barlow, scribbling furiously with chalk. Then I had to cover my eyes again, if only for a moment: Caleb had found the wall switch.
Trumbull threw the chalk to the floor. It shattered, and the suddenly returned sound echoed from the walls. I stumbled as my bonds dissolved.
“You are abominable creatures,” she said, rising to face Barlow. “Do you think you can play trial and error with this kind of thing? Your own lives and sanity are yours to risk, for whatever they’re worth. But you very nearly wiped out three hundred years of work!”
Barlow took a step back. “What are you talking about?” He glanced at the diagram, with its strange asymmetries now subtly altered, and frowned.
“You interfered,” said Peters. “You were deliberately trying to sabotage—”
“Keep silent,” she snapped, and then smiled as he did. “Well, you’ve burnt out your little amulet, if nothing else. All of you hold a moment.”
I thought perhaps I ought to intervene—but the urge was not a strong one. Our captors stood dazed as Trumbull looked them over. A part of me watched avidly, delighted to see them at her mercy. And a larger part hoped that she would take advantage—that whatever interest the Yith held in my people’s existence would inform what she did next.
“Ah,” she said to Jesse. “You raided the library, but they took the excuse to steal what they wanted for themselves. And made better, or worse, use of the materials than you could have hoped to on your own. Somehow you thought their mentorship a route to safety. You are an idiot.” Over her shoulder, to me: “He distrusts you because you wouldn’t mate with him.”
“Thank you; I had figured that part out myself.” I recalled his cheerful insistence that he’d accepted my refusal, and felt my urge to intervene wane still further.
Trumbull glanced at Sally, still pressed against the wall, and dismissed her. She passed on to Peters. “An intelligent brute. Terrible combination, all too common.”
Barlow was next. “Loyalty and curiosity. A rarer combination. A pity that you direct your virtues toward such petty ends—and that you aren’t nearly as intelligent as you want to believe yourself.”
Then she turned on Mary. “Now you, you’re more interesting. You might have been one of Miss Marsh’s pupils, under better circumstances. Or a researcher in your own right in fifty years, without tailoring your studies to the agendas of imbeciles. A pity: I hate to see intelligence wasted. But we cannot afford you repeating such experiments; Miskatonic must stand for a few years yet.” She cupped Mary’s chin, locked eyes. For a moment Trumbull’s body sagged, jerked away—then returned to its accustomed posture of confidence. Mary gasped and pulled back. She put her hand to her chin, touching it gingerly.
Trumbull looked around. “It would be best if you recalled this night well enough to learn more caution. But I see you rewriting your memories already—better then to know only that your ‘equation’ failed spectacularly, and leave us out entirely.” I realized, with mingled regret and relief, that her concern was all for their dangerous experiments; their suspicion of the people of the water, the threat of their politics, hadn’t even registered. And I didn’t dare speak up, lest I disrupt her work.
One by one, she took their heads in hand and met their eyes. No sign of body switching this time, simply a moment of contact. When she got to Sally, she snorted. “You’ve already effaced the whole thing for yourself. Some minds are truly incapable of correlating their contents.”
At last she stepped back. “Well. Clean up and go home. Or curl gibbering in a corner; I’m sure it will serve the world just as well.” To the rest of us: “Are you coming? Or do you want to stay here and wait for something else to try and eat you?”
Audrey glanced at Sally. “But—”
“She’ll do better if you leave her mind to scab over on its own,” said Trumbull. Audrey looked uncertain, but followed. Caleb and I did likewise. I wanted to be out of that room.
Trumbull began muttering to herself. By the time we left the building, she was cursing audibly in Enochian. Or so I supposed: not all the expletives were ones I recognized.
“What did you do to Mary?” Caleb asked, cutting through the stream of profanity.
“Gave her alexia,” she said. “She’s the smartest of them, and did much of their design, for all Barlow styles her his secretary.”
“And now she can’t read?” I asked, horrified in spite of myself. If it worked, though …
“It’s easy enough, on a human brain—though the process does make it more vulnerable to later lesions.” She glared at us. “I swore I wouldn’t put myself in danger, and instead I find myself defending the local archive from outsiders. I’m losing all sense of scale.”
“We’re glad you stayed to help,” I said. And, thinking that might not be enough: “As you said, they risked destroying three hundred years of work.”
“And in defending three hundred, I risked millions of years of memories. I will answer for that, you may be sure.”
Charlie hurried up to us. “Are you all right? I thought I saw—what was that?”
“Outsider,” said Trumbull.
“Do you remember what I said about trying to summon gods?” I asked.
“That it’s a bad idea; other things are likely to answer.”
“Yes. Apparently no one ever told Barlow. Or Mary, I suppose.” Trumbull’s suggestion that Mary might have made a good student felt strange. I imagined a woman like Audrey, already grown and forced into the box of a powerful man’s expectations, discovering a talent for magical research.
Dawson came running around the building. She flung her arms around Caleb. “You absolute idiot—what were you doing?”
“Failing to get any useful evidence,” he said. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be back at Dean Skinner’s place, pretending you don’t know where we are?”
“I figured you might get in trouble and I ought to pretend from a little closer. But when you got in trouble, I had no idea what it was, or where you were—idiot!”