Aliyah

Jackal had been right; the marked paths were crawling with apprentices.

The first time she’d returned, alone and trembling with nerves, she’d headed into the fourth zone to seek out where the Healer apprentices got their books. Finding it had been easy enough; she’d kept walking until the signage had started popping up; occasional panels etched with numbers to indicate zones, and little plaques to point the way: leftwards lies Healing subjects, rightwards for Thaumaturgy, that sort of thing. Skirting around the blocks of specially demarcated shelves, she saw strings of thick, red rope strung through the aisles. The stacks were thick with the scent of ageing paper.

She’d had to retreat upwards of a dozen times, eyes kept peeled for glimpses of red cloaks through the layers of books. Her heart felt as though it stopped in her chest whenever she heard the faint rustling of study-chatter through the shelves. Entering that section didn’t feel worth the risk—luckily, there were plenty of other Healing texts further out.

A month after that very first visit with Jackal, she’d found a short note slipped under her door; a short list of sub-zones, penned in a neat hand. Navigating the signage according to the list had led her to isolated pockets of Healer books, untouched and unmarked by red rope. Later, she heard through her circle, that one of the old cooks had gone away with her remaining family, and that the lamb stew just wasn’t the same anymore. They were only words in passing, words that she wouldn’t have paid attention to had she not been listening for them. She’d felt a guilty pang, at that. She hoped that Jackal was safe now, wherever he was.

Armed with Jackal’s list, she’d stuck to exploring in the quiet of the sixth zone, where esoteric tomes on speculative biology and ancient print-making techniques leaned against huge jars of pickled pig’s trotters. She’d given herself a crick in her neck from tilting her head sideways to read the titles. It had taken two more visits and hours of skim-reading before she compiled a modest pile of promising volumes.

She hadn’t taken anything outside of the library, of course; Jackal’s warning echoed in her head—bad way to lose a hand. Instead, she’d stashed her finds in a middling area of the fifth zone, through a maze of melted glass globes and under a pile of floral-patterned rugs. There was room in the center to shape a few of the stiffer carpets into a cosy, if very dark, tented reading nook. The problem of illumination ate at her as she went about her searching. An ordinary sun-lamp would never work—too fiery, too bright.

She’d had to pop back into the Lower Library to teach herself how to draw light runes; without expensive spell-paper or proper teaching or even a runequill, her slips of illumination could only give off the weakest of glimmers when activated. She’d made dozens of spell-slips with cheap paper and watered-down ink, copying symbols and pouring magic into them night after night until her head throbbed and her fingers cramped. It was worth it, though: by using a dozen of her clumsy, homespun spell-slips at once, she could huddle under her nook in the middle of the lumpy rug pile and read without fear of being caught.

She was back in the Higher Library now, her sixteenth visit in three months—already most of another season without word from a suitably bribe-able Healer. Well, that was fine. She’d taken to creeping in at midnight; the Library seemed quieter then. She kept herself wrapped up in a dark cloak—navy, not black—to better blend into the bluish shadows.

She had a satchel with her, too: along with the spell-slips sheltered in its depths, she’d stashed medical gauze, a couple of sweetcakes, a flask of water, a timepiece, and a knife. The gauze always came in handy to stem her inevitable, gateway-induced nosebleeds; the knife, she doubted that would ever be of any real use. It’d never work against a daemon, and a pointy scrap of metal was nothing against what Jackal had described at the edge of the thirteenth zone: the twisting logic and insidious knowledge of titles which it bestowed. But something about coming back into the Library without anything to defend herself made her prickle with anxiety.

She headed off to her reading nook as quickly as possible. Her choice of material did not include the temptingly big, heavy books with gorgeously rendered gilt diagrams, but instead, those that were densely packed with information on pain relief. The sole concession she’d made was the addition of a book of fugitive sheets to her miniature hoard; it was fully illustrated, with flaps that could be pulled back to reveal organs and musculature within the body. She’d unfolded a woman’s paper pelvis to squint at the shapes of the organ that plagued her. The bad days crashed over her like poison mist; she wished that she could rip it out of her body and be done with it.

She crawled into her nest of carpets, almost tearing one of the light-slips in her haste to illuminate the nook. Twelve points of light flared to life—bright enough to read by but weak enough to not show through the woven walls of her carpeted sanctuary. She grabbed one of the thicker books—‘Healing Magicks of the Reproductive Tract’ by one ‘Suhail Hadar’, a Healer from decades past with a self-professed interest in the unordinary. She flipped open where she’d left off, halfway through the chapter on pathology within what Hadar had termed a ‘metra’—the organ that nowadays, most called a womb. Recently, she had taken to thinking of it as nothing but a source of trouble.

Rana, bless her sweet soul, had coaxed her into paying to see a different Mender. The insufferable man had suggested having children to cure her pains. Aliyah had promptly stood up and left, slamming the door on her way out. That had resulted in a message to one of her supervisors and her pay being docked for a week. It might have been worth it if she’d had the resolve to throw in an insult, too.

She tore her thoughts away from the miserable encounter and focused on reading. Her understanding of anatomy was rough at best; memorised facts overlaid over blurry ideas and imprecise doses of comprehension. As far as she could tell, her illness was a result of unnatural growth of tissue linings. But knowing the problem did not alleviate the continuous, half-predictable bouts of agony. Knowing that did not tell her how to twist her magic to fix it, either—the more she read, the more she despaired. It seemed that the mere reading of some books did not a real Healer make.

A couple of the simpler numbing spells had worked when she’d tried them—sort of. The techniques described weren’t terribly different from piloting needles in the laundry hall. It was the same pouring of magic into a shape, only now the shape was her body and the magic had to be intertwined with the structures there. It was doable, but the results had been disappointing: the spells were a constant drain on her magic and they hardly matched the effectiveness of Yara’s painkillers. They didn’t feel very good, either; the numbness wasn’t complete. It was a buzzing kind of numb, like how her leg fell asleep if she perched strangely on her seat while sewing.

Her eyes alighted upon a heading: to remove the problem at the root.

Her pulse jumped in excitement. Here is an issue of unwanted tissue growth outside its intended organ, she read. The ideal method to date is much similar to the treatment of more serious conditions of cancerous growths. When encountering this condition, a Healer should remove the existing field of such growths and to trim them as they arise, much like a devoted gardener may prune an unruly sapling. Indeed, these protrusions do resemble sharp buds of flesh; by removing them, we ensure that they do not shed with each cycle. If performed with great regularity, this resolves complaints of great discomforts.

She slid her gaze down to the methodology below. Hadar had included a hand-drawn diagram and several instructional paragraphs regarding targeting and removal. All this, he’d written, may be accomplished without incisions into the body.

She read for another hour, drinking in the words with hungry eyes. She traced a finger over the lines of the diagram, flipped through the book of fugitive sheets to find better cross-sectional views of what was being described. She went through another set of illuminating spell-slips and rifled through her stack of books for fundamental tomes to refresh her knowledge on the techniques to magically map out the body from within. She ate a sweet-cake and sipped her water. Finally, she could put it off no longer. The urge to try burned at her like a rising coalfire. She took a deep breath, gathered her magic, and delved into her own innards.

It was surprising how easy it was. She grasped at blurry shape and half-seeable structure, twisted her new senses around form and texture and osmolarity. She skirted well away from delicate bundles of nerves and slid around coils of intestines to prod at the problem itself.

The book was right; there were little protrusions dotted throughout her insides, and what might be patches of scarring here and there. The protrusions were so small and so few, for the shattering level of pain that plagued her at every turn. She had envisioned a field of bloody spears piercing through her gut like a cruel, spined urchin-flower, or clusters of fleshy needles sinking into her bones. In reality, they looked far smaller than the example illustrations printed into the book. Well, that was fine. That just meant they would be easier to remove.

She cast her eyes over the final paragraph, summarizing how to define and grasp and excise. She nodded to herself as she held the steps in her mind. Yes, she could do this. She placed a hand against her stomach and reached inwards with her magic. She grasped the protrusions tight—and excised.

It was a mistake.

A wall of agony hit her. She was too shocked to scream; instead, she sucked in a stuttering breath as her hand twitched and curled itself into a fist. Was—was it meant to hurt that much? The book hadn’t said anything about pain, hadn’t said anything about needing potions or numbing…

Her vision blurred. Pain blossomed in her core, hard and fast. It felt just as grueling as any day of agony she’d had. She gritted her teeth. She’d followed the instructions correctly. It would pass. A fresh, rolling tide of agony crested again and bisected the first pain-blossom in two, made it look soft in comparison. She screamed a little, then. No, it was worse than normal. It was definitely worse. She pressed her free hand over her mouth. Still in the Higher Library, she reminded herself. Couldn’t afford to scream. Fucking hells. She scraped her bitten-down nails over her stomach, panting in ragged gasps. Her thoughts moved too slowly, crowded in by the sheer hurt of it all.

She’d injured herself. How? She’d done exactly what the book had told her to do.

Writers can be lying or wrong or both, she thought. Or maybe it was just her. Maybe she’d just fucked it up, like how she’d done her examinations.

Idiot, she thought. You idiot.

She clenched her jaw so hard that a small, fleeting part of her brain feared that her teeth might break. The rest of her mind, the part afire with agony, quashed that thought and ground her teeth together in a futile effort to make the pain stop. It gorged a path through her guts with blunt teeth, carving an ice-fire sensation in its wake.

It had been stupid to try this in the Library. She had to get out. To get to her room. Yes, that was it. Her room. She needed to lie down.

A cascading chain of hurt was clawing up the ladder of her ribcage, bursts of shivery, unsteady agony puncturing from within. She forced herself to lift the hand clenched around her stomach. It wasn’t really helping, anyway. It didn’t matter that she instinctively thought it would. This was beyond the point of any smaller pain masking a larger one. She used the hand to push at one side of the carpet-tent and used her other hand to grab her satchel—her tickets home.

She crawled out of the cocoon of carpets, clenching her mouth shut and trying not to sob. Now if she could just get to a flat, vertical surface and…oh.

There was a problem.

The carpets were all lumps, and the stuff here was all…piles of fabric, rounded bauble-sculptures and spirals of blue glass. That was why she’d chosen it as a hideaway, after all; there’d be less chance of a Librarian coming to shelve a book in a place without books. It had made sense, at the time. But now, it meant there wasn’t a tall stack of book spines to rest the paper against.

The nearest proper shelf-end was…where was it, again? That way, she thought hazily. She blinked her tears away, but her vision was ghosting in on itself now, blurring and shrinking and rising and falling. Why hadn’t she seen the danger of setting up here? Because it would only have taken her two or three minutes to walk to the nearest flat surface if she’d been uninjured. Idiot. She forced herself upright and began to walk, step by painful step.

The arrogance of assuming she would be okay. The hubris of assuming that it would work; of course it hadn’t worked. Why had she ever thought that it would work? Miracles only happened in stories.

She shuffled along the aisle of glass, one hand clutching at slippery edges, feeling her way forwards. Her vision felt askew, blurred and doubled no matter how hard she squinted. Her head was starting to throb with overexertion. She walked for what felt like longer than two or three minutes. There wasn’t a flat surface in sight. She staggered onwards, thoughts overlapping: flat surface—can’t get caught—need to stop hurting.

What could she do once she collapsed back into her bedroom? Scream for help? Maybe. Plausible enough. She’s have to hide the satchel, though. And she still had to say the word of power and make it through the in-between part of the doorway. She’d adjusted with practice, but it still hurt. The mere prospect of the compounding pain made her want to cry. Blood leaked out of her nose and welled up in the back of her throat, as if in cruel sympathy.

She kept walking and swallowed the blood as it bubbled up in her throat. Must not bleed on the floor, she thought. Must not set anything on fire. Must not scream. She tried to reach inside with magic again, clumsy and fumbling, to see if she could fix it. Patch it up, apply pressure. Basic things, to tide her over until she reached safety. She could do that, couldn’t she? The magic swept over her insides, mapping out a confusing jumble of flesh. There was also…magic bouncing around, her own magic leaking loose and driving spikes into her core. She could barely orient herself. She pinched an internal wound shut only to have a fresh one split open next to it. The magic ricocheted and shoved her awareness out of her churning guts and back into her head.

Where the hell was the shelf-end? Surely it’d been around this corner. No. Further on, was that it?

The blood was really welling out of her throat now; she fought back an iron-tinged mouthful of it, almost choking. There was a shelf end, just there. Her vision wavered. A hundred metres, at most. A quarter-mile. Half a league? It was in front of her, that was all she knew. Walkable distance. Had to be. She sniffed and felt a queasy lump of blood and mucus dislodge from the back of her nasal passages and slide down the back of her throat. Everything felt shivery and disgusting and painful. But she could make it. She would be okay. She would make it out of this awful Library and she would be safe safe safe safe—

Her mouth flooded with saliva. Her stomach lurched. She recognised it for what it was a moment before it happened: a flash of old memory, a matron chiding her—never tilt your head back with a nosebleed, Aliyah. You’ll swallow your own blood. You’ll vomit.

She vomited.

Bile and bloody froth pooled at her feet, fresh and body-warm and reeking of iron. Her body jerked and she doubled over without meaning to. She coughed up flecks of blood—bright red blood. Too much. She crumpled to the ground and convulsed—once, twice, more. Something was terribly wrong. Trying the spell had been a mistake.

Her unfocused eyes landed on the blurry rectangle of a shelf-end just down the corridor. So close, and too far. It beckoned her, a mocking salvation. She trembled and let out a small, keening sound as the muscles of her stomach spasmed under a fresh wave of agony. Useless. It was all so useless.

Then, a soft, invisible hand fluttered over her cheek. It was gentle, caressing; a ghost-hand.

Was this what it felt like to die?

“Aliyah,” she heard, right against her ear.

She turned her head weakly. There was no one there. She was hallucinating. She’d read about this, in one of the book: bursts of brain chemicals ejected like festival fireworks, a last wake-up call.

“Aliyah,” she heard again. “You’re not dead yet. You’ve come so far. You’re almost there.”

It wasn’t her own inner voice that she was hallucinating. Nor was it a voice belonging to anyone she knew. Neither masculine nor feminine, nor particularly accented. A ghost? A kindly spirit? An ancestor? Maybe that sort of thing existed after all. Or maybe she was just hallucinating. It didn’t matter. She had been stupid, and now she was as good as dead.

“Stand up, Aliyah,” said the hallucination. “You are not stupid. I believe in you.”

A speck of warmth flared to life inside her, driving the ice-hot pain aside. It brought fresh tears to her eyes. Oh, it was such a small speck. A thin streak of blood still leaked from her nose. Grotesque bubbles of agony still pushed against the inside of her skin. It was hopeless.

The speck flared once more, growing larger. It was the inverse of the pain. It felt soft and clever and cosy. She craved more. It didn’t matter if that meant she was dying faster, going into shock. She just wanted everything to stop hurting.

“Aliyah,” the voice urged again.

“Help me,” she mumbled, or tried to. It came out as an unintelligible mash of sound, over a blood-coated tongue and through clumsy, numb lips. She could barely parse her own thoughts.

“I am helping,” it said. “Help yourself, now. Prove them wrong.”

Slowly, carefully, she picked herself up. The wonderful not-pain lapped at her ribcage, swallowing the agony and growing stronger with each passing moment. Yes, she would do it. She looked at the shelf-end now, clear as day. She would save herself or die trying.

She made it two steps before she felt something snap inside her. Physical, or magical, or perhaps both. She collapsed against a mockingly concave shelf of glass, scattering little coils of coloured wool as she fell, dazed and limp and floating in a sea of unwelcome sensation.

No, she thought desperately. The not-pain was still there, but her body was shaking and she could barely move. There was blood filling her mouth. No, she thought again. Nearly there—just a few steps more, nearly there—

She opened her mouth to scream, and blood gushed out. So dark and so red and…so much. Obscenely much—far too much.

Vomiting blood didn’t make anything hurt more than it already did, which was sort of yes and sort of no. The warm, not-pain sensation plateaued and wavered. She could feel her heart pumping faster and faster as she watched her own life flow out of her. Her body was sending her hurtling towards her death even as it tried to keep her alive. The blood kept coming. Crackles of magic chased after it, tiny, white-hot sparks that hissed and steamed as they collided with stray droplets. It was just too much blood. How did she even have any left? Was that two flagon-fulls, or more, pooled over the tile? Perhaps her body was just making more blood to bleed out. It seemed like the sort of stupid thing that it’d do.

The blood tasted iron-hot and salty-smooth against the inside of her throat. It gushed past her teeth in torrents. Her collar clung wetly to the side of her neck. Somewhere, an alarm was sounding. More blood leaked onto the floor. Little runes fizzled into existence on the floor where it puddled. The symbols shivered and swarmed around her, flooding the twisted aisle with stark white light. She squeezed her eyes shut against the glow of the—beacons? Why did she think they were beacons?

“Aliyah,” the voice urged, but it was fading, slipping away…

“Shit,” someone said. “She’s still alive. Where are the stasis-slips?”

"I have them. You deal with the shielding."

More hallucinations, she thought dimly.

Then, a hand pressed something into her shoulder—a solid hand, a real hand. She cracked her eyes open and saw faintly wrinkled skin, rings on the fingers. She didn’t have the strength to turn her head to see who the hand was attached to. Something papery rustled against the bloodstained fabric of her uniform.

“Help,” she tried to say through a mouthful of blood; not gushing now, just trickling slowly. Lapping at her teeth. Congealing. Help didn’t sound like a real word, coming out of her mouth.

“Still conscious?” It was a woman’s voice, firm but not unkind. “Stay calm, poppet. We’re getting you out of here.”

The woman spoke another thing, a not-sentence. It reminded her of the word of power that she had to use for the Library doorway, though more elongated, further charmed, very twisted into itself.

The woman stopped speaking, and everything went numb—actually, blessedly numb, not like the buzzing pins-and-needles numb that she’d tried on herself. The blood coming out of her mouth eased and stilled. When she tried to move her mouth to thank the woman, she couldn’t. She could blink and she could breathe, but the rest of her couldn’t so much as twitch. A rising flutter of panic forced itself through the wreckage of her gut.

“Sorry about the half-stasis, dear. I know it’s uncomfortable, but we have to do it to stop the bleeding. We’re going to give you a little nap, alright? Just until we get you to a Healer. Stay calm, you’re in good hands. Everything will be alright.”

Dimly, part of her doubted that. But she was so tired and so deeply immersed in that floppy, lightheaded, boneless feeling that only surfaced with the abrupt comedown from acute pain that she couldn’t bring herself to care. The woman placed her hand back onto her shoulder. She felt a pinprick, stark against the numbness in her arm, then the faintest tinge of a dull, swelling ache as something cold was injected there.

“I’m going to count backwards from ten now. Try to breathe with the count—nice and slow, okay? “Ten…nine…eight…”

Cold, merciful darkness took her in its embrace.