The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

Dresden, dreaming, understood he would wake in a distant land, wake in a high-walled trap, slick beyond climbing, tall beyond jumping. There would be no escape.

backseat. But at the same time he saw Carolyn walking, saw the way the muscles of her calves flashed in the headlights with each step. Something in this tableau—he never quite settled on exactly what—put him in mind of Dresden, turning to face the pack of dogs, how every muscle of the lion’s anatomy stood out in taut relief, the mute vehicles of his titanic and furious will.

“That’s the risk in working to be a dangerous person,” she said. “There’s always the chance you’ll run into someone who’s better at it than you.”

Steve suddenly wanted very much to buy Dr. Abendroth a drink. In all the world, she was the only other person who really got it. “Well,” Steve said, “you’re not wrong. But it’s worse than that.” He cast a shifty, paranoid glance into the shadows. “I think she might be out of her fucking mind.” Hearing himself say this, the thought came to him fully formed as from the void: The vocabulary of such a creature would be different from what I am used to, different from what I know. It was in that moment that he first began to understand what he had to do.

“Just go.” Then, in Pelapi: “I must send you into exile, that you may be the coal of her heart. No real thing can be so perfect as memory, and she will need a perfect thing if she is to survive. She will warm herself on the memory of you when there is nothing else, and be sustained.”