The Hexologists (The Hexologists, #1)

by Josiah Bancroft

her father, the famous Professor Silas Wilby, had had many weaknesses—including an insatiable wanderlust and an allergy to obligations—but none worse than his fondness for puns, which she personally reviled as charmless linguistic coincidences that could only be conflated with humor by a gormless twit. Only the sort of vacuous cretin who went around asking people if their names were made-up could possibly enjoy the lumbering comedy that was the godless pun.

her father, the famous Professor Silas Wilby, had had many weaknesses—including an insatiable wanderlust and an allergy to obligations—but none worse than his fondness for puns, which she personally reviled as charmless linguistic coincidences that could only be conflated with humor by a gormless twit. Only the sort of vacuous cretin who went around asking people if their names were made-up could possibly enjoy the lumbering comedy that was the godless pun.

The layered floors teemed with browsers in search of diversion, scholars scrounging for vindication, indigents seeking comfort, novelists hunting for reclaimable material, and burgeoning adolescents diligently sifting for any reference to the carnal act in verse, narrative, or diagram. And at the focal point of this kaleidoscope of desires and book spines rose the archivist’s desk: a round battlement defended by a woman who wore a black shift, a monocle on a gold chain, and her white hair in a sharply angled bob.

“I’ve had an inquiry from the royal secretary to look into a delicate matter of—” Luella Timmons-Wilby gave an arid little cough of surprise. “The royal secretary? What happened to all your convictions, your tender conscience that absolutely could not abide a compromise?” “These are extenuating circumstances.” “They often are, and that’s the point. Society is built upon the currency of concession, of give and take, of small sins for greater triumphs. You could be running the institutions you abhor, reforming the very failing agencies you could not abide. You could’ve been the chief of police by now.”

“Do you really think the board of directors that oversee this library hold me in perfect esteem? Hardly. Administrators are oblivious and generally get in the way; effective employees learn to work around them. That’s how it always is. Besides, it wasn’t really your commissioner’s approval that you wanted, was it?”

Isolde scowled with ready comprehension. Some years prior, Warren had been rummaging around Grandad’s bottomless bellows when his wedding band had slipped from his finger. The ring was in every way unremarkable. It was not a cherished heirloom, nor uncommonly arrayed, nor expensive to replace, and yet War had been devastated by the loss because what distinguished the modest band was its history of contact with his wife: The ring was suffused with tender caresses, clasped hands, and stroked hair. As such, he believed it the rarest metal in existence.

Crowded together behind the nurse’s station, Iz looked him in the eye when she reminded him: “You said never again.” “Once is almost never.” “Said the bullet to the head.”

But the letter also veered into advice and encouragement that seemed oddly trivial at first blush. Her father shared a trick for vanishing unwanted peas from a dinner plate, a reminder to put her socks on before her trousers, and directions for making “special milk,” a warm drink tinctured with vanilla, cinnamon, and sugar. Special milk, her father wrote, is a powerful potion in the battle against the dark. And it is perfectly all right, my dear Iz, to be afraid of the dark. People who tell you not to be afraid of things are usually the first to get eaten by tigers. Fear helps us to prepare. I say, gather your supplies, arm yourself, and make the dark afraid of you.

Do not neglect to live your life. No cause, no matter how noble, will ever love you.

His deep-seated need for comradery had, among other youthful calamities, driven him into the criminal arms of bootleggers, seen him hired on by a traveling circus as a strongman, and had signed him on for a six-month stint at sea on the occasion of his twentieth birthday. War’s mother liked to say he would gladly befriend a hungry cannibal if it saved him from that most dire of all fates: solitude.

“If you like. In the meantime, find something better to do than this. Pretend that you are worth the trouble until you convince yourself that you are.”

“Luck,” the faceless bettor intoned, his voice like warm water funneled into the ear. The bartenders stilled their swizzles. The whisperers swallowed their tongues. “It is luck that hobbles the general’s horse and aims the errant shot. Luck is love’s pander, its broker, its pimp. Luck rules on a golden throne under a mantle of rags. Spendthrift and skinflint is luck.” Again, he drained his stack of plaques into his palm. “Luck is the universe’s thumb placed upon the unequal scales of history. Luck is the primordial sea from which all magic—coherent and entire—once sprang. It is not upon providence but the pivot of misfortune that all existence turns.”

“I asked for company not criticism,” Isolde grunted. “I’m afraid company is the white in which the yolk of criticism swims! Can’t have one without the other!”

The difficulty was that even while everyone argued about whether panning the rivers of hell for gold was a safe and sensible thing to do, the applications of electrahol exploded in the national consciousness. Visions of racing jaunts and well-lit homes and wireless entertainment did more to alleviate the public’s concerns than any reassurances the industry produced. It was the promise of convenience that settled the debate. It was electric kettles that swayed the world.

In the storybooks young Warren had read, children who had swings took tea on vast, weedless lawns, wore unstained pinafores, and had private tutors who taught them improbable instruments like the bassoon.