Her hands laid out the three souls. Max Brand’s cowpoke permanently creased down the middle, Bradbury’s Illustrated Man rubbed clean of color, and a dirty, dirty girl masturbating behind a tiny black dot.
It was all she had come away with, but it was enough.
Scooping them up, the Bookseller turned back to the Sealy pillow-top stained and sagging and scattered with her gear. She lifted on her oiled coat and ran her fingers through her satchel. Three cans, bits of hardware and wire, tallow and wick, flint and steel, and her copy of The Illustrated Castle Book long since unbound, folded in quarters and wrapped carefully in thickly waxed paper. This she would never sell. Its colors were still bright.
She slung her blade across her back, then paused and glanced back through the broken Plaza window at the Smith Center across the tracks , its flanks scrawled and fire stained. Its dead spiked on rebar fasci. Waiting for souls.
She strode through the parking garage, scanning for trouble. Few lived here permanently: only a handful who catered to pilgrims who came during the Walk.
Then out into the open and over the tracks. The sun glared half-lidded, gray and hot above an omnipresent veil.
A pedestrian bridge stood over the tracks. A place for killers. The Bookseller stayed clear, rounding across the flat ground.
A clanging of scrap on scrap sounded as she crossed an unseen line. She stopped and turned her eyes to the tower, all symmetry and soot. A figure peeled itself from the shadowed doorway at the tower’s base and walked toward her, past the spiked dead. She waited.
He came, naked and thin and rubbed in fat and talc. A buyer-priest.
“Do you have them?”
“Yes.”
“And the price?”
“You know the price”
“Of course. Let me see them.”
The Bookseller pulled the cowpoke from her satchel.
“Is that all?”
“My payment?”
The buyer croaked once, then twice, then the third time loud.
Three rags carrying rags scuttled from the shadows and resolved into children, toothless and hunched and blessed with pain.
The buyer took the stracci strappati and held them out to the Bookseller. She took one and hefted it. The buyer split a gummed grin and nodded.
She tugged a corner, as if in disbelief. Rare, so rare. A grinder, a hearth coffeepot, and a vacuum-sealed bag. The Bookseller hurried them into her satchel. She handed Bradbury and masturbating girl over to the priest.
“Will you stay for the ritual?”
She never did. These books had souls alright, but they could no more raise the dead than could she. Stories from the east told of Lazarus tomes, and maybe they were true, but probably not. Books, she knew, help you quiet the walk to death, not stir you once you arrived.
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| Emily Kray copyright 2014 |
And tonight, like pictures she had seen in her dreams, she would sit over the city, sip coffee, and gaze at castles in the candlelight.
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