There is no one more frightening than a motherly figure who wants to hit you. I learned this well, in my youth. My own mother would go red with anger. She wouldn’t scream. She would shout, and the shouts would feel like blows. When she slapped me, the slap carried all of the fury that she had been storing up for days. If some man had hit her, she took the pain of that blow and gave it to me. All of this is very sad, of course, and explains some of my less pleasing qualities. It also means that I know how to avoid being struck.

  Vaetra came at me. She was very quick, and she had picked up a heavy beater and swung it with an expert hand. I ducked. I swung my sleeve and hit her with the brick. That took her by surprise. She stepped back to reassess me, and I swung again, and the brick fell from my sleeve. She looked at it and smiled. Then she looked at it again. I looked, too. It has split open, and something long and sinuous was unfurling itself from inside of it.

  “What is that?” Vaetra hissed, and I heard Bhaetamistri shift on his loom bench. I edged carefully towards the wall.

  It wasn’t quite a snake. Or maybe it wasn’t just one snake. It appeared to have multiple legs and feet, but as we watched it extended them, and they writhed out and bit the air with separate heads. Their little mouths had many teeth.

  It lifted its sinuous body and swayed there, and specks of blown fiber seemed to settle about it like snow. But it was warm, and seemed to be stretching with a kind of contentment. Cat-like in an unsettling way. Its main head sparkled with many eyes. It unhinged its jaw and seemed to smirk. Then it struck.

  Vaetra batted it away with the beater. It flew through the air and landed by the door. She backed away, towards the looms. It unfurled itself and chuckled. Not hissed. A low, cruel sound that hinted at amused intelligence. It slithered forward, draping its long body across the space between the door and the looms. It was growing very quickly. It was at least three times as large as it had been when it emerged from the brick.

  Vaetra’s face was entirely red. She was panting with fear. She was trying to place herself between the monster and Bhaetamistri, but she had backed up so far that she was about to bump into him. He moved, slipping to the side, out of her way. She stood facing the creature, with only a loom and the large maw of the well at her back.

  It struck again. She swung the beater and missed, and the creature seized her throat in its primary mouth. The other mouths bit through the clothing of her robes and the whole thing hung off of her like a second spine. Her eyes were wide, and she stared right at me. Then she fell backwards into the well, taking an entire loom clattering down with her.

  Silence. I could barely breathe. I stared at the well, imagining the creature crawling out of it. It had those eight skeins of cloth to climb. It had those many mouths to grip the yarn with. Bhaetamistri was staring at the well and saying, “No, no.” He sounded just like a little boy. Like I had, when I found my mother’s body.

  There was a shaking in the ground beneath us. The sound of cracking stone. I edged towards the door. A skittering sound, pebbles falling somewhere deep with the well. And then a terrible silence. Lantern light flickered across the looms. A ghost appeared, sliding over the mouth of the well. A thin old man with a kindly face. He turned and looked at me. Then there was another ghost standing beside him. And another. They didn’t explode into the room. They simply filled it, each appearing in turn, each face with a distracted look, as if they had forgotten some urgent task and were struggling to remember it.

  Bhaetamistri went rigid as they came close. His face stretched into a scream, but no sound came out of him. His arms were tight to his sides and his fingers were flexed. His eyes rolled back into his head. The room was filled with the dead. I turned and threw open the door and ran out into the hallway.

  People were standing in the doorways. Nice people, who a few moments before had been sitting pleasantly by the fire. Now they, too, were going stiff, their mouths agape, their faces stretched. The dead were following me. They were capturing the mediums as they went, possessing them against their wills. I would have been less frightened if there had been any sound beside my footsteps.

  Out into the cold of the courtyard, where the children were standing, silent and stiff. Out through the entrance tunnel into the street. The city breathed innocently before me. Warm lights flickered in the windows of the houses up and down the hills.

  Footsteps coming towards me. The boy Oulute. He stopped a few paces from me. “What is it? What’s happened?” Then he looked beyond me. I turned and looked back. The entrance of the house was filling with the dead. They were walking quietly, with determination, anxious to find the living and haunt them.

  Oulute tugged at my arm. “Run, Doefrit,” he whispered. “We need to run.” So we ran, through the cold streets, leading the procession of the dead.

  Whinagher was still at his desk as we entered Haunts and Scribbles. He looked up and stared at us. We ran passed him. He shouted, as Oulute was not allowed upstairs. But then he fell silent. The atrium had begun to fill with dead scholars.

  I banged on Lianahndra’s door and threw it open. She was laying across her bed, already in her sleeping robes. She looked quite comely and she lifted her head and looked at us. Her face was weary and raw with tears, but beautiful in the light from the fireplace. “Go away, Bends,” she said.

  “The bricks!” I hissed, pacing into the room. “Are there monsters in all of them? Did you bring a crate of monsters into the tower, Lianahndra?”

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  She went pale. “They’re dormant. As long as we keep them cold.”

  “Dormant? Well, not anymore.”

  Now she was alarmed. She leapt up. “Bends, what did you do?”

  “What did I do? What did you do? What was it all for?”

  “You didn’t wake them, did you?”

  “One. I woke one. And it’s caused enough damage.”

  She looked around wildly, trying to find her outer robes. “Where?”

  “Oh, not here. Don’t worry. Or rather, do worry. It’s caused more damage than you could have ever hoped for.”

  Her eyes flew to the window. “The palace?”

  “Not the palace, Lianahndra! The Sasturi. I took it to their guild house. Don’t look at me like that! I didn’t know what it was.”

  She stared at me. She was quivering. Then she sat down on the bed. “What happened?”

  “What happened? It hatched. That’s what happened. And then it fell into the well, and released the ghosts.”

  Honest bewilderment flattened her expression. “The well?”

  “Oh yes. I have seen wonders, this night, that no scholar has ever been allowed to see. I have learned things that have been kept secret from all of our researches. And they were going to kill me because of that. But then your little brick hatched, and now the dead are walking abroad.”

  Her eyes flicked to the doorway, where poor Oulute was still standing, a mute audience to our confrontation. Something eased in her face. Her eyes welled with tears. I turned to look. The ghost of Lewibindi Jaestis was standing just behind the boy.

  I gathered what courage I had and walked forward. “Oulute,” I said gently, “step into the room. No, don’t look back. Just come with me. That’s it. Over here, to stand beside the fire.”

  Lianahndra was on her feet. She had her arms stretched out towards Lewibindi’s spirit, as if she wanted to embrace him. He moved towards her and faced her without emotion, as if she were a stranger he had met on the street. But she seemed to read some feeling, some revenant love, in his expression. “Lew,” she said. “Oh Lew. Oh Lew.”

  There were other shapes in the doorway. The spirits of other scholars. All the old men and women who had ever lived in Lianahndra’s chambers. She noticed them. Her eyes widened. Her gaze flicked to me.

  “All the dead, Lianahndra,” I said. “They’ve been released from the well. Maybe the spirit stone was broken. I don’t know. But they’re here. They’re everywhere in the city. You’ve gotten your wish. The king won’t want to build here, now.”

  Her brow knitted in concentration. “The Sasturi…”

  “When I fled their house, they were possessed. As if they couldn’t help it, or control it. As if the dead were moving through them without their willing it. The Sasturi won’t be able to help.”

  Her expression tightened as she remembered that she was intelligent, a plotter. “More will come. From other cities. It’s happened before. The Sasturi will confront this plague.”

  “And when they do? What will they learn? That you and the Archivist have been plotting against the king.”

  “The Archivist?”

  “Yes, the Archivist. I heard her talking to you earlier.”

  She stared at me. “You were spying?”

  “Yes, I was spying. You’ve made me into a spy. All of you. With your plots.”

  I left the room, taking Oulute with me. I placed my hands firmly on his shoulders and guided him through the maze of ghosts. It was a little like navigating a crowded party, only we didn’t want to know what would happen if we accidentally touched one of the guests. Only the Sasturi can be possessed by ghosts, it’s true. But us regular people can hear a faint whisper of the words that a ghost speaks so clearly in a Sasturi’s mind. It is more than unpleasant.

  The stairs, too, were full of spirits. Scholars whom death had interrupted in the middle of a thought. They were paused on the steps with an air of distraction, as if trying to remember which reading room held the book they needed. We wound our way gingerly between them. We didn’t go down, but up, and not to my chambers. I have often been accused of only being concerned for myself and my comforts. I am proud to say that on that night, I went to check on Moesebai.

  I wish I hadn’t. He was dead when we arrived in his chambers. The kind old man had expired while sitting beside the fire. His head was thrown back and his eyes were wide, staring at a corner of the ceiling. His chambers were full of ghosts, like everywhere else. Perhaps he had been staring at one of them as he died. Some old friend who had been looming above him. But the spirits were drifting from place to place, and whoever it was had wandered to some other part of the room. Moesebai’s own ghost was not in evidence. I closed his eyes. Oulute took my hand. I remain very grateful that I had a friend with me in that moment. I have never understood why Oulute chose to be my friend.

  We went back out into the city. I took nothing from my chambers. What did I have to take? Only some styluses and inkwells. Only some scraped over scrolls. What would I need with palimpsests from then on? The whole city had become a palimpsest. The dead roved the streets like ghostly letters, and our living selves were mere scribbles across the scraped parchment of Libreigia.

  Oulute declined to leave the city with me. I took him back to the Bird and Baby, where his uncle was getting riotously drunk, offering drinks to the ghosts who haunted the bar. Spirits for spirits, as it were. They didn’t drink, which was for the best, as they would never pay their bar bills.

  I left Libreigia by way of the Pinnacle Gate. I was among the first of the refugees, and I stopped at the first rise and looked back. The city flickered with warm light, as if nothing was happening. The half-built palace floated on the cliff, a nest of stone block and cranes and pulleys. And bricks. It would have been so easy for Lianahndra’s cabal to slip an innocent looking crate of bricks into the building supplies. And then, when summer came, they would have released their sleeping monsters. Maybe on a day when the king was inspecting the building site. Maybe at the moment when Nirmaluko the Builder was walking by. It didn’t matter. Chaos would be visited on the unfinished palace. Just another kind of avalanche, sweeping the innocent and the guilty along with it. I would have liked to deliver a brick to Malreesi Muelant, a thank you gift for inviting me to her party.