Filed To Story: The Knight and the Moth Book PDF Free by Rachel Gillig
My brows shot up. “Animated how?”
“Will there be kissing?” the gargoyle asked.
“What-no.” Rory made a face. “We’re going to…” He turned to Maude for help, but she offered none, grinning as he struggled to articulate.
“We are taking up the mantle and challenging this man to his craft,” King Castor said, then blinked rapidly, as if surprised by his own exactitude. He looked to Maude, who patted him on the back, then focused on me. “Do you know what that means, Six?”
I didn’t. It sounded vaguely familiar-a memory stuck in a dark corner of my mind. But my pride was a formidable beast. I’d sooner go back to Aisling than give these idiots another cause to think me witless and unworldly. “Of course.”
I could see in the way they looked at one another that they thought me a prodigiously bad liar.
Maude wrenched open the alleyway door, revealing a dark corridor. “Then let’s go.”
King Castor followed, quick in his step, like he did not want to stray too far from Maude.
I handed the gargoyle my hammer and chisel for safekeeping. “You still haven’t told me this man’s name,” I said to Rory, stepping over a fractured wood threshold into the corridor.
“He’ll be more than happy to introduce himself.”
Rory shut the door behind him, expelling the echo of the Seacht and the gargoyle’s voice as he began to lecture Fig about varying sorts of ivy. The only thing I could hear now was the muffled patter of our steps on wool rugs. I peered at the surrounding walls, their height so vast I had to crane my neck. Upon then, obscured by dimness, were rows of elaborate paintings I could not make out. They looked like portraits with blurry faces-bent, unclothed bodies.
No lanterns were lit. The corridor stretched on, its end obscured by murky shadow. I walked behind the king, a step ahead of Rory, suddenly afraid I was being heedlessly led into the unknown.
Ahead, Maude’s and King Castor’s backs were rigid. Behind, I could hear the swish of Rory’s fidgeting fingers in his pocket. He was toying with his coin. An anxious habit, perhaps. His steps were unflagging, but his breaths were rough and uneven. “You lot seem tense,” I murmured. “Nervous about something, Myndacious?”
The fidgeting sounds stopped. “Do you have some moral compunction against saying my name?”
“Is Myndacious not your name?”
“I told you the night we met to call me Rory.”
“And I might have. But then we got to talking, and suddenly there was nothing about you that made me want to encourage familiarity.”
“Job well done. Vomiting on my favorite boots is a surefire way to keep things formal between us.”
I glared back at him. “You’re remarkably difficult to like.”
“You’d like me better if you called me Rory.”
“I’d like you better if you were on your back again.”
He smiled.
An unfamiliar heat burrowed into my face. “From throwing you and your inferior strength down, obviously.”
“Loud and clear, Diviner. I hear you loud and clear.”
A line of light drew before us, coming from the cracks in a wide oaken door at the end of the corridor. Maude put a hand upon it and pressed.
The door opened to a room with no windows, lit by sunlight cascading from a dome ceiling made entirely out of glass. Upon the walls, several stories high, were shelves stacked with books. Tens of thousands of books.
In the heart of the room, fixed upon fine woolen rugs, was a man.
An old man, with draping silken robes and long, gnarled fingers. He stood stooped, but his eyes were lifted. Lifted-and made entirely out of stone.
In his hand was the inkwell from my dreams.
He stared at me, drawing in a long, rasping breath. “A daughter of Aisling.” He lifted a hand, beckoning me. “Come in.”
The Knight and the Moth
THE HARRIED SCRIBE
Denying. Every part of me was caught up, denying.
“This can’t…” My voice carried up, and the glass ceiling threw it back.
This can’t, my echo mocked.
This can’t…
The old man peered at me through stone eyes. His hands were thin, with bulbous joints, the undersides of his fingernails ink-stained. He had no hair upon his head or face. No color in his sunken cheeks.
He said nothing, slowly running a finger through his inkpot as he stared at me.
“Don’t be an ass.” Maude elbowed the king. “Tell her who he is.”
King Castor gave a shaky laugh. “I should think it rather obvious.”
When I looked over my shoulder at Rory, none of my shock was painted upon his face. “What kind of cruel trick is this?”
“It’s not a trick, Diviner.”
The old man watched. “I see,” he rasped. “You mean to rip the veil from her eyes. So to speak.”
I had the brimming compulsion to scream.
“Who are you?”
On and on, the man’s finger stirred clockwise circles in the black ink of his inkwell. “Traum’s historian. Its knowledge. Its greatest craftsman.”
He came toward me with pounding steps, as if he weighed a great deal, and the echoes traveled far and near. “For nothing but ink and the persuasive quill can devise what is true.”
A chill set its claws in me. I could see his pores-the lines of his face. Save his eerie stone eyes he looked so… mortal. “Those are the words of the Harried Scribe. An Omen. A god.” I stared at his inkwell. “But you-you’re just a man.”
He blinked once, twice, then, far quicker than a man his age had any right to be, he flung the ink from his inkwell.
And vanished.
The ink came at me in a black glob. I winced, waiting for it to splash upon my face. It didn’t. There was a ripple in the daylight, and then the ink was gone, replaced by the man who’d thrown it. He’d traveled nigh twenty paces on that tide of ink, invisible until he was but a whit from my face.