Free The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross by Peter Roman Page B

spells because they think their show is afflicted with some enchantment. Magic has a life of its own sometimes, as the curse was ample evidence of.
    Laertes lunged forward, as the script called for him to do. And I lunged at him, as was my role. Our rapiers passed each other’s guard. I smiled at Morgana in the audience. I wanted to show her I had found the curse and dispelled it. I wanted her to approve of me. I wanted her to love me like I loved her.
    The blade of my rapier collapsed back into itself when the point hit Laertes’ chest. His blade bit into my chest and kept going, piercing my heart and continuing on through me. Laertes’ eyes widened as I cried out, and the audience gasped as one. Except for Morgana. I heard her sigh in exasperation, and I felt a fresh pain in my chest at having let her down.
    I’d been wrong. I’d been wrong about everything. The Witches’ counterspell didn’t work, which meant it wasn’t the Macbeth curse. Either that or the Witches had tricked me. That was a possibility, granted, but I couldn’t see them doing that when their safety was at stake. Besides, they’d already given me their punishment.
    “O, I die,” I heard myself say. I looked around until I caught sight of Amelia standing to the side, her hand over her mouth, as if to smother a scream. I dropped my rapier and reached out to her. Then I collapsed to the wooden floorboards of the stage, and into a mess of my own blood.
    And then, of course, I died.

‘DO YOU KNOW ME,
MY LORD?’
    I woke lying on a mess of ancient books.
    There were a few things strange about this. First, I woke on a mess of ancient books and not the wooden floorboards of the stage. I had so much grace in my system from Baal that I should have resurrected before anyone had a chance to move me from the theatre. Yet somehow I’d moved or been moved to wherever I was now.
    The second strange thing was that I woke, not resurrected. Instead of the sudden and violent surge of life into me that usually accompanies a resurrection, I gradually came to, like out of a dream.
    The third strange thing was some of the books were burning. I leapt to my feet to get away from the books blazing around me. That’s when I noticed the next strange thing.
    The rapier was still stuck through my chest, although it didn’t hurt any more than as if I’d been hit with a prop sword. I looked over my shoulder and saw the point sticking out behind me, through the shirt. The blade was covered in my blood, and it was still wet. I couldn’t have been dead for that long.
    I decided it was time to figure out where I was, so I looked around. And things got stranger still.
    I was in a library of some sort. I thought it was a library, anyway. The walls were lined with books. In fact, the walls were made of books. They rose up all around me, thousands of them stacked upon one another, forming their own shelves. Leather volumes and texts bound in other sorts of hide. They were jammed together in no order I could tell: some were spine out, others were face out, while others still were upside down. The covers and spines were damaged or outright destroyed on most, but I could make out a few names on some of the others.
A Botanist’s Guide
to the Aether. The Collected Works of Fairlisle, an Angel of the Seventh Rank. A Most Memorable Account of a Pope’s Exorcism. The Goblin Index, Third Edition
. And so on.
    They formed the floor, too, spreading out everywhere underfoot. And the ceiling: they hung in a sagging, interlocked jumble that looked as if it should have collapsed already but somehow hadn’t. Books were burning here and there in the midst of all this, but their flames didn’t seem to be spreading to the adjoining books. Perhaps because many of them were dripping wet with water, or covered in mud or mould. There were even tables and chairs made of books. On one of the tables sat an inkpot turned on its side, as well as a white quill and sheaf of papers. The quill and papers