Painting the Sky [8]

After a day of flying Ingrid was ready to rest. Vaska commanded Algot Gunn to fly them down to the Imperial Palace in a tilt-rotor. Ingrid climbed up into the rear door of the craft for the first time and she was shocked at the sheer quantity of pipes, all painted black against the silvery hull. It was like the innards of some beast made entirely of metal.

The clever little aircraft took them down to a pad on the roof of the Imperial Palace, between the towers with the onion domes. As they approached the palace Vaska excitedly described the overall layout. Each ministry of the government had been granted a wing. The Ministry of Defense was located in the Life Wing, the Ministry of Resources was located in the Metal Wing, and on and on she rambled excitedly, describing the various ministries and their correlation to the elements.

Ingrid was interested to discover that the imperial family lived in the Dark Wing, whereas the Light Wing was reserved for the chairman of the bank and his family. There were other tilt-rotors on the roof of the palace and the place was swarming with marines. The chairman of the bank, his wife, and his adult children had already been executed. The youth of that bloodline had been shipped off to various boarding schools in years gone where they would remain and there they would remain irrelevant.

The empress consort lived in the emperor's suite and the first concubine lived in a smaller suite on a higher level. Unfortunately this suite did not provide easy access to the gardens or the library and it was this latter fact which Vaska considered to be the greatest tragedy. Ingrid was dumbstruck at the ostentatious wealth. Everything was made from polished ebony and stamped with gold filigree and there were landscape paintings on the walls and the roof of the whole wing was painted with religious murals.

Vaska led Ingrid through the palace gardens to the emperor's library. It was a vast vaulted chamber that made the library tower in House Varelion look modest. It smelled of animal glue and wheat paste and musty leather. It was at least five stories tall with a roof made of glass windows arranged in a honeycomb pattern. The walls were covered floor-to-cieling with shelves packed tight with books.

There were spiral staircases and moving ladders but most of the librarians levitated around with heaven elementals. Some of the books were so large that it took two people to carry them. Some of the books had to be taken apart and restored by a bookbinder every three hundred years and for some books this process had been repeated for a thousand years and for other books three thousand.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Memories linger in this place," Ashe said. "Intent. Ambition."

The Elemental Queen of Darkness fluttered up into the towering stacks and vanished. When she returned she was carrying a pair of books, one in each hand.

"You can hold things?" Vaska asked.

"For things as evil as this, I am willing to make the effort."

"I thought you liked evil things!"

"Not this type of evil thing."

Vaska snapped one of the books out of Ashe's hands. It was bound in black leather stamped with silver filigree. The edges on all sides were gilded silver and coated with beeswax. Vaska opened the book and rifled past the black-gold marbled endpapers and the frontispiece and the title page and finally the first few pages. It was handwritten, with hand-drawn and hand-colored illustrations. There were clearly monks or other clergy being represented, and the likeness of various elementals.

"Neat," Vaska said.

"Destroy it! Burn it with fire!" Ashe insisted.

She offered the second book to Ingrid. It was bound in white leather and stamped with golden filigree, gilded with gold edges.

"What is it?" Ingrid asked.

"Don't read it!"

"Now I'm curious," Vaska said.

"These are the books from the Twin Fates Monastery," Erika said. She materialized beside Vaska in a puff of black smoke. "They describe how to manipulate children into believing what is best or worst. They describe how to abuse me and Titania."

"We should burn the books," Ingrid said.

Vaska sighed. "My love, you know how much I love books, right?"

"I know, Vaska. But what could these books describe that you do not already know?"

"That's fair." She snapped the black tome shut.

They went up on the roof and they gave the two books to Algot Gunn. He promised to destroy them and Titania confirmed that he intended to do so. Vaska refused to watch a book burning but Ingrid remained on the roof just to make sure. The man summoned a fire elemental and the elemental happily began consuming the flammable material. The covers were fresh and strong after a recent restoration and they did not want to burn, but the paper itself was perhaps older than the Imperial Palace and once the sheets caught flame they began to glow orange and curl up like the legs of a dead spider.