The Word
The figure on the doorstep was but a faint silhouette against the night. 'A hooded cloak,' thought Sharp. 'Oh goody.'
The universe began with a word.
This much is generally agreed upon. Many religions believe this word, this first utterance, to have been a beautiful, sacred, divine word—the most superlative word possible in any language.
But the original Creator had no need of beauty, nor of a show of divinity, nor of superlatives of any kind. They would not have spoken any longer than was necessary—they would, in fact, have used the shortest possible word necessary for the greatest possible outcome. What, then, was that word?
Here the great Librarians invariably run aground on that ancient semantic shore, the Argument of Definition. For the sake of our own sanity, we shall constrain ourselves to the definition of a word as the most concise subparticle of language capable of containing meaning sans context. In Shotok, the language of gods and Abominations, written and spoken word are synonymous, and thus we can also sidestep that meaningless binary, avoiding yet another pitfall of this ancient discussion to arrive at the inevitable answer.
For the original Creator had no audience, and thus no listener for us to reference when speaking of context—alone in a time before Time and a space before Space, they existed in the only instance of true information parity ever experienced. They had no need of showmanship, no reason to compromise efficiency for the sake of communication.
With this in mind, the answer is obvious—any teenager with their covers pulled over their head knows as much, when contending with a parent’s shouted interrogative on a weekend morning.
The universe began with a grunt.
“Technically,” said Sergeant Grey, “she’s not dead until we say she’s dead.”
“Technically,” said Constable Sharp, staring at the body, “she was dead when she died.”
Grey gave her one of his flat stares, the kind that said I put up with you because I have to, not because I want to, and ‘have to’ is subject to change. “Which specific time is of course mutable upon our word,” she added. Grey nodded brusquely, then pulled out his watch and tried to stare it to death.
Sharp surveyed the room.
Barely twenty paces square and lined with sagging bookshelves, it had the feel of a once-nice study fallen into disrepair. An armchair was shoved up against the wall by the only window; on the table beside it, a candle burned fitfully, throwing shadows around the room like occult confetti. The rest of the room was empty. Apart from the steadily cooling, unblemished corpse.
“Two hours,” said Grey, stuffing his watch back into its pocket.
“Sorry?” said Sharp. The flickering candlelight kept catching on the corpse’s eyes, making it seem like they were moving.
“That’s how long we can put off calling this in before our lass here starts to disagree with our asserted time of death.” Grey stuck his hands under the armpits of his black officer’s coat, back straight. “That’s how long we have to get some answers, and maybe figure out how someone drops dead alone in a room while appearing, otherwise, perfectly healthy.” Before Doca appears and takes over and we never hear about it again, heard Sharp in the silence that followed. As had happened with the previous two similar cases.
Two points of data was not a trend, but the Sergeant didn’t believe in waiting for a trend to assert itself before taking measures to prevent it from doing so.
“And how do you propose doing that, sir?” The other instances had yielded less than a Library card after the Summoning Wars, despite the efforts of their best and brightest. Well, best.
“I’ve called in some help.” Grey cleared his throat, and did not glance in her direction. “External.”
"Ah," said Sharp diplomatically. That explained why he'd brought her along, rather than any of the others. The constabulary and the abominable mixed like oil and flame, but Sharp at least had proven capable of maintaining enough presence of mind not to take a bellows to the resulting conflagration. Still, even she didn't fancy sharing this tiny space with some beast of slime and tentacles.
There was a knock; Sharp jumped, and immediately cursed herself for doing so. Grey dipped his head just enough to count as a nod. “Bring them in.” His voice caught in his throat, like refuse clogging the sewers following a particularly heavy skinfall.
Sharp opened the plain wood door with only the briefest of hesitations. There was likely nothing to fear—Sergeant Grey wouldn’t endanger his personnel, and besides, the real dangers were the people and things that declined to knock before entering.
The figure on the doorstep was but a faint silhouette against the night. A hooded cloak, thought Sharp. Oh goody.
She stepped back and gestured stiffly for the figure to enter, which it did, stepping unhurriedly past her. It smelled of rain, though there had been none.
“Well,” said Grey as she closed the door. She joined him back in the middle of the room, where he seemed to be facing off with the hooded figure. He cleared his throat. Twice in as many minutes; he was more than just uncomfortable. Who in Heck did he bring in?
“And good,” said the figure, lowering its hood. The words buzzed, two voices overlapping—one normal, the other the low rasp of wind through ancient pages. Sharp suppressed a shiver, and then shock, noting that the Cursed voice belonged to a surprisingly normal-looking woman, perhaps twice Sharp’s own thirty years, with gray-blond hair and blocky features. “What are we looking at?” the woman asked.
“A dead body,” said Grey flatly.
“I’d gathered,” the woman answered, no hint of the exasperation Sharp would have expected. The buzz was unnerving, but this wasn’t the first Cursed that Sharp had run into, and she was determined not to let it get to her. “Identity?”
“Not anymore,” said Grey. Sharp swallowed a groan; if the Sergeant was this bad, they weren't going to get anywhere.
“We don’t know who it is,” she said. The woman turned to regard her, then nodded, as if waiting for more. Sharp licked her lips. “This structure wasn’t supposed to be here. Not as in by law or dictate—just that there was no structure here before. As recent as two days ago, according to the locals.” She caught Sergeant Grey’s eye, and he blinked her a thank-you.
“Ah,” said the woman, clearly getting much more from hearing the information than Sharp had from sharing it.
“Can you…tell which of the cults did this?”
The woman did not respond, but walked to the table with the candle. As she neared it, the wrinkles on her face were thrown into such sharp relief that Sharp half expected to see blood. “Amusing,” said the woman. She plucked the candle from its holder. The moment she did so, the flame at its tip went out, and the room was dunked unceremoniously into darkness.
Then the woman said a word that Sharp did not recognize, and a gray-green orb of light appeared directly in the center of the room. Hovering.
Sharp gasped; the sergeant made a strangled sound that could have been a gasp if the gasp had been forced through a very narrow tube and then crushed with a boulder.
The orb bathed the room in a pale luminance, steady and even where the candlelight had been fitful and broken.
“Trick candle,” said the woman, tossing said candle to the floor. It hit with a soft thunk, rolling to rest against the heel of the corpse’s boot.
“Hum,” said Grey.
“You’re a Librarian,” Sharp whispered.
Both Grey and the woman looked at her, the former with a warning, the latter with an unreadable expression.
“No,” she buzzed after a long moment. “I used to be a Librarian. Briefly. Now…” She trailed off, and her gaze moved to the corpse, or perhaps the candle. “Now I listen.”
Sharp said nothing, merely wondering what in the two-timing Heck Sergeant Grey had been thinking calling on this woman for help. And why she'd said yes. Only the insane became Librarians.
“I’d prefer if you talked,” said Grey.
The former Librarian turned to him, face blank. “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t.”
They stared each other down for a tense moment before Grey responded. “Then what are we doing here.”
“Please,” Sharp said quickly, hoping to arrest the woman’s attention. “Isn’t there anything you can tell us?”
The woman looked at her, then at the body; her robe seemed almost frozen in time, motionless as her neck swiveled this way and that. “Yes.”
They waited as her gaze stayed glued to the corpse. Sharp thought that without the ethereal gray-green lighting, the whole scene wouldn’t have been nearly as creepy, but maybe she was fooling herself. This woman had been a Librarian, after all.
The silence stretched toward breaking.
“Great,” said Grey flatly. “Well, this was a waste of everyone’s time. My apologies, Constable Sharp.”
“This was no enemy action,” said the woman, soft voice buzzing. Sharp shared a glance with the Sergeant, who had folded his arms.
“I suppose the lady offed herself, then,” said Grey.
“Yes,” said the woman.
“Eh?” said Sharp.
“Not…by intent, I do not think.” The woman’s cloak swished as she took a single step closer to the body. She crouched, then reached out a pale finger and caressed its lips. Sharp shuddered. “She described death.”
“That’s a euphemism I haven’t heard,” mumbled Grey.
Sharp cleared her throat. “Can you elaborate?”
“Not without losing meaning,” said the woman. She stood smoothly, a screeching willow straightening from the wind.
Grey snorted. “How about without speaking in Librarian riddles?”
At this the woman smiled, the first hint of emotion Sharp had seen from her. It almost reached her eyes. “The most accurate definition of a thing is the thing itself,” she buzzed.
Sharp tried to follow the woman's thoughts, but it was like tracking someone through a crowd when they kept spontaneously changing outfits. And bodies. "You're saying you can't explain what happened without...recreating it?"
The smile widened beyond a smile's typical bounds. "I'm saying that our corpse here described death with an accuracy not possible using mere language."
"She described it by dying," said Grey flatly.
"No," said the woman, turning back to regard the body. "You have your causal signage flipped."
"Pardon?"
"She died by describing it."
Sharp shared a glance with Grey, whose stony face was tingeing red. If there was one thing the Sergeant hated more than the abominable, it was indirect replies to what he thought were direct lines of inquiry. "Our lass here died...by describing death."
"The most accurate definition of a thing is the thing itself," buzzed the woman, echoing her earlier words. "That is how spells work."
Grey snorted; Sharp realized she had begun to lean forward, and rocked back on her heels, boots relaxing around her calves. Cultists and Librarians were one thing—magic was quite another.
"But then, wouldn't a spell just be the thing it's describing, instead of...a spell?"
The woman gave her an appraising look—not to be confused with a praising one, which would have been much less unsettling. "You would be correct, were spells completely accurate. But the map that describes the land with the most accuracy is the land, and this you cannot store in your pocket." Her overlapping voices bothered Sharp almost not at all, so engrossing were the words themselves. "Most spells approach accuracy only vaguely, hinting at one or another particular aspect of that which they seek to describe, hoping to evoke the same. Too accurate and you waste...resources." Her left eyelid twitched. "Too vague, and nothing happens."
Sharp pondered this. "So magic is just...semantics?"
She got a too-wide smile in response. "Everything is semantics."
"Well, not everything," said Grey, clearly losing what little patience he’d started with. Sharp and the woman both looked at him; Sharp with amusement, the woman with reproach. "Fair enough," he grunted. He unfolded and refolded his arms. "So. Our unblemished corpse incanted a description of death accurate enough to kill her." He glanced at the woman. "That about sum it up?"
She nodded.
Grey exhaled.
"Were you hoping for something else?"
"We thought one of the cults might have been involved," said Sharp. That had been their only running hypothesis, at any rate. Which might at least have lent some context to whatever was going on in Malison these days.
"Oh, but they were," said the woman, eyebrows climbing just the slightest bit up her lined forehead. She gestured to the glowing orb suspended motionless on the other side of the corpse. "The trick candle is favored by many of their number, used to hide the true source necessary for them to perform their rituals: the light of the Library."
Suddenly, Sharp swore she could feel the grey-green light coating her skin, venturing into her pores, seeking her soul... Superstition, she scolded herself. Grey made a muffled choking noise, but otherwise didn't react.
"Can you—"
"No," said the woman. "Nothing identifying, unfortunately."
Another dead end. Sharp glanced at the body, and tried to convince herself that that hadn't been on purpose.
Grey let out a longer, more tired exhale. "Thanks. That'll be all."
"Indeed," said the woman with a nod towards him, then Sharp. "You may leave."
"Sorry?" The Sergeant very much did not sound like he was sorry.
"Return to your precinct," she said, eyes turning up at the corners with what, on anyone else, Sharp might have described as amusement. "We'll clean up."
"We?"
At that moment the door slid roughly open, and five liveried men and women filed in; shining tassels bounced upon red vests, with matching caps perched atop heads that seemed like they'd never once bent at the neck to look down. The room passed by crowded and went straight to overcrowded.
Grey was fuming, fists curling around nothing as if to wring answers from it.
"Doca," said Sharp under her breath.
"Give my best to Ort," said the former Librarian and current leader of the local cell of the Department of Countercult Activity.
Grey growled like a feral canid.
"Ort was...let go," said Sharp distractedly, watching as the Doca agents knelt around the corpse, sniffing the air.
"Pity. He was the only one of you with any imagination."
The door was pulled shut behind them. They stood together in the clear night, saying nothing, thinking ugly thoughts.
Finally, Sergeant Grey gave a grunt, and they started walking. Sharp took that to mean conversation was once again on the table.
"How do you know her, Sergeant?"
"Friend of a friend," he grumbled.
The long grass swished past Sharp's boots; when she glanced back, the lone structure was gone.
"Was that friend...?"
"Ort."
"Ah."
"Aye."
She let the swishing fill the silence for a few minutes. Then, "Why did you think—"
"Describe shutting up," said Grey.
Sharp managed an impressive level of accuracy.
I can't wait to see what you do with this world and these characters