A lover of books.

Spider

It is only in retrospect that he notices her, some examination of memory. Three Mondays ago at 2:00 p.m. outside the Bernie's Bagels, as he emerged with an Everything and a schmear: sitting on a bench advertising credit counseling services, unearthing something from an olive green backpack. The sort of person one overlooks. Drifting about the edges of the scene, you understand. Vagrant.

Something about that pack.

Perhaps the walking stick, the sense of transience: movement. --

Wednesday last: a different scene, a different hour. Well after nightfall and the moon somewhere in the scene, fickle but present. The weight of it in the sky. The way it moves.

There she was, in the alley behind his shop, shoulders back against the brick of the papergoods store around the corner, her pack unslung, the walking stick leaning against the brick. Chewing on something that made her mouth slick and red, browsing through a dumpster.

--

Sunday morning, crossing the street, half-a-mile from his home. The walking stick swinging and something about her stride that makes it seem ground-devouring. As if she were on the longest and most arduous of treks but would, and could, walk and walk and walk some more, across the ocean when she ran out of earth, across the sky when she ran out of water across this world and the next.

--

Monday, oh Monday, the little door to a little shop opens. The little bell mounted on the door: chimes, exited: A customer! A customer!

Here she is.

Gallows

Here she is.

Has she circled him? Does he now, Dominic of the Order of Hermes, the Hermetic whose names are the names of Christian martyrs and Christian philosophers, of scientists and of lords, look at her and think that it is odd?

He must. Perhaps, at the altar he keeps at home, at the beginning of a sanctum he has built, is building, is impressing his own view of the universe into and upon, because Will is everything, Will is fire, Will is animation, Will is the cold after the fire's come and gone, Will is the stillness that might still leap, perhaps at his home he has allowed himself to be influenced, to wander down yet another path of study.

He studies. He is always studying. The Order of Hermes is a tradition of readers and of scholars.

The little bell rings, heralds her appearance, and Adam is at his desk, reading a book about a hermit who it is said never died but only transmuted himself into a lick of salt on a promontory where there is still a lick of salt hermit-shaped that is unlucky for those who stand there but from which every hundred and seven years a book-tree grows and the books on the book-tree grow and might be plucked but then you must read them quickly before they rot and one of the books which will grow from this book-tree will hold the secret of the hermit and the book Adam is reading is a dry treatise on those who perished trying to find the hermit, so it is not as much about the hermit as it is about his death, about his life, about the unattainable

and here is a customer.

Or, no, perhaps not a customer. Adam finishes a page before looking up at the door; he feels as if he is in no hurry, because this is his shop, and while he is often overlooked by people who first come into his shop, they wander nearer him eventually or he calls out to ask them how he can help them when he decides he needs to direct them.

Perhaps he does that after he looks up from his book.

[Inaugural Awareness roll.]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Spider

???? -4

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1

Spider

She feels like things. Like Things with a capital letter that has grown itself up from the smallest of scrawls, with a T that bridge the roof of one's mouth: these Things, which are not his sort of Things, but enough there that he may well take notice of her beyond the usual sort of notice one pays to a customer who is circling one. Who is coming and who is going, and who is crossing one's path with strange regularity even as she travels her own. It is difficult to name that feeling, but his is a tradition of namers so: the first thing that comes to his mind when he feels her Things is two words pushed strangely and thoroughly together: otherworlds.

And she smells like patchouli and marijuana and human ripeness and hearthsmoke.

Like ale, perhaps, and a hearty one, that has been spilled on one's shoes.

There is a hood today covering her variegated hair that seems deeper than it is, an olivine to match the pack that rests so easily on her back and within that hood a face so fine and cool and animate it seems to have been carved from marble, hewn from stone.

She looks up at the ceiling first, as if she were entering a cathedral, as if she were searching out the play of light on the domed roof from a clerestory, soaring-high, or entering a new place with a new sky, and laws of physics all its own.

Then down to the shelves and oh, the pitch of her head. Listening, listening.

Then to Adam, and with remarkable directness, this slow burn of a smile, as if she recognized him from forever-ago, or perhaps merely from just-now.

"Hullo." An Accent, as difficult to place as his own. "Perhaps you can help me. I'm looking for a book. I was told I could find it here."

Gallows

He narrows in on her, woman with Things feeling of otherworlds as she is and they do, but he doesn't quite know what it means yet. He curls his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he sometimes does to pronounce a word in the archaic and eternal language of the angels, in order to command, to undo or to reveal, but he has no word to scrape free. He is only curling his tongue thoughtfully, his considering a narrow thing. He considers how she looks around.

He considers her staff and her bag, and he sweeps his long-fingered fingers through his unschooled hair, a lick of messiness, a muss of unlicked scruff, then scratches the edge of his bearded jaw, meditative.

"I'm listening."

Spider

Now she is looking: around again, and there is something searching about way she looks, the way she takes her time to see everything that has laid itself out before and around her. The disorder of the shelves, oh familiar, the slow slide of dust to ruin. The display tables and the nooks and the crannies and the crannies and the nooks.

The ceiling, again, as if it were far, far higher than it has any right to be.

"Volume Seven of J. W. Roth's series. The Not-So-Open-Door. I'm told that you hosted her, on your - Michaelmas, was it? Or," a small pause, the supple thread of a smile. "Eostre, perhaps. Regardless. A signed work, if you have one.

"If not, an unsigned will do."

--

He hosted JW Roth, yes. Though not so recently as Michaelmas, and of course, this was the debut of Volume 2, 13 years after the unheralded appearance of Volume 1. The series contemplates 13 volumes in total, at least per its many sub and secondary titles,

Il Pentamerone, or the Tale of Tales, and Not the One by Battista, Either, Being a Concise and Illiteral Explication of the War on the Other Side of Veil of Sleep in Thirteen Volumes.

but there is to date certainly no Volume Seven.

Gallows

His fingers are curled under his throat, near his adam's apple, and his elbow is on his desk. He has not stood quite yet, and while he listens to the woman speak, his long fingers reach for a pen. He always has pens around, knight of wands, king of wands, page of wands, wizard that he is; pens of all different makes, pens heavy to the hand, pens of wood and pens of metal, pens hand-crafted and hand-made, and the pen his fingers close around is blue and silver. He twirls it.

"Hmm," a placeholder. His expression is bemused, and he adjusts his awkward frame all at once, hauling a receipt paper or a paper bag scrapling near him to write down JW Roth and then a circle around the name and then around the circle a symbol an Enochian sigil the beginning of one which will soon be crossed by another.

He takes his time when he decides to Look at something, doesn't he? He does, just.

"Would an earlier volume, signed, work instead? That is, erm, it is a gift, or for you? The signed versus the unsigned, I've never known a lover of books turn away a signature."

[Adam! wants to do a Prime/Time scan of Ms. Stranger, to see whether there are any anomalies, to see what the shape of that otherworldyness looks like in a magicky way and if it is out-of-sync. So! -1 for Taking Time, -1 for Focus.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 3) ( fail )

Gallows

[Totally gonna extend. Hermetics do not fail.]

Spider

"An earlier volume?" An alert gleam from her eyes, which are hooded in that moment. The spark behind them seems to mirror some sunken and half-remembered sky. She is looking directly at him in a manner that few people can manage with strangers, and fewer still can manage with him but there it is, the sloe-gleam spark of her eyes on his. The sudden impression of vastness behind them.

We belong to everything.

"Which one?" She pauses, and smiles, and the smiles belongs to herself, to herself, only. "Signed you say? How many do you have?"

He asks whether it is a gift, whether she would have it for herself.

This question she does not answer.

Gallows

A pause, and then he taps his pen against the sigil, setting it down in the next moment the better to lean on his forearms, folded against his desk.

He is not slovenly, but he is messy; he is a dusty bookshop clerk, unable it would seem to stand straight, weighed down by his hair, by his own considering eyes. A pause, and then he smiles a smile that carves a dimple into his cheeks, moves his eyebrows, draws tension-wrinkles out around his eyes.

"The first one?" His eyebrows lower. "Listen to this pitch: The number one is special. Ain Soph Aur. As many ones as we have or do not have, they always start at the same place. And I didn't say," not quite a laugh; no, not quite. "How many do you need?"

[The extendinging! WP HERMETICS DO NOT FAIL.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (4, 6) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Spider

"Everything she touched."

--

The woman is inked. She is worked. She has gems in her cheeks and sigils stain her skin. There is a certain degree of imperiousness when she makes her desire known.

"Perhaps. I will see the first one, and know from thence if I require more."

The walking-stick has been laid aside by now, near the door, in precisely the sort of place one would look for such a thing, abandoned but only temporarily. The olive-green pack is on her back, and is smaller than it should be, than it would be, for someone who spends her life on the road.

And yet: beneath all that, below it or above it, she is also quite thoroughly ordinary. A vagrant. A drifter. A wanderer, alone.

--

And she is within-time and also out-of-time. Something in her or of her or about her is old, old, old. Older perhaps than anything in the room. Resonant with age that seems both remarkable and somehow veiled. The way an avatar, ancient but close to the surface. She is also: wrapped right 'round with a magic that is both present and otherworldly. Ritualized and strange.

Gallows

His gaze rakes over her; this gaze that is a fork for coals, for stirring up light, seeing what's buried. That's how his gaze rakes; but he is ordinary, too, is Dominic Adam Julian Gallowglass bani Bonisagus, ordinary and listening, accepting the flat knife of her unmatching arrogance and her strange requests just as he'd accepted the strange requests of JW Roth, too, calculations and measurements according to the stars and the planets, because after all: these things make sense, these things are ever-present even though most are too dim to use them.

"I will let you see it," he says, meaning 'and nothing more, for now.' Because that is how deals work, isn't it? A hint, a suggestion. An ordinary exchange of words, each dealer alone. Alone is how man sharpens his Will.

And he does go back, back, back, an eye on the mirror, to see what he's got in stock, to lay out a book closed so no signature is seen.

Spider

There is a rhythm to a negotiation, a certain ritual to the act of bartering for which Adam seems wholly prepared. He reads people - even strangers - so very well. He finds her: nigh to unreadable, which seems to be just as precise a skill as deciphering the grace notes hidden beneath the immediate and the obvious day to day.

He lays out the book. She does not betray her greed for it, not in those first moments, when she demurs that there is no value for her, in it, whatsoever. Doesn't he have others -

Perhaps there are -

--

Adam does not remember the night of JW Roth's reading. Not precisely, and this is the first time he has taken note of the fuzziness of his own recollection of it. Oh he remembers the correspondence before and the preparations and he remembers the strange darkness of the streets surrounding, after. All the streetlights had gone out, and all at once. He remembers, too, her face as being quick remarkably ordinary. Round, with apple cheeks and wisps of gray to distinguish her otherwise dull brown hair. A strange and small assortment of attendees. Too many for the haggard ring of chairs he had gathered, too few to fill up the space.

He has no records of the number of volumes sold that night, but JW Roth left behind 13 volumes of the new book, each signed. Perhaps he put them on display for a few days. Perhaps he tucked them away on the shelves.

There was: little call for them. She is an acquired taste, and the first volume was published 13 years ago, and no publicity other than her strange little reading at his odd little shop heralded the publication of the second.

And yet: when he lays them out for the stranger in his shop today, slowly, slowly slowly, haggling each to his, he brings them out for the strange and he finds that there are but ten left. Three are missing - gone. Sold or perhaps even stolen. The stranger leafs through the remaining, and he has these glimpses of a strange, cramped and scribbled script all crabbed in the margins. Opaque as she is, she has moments of breathlessness reviewing whatever the volumes contain. Treats each differently, almost reverently, and buys the ten remaining for a sum that will certainly pay a fair portion of Sara's 'round the world odyssey.

She wants the remaining three. Surely he can search his records and contact the buyers on her behalf so that she may attempt to complete her collection and she promises to return on the morrow to collect what information he can provide, or perhaps to persuade him to search further.

Adam wraps up the remaining ten volumes of JW Roth's work in crisp brown paper, ties them all in twine.

Whatever he does or does not do to follow-through on the stranger's request, though: she does not return. Not the next morning. Not for days thereafter.