Tears shone in Tamara’s eyes. She stepped forward and caught me in a hug before I realized what was happening. “You met Ivy!” she said. “I can’t believe you met Ivy. Did she look well?”
“Very well, and she seemed happy.”
“Wait.” The bookmaker looked suddenly panicked. “She wasn’t in the group of Followers that was attacked?”
“Oh! No, a different group, I’m sure. I met them far from where the attack took place, several days ago, and they weren’t headed in this direction.”
Tamara let out a breath. “That’s a relief. I may not have seen Ivy in a long time, but I think about her always. I didn’t mean to disappear, but in this line of work … Well, you have to, a little.”
Patrick smiled at her. “How does one get into the business of making books, as a …” He hesitated.
“As a woman?” She smiled wryly. I must have looked puzzled, because she turned to me. “Women are allowed to bebookmakers, but our opportunities are … limited. Before the Temple really took over everything, before the time of the Plague, there were many of us. My great-great-grandmother was a bookmaker, and her materials were passed down through the family until they got to me, and I was the only one to bother to learn how to use them.” She was much friendlier and more open after finding out that I knew Ivy, as if we had now been elevated to honorary family status.
“You taught yourself?”
“I had to, at first. Later, I found others who practiced outside of the Temple’s purview, and they shared their tips and knowledge, and I gave mine in return. By then, I had a few. Anyway, the monks came to me when I was in school and told me of a job opening: using the scriptorium’s resources to makevery specialbooks for clients who wanted something … out of the Temple’s usual bailiwick, but requiring their level of skill and access to materials. So I jumped at the chance, naturally. It took me a long time to swab this place down when I moved in, though.”
“What do you mean?” said Patrick, keeping his tone even.
She sighed, and her fingers stilled their search for a moment. “It’s not the most pleasant of tales.”
“And yet I find myself agog to hear it.”
Tamara raised an eyebrow at me.
“Yes, he always talks like that,” I said.
“Well,” said Tamara, continuing to flick through the papers, but a little slower now, “I came to this place about a month ago. One of the monks had heard of my … independent endeavors and seen some of my work. They sought me out and explained they were in need of someone to live here as a permanent fixture, to take care of the materials and work on commissions. There are others who come down here for particular projects, of course, but they can’t always get away unseen. I, on the other hand, am always here.”
The little monk who had led us down smiled nervously.
“Anyway,” continued Tamara, “I come down here, and the place is a mess. Not regular mess—mess like someone had been thrashing around in here. And bleeding. A lot. And then I find out that the old bookmaker had been murdered, which gave me pause, you might imagine.”
“Murdered?” echoed Patrick.
“Murdered. Not a week before. So now I’m wondering if I’m putting myself in some danger, being here, but they assure me it was a … disagreement with a specific client, very unusual, unlikely to happen again, so on and so on. So I get to scrubbing the place clean, as that is part of the agreement, and I come across … odd things.”
She paused.
“The blood is everywhere, you understand, in all shades from pink to almost black. A bouquet of blood.” She smiled a little. “I start to wonder. For a start, not all the blood belongs to the same person. Some of the blood doesn’t even belong to a human. I’ve been working with inks and chemicals for a long time, and I have a nose for smells and compositions. I can also see some of the bloodstains are much older—in fact, there seem to be stains of all different ages. So something unpleasant has clearly been going on here for a while. It took a goodly time for them to admit it, but eventually the monks told me my predecessor had been an odd sort, into experimenting with different … materials.”
The pause stretched out.
“What materials?” I murmured, almost reluctant to hear the answer.
Tamara made a face. “It’s not my favorite thing to talk about. Blood. Skin. Body parts … I don’t know all the different things he tried. The bones that you saw, for example, are a mixture of cattle bones and human. Very strange fellow, clearly.”
“Human?” I said.
“And did he have any success with these … experiments?” said Patrick.
Tamara looked at him sharply. “I certainly hope not,” she said. “So don’t get any ideas.”
He lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Never. But you must admit it piques the curiosity, rather.”
“Well, from a purely professional standpoint, it is interesting. You would have to spend so much time finessing the proper compounds to keep the blood stable, for instance, and to keep it from fading when used as ink. The skin would be simpler, I suppose, as it’s really a sort of leather. Treating it, though, that would be a challenge. Hair could be used to stitch, if you strengthened it somehow—”
“There was hair?” I said sharply.
