The runner burst into the bullpen and announced, “There’s an Anarchy loose on Baker’s Street!”
Vander dropped his pile of Ink slips in a heap on his desk, grabbed his ledger and leapt to his feet, head swiveling until he spotted the boy. “When did it appear?”
“Twelve minutes ago, give or take,” the runner said, dashing up to him, doffing his cap by the brim and fishing out a sheet of paper.
“Has the Tower of Law dispatched anyone yet?” Vander flipped his ledger open and creased a page back towards the binding, creating a new section.
“George Randolph Hartley, the Elder.” The runner offered Vander the slip of paper with his bet marked on it. “I have twenty on him taking it.”
“I haven’t even put odds on it yet,” Vander said.
The runner offered a savage grin. “On Hartley? Come on, Van, you know he never fails.”
Vander plucked the page out of the runner’s hands and slid it into his ledger, letting the book’s Axioms bind it in place. “That’s not the way the odds work, boy. Stick with the Library long enough and you’ll learn to appreciate that.”
“I’ll learn whatever you want so long as you give me the odds.”
“Three to one.”
“Good enough for me.” The runner grinned again and took off to whatever the next stop on his circuit was.
The ledger went into the inside pocket of Vander’s jacket as he pulled it on. As he snatched his hat off his desk he slipped his oddsmaker’s card into its band before tugging it onto his head. A check of his pockets confirmed he had all his blank slips and Ink bottles. With a nod to himself he strode out the door of the Library bullpen towards Baker’s Street.
It hadn’t been that long since Vander was a runner himself and the urge to take off for his destination in a dead run was hard to ignore. However, that wasn’t his part to play anymore. Oddsmakers had other things to think about. So he tilted his hat back and strode confidently down the streets towards the south, one hand resting inside his coat on top of his ledger. It took all of thirty seconds for the good people of Ivybrook to take note of him.
“Hullo, Oddsmaker!” Called a pug faced boot waxer, hopping up from his stool on the street corner. “What’s the word?”
“A loose Anarchy in the brick maker’s paradise, my good shoe shine. They say Mr. Hartly himself is on his way to care for it.” Vander flicked his ledger out and the book opened itself, hovering in the air in front of him in an expectant fashion. With his other hand the oddsmaker offered the other man a slip. “Take a chance on it?”
“What kind of Anarchy?” The boot waxer asked, his deep set eyes suspicious. “And the younger Hartley or the elder?”
“The elder,” Vander said, proceeding onward at a steady pace. “No word on the class of Anarchy yet, though we’ve had plenty of Sensory Anarchies in the last few months. We’re overdue for a Material one.”
The shoe shiner fell in beside Vander as he scratched his scraggly beard. He had to trot along quickly to keep up with Vander’s longer strides. “Aye, that’s what worries me. Hartley’s old and savvy but his Axioms are a bad fit for a Material Anarchy on the biggest brick baking street in the city!”
“You could always bet on the Anarchy…”
“Ain’t sit right to bet against the home boys.”
Vander slowed a bit and stared hard at the boot waxer’s watery blue eyes. “Sir, you’re not speaking to any old oddsmaker. I am from the Library of Chances!” He held out the Ink slip. “We give odds on anything you’d like, and if you’d like four to one on the chance that Hartley finds Ivybrook’s seventh Sensory Anarchy in a row then you may certainly have it.”
Those eyes sparkled at the offer of easy wealth. The boot black took the slip and deposited several drops of Ink onto it saying, “That’s quite a generous offer, oddsmaker. I’ll put five on it.”
He squashed his thumb onto the last drop of Ink and handed the slip back to Vander before returning to his shoe shine station. Like the first drop of rain from the sky, the boot waxer’s Ink was rapidly followed by a torrent more. Vander hadn’t even bound the slip into his ledger before two businessmen in fine waistcoats and billowing robes approached him. The taller worried the point of his ivory beard between his fingers as he said, “Anarchy on Baker Street, was it?”
“As you say, sir!”
The shorter had produced his own Ink bottle from his pocket and dribbled some of the precious substance onto a paper as he said, “Fifty drops says it gives old Hartley the slip.”
“A daring choice, to be sure, though at six to one odds it’s worth considering,” Vander said, binding the man’s betting sheet to his ledger. “Not a fan of Hartley’s?”
“Not a fan of easy Ink,” the taller said with a laugh. “Ten drops on the Anarchy being Material.”
Another Ink slip bound into the ledger. “That will get you two and a half to one, sir.”
They turned back towards their original destination and Vander continued on his way. Once he rounded the corner at Ordination Street it was a straight shot south to Baker Street, moving at the same even pace the whole way. Word of the Anarchy there had already spread. At least a dozen other citizens stopped to ask what brought him into the street and what odds he would give them on this aspect or that.
As Vander got closer to the scene of the action he passed more and more people moving away from it. Few stopped to ask him questions or place bets. Fewer still responded when he asked them questions. It was a common problem when giving odds on something as dangerous as an Anarchy. Most people didn’t want to look at it too closely, not when they could just leave the vicinity as quickly as possible. Yet good odds required good information and good instincts. Vander had carefully cultivated the latter over the years but getting ahold of the former never seemed to get any easier. It was confounding considering how much Shirelings loved gossip under other circumstances.
Ultimately there was nothing for it but getting to Baker Street as soon as possible. As the city’s crowds thinned out the brick kilns that gave the street its name came into view, a perpetual coal haze giving the neighborhood a grimy feel. In sharp contrast a piece of rich, purple cloth with bright red embroidery hung from the open doorway of a shop front, flapping gently in the fall breeze. A twinge of anticipation shot up his spine. He was getting close.
“Sarah, Sarah, Sarah O’Hara,” he whispered under his breath. “Bright red locks and skin so fair…”
As if summoned by the lyrics of the children’s rhyme, the woman herself emerged from the fabric, the cloth of her veil emerging from the scarf she’d left in the doorway with a sudden twist that defied human vision. One moment the doorway was empty, the next she was there. With a flip of a single hand, gloved in the same cloth, she pulled a blood smeared workman out behind her and gently laid him down on the ground. She knelt down by him, a bottle of some tonic in one hand, but he waved her away. She hesitated, clearly of two minds.
“Miss O’Hara!” Vander called, closing his ledger and increasing his pace to a light jog. “Miss O’Hara! A moment of your time!”
Her attention swung around to him, a worried look quickly melting into an expression of contempt that was a poor fit for her fine boned features. Like Hartley, her senior Lawman, she was no fan of the Library. “No bets, oddsmaker.”
“Just a question then?”
In response she rose back to her feet, the cloth fluttered between them and she vanished into it once again. The workman watched her go with a vaguely satisfied look. Vander knelt down beside him, opening his ledger once more. “It got you, did it?”
“Glancing hit,” the man whispered. “Here to put the odds on it?”
“What else?” Vander examined the man, looking for the source of the blood, but realized it was just a slowly leaking scrape on his forehead. Hardly enough to explain his thready voice and pale color. He carefully probed the bricklayer’s torso and elicited a groan.
“Side,” he muttered. “Crushed ribs.” Vander heard a wet gurgle in the second word but he tried to ignore it.
“A Material Anarchy then,” Vander muttered. “And half the neighborhood full of bricks. What is it doing with them? Melting them? Bouncing them like rubber?”
“Not Material.” The bricklayer carefully pointed at a ceramic tile with a blue star painted on its glazed surface, for sale in the window beside them. “Sidereal.”
Vander’s stomach clenched. A Sidereal Anarchy in Ivybrook? He’d have to check the Library to know when the last time something that unlikely had happened. If it ever had.
“Oddsmaker.” The other man tapped him on the leg. “A bet.”
Vander shook off his surprise and pulled an Ink slip from his pocket. “Of course, sir. Your name?”
“George. George Potter.”
“Ah! The same name as Master Hartley. That’s some luck, sharing a name with the Lawman who came to save you.” Vander forced himself to smile, doing his best to appear comforting.
“Some luck. Yes.” George’s smile looked almost serene. “My bet: I survive the day. Three drops. What odds?”
Vander’s smile faded as the nature of his work forced him to answer. “Eighty to one.”
The brick maker looked skeptical. “And what are they in truth?”
“Eighty two to one.”
“Less than I thought. Five drops, then.” He pulled a small, porcelain bottle from his pants pocket and held it out, hand shaking. “George Potter, Twenty Six Pushkin Lane.”
Vander quickly finished filling out the Ink slip and took the bottle from him. “Best keep breathing, then, Mr. Potter. Now, if you’ll forgive me, duty calls.”
The Anarchy itself was only a block and a half away, looming over the intersection of Baker’s Street and Gaspard’s Way, a place called Bricker’s Square. Looming was the only word Vander could think of for it. As the name implied, there were no rules to an Anarchy, they followed no predictable structure and, indeed, the appearance of each was entirely unique. Sensory Anarchies were a riot of colors, sounds and smells, no two alike. They might be tall pillars of light and sound or deep pools of dark and loathsome smells. Material Anarchies absorbed whatever was around them, becoming spinning discs of stone or trees that wormed along the ground like a snake.
Vander had never seen a Sidereal Anarchy before. He wasn’t sure he was seeing one now. Instead it looked as if the sky a few dozen feet over the rooftops of Bricker’s Square had transformed into the inside of a cave, if the ceiling of that cave was lined with strange trees and thick brush with wild green fronds for leaves. In short, it seemed there was a jungle upside down in the sky overhead. Huge snakes, uprooted trees, savage cats and swarms of insects all tumbled down from the Anarchy in an almost constant stream, pelting the Square.
Or rather, most of the Square.
At the western entrance to the intersection, feet astride Gaspard’s Way, stood George Randolph Hartley, the elder, surrounded by open grimoires, protected from the unnatural rain by a pale blue dome. Ivybrook’s foremost Lawman was in fine form that day.
He had lost his hat at some point in the battle, that was true. As a consequence the world could see graying hairs and a receding hairline that were less than flattering. An observant man might note that his stomach hung a bit further over his belt than it had when he led the Lawmen in the Founder’s Day parade a year ago. His muttonchops whiskers, though luxurious, were now out of fashion.
But his hands worked quickly, a brush in one and a draftsman’s compass in the other. As Vander watched, Hartley painted in the pages of one of his floating grimoires, the pale, rust colored Ink on his brush glowing faintly with the Axioms it contained. The fingers of his other hand looped the compass around and around, deftly expanding it a tiny amount with each revolution. Each time it completed a loop the glowing dome expanded another foot. Any creature or debris from the Anarchy that came into contact with the blue dome seemed to fade to transparency, flicker once or twice then vanish.
It was impressive work. Especially since Hartley was dealing with something as bizarre as a Sidereal Anarchy.
Vander struggled to recall anything about that kind of Anarchy. The only detail that came to mind was that they joined distant places together. The name Sidereal was given to them because most scholars agreed they did not just join places on Terra but rather spanned the far reaches of the stars, bringing weird and unnatural forms of life to their little planet with malice and cruelty for all involved.
“Not a pretty sight, is it?” Vander tore his eyes away from the Anarchy to find that Hartley’s other famous apprentice had put in an appearance – his son, George Randolph Hartley, the younger. Randolph to his friends. He was the spitting image of his father. Average height, stocky build, wild, curly brown hair. Randolph was clean shaven and twenty pounds lighter than his father but otherwise they could easily be mistaken for one another. Except the bright purple and red scarf he wore and the bleeding man he carried made who was who obvious.
“Ever seen one of these before?” Vander asked, running his fingers through the Ink slips in his ledger.
“In books and one of Father’s paintings.” Randolph pulled off his scarf and snapped it once, twice and a third time. O’Hara emerged from it and scooped up the injured man. Then she was gone again. As he wrapped it back around his neck he said, “You’re the first oddsmaker on scene. What are our chances?”
The gambles recorded in Vander’s ledger were more than the collected hopes of the people of Ivybrook. They were a window, however flawed it might be, into the laws of probability itself. If this Anarchy was going to be restrained then every Law known, however poorly understood, must be brought to bear on it. Yet Vander struggled to formulate what kind of odds could apply to the current predicament.
The strange image overhead spasmed, a distant voice booming out garbled and meaningless words. The inverted forest began to disappear in the same way the shadows faded before a creeping sunrise. Except it didn’t reveal the hope of a better day to come. Instead the vibrant green was replaced with a blinding white and a blast of icy cold wind fell on Bricker’s Square like an avalanche. It tore Randolph’s scarf from his hands and sent it billowing down the street, away from the action.
Vander’s ledger was nearly swept away as well. If he hadn’t been holding it in his hands right that moment he would surely have lost it and with it any hopes of constraining the Anarchy through the odds. It was, he realized, a fine bit of luck. And, of course, there was Lucky George, who turned the father and son duo into a perfectly symmetrical trio. In point of fact, they might be very lucky that day. With a surge of confidence, Vander raised his voice over the wind and yelled, “Two in three. You can handle this one, Lawman, but it’s not a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Well then, we’d best get to it.” Randolph pulled his hat a little lower over his brow to shelter him from the wind, pulled a grimoire out of one of his robe pockets and pushed into the wind, heading towards his father.
Vander pulled a bottle of Ink out of his pocket, fumbling to uncork it with stiff fingers as he watched the battle unfold. The debris and animals from the jungle hadn’t vanished when the Anarchy changed but the cold made the snakes and insects useless almost immediately. That left a pair of panthers stalking Hartley. His son charged towards them, his grimoire unfolding to a roaring locomotive made of paper and Axiom. It blasted steam with a soul shaking whistle that sent the cats running scared up Baker’s Street.
That would cause some sort of a problem eventually and Vander went to make a note of it in his ledger. However, as he dipped his pen into the Ink he felt an odd scraping sensation. Confused, he looked down. The Ink was frozen.
The odds had changed and, worse, Vander wasn’t able to make note of them in his ledger. Cupping his freezing hands in front of his mouth to form a horn he yelled, “One in four, Hartley! One in four!”
But between the howling wind and the puffing locomotive grimoire Vander could tell they hadn’t heard him. At least he could tell Hartley understood the problem. His dome shield was gone, he’d had to put his compass away to hold onto the book he was painting in, and he’d met Randolph halfway, rushing to the side of the glowing steam engine construct his son created. Hopefully the heat would be enough to thaw his ink and let him return to his art. Which brought Vander back to his own predicament.
Thankfully he was on Baker Street, where the finest bricks in Ivybrook were made. He looked around for the closest smoking chimney and rushed into that building, fishing some coals out of the kiln there and into a thick, clay bowl waiting for firing. He dumped sand from the sand pail on top of the coals and then stuck his Ink bottle on top. The whole process took a minute, perhaps two. In the midst of it he heard an incredible bang, like a balloon popping, and by the time he got back out into the Square everything was different. Again.
Randolph’s locomotive was torn to shreds, the pages of its grimoire scattered and burning all up and down Gaspard’s Way. To make matters more confusing the rest of Bricker’s Square was ankle deep in liquid. Torrents of foul smelling saltwater cascaded out of the sky, pouring down the sides of a colossal serpent that had fallen through the Sidereal, thrashing and snapping jaws the size of an elephant this way and that. At a guess Vander thought there might be fifty or sixty feet of the creature in the square. Yet some part of its body was still on the other side of the Sidereal Anarchy in whatever horrid ocean had given birth to the creature. The sight of it’s enormous body rising into the air and disappearing through the Anarchy was the most surreal thing he’d seen yet.
Hartley and son were no longer on the ground. In fact, Vander only spotted them on the roof of the square’s tallest building because they were still beside the huge purple flag O’Hara had used to bring them there. Randolph had opened two new grimoires, one packed with raw, pulsing Axiom that poured out of its pitch black pages and into pages the other, which was unfolding itself into two enormous purple hands that grabbed the sea snake and slammed it to the ground. Vander felt like the whole world shook on the impact.
Even with the snake’s head and twenty feet of its body pinned more and more of the creature’s bulk was sliding through the Anarchy into the Square, coiling and thrashing as it tried to escape Randolph’s grip. Vander cursed and scrambled back into the building, barely getting away before the serpent’s flank crashed into the wall. The building’s front cracked and partly collapsed under the impact. The oddsmaker dashed out the back, running down the back alley with his bowl balanced on one hand. “One chance in eight, now. One in eight!”
It was doubtful anyone could hear him.
After running half a block at a dead sprint he looped back around on Baker’s Street, pausing just long enough to note the changing odds in his ledger now that his Ink was thawed. He set the bowl and sand aside, hoping to return it to the kiln’s owner, and sloshed through the ankle deep water filling Baker’s Street back towards the Square. Along the way a bright swatch of purple caught Vander’s eye and he fished Randolph’s lost scarf out of the water right as the liquid started turning a ghastly shade of muddy red.
The Anarchy had changed again, cutting the snake in half and leaving the bloody stump of its body thrashing weakly in Bricker’s Square. The Sidereal’s new terminus was a volcanic landscape. Heat poured out of it in waves and the skin of the serpent began to blacken and crack accompanied by a smell more vile than a fish market in summer. Compared to most of what he’d seen so far Vander thought it was fairly pleasant.
Even better than that, Hartley was finally ready to make his own move. One of Randolph’s giant hands took up O’Hara’s flag and carried it to the opposite side of the Square. A moment later she stepped out of it, a rune covered rectangle three feet by four held in one hand. Randolph held it’s matching counterpart in his own hands while the hands of his grimoire shrank to nearly human size and picked up the two halves of a pole and carried them to the other two sides of the Square.
Hartley himself was surrounded by an almost solid dome of pages, his brush moving swiftly to put the finishing touches on his work, a half a dozen empty Ink bottles of different colors scattered about him. The scorched tarn in the sky began to change to a dark, rocky landscape lit by a handful of barely visible stars. A sudden, unnatural wind kicked up, rushing into the Square. It felt for all the world like the Anarchy was taking a deep breath as it prepared for its next great eruption of violence.
The papers surged up and stretched over the Square, flying over the Anarchy and the square in a solid, unbroken sheet. For a moment they hung there like a hot air balloon that had sprung a leak. Then Hartley waved a hand down and the papers slammed to the ground, pressing the Anarchy to the earth like a flower pressed in a book. The wind cut off. The serpent and the water and much of the rubble disappeared under the Anarchy, presumably expelled back out into the Sidereal places beyond it.
Vander looked over the papers in stark amazement. The backs of the papers were painted with a mural of Bricker’s Square as seen from above. If he didn’t look closely he might almost be convinced that nothing about the intersection had changed since the day previous, Hartley’s painting was that convincing. Under any scrutiny the illusion fell apart, of course. The brushwork was rough and the colors didn’t quite match reality but the intent of Hartley’s masterpiece was obvious. He was going to press the Anarchy under the weight of the Square and force it to conform to the laws of the world or depart it entirely. Paper wasn’t the best medium to enforce the Axioms of brick and stone. Hopefully the artistic eye that had made Hartley Ivybrook’s greatest Lawman would be enough to make up the balance.
“One in six,” Vander muttered, scribbling the change into his ledger. He wanted to tilt things more in the Lawmen’s favor but his own professionalism wouldn’t let him. There was just too much he didn’t know about what they were dealing with. Already the Sidereal Anarchy was proving itself more than they had bargained for. The painting Hartley had woven together was bulging unnaturally as the creature beneath it struggled to break free, the outlines of limbs distorting the image of the square as they struggled against the paper pressing it down.
Anarchies had made themselves known since time immemorial. In all that time no one had ever managed to draw any definitive conclusions about what they might look like or whether they would be intelligible or not. As one might expect of beings that embodied chaos, each was different. So Vander was not surprised to count seven limbs with three joints in each. That was as expected as any other possible body plan. He was far more disturbed at the pure strength they demonstrated, pushing so hard part of the Square caved into the sewers below with a crash. Splashes echoed up from the storm drains lining the streets.
Randolph and O’Hara leapt down to the ground, the runes on their boards glowing bright. In response Hartley’s painting began to glow as well. His apprentices held up the boards with runes facing each other and threads of Axiom began to weave their way between the two boards and between the boards and the mural on the ground. The grimoire hands lowered the poles it was holding and began to weave those threads together, slowly binding the paper and boards together.
As the threads began to pull the paper naturally developed wrinkles and folds of its own. A few of the Anarchy’s limbs seemed to get caught and folded up into the paper but three of them managed to wiggle out. Two of them dug into the painting from below, one with claws and one with disturbingly human looking fingers. As they pulled the paper taught the third stabbed it with a single large, sharp limb, tearing the painting to shreds and freeing that side of the creature’s body. All three limbs tore their way out from under the painting. Vander’s heart sank as the odds tilted wildly against them.
The situation spun out of control far faster than one might have expected, even from a situation where the odds were one in twenty. The humanesque hand grabbed O’Hara’s board, wrenched it away from her and threw it on the ground. Her arms from the elbow down went with it.
At first Vander didn’t fully comprehend what happened. The Anarchy’s arm was already beginning to warp and distort out of predictable, reasonable forms and back into a doorway to other places. It was only when bright red blood splashed onto the painted ground that he made sense of the torn stubs the Anarchy had cast aside.
O’Hara dropped to the ground, her high pitched scream rising over the Square. Vander cast his ledger aside and grabbed for the scarf he’d picked up then snapped it three times like he’d seen Randolph do before. Unfortunately nothing happened besides O’Hara’s scream faltering. It must require she do something on her side. Growing frantic he snapped it three times once more. The scarf suddenly grew heavy in his hands and O’Hara dropped out of it onto the ground. Her face, pale under the best of circumstances, was practically translucent and a trickle of blood dribbled from the stumps of her arms. Vander quickly took the scarf and tied it on one arm as a tourniquet. He used his belt to make another. He was busy trying to cinch it down tight when he caught something intelligible among O’Hara’s pained gasps.
“You have to finish the binding.” She flailed the arm with the scarf and he realized she was no longer wearing her veil. “I’ll send you.”
Vander finished with his belt and grabbed his ledger, shoving it into his jacket pocket before taking the scarf and asking, “Is there anything I need to do?”
“Tell me what our chances are.” It was hard to tell if her sour expression stemmed from pain or something else.
He grimaced. “One in ten, at best.”
The scarf went up over his head and for a brief moment Vander felt like he was wrapped in a nest of soft, fragrant fabric. Then it pulled away and he found himself standing beside the mural of the square as the Anarchy’s limbs flailed in a bizarre grapple with Randolph’s grimoire hands. Loose pages painted with patches to fill in the hole in Hartley’s painting flew over in a continuous stream, smacking into the limbs and slowly dragging them back to the ground. The stabbing, pointed arm was already mostly tied down again but the other two were still struggling and gradually pulling other parts of the mural apart. If left as is they would undoubtedly get the main body of the creature free again.
The board that would let them complete the ritual was sitting on the mural a dozen feet away. Vander tucked O’Hara’s veil into his belt in case it came in handy again and scrambled for the board, a carefully lacquered and painted piece of cherry wood, and hefted it in the air. He waved it twice and bellowed, “Randolph!”
The other man pulled his attention away from the struggling hands and raised two fingers to acknowledge Vander’s presence. Then he pointed towards the ground. Vardar followed the line just in time to see one of the Anarchy’s limbs surging underfoot, throwing him to the ground. Before the Anarchy’s limb could get free Vander elbow crawled off the mural as fast as possible. By the time he got to his feet the whole fabric of the painting was surging and straining as the Sidereal struggled against it.
Randolph held his board aloft again and Vander matched the motion. Hartley swooped by overhead, flying on a metal sheet shaped like the prow of a boat. He continued to rain down new pages to repair the mural.
The hands of Randolph’s grimoire snatched up their rods again, frantically weaving through the strands of Axiom, trying to undo all the damage done to the Anarchy’s containment. Hartley’s voice rang out from above. “The Law stands that men may know peace and not war!”
The whole mural surged upward once then slammed itself down on the Anarchy. In response the arm ending in a humanesque hand stretched up as far as it could reach. It pointed a single finger towards the sky. A shriek like steel scraping on steel rose from beneath the paper. “IGNIS.”
The Anarchy’s voice hit Vandar like a physical thing, causing the muscles on his back to lock up. His ears rang as its echoes faded. Yet he could still hear the next words in Hartley’s invocation. “The Law moves that the sun might rise and the world turn.”
The Anarchy’s hand turned about, an eye in its palm looking about until it locked onto Hartley. “FATUUS.”
The rods finished weaving the Axiom together and they flew out of the grimoire’s hands and attached themselves, one to each board. The web of Axiom connecting them to the painting began to pull itself tight. The mural came free of the ground, wrapping itself around the Anarchy and, at the same time, separating itself into pages that bound themselves to the poles and boards, forming into a new book.
Hartley stared down the Sidereal hand saying, “The Law fails if we choose not to keep it.”
The Anarchy pointed its finger at Hartley. “LUMLUSTRII.”
“So we turn its pages that we might learn.” Hartley stretched his arms out wide then clapped his hands together in front of him.
The covers of the book tried to slam themselves closed but the Anarchy’s claw arm jammed them open, its claws braced on one cover and its elbow braced on the other. Randolph’s grimoire hands grabbed at the limb and began to tortuously push it into the pages. But the humanesque arm was still free. Though muffled, the Sidereal’s final word could still be heard clearly. “PRIMORII.”
The hand lunged at Hartley, stretching further than seemed physically possible. At a loss, Vander grabbed his ledger and threw it at the Anarchy’s limb. The ledger’s impact wouldn’t have done anything to the Anarchy’s arm under normal circumstances but now that it was stretched thin it was far less solid. Though Vander was no record setting thrower he still hit the limb with enough force to knock it off course.
Instead of piercing Hartley’s hands, potentially breaking the binding ritual, the finger plunged into his eye. Hartley bared his teeth but didn’t cry out. Randolph grabbed the covers of the book with his own hands, adding his strength to that of his grimoire, and combined they pushed the book closed. There was a flash of Axiom and new threads wrapped around the Anarchy’s remaining arm. It was dragged twitching into the pages of the book.
Just like that Bricker’s Square fell quiet. A strange smell hung in the air, the walls of the buildings on the north side were cracked or collapsing and a deep sinkhole now led down into the sewers. Streaks of sea serpent blood still stained the ground. But the sky was once again clear and blue and the breeze was cool and gentle.
The enormous codex that now contained the Sidereal Anarchy tumbled to the ground, already shrinking to the size of a normal grimoire. Randolph ignored it and sprinted over to his father. Vander realized he was incredibly tired and decided he would take a seat right there in the middle of the Square.
“Are you alright, sir?”
Vander took a break from enjoying living and breathing to examine the runner that had just arrived. It was a different one from the boy that had announced the Anarchy’s existence to him not more than half an hour ago. This one was older, perhaps on the verge of becoming an oddsmaker himself. He certainly had the politely disinterested attitude down. “I’m fine. What route did you take, runner?”
“Came up Baker Street, sir.”
“You didn’t happen to see a man lying by the ceramic store with blue star tiles in the window, did you?”
“Yes, sir,” the runner said. “There was a corpsman attending to him so I didn’t stop.”
“A corpsman?” They wouldn’t have stopped to give him medical attention if he wasn’t going to make it. “What do you know about that. All three Georges safe.”
“Sir? Do you want me to take your Ink slips back to the Library for the accountants?”
“Yes. Give me a moment.” Vander pushed himself up and went to retrieve his ledger.
On his way back to the runner his eye fell on the codex, still sitting on the ground and steaming as the Axioms and Anarchies within warred with each other. They hadn’t yet reached a state of balance. However one thing was clear. The codex had already formed a unique and disturbing cover.
“Something wrong, oddsmaker?” Hartley asked, leaning on his son’s shoulder, a handkerchief over his bleeding eye.
“Look at this.” Vander carefully picked up the codex using O’hara’s veil. Hopefully the Axiom in the cloth would cancel out any Anarchy still leaking out of the pages.
Hartley chuckled darkly. “Not in the best shape for that right now, am I?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Vander turned the book so Hartley and Randolph could see the cover. The original runes there had been replaced with a new engraving. A single human eye stared out from the center of the cover, cupped in a pair of feminine hands. Beams of light radiated out from them. “The pages have tasted blood, Lawman Hartley. This codex isn’t safe. It needs to be disposed of and the Anarchy rebound.”
Randolph frowned. “It’s Sidereal. No one willingly frees those and rebinds them. It’s far too dangerous.”
“It’s a blood codex,” Vander snapped. “Do you know how often one of these will drive its keeper insane? The odds are one in two after five years, Hartley. Five years!”
Hartley gently folded O’hara’s veil around the codex and took it from Vander’s hands. “There are ways for us to deal with those risks. We’re Lawmen. That’s what we do.”
Vander scowled. “Careless risks are unbecoming of Ivybrook’s best Lawman.”
“Well, when he takes such a risk I’ll mention that to him. What’s your name, oddsmaker?”
“Evander Halloway, sir.”
“Do you know the Mortal Speech, Mr. Halloway?”
“We don’t have the time for many scholarly books at the Library of Chances.”
Hartley nodded. “Then the Anarchy’s parting curse meant nothing to you?”
“I… did not realize it was a curse, Mr. Hartley.”
“A fool’s flame burns brightest before death. A common enough curse among those that spoke that tongue. Strange that an Anarchy would know it but no stranger than anything else about those creatures. So. Given all that and the dangers of a blood codex, which you have already described, a question.” Hartley tapped the book against his chest. “What are the chances the owner of this codex dies in the next year?”
Vander narrowed his eyes. “One chance in one, sir. It’s a statistical certainty.”
Hartley tucked the codex under his free arm. “We will see, then.”
“Yes. I suppose we will.”
Nate Chen Publications 