Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys

Author:Ruthanna Emrys
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER 18

I slept poorly. No sickening dreams whose reality I might deny—instead, I startled awake a dozen times, convinced that a particular camp guard loomed in the door to check on our slumber. Once I woke Neko as well, whimpering the man’s name, and she shivered and put her arm over me.

When at last I came down to breakfast, Trumbull had covered half the table with syllabi and lesson plans. “The library is a chaos of forgetful students and teaching assistants waiting to use the mimeograph machines. They all smell like chewing gum. The department can’t spare an assistant for me, of course.”

Her mundane exasperation startled a laugh from me, and eased the fog of fatigue. It was hard to hold on to my revulsion. Neko handed me a plate of fried eggs and a cup of tea. She sat beside Audrey, who’d finished her own breakfast and was reading the Sunday paper with pursed lips.

“Perhaps this isn’t a good day to brave the stacks,” I suggested. “Or will it be that bad all the time, now that the students have returned?”

“Last semester the bedlam was confined to their first day back,” said Trumbull. “If that’s typical, tomorrow should be safer.”

So, she’d arrived last summer. In four years or so, I’d need to come back to the university and see if I couldn’t help the real Trumbull through the shock of her return. For now, I needed to be on this Trumbull’s good side if I was to follow up on Caleb’s suggestion. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“If you’d asked earlier, I might have made you brave the crawling crowd. At this point, I just need to look over my notes, and do a last check for anachronistic insights. The same horrible low-level classes every semester—the price one pays for access to the university resources, and I gather the other professors feel much the same.”

“Ah.” I peered over her notes, sideways, but the last of my mathematics had been the most basic of algebra, two decades past.

Trumbull tapped her pencil on the table. “Well? Whatever you want to ask, it will at least be a distraction.”

I glanced at Neko and Audrey—but my desires here were a secret from neither. “We’re still discussing what to do about the spawning grounds, but Caleb and I thought—that is, we hoped you might be willing to help us retrieve our books. You’re as frustrated with the limited access as we are. Your people must have places where you store records in this era. Followers who help out when you want to do something authorities might not like.”

She snorted. “Certainly we have places to store temporary records. We call the local one Miskatonic University.”

I dropped my eyes. “Oh. But still…”

“Despite its inconveniences, we have long cultivated this place as a shelter and way station for knowledge worthy of preservation. One of our architects helped design the library. Our cultists, we choose primarily for tractability. They don’t know the first thing about even primitive archival technique.

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