The Woman Who Died a Lot

“On their way back. It didn’t sound as if they had much luck. Our math geniuses are hard at work. There was a panic earlier when Tuesday took Gavin to meet Jenny, then found she wasn’t there. I made up some story about her being off at a sleepover.”

It was one of our standard excuses.

“She does a lot of sleepovers.”

“I know. Damn that Aornis.”

I looked down at my tattoo, then noticed that I had a Band-Aid on the back of my hand—a new one, next to the tattoo. I frowned, then lifted up the corner of the Band-Aid, read part of the words beneath and stuck it down again. I looked at the clock. It was just past six.

“Landen,” I said quietly, “we should have a family meeting, here in the kitchen at exactly eight o’clock—and bring the cordless drill and some screws.”

“Why?”

“I can’t say.”

“You can tell me.”

“No, I can’t say because . . . I don’t know.”

35. Thursday: Aornis

The Hades family when I knew them comprised, in order of age: Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Lethe and the only girl, Aornis. Once described by Vlad the Impaler as “unspeakably repellent,” the family drew strength from deviancy and committing every sort of horror that they could. Some with panache, some with halfhearted seriousness. In time I was to defeat three of them.

Thursday Next,

A Life in SpecOps

Friday got back at seven, very tired and none the wiser. He had met the Manchild again, who had confirmed that there had been sixteen letters, but with no idea who the sixteenth might have been. He was simply told to dump them in a mailbox at the correct time, which he had done. The only thing he did mention was that two of the envelopes might have been opened and then resealed—but for what reason, again, he had no idea.

Millon had gone down to his hermitage to practice thinking deep thoughts and cram for his upcoming hermiting exam, and Gavin had nipped out, to the Swindon Best Deals for Used Cars at Fish Brothers University to speak to a professor of mathematics, who, while an “oaf with so little knowledge it saddens me,” could nonetheless offer a few pointers regarding knot theory, which might open a potentially exciting new line of inquiry to the U_c.

At a quarter to eight, I had just finished a call from Phoebe when Landen walked into the kitchen with the cordless drill and some screws, and I told him what she had said: that Bowden had been up to the library and identified the mystery palimpsest as being a lost work of Homer’s entitled Margites and that it was probably translated by the Venerable Bede, which was not only one coup but two. Phoebe was working under the theory that this lost epic poem of Homer’s had accidentally found its way into St. Zvlkx’s recycling pile along with mostly eleventh-to thirteenth-century dross and that the book had then been spread around Zvlkx’s mass-copied publications—and Jack Schitt had been going around hunting them down to be destroyed.

“Why destroy them?” asked Landen.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps to give another copy greater value, a little like the plot of Goldfinger. But given the risk involved, it hardly seems worth it. Besides, Jack Schitt is a highlevel operative with a top One Hundred Laddernumber—why would he waste his time on a lost work of Homer’s?”

“And why didn’t he want the defenestrator’s copy when he’d found that it had already been cataloged?”

There was no good answer to this either. But at that moment, Tuesday walked in, and the matter was quickly dropped in lieu of something that I think was more pressing but still didn’t know what it was.

“Okay,” said Landen, “we’re all here, and it’s almost eight o’clock. What’s this all about, hon?”

“I can’t remember.”

Landen raised an eyebrow. “Aornis?”

I said nothing and, after handing the cordless drill to Friday, told him to secure the three doors that led into the kitchen.

“Through the doorframe?” he asked, since the doors were all Regency period doors and had architraves.

“Do it now.”

So he did, and the screws bit deep, splintering the wood and looking shockingly untidy. I could only hope that we weren’t due a visit by English Heritage’s militant wing anytime soon.

“What now?”

I told them all to sit down and explained to Tuesday that Jenny didn’t exist—never had, in fact, that she was just a mindworm created by Aornis Hades in order to mess with our heads.

“That’s crazy,” said Tuesday. “She came into my lab to say hello to Gavin not half an hour ago.”

“No, you only remember seeing her. Like all the other memories you have of her.”

“So I didn’t rescue her when she got into trouble swimming on that holiday on Rùm?”