She retreated upstairs once more.
The study was filled with small stacks of books she’d considered and discarded in her research. On the desk, in the corners, by the circle drawn on the floor. She planted herself in the center of that circle and turned slowly, surveying the mess.
A test. Could she work her will upon the environment? Building the circle was second nature now. She stopped at the height of it, poised like Renton, arms spread, body rigid.
She focused on the nearest book. Nonmagical, useless, but the title, History of Breltainian Thought, had seemed promising, and so she’d paged through it before casting it aside. It needed to be put away. She brought her hands before her and willed it to rise from the floor.
It did not move.
And why should it? Dr. Nizamiev’s explanations echoed through her mind, winding together with scraps and fragments of countless texts, snippets and phrases that never spoke of easily comprehensible feats. Everything was internal. Everything was instant. Knowing, knowing that the world was other than it had been a moment before.
The book was on the shelf.
No, it’s not. She was looking straight at it, and it had not moved. It was on the floor, because where else could it be? She had not touched it. She had not moved it, and how could a book move on its own?
Jane turned away from it, until it sat only in the corner of her eye, barely visible.
The book was on the shelf. She must believe it. No; she must know it.
The book was on the shelf.
The book was on the shelf, where its gray cloth binding barely caught the lamplight enough for her to see the snag at the base of the spine. A thread had pulled loose. The book was on the shelf.
The book was on the shelf.
Jane stared.
Where there had been an empty slot on the shelf across from her, there was now a gray, clothbound text of the size and shape of the one on the floor. And when she looked, the one on the floor was gone.
She clasped her hands over her mouth, giddy, laughing. Shaking, she left the circle. A grin split her face, and she felt as if she would come apart. Filled with wonder, she pulled History of Breltainian Thought down. It was real. It had weight, and it was as she remembered it. It was a book, and she had moved it with a thought. She had done that.
She had changed the world around her. With five nights left of the ritual, she had influenced the world.
The book fell open in her hands. Idly, she read the page.
She tried to read the page.
She could not.
The printed ink looked like words, but they were nonsense, jumbled and meaningless. She turned the page. The next was just the same, and the next, and the next. She closed it, heart pounding, and inspected the cover. That was sensible, History of Breltainian Thought, but the author’s name—was that the same as it had been before? Was it even a name?
She dropped the book and grabbed another, one she had not moved. It was filled with intelligible text, word after word, sentence after sentence. The next book was the same, and the next. They were all as they had been, except for the one she had moved.
She had known it was on the shelf. What had it done to the book?
Known.
Perhaps knowing was too simple a term. What was it Dr. Nizamiev had said? Jane remembered balancing equations, the flow of logic in a proof. Every variable needed to be defined. Every element known. To truly bring somebody back from death, the changes to the world that would be necessary to make that happen would require knowledge too complex for the mind of man to comprehend.
She had not moved that book. She had known it to be somewhere else. But she hadn’t known its contents, back to front. And so the book she knew was not the book that had been.
Knowing she was safe inside a circle was different from knowing a book. One was simple, the other far too complex for realistic interaction. And by knowing something that was not fully described, she had changed it. Irrevocably.
What would happen when she freed Augustine?
The thought paralyzed her. She did not cry or make a sound, and her heart did not even beat quickly. She was as stone, because to be anything else was too momentous, too all-encompassing.
A door. A door was simpler than a book. Wasn’t it? A door only had to open. But did she need to know what lay beyond the door? Did she need to know the whole layout of the crypt, and where Augustine was, and what state he was in? What happened if she changed too much? What assumptions would she make without realizing it, and what would she alter?
She moaned.
When Augustine had tried to call back Elodie, he had not fully understood what he was doing. He had done something other than he had intended, because his assumptions, his knowledge, had not been enough. Elodie—Elodie was gone, in that vision of the past, and in her place, a blankness. He had torn her from her life, and fixed her in the moment of her death, suffering, down in that cellar. He had known only that the dead could come back.