Page 17 of The Maiden and Her Monster

“Stay, if you want,” Nimrah repeated tamely, despite Malka’s and Amnon’s obvious bewilderment. “Until you figure things out.”

She had left the table, now attending the sword she had previously eyed. She wiped her hand down the scabbard, clearing the dust. “Believe me, I can’t wait to be rid of you both. But I’d prefer not to find you two dead, seeing as I went through so much trouble to save you once already.”

Malka doubted that was the reason. She found it hard to believe Nimrah cared about their fate at all. Which left her even more suspicious.

“How do we know you are any less of a threat than what waits out there?” she asked.

Nimrah unsheathed the sword, metal glinting in the firelight. She began to sharpen the blade by running it through the thumb and forefinger of her stone hand. “You don’t.”

Malka resisted the urge to squirm in her seat.

“We might as well, Malka,” Amnon said. “We need to reevaluate what to do.”

She couldn’t bring herself to argue. He was right. Whatever plan they had had would no longer work.

When she relented, Malka didn’t miss the smirk that flickered across Nimrah’s face.

“You’ll be safe in here,” Nimrah said the next morning, slinging a sack around her shoulder.

She donned a man’s doublet, but it was not oversized.

Instead, the silver brocade lining emphasized her broad shoulders and towering stature.

When Nimrah wrapped a cloak around her shoulders, Malka found she missed the way the silver glinted with her movement.

“The creatures do not come close to the trunk of the Great Oak tree. I’m not sure why, but I haven’t ever been bothered within these walls. ”

Malka watched her slip out, tall and impending against the carved door.

The golem had left last night, too. Malka had woken from a fitful sleep when it was still dark, only to find Nimrah gone. By the time she woke that morning, Nimrah had already returned, mentioning nothing of her midnight trip.

Malka wondered what Nimrah did when she left, what secrets she held close. Malka didn’t trust her. Didn’t trust they were saved from the same fate as that poor Yahadi boy years ago.

Amnon joined Malka at the table, where Malka had begun to strain the tea Nimrah had given her with netting found in one of the drawers.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“The tea—I don’t understand it. It should not be healing us like it is.”

Amnon ran a hand along the back of his neck. “I saw her make it that first night. What she used… you won’t find it within that netting.”

Malka blinked. “What do you mean?”

He scratched his cheek. It had been days since he shaved, and thin bristles of curly hair were beginning to speckle his jaw. “You know… she’s a creature of it. Makes sense she’d use it, too.”

It.

Malka frowned. “You think she performed Kefesh to make the tea?”

“I highly doubt it could’ve been anything else.”

It took more effort to even her breathing than she would’ve liked. “I should’ve known.”

Amnon shook his head. “We went from Kefesh being a distant, rotted mysticism to surrounding ourselves with it. Whether we leave or stay here with her, we are at its mercy.”

Malka pressed her thumb along the pad of her hand. “I keep thinking about what we were told of her. How one day she became something even the Maharal couldn’t recognize. All because of Kefesh and our hubris to control the earth.”

“She didn’t look at all unsure when she made the tea. She held the leaves tight in her palm and rubbed at one of the etchings on her arm with the other. Like she had done it many times before.”

Malka mulled that over, dipping her finger into the old tea, as if she could discover its secrets from touch alone.

When she had first felt the tea’s effects, how quickly it soothed her, she had imagined what it would’ve been like for someone like Yael to sip from this tea—if it would aid her brittle bones or mitigate the symptoms of the sickness which gripped her.

A traitorous thought now, yet she couldn’t let it go.

“There’s a specific story your Baba used to tell…” Amnon’s eyes drifted toward the roof as he thought. His cheek was still red where he had scratched it. “Ah, yes. The story of Tzvidi the librarian and the holy book he left open, allowing the demons to take advantage of his mistake.”

Malka remembered. The tale had kept her awake in the darkest hours of the night. She traced the contour of her throat, remembering the quick work the tea made of her frostbite symptoms.

Baba had first told her the story of Tzvidi when Malka witnessed Kefesh for the first time.

She and Baba had been in the shektal early one morning.

A Yahadi merchant from the southern Balkisk Kingdom had come for market day, and much to his dismay, had accidentally overturned his crate of apples, bruising them all.

Malka thought he would either sell the fruit for a discounted price or accept his losses and trek back to his kingdom.

Instead, he had closed his eyes and whispered a spell, carving a word onto an apple until the bruised fruit lost its purple hue and shone bright green once again.

“You must not tell anyone what you saw,” Baba had said. “Kefesh is not always what it appears.”

The Balkisk Yahad were more casual toward mysticism.

It had been a cultural difference Baba staunchly opposed.

To Ordobavian Yahad, Kefesh was highly taboo, and while people accepted the Maharal’s practice of Kefesh as being ordained by Yohev, the wave of secularization in the Balkisk Kingdom meant some Balkisk Yahad began to use the holy magic carelessly and without understanding its true portentous weight.

“ Have I told you the story of Tzvidi? ” he had asked.

Malka had shaken her head.

“ Ah, well, ” Baba had said, reclining in his chair. It creaked under his weight. “ Let me tell you a cautionary tale, and as with all stories, you can see why we share it. ”

Malka recalled the story now.

Once, there lived a Yahadi scholar named Tzvidi, who held his position in the Great Library in the highest regard.

He cataloged all the scrolls and books like any librarian would.

Only, this was not an ordinary library. The Great Library was a holy library filled with holy books written by Yahadi religious scholars since the dawn of time.

There was one book in the Great Library that Tzvidi considered his greatest joy and privilege to catalog and protect.

It was the Seefa Narach , a holy book written by the holiest man of their time—a scholar named Gabriel who had studied Yahadi mysticism for many years.

In the Seefa Narach , he wrote of his trials and errors of commanding the mysticism.

Some said he succeeded in understanding the magic, others said he could try as much as he’d like, but Yahadi mysticism was a magic that could not be fully understood by anyone.

Regardless, when Gabriel died, his grandson—far less of a holy man but a man who still respected his grandfather as one—inherited the book. But he had no desire to continue his grandfather’s studies of Yahadi mysticism, so he donated the book to the Great Library, where it came into Tzvidi’s care.

Tzvidi gleamed with excitement. He could not wait to read what Gabriel had discovered. Only, as soon as it came into the library so, too, did it bring a line of scholars desperate to read its pages.

Given the specialty of this book, no one—no matter how powerful—was allowed to take the book home. They could only visit the library and read it there. Day after day, Tzvidi watched with jealousy as his fellow scholars devoured the pages of the Seefa Narach .

Until he realized what he could do that no others could.

Tzvidi worked at the library and could study the Seefa Narach long after the library closed its doors for the night. After all, no one could take the book home. Only, the library was Tzvidi’s home.

So, every night after the library closed, he would slip through the side door with his key and pull the Seefa Narach from the shelf.

He would pore over the text until the sun traced the horizon, and he could no longer keep his eyes open.

Gingerly, he would place the book back and rush to his bed to slumber for the next hour until his work began.

Oh, how tired he became. He would work all day and read all night. To him, the chance at studying Gabriel’s words was worth all the sleep he lost.

One night, Tzvidi had become so tired he fell asleep on top of the book and woke far after the sun. In his haste to get home and change before coming back to work again, he forgot to put the Seefa Narach back in its place, leaving its pages open on the table.

With any other book this would not be a problem. A book is just a book, after all.

Except when a book is holy.

Except when a book has Kefesh pressed between its pages.

Then, it is something far more dangerous.

For scholars are not the only ones who lurk in the library.

Trembling on the shelves waiting for men like Tzvidi are shalkat—demons who sneak into holy books left open by their readers and corrupt the prayer and magic within them.

And as Tzvidi hastily left, so did the shalkat come and crawl into the Seefa Narach .

They burrowed into the prayers which Gabriel had twisted into magic and turned them into something nefarious.

Spells which brought vitality to the earth were manipulated to cause famine.

Spells which shared ways to improve health became spells which grew pus-filled pox from the skin.

Spells which asked for rain in the dry climate transformed to spells of drought.

The changes were not noticed right away, especially not by Tzvidi.

However, as more and more scholars began to take notes from the Seefa Narach and attempt to use the spells Gabriel had written, the more and more things began to go terribly wrong.

Soon, the shalkat’s manipulated words began to plague the city—sick people grew sicker when doctors tried to heal them, storms grew wilder when scholars tried to tame them.

But perhaps worst of all to a scholar like Tzvidi was when, oblivious to the disastrous repercussions of the Seefa Narach , he decided to cast his first spell from the book.

Late in the night, his light had grown dim—too dim to properly read.

So, emboldened by all of his stolen nights studying, he used a spell from the book to brighten the fires of his candelabra.

However, instead of brightening his lights, from his spell grew a fire so large, the flames licked up the walls and, in its mouth, swallowed Tzvidi and the Great Library whole, until there was nothing left but ash and the snickering shalkat.

When he had finished telling Malka the story, Baba had patted her cheek gently. “ Let this be a lesson to you, Simcha Shachar. Power like that cannot be contained. There will always be shalkat in the wings waiting to strike. ”

Frightened by her memory of Tzvidi’s story, Malka decidedly lost her taste for the tea, and any potential use of it. Tzvidi, Mavetéh, the golem… Nothing good came from Kefesh. If there was one thing Malka was sure of, it was that.