She quickly smiled her thanks, then returned to practical matters. “I don’t see a door out, but we might not from here.”
Real churches often had doors in the arcades, or behind the altar so that the priest could get to and from his chambers more easily. If the room they were standing in was a real church, Toinette doubted it was to any god she wanted to know about; still, they had to go further in.
Each took one side, stepping under the arches and traveling up the long stone floor. Walking so far apart, they still fell into rhythm with each other. Toinette thought her part of that might have been because she was listening to Erik’s footsteps, tryingnotto hear the steady, wet noise that continued around them. Hearing that was like having a slug crawl up her back.
There were no doors on Toinette’s side, nor did Erik stop and shout a discovery. Even the places where tapestries would have hung in a normal church were bare—but they flickered as Toinette looked at them, gray stone giving way to black void and then returning again in the blink of an eye.
“Saints defend us,” she muttered, equal parts prayer and curse. She’d never thought either would truly be heard before, or at least not answered, no matter what the priests said. Now, after the words had left her mouth, she feared what might listen to them.
* * *
They met again before the altar.
“Nothing,” said Erik, and watched Toinette shake her head in answer. They stood facing each other, a pose that called to mind the mass after a wedding—though any such joining in this church would certainly be cursed from the start, and the progeny likely monsters from the worst of the old tales.
The similarity only reminded him of the difference and made him long for the true version with a strength that took him utterly off guard. He might have spoken then, had Toinette not already been making for the lectern and the immense book open on it, which likely had nothing to do with any scripture he’d ever heard.
“Too much to hope that they kept records, I—faugh!”
She leaned back abruptly from the book, upper lip curling and one hand instinctively raised in defense. As Erik rounded the corner, he could see why.
One page of the book was covered with writing in a small crawling hand. On another yawned a face, one with gaping black holes for eyes above an otherwise featureless dark maw. As Erik watched, the eyes drooped and the mouth opened wider, laughing or screaming, or both.
“Close it,” he said, but Toinette shook her head.
“If it’s trying to scare us, there’s something it doesn’t want us to see.” She bent her head to the paper, squinted, and slowly began reading aloud. “The Year of Our Lord 1308, if God grant my memory serves. Roul ran into the forest, and Amis after him. We found them not, and I fear the worst.
“It corrupts. I think we have contained the worst for now, but without the Order’s greater protections, we may be able to save no more than our souls, if those. Would that this cursed place would meet the fate of Atlantis, and—What’s that?” She looked up and to the side.
“What?” Erik asked. From what he could tell, the rest of the room looked as it always had.
“There was a sort of red flicker. I thought.” Frowning, Toinette shifted her weight to get a better view.
As she moved, Erik did see more, but not the red flash Toinette had mentioned. Instead, he noticed the floor below the altar, and how the edges were wavering just around the lectern. A crack shivered silently into being. Another followed.
He threw himself backward with a shout of alarm. Toinette spun around at the noise. She had a knife in one hand, but that wouldn’t save her. The floor was crumbling rapidly by then, pieces falling away into a lightless void. Her face went white with fear, and she scrambled backward—too slowly.
The last of the floor around the altar disintegrated beneath Toinette’s feet just as Erik wrapped his arms around her. Briefly they both teetered on the edge, balance shifting between solid ground and nothing. Then Erik pulled with all his strength, and Toinette shifted her weight, and they fell, but backward, landing hard on stone whose solidity proved itself along every inch of Erik’s spine.
He didn’t care.
“Damned welldidn’twant us reading that book, then,” Toinette said, getting to her feet and straightening her clothing. “I don’t guess it can do that to the rest of the room, or it would have. But I’d as soon not linger.”
Erik rose as well. The place where the altar had stood was now a neat-edged hole, bottomless to all appearances. He looked away swiftly. “Back, then, and try the other door. What did you see?”
“A shape made of red light,” said Toinette. “I didn’t get a very good look at it. It vanished almost as soon as I saw it.”
“Perhaps a sign of the room changing,” Erik said, as they made their way up the aisle, past the polluted font. “I’d not have expected red, though. Nor the light from that direction.”
Toinette nodded. “Nor I. We’d best look if we see it again, though. Whatever it was, it may well have saved us.”
Thirty-Five
“Porca Madonna!”
Toinette breathed the blasphemy into the great vaulted hall that lay behind the left-hand door. It was far larger than the church, easily the size of a similar hall in any great castle. She wasn’t at all certain how it, the church, and the hallway fit together inside the temple building, but she’d stopped trying to make her ideas of size and place work. That wasn’t what had drawn the curse from her throat.
As in any hall, this one had long tables running down the center, with a dais at the head. Figures sat on the benches, and a fire danced in the hearth—but the flames were sickly green, and the figures were all of men long dead. Skeletal hands clasped stone cups. Wispy gray raiment flowed over shriveled shoulders. Their faces, however, were not like any man’s, living or dead: smooth black ovals obscured all their features.
