He was afraid to raise his voice higher than a whisper.
No response.
He lay back down on the bed, thinking hard. The objects were still together, and Ceri had said that was a problem. But they were also active, at least some of them, and Leo worried that if he did what he wanted to—which was flush as many as he could down the toilet and chuck the rest out the window—that he would need them again and wouldn’t be able to find them.
They seemed to be somewhat safe in this room, at least. Maybe if he left them here, he’d be able to retrieve the journal without attracting the notice of whatever was out there.
Could that really be a tarasque? The monster in the story book had been roughly the size of a house. It had destroyed entire villages and was practically unstoppable because of its armor.
But the tarasque Leo had seen had fit in the hallway and had failed to even knock down a door.
Maybe it was a baby.
Or maybe it was Leo’s worst nightmare come to life. There were few in Loegria who had ever even heard of tarasques, as he'd discovered while playing a drinking game with some of the other doctoral candidates last year. This place seemed to have been made for him in some way. Could it be that the tarasque was made for him too?
For what purpose?
Leo had read about curses that bent reality. He felt it was fair to say he was experiencing that. But while the rules may have changed, he believed there still must have been rules.
The tarasque of legend had been tamed by a woman who doused it in water blessed by the Gods. She’d then been able to put a collar on it, and she kept it as a pet.
Maybe this tarasque could be tamed the same way.
He had no blessed water, but maybe the blessing had been less important. He retrieved the horn from the bag (its reading was marginally higher than earlier, or maybe he was misremembering) and filled it at the sink.
As he left the bathroom, he thought he saw Ceri again, but maybe it was only what he wanted to see.
He needed the journal. It was his only hope of getting back to her.
He listened at the door. There was nothing nearby.
He opened it and crept into the hallway.
The sun was going down by the time he reached the courtyard. It seemed time, however different it was in this place, wasn’t frozen.
No tarasque in the courtyard. He stuck close to the wall on the side that was still intact anyway.
He could enter the library here rather than cutting across the courtyard to the dining hall door. The library hadn’t fought him before, and the stacks offered more protection than the open courtyard did.
He opened the library door.
No tarasque. No whispers.
No, there were whispers. But they were different.
It was a language Leo didn’t recognize. There were several voices of varying age and gender. They seemed—kind? Leo wasn’t sure. It could be some kind of trap. Maybe the whispering woman had realized he was too frightened of her to go along with what she wanted and had changed tactics.
Leo walked away from the whispers. They grew more urgent for a moment, but then subsided.
He made it into the hallway outside of the library with the statue of the phoenix, still unbroken.
It wasn’t far now. Just one more corridor and then—
There it was. The tarasque.
Leo ducked behind the statue. Had it seen him?
The only sound was the pounding of Leo’s heart. Could he manage to make himself take a look?
