“The red-eyed devils!” the pages call,
“the bringers and keepers of death!”
whose eyes of burning light do glow
upon their prey’s final breath
’Neath the wise eyes of the Oracle,
there yawns a dark and winding cave;
the lips know only dust and earth
but its limit holds relics saved
Roy raised his wide-eyed gaze to Percival. “A tunnel network?”
“It seems like it,” Percival said, then snatched the scrap of paper off Roy and pointed at the first line of the third stanza. “And the Oracle. Darling, that was one of Patiny’s names for Walestone. He thanked him in the acknowledgments ofHearts Unsung, his last novel. ‘My greatest blessings to the Oracle, he whose insight—’ ”
“‘—is as effulgent as his heart,’” Roy finished. He’d always wondered what that moniker had meant. “By theScribes, Percival, there must be something underneath us. Under the library itself.” He blinked. “The bust of Walestone on the first floor. I saw it when I was first brought here. That has to be it. Itmustbe, Percival. Don’t you think?”
“’Neath the wise eyes of the Oracle...’” Percival grinned. “Oh, I don’t just think it. I wouldbeton it, Dawnseve.”
After exchanging an incredulous look, they sprinted down to the first floor.
* * *
Roy bounded off the last step of the staircase that led to the first floor, then raced over to the elaborately sculpted bust of Atticus Walestone.
“Give me a hand, would you?” asked Percival, who had his sleeves rolled up and his hands braced on one side of the plinth on which the bust was resting. “I have a feeling this won’t be accomplishable with only one of us.”
Roy looked around him, half-afraid that Walestone’s ghost might come soaring out of some shadowy study hall and give them a tongue-lashing for plotting to destroy the statue of his likeness. “We don’t have to break it, do we?”
“This thing is damn heavy, darling,” Percival said, then grunted as he grabbed hold of the crown of Walestone’s head and shook it a little. “And I’m pretty sure the bust is welded to the plinth. So, yes, we do have to break it.”
Roy stood there hesitating for a long moment, then muttered, “I doubt this is how the Scribes opened it in their time,” and finally assisted Percival. They each took hold of either side of the plinth, which was flatter and therefore less cumbersome to grip than the bust, and then heaved it to the side. Roy let out a whooshing breath at the staggering weight of the plinth, and Percival’s face, which had turned a dark shade of red, was slathered in a gleaming veil of sweat. Then, once they’d pushed the plinth off the ground to such an angle that it was slanted more backward than standing upright, the two of them let go on Percival’s murmured count of three.
The bust crashed to the floor with a disconcertingly loud crunch. It and the plinth might have been fused together, or had maybe been seamlessly crafted from the same marble block, but Roy and Percival had toppled it with enough force to send a splinter, loosely resemblant of a lightning bolt, zigzagging down the middle of Walestone’s scalp. He looked like a felled warrior, but that thought only made Roy think of the inscription he’d read under the painting, which in turn brought back the unsettling image he’d had of the Elder Scribes all bearing swords. He shook off these memories and bid himself to focus.
Though nothing moved, Roy could feel the world slowing in the air around them, a grinding, then a halting, of clockwork. A long pause, which he waited through with bated breath. And then the cogs began turning anew.
He knelt before Percival, who was crouched in front of the floorboard where the sculpture had once stood. Between them was a small square wooden platform, slightly raised above the surrounding redwood. It was the size of a fist, its edges flat and smooth, and was encompassed by a gap as thin as paper.
Percival licked his lips, sweat dripping down his face. “This is it, Dawnseve,” he whispered. “This is it.” He looked directly at Roy, then, and smiled.
Roy, despite himself, smiled back.
Before Percival could move, Roy pulled his gaze from those captivating hazel eyes, reached over, and pressed his palm into the block, the tips of Percival’s fingers grazing his shoulder. Roy recoiled with a small cry, acutely aware of the scars that had been so near to Percival’s touch, but Percival did no more than frown at Roy’s reaction before the piece of wood clicked into place. A hidden compartment in the block sprang open, covering the gap that surrounded it. The block now created the barest dip in the floorboards.
A sound rumbled from beneath their feet, rising higher and higher, and then exploded outward in a cacophony of discordant noises. Roy was unprepared for the assault. He could not pick apart the sounds at first, but as he gritted his teeth against the racket, they clarified: the grinding of stone against stone; the grating sound of scratched sandpaper, its volume increased tenfold; and a clamor of tortured, grief-stricken screams. The noise didn’t seem to affect the library; no books toppled from their shelves, none of the remaining busts trembled on their plinths, and none of the curtains swung.
Still, Percival grabbed Roy’s wrist. “Get back.Move.” He pulled back Roy, who let out a muttered “Fuck” when the ground abruptly opened out beneath them.
The floorboards rippled apart, revealing a descending passage of stairs. Wide slabs of stone, uneroded by time and unmarked by footsteps, led down into an untold length of pitch-blackness. A terrible stench wafted up from the void, borne aloft on a dry breeze: graveyard dirt and dried wallpaper. Roy closed his eyes, and somehow, in the darkness behind his lids, he glimpsed a history cloaked in shadow: the skeletal remains of scholars who had suffered far beneath his feet; their eyes bulging out of sockets, liquefying and running down their cheeks, aghast—in the last moment of their lives—by the deplorable things they had seen down in the dark.
Roy was struck with terror, now stronger than ever. He tried to swallow, but his tongue felt dry and compact, like a block of hardened sand. He wanted more than anything to give in, to run from the pursuit of knowledge, the one prospect that had provided him clarity throughout a lifetime of questioning his identity and determining his future, but...
But something had called to him for all those years as it was calling now, echoing from the darkness.
