There was also the uneasy feeling that had snuck up on him ever since entering the catacombs of the Orphic Basilica—the feeling ofsameness. It was as though he was treading through a maze of cave walls reflected upon one another. There were no distinct markers of progression. Even the bones lying among the mist began to assume an uncanny resemblance to those he’d seen hours ago, but Roy wondered whether this was due more to the process of decomposition than to the hallucinatory effects that sustained darkness had on the human mind. Either way, he was too scared to voice his concerns.
Percival had grown quiet, too, but regardless of their recent argument, he looked introspective rather than mad. He was walking slowly, his head tilted back and his eyes alight with faint shimmers of candlelight. He looked to be observing the irregularly placed recesses embedded in the tunnel walls and the agape-mouthed skeletons of ancient explorers sleeping within them, but he kept gnawing at his bottom lip and tugging on the hem of his tunic.
Not for the first time, Roy wished he could better recognize emotions. If he could at least make out what was on Percival’s mind, then this whole damn mission might go ahead a lot more smoothly. He had no immediate compulsions to dredge up the entirety of Percival’s past, but it seemed more than unfair that, in spite of Percival’s obstinate insistence that Roy should open up and bare his heart, Percival could still intuit the smallest measure of Roy’s history while never divulging in kind. He didn’t know if it was selfish or impure to want the same, to see Percival to the extent that Percival saw Roy.
These thoughts did not so much as flutter through his head before a powerful, howling squall came racing toward him out of the darkness, trailing a whipping cloud of dust, grit, and the powder of trampled bones.
Roy yelped, his overcoat billowing about him in the breeze, his breath momentarily stolen from, and then rushed back into, his lungs. Percival uttered an indignant, stunned curse, but the wind was much too loud for Roy to hear what he said. Startled, Roy fumbled with the candle for a moment but lost his grip, and the dish upon which it sat plummeted to the ground and shattered on impact, plunging them into darkness.
Roy reached out for Percival, and when he caught the sleeve of his tunic, Percival didn’t push him away but instead pulled Roy closer, against his heaving chest. Roy rooted the soles of his boots to the ground, overwhelmed with an odd mixture of terror and gratitude. Then the wind started anew, shrieking shrilly, and he gritted his teeth against the blustering gale. Tears streamed from the corners of his squinted eyes, running down his cheeks like chilled water. A numbness crept over his skin, stealing the warmth from his blood.
When the squall finally disappeared, all at once as if vanquished by the incantations of some unseen wizard, Roy was still shivering, his skin speckled with gooseflesh. He let out a series of deep, ragged breaths, Percival doing the same as they gracelessly held on to one another.
Although he knew better, in the endless gulf of darkness, Roy felt terribly alone. He felt, too, that he had no accurate sense of reality, like everything he had been told about the world had been as real as his hallucinations of his dead brother. Timeless horrors of unknown origins could be crouched here, watching Roy, with their thousands of lunatic blood-filled eyes, without his knowing. And though Roy felt so near to the truth, the reality of Northgard’s looming downfall, he also felt like a fool, like he’d learned nothing throughout his month of huddling over dusty books.
You’re a liar. You’re a fucking liar.
He wasn’t only a liar; he was terrified beyond his wits. Now that he stood here, his arms covered with prickles and his legs watery and wobbling, he realized that the Governor had never known the complete extent of what he’d assigned them, that it had been up to Roy and Percival, two scholars towed out of their homes by the scruffs of their necks, to unearth what had been lying beneath them all along.
Northgard was sitting atop a necropolis.
A city of corpses resting forgotten underneath a city of impending death, he thought, but he knew the truth ran far deeper than that. He’d assumed earlier that the chamber somewhere ahead of them contained the tombs of the Elder Scribes, as there had to be a reason why that block of wood had been installed and a mausoleum seemed a good one, but exactly how the Old Ones were connected to the Elder Scribes,howthey’d been cast out of Northgard by the Elder Scribes, far surpassed Roy’s knowledge.
“Percival, I believe that wind might be the least of our worries,” he whispered.
“Don’t move too far from me,” Percival demanded, though his voice was as soft and low as Roy’s. “I’m not going to chase after you—” He stilled, his eyes wide. “What is that?”
Roy murmured, “Don’t do that.”
“No, I’m quite serious,” Percival said. “Look ahead.Look.”
Gingerly, Roy stared where Percival had indicated. Nothing materialized initially, but it was as with any dark space: The longer you looked, the more you saw. His surroundings grew clearer, his vision sharpened, and as he squinted, a ghostly gray light appeared in the distance, swaying and rippling like murky water. He appraised the illumination, vaguely unsettled by its hypnotic quality, but it began to soothe him and, after a while, drew him forward.
Without thinking, Roy complied. He drifted toward the dim gray light, by which he made out Percival’s features. He had a hand cupped over his brow, which was gleaming with sweat, and his mouth was twisted into a sour, mistrustful grimace. He looked askance at Roy, a small divot between his brows, but kept up his pace without complaining. A part of Roy wished that he would have, but a bigger part, the part that was under the thrall of the mystical light, was unfazed.
After about five minutes, they came to the source of the light. Roy gasped. The ceiling of the narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel widened into a gargantuan domed chamber, which appeared about fifty feet wide and made of sandstone. The walls were bare of decorations, tapestries, or murals—startlingly naked compared to the gaudy embellishments, portraits, and artworks hung on the library’s upper levels. The air was thick with dust and damp, along with the familiar scent of crumbled bone. A quick look around revealed no adjoining chambers except the tunnel through which they had arrived.
Carved into the walls were rows after rows of stone alcoves, each twice the size of a skeleton and inside of which were chipped mahogany coffins coated with grime. The ground was scattered with clumps of earth and furred moss, which sprouted from the untouched soil. No bones rested upon the cobblestones underfoot, yet a horrid stench swirled up from the floor nonetheless, something noxious like fungi or rotting cabbage.
A coffin hovered in the heart of the chamber, hewn from misshapen bits of crumbled cobblestone and hardpan, surrounded by six others of identical material. Gray light escaped from underneath the middle coffin, coiled out of the earth and stone like blood from a wound, and then passed through crevices in the ground, pulsing from the outer coffins to the inner, like a call and a responding cry.
Gold, silver, and bronze glinted in Roy’s periphery. Ancient relics lined the stone slabs upon the walls: amulets, necklaces, wineglasses, and vases. A small gilded chalice was filled to the brim with ash and beads of crystal. A reliquary housed a grinning skull, its huge, jagged teeth looking like shattered bones in the cold light.
On the far left wall, bordered by a column of coffins, was a glass bookshelf containing only four volumes. Engraved on all their covers were weird, arcane symbols. Hieroglyphics? Cryptic motifs? Runes? Roy could not say. Curious, he traipsed forward, close enough to make out a name inscribed in miniature stenciled letters underneath each of the four different symbols:Jocelyn Kallard, Neil Eldreave, Tarnan Eldreave,andAtticus Walestone.
Roy walked around and touched one of the coffins in the wall, disquieted. “Who are all these other people? The seven sarcophagi in the middle here must have been leaders of the library—certainly all scholars of the highest repute, anyway. But the rest? Other scholars? Librarians? Students? And if so, who buried them here? Whobuiltall this? It looks like these coffins were made from the catacombs themselves.”
“What does any of that matter now?” Percival asked. “The Elder Scribes left us here to fend for ourselves. Either they couldn’t find an answer, or theydid, but were too cowardly to use it. And now here we are, living with as much purpose as the dead around us.” Roy was startled at how matter-of-fact he sounded.
“Men, women, and children are slaughtered every day by the hundreds and, if the Old Ones go on as they have been, by the thousands,” Roy said with finality. “There is no god, no deity who metes out death; there is only circumstance and consequence. The Elder Scribes might be our idols, but they weren’t immortal. This chamber is proof of that.”
“And so, what?” Percival asked. “We just pick up where they left off, as if it’s just a matter ofreading books?” He swirled his finger in a circle through the ash that had settled on one of the coffins. “Maybe they weren’t truly divine, but the Scribes were considered gods by those who paid tribute to their guidance. They weren’t immortal, no, but they were blessed by other means. They built the Basilica—they builtthis—and if that isn’t testament of their power, what is? The problem, however, is that this room is also testament to their failure.”
“Then they did not leave us, Percival,” Roy said, “and most importantly, they did not leave nothing behind. We are standing in the last stronghold of knowledge.”
Percival scowled. “Or we’re just in the place where that knowledge died.”
“I have to believe that isn’t true.”
