For a long time, there was silence. Then, sounding frustrated when he replied, Percival said, “Then we better find some damn answers.”
They paced around the circumference of the silver-lit crypt, searching attentively for anything that immediately jumped out at them. A correlation, whether express or extraneous, to what they had happened upon in their studies thus far: a line of archaic scripture; a passage from a book either or both of them had researched; a portrait of a historical figure, perhaps a knight-errant, or even an Elder Scribe, riding back home on horseback from some grisly skirmish against a division of the Old Ones. Nothing could be ruled out. Nothing was beyond the realm of possibility or practicality.
There were about a hundred coffins in the burial chamber, including those of the Elder Scribes. Roy supposed the wooden caskets, those on the wall, contained the remains of the members of the Protectorate, the private association that had answered exclusively to the Elder Scribes’ demands. Chief among these had been administrative tasks—relocating contraband and gathering scholars’ reports and theses into anthologies. They didn’t write the books; they tended to them. In the latter days of the old world, they had been considered the last voice of hope, the last defense against the anti-Scribe movement, but they had been purged and afterward forgotten alongside their proprietors. Beyond this, Roy hadn’t gleaned much from the books in Dawnseve Manor.
“The Basilica brought us here. We know that,” Percival said, his voice quickening. “And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it brought us to the Scribes’ burial vault. It knows we’re here. The library, I mean to say. That must be why we feel so connected to it, and maybe when we came here, it awakened.”
“That’s not our primary concern right now,” Roy said. He nodded to the coffins, and to the ethereal light throbbing from stone to stone like a pulse. “Thisis.”
He surveyed the seven sarcophagi, an air of foreboding suspended about him. Pinpricks of light raced among the crevices in the cobbles, like stars arcing through the night. With each pulsation, the light converged at the middle sarcophagus, which hovered five feet from the ground.
Roy ran his tongue along his lips, which had gone dry from fear and uncertainty. “This doesn’t look like a summit, Percival.” A breeze, much softer this time, eased out of the crypt’s entrance and ruffled through the snarled curls of Roy’s hair. He tensed, his nerves strung tight. “It looks like a trial, like the Elder Scribes, interred at the bottom here, are the defendants.”
Percival shivered, his apprehensive gaze flicking from one sarcophagus to another. “The one hovering in the middle there... Itmustbe connected to something.”
But that contradicted the surreal atmosphere of the high-ceilinged space, the sense of unseen terrors moving around in the dark beyond. Regardless, Roy doubted a rope or string could suspend the stone coffin at the height at which it was positioned. Beneath the middle sarcophagi was a round pool of the silver light, its depth indiscernible.
Roy started forward to inspect closer but was drawn to a halt by the crack in Percival’s voice as he commanded, “Stop.”
“My humble apologies; I forgot your position as the keeper of the crypt.”
Percival narrowed his brows. “Be grateful it isn’t your skeleton in one of these coffins.”
“Because you’re so confident you can arrange that?”
Percival gestured to the coffins. “Maybe walking near those will kill you first.”
“You said you wanted answers.” Though Roy was some distance away from him, he still heard Percival’s sigh of resignation. “We’ve had no luck for almost a month, Percival. I don’t know if the Basilica showed us the way here, butsomethingdid.” He lowered his voice. “The Protectorate is gone. The Scribes are gone. But we aren’t.”
Remnants of hesitation scudded across Percival’s face, but he smoothed out his features, pressed his lips into a rigid line, and then blew out a short breath. “I’ll do it.”
Roy didn’t think it mattered either way, but still he asked, “Why?”
Percival shrugged, his expression of uncertainty becoming one of fathomless sorrow, a soldier who’d fought one too many battles. “Everybody wants something to be remembered by.”
With that, he burst forward in a flurry of movement, his boots crunching through gravel and stone. The closer he drew to the central sarcophagus, the faster the light traveled, until it seemed that the crypt was ablaze with starlight. Silver and shadow flickered upon the walls, incandescent and divine. Despite the dust layered upon the relics throughout the burial vault, they were still gleaming as fiercely as if they had been set afire.
As Percival entered the inner ring of the six sarcophagi, he slowed his pace, cautious. Though his gaze was locked onto the central coffin, he wove around the luminous cracks in the stone floor with perfect facility. He looked like a wingless fallen angel, his blond hair uncombed and his shoulders heavy with despair.
Above the merciless beating of Roy’s heart, and the roaring of the blood in his ears, there came a distant melody. It grew louder and louder by the second, from a strident whining to an orchestral chorus of whispers. He clamped the heels of his hands against the sides of his head, jamming his ears shut, but the noise persisted, building into a shriek that swooped and wheeled around the inside of his skull like screeching bats.
Percival gave him a shadow of a smile, there and then gone. Then he curled the fingers of his left hand around the top of the coffin, his thumb pressed against its lid. It did not budge. It was nailed firmly shut. He drew back and clenched his jaw, as though about to give it another go, but stiffened when a deluge of light blasted out from the small pool under the coffin.
Roy watched with increasing fascination, his tongue pinned between his teeth. His heart was racing with anticipation. The light rose and rose, halted just before it could overflow and spill across the cobbles, then swept back toward the middle coffin.
A faint rumble went through the earth, like a faraway stampede of beasts trundling by, which was then followed by utter silence. Wisps of mist united at the light-pool, twisted and whirled into a wind-whipped frenzy. The fog rose higher into a cylindrical pillar that speared through the foundation of the sarcophagus. Trickles of liquefied light spiraled up into the coffin and disappeared. Inky darkness swamped the crypt for only a moment before silver light seeped out from the edges of the sarcophagus and cast a celestial glow.
Roy yelped and staggered to the side, his balance unsteadied by the pressure mounting swiftly in the air. He felt trapped, like the walls were closing in on him, yet nothing beyond the light and the mist was moving. Not even Percival, whose hand had gone still on the side of the sarcophagus and whose mouth was agape with astonishment.
Operating on sheer impulse, Roy joined Percival in the central ring of the crypt, and once he came to Percival’s side, he could see the muscles in Percival’s back bunching and shifting, as if he was carrying some tremendous weight. He uttered a low, nearly breathless grunt and, with a fierce tug that sent a bolt of heat through Roy’s stomach, relieved the sarcophagus of its lid. Although he didn’t move it aside.
Instead, Percival looked to Roy and muttered, “The light. It looks like it... I think it loosened the nails hammered into the coffin. The Basilica wants us to do this, Roy. It’s been showing us the way the entire time.”
Roy shook his head, sinking his teeth into his lower lip. “Why didn’t it show us a month ago? Why were we shown this crypt only now?”
Percival froze. The idea, Roy realized, had not occurred to him. “I believe there’s only one way to find out.”
Yes, Roy believed so, too, but he was so scared—so horribly frightened—of what might be lying in the coffin, the tomb of one of his childhood heroes. However, the toughest part was that he could not even bring himself to imagine the worst scenario. He was afraid to. Now that he found himself at the edge of what he predicted to be their greatest discovery yet, he was struck by the totality of his duplicity. He had never felt so much like a hypocrite, a fraud.
