Percival braced his hands on the lid of the coffin, apparently oblivious to Roy’s self-haranguing, and then unceremoniously thrust aside the large slab of stone. It smashed into the cobbles on the other side of the coffin and shattered. Thick chunks of crumbled stone jutted skyward like the cracked spine of a titan. Another cacophonous thud went through the ground and set it trembling.
Once the air stilled, Roy became conscious of the heady, pernicious stench rising out of the opened coffin. Attempting and failing not to gag, he pushed up onto his toes, the palm of his hand clamped against his mouth, and peered inside.
There was indeed a skeleton inside the sarcophagus. Its jaws were ripped wide open, as if its last scream had torn it in two. Its fingers were crossed over its chest. The cracked bones of the rest of its body had long decomposed after thousands of years and fully decayed. Only the brittle frame had been left behind, like that of a burnt house.
Roy was more interested, however, in what lay next to the Elder Scribe.
By its right hip was a slightly curved sword sheathed in a dark scabbard, the cross hilt resemblant of the upper half of a skeleton: the pommel was the head, the cross the chest and arms. Even sheathed, the sword radiated an aura of vicious, savage power. In his mind, Roy imagined releasing the sword from its scabbard and a thousand untold stories of unbridled carnage pouring out.
By its left hip was another sword, and though the scabbard had seemingly been forged from the same dark metal, it was much narrower than the first sword. Yet it still discharged a sense of barely bridled malice, contained within the scabbard.
“By the love and mercy of the Elder Scribes,” Percival exclaimed, his voice thick with betrayal and terror, “what thefuckare swords doing in a philosopher’s coffin?” He lurched sideways and nearly staggered to the ground, but Roy caught Percival by his armpit, hauling him up as they both gawked at the skeleton.
Roy could not speak; shock had rendered him mute and jammed his tongue against the bottom of his mouth. He managed to keep his hold on Percival, who had buried his head in Roy’s shoulder and was now weeping quietly, but only through the sheer force of willpower and desperation.
“I—” Percival choked out. “I can’t—”
“Percival, would you stop it for a moment?” Roy demanded, shocked by the stern authority in his voice. Percival took a second to recompose himself, then looked at Roy, who went on, “This is troubling to see, I will not lie about that, but it’s nothing we didn’t suspect before. It’s completely contradictory to the notion of pacifism we once believed the Scribes to have upheld, and to Lortan’sNeither Sword Nor Shield,but don’t you remember the painting we saw? The Old Ones—”
At some point while Roy had been speaking, something close to acceptance dawned upon Percival’s face. “The Elder Scribes cast them out of Northgard.” He appeared mystified; his eyes wide as he scrutinized the entombed weapons.
Roy nodded vigorously, then gestured to the swords. “Withthese.”
A noise coalesced in the air around them then, borne aloft by the wind.
“The whispers, darling,” Percival said. “They’re trying to communicate with us. I canhearthem; they’re calling out. It’s so beautiful.” His eyes were filled with tears, though Roy doubted this was purely out of his awe at the whispers, because Percival’s gaze had shifted back to the black-scabbarded swords.
But to Roy’s ears, the whispers were far from beautiful. He detected, though he could not completely pick apart, the shapes of voices, like tremors passing through the air. Emotions that were not all his own tore through him: misery and despair, heartache and anger. But underlying them all was the deepest, most profound anguish he’d ever known. He could not tell who these phantoms had once been, only the unimaginable torture to which they had been subjected.
A refrain of screams exploded inside his skull.See me! Heed me! Witness what they did to us, what they took from us!An iron clamp took hold of Roy, its grasp tightening.See what they made of your kind! Oh please, I say! I plead to the Above! Heed me! They butchered us and killed our young—
The voices vanished as quickly as they’d appeared, concealed behind the barrier he and Percival had sensed when they’d first entered the Basilica.
Roy didn’t know if it was his proximity to the sarcophagi of the Elder Scribes, or some other anomaly, but he couldfeelthe dissolution of those intellectuals, the knowledge that Northgard had cut off at the legs and replaced with the disease that was war. It had infected the Governor first, then the Radiant Droves, and—
And then Matron Dimestra, Roy thought.This city and this war changed her.
While Matron Dimestra had always prioritized her squadrons before her children, she had once demonstrated moments of kindness. She would offer to wash Roy’s hair, even when Roy decided to grow it out to seek some independence, and she would request that their chefs make him his favorite meals. But any reminders of his literary interests had slowly stolen the love from her heart.
Tears rolling down his cheeks, Roy murmured, “All those people. They’re restrained by something, imprisoned.”
“The swords.”
Roy wiped away his tears with the back of his hand, then asked, “The swords? What about them?”
Percival swallowed. “Where else could those whispers be coming from? They were so soft before, soquiet,but now... Now I can hear it all.” His expression turned glum but still determined. “We need to study these weapons, darling. We’ll start first thing tomorrow. It’s obvious that something is missing here.”
Roy agreed. Besides, he needed to work, to dive back into the books or otherwise dosomethingto put to use what he had seen and learned.
Nodding decisively, Percival reached for the sword with the skeleton-shaped hilt, and once he’d hefted it out of the sarcophagus, Roy retrieved its narrower companion. As he did, Percival tugged on the hilt of his sword, trying to get the blade out of its scabbard.
Panicked, Roy gripped Percival’s forearm with his spare hand and drew it away. “Percival, stop. I don’t want to do it here. These people have gone through enough. They shouldn’t bear witness to this, too.”
Percival looked at Roy’s hand, which was still closed around his arm, then brushed it off. “Soon they will know peace.” He hung his sword in a loop in his belt. When he was facing Roy again, Percival rested his hands on either side of Roy’s face, pressed their foreheads together, and whispered, “And we will know war.”
17
Later that night—hours after a treacherouswalk up the staircase in the catacombs, which Roy and Percival had somehow managed in complete darkness on account of Roy dropping the candle—Roy decided to finish up on a bit of light reading alone, wanting to alleviate some of the anxiety that had been hounding him since he’d departed the catacombs. Percival, upon their return upstairs, had announced he was going for a nightcap, the weight of the experience more than the weight of the swords on his mind.
