An hour later, once he’d pulled himself out of bed and attempted to work out how to wiggle himself out of a conversation with Percival about the drinking game if it was brought into discussion—only to come up empty—Roy was walking into the Observatory and rubbing the sleep from his eyes when he skidded to a halt and gasped.
Gone was the decrepit, ghostly room where Roy loved to study; the Observatory was now spotless and beautifully organized. At the back of the room was an opened door, which Roy hadn’t seen through the clutter before, that gave on to either another chamber or a hallway. Against the wall beside him was the piano where he had broken down and sobbed, now polished to a fine gleam and topped with gargoyle-shaped bookends. Along the window opposite the piano was the desk Roy typically used. It had been cleared entirely free of dust.
“The library did this?” Roy exclaimed, amazed. “By the Scribes, Percival, look howneateverything is.” He pointed at the entryway at the back of the room. “I didn’t even know that existed.”
Percival swallowed and rubbed the back of his neck, which had turned a feverish shade of red. “This was...” He cleared his throat, despite that he sounded perfectly articulate, albeit a little nervous. “This was all me, actually. I’ve noticed how uncomfortable you get whenever your study space is cluttered. I know sometimes you design it that way, but I’ve still seen you fidgeting and moving papers around, trying to get things in order, so I put some drawers from my closet on the windowsill there. You can label them if you like; I would’ve done it, but it was nearing dawn and I couldn’t find anything, and besides, I thought that you’d like to label them yourself—”
Suddenly, Roy cared not at all that the night before had ended the way it had; with Roy closing his eyes, waiting and wanting, and Percival already gone. He kissed Percival’s cheek. “It’s perfect.”
Percival shrugged. “It just needed some flair.” But Roy spotted the rosy blush spreading across his damp cheek.
Once they settled in at the desk together, reluctantly delving into research on the black-scabbarded swords, Roy and Percival retired from broader war books, fictional and non-, to books on the exact weapons wielded in skirmishes, duels, wars, and other forms of combat. There were axes, clubs, hatchets, bows and arrows, falchions, and war hammers. No muskets, though, since these had been invented in the new world and the Orphic Basilica housed texts specifically written during the old world.
And so many swords. Roy had not realized just how many types existed. He found longswords, scimitars, claymores, fabers, and cutlasses. Some belonged to warrior-kings and knights-errant, others to impoverished servants whose royal-blooded relatives were unbeknownst to them. There were depictions of swords being used on the battlefield, too, and of legendary swords hung on the glimmering walls of throne halls.
None of them, however, held even a vague resemblance to the swords they’d discovered in the catacombs.
Every so often, while he was becoming increasingly agitated looking through historical accounts that yielded no answers, he would glance at the black-scabbarded sword propped up against the side of Percival’s desk, and then the narrower sword resting against his own desk, and shiver.
The third time this happened, as it had several times the night before, it crept up on him what was missing from all these books he was rapidly consuming, what he had been hunting for: the wickedness of the sword, not of its bearer. He had come across no shortage of stories about soldiers who had gone mad, who had luxuriated in the power that stole into their heads whenever they curled their fingers around the hilts of their swords. But there seemed to be no accounts on innately wickedweapons.
Roy knew it was out of the ordinary, but he couldn’t stop toying with the theory that had begun brewing in his mind. He was rigidly opposed to the notion of superstition and the like, but was it rational to deny what was right before your eyes? How long could he blame every unexplainable phenomenon he encountered on its impossibility?
One avenue he and Percival had begun pursuing was the unsettling power that they suspected was contained within the swords’ sheaths. Had the Elder Scribes been aware of it? Whatwasit? How had they used it to effectively banish the Old Ones from Northgard?
On the desk in front of Roy, who had been working opposite Percival for the past few days, were five piles of novels, essays, articles, critical and expository analyses, literature reviews, and stray pieces of paper filled with nonsensical jargon. He went through each and divided some in two—on the left, those written in the common tongue; on the right, the remaining texts, twice as high as the other.
Roy normally liked to tackle the challenging aspects of his research first, but he didn’t want to start the day struggling, so he started on the left pile. In it, he found many texts that had seemingly important but ultimately useless connections to what he had gathered over the past month or so. He discovered a history book about the Burnt-Eyed Centurion, a knight whose sword was reportedly cursed... but this curse was unfortunately only in name. He found a few poems exploring death, soul-seeking, and the afterlife. Roy read through a few and thought that he, a mediocre poet, could have written better with his hands bound behind his back.
Then Roy discovered a thick book with a dark green cover: Leopileus’sThe Blades of Tangror, a volume on weapons of historically lauded craftsmanship. Throughout the book were paintings of a variety of weapons, but mostly swords. These were accompanied by a succinct description of their history, previous owners, and material. Their names were written at the bottom in cursive lettering:Malevoli,Kharuan,Cephius, Valusvar, Parlikeves... There were more names but considering only Valusvar resembled the sword from the crypt—which would have been a match, had the metal been the same color—Roy wasn’t concerned with them.
As soon as the thought formed, though, a cool, serene wind played with his curls and snuck behind his ear. Whispers gathered within his mind, like a softened echo of the storm currently slamming against the window behind him.
Percival glanced around the room, looking disconcerted, then continued researching.
Galvanized by the Basilica’s encouragement, Roy moved the texts he could understand closest to him, and the rest behind them. This way, he could refer to any that seemed important later, includingThe Blades of Tangror, which the library seemed to insist was significant.
He went back to the pile of legible writings. He saw a longwinded report, written by one M. R. Svadir, about an enigmatic, sickening odor drifting out the maw of the Macchylian Mines.An odor of grime and the dead, Svadir claimed, but after a monthslong excavation, no discoveries were made as to what had been interred within.
Roy was disappointed by this, but at least he had a similarity to draw upon. When he’d caught that scent of “grime and the dead” in the catacombs, he had been plagued by visions, either of the past or of his own vision but magnified.It feels more like a closer view of our surroundings, as Percival had put it.
Roy then made a third stack of texts, which held possible connections to the Old Ones, and slid it next to the other two he had made.
The fourth pile held nothing but some old books on rare archaeological finds, none of which hinted at the Old Ones, so he moved onto the fifth and last pile. He started to pull down the book on top, then paused as he read its title: Mortys’sAn Account of Thanatology, the Study of Death. He glanced at the spines of the manuscripts underneath it, and terror gripped his gut and twisted hard, nearly making him vomit.
There was a detailed diagram and written analysis of a child’s skull, which had been trampled in an undisclosed incident. Beneath this was a research paper, written by a novelist who had performed disturbing biological experiments on his husband to “accurately convey an evocation of fright, heartache, and turmoil.” The next was a book teeming with perverse confessions, including a young man who’d admitted to a yearslong passion for consuming the blood and ashes of his relatives, certain it would grant him immortality. He died at sixteen.
On and on the texts went, each as macabre as the last. Roy skimmed through books on occultism, necromancy, and psychological experimentation. Interspersed among them were haunting artworks of tragedy, some moments before the event but most at the time of. A black-hooded man grinning lecherously, bearing a scythe above a teary-eyed boy. A faceless woman strapped to a chair, glittering blades dangling overhead like a silver chandelier. Two women embracing, the cut wrists of their interlocked hands weeping blood.
Roy paused at the final item in the pile, breathless with terror. It was a colored, hyper-realistic painting of a valley covered with human entrails.The Massacre of Kaolon, read the messily scrawled title at the bottom. Beneath it, someone had left an annotation.As far as I can make out, this is an artist’s interpretation, described by a survivor of the Old Ones. This is the most we’ve seen of their thanatological abilities on full display.
Roy stared, finally catching his breath. He recalled Charles Patiny’s untitled poem, whose allusion to the catacombs—and the whereabouts of its entryway—had directed him and Percival underground. But the second stanza seemed to focus on the subject of the books contained in the catacombs, and though Roy hadn’t found anything pertinent to the Old Ones there, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Patiny had been alluding to the soldiers.
Roy asked, “Percival, do you have that poem with you? The one by Patiny?”
Percival, who appeared disgruntled by the interruption, scanned the disarray he’d made on his side of the table and then procured a scrap of paper from underneath a literary analysis he’d been skimming.
Roy read the poem to himself, then stilled at the first two lines of the second stanza:“The red-eyed devils!” the pages call,/“the bringers and keepers of death!”
