The work would not be as easy as the words promised. There would be sleepless nights aplenty. There would be days of labor and tedium. But it would be worth it, despite the costs and the consequences. He begrudged the efforts he had to go to sometimes, but that didn’t discount the satisfaction he received from the completion of such large tasks as these. That gratification was his and his alone.
Northgard could not,wouldnot, take that from him.
19
Roy and Percival made thrice as much progresscombining their knowledge as they had ever made alone. Over the next few weeks, they amassed their recent discoveries—the catacombs, the swords, thanatology, and the apparent significance of these elements to the Old Ones’ reason of invasion—and recorded these in their second progress report to the Governor, who returned with additional provisions at the beginning of their second month in the Orphic Basilica. He then declared that the next supply drop would be in three weeks.
Throughout all this, whenever Roy got stuck or lost or distracted, it reinvigorated him to know that someone else was there. All he had to do was reach out, and Percival would reach right back. But he could only sustain Roy’s sanity for so long.
And their new subject matter, the study of death, put a strong damper on Roy’s spirits. There were more books on thanatology than he knew what to do with. He initially focused on the core attitudes of the study, the ethical and political and clinical and whatnot. But most of the texts he and Percival found—typically by way of the odd wind—perverted these values, especially when it came to compassion.
Together, they pored over old volumes on nightmarish torture practices, complete with demonstrations drawn from history. They read dialogues between killers and inquisitors. One book, a diary written by an arsonist who’d butchered and incinerated his father and sister, Percival vigorously refused to look at, much less read. Roy took up the task instead, concerned by Percival’s reaction, yet once he discovered there was nothing of import in the journal anyway, he moved on.
As a consequence of the workload and the distressing contents of their research, Roy slept less and less. Seven hours a night dwindled to six, then four, then two if he was lucky. Initially, it occurred to him that he was suffering from insomnia, but he soon realized that was ridiculous. There was a simple cure for his lack of sleep: work less, sleep more. He couldn’t do that, though.Do it, then it’s done, Percival had said, and Roy took that to mean one thing:We work harder.
So they did precisely that. They worked themselves to the bone, until their eyes were gritty and they were out of breath from coughing at the dust that escaped the endlessly growing mountains of texts before them. But especially Roy. From the morning to the evening, he and Percival chipped away at thanatology, the odor within the Macchylian Mines, and the sword’s bizarre abilities. But from midnight to dawn, sometimes hours later, Roy retired to his bed and continued his research there. Eventually he realized he was wasting the five minutes this process took and kept working at the desk. Percival did not pry.
It was only as the days went by, though, that Roy understood just how bad his restlessness had gotten. He started to hallucinate Gabriel again, spying his brother lurching between the bookshelves, his knife held firmly in his bloodied hand, his smile cold and wide. Once Roy dropped the pile of books he’d been lugging around and sprinted to the next aisle, only to find Percival standing there. Roy had stammered an incoherent, illogical explanation and darted off, abandoning his dropped books.
The night after, Roy was cautiously perusing the bookshelves on the first floor, where the breeze had brought him, when a tall, dark figure materialized at the right end of the aisle.
“No,” Roy whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. He’d gotten a decent amount of sleep and had thought, all things considered, he was doing reasonably well. “Please, Gabriel, get out of my head. Get out, just for the next couple of months, and—” He opened his eyes, looked over to the right. But it wasn’t Gabriel.
It was a ghost. He had seen one before—and theorized the identity of the first creature he’d encountered, deeming it a shadow, a figment of his imagination, one of the hallucinations the Governor’s guards had seen during their own conducted investigations—but something else struck him.
Roy remembered the agonized, terrified pleas in the burial grounds of the Elder Scribes, the screams woven into the stone like mortar and seeping out of the walls like dust. Were those ghosts trapped in the crypt, imprisoned? And if so, did they begrudge the ghosts wandering about the Basilica, free from the cloud of gloom that had taken shape and grown over time beneath them?
Roy covered his hand with his mouth, ignoring the frantic beating of his heart, and observed the ghost. Hovering about six feet from the ground, it looked eerily like a three-dimensional silhouette, its eyes of scarlet light blazing out of its sockets. It extended its long, crooked arm, and Roy bounced back on the balls of his feet, preparing to run, but halted when it brought up its hand to its face, like a man demonstrating how to put on a mask.
Something uncanny happened then, something that Roy knew he would lack the ability to explain for some time: the ghost covered its shadowy face with its hand, and through the semitransparent palm, Roy could faintly spy a horribly disfigured face. It took him a moment to connect the dots, but when he got there, Roy reeled back, grasping at the bookshelf he had been inspecting before he could fall.
“That’s...” Roy murmured. He felt dizzy, bilious, and energized all at once. It seemed getting any sleep tonight would be out of the question. “That’syou, isn’t it?” he asked. “The shadow hides your face, yourtrueface.”
As if to confirm Roy’s hypothesis, the ghost pressed its dim, incorporeal hand closer to its partially obscured features, which were now clearer than ever before. He made out a jaw, cracked in half and gaping; a pair of bulging eyes, the left one swollen and smeared with blood. Its skull had been crushed and trodden, speckled with a crisscrossing web of gory foot- and handprints.
Roy inhaled, horrified. “That’s what you looked like when you died.”
The ghost swung its hand back to its side, its eyes brightening and flooding the aisle with a lurid scarlet glow. Shadow once more engulfed its face, frozen in death.
Roy winced. “My apologies, I wasn’t thinking straight; I... Well, to tell you the truth, I haven’t been thinking straight for a month or so.” He paused, struck by a sudden realization. He had been sleeping fine when he’d happened upon the first ghost, or fine enough, but that didn’t stop him from wondering. “This is real, yes?”
For a long while the ghost watched him with interrogatory concentration. A long, uneasy silence fell, stretching across the aisle and then the first floor beyond. The moaning wind, and the gangly branches scratching at the arched windows high above, receded and then faded to a dry whisper.
With startling abruptness, the ghost looked up, and Roy followed its gaze. He could’ve been sidetracked by those burning red eyes, but he hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary. Then an amorphous blotch of darkness scampered across the top of the bookshelf on his left, smoke arising from the tips of its wispy black claws. It reached the end of the shelf, joining the more humanoid-looking ghost, and perched on the corner, glowering down at Roy with its red eyes, a shade or two darker than its companion’s.
A wail sounded from behind Roy, followed by a low, inhuman sneer. He whirled, finding two slender ghosts hovering beside one another. They would have been twins had it not been for the left one’s head, which drooped over the stem of its broken neck. The other stared at Roy, its expression impossible to read with its mask of gloom, then floated closer to him. The ghost with the twisted neck dawdled behind, like an inattentive younger sibling, but it glided toward Roy, nevertheless.
“Please,” Roy sobbed. Tears were leaking out of his eyes and dribbling down his cheeks. “I don’t know what you want with me, or what I can do for you, but if you would justtellme, if you...” He trailed off, raising his hands to the sides of his head.
The ghosts gained ever nearer, surrounding him, hemming him in at every direction. He could take his chances and make a run for it, maybe through the gap between the shapeless entity and its companion, but these creatures were fast, unpredictable.
In the few seconds that these thoughts had run through his head, the ghosts had gotten within reaching distance of him and were now glaring, fixing him with their insidious, garish eyes. Roy was saturated with their scarlet glow, as though someone had overturned a pail of blood upon his head. He scrambled back, the heels of his boots screeching against the floorboards.
“Percival,” Roy whispered, his voice shaky, rough. He told himself it was the first name that came to mind because Percival was the only other person—The only other living person, he corrected himself—occupying the Basilica, but it didn’t change the fact that Roy needed,wanted, Percival here regardless. He repeated, shouting this time, “Percival! Percival, come to the first floor! The first floor!”
His screams dissolved into inarticulate garbling and crying, and he sank to the ground, his knees pulled up to his chest and his eyes swollen and flooded with tears. He closed them, and spectral impressions floated by in the darkness. Voices raved and screamed and howled, like the baying of insane beasts. He could feel himself, hismind, buckling under the pressure, tearing apart at the seams—
A hand came down hard on his shoulder.
