A bolt of agony shot through his scalp and spread across his skull. His head felt like it was catching flame. He screamed, tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t think clearly through the pain, couldn’t wrap his mind around what had occurred, what the Governor had said, what he meant—
Above him, the guard yanking at his hair shouted and went flying off Roy, skidding across the carpet.
Roy scrambled to his feet; his hair tangled across his tear-streaked face. He brushed it back with a quivering hand, clearing his vision, then glanced to his right, where the guard had disappeared. He was squirming on the ground, digging the heels of his boots into the carpet and leaving smears of muddy snow.
A horde of ghosts, maybe four or five, was upon him. They pulled at his arms, his legs, his skull. They shrieked in his face, babbled in his ears. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head. He raked his fingernails down his cheeks, drawing shallow trenches that slowly filled with blood.
The second guard marched forward, then reached in through the cloud of ghosts surrounding his companion and pulled him out by the collar of his coat. The incapacitated guard staggered to his feet, and after a moment, the ghosts slinked farther back into the gloomy alcoves and reading rooms on the first floor.
Percival looked frantically from the dazed guard to Roy, then finally landed his gaze on the Governor, his arms hanging motionless by his sides.
The Drove returned to his station, mumbling incoherently underneath his breath and feverishly shaking his head.
“Please,” Roy whispered, his skull throbbing. “Just grant my sister mercy.”
“I’m afraid I cannot do that, Roy,” the Governor said. Somewhere past the ringing in his ears, Roy heard the Governor say: “You both have threeweeksto stop the Old Ones and to tear thisblasphemousbuilding down. I trust you know the consequences you will be subjected to, should you not meet this new deadline. But at least youhavethose three weeks. As your sister and Irene can attest, justice in Northgard is usually much swifter.” Then, with a pat on Roy’s face that was abnormally paternal, the Governor smiled and said, “Consider it a demonstration of my generosity.”
Then he twisted on his heel. One of the guards hauled open the door, letting the Governor depart first, accompanied by his companion, and then himself after. The door banged shut.
Roy fell to his knees and screamed.
Part Three
The Old Ones
24
Roy went mad with grief.
He did not eat. He hardly drank, and the little that hediddrink, he couldn’t tell whether it was water or whiskey, so clouded were his senses. He was a stranger to himself, a dead man walking, a wayward soul floating on the outside of its vessel. At one point, he wondered if he was breathing in this gray hellscape or if he was merely clinging to reality by his diminishing will to survive. But he could not move on, nor accept what had happened, and so he would hurt himself. He would push himself to his limits.
On the first three nights of his psychological decline, he began to skip sleep. He didn’t need it, he decided. It was a burden, a necessary sacrifice. He’d worked himself to the bone before, gone a day or two without rest, but now there was no respite. If he gave himself a break, even for a moment, his mind would start to drift and splinter, and the memories would burst through, shattering the mental dam he’d subconsciously forged after the Governor had left, after Roy had crumpled to his knees and screamed.
On the fourth night, Roy threw himself back into his studies, disregarding Percival’s protests and implorations, not at all aware of what he was reading. He picked up books at random, his vision glazed and dim, the words swirling and blurring in the air before him. He walked into walls and bookshelves. He stumbled past paintings that stared at him and statues that seemed to follow his movements. He plunged in and out of consciousness. He would be torpidly wandering to his chamber, then blink and find himself in a reading room on the third floor, entirely oblivious as to how he had gotten there.
On the fifth night, his awareness had so deteriorated that he could not multitask, something which had once cost him minimal effort. He could not concentrate on what he was absorbing, but he still forced himself to absorb it regardless. He read three books a night, four sometimes. He understood none of it, hoping that his subconscious would pick up on what the rest of his grief-addled mind could not. When the day drew to a close, he ate a small portion of the Orphic Basilica’s provisions, which had strangely decreased since, but it took him two attempts to consume the food without vomiting. Then, as midnight came around, the Governor briefly visited the library, attended by his Droves, and personally handed Roy an official proclamation of Briar’s execution—complete with Dawnseve Manor’s emblem of a bloody eye set within a rising sun. He also gave Roy Briar’s beloved talisman, the carving of the two-faced woman she’d always kept on her person, even in her crib. Then, once the Droves slammed the doors shut behind themselves and the Governor, Roy threw up all the food he’d forced down. He didn’t deserve the momentary strength it had afforded him anyway.
On the sixth night and onward, as the veil between sanity and madness thinned and threatened to fall, he started hearing voices and seeing faces that were not there. Initially, these hallucinations were more distracting than damaging. He saw a woman in a white gossamer dress, her arms covered in gashes and lacerations, thick, dark blood pouring from her empty eye sockets. Another time, he heard someone weeping, then looked over his shoulder and saw a man bent over his decapitated daughter, cradling her to his chest. Only hours after, a wind curled around Roy’s neck and swept to his left, and he glanced there to find another man, who had an unnervingly wide grin on his face as he slipped his head into a noose.
The visions became more vivid, more complex... but infinitely more difficult for his mind to explicate. He saw a stampede of slender, pallid beasts loping between bookshelves, wailing infants swaddled in loincloths held to their waists. He saw a woman with great, bloodied shears cutting off chunks of her body—her arm, her eye, her cheek—and throwing them over the balcony, laughing hysterically. He saw, orthoughthe saw, Percival lurking within the shadows of a bookshelf. Then Percival stepped out into the moonlight, and Roy could not entirely grasp the creature that shambled toward him on four crooked stumps: his and Percival’s bodies hacked and spliced together, a horrific, anatomically crude grotesquerie.
On the ninth night—or maybe it was the tenth—Roy’s mind, softened by sleep deprivation, began the process of recollection. Then it ricocheted against the mental shield he’d constructed. All he could rely on was the time before that moment of reckoning, before the Governor and the Orphic Basilica had come into his life. He remembered racing alongside Briar through Dawnseve Manor’s garden house. He remembered when they would sip lemonade from carafes and pretend they were attending a royal luncheon. How had he forgotten such bright and pivotal moments of his life?
But these recollections didn’t last long.
His hallucinations continued, becoming progressively realistic. But over time, they shifted from unnatural, unfamiliar horrors to people he knew, both those who he loved and those who’d done him wrong.
He saw Briar in a hallway, her face pale as milk and pockmarked with punctures, from which blood flowed. It flooded her face. It dripped off her chin. It pooled at her feet until she was standing in a widening crimson river.
He saw Matron Dimestra in the Observatory, standing in front of the piano and pointing a musket at his face. He stared into the black mouth of the barrel. She pulled the trigger. Smoke issued out of the barrel, engulfing Roy, who had his arm raised as if that might somehow thwart his death. But no projectile came whistling toward his head.
And despite Roy’s wavering certainty that admitting his trauma to Percival would evict his brother from his mind, he saw Gabriel again and again. He was in every corner, near every bookshelf, and on every floor of the library. He was a specter, the mastermind pulling the strings behind the rest of Roy’s hallucinations.
Somewhere in the farthest corners of his mind, Roy knew that this was the Orphic Basilica’s otherworldly inhabitants tugging on and uprooting his memories, forcing him to relive his deepest agonies, as had happened to the Droves when they had embarked on their own investigation prior to Roy and Percival’s. A part of him was saddened by this idea—that the Orphic Basilica could not presently recognize him as a scholar, that his indisposition had made it so that his trauma exclusively constituted his identity, that, with his mental defenses lowered, he was completely unarmed... and the Basilica could no longer support or protect him. He asked it for more whiskey, having imbibed the last of what Percival had left out in a reading room one night, but the library ignored his request. So instead, Roy stumbled around from the first floor to the seventh, sobbing with Briar’s carving clutched in his hands, and frantically searched for a drink. Whether it was wine or whiskey or cider, he did not care. He just needed something that would drown him, something that would pull him deeper into his misery.
Aside from his insobriety, Roy found that the longer he went without sleep, the more time he had to stew on his hopelessness, and therefore, the more grief he was inadvertently feeding to the ghosts. This went on for long enough that, in his regressed state, he became just as detached from scholarship as the Droves. Within days, it was almost impossible for Roy to distinguish between reality and recollection.
So for what seemed like the first time, but what his shattered subconscious dimly knew was not, he bore the full impact of Gabriel’s anger. He was beaten. He was kicked. He was told he was nothing, a purposeless waste of existence. He had his scars whipped. He had his eyes removed with the poker, again and again, until he grew too scared to blink, too scared that it might be the last time. After a while of this torture, Roy could not remember the shape of his own face, nor when he had looked into the mirror and seen a man, not some detestable wretch masquerading as a man.
