Atticus recoiled, his knees threatening to buckle at the relief in their voices. Frantically, he dispelled the levitation rune and supplanted it with an amplification rune. He shouted, “To me, Protectorate! To me!”
Perhaps thirty paces ahead, the looming double doors to the Orphic Basilica boomed and rattled, straining at their hinges. A glint of sunlight peeked through, then vanished like a torch snuffed out by wicked winds.
“To me, Protectorate!” he shouted again, raising his voice over the commotion. “To me, to me!”
He made the summons again and again until, at last, ten or fifteen archivists dressed in flowing white robes shouldered through the throng and then stood before Atticus, their chests puffed out in feigned defiance. They were playing at soldiers, Atticus thought, the last duty any one of them had ever believed they would take up.
This damned city has ruined us.And they had no more time to appraise their losses, no more chances to rebuild themselves into the civilization they’d been striving day after day to become... but for this.
“Raise the barricade!” Atticus ordered.
As one, the gathered members of the Protectorate turned on their heels and assembled themselves into a rectangular formation, mirroring the structure of the double doors. Scholars gave them a wide berth, shuffling from foot to foot, and then rocked back as the Protectorate uttered a sequence of convoluted incantations and lunged forth, thrusting their upraised palms toward the doors.
A horizontal, milky shield of protection sputtered into existence, raining sparks down on the Protectorate. They gritted their teeth, laboring beneath the accumulation of invoked runes, then shoved the shield forward. It sprang ahead, although before it could coat the entrance and lock into place, the doors burst inward with a resonant crack.
Atticus turned and ran. But he couldn’t stop himself from looking over his shoulder.
The enemy streamed through, their eyes red as murder and their boots black as sin. They seized scholars by the backs of their necks and shattered their skulls with black-gauntleted fists. They pursued those who had fallen, then brought their boots down on their backs, splintering their spines into bloody shards. They wrestled children out of their mothers’ and fathers’ arms so they could watch as they dashed their skulls across the walls.
One of the soldiers stilled above the corpse of a boy it had slain, then abruptly lifted its head. Its shoulders rose and fell with increasing regularity. Steam furled out from the narrow slits over its nostrils.
Can it smell something?Atticus thought, his mind racing for an explanation. He seethed. He wanted to scream at the frustrating shortage of information he had on these unfathomable beings. He should have dedicated more time to the coming evil instead of to the evolving design of purgatory and the cosmos. Eldreave had always reprimanded him for his dreaminess.
There’s nothing to do about it now, I suppose.
No, he could still take initiative. He could still honor his master, and salvage the prized possession of his people, in one fell swoop. He had his doubts, of course. This endeavor could very likely be the undoing of intellectualism. It could reverse, and consequently erase, every thesis written and every poem drafted. It could topple the foundations of scholarship once and for all.
But as bleak as these recent days had become, Atticus was an optimist. He had endured years of adversity and prejudice, had survived his uncle’s fists and his aunt’s repulsed scowls, had crawled from the trenches of Hell and ended up in the arms of his parents, who’d finally, after casting him out on the streets, accepted him for what he loved. Even through those dark, unforgiving tunnels, even now, he could see the light.
Atticus snapped back to attention. “The catacombs!” he roared. He raced to the left, where inserted in the redwood floorboards was the slightly declined platform which, when activated, opened a passageway to the subterranean level of the Orphic Basilica. He had used it on few occasions, mostly to appraise the tombs of long-departed academics—constructed from earth and crumbled cobblestone by the nameless wind drifting about the library—but he’d never thought he would have to employ it in an invasion. “Get to the catacombs! Go!Go!”
Much of the crowd had scattered, either pursued or slaughtered by the enemy soldiers, but those who heard Atticus’s command frantically obeyed. As the platform rippled outward, revealing a cobblestone stairway leading into an impenetrably dark abyss, the scholars who had heard the cry poured in.
Hundreds upon hundreds of scholars hurried into the darkness. A little way down, someone summoned a ball of flame. It rose and dipped, setting a burnished orange hue across the sea of churning bodies jostling past one another in the narrow enclosure.
As the scholars fled into the darkness, Atticus cast about, his concern for Maude morphing into panic. Gods Above, had she fallen? Had the red-eyed devils crushed her spine, too, mutilated her as they were now doing to hundreds of others? Had—
Then he saw her. She was ushering a throng of scholars—some of whom he recognized as friends he’d glimpsed her researching alongside over the years—out of the Basilica’s front doors. They’d covertly slipped around the western border of the shield of protection, which was deteriorating with speed under the enemy’s bludgeoning blows.
Just beyond the shield, Maude raised a hand to Atticus, tears welling in her eyes. He returned the gesture, his smile quivering. Then she rushed out of the Orphic Basilica, and by the way events were unfolding, he had a feeling it would be the last he saw of her, though he hoped it were not so.
Atticus stood at the entrance to the catacombs, contemplating, mulling over the past. Even after receiving intelligence reports of the enemy’s location, he had not allowed himself a moment to do this, to reflect on his scholastic accomplishments, to ruminate on the allies he’d made and the rivals he’d agitated. He had been grounded in the present, locked in his office, too stubborn to look up and watch as the world shifted on its axis, catapulted from an age of enlightenment into an age of materialism.
Had he had the chance, though, he would not change a thing. He had torn up the roots of existence and unearthed the secrets buried thereunder. A world hidden in their own, inhabited by the souls of the departed. A gateway within the subconscious, obscured from view by a fog of pain and torment.
And what if Eldreave’s grand plan does not work?a cynical voice sneered in his mind.What if you were wrong? What if, in doing this, you’re erasing from history the archives you and your people, your friends, vowed to protect?
I am strong, I am resilient, Atticus told the pessimistic voice that had been taunting him since Eldreave had passed the duty down.I will persevere.
The voice laughed at him.You are weak, and the people you lead doubly so. Your supporters can barely secure a rudimentary protection rune. What has you so convinced that you will succeed?
That gave Atticus pause. In truth, he was not completely persuaded that Eldreave’s planwouldwork. For one thing, it hadn’t been done before. For another, it was, at best, a slapdash escape route, a dull-witted soldier’s getaway. But he was no soldier, and neither was his Protectorate. He hadn’t expected their flimsy protection rune to impede the enemy. He was honestly surprised their combined spellwork had manifested into some semblance of fortification, however ineffective it had been. He hadn’t needed them tostopthe enemy.
He had just needed to buy more time, to get as many scholars as possible—no matter their proficiency in magic—into the catacombs.
Atticus grasped the nearest Protectorate member by the shoulder. “Don’t let anyone follow me down there,” he hastily ordered the woman. “I don’t care for their rank, their name, their age. If even one of these red-eyed bastards slips in—”
The woman offered him a curt nod. “Understood.” She turned her back on him and then yelled out the command she’d been given to her affiliates, who, without question, fanned out around the stairway and pressed inward.
