When Percival reappeared, carrying both of the swords in his arms, the ghosts began shrilling in earnest. They exploded out of bookshelves and study halls, reading rooms and bedchambers, the foundations of the library—and the twisting tunnels thereunder—shaking from the tumult.
As Percival quickly thrust Kharuan into Roy’s hands, Roy shivered at the droning hum that sounded in his ears. He closed both hands around the scabbard, which was exuding thin tendrils of silver luminescence like moonlight sliding through parted curtains. It had been a while since he’d carried the sword, and so as he lifted it, his shock at its weight was quickly renewed. He couldn’t imagine how Percival had carted both in his arms.
Although Percival was struggling now, too. He clasped the hilt, the blade pointed down, and was about to reach up and pull off the scabbard when he paused, likely remembering that he had to rotate it. “We’ll open the gateway with Valusvar,” he said, panting, “and get out and close it with Kharuan. If we can evenliftthe fucking things, that is. Damn, they’re heavy. Did Walestone truly plunge Holyborn through stone?”
Roy shrugged, then grimaced at the tension strung throughout his shoulders. “That’s what I saw.”
“Do we both need to betouchingValusvar when I do this?” Percival asked.
“I don’t think so. When it happened for Walestone, the world seemed to crumble around him, then brought him to the other side.”
Percival looked daunted and stunned, as if he had only just now comprehended the magnitude of what lay ahead of them, then nodded resolutely. He closed his left hand around the hilt and his right around the scabbard, twisted, and then tugged. It didn’t come free at first, at which his face reddened, but on his second attempt he gave the scabbard a quick jiggle and it slid off. He flung aside the scabbard, which clattered across the floorboards.
“Now drive the blade through the ground at your feet,” Roy said, echoing Eldreave’s instructions.
Apprehension skittered across Percival’s face, but then he looked up at the ghosts amassing overhead like a murder of crows, his handsome features awash with the shadows of the library, the red glow of the ghosts and the radiant silver light of the sword. “For you,” he whispered, and when he plunged Valusvar toward the ground, the wind—which had been hovering companionably about them—abruptly reared up over his head and bore down onto the hilt of the sword with incredible force, thrusting the blade into the carpet and the redwood underneath.
The floorboards splintered, sending chips of wood spraying in every direction. The persistent humming that rippled out of Valusvar increased in pitch and volume, turning into a livid, distorted scream. A shock wave of wind and light blasted out of the blade, which had brightened significantly, painting Roy’s and Percival’s faces in a silver glare.
Percival reinforced his grip on Valusvar’s hilt, his eyes sparkling with amazement. Another shock wave erupted out of the sword—weaker than the first but still formidable—and Percival frantically reached out for Roy’s left hand, the right clutching Kharuan, and pressed it atop the hilt with his own.
Around them, the world had begun to disintegrate. The walls peeled back in scrolls of gray ashes. The bookshelves crumbled apart and were then blown away on a strong breeze. The thunder rumbling beyond the walls became distant, then quieted completely. And just before the silence could take over, Valusvar shattered, fragmenting into scintillating shards, the silver luminescence gradually subduing and reverting to the dull black metal—the same, Roy reflected distantly, as the Governor’s necklace.
A thick darkness suddenly consumed Roy’s vision, and immediately after, he and Percival were surrounded by a chorus of screams.
It was like nothing that Roy had ever heard before, an infernal cacophony of misery. It went on and on, beating him, demoralizing him. He felt defeated, crushed beneath the weight of a thousand wounds, like someone had taken a cudgel to his soul—
The darkness disappeared, replaced by a searing white light that nearly blinded him. He grimaced, raising a hand to shield his eyes. Then, slowly, he lowered it in utter disbelief as an alien landscape materialized into existence.
The scene developed with dexterous calculation, as though some invisible painter was rapidly finishing the backdrop of a painting. Rivers of molten lava appeared, snaking across cracked gray earth and overlapping, creating intercrossing tributaries whose spindly branches streamed out in every which direction, far into the mist-wreathed horizon. These rivers were overflowing with an unfathomable number of ghosts—millions, easily. All struggled to keep afloat, their heads craned back, their mouths contorted into unnaturally elongated chasms that ejected tormented screams.
As soon as the rivers appeared, another geographical feature emerged, encircling the interconnected tributaries. Ten fortresses protruded from the fractured earth, each forged from an ethereal, smooth white crystal. Once erected, they stood at least seventy feet tall, their peaks indistinct and fuzzy high above, like the beaks of phantom birds. They cast no shadow upon the rivers.
Roy stared, equally amazed and petrified. “Purgatory.” He could hear his own voice, could feel his mouth working and his heart pumping. He had a body here, and with a body, he could still return to his home world.
Percival stepped up beside him, gawking at the fortresses and the rivers with incredulity. “We made it.”
Ahead of them, Atticus Walestone materialized, levitating before them. His features—vaguely human and enshrouded in shadow, as always—were arranged into a look of placid, unaffected calm. When he spoke, though, there was a tone of pensive gratitude in his voice.So you have, mortals, and for this I thank you. Finally, after two thousand years, my people will know the peace for which they have been desperate. No longer will they languish. No longer will they wallow, trapped in a place where memories die, where their accomplishments and their hardships are pale compared to their pain.
Percival, who had recovered from his disbelief and was now watching Walestone with melancholy, said, “No one should have to suffer like this. I’m sorry you had to wait so long, that the answer was not discovered sooner.”
As am I, Walestone said,but the deed is done.You unlocked the gateway.He glanced at Kharuan, still clutched in Roy’s hand.You have your way out, and now these millions of souls will get the revenge they rightfully deserve, that which they have gone without ever since that fateful day.
“Millions,” Roy muttered. He hadn’t come to even a rough estimate of the amount of souls trapped within purgatory when he’d considered the idea of multiple power sources of thanatological energy, butmillions? He turned to Percival, who seemed dumbfounded. “That’s it. That’s the advantage we were banking on.”
“Will it be enough?” Percival asked Walestone. “It must be. The Old Ones have been indulging in wholescale murder across the world for thousands of years. If all those ghosts are containedhere, then...”
Walestone hung his head, though it was not with shame. To Roy, he almost appeared rancorous at the prospect of the violent fallout of the ghosts’ liberation, his red eyes shining with perverse glee.It will be enough.Morethan enough. A great many of the souls pooled here were at the siege of the Orphic Basilica, though all sources of thanatological energy, including the one beneath the library, lead directly here.
Roy could hardly envisage the magnitude of this ultimate deliverance. He had not educated himself as strongly in geography as philosophy, but he knew the archipelago of the Hasdan Isles was a speck on the map. A single continent in a world full of them. By the Scribes, the quantity of the weaponized ghosts—and thus the scale of destruction soon to be exacted—would be catastrophic.
He thought of Briar, then, how frightened she’d sounded in her letters. All she’d wanted was to help her brother and the girl she liked—might have evenloved, if the way that she had spoken about Irene was anything to go by—and because of this, because she had seen faith in a world of endless evils, she had been put to death.
Roy tried to search for Briar now, but it was impossible to do so when she was within the milling crush of ghosts.
“Briar,” he whispered, “if you can see me, if you can hear me...” His vision blurred with tears. “Know that I’m proud of you, that you did all you could, and without you, we wouldn’t be where we are.”
He got no reply, but he held out hope.
