I looked up. And farther up.
Clearly the designs on all the Temple doors had been modeled after this one, but on a smaller scale, as these were immense—thirty feet high, at least, made entirely of bone. I couldn’t even identify all the bones stacked to create the doors themselves.
At the center, they formed the shape of a spine with more vertebrae than any real backbone had in life; long and sinuous and beautiful, marking the division between the two panels. About two-thirds of the way up was a stylized ribcage. If you squinted, the whole thing looked like a great skeletal bird flying overhead, seen from below, with the spine serving as the length of its body and tail, and the ribs like great wings stretching to either side.
Baldbeak flew from my shoulder and perched on one of the bones, his feathers startlingly dark against the aged white. His claws made an odd, hollow click against it that echoed through the cavernous room. I stretched out a hand and touched the knobs of the “spine,” feeling them smooth and cool under my palm. I knew that the bones were long dead, but there was a thrum of life still in them, deep in the marrow—a memory of life.
I could almost imagine that if I pressed my hand into the door, it would give way beneath my skin, and I could touch that strange, pale force. It called to me as thread called to theneedle: asking to be used. Asking to be woven into something entirely new.
I pulled my hand away. My palm stung when I removed it. Was it my imagination, or had it adhered to the bone, just a little? I looked at my hand, and saw it was red and raw, as if I had held it too close to a fire. It did not hurt, but it throbbed with warmth and energy.
Are you all right?
“I’m fine.”
We had to get in, but how did you open the doors? I looked around everywhere I could reach and saw nothing—just the elaborate sculpture, bones on bones on bones. I craned my neck to look upward. In the center of the ribcage design was a dark spot—the only point of blackness in the ivory. I looked at the bone key in my hand.
“Right, key,” I said aloud, feeling foolish. “Time to be a different shape. Please,” I added, just in case bone magic cared about manners.
This time, there was no hesitation. The bone wriggled in my hand like a maggot, startling me so that I almost dropped it, before shaping itself into a new pattern of ridges and teeth. Was it my imagination, or had it somehow also grown larger?
“Baldbeak,” I hissed, holding it gingerly between my thumb and forefinger in case it started writhing again. Heraark-ed at me and flapped down from his perch, gripping my shoulder and nibbling my ear affectionately. I held up the key for him to grasp in his beak.
“Can you fly up there and put it in?” I asked.
Of course.
Baldbeak launched himself from my shoulder and flew up to the keyhole, moving his beak awkwardly to angle the key and edge it inwards until I heard the click of contact. I was about to ask him if he could swivel it, not sure if his beak would be capable of the feat, but before I could voice the request, he gripped the bone with his claws and tilted his head,laboriously turning the key in the lock. He pushed away just in time as the doors began to grind and move.
Clearly they had been weighted just so, expertly hung to swing open as soon as they were unlocked—I remembered Bertram’s lecture on the subject at the East Temple only vaguely. I watched as they yawned inward, revealing a gleaming corridor built entirely of bones. The stuff of nightmares. At least, it should have been. I felt a thrill of recognition, however; a shiver somewhere deep in my being.
With Baldbeak back on my shoulder, I made my way slowly forward, swinging the glim from side to side to illuminate the walls in detail. The lower part was made up of rows of long bones placed horizontally. As I looked farther up, these gave way to skulls, wedged together in grinning fellowship, while the ceiling above was packed with long bones again, vertically placed, forming an arch overhead.
Behind us, the great doors swung shut again with a crash that nearly made me jump out of my skin. Sound behaved strangely in here. Any noise Baldbeak made was ghoulishly amplified, and my footsteps rang from the walls so that I could have been a whole army marching through the place—but I was on my own.
On my own.No Patrick or Dwale, no Mieka, no Book Man to come to my aid. I truly was alone.
Baldbeak nipped at my Hair, as if reminding me of his presence.
“Yes, I know you’re here,” I said, reaching up to rub his beak. “And I appreciate that. Thank you.”
The tunnel came to a fork. Bone-lined passages wound in two directions. The catacombs were a labyrinth, I knew, and it would be all too easy to lose myself in them. How was I to find Mother’s book?
“Any ideas?” I asked Baldbeak. His answeringraarkbounced from bone to bone until it sounded like all the grinning skulls were laughing at me.
I remembered the sensation when I had laid my palm against the door, and in the Corpse Roads, when the bone-riddled earth had responded to my touch. Of life, buried deep. Ofmemory. Whatever bone magic there was within me, however it had gotten there, it recognized itself in this place. Bone called to bone.
I knelt against one of the walls and pressed both hands against it. I felt it again—that same low thrumming, like the sound of an underground river, or a carriage rumbling on a distant street, but it was coming from within me and without all at once.
“Do you feel that?” I asked Baldbeak.
Yes.
So it wasn’t just my imagination.Show me, I thought, trying to press the words into the bones. I was pushing so hard against the wall that my own bones showed white through the skin on the backs of my hands. As I screwed my eyes shut and willed the skeletal walls towards myself, I imagined my bone needle pushing against fabric: something bulky and resistant, like leather, perhaps. I imagined it piercing through.
“Please,” I whispered.
I felt a great sigh, a yielding. I overbalanced a little, and my heart thudded. It felt as if I would have passed right through the wall if I had fallen into it. It had that sense ofgive.
