Chapter 9 #3
Roy inhaled deeply. He feared, for a split second, that he might smell remnant wisps of smoke from the burnings, orchestrated when he was only ten, on the day of reckoning when the Governor had dispatched a squadron of Droves across the archipelago to immolate the archives throughout the Hasdan Isles.
Cold terror laced through Roy’s bones at the grim reminder of Northgard’s barbaric crimes, all committed before the construction of the Edict of Containment.
“I do,” Roy whispered. “I need it more than I thought I did.”
“Nobody could protest those burnings, Roy,” Percival said softly.
He shifted his gaze away, but before he could, Roy glimpsed the tears shining in his eyes.
“Granted, there were more scholars then, but they knew any attempt at rebellion would be transient. Even if they’d had access to weapons, they were creatives; they didn’t fight, just like the Elder Scribes. ”
Roy recalled an account he’d discreetly gotten ahold of, passed through several of his correspondents—Clive Lortan’s Neither Sword Nor Shield, a historical analytical essay on the Elder Scribes’ code of nonviolence.
“‘Although schisms of faith and opinion are inevitable within a community, it must be noted that the Elder Scribes, and their disciples, all stood firm on this: Neither sword nor shield were they to wield.’ ”
Percival gave a slow, sad nod. “So too did the scholars of fifteen years ago adhere to this code, paying respect to the ancients. They watched—we watched—as the world that we had come to love, and all whom we loved in it, burned. Some of us died in the wreckage; some years later from the smoke caught in their lungs. Both fared better than the survivors.”
Against his best wishes, Roy’s harrowing memories of the burnings reared up before his mind’s eye like a nightmare augury in some dark sorcerer’s crystal ball: parchment pages scattered on bloodstained streets; students and artists and highbrow classicists kneeling before bookshops engulfed in flame; years upon years of accumulated research, turned to ash after days of endless fire.
And now, Roy thought, Northgard has fallen victim to a similar fate.
He remembered the military reports from Matron Dimestra’s meetings with her soldiers.
After storming Northgard’s southern coast three years ago, the Old Ones had set upon the city in a blazing warpath, tearing towns asunder, scorching noble manors to piles of debris, butchering civilians, infant and grown and elderly, without mercy or reason.
Roy despised the higher powers of Northgard, sometimes so fiercely he could barely breathe, but if the Old Ones laid waste to this city, the guilt—which his mission had made Roy responsible for carrying—would be insurmountable.
He dared to imagine the outcome, and when he did, he thought of the rubble in the wake of war, the scholars trapped within it, choking on the ashes of their own, waiting for a respite, however temporary, so that they might fight back.
He couldn’t turn on them. How could he? Such a betrayal would make him just as bad, just as monstrous, as the governing bodies of Northgard. The dream seemed vague from even its best angle, but it was all he had.
“If there are barely any of us left, if we’re at a loss as to how to rebuild this shattered community, then how did the Basilica survive those dark, awful days?
” Percival asked, breaking into Roy’s thoughts.
“How can it still stand, after everything its dissenters did to tear it down?” He shook his head.
“It’s a mystery. When the Droves attempted to burn it down, it was as though some invisible wind blew out their torches.
They were out there in the storm for days, trying to strike a spark, a single ember, but .
. . nothing.” He looked at the floor, an introspective expression on his face.
“The Governor told me some of the Droves vowed they were accosted by the dead—departed relatives, lovers, friends. One saw his mother, who had been killed by the Old Ones, and later blew a hole in the side of his head on the ride back to the Iron Citadel. It’s utterly bizarre. ”
It was more than bizarre, Roy thought; it transcended coincidence.
But then again, he had seen and sensed evidence of the Orphic Basilica’s otherworldliness.
Even from his short time here, it was clear that this library wasn’t just a collection; it was a phenomenon, as ethereal and dazzling as sunlight after years of darkness—a darkness which seemed ever-present since the storm had begun.
There had been a shift in the air the first time he stepped inside, a transference of power from the Basilica’s soul to his own.
Maybe Percival was right. This library might just be unlike any other.
It had certainly shaken Roy to his core, for he wasn’t a believer of superstitions.
He trusted his instincts and cold, hard logic .
. . but he also couldn’t stop thinking of the creature that had chased him that first day.
A shadow? A ghost? Whatever it had been, there was no point denying what he had seen with his own eyes, and the one thing that had truly shifted in his life, that had granted him a new and tantalizing perspective, was undoubtedly his entrance into the Orphic Basilica.
What he didn’t quite understand, though, was why Percival was bringing this up . . . unless he, too, had experienced something similar—something that set scholars apart and connected them to this building that defied so much logic.
“I might sound mad,” Roy said tentatively, testing out this theory, “but when I first came here, I felt . . . I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Voices,” Percival suggested. “You didn’t hear voices; you felt the vibrations of voices, not as the Governor and his Droves did but rather . . . You sensed that someone was speaking to you.”
“Yes,” Roy said, satisfied to hear someone else verify his conflicted thoughts. “Yes! That’s exactly it.”
Percival nodded. “I think someone was trying to communicate with us but they couldn’t, for whatever reason. An obstacle was in the way, perhaps, a barrier between where we are and wherever they are.”
Again, Roy’s flight through the bookshelves flashed before him. The creature had followed him, a bright light flooding his vision . . . and then he’d been assailed by a cacophony of anguished cries.
Now that he thought on it, though, something had held back the full brunt of the voices, not unlike the Basilica’s thick-glassed windows muting the roar of the storm.
As for the creature itself, Roy was hesitant to confide in Percival.
He’d admitted to believing in the voices, but would Percival accept the actual presence of another being?
He had said this was all a game to him—so what if he was goading Roy, baiting him to confess what he’d truly seen, only to deem Roy insane? Just as he’d thought of Razkamun.
So he decided to probe Percival’s original thesis, rather than risk being discounted just yet. “How does this have anything to do with the Old Ones?” Roy asked.
Percival rubbed his temples. “I’m not so sure that it does. Everything’s so disconnected it’s hard to even make an educated guess.”
His chest tightening, Roy chose his next words carefully. “What would you do about it? How might you solidify your assumptions into something substantial, something you could, theoretically, work with?”
Percival sighed. “Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it?
Because any good theory necessitates a good foundation, yet I’ve made no progress on acquiring any historical records pertaining to the Old Ones.
And while we’ve both found research material”—he jerked his chin to Tracing Back the Past—“unless I’m mistaken on your behalf, thus far no direct, let alone oblique, correlations have presented themselves. ”
“So?”
“So,” Percival said, “maybe it isn’t the books within the Basilica waiting to be found.
It could be, and bear with me here, the library itself.
Oh, don’t give me that look, Dawnseve. We’ve established we felt something when we walked through the front doors.
This place is trying to tell us something.
Something it has hidden from those it cannot trust.”
A feeble spark of hope rose in Roy, and yet he felt he had to push back, to make Percival be the one to say what he was so afraid to voice out loud. “The Orphic Basilica isn’t . . . It isn’t alive—”
A bright, stark lucidity swam across Percival’s features.
He had the look of a man whose purpose in life has suddenly been revealed to him.
“Well, why wouldn’t it be? Have you ever considered why the Basilica couldn’t be burned down?
Maybe someone was protecting it, yes, or maybe it was protecting itself. ”
“Fine,” Roy said. “But then can you explain to me, Percival, why it won’t openly communicate with us?
Can you explain why, when two scholars wander through the library’s doors after years of neglect, it refuses to show its secrets to us, those it’s supposedly meant to trust?
” He had meant to sound sarcastic, but as the question left his mouth, he realized he was genuinely curious.
“It’s scared,” Percival muttered. “It doesn’t want to place its trust in anyone else. Would you, after being hated, denigrated—abused—so viciously?”
Abused. Roy swallowed at that word, keenly conscious of his scar.
“That’s . . . definitely something to consider.
” He sighed. “Regardless, we’re here so that we can avoid war, not unearth some great magical revelation.
A revelation, mind you, that is based on nothing but conjecture. ” Again, these words didn’t ring true.
“Is it really conjecture, or are you just afraid?” Percival shook his head. “I’m beginning to think our game is forfeit, considering I’m more mentally equipped for this task.”
“Your constant resorting to idiocy as a subject of ridicule is childish,” Roy said.
He rose to his feet and began to peruse the room for another book, preferably something connected to the actual topic they’d been allocated.
As much as he’d wanted to discuss the creature, he was certain that was a topic that would lead nowhere and take up time they didn’t have.
If the library was alive, if there were ghosts, they weren’t helping him, and Percival pursuing this line of thought wasn’t doing much good, either.
“It probably is, but it’s also the truth,” Percival said. “As is the fact that . . . Well, you’re a good person, darling, I know you are. And that’s why I can’t work with you. Because if I do, then I’ll use everything in my power to change you into someone you’re not.”
“Change me?” Roy repeated, turning to Percival, his pulse thumping rapidly against the undersides of his wrists. “What are you talking about?”
Percival crossed the distance between them, his stride slow, and rested his hand over Roy’s heart.
He looked at the area of contact, more intimate than it ought to be, then at Roy.
“The game, Roy. Ambition. All I’m doing is giving you an opportunity.
Would you rather take one from a tyrant who doesn’t give a damn .
. . or from a fellow student of the arts, someone who knows what you’ve been through, what you feel? ”
Roy stood straight, his obdurate foot-dragging vanquished by a sense of noble determination.
He couldn’t quite pinpoint what had overcome his stubbornness.
Percival’s voice? His confidence? Whatever it was, a measure of that same recklessness now flowed through Roy, and so he lifted his clammy hand and placed it atop Percival’s, which still lay on Roy’s heart.
Around and between them, a wind rose, swirling and moaning.
Everything took on an eerie gray cast. The reading room grew dim, the darkness of gathered thunderheads pressing against the windows.
The breeze gained strength, augmented by something greater than they could both fathom, a force more enigmatic than human.
In his panic, Roy grounded himself with the variables presently before him, what he’d divined from this conversation with Percival. The more he thought on it, though, the simpler it was.
Percival wanted retribution for the freedom and independence which he’d been denied.
If he thought magic was the answer, then so be it—let him travel down that strange road by himself.
Roy wanted acknowledgement of his value to society, something Northgard would forever despise him for pursuing, something with which his memories of Gabriel would forever taunt him.
He was now more and more certain he could find that sense of value on his own by doing what he’d always done: digging deep into the texts until the truth emerged.
“I accept,” Roy said before he could change his mind.
“We’ll each go about this investigation in our own way.
The first to discover the Old Ones’ identity and plans, along with incontrovertible evidence to support their findings, will be awarded complete academic credit for the breakthrough.
” Before Percival could interrupt, likely to reiterate the triviality of credit in a city bent on eradicating scholarship, Roy added, “Someone is bound to read what we’ve discovered.
Years ahead of us, yes, but that slim hope is what I’m banking on.
And I know some small piece of you wants that, too. Don’t we all?”
Percival regarded Roy for a moment, then nodded with resignation. “And as for the losing participant?”
“Their fate shall be decided by the Governor upon his return to the Basilica,” Roy said. Where this ambiguous penalty had come from, he was not sure.
“Well, then”—Percival disentangled their fingers, turned his hand around, and then locked his fingers around Roy’s slim wrist, pressing his hand to his hammering heart—“let the game begin.”