Chapter 25
Roy woke up a few hours later, groggy but content.
Percival was sleeping beside him, rolled over on his side with one leg draped protectively over Roy’s. He snored quietly, his face soft in repose.
A solemn breeze curled around Roy’s head, ruffling his sweat-matted hair.
It had followed him since Briar’s death, that breeze.
A silent pursuer. It had caressed the line of his jaw and the breadth of his shoulders.
It had danced and frolicked around him as he hunched over ancient texts, Briar’s carving standing vigil by his side.
He had fumbled, at first, to place his finger on the entity, but now that his fog of grief had cleared—or at least somewhat, Percival’s story a somber reminder that he wasn’t alone; the young man’s body next to his a more hopeful one—Roy remembered that this wind had accompanied him when the Governor had admitted to Briar’s and Irene’s imminent execution.
Now it wove through Roy’s tunic, which clung to his sweaty skin. It wound through his hair, playful and maternal but somehow reluctant, as though afraid to cross some line, to betray his trust.
Roy stiffened at that thought, then glanced fleetingly at Percival, nervous that he might have woken him.
There was a suspicion swirling through his head, traipsing at the borders of his mind, but he could do nothing beyond giving it due thought, at least not while he was in Percival’s company, asleep or no.
Although I have come to your world from my own, Atticus Walestone had told them when they’d journeyed to the Elder Scribes’ burial vault, others may be hesitant to do so.
Roy had cleaved to this ominous intelligence, though he’d been uncertain as to why. But if the suspicion that had roused him from his slumber held even a grain of truth, then he had to take this leap in the dark.
Roy rose from his bed, passing a fleeting glance to the two-faced carving on his bedside table, then donned his trousers and boots, watching Percival as he did so.
He trod silently out of his room, leaving the door slightly ajar to prevent it from snicking shut or the hinges from creaking.
He came to the end of the hallway, steering clear of groaning ghosts, then took a torch from the nearest wall.
He scouted the floorboards to the left of the carpet runner, found what he was looking for, and pressed his foot into the wooden entryway to the underground crypts. Once he had rallied his nerves, he descended into the darkness.
It encased him, consumed him. He went farther and farther down, each step tightening the clamp around his skull.
Fifty steps, seventy steps, a hundred . . .
He saw faces in the blackness, imprinted on the slick cobblestone walls.
They stared at him as he made his way down, bloodshot eyes bulging out of inhumanly wide sockets.
They cursed him. They reprimanded him. They spat at him, though when he swiped the back of his hand across the places where he thought the spit had landed, his skin was faintly moist from the damp, but mostly dry.
He could still not yet comprehend the bizarre nature of the library, especially its tunnel network, but he pushed onward, suppressing the unease swirling in the pit of his stomach. He endured it. For Briar, he persevered. His denial had brought him in here. Now his acceptance would bring him out.
When he arrived at the catacombs, Roy held the torch aloft. Firelight flickered across the rounded walls, dappling the coffins of the Protectorate with a rosy glow.
A peculiar sense of confidence came over Roy.
He was unsure whether it was the sight of the sarcophagi and the bodies of his idols within them or the reminder of what existed under the Orphic Basilica, but he felt like he belonged here.
Had this been a test, engineered by the elemental entity that had been shadowing him over the past week or so?
He didn’t know, but what had risen him from bed, and out of his grief, recurred to him now. And instantly, he felt restored.
“Hear me!” Roy called out. He raised the torch, his heart pounding against his ribs. “Hear me, I said! Hear me! I will the dead to hear my summons!”
Cold air and mist swished about his feet. The crypt remained silent but for the dwindling echoes of his voice.
Again, Roy screamed, “I will the dead to hear my summons!” He thrust the torch out, and the flame swayed back, then hovered upright. “Come forth! Come to the light!”
Whispers sounded from afar; they were formless, unintelligible voices, hissing like the sigh of wind through bare branches.
They seemed to come from a place deeper than the crypt.
Roy thought of a severed bond, the link between the library and the supernatural world from which the ghosts had come.
Perhaps if he put them under pressure and brought them to the surface of this world, he could give them shape, but there was only one spirit with whom he wished to commune.
“Hear me, for I will not break this vow!” Roy exclaimed. “I promise to take your pain! I will bear your agony! I just ask of you . . . May I see her?”
As if in confusion, the voices quieted, then disappeared.
Roy choked on a sob, tears obscuring his vision, but the breeze brushed them away, bestowing upon him a newfound sense of clarity.
Unseen spectral heads seemed to lift in recognition of his torment. Roy could feel their unrest, like a sailor reading patterns in the sky: a black storm of agony, trepidation, terror, and fragmented empathy.
“You know this pain!” Roy screamed. “You know it! You’ve carried it for years or centuries or longer, how long I do not know, but I cannot stand it!” His hand shook, and the torch in his grasp flung crooked shadows across the coffins. “I don’t know how to live, how to move on!”
Voices rose from beneath him, ascending in pitch and volume, until he was surrounded by a whirling pillar of the dead.
A din of shrieks, howls, and wails spoke of their misery, of their thousands of lives eradicated by tragedy and heartache.
They pulled and tugged at Roy’s heartstrings, pouring their anguish into his own.
“Please!” Roy shouted. “How do I move on? Why should I move on? There is no point to this life if the end is just silence—”
Something shifted behind him, disturbing the stale air at his back. Sweat beaded on his palms, prickling his skin. He turned on his heel, his breathing rapid and coarse, and then pushed the torch out before him, squinting to discern the newcomer.
A ghost lingered at the yawning mouth of the tunnel, its blazing ruby eyes contrasting sharply with the orange torchlight. By this dual illumination, Roy discerned the slightest of features, the barest indication of its humanoid structure: the crook of an armpit, the line of a jaw.
It was Walestone.
I may not be whom you seek, Walestone said, though I offer you my condolences for your loss. His sibilant voice meandered around the chamber and rebounded off the stone walls and the wooden coffins.
“Bring her back,” Roy demanded, his voice dry and cracking. “Bring her back to me, not as an Old One, not Blighted, but as the sister I know. I will the dead to heed my directives.”
Walestone shook his head, slowly and with great solemnity. Even if I could exercise such powers, that sort of sorcery has been forbidden for thousands of years and was only recently discovered to be impossible. The repercussions are . . . troubling.
“Resurrection. It was once accessible, then. It was once used to breathe life back into the dead, to restore not just the animus”—he was thinking of the Blighted as he queried this—“but the actual humanity within them?”
You misheard me. You think without regard for consequences. Given the state you are in, I do not condemn you for this lack of judgment, and so I warn you again: These powers have, over time, been rendered inoperable.
“Would you return if you could?” Roy asked. “To the world of the living?”
Walestone drifted around the sarcophagi of the Elder Scribes, his amorphous, fuzzy hands clasped delicately over his middle, then answered contemplatively, How many years or eons I have walked among the dead, I know not.
My soul is immersed so deeply in the world I now inhabit that if I were to march through the gates of reality, I would not even vaguely resemble who I had once been.
Roy contemplated this. “You’re saying the soul of a person undergoes some . . . some change in the interim between death and whatever comes after?”
In many ways, yes, Walestone confirmed. Humans are brimming with contradictions.
Your kind dread the end and what it comprises, but you also long to be rid of the anxiety, the anticipation, to bear witness to the other side of the horizon.
Similarly, when a soul passes into the afterlife, there is resistance.
Some cling to reality tighter than others, to linger, to say one last farewell, but all, in the end, come to a state of acceptance.
A place of weightlessness. A period of blessed absence.
“And that is where her soul resides?” Roy asked, hope rising inside him. “A neutral zone? A sanctuary?”
Walestone recoiled. Your . . . your sister.
Roy swallowed at Walestone’s unexpected reaction. “I tried to summon her, but you came to my aid instead. Could you not find her? Was she not in this purgatory that you’ve mentioned?”
Walestone held up a hand. You do not quite understand.
“There is a barrier,” Roy said, unease moving through him, along with an eerie, murky premonition.
“A wall of some sort, dividing the ghosts confined within the Orphic Basilica from your world. Is my sister suspended in that barrier? Is she stuck?” He had a possibly mad urge to scream for Briar, to cast her down from her prison, to anchor her back to Northgard, but he stilled himself.
“Why did you come to me?” he asked. He sounded childish, although he was running out of options, out of patience. “Why are you here, and not her?”
I cannot bring your sister back, Roy, Walestone said in an apologetic tone.
I sincerely wish that I could, but even if it were possible, the repercussions of resurrection are perilous and irrevocable.
The Old Ones would seem a minor obstacle compared to the danger that would emerge from such a spell.
He paused. But I can show you how to free Briar Dawnseve from purgatory.
Your sister could have peace, Roy. A hint of sadness came into his voice, but Roy couldn’t puzzle out why.
Then a troubling notion stole into his mind. “She might be erased from existence completely, right?” he asked. “Her peace might not come in the form of an afterlife, but rather no life at all.”
That is a risk you will have to consider, yes, Walestone affirmed, then, with surprising diffidence, he asked, Would you like to see how it can be done, Roy? Would you like to see how to release the ghosts?
Roy didn’t need as long as he would’ve thought he might to come up with an answer.
He’d heard the ghosts’ anguished screams, their despairing cries and pleas, and he couldn’t bear the thought of Briar—his polite, sweet-hearted sister—enduring such agony.
She’d already gone through unimaginable distress, having been harassed by Gregori, a Blighted Drove, and then executed for the Governor’s entertainment.
Roy couldn’t fathom the world of pain she would be in if she continued living out her days trapped in purgatory.
“I would,” Roy said to Walestone. “Show me.”
Walestone nodded. Steel yourself, mortal. This may cause you some discomfort.
Not a second after Walestone spoke did a crackling bolt of darkness erupt out of his hand, split into two tenebrous prongs, and puncture Roy’s chest.
Roy keeled over, grasping at his chest. He was filled with pain, like a thousand rivers of flame were chasing through his veins.
He clawed at his heart. He tried to rip through his tunic and wrench the dark bolt of energy out through brute force.
He tried to scream it out, to expel the magic with sheer defiance, but it had already wound its way inside him, coiling in his gut like a serpent.
He crumpled to his knees, and the pain came again, slamming into the back of his skull with a sickening crack. He doubled forward, on all fours now. A viscous rope of bile hung from his agape mouth, swinging. He went to wipe it away, then tumbled face first to the ground.
A gossamer veil of darkness closed in over his vision, and in Roy’s mind, Walestone said, I will see you shortly, Roy Dawnseve. I cannot do this without you.