Chapter 28
When they reappeared in the Orphic Basilica, Roy immediately became aware of the tremors coursing beneath his feet.
He stood braced in the same position as when he and Percival had crossed from purgatory to the material world, but he was no longer grasping Kharuan in his white-knuckled hands.
The sword had exploded into glittering smithereens, scattered around the redwood floorboards alongside the remains of Valusvar.
The shuddering vibrations continued, pitching Roy into Percival, who staggered to the side and almost tripped over his own feet.
But Roy hauled him upright, clutching him by the sleeve of his tunic, gazing around with increasing fascination and incredulity.
A torrent of snow blew violently down through the shattered skylight, whipping and stirring past bookshelves and sculptures.
The tremors intensified, rumbling and trembling through the foundations of the library.
Rolling ladders skidded back and forth, producing a terrible screech that grated against Roy’s ears.
The wind whistled and howled and ripped a sculpture off its plinth, then hurled it against the staircase with dreadful strength.
Splinters and chips of wood cracked off the risers and spiraled through the air, nearly slashing across Percival’s cheek.
Roy cried out and wrapped his arm around Percival, tenderly cupping the back of his head. He pressed down, lowering them both to the carpet, which was sprinkled with glass and metal.
He did not know how—perhaps because of the gaping hole in the floor to his left, from which the ghosts had evacuated—but he could feel the erosion of this ancient, long-believed-invincible building underneath him: the grinding of cobblestone, the crumbling of mortar, the eerily human groaning of its skeletal framework .
. . and the prolonged booms and echoes of the release of thanatological energy.
Intermittent pulsations of silver light, much stronger and more vibrant than what had emitted from either of the swords, erupted from the chasm that tunneled deep down into the catacombs.
Paroxysms of dust and dirt shot out of the blackness.
A brown mist of earth rained down on Roy and Percival, their heads still covered, their bodies still hunched and curled around one another.
They began coughing, and Roy was instantly filled with alarm.
He remembered when, during their initial foray into the catacombs, he’d coughed and hacked and then been assailed by a series of disturbing visions.
He waited, dread curdling his blood, but nothing happened.
The visions seemed to have gone with the dead.
Now new visions assaulted him: premonitions of himself and Percival being crushed to death, pummeled by books and sculptures and stones.
Because the waves of destruction went on, and those reverberations and lights coming from the catacombs did not seem to be ceasing anytime soon.
One did not need to be a seer to know how easily that timeline could become their reality.
A plangent crack sounded from their left, like a stack of wood dropped from the precipice of a towering cliff.
The doors to the Orphic Basilica had swung wide open, one of them hanging askew, the hinges torn free by the force of the wind.
A bestial howl blasted out of the entryway, as if from the maw of some prehistoric leviathan, and began dragging Roy and Percival by the heels of their boots.
“The wind!” Roy shouted in Percival’s ear, clutching him tightly. His teeth were chattering, and his extremities were growing number by the minute, but there was a wild grin on his face.
Percival trudged toward the entryway, the intact door of which was slowly coming loose from its hinges. He looked pale as an apparition, a path of half-frozen tears imprinted onto his cheeks.
“Come on,” Roy yelled, tugging on Percival’s sleeve.
Percival, who seemed unusually reticent, at last pulled himself out of his thoughts and came back to his senses. He grabbed Roy’s hand, his grip firm.
They tried briskly walking toward the entryway first, though the wind of the Orphic Basilica and the wind of the snowstorm contested for control, battering Roy and Percival from side to side.
The biting chill rushed into them with an almost sentient fury, as though eager to take them off their feet.
But the other wind, that which had followed and assisted them throughout their investigation, set them back to standing.
It even protected them from the cyclone of debris whooshing through the library behind them.
A book flew toward them and nearly struck Roy over the head, but the wind soared off with it, leaving them briefly exposed, then returned just before a hail of ice and snow could attack them.
After what felt like an eternity of pushing back a wall of raging winds, they eventually made it past the threshold and out of the Orphic Basilica.
As they did, a plaintive cry—high and angelic—issued from the wind, like a mournful farewell.
Then it rushed forward, sending Roy and Percival wheeling through the air, far beyond the range of danger.
For a few dizzying moments, Roy rolled through the snow. It got into his mouth, his nostrils, and his hair. Then, shuddering against the cold, he rose to his knees and watched the library he had come to love buckle under the pressure of the swords’ expended abilities, crumble, and fall.
The roof caved in from the broken skylight.
The impossibly large steeple, which jutted toward the clouds like an upthrust spear, listed forward with exquisite slowness then crashed down onto and split the gable of the seventh floor in half.
A rumble went through the ground, deeper than Roy had felt moments before, and drove the steeple farther into the wrecked front of the building.
The left and right facades toppled inward and slammed into the steeple with colossal force, crushing it, driving it farther into the widening, cavernous hole in the rooftop.
The steeple tipped, slanted, then drilled through the seventh, sixth, and fifth floors, destroying the Observatory and the sitting and reading rooms where Roy and Percival had sat when they had started collaborating.
Several of the curtains had been ripped away and torn apart by the storm, Roy noticed, showing dark chambers littered with damaged texts.
A cobweb of cracks slithered down one of the limestone pillars that had held up the front vestibule, and when the steeple plunged down into the fourth floor, the pillar collapsed entirely.
It leaned to the right, then collided into its counterpart, and the vestibule crumpled right after.
The overhang bowed forward, fell, and crushed the platform at the head of the front staircase.
The birdbaths resting on either side of the absent doors tumbled, too, crushed by the overhang.
Once all four facades had plummeted, the rest of the Orphic Basilica’s downfall happened rather quickly.
The storm wind gave a tremendous gust, and it all sank in and blew over.
As the breeze lessened, a haunting silence swept in around Roy.
He stared unblinkingly at the rubble, his gut leaden with dismay and awe.
The detritus of the library, a millennia-old accrual of countless outlawed tomes and scrolls, lay in heaps and piles.
It looked so mundane, so bereft of the magic that had kept all those pages bound and unharmed for untold years. He could hardly believe it.
“Percival . . .” Roy whispered, his voice shaky with disbelief. “What have we done? What . . . What did we just do?”
“What we set out to do,” Percival said, standing and brushing snow off his knees.
“And more.” He sounded put together, like he had everything in control, but Roy knew Percival, knew that his inattentive expression was from sadness, not exhaustion.
Despite this, he explained, “This was always the plan. We meant to do this when we decided what the Governor would get out of the bargain. Maybe we hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but what happened is actually convenient, Roy. ”
“How can you say that?”
“Well, we hadn’t actually gotten around to how we’d tear it down, now, did we?”
Roy nodded with numb acknowledgment, and yet the sight of the Orphic Basilica stripped down to its bare bones flooded his heart with such despair that he could not help but turn his back on the damage. He clapped a hand over his mouth, tears running down his face and slowly freezing there.
“I know, darling,” Percival murmured, embracing Roy for a while, running the palm of his hand down his back, and then pulling gently away.
“I know. But perhaps it’s for the best. Just think: If we hadn’t done what we did, if we hadn’t taken it down, the doors to purgatory might have stood open for years until someone else with one of those swords came around.
And who knows how long that might have taken? ”
“I know. I know.” And Roy did. But . . . “All those books, the Observatory . . . Briar’s carving . . .”
Percival brushed a knot of windswept hair back from Roy’s face. “I know,” he repeated, “but we’ll have time to grieve later.”
“Why? Where are we going?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Percival said, looking around, “but all I’m concerned with right now is getting out of the cold.”