Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
The books on the shelves jitter. A quill topples off the edge of Stavros’s desk.
An unearthly groan reverberates through the walls.
With a lurch of my heart, I spring off the sofa. As I dash to the window, the view outside already looks wrong.
The second I reach the glass, I understand why.
One of the Quadring’s four towers is collapsing.
A flood of dislodged stone and crumbling mortar tumbles to the ground in an earth-shaking thunder. The floor heaves beneath my feet, leaving me clutching the edge of the window.
Shouts carry across the courtyard, loud enough to penetrate the glass but too muddled to be all that coherent. I back away, a cold sweat breaking over my back.
The floor gives another shudder.
This doesn’t seem good, Julita says in a taut voice.
I snatch up the sword from where I dropped it and lash the belt around my waist. “It doesn’t. Stavros will have to forgive me for leaving when it looks like the ceiling’s about to fall on our heads.”
When I shove out into the hall, a few professors are already bustling toward the stairwell ahead of me.
“We’ve got to evacuate now,” one of them is saying. “The spirits have gone absolutely insane.”
Another nods. “Check the dorms. Get all the students out into the courtyard. The dean’s disabling the locking system on the second and third floors so no one gets locked in their bedroom injured and beyond reach.”
Her statement sinks in through the hammering of my pulse. The dorm room locks will be disabled?
That means I could get right into Wendos’s room. Look through his private things.
None of the men have set off the alert in the locket. They haven’t found him yet.
And who knows how much worse this disaster will get if we don’t figure out what Julita’s old nemesis and the other scourge sorcerers are up to soon?
I dash after the professors, racing on down the stairs after they veer off to tackle the third-floor dorms.
I saw Wendos leaving his dorm room before, after I visited Julita’s during my first trip to the college. In the back of my mind, I bring up the mental picture that matches the marked blueprint Stavros showed me.
On the second floor, students are crowding the hallway—some pushing past me into the stairwell or hurrying toward the other flights of stairs, some milling about in confusion. I weave through them as deftly as I can, grateful that my destination isn’t too far along.
A skinny, harried-looking guy is just emerging from the dorm, stumbling when the floor abruptly shakes. I catch his arm to help him keep his balance, and he shoots a tight but grateful smile at me. “Thank you. It’s madness around here.”
I give a half-hearted chuckle of agreement and raise my chin toward the room he was coming out of. “You’re one of Wendos’s dormmates. Is he still in there?”
The guy makes a face. “He headed out a little while ago, like he had somewhere important to be—lucky for him. Tossed off a remark that he was going to high places, whatever that was supposed to mean.”
High places. The ballroom? Was he up in the tower that just collapsed?
We should be so fortunate.
“You’d better get out of here too,” I suggest, and the guy doesn’t hesitate to brush past me, doing just that. He never glances back, so he doesn’t see me slip past the door into the common room he just vacated.
It is vacant—he must have been the last to leave. The bedroom doors are all closed or slightly ajar, but no sounds of movement reach me from any of them.
Are you sure about this? Julita asks as I dart to the nearest bedroom. If the ceiling does collapse…
“This is our best chance of making sure the disaster doesn’t get to that point,” I murmur, and yank open the first door.
My conviction is rattled by a more emphatic hitch of the floor—and the sight of a crack opening in the plaster of the far wall. Gritting my teeth, I peer into the room.
Heaps of discarded clothes, a tipped over goblet on a stained rug, rumpled bedcovers—obviously someone used to household servants picking up after him.
“See anything that looks like it’s Wendos’s?” I ask Julita.
No. This wouldn’t be him. He was always careful with his things.
“Good, that’ll help narrow it down.”
The next two rooms aren’t quite as messy but still nothing close to “careful.” The fourth looks tidy, but Julita points out the godlen sigil marked on a wall-hanging over the desk.
This must be a Creaden dedicat. Wendos went with Prospira.
Her tone turns acidic. He wanted his own abundance of sorts.
The floorboards rock with my steps as I sprint to the next doorway. A distant rumble suggests more stones have fallen.
I throw open the door with an unsteady hand—and see a neatly tucked bed, closed wardrobe, and shelves organized into books, scrolls, and various wooden contraptions.
But what convinces me is the glass tank at the back of the desk where a couple of bright orange beetles are crawling across strips of mossy bark.
I stride into the room. “He really does like bugs, huh?”
Julita makes a disgusted sound. Either that or it’s just to keep up the front. But I wouldn’t be surprised, given how low he stoops.
I jerk open the drawers on the desk and quickly uncover definitive proof of whose bedroom this is: a set of papers—a report Wendos has been working on in a cramped scrawl—with his name already written at the top.
I dig further, displacing quills and stoppered inkpots, sheafs of paper and spare candles. “This all looks like schoolwork.”
It does seem unlikely he’d have left any obvious evidence of his magical experiments lying around, even in his private chamber.
“We just need some kind of hint, anything… What are they doing to rile up the daimon now? Where are they working their magic? No one can be perfectly careful.”
I crouch down to sweep my hand under his bed, but Wendos keeps the floor not only clear but regularly swept. I don’t even reach a dust bunny.
Lifting up the mattress reveals a few sketches of naked women sprawled in provocative positions, but nothing I can’t imagine half the other male students—and some of the women too—have secreted away.
Maybe the books? Julita suggests.
Through another tremor, I turn toward the bookcase. Heedless of the mess I’m making, I yank text after text off the shelves. I shake their pages over the floor to check for anything stuck inside and then toss them away.
An ominous creaking sound resonates through the walls. Julita squirms in the back of my skull. Ivy, we’re not getting anywhere. The whole school could fall apart.
“No. I’m not leaving yet. Not until I’ve tried everything. You obsessed over Wendos for months even when the men started to doubt you, and you were right. So let’s see this fucking through.”
I grate the last few words through my teeth as I throw the last book aside. Popping the seals on the scrolls, I discover nothing but faded ink.
The contraptions on the lower shelves look like they might be something to do with the bugs—to examine the creatures and test them.
Where else would he hide something? Someplace he wouldn’t think anyone would look if they happened to come into his room.
My gaze slides back toward the tank with the beetles. Or someplace most people wouldn’t want to disturb?
Gingerly, I set my hands on either side of the tank and lift it. At first glance, my spirits sink—the desk is bare beneath it.
But then I bother to hold the tank up higher and check underneath.
There’s a folded paper with its corner wedged in the seam along the edge.
My breath catches in my throat. I snatch the paper out, set the tank down, and unfold my discovery on the desk.
It’s… a bunch of circles. Three in a lopsided triangle here, three in a differently lopsided triangle there. Five different configurations, spaced far apart on the thin paper with sketchy lines, as if Wendos were simply doodling different patterns.
But why would he hide a doodle of a trios of circles?
“Does this mean anything to you?” I ask Julita.
I’ve never seen anything like that. I mean, just like that. It could symbolize three towers or spires or windows or whatever. A lot of buildings have those.
Yes, because we like to do things by threes in recognition of the godlen. Three overall domains they belong to, three of them in each. But that hardly narrows anything down.
Peering closer, I notice what might be a smudge on the underside of the paper. I flip it toward me and hold it up to the late afternoon sunlight streaking through the window.
There are several smudges—faint imprints of ink as if this paper was pressed into another one it was resting on top of.
The imprints are too vague to identify any definite shapes or writing… but something about the overall pattern strikes a chord of familiarity in me. Darker clumps and touched spaces winding in between…
Like a map. Like a city map, with winding streets and clumps of buildings.
Why was Wendos marking circles on top of a map—and why in clusters of three?
“He said he was going to high places,” I murmur.
An image flashes through my mind—the old woman I saw in town earlier today, tapping three fingers against her chest in the row of three to honor the divinities.
And Alek’s comment about the daimon. They’re under the governance of all the godlen.
If you wanted to control the wild spirits, you’d need to call on all the gods. And if you wanted to control them on a larger scale than ever before…
Maybe you’d want to get as far from mortal activity as possible. In three different spots, to echo the divine pattern on as large a scale as possible.
What are the highest places in the city?
My mouth has gone dry. I shove the paper into my pocket and run out of the dorm, Stavros’s short sword bumping against my thigh.
Ivy, where are you going now?
“I need a better vantage point.”
I scramble up the stairs to the fifth floor that holds the dome. The hall that surrounds the ballroom is lined with windows.
I walk from one to the next, trying to clear my head of any sensation. Focusing my gaze on the tallest buildings I can see beyond the square.
Coming around the corner, I find myself facing the Temple of the Crown. And in that mere glance, a jitter of wafting magic tickles into the broken space inside of me.
I draw my gaze up the central spire, the tallest one right in the center of the building. The jitter expands the higher I draw my gaze.
A clammy sensation wraps around my gut. Shit.
Someone’s up there. And I’d bet my riven soul that whatever they’re doing, they shouldn’t be.
I hesitate. I could go back to Stavros’s room or out into the courtyard and summon the others there. Try to convince them of what I’ve pieced together.
But I don’t know how long that’ll take. Stavros might not even have started talking to the king yet. Who knows where the other three are at this point?
My mind slips back to the moment we stood around the desk in the archive room, all of them listening to me, jumping to respond without question or argument.
I have no idea where I’ll stand with them once this is over or whether I should even let myself care. But I trust them to have my back in this.
I’ll go, they’ll follow, and we’ll tackle the threat together.
Without wasting another second, I sprint to the stairs.