Chapter 57 Baz
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GOT my sister involved,” Clover muttered.
“I can’t believe you were planning to leave me here alone while you go traipsing off into the Deep without so much as a goodbye,” Cordie snapped back.
Baz, Kai, and Luce exchanged a pointed look at the tension simmering between the two siblings.
It was the middle of the night. They’d snuck into the Decrescens library, ready to face the perils of the wards.
Clover, understandably, wasn’t happy about his sister joining them—about Baz telling her in the first place.
Baz didn’t regret it. And Cordie’s mind seemed made up. Fueled by her sorrow over Louka and her anger at her brother, there was no convincing her to stay out of it now.
Thames was glaringly absent. They’d looked all over for him, knowing he’d want to be here.
Polina’s earlier worry troubled Baz. They’d talked about delaying things until they found him, but with the games drawing to their end and other students getting closer to figuring out the wards, they had to act now.
“Are we sure about this?”
Baz’s question broke the resounding quiet.
The five of them stood before the archway to the Vault, staring at the silver door.
If they’d gotten it wrong, Clover would be exsanguinated by the wards—unless Baz stopped it in time, as he’d done for the Trevelyan student.
The Tidecaller seemed unfazed as he said, “As sure as we’ll ever be. ”
They all stepped back to give Clover space to perform what would be a complex sequence of magic that had to be done in the exact order of the founders’ deaths. And so it started with Hilda Dunhall, founder of the Noviluna library.
Clover closed his eyes to call upon Hilda’s Shadowguide magic. “Spirits of the four founders,” he said, “with the dark of a new moon at my fingertips and the power of Shadowguides in my blood, I call on you from beyond the veil.”
His voice had the cadence of an entrancing performer, brimming with gravitas. He looked like a supplicant at the altar of a great god. Yet nothing happened.
After a heart-stopping moment where Baz thought they might have gotten it all wrong, an unnatural chill ran through the quiet library.
The air in front of the archway seemed to shift and part like a gauzy curtain caught in a breeze, and before their eyes appeared four translucent, shapeless forms. They were no more than tricks of the light, an out-of-focus impression that was there and gone as Baz blinked.
Clover didn’t look surprised it had worked, only grew more confident in his stance. He breathed in deeply as if bracing for the next step: drawing upon the magic of Florien Delaune, the founder of the Crescens library.
“With the voice of a Wordsmith,” Clover said, “I beseech you, spirits of the four founders, to make yourselves visible to us, just like a waxing moon growing into its light.”
Kai swore. Baz gripped his arm, eyes wide as he stared at the literal ghosts that slowly appeared before them. With a Wordsmith’s ability to manifest things into being, Clover had effectively solidified the founders’ spirits, making them visible, tangible things.
Hilda, Florien, Lutwin, Suera—the four library founders of two hundred years past, dressed in robes and garments that screamed of another time. They were still somewhat translucent, but now they had faces and bodies and eyes that peered at them with a keen awareness that set Baz on edge.
And then the ghosts pounced.
Their eyes bulged in an unnatural way, their mouths opening on screeching, bloodcurdling screams to reveal pointed teeth. Their flesh had a green tinge, putrid and decaying, and their hands were clawed as they reached for those who dared to disturb their peace.
Baz and Clover had anticipated this—that surely the founders’ spirits would have been enchanted to bar the way into the Vault by whatever means. Still, nothing could have prepared Baz for the pain.
His blood was boiling, bubbling in his veins, sprouting from his mouth. He clawed at his stomach and saw the others suffering in a similar way. They were being exsanguinated.
“Spirits of the four founders,” Clover intoned over the chaos, blond hair fluttering wildly around him like on some invisible wind, turquoise eyes gleaming in the dark, “with the virtuous light of the full moon and the cleansing tide of Purifiers, I command you to be at peace and let us be.”
The pain stopped. Baz’s blood stilled.
With a Purifier’s ability to balance energies—the magic of Lutwin de Vruyes, the founder of the Pleniluna library—the founders’ spirits were appeased, settling back into their human forms.
Clover was panting now, but he seemed indomitable, eager to keep going so close to the end. “With the intuitive intellect of Unravelers and all the secrecy of a dark waning moon night,” he said, “I urge you, spirits of the four founders, to unveil what you have so long kept concealed.”
The magic of Suera Belesa, founder of the Decrescens library they stood in, was perhaps the most evident last step in picking through the Vault’s wards, but Baz nevertheless held his breath, praying it would work.
And it did. Like a key fitting into a lock, the ghosts suddenly went still at Clover’s magic—and like a cloud of smoke vanishing on a sudden wind, they dispersed.
A shudder went through the library. Something prickled against Baz’s magic, familiar and inexplicable. He watched as Clover stepped up to the door beneath the arch and froze with his hand hovering over the knob. He turned to Baz.
“The honor should be yours,” he said with a smile.
“But you’re the one who broke through the wards.”
“And you’re the one who figured the whole thing out.” Before Baz could argue that this wasn’t true, Clover added, “Besides, I’m afraid we won’t know if the wards are truly gone if I’m the one to open the door, since I am technically already allowed entry into the Vault. You, on the other hand…”
Baz wasn’t in the Selenic Order, and so the wards, if they were still intact, would not allow him through.
Gulping down his fear, Baz reached for the door—only for Kai to step in and pull it open in his place.
“What are you—” Panic sliced through Baz. He desperately tried to pull Kai back, but the Nightmare Weaver had already stepped over the threshold. He held the door open for them with an almost bored expression.
Nothing happened. No blood loss, no sentient wards attacking him in any way.
Baz shoved at Kai’s chest. “Why in the Tides’ name would you do that? The wards—”
“You would have saved me.” Kai’s eyes shone with fierce emotion. “None of us could have turned back time if you’d been attacked by the wards.”
Baz couldn’t exactly fault that logic. And as Clover and Cordie and Luce stepped through the door, all he could think of was that they’d really done it. They’d broken through the wards.
Together, they descended into the Vault of Knowledge.
The Vault was not quite as Baz remembered.
For one thing, the silver door behind the permissions desk that he remembered was not there; the grotto-like space at the bottom of the stairs merely led to the Vault proper, where the aisles were laid out in the same clocklike fashion Baz remembered, with the Fountain of Fate spilling into the heart of the Vault, acting like the center of said clock.
But the shelves were older, more sacred, in a way.
The tomes they held looked like they were about to disintegrate.
There were shelves covered entirely in scrolls of parchment that Baz did not recall seeing in his time, making him think they must have been moved in the next two hundred years, or perhaps had been lost to time.
Clover brought them to the S aisle, at the entrance of which stood a replica of the Fountain of Fate’s statues of the Tides: Bruma, Anima, Aestas, Quies, all standing back-to-back.
“I thought there was supposed to be a spiral staircase here,” Baz whispered to Kai, remembering how Virgil and Nisha had described the entrance to the Treasury.
“Maybe it was built later?” Kai suggested.
They watched as Clover stopped in front of the statue of Anima, the Waxing Moon Tide.
A spiral was carved in the palm of her outstretched hand.
At Clover’s touch, the statue began to slowly spin on itself, stone grumbling beneath it as it unveiled an opening at its base.
And there beneath their feet was a spiral staircase that wound on and on in the dark.
A faint turquoise light was the only indication of there being something at the bottom.
Clover met their gaze. “Let’s hope this worked.”
They descended the steps and came into a large circular chamber carved from stone.
This was exactly as Virgil and Nisha had described: sixteen throne-like chairs carved into the stone walls, one for each tidal alignment.
In the middle of the grotto was a basin into which the water from the fountain high above them spilled, the sides of the pool adorned with carvings of the moon’s phases.
The turquoise light they’d seen came from the bottom of the pool, refracting prettily on the walls around them.
There was no door that Baz could see, nothing that resembled the Hourglass or a way to get to it.
But he felt it—the magic of Dovermere close at hand, pulsing rhythmically like the beating of a heart.
It was faint, as if it had just awoken from a long slumber, hidden as it had been behind the wards.
The thrum of magic seemed to come from the glowing pool.
Baz froze when he spotted the body. It floated in the pool, face down and eerily still.
He knew who it was even without seeing his face, recognition shocking through him as he took in the curly hair, the half-moon glasses left at the side of the pool.
They’d found Thames after all.