Chapter Twenty-One
The Wishbone
‘A method of edging a piece with an angled stitch that is both pleasing to the eye and secures against fraying and unraveling.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
The Pontiff had not been lying, as it turned out.
Baldbeak and I made our way down, down, down into the bowels of the Pontiff’s palace, the air growing danker and colder the lower we went.
I don’t like it, said Baldbeak, shivering his feathers.
“I know. I’m sorry.” I reached up to pet him. “Look at it this way—you’ve been dead. It can’t be worse than that.”
Dead was just … nothing, Baldbeak said. No darkness.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Do you want to stay above and wait for me? I would understand.”
No. He clicked his beak and did not speak again as we descended, but I felt the tension in the clasp of his claws.
The entrance to the catacombs, when we reached it, was old—older, perhaps, than the city of Mirthwater itself.
Some ancient people had hollowed the tunnel from the smooth, darkly gleaming stone and carved decorative pillars into its sides, but those pillars had long crumbled to little more than outlines.
A glim burned on the wall, casting everything in an eerie light, and I took it down so I could see more clearly.
There were suggestions of shapes carved in bas-relief into the walls—creatures of some kind, I thought, with the remnants of eyes and legs frozen in active movement. Too many eyes, and too many legs.
And then there were the doors.
I looked up. And farther up.
Clearly the designs on all the Temple doors had been modeled after this one, but on a smaller scale, as these were immense—thirty feet high, at least, made entirely of bone. I couldn’t even identify all the bones stacked to create the doors themselves.
At the center, they formed the shape of a spine with more vertebrae than any real backbone had in life; long and sinuous and beautiful, marking the division between the two panels.
About two-thirds of the way up was a stylized ribcage.
If you squinted, the whole thing looked like a great skeletal bird flying overhead, seen from below, with the spine serving as the length of its body and tail, and the ribs like great wings stretching to either side.
Baldbeak flew from my shoulder and perched on one of the bones, his feathers startlingly dark against the aged white.
His claws made an odd, hollow click against it that echoed through the cavernous room.
I stretched out a hand and touched the knobs of the “spine,” feeling them smooth and cool under my palm.
I knew that the bones were long dead, but there was a thrum of life still in them, deep in the marrow—a memory of life.
I could almost imagine that if I pressed my hand into the door, it would give way beneath my skin, and I could touch that strange, pale force. It called to me as thread called to the needle: asking to be used. Asking to be woven into something entirely new.
I pulled my hand away. My palm stung when I removed it. Was it my imagination, or had it adhered to the bone, just a little? I looked at my hand, and saw it was red and raw, as if I had held it too close to a fire. It did not hurt, but it throbbed with warmth and energy.
Are you all right?
“I’m fine.”
We had to get in, but how did you open the doors?
I looked around everywhere I could reach and saw nothing—just the elaborate sculpture, bones on bones on bones.
I craned my neck to look upward. In the center of the ribcage design was a dark spot—the only point of blackness in the ivory. I looked at the bone key in my hand.
“Right, key,” I said aloud, feeling foolish. “Time to be a different shape. Please,” I added, just in case bone magic cared about manners.
This time, there was no hesitation. The bone wriggled in my hand like a maggot, startling me so that I almost dropped it, before shaping itself into a new pattern of ridges and teeth. Was it my imagination, or had it somehow also grown larger?
“Baldbeak,” I hissed, holding it gingerly between my thumb and forefinger in case it started writhing again. He raark-ed at me and flapped down from his perch, gripping my shoulder and nibbling my ear affectionately. I held up the key for him to grasp in his beak.
“Can you fly up there and put it in?” I asked.
Of course.
Baldbeak launched himself from my shoulder and flew up to the keyhole, moving his beak awkwardly to angle the key and edge it inwards until I heard the click of contact.
I was about to ask him if he could swivel it, not sure if his beak would be capable of the feat, but before I could voice the request, he gripped the bone with his claws and tilted his head, laboriously turning the key in the lock.
He pushed away just in time as the doors began to grind and move.
Clearly they had been weighted just so, expertly hung to swing open as soon as they were unlocked—I remembered Bertram’s lecture on the subject at the East Temple only vaguely.
I watched as they yawned inward, revealing a gleaming corridor built entirely of bones.
The stuff of nightmares. At least, it should have been.
I felt a thrill of recognition, however; a shiver somewhere deep in my being.
With Baldbeak back on my shoulder, I made my way slowly forward, swinging the glim from side to side to illuminate the walls in detail.
The lower part was made up of rows of long bones placed horizontally.
As I looked farther up, these gave way to skulls, wedged together in grinning fellowship, while the ceiling above was packed with long bones again, vertically placed, forming an arch overhead.
Behind us, the great doors swung shut again with a crash that nearly made me jump out of my skin.
Sound behaved strangely in here. Any noise Baldbeak made was ghoulishly amplified, and my footsteps rang from the walls so that I could have been a whole army marching through the place—but I was on my own.
On my own. No Patrick or Dwale, no Mieka, no Book Man to come to my aid. I truly was alone.
Baldbeak nipped at my Hair, as if reminding me of his presence.
“Yes, I know you’re here,” I said, reaching up to rub his beak. “And I appreciate that. Thank you.”
The tunnel came to a fork. Bone-lined passages wound in two directions. The catacombs were a labyrinth, I knew, and it would be all too easy to lose myself in them. How was I to find Mother’s book?
“Any ideas?” I asked Baldbeak. His answering raark bounced from bone to bone until it sounded like all the grinning skulls were laughing at me.
I remembered the sensation when I had laid my palm against the door, and in the Corpse Roads, when the bone-riddled earth had responded to my touch.
Of life, buried deep. Of memory. Whatever bone magic there was within me, however it had gotten there, it recognized itself in this place. Bone called to bone.
I knelt against one of the walls and pressed both hands against it. I felt it again—that same low thrumming, like the sound of an underground river, or a carriage rumbling on a distant street, but it was coming from within me and without all at once.
“Do you feel that?” I asked Baldbeak.
Yes.
So it wasn’t just my imagination. Show me, I thought, trying to press the words into the bones.
I was pushing so hard against the wall that my own bones showed white through the skin on the backs of my hands.
As I screwed my eyes shut and willed the skeletal walls towards myself, I imagined my bone needle pushing against fabric: something bulky and resistant, like leather, perhaps. I imagined it piercing through.
“Please,” I whispered.
I felt a great sigh, a yielding. I overbalanced a little, and my heart thudded. It felt as if I would have passed right through the wall if I had fallen into it. It had that sense of give.
The low vibration changed in pitch, now coming very clearly from one pathway and not the other. I stood, brushing the bone fragments and dust from my skirts, and started to walk, but the sense of surety faded. Puzzled, I touched my hand to the wall and immediately felt it again.
“So I have to be touching you,” I said. “All right.”
It should have felt strange to be talking to a wall. It was remarkable how very not strange it actually felt. Baldbeak and I continued together through the catacombs, turning this way or that depending on what my fingertips told me.
I felt rather like I was following a fine thread spooling out in front of me and behind, marking my path and drawing me inexorably forward to … something. The book, I hoped. But something was calling me, undeniably.
Strangely, I was very calm. I felt the same sense of timelessness and quiet absorption that I felt when embroidering a design. Baldbeak was silent, hunched and vigilant on my shoulder, staring straight ahead as we walked.
The imaginary thread led me to a cavern, different from the others we had passed.
For one thing, there was only one way out—the tunnel through which we had entered.
It was a perfectly round space with an arched ceiling, every surface set with ivory bones.
The curve of the walls and ceiling gave the feeling of being inside a gigantic eggshell.
Large sarcophagi lay at intervals throughout the room, carved with frowning, bearded men wearing crowns and holding swords in the hands they clasped at their chests.
The effigies were painted gold. It wasn’t hard to guess that this was the Tomb of Kings.
Shiny, said Baldbeak approvingly.