Chapter 2
Two
Galileo
Dakari races up the stairs, a limp and bloody Kyrith cradled in his arms. Concern for her pulses through my veins, urging me to join Jasper, Eddy, and Lambert and follow him.
But I’m frozen. She’s breathing. Living.
A woman made flesh for the first time in centuries.
Stars only know how that’s even possible, or what that will mean for her.
I take a step in her direction, then hesitate.
I’m in the Vault.
She’ll never let me down here again. This is my one chance.
I don’t know what I imagined, but the reality is infinitely more impressive. Purple flames cast shadows so deep that the room seems to sprawl on forever in every direction. Maybe it does.
A person could get lost in the vastness of this place. Surely somewhere on these shelves there has to be a cure to the red mark pulsing on my skin. Yet, hot on the heels of that certainty comes a dose of cold, painful truth.
Even if the answers to my affliction are down here, the odds of me finding them are a million-to-one. The only person who’s been alive long enough to read all of these books and scrolls is Kyrith.
Without her, all of this knowledge is meaningless.
The golden dagger lies in a pool of her blood on the cracked stone floor. North takes a step towards it, and I realise belatedly that I’m not alone down here. I shove my arm out to stop him.
“Don’t touch it.”
That’s a powerful magical artefact. The kind that’s normally kept under lock and key by the parriarchs.
Between that, the altar, and the spire looming over this atrium, we’re surrounded by dangerous magic.
He ducks beneath my arm, ignoring me as he picks it up with his bare hand. Eejit.
“I already did, remember?”
Unfortunately, it’ll be a good while before I can forget the sucking sound of the knife drawing free of Kyrith’s chest, and the geyser of blood that followed it.
It’s the stuff of nightmares.
I take two steps closer, carefully skirting the crater in the floor Lambert made when he decided to jump instead of taking the stairs. He scared the bejesus out of me, but I understand why he did it.
The idea of Kyrith down here, alone and terrified, makes my jaw clench so hard that it aches.
The ruby in the dagger’s pommel glimmers as North raises it into the light. It matches the scarlet of Kyrith’s blood still smeared across the etched blade. Is it… pulsing?
What the…?
“We should leave it here,” I caution, as he wipes the weapon on the hem of his shirt. “The Vault is well protected.” I hold my hand out for it, and North hesitates. “That thing cannot leave this room.”
We don’t know what it does, but it must be connected to Kyrith and her miraculous resurrection. Magic only knows what would happen if it fell into the hands of someone like his father, or worse, the Carltons.
North shrugs, pretending disinterest as he hands it over. My gut twists viscerally the moment my skin makes contact. This blade thuds with its own heartbeat, something that shouldn’t be possible and yet…
I turn on my heel, returning to the monstrous altar of black and gold granite.
The thing is carved with so many runeforms it would take weeks to decipher them all.
The cuffs attached to it are still open, and the top is coated with a mixture of Kyrith’s blood and shards of crystal.
There are six intricately decorated grooves around the edges, and it takes a second for me to realise they’re inbuilt bookstands.
That’s where the parriarchs of so long ago rested their grimoires while they went about the gory business of murdering her.
The one closest to me is as good a place as any to leave the dagger with its disturbing heartbeat. It chinks as I set it down. I can’t help but think, ‘good riddance.’
Now that I’ve touched it once, I never want to again.
“Come on,” I tell North. “Let’s get upstairs before the Arcanaeum kicks both our asses on Kyrith’s behalf.” He looks around at the shelves, and I grimace. “If you’re thinking of searching for Ackland’s grimoire, you’d be looking for a needle in a haystack. Besides, she said it wasn’t down here.”
“You’re right,” he mutters. “Fuck. Where would I even start?”
I don’t think Kyrith was ever concerned that he’d find it. Now that we’re here, it’s abundantly clear the Librarian was only trying to hide one thing; her tomb.
Thighs burning—because damn Eddy was right about there being too many stairs—I follow North, grumbling silently as the eejit takes them two at a time like it’s nothing.
I really need to get back into the gym. I was religious about it before the curse activated, stupidly clinging to the adage that a healthy body meant a healthy mind, and therefore a better chance of figuring my way out of this mess.
But I haven’t been taking care of myself properly in recent weeks.
Now all of my muscles are protesting the sudden workout.
“If she died down there, how’s she alive?” North asks, annoyingly peppy for someone also scaling this accursed stairwell.
“Necromancy.” I try to hide my wheeze, but I’m not successful because the bastard slows to one stair at a time.
I want to believe that he does it because he’s struggling too, but he hasn’t even broken a sweat.
I hate him for it.
“So she’s like a zombie?” He makes a face as he looks back at me, and I pause.
“No. No, she’s not.”
Necromancy is the art of life-energy manipulation. It made sense that her soul was tied to the Arcanaeum when she was a ghost. That was close enough to liches tying their souls to gems to gain eternal life that I could put the ‘how’ of it down to my lack of knowledge around a very taboo subject.
Reanimating a corpse is technically also within the purview of a necromancer.
In the books, they were called revenants.
Magic like that can make their limbs move, and occasionally force them to speak, but not much more.
A soul is shoved inside the body to make it into a puppet, but the higher functions leave with death.
They don’t breathe. Their hearts are silent. They’re blank slates, bent to the will of the one who raised them.
Kyrith was definitely breathing and responding to us, and judging by the way her blood splattered everywhere, her heart was definitely beating.
She’s not a revenant.
I don’t know what she is.
“What if she was never dead?” I ask aloud, not expecting North to answer.
“For five hundred years? Wouldn’t she look a little older by now? And what about the ghost thing?”
My next huff has nothing to do with being out of breath. He’s making valid points, even if he doesn’t have a clue what we’re talking about.
We finally reach the Rotunda and pause to heft the trapdoor closed. The screech of rusted hinges rakes down my spine, and I rotate my jaw to clear it.
“I don’t know,” I finally say. “Hopefully she’s recovered and can tell us what just happened.”
“I don’t think she meant to come back,” North mutters as we head down the long hall towards the stairs that will take us to the parapet and across to her clock tower.
No. Neither do I.
Hindsight’s a bitch. Kyrith asking me to protect the Arcanaeum, her practically begging us to just watch the game in peace like it was her last one, her kissing Lambert when she knew it would crack her… All of those little moments were the actions of someone preparing for their end.
She knew what it would do to her, but did she even spare a thought for what it would do to him?
“He’ll be wrecked,” I bite out. “Stupid, selfish—”
A hand fists my sleeve, dragging me to a stop in the middle of the hall. “Shut it. You don’t know what she was going through.”
Blinking in surprise, I meet his angry golden stare with my own. “You’re defending her?”
North releases my arm. “Look, I get it. Suicide seems selfish from the outside, but it’s more complicated than that.
It’s like…” He shrugs. “They can’t see the good they bring to the world anymore, or that they have much left to live for.
They honestly think everyone would be no worse off without them.
It takes a lot to convince them otherwise. ”
The defeat in his tone makes me pause. He’s been going through a lot since Josef showed up in his life, and even though he’s a dumbass with a temper, he’s not bad company most of the time.
Deflating a little, I ask, “Are you speaking from experience or…?”
He swallows and looks away. “Not mine.”
Ah. It’s fairly safe to assume that he’s talking about Eddy. She’s the only other person he gives a shite about.
“The hospital?” They can be pretty soul-sucking places.
He looks away. “Yeah. She felt like she was a fucking burden or some shit. I told her she wasn’t.
But…yeah.” He gives another heavy shrug.
“Easy to say the words, harder to make her believe them, I guess. Josef was holding her cure over my head, and overnight, her life went from partying every week to a brutal cycle of endless hospital treatments. The doctors couldn’t let her leave, and a handful of kind nurses couldn’t fix it… It was tough.”
“Yeah. I can imagine.” I pause, not knowing what the feck else I can say.
“She got help,” North finishes lamely. “Obviously she had to keep some stuff secret, but it was good for her to talk about it. Someone impartial who could see all of the self-blame she was piling on herself, then help her dismantle it.”
Lucky for her.
A lot of arcanists who become therapists won’t treat ó Rinn patients. I’ve never worked out if it’s because of the ever-present cloud of doom that tends to hang around us, or the risk of falling victim to the curse.
Probably both.
The reminder puts my hackles up. “At least Eddy didn’t try to use Lambert to end her life.”
I turn away so he can’t see the guilt on my face and start walking again.
“True,” he agrees quietly.