Chapter Nineteen #3
Silas began leading her away from the monument and through the square. They passed a group of policemen clearing out people from tents in an alleyway.
“Best not to stare,” Silas said. “The attention of the constabulary is the last thing we need tonight.”
“Will you at least tell me where we’re going?”
“Right this instant? There,” Silas said. He nodded ahead to where Charing Cross rose above the buildings around it.
“The train station? Going for a trip into the country, are we? A romantic getaway?”
Silas smiled. “Not quite. Come now.”
Silas led her across the street and toward the train station.
They took a left at the door, however, instead moving down a side alley.
A construction site waited for them, roped off, covered in warning signs.
Silas looked over his shoulder and ducked under the rope.
Then he lifted it for her and extended a hand.
“What are you doing? It must be dangerous or it wouldn’t be roped off.”
“If you wanted safety, you could have stayed locked in your room. Are you coming?”
Elswyth ducked down, following him. They maneuvered through a series of scaffolds until they came to what appeared to be a hole in the ground. A single ladder led into the darkness below. Silas began to climb down it.
“Where are we going?” Elswyth asked.
“On an adventure. Come on,” he said.
“I cannot climb a ladder in a gown! Not when you are beneath me,” she said. She tapped her foot expectantly.
Silas paused on the ladder. “On my honor, my lady, I wouldn’t dream of looking anywhere inappropriate. And if it is any consolation, I already saw your knickers this morning.”
Elswyth scoffed, folding her arms.
Silas rolled his eyes and shrugged—an eminently charming gesture.
“My lady, I have traveled the world three times over. I have been in the dancing harems of sultans and among tribes where the women wear no clothes at all. I have seen more interesting things in my day than a pair of bloomers. Really, Elswyth, if you want to be a scholar, you will eventually find yourself in the field. How will you traverse a rainforest if you can’t even climb down a ladder? ”
He extended a hand to her, waiting expectantly. She sighed and then took it. “Fine, but after this, I want to see your knickers.”
“All you had to do was ask,” Silas said. Even with him beneath her, she could hear the smile in his voice. She lifted her skirts and began climbing down the ladder after him.
Elswyth climbed until her foot found the dirt. She steadied herself, trying to assess her surroundings. In the meager light, it looked like a long tunnel, stretching in either direction as far as she could see.
“Silas… where are we?”
At that moment, a small light appeared in front of her. It quickly illuminated the room, and Silas with it. He held a slender elderwood branch, carved into the shape of a wand.
“What? Not all of us can fabricate elderwood on our own. It’s remarkably difficult, you know, for us casual floromancers.”
Elswyth inspected the wand and then raised her hand, sprouting an identical stalk of elderwood from the veins in her wrist. With a little vitae, it glowed even more brightly than Silas’s.
He sighed. “And now who is cocky, Miss Elderwood?”
She smiled. “You did ask for a floromancer. I don’t suppose I am here to be a glorified lantern, am I?”
“Oh, but you are bright,” Silas said. “Our task lies this way. Come.”
He set off down the tunnel, and Elswyth followed, pouring vitae into her elderwood wand. The walls around her were rough-hewn dirt and paving stone. Tools littered the ground, left from the day’s work. “What is all of this?”
“Haven’t you heard? The city is planning on putting trains beneath the ground. It’s been in the works for years now.”
“Trains beneath the city? To where?”
Silas led her deeper into the tunnel as the walls grew rougher and the ground more crooked.
Rats scurried in the shadows. He shrugged.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. It’s going to replace omnibuses one day; you’ll be able to take a train from Mayfair to Spitalfields.
Soon, the whole city will run on iron and coal, and trains will run like veins of metal beneath the skin of the earth. Ah. Here we are.”
Silas stopped, raising his elderwood wand. To their left, a second tunnel branched off from the first. This one was smaller, older. The walls were made of cobblestone, and the floor was compacted dirt. Water dripped from the ceiling into foul-smelling puddles.
“Of course, there were some unintended consequences. Old tunnels that were discovered, going all the way back to the Romans, and to the Celts before them.”
Elswyth lifted the hem of her dress, hurrying after Silas. The tunnel around her was indeed ancient. It smelled of cold water and musty rot, of dirt and stone and shadow. “And how did you learn about this, Silas?”
“The city government invited me, naturally,” he said. “They needed an archaeologist to examine the tunnels, determine what was worth preserving. And that…”
Silas raised his elderwood wand, casting its glow over the tunnel.
“Is when I found this.”
Elswyth’s heart jumped. Just before them, half-shrouded in darkness, was a gateway—an arch built entirely from human skulls.
Their dark eye sockets looked down at her, waiting, empty. Jaws lay open, hanging from withered ligaments. Fragments of bone made mosaics around the gateway, and through the tunnel, she saw that the walls, too, were made of bones: femur and tibia, spine and skull.
Elswyth stepped forward. The skulls stared back at her with black, empty eyes. “What… what is it?”
“Catacombs. Uncovered when the crews came through digging tunnels for the underground trains.”
“Yes, but who were all these people?”
“Victims of a blight, centuries ago,” Silas said.
He began walking forward, under the skull arch and deeper into the tunnels.
Elswyth followed him, examining the skulls as she passed.
It seemed as though they went on forever, to where the light from her elderwood wand did not reach.
Thousands of skulls, stacked on top of each other to create walls.
Here and there, alcoves appeared, with stone altars speckled with long-dead candles.
What made her most curious were the mushrooms. They were pale white, whiter even than the ancient bones.
They sprouted from empty eye sockets and open mouths, seeming to feed off the bones themselves.
In one alcove, a complete skeleton lay huddled as though sleeping, with mushrooms growing from its ribs.
“Fifth century, I believe—skeletons from a time when people believed that eldren still walked the earth.”
“Blight. The same blight that struck ten years ago?” Elswyth said. She neglected to mention her mother, or her scar.
Silas shrugged. “Doubtful. Monastic texts from the era claim that this blight made the dead walk again. Nonsense, really.”
To her right, a patch of mushrooms pushed its way through a broken skull, stretching its jaws open in an eternal scream. “Let us hope so…” Elswyth said.
Eventually they came to a circular chamber. Above their heads, a dome of earth curved, vaulted with bones and glowing roots. She realized then that it was the base of an enormous elderwood tree, seen from below. The glowing roots wove through the earthen dome above like buttresses.
Other than that, the chamber was empty—save for a single door.
It was a door of carved elderwood, although the glow had long since faded.
What remained was polished and ghostly white.
Shards of bone were embedded in the wood, forming geometric patterns and mosaic-swirls.
At the center of the door was a lone skull, its mouth open, holding a knocker. A grim mascaron.
“And here is where I need you,” Silas said.
“What is it?”
“Some kind of floromantic lock. If I’m right—and I believe I am—this will take us where we need to go.”
Elswyth stepped toward the door. Above them, elderwood roots glowed brightly, leading toward what appeared to be a central trunk. The lighting of the elderwood roots snaking through the dome above allowed her to see the door clearly.
Elswyth put her hand on the elderwood door and pushed. It didn’t budge.
“What makes you say it’s floromantic?” she asked.
“I may not be as talented a floromancer as you, but I can still use my floromantic sense.”
Elswyth sent her awareness through her hand into the wood of the door. It came back to her, a vision in orange light. But still, just a door made from dead wood.
“I don’t sense anything unusual.”
“Here,” Silas said. He took her hand and then placed it on the knocker. The warmth of him shocked her, the feeling of his coarse palm on hers. He stood so close that she could feel the tickle of his hair on her face.
Elswyth sent her floromantic sense through the knocker.
Vitae went outward, gratefully accepted by the ancient door.
The wood of the knocker was still alive.
Her vitae disappeared into the skull and flared out, mapped in orange light.
Roots spread from the knocker throughout the door and wove through the walls all around it, keeping it sealed.
“I can’t work the elderwood well enough to open the door. I figured that, perhaps, one of your talents could.”
Elswyth suppressed a smile. She never wanted to be overconfident, but she did enjoy it when her talent was recognized.
The fact that it was Silas doing the complimenting, well…
that didn’t mean anything. She reached in with her floromantic sense again, felt where the roots reached into the earth, and then pulled.
The mechanism of the lock began to turn as roots slithered back into the door, untethering it from the surrounding stone. Dust plumed from the hinges. By the time Elswyth released the knocker, her heart beat rapidly.
Silas threw his shoulder into the door, forcing it to open all the way. He grunted, and when the door finally gave, something crashed on the other side.
“What was that?” Elswyth asked.
Silas disappeared through the crack in the ancient door.
Elswyth followed, squeezing into the opening.
They came into a pitch-dark room, but Silas had already produced his elderwood wand.
Dim light illuminated a pile of wooden boxes and broken clay.
Shards of it lay smashed on the floor, scattered amid more crates, all of them stuffed with vases and tablets.
“I imagine it was some very priceless pottery,” Silas said. His wand cast light around the room. A hallway lined with endless dust-covered shelves stretched before her.
“What is this place, Silas?” she asked.
“I did say something was stolen from me, didn’t I? We’re where the Empire keeps all its stolen things.”
“And where is that?”
“The museum, of course.”