Chapter 14 The Party That Wasn’t
The Party That Wasn’t
Ididn’t see Graham anywhere nearby after Forsooth left.
It occurred to me that I still held the goblet he’d given me, although I hadn’t taken so much as a sip since he first handed it to me.
Now I drank down a few swallows, and the liquid burned down my throat, but also managed to calm me enough that I took a deeper breath, gazing around at the clusters of people loitering in the rough vicinity of the fountain.
A lot more people had arrived at Forsooth’s party by now.
I mostly saw faces I recognized from Grathrock, and now the Valarian dining halls, but a number of older students were there, too, presumably as dates or crashers.
A handful looked between me and in the direction Forsooth had just gone, which made me think our little tête à tête had piqued a few people’s curiosity.
I didn’t really care right then.
My mind was buzzing about the conversation itself. I was positive I hadn’t misunderstood any part of Forsooth’s careful words. He’d invited me to a group investigating Dark Cathedral, likely working completely outside of official channels.
Could I trust him, though?
My instinctive answer was yes, of course I could trust him. My aunt’s memories of Forsooth before she died remained crystal clear in my mind, especially the way he’d looked at her while questioning her fitness to be guardian to two hybrid children.
Yes, I could trust him. More than most, I strongly suspected.
I only wished Alaric was around, so I could talk to him about it.
If he had been, I wondered if Forsooth would have invited him to the meetings, too.
Regardless, Forsooth’s invitation was the closest thing to a real lead I’d been offered so far, and I wasn’t about to refuse it.
Forsooth as much as said they were looking for Alaric, and looking into his disappearance, and he had to have more resources for that than I did.
Maybe they’d even attempt to intervene with Lord Greythorne to bring him back.
I could still attempt to eavesdrop over the course of the night, see if I could learn something that way, but it no longer seemed like a particularly worthwhile risk to push my attempts too far.
I could listen without risking being caught with elaborate spells meant to probe more deeply into their magic or minds, especially that of the royals.
And really, the royals were the only minds that interested me at that point. I’d already likely gotten as much as I would from the rest of the second years.
Which meant I was now at a party, with very little I needed to be doing.
I downed the rest of the goblet, tilting back my head.
I thought about Alaric, and how afraid of their fathers both Alaric and Bones seemed to be.
Would Lord Greythorne really hurt his own son?
Would he kill him, if he saw him as some kind of traitor or direct threat to his “Project of Worlds”?
Just how bad were the Bones and Greythorne patriarchs, really?
One of Forsooth’s vortices opened directly in front of me.
I didn’t think, beyond being faintly relieved for the distraction.
I barely looked at what lived on the other side. I glimpsed red-gold light, what looked like sunlight streaming down through dark fronds of green and black. Gold snakes with flicking tongues hung from branches that framed the edges of the opening.
I stepped through with the empty goblet still clutched in one hand.
I’d expected daylight, despite the nighttime where I was, because of the reddish-gold glow.
It wasn’t daylight that greeted me.
I stumbled into a cavernous, underground space, feeling off-balance as I landed on a much different stone floor than the one I’d just left behind. I gazed up at a ceiling so high, I questioned whether the walls around me ended anywhere at all.
The reddish-gold light turned out to be fire.
Flames rose up out of a stone, square pit in the center of the floor.
A black plume of smoke tunneled upwards in rippling spirals.
I glanced over my shoulder at a long, stone passage that led down to the chamber where I stood.
A strip of night sky shone at the end of that steep ramp, filled with so many stars it scarcely looked real.
It wasn’t real, I reminded myself. This was all a construct, a testament to Forsooth’s magic, his ability to bend light and infuse it with living presence.
Eye of Ra, it looked so real, though.
Detailed carvings decorated the stone to either side of the doorway, next to tall statues of Anubis and Osiris, and what looked like an Ancient Egyptian king.
I was in an Egyptian temple.
I scanned the rows of hieroglyphs, wondering if these vortices were puzzles as much as artificial environments to explore.
It would be so like Forsooth to send us somewhere to teach us something, or to test our skills.
Unfortunately, I could only read a handful of the hieroglyphs, not enough to guess the temple’s exact purpose.
I stepped closer to the flames, and a green circle appeared on the stone floor, marked with black symbols.
A man walked into my sight, appearing out of nowhere.
He wore only a loincloth, a mask, and a long, beaded belt.
The mask covered his face and head, and I guessed it must be Osiris from the green skin, painted eyes, and curved beard.
His muscular body shone in the firelight as he held up a large stone bowl.
I was still staring when he poured the contents of the bowl over his chest and shoulders.
The red liquid ran down him in thick, stringy clumps.
It was blood. Worse somehow, the blood looked dead to me. It smelled dead.
I stumbled back a few feet in my high heels.
The man didn’t seem to notice me at all.
He set the emptied, blood-streaked bowl on a low table by the fire, fell to his knees, and pulled a curved knife from his belt.
He began chanting out words in a low, gravelly voice.
As his voice grew louder, the colors of the fire changed from red and orange to gold and green.
The fire doubled in height, and the masked man chanted louder.
As his chants reached a kind of peak, he began carving hieroglyphs into his own chest. I stared, horrified as he cut nearly an inch into his own skin and muscle. I saw the muscle pull the flesh open, even as something in the knife blackened it.
The smell of burning flesh filled my nose.
It must have hurt him, but the man didn’t flinch or cry out. His voice grew harder, more guttural. Magic swirled around him, filled with increasingly detailed images.
I glimpsed bloody sacrifices, murders in the swirling smoke, battles, swords clashing, beheaded enemies, the ground soaked with blood.
Worse than any of what the smoke showed me, I realized I recognized the marks on the man’s chest. They were the same hieroglyphs I’d seen glowing under Bones’s skin when his magic overloaded.
The realization made me feel even sicker.
Had someone done this to him? His own father? Had Lord Bones mutilated his son with his own hand, or had he simply ordered Bones do it to himself?
The man finished his grotesque carvings.
Gripping the knife, he began to chant louder, holding up his arms.
Blood ran down his hands, wrists, forearms, chest, and abdomen.
Magical images continued to form in the smoke and, increasingly, the same man’s face appeared.
I saw him driving a chariot, his sword flashing in the sun.
I saw him stood over bloody battlefields, streaked in blood, perfumed and lounging inside pavilions, decked in gold and draping robes, bathing in stone pools, having sex with a servant in a bed with white sheets, eating at a long table, riding in a boat decked with flowers down a long, blue river.
The chants grew louder, more harsh, more fierce.
Something new began to materialize in front of him.
A falcon-shaped container appeared out of nothing, manifesting on the same stone table as the empty, blood-streaked bowl.
It began to shake and vibrate as dense smoke and light formed into the face and body of the same man I’d seen in the visions, only he looked much older now, with pitted, glowing, gold eyes.
My mind went to the ritual my aunt had attempted on me, the one where she’d meant to put my great-great grandmother’s spirit or soul in my body.
The parallels suddenly felt disturbingly close.
I began walking forward, closer to the man covered in blood.
I’d nearly reached his side, when a flash of light behind me caused me to turn.
Graham Strangemore stepped through a vortex opening, laughing, holding two drinks in his hands. The image of him there, obviously more than a little plastered, was so incongruous with the priest with the Osiris head and the blood, I could only stare at him in bewilderment.
When he landed on the stone floor, the scene around us abruptly reconfigured.
I watched the priest with his mask and carved, bloody chest vanish.
The green circle, the falcon urn, the curved knife, and the gold and green flames rippled out of existence. The pyramid and its temple vanished, too.
I bit my tongue, fighting a scream of frustration.
Everything had disintegrated in a puff of smoke, and I couldn’t even say why I wanted to call it back.
It was an illusion, after all, a chimaeric fantasy.
The scene I’d witnessed came from Forsooth’s mind, not mine, and not from anything that happened between me and my aunt.
Knowing that didn’t change anything about how I felt, or lessen my rage at having the whole thing snatched away before I could make sense of it.
All I knew was, whatever I’d been witnessing, it felt important.
It felt like the answer to a question I hadn’t known to ask.