Chapter 25 #2
Hefertus’s boot drew back and kicked, and for a moment all I saw was black and all I felt was pain. I forced myself to stay aware through the pounding in my head. I must not lose my grip on my sword. I must not lose consciousness.
My mouth was full of warm iron. I spat blood. My face was on fire.
“Suture will bring her, and Cleft has the dog,” Sir Coriand said calmly, as if he routinely kidnapped other paladins with the help of his golems. “If you would be so good as to carry your friend. He deserves more honor than a golem can offer and we’ll be sure he’s safe enough in the trial to come.”
“Of course,” Hefertus said, and I could hardly blame him. Wouldn’t I do the same myself if I’d discovered a friend was hiding a demon from me?
The golem holding my ankles began to walk, swinging me side to side with his long strides. I wiggled in his grasp, trying to catch sight of what was happening.
Hefertus collected Adalbrand’s unconscious form and shot me a death glare as he slung the man over his shoulders. Behind him, Cleft carried Brindle by the foot. My dog yipped and growled, sounding desperate and panicked.
Well, isn’t this a treat. Paladin versus paladin and not a one who wants to be near you, demon consort.
He laughed long and haunting in my mind as I blinked back tears of frustration, carried to a fate I did not want and had not chosen.
The golem’s strides sent me heaving back and forth, an angry pendulum.
I tried to twist to see what the locked door might reveal, but Suture carried me with my back to the door.
Instead, I had a good look at the clock.
Our cups were slotted in place in an odd pattern I didn’t have time to analyze.
What worried me was that they still glowed slightly with an eye-twisting dark light, as if with a power untouched by the God.
We passed it in a moment and found the open door. Cleft went through before me and in my mind, the demon roared out the translation to the next verse of the poem. Or the prophecy. Or the spell. Whichever it may be.
No power is priceless,
No honor unearned,
From storehouse bring wisely,
Add gift to the churn,
A sacrifice given,
An offering made,
What no longer serves you,
Is the price you must pay.
Oh lovely. More sacrifices. I gripped my sword hilt doubly hard, wondering if I’d be able to fight upside down with my feet anchored. If there were sacrifices required, I had a bad feeling that they’d be happy to be rid of me. I would not go like a lamb to slaughter.
And what about Adalbrand? He was in no position to be dragged into a fight. I hadn’t expected those golems to surprise me — a terrible oversight, to be sure. I should have known better. It was always the quiet ones.
Well, not always. I knew a man once who sang while he burned cities. He wasn’t quiet at all.
And I hadn’t expected Hefertus to turn on me after he’d sworn to stand with me.
Yes, well, you didn’t exactly tell him that he was making an alliance with two knights, one paladin defuncti and one demon vivius.
Cute nickname, rotting corpse. I think I’ll call myself Vivius from now on.
There was a sigh in my brain that sounded as world-weary as I felt.
But there was no time to explore any of this. We rounded the curved hall and came out into the great room, and even from my view — upside down — it was spectacular.
When this room had been carved from the rock, someone had said, “I want a vaulted ceiling and a vaulted floor. Make me islands of bleached white skulls of every creature you can find and the spines of great fish. Then splash some purple light around. You know. For mourning and repentance. And don’t forget the books.
There should be lots and lots of books. Shelves.
Stacks. You know, every way you can think of to include books is what there should be. ”
Just like in the previous room, someone had drilled holes in the ceiling, but half of these had been fit somehow with purple glass and the light shone down half purple and half white.
In our liturgy, purple was the color of mourning. And my heart was mourning with the purple. I was mourning that eleven paladins had entered this place and only one seemed to still have his honor intact, and that one was being borne into this place whether he willed it or not by a silent servant.
I love this place entirely. Do you know what it is?
If it was a library, it was a terrible one.
The curving walls of the cylindrical vault were lined with books, books, and more books on shelves innumerable.
But how anyone would access them, or how they could possibly read them all or even find what they were looking for, seemed like an impossible task.
There were deep grooves between some of the shelves, but they were too far apart for steps, and wove too strange a track for a moving ladder.
Some spiraled high into the shelves above, others dipped low below and still others wove through the center, crossing at times.
The books were shelved between them, positioned to adjust to the widening and narrowing of the space.
Since some were higher than my forearm and others as short and narrow as my pinkie finger, there were no shortage of volumes for every space.
Even so, the uneven shelving only added to the general look of chaos.
At least the books had been preserved. By all rights, they ought to have crumbled away to nothing in the centuries since the monastery … demonary? … was lost to the world.
It’s a grimivior.
That was entirely unhelpful.
Like a holy repository but the opposite, I would think, my girl.
No, no, that makes it sound so dull. It’s a reservoir, like a place to hold a great deal of water, only this is a reservoir for grimoires — books of demonology and the teachings of the arcane. And the swell and rise of the mortal understanding of all things finds its climax here.
So it was a room of evil. And writings about evil.
Overly simplistic, as always, snackling, and that is why you are worth nothing but to be devoured whole. Who are you to discount Viscoth’s Soul Anatomy or Corthasasm’s Holy Dissipation or even Fragralot’s The Debauchery of the Nine Saints and the Siphoning of Secrets Closely Held?
Based only on the titles, it occurred to me that if I were to light a candle and set it against those shelves, that act alone might elevate me to Sainthood.
Ha! That’s adorable. Look down.
It was hard to look down when I was hanging upside down.
Much easier to look up into the complicated silver-edged buttressing where the shelves ended in the distant shadows of a wealth of fish skeletons large enough to swallow a whole horse.
Easier still to view the central pillar that rose up in the middle of the cylindrical room.
It was white and thick with carved statues of men and women who were half human and half creature.
They were layered one above the other and all of them reached upward with hands and mouths as if waiting for the heavens to feed them …
or screaming in despair, perhaps. I understood the sentiment.
Oddly, the pillar did not contain books.
I tried to crane my neck to look down and only caught a yawning chasm of ghastly books falling away as far as the eye could see.
Exactly. They drilled to the heart of the rock. And what did they find down there in the bones of the earth?
The world was built in the bones of the God. Maybe that’s what they found.
Or is it built on the sediment of hell?
Fear quickened within me — partly in horror at his proposition, but mostly because Suture had shambled to the edge of the drop and was holding me over it. Emptiness yawned beneath me. And possibly so did the sediment of hell or whatever we’d just been talking about.
Breathe, Victoriana.
Breathe, my girl. Easy, steady breaths. Fear is not your friend today.
Friend or no, he was bent on having me.
Not before I do. No fear for you, little sweet. You are mine to devour.
Well, at least I was popular among the things that wanted to kill, rend, and tear.
Sooo popular.
The cliff edge was ringed by little walkways that were a touch more narrow than I’d like, and each one ended at an island.
I turned my head to the side and realized the walkways were more like arms and the arms fit into the slots between the shelves.
The ones that looped and wrapped every which way.
So they accessed the shelves in some way, then.
That’s nice. Maybe I’d get to see them operate before I dropped to my death.
The islands were ringed with railings, contained their own stacks of books — of course — and at the center, each one bore a small altar woven of bone.
On each altar were candles. Unlit. But candles all the same.
The same magic that preserved this place must have preserved them, too, or vermin would have eaten them centuries ago. There were dozens on each altar.
“When you’re all on an island, I can throw the switch and it will begin,” Sir Sorken called out, pointing at a complicated mechanism attached to his island on the far end of the semicircle.
I tried to trace the way the mechanism reached to each platform but I found it too hard to follow from where I hung.
Sir Sorken leaned casually beside the switch — if that was what it was — and beside that was a handle attached to a gear, carved to look like leaping fish within delicate sprays of water rather than a practical machine. Of course.
“I think it’s important to balance out the weight,” Sir Sorken announced.
“Just a theory, but possibly an important one when we dangle over a drop, hmm? Set the Poisoned Saint on his own platform, Sir Hefertus. I left room down at the end for him and the Beggar, but you’re the heaviest and I need you in the middle. ”