Chapter 26 Rhiannon
RHIANNON
The first key—from Magnus’ office—was easy enough to use.
Nothing even remotely strange happened when Eryx fit it to its lock and pushed open the heavy door to the basement.
Of course, it felt as though we were in the rising action of a propagandist’s film about haunted houses, but that was the point of those films, after all. To make humans fear the dead.
To make humans fear death itself.
So that when a solution was offered, they would be ravenous for it.
It was all so obvious now. Blaire would sell immortality, damn the consequences. Apprehension rose in my chest. I feared we were too late. It felt like we’d been out of time for far too long.
Eryx went first, then me next, with Lara bringing up our rear guard.
The basement was, at first, exactly what I would have expected.
Dark, musty, and uncomfortable. Though the last was more because something odd was happening between Lara and Eryx.
Or rather, he seemed ill at ease around her, while she was doing that thing where she smirked too much.
Cardboard boxes moldered in unstable stacks, giving off a sour smell that turned my stomach.
Was it only damp, or was there something else that caused the basement to smell so bad?
This wasn’t, as far as I knew, a common element to spaces where the world of the living bumped up against the underworld.
I wished Calypso were here to ask, as it didn’t feel like the right time to ask Eryx.
I was suddenly shy. He had been to the island. He knew what I was: a revenant. A monster, made, not born.
To distract myself, I glanced back at Lara, who grimaced as she pried a stack of boxes very gently away from the wall. A corpse fell out from behind them, oozing bright white maggots, oleander flowers springing from the rot.
“Disgusting,” Lara muttered, as flowers burst from the rotting corpse. Her lips pressed into a hard line. There were no more smirks now. She was at her best, sharp as a finely honed blade.
I frowned. For a moment, oleander was all that was left of the corpse and then hemlock and white roses bloomed around it. I felt nothing associated with Cassandra attached to the vision of this odd bouquet. “Does it feel like Cassandra to you?”
“No,” Eryx murmured, crouching down. “Spirit auras are like a signature. This isn’t her doing, it’s someone else.”
“What does the oleander stand for?” Lara asked. “In floriography, I mean?”
Eryx rose from his crouch. “It is a warning to be cautious.”
Lara was onto something. My mind jumped ahead of me. “What about hemlock?”
Eryx raised an eyebrow. “Death. It’s the most common floriographic symbol of the Necroline Dynasty.
” Lara and I both nodded. “But it is interesting—paired, hemlock and oleander, I mean—they would literally mean: beware death. But there’s an older tradition, one that dates back to human cults of Tanith. ”
He stared at the spot on the floor where the rotting corpse had been, frowning.
His eyes slid to me. “There was a combination of hemlock and oleander that loosely meant to beware the union of Tanith and Amarante—not literally of course, their union is considered a blessing—but more the emulation of it. To beware the creation of eternal life, you would add a rose, a white rose.”
I drew in a slow hiss of a breath. It had been there the whole time. I’d seen the roses over and over, rather than the oleander. The house, the dead, they’d all been trying to warn us. It hadn’t just been Cassandra. I only had one question left. “Do the dead experience time as we do?”
Lara’s eyes widened; though she didn’t know the details of why the roses were so important, she obviously followed my train of thought. Eryx shook his head. “No, and though we don’t know exactly how it works, Necroline scholars have always thought that the dead might see into the future.”
They had known what might happen. The dead had known, and had tried to keep everyone who came here from finding the door to the underworld. These were not the condemned dead.
These were the restless, the unquiet—the dead who still loved the living and who had wanted to protect them from the doors to the netherrealm opening, to protect them from the island’s cloistered magic. From its secrets of eternal life.
And Blaire knew all of that. He knew the power of the white rose, and he wasn’t going to the island for the scrolls or the frescoes. He was going to the one person still alive who could wield the magic it would take to create immortality. Blaire was going to take my mother.
“We need to hurry,” I said. “Blaire means to kidnap the queen. This isn’t about stealing the knowledge, or the process. He’ll get her to give him eternal life.”
“Everything Cassandra warned me against,” Eryx murmured. He shook his head, staring at the floor. The whispers had gone quiet. Now that we knew what the dead did, they had nothing left to say.
Eryx turned slowly from where the flowers had grown out of the corpse, his eyes tracing the wall behind him. I knew the look on his face by now. He saw or sensed something we did not.
“What is it?” I asked.
He startled. “Give me the key.”
My chest was heavy, something constricting with each breath I took. I handed him the key. He took it from me, staring at my fingers for a long moment as they brushed his. His jaw clenched.
Something inside me paused. It wasn’t my breath catching, or my heart stopping. It was something else. Some essential part of me that reached out for some essential part of him. I wanted to know why he was upset, what he heard that I didn’t. I wanted Lara not to be here right now.
As he took the key from me, I glanced back at her. Had she said something to scare him? She winked. Amarante take her, she was a pain in my ass. I would have to deal with that later.
Right now, Eryx had pressed the key to a spot only he saw in the wall, and a door began forming out of nothing.
“Magic,” Lara whispered.
I nodded. It could be nothing else, and seeing magic manifesting here, in Orphium, was unsettling.
When the door had fully materialized, Eryx pulled the key back and handed it to me. “I think you should open it. Cassandra left this for you to find.”
His words hit me harder than I might have expected. My aunt had looked ahead. She’d seen me. The dream I had, the day on the beach. That had been real.
Somehow, I’d slipped through time, and Cassandra had known that I would end up here.
That was before she’d fractured her ability to See.
It was the day she’d had the vision of her own death.
She’d known what would happen and she’d still tried to stop it.
She’d tried her hardest not to die, and lost her memory of the island instead.
It was more than I could bear to think about as I slid the key into the lock.
I twisted it, and the door opened to a dimly lit, arched hallway. The whispers increased in volume as we stepped inside, our footsteps creating hollow echoes down the long hall. This felt like the old world, the places that the Authority wanted humans to forget.
What I first assumed to be carved limestone immediately revealed itself to be the bones of the dead.
The spine of the arched hallway was crafted from the vertebrae of Orphium’s fallen, the walls encrusted with skulls barely peeking out of the plaster, their prominent eye sockets all that showed.
The dead whispered from within the hollowed-out windows to their souls.
But this time their words were not a terror or a mystery. They whispered benedictions ancient as the stars. Blessings on our path, wishes for our safety. The dead here were not frightening souls. They loved us, they wanted us to succeed.
As we moved further, the benedictions turned to warnings. To cautionary tales. The skulls embedded in the wall appeared to emerge, to seek out life. Our footsteps echoed amongst their howling alarum.
Lara, Eryx, and I moved in closer formation, as the warnings changed to whispered laments.
Now, the skulls were not just skulls. They were skeletons in various states of assemblage, looking as though they fought to escape from the plaster, their bony mouths gaped open in screams. The sounds of their massacre, entombed for eternity. It was a gruesome path to walk.
A reminder that the dead were us. That we were the dead.
That someday, most would join them. But not the Maere.
Never us. We couldn’t die here, or anywhere, and that scared me more than anything.
Lara glanced back at me, the same bone-deep exhaustion that lived in me hollowing out her eyes.
I was not the only tired one. I’d seen that same expression on Ember’s resting face dozens of times.
Eternal life was killing us, but we could not ever truly rest. We’d given that up when they killed us with our own swords. If we had known this was the price, I doubt any of us would ever have paid it. Regret that we had not found another way filled me, weighing down each step.
The sound of the dead’s terror grew in intensity as we reached a crossroads of sorts, an opening in the way.
Five spirits in corpse garb materialized in the doorways to other paths as we stepped over the threshold into the crossroads.
Eryx threw an arm out, pushing both Lara and I back into the tunnel we’d just come through.
Lara opened her mouth to protest, and I knew what she would say—that he didn’t have to protect us that way.
It was easy to forget we couldn’t be killed, but I didn’t think that was why Eryx had stopped us.
He spoke in a low, almost guttural tongue—the vox spiritus, but also another language I didn’t recognize.
The syllables of the dead were lyrical. I could hear the rhythm of the words, though I couldn’t understand them.