“He’s barely conscious. He wouldn’t survive the death glimmer.”
Oswald looked on David with pity. “You are strong, David. You’ve had your challenges and overcome them. Let others have that same chance.”
“There’s a difference between letting people learn and letting people die. He’s not strong enough for this. He’s got so many eidolons they’re draining him faster than he can replenish his energy.”
“You’re right. There is a difference between letting people learn and letting them die. There may even be times when letting them die is the correct choice. The difficult thing for us is learning where that line is.” Oswald looked at him. “I leave this decision up to you.”
“Then I’m going.”
Oswald nodded.
David tapped his fingers on the armrest of his chair, then looked up again. “And, sir?”
“Mmm?”
“What about the girl, Arabel?”
“What about her?”
“Do you really think it was an accident, her breaking into the vault?”
Oswald adjusted his glasses. “I do.”
“Can I ask why?”
“The door was built by her mother. The mother she doesn’t remember. I believe it called to her.”
David’s eyes widened. “Is that possible?”
“Serafina Fossey was a very unique person. A good person. She would want us to think well of her daughter. At least until she gives us real cause to think otherwise.”
David ran a hand over the back of his neck, nodding as he dropped it back into his lap.
“I understand. Thank you, sir.”
9
Arabel hadn’t even looked at the piece of parchment with her chores written on it. She’d just shoved it into a pocket. But, after finding her way back down to the courtyard, she pulled the crumpled paper out of her pocket.
Sweep the new tower.
Arabel’s gaze traveled up the looming black edifice. What, the whole thing?
The dining room had almost completely emptied out by now. Three guardians remained, sitting around one of the tables, their plates empty in front of them, arguing loudly.
They stopped and stared at her as she approached. One was pale, with thick dark hair sprouting on his arms. The second was heavily tanned, with pale eyes and leathery skin. The third was covered in actual burns. The burned one grinned in a lopsided way; he was missing an eyebrow.
“Is this the new tower?” she asked.
“That depends on who’s asking.” His grin widened.
The pale man rolled his eyes. “Yes, it is.” He glanced at the parchment in her hand. “Broom’s leaning against the wall in the kitchens. Other side of that door.” He pointed. “I’m Marl.”
“Most important man here,” the burned man said.
Marl rolled his eyes again. “I keep the cellars.”
“He brews the beer.” The burned man winked.
“And fine vinegars.”
“Right. That too. Vinegars. Everyone loves that.” He turned to Arabel. “I’m Rody, the smith.” Ah. That explained the burns. “The quiet one’s Walt.”
“Nice to meet you,” Walt said softly.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Arabel said. “I’d better get going.”
“Stay away from any locked doors!” Rody called after her, chuckling. Arabel blushed. News traveled fast. These people were worse than girls at court. She hadn’t even done anything. It wasn’t her fault the door had been left unlocked.
She had swept for a few minutes when she bumped into David coming up the stairs; he gave her a friendly wave but stopped when he saw the look on her face.
“What’s up?”
Apparently her face was an open book and whatever she was thinking was obvious to everyone around her. Excellent. “Nothing.”
“Er, all right. Well, I’m heading out on a patrol. I’ll probably be gone a week or so. Good luck with Naomi.”
“Thanks.”
“Um, and look, I’m sorry I was weird last night. And this morning. Oswald trusts you and so do I.”
“I haven’t even done anything,” she shot back. “I was just wandering around. I hate Cecil just as much as the next person. I didn’t ask to be sent here and I have no intention of playing along with whatever plan he has. You saw me when he told me I was coming here. Did I look like someone who was in on some giant conspiracy?”
“No.”
There was more to her rant, but she cut it off, seeing his face harden. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re right. I should be apologizing to you.”
“You were apologizing to me. Until I started yelling at you.”
He grinned. “Yeah, well, maybe I deserved it.”
“No, you didn’t. Hey, when it says, ‘sweep the new tower’…” She held out the piece of parchment.
“Ouch.” He grimaced. “Yeah, that’s a fun one. It means exactly what it says.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “What, the whole tower?”
“Yeah. Well, the inside, obviously. But all the floors. Not peoples’ individual rooms, though.”
“Of course not.”
“Hey, I’m not sure what you see as an OK place to go unsupervised. Better to err on the safe side.”
“Offending me isn’t necessarily the safe side.” She grinned.
“Yeah. Definitely talk like that if you want people to trust you.” But he grinned back.
She waited until he was a few steps away, then surreptitiously watched him over her shoulder as he strode down the hall.
Sweeping was dirty and slow work. She was pretty sure she’d used a broom before, but it had been a long time and it definitely wasn’t something she’d done frequently. She kept sweeping into the pan, then noticing little lines of dust, and no matter how many times she swept it up, the little line of dust never went away. It just got fainter and fainter.
She was sweeping the landing near her own room when she heard sobbing. She paused, then inched slowly around the staircase until she came to the spot where the crying was loudest. It was a raw, hopeless guttural sound that conveyed such a deep despair she could barely stand to listen to it.
She was now standing in front of the door marked ‘Alistair’. The sobbing continued, so he hadn’t heard her approach, hopefully. She considered. If she were crying in there, she wouldn’t want anyone to come in. She would want no one to hear her or know that she had been crying. But the sounds this man was making were so deeply despairing it seemed intensely cruel to leave him alone with whatever it was. She leaned the broom against the wall and lifted her hand, preparing to knock.
But, no. He probably wanted privacy. He was in his room. With the door closed. If he wanted to talk, he could go find someone to talk to. Or cry in public. Arabel bit her lip. Maybe she could go find Avery and send her up here on some pretext. Avery would make the right decision, hearing someone crying like that. She would probably know whether to try to comfort the person or not.
Arabel lowered her hand. The crying inside stopped, and there was a creak as someone got up from the bed. She stood there, hearing him move about the room, then she realized with horror that he was probably going to come out here any minute and see her standing there listening to him cry.
She lunged around the corner, then, remembering the broom, lunged back, grabbed it, sprinted as quietly as she could back to her own room, fumbled with the lock, and ducked inside just as the door to Alistair’s room clicked open and he came out. She heard him start down the stairs and breathed a sigh of relief.
She waited a few moments, still clutching the broom, until she was sure he was gone, then went back out and hurriedly finished sweeping. Sounds of people arriving for lunch echoed up the stairs. She returned the broom to the kitchen and went to look for Ferne and Charlotte.
10
After lunch Naomi collected them and led them across the courtyard, into the old tower. They took the staircase down this time, plunging into utter darkness. Ferne’
s hand gripped Arabel’s shoulder as they felt heir way along, until a dim light grew ahead. As they came around a final bend into a cavernous open space, Arabel lifted her eyebrows.
They were perched on a landing high above an enormous room extending three stories down. The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves. Red-carpeted landings darted in and out, connected by stairways. Three stories below, an enormous clear glass cage glowed brightly, illuminated by a bright shaft of light blazing from the bottom of the staircase.
“Where’s all the light coming from?” Charlotte asked.
“It’s the oculus,” Avery breathed, her pale hands gripping the railing as they stared down at the glass enclosure.
“The what?”
“A tunnel, running from the roof of the tower all the way down here. There’s a system of parabolic mirrors on the roof that collect the sunlight and aim it down here,” Avery said.
“What’s wrong with oil lamps?” Ferne muttered.
“Seems like a lot of work,” her sister added.
It did, but it was also incredibly beautiful. Arabel leaned over the rail, trying to get a better look. Fragments of color sparkled up through the glass enclosure, which took up nearly the whole bottom floor.
A bridge suspended from the ceiling took them across to another landing where Naomi stood tapping her foot. When they had all joined her, she led them past rows and rows of bookshelves, down three different staircases, up a third, and finally down a fourth. They found themselves standing in front of the glass enclosure, looking up at the light streaming from the tunnel that ran through the spiraling staircase, up the whole length of the tower. The enclosure was twenty feet wide and about fifteen feet tall. The insides of the glass were fogged; tiny beads of moisture ran sparkling down the walls.
Naomi grasped the silver handle of the door to the enclosure, edged in wrought iron, and pulled it open, ushering them inside.
Arabel stepped in, warm moist air hitting her face. The enclosure was empty. The colors she had seen from above came from the image of a many-petaled flower sunk into the floor, done in colorful marble tiles, each less than a quarter inch on a side. The petals were each a single color, and divided into segments, each a slightly different shade of that color. She was standing on a segment of the yellow petal that said ‘serenity’. She stepped onto the next segment, a slightly darker yellow, which read ‘joy.’ She took another few steps and then stepped down again onto ‘ecstasy’. Past ecstasy, there was a central white circle, then an opposing blue petal read ‘grief’, which stepped up to sadness and then pensiveness.
Naomi stood in the center, where the multicolored petals joined at the lowest point. Moss grew in places between the tiles, and below Naomi’s feet Arabel saw what looked like a drain. For cleaning? She glanced up into the light. A faint breeze touched her face. Wait. Was that open to the outside? Did they let rainwater down here? Into the middle of a library? She lifted her eyebrows. Interesting choice.
“Welcome to the library,” Naomi said, directing her words to Ferne, Charlotte, and Avery. She nodded towards the edge of the room, outside of the enclosure, and Arabel realized there was a person standing there. A tiny woman with high-heeled shoes, carrying a large stack of papers. Ferne and Charlotte examined the shoes appreciatively. The woman, her whole body tense, stepped sideways so that she disappeared between two shelves. “That is Maureen, our current librarian. Over the years, various librarians have made attempts to categorize all the eidolons ever discovered. We keep records of each one we capture, each one every guardian reincorporates.
“There have been attempts over the last two thousand years,” Naomi continued, raising her voice, “to categorize the pieces of soul that people are most likely to shun. The first you can see on the floor here. The eight-pointed star shows four pairs of opposite emotions. Joy opposed to sadness, and so on. Each level represents a different intensity to the emotion. The more intense emotions create correspondingly stronger eidolons.”
Arabel’s mind began to drift, wondering when they were going to get to the actual fighting.
“Today you will be familiarizing yourself with our various systems for categorizing the eidolons,” Naomi said. Avery gave a little hop of happiness.
“What?” Arabel said. “When are we going to learn to fight them?”
“You can’t fight what you don’t understand,” Naomi said. “Fighting an eidolon is about subtlety. About self-knowledge. Not about hitting things with swords.” She turned to the rest of them.
“In two weeks, you will take the initiation test. In it, you will attempt to earn the death glimmer.”
That sounded more interesting.
“What’s that?” Charlotte asked.
“Many thousands of years ago it was discovered that eating the sap of a certain flower increased one’s sensitivity to the eidolons. It also increased the flow of connection between a person and their eidolon so much that it could be seen as a visible path. The first people who ate this flower did not know what was happening to them. They were imbibing a much weaker version than the one we use now, and it’s likely they only saw the occasional glimmer of light. Those who followed it came upon their eidolons and were usually killed. For this reason, it was called the death glimmer, and for generations there were stories told about it. Some people saw it as a way to test one’s strength, because those who came back were stronger, more whole, and ended up living longer and more meaningful lives. Those who took the death glimmer and did not follow the path died within a year.
“If you pass the initiation test, you will be given the death glimmer. It will help you in your training, give you a stronger connection to not only your eidolons, but all eidolons. At that point you will have a year to complete your training and attempt your Rite of Integrity.”
“Or it kills you?” Charlotte asked.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“As I’m sure you know,” she glanced at Arabel, “there is a connection, a thread of energy, that exists between every person and his or her eidolons. This energy is a drain, and shortens one’s life, but only slightly. The death glimmer increases this flow enough to make the path strong and clear and easy to follow, leading you straight to your eidolons. But it also increases the drain on your life energy. Eventually causing death.”
“Cool,” Charlotte said, examining her nails.
“Today,” Naomi said, “you will read those.” She pointed to five stacks of papers that had materialized on a table just outside the enclosure. “And then you will begin an assessment of your own eidolons. You’ll stand on every colored segment of this floor, one by one, and call to mind the times you have felt the emotion it represents. You need to familiarize yourself with the various emotions, the different intensity levels and nuances of each, and in particular how you yourself experience that emotion, if at all. Any emotion you cannot experience is likely an eidolon. I want a list of your possible eidolons by the end of the session.”
Arabel glowered.
“Master Albury?” Ferne asked.
“Yes?”
“What were your eidolons?”
Naomi stared back at her for several seconds. “One was an intense dislike of people asking me personal questions.”
Ferne looked confused, was about to ask something else, but her sister elbowed her in the stomach.
“All right, get to work,” Naomi said, crossing her arms over her chest.
For the next three hours they read through the incredibly boring histories of the various types of classification systems. Arabel fell asleep twice, Avery nudging her awake each time when she started to snore.
Avery finished first and enthusiastically began working her way around the points of the star. Charlotte and Ferne divided up the reading and each only did half, then did the same. Arabel stared at the pages long enough that she might reasonably have read all of it, then made a show of standing on the variously colored tiles. She hoped they’d get to the real work soon.
11
A week passed, and every day Naomi brought them to the library and forced them to memorize some new emotion categorization system. She had begun testing them on the systems, too, and punishing them with extra chores if they didn’t pass, so Arabel was forced to actually pay attention.
“You’re back late,” Avery commented one evening as Arabel came through the door to their room. She was hunched over her desk, writing something. Arabel peeked over her shoulder and saw lines of neat, tiny letters.
Shaking the rain off her cloak and throwing it over the back of her chair, where it landed on top of the growing pile of dirty clothes, Arabel shrugged. “Am I?”
Avery glanced at the brass pocket watch she’d hung by its chain over a nail sticking out of one of the beams at the top of the wall. “I mean, yes. Dinner was what, four hours ago?” She returned to her writing. “Sorry, didn’t mean it to sound like I was interrogating you. Just making conversation.”
Four hours? Really? It hadn’t felt like that. Had she really been wandering around for four hours? She’d gone to the cellars, that much she remembered. For several seconds the only sounds were the scratches of Avery’s quill pen and the drip of muddy water off the sodden end of Arabel’s cloak. “I was just out wandering around.”
“Cool.”
A bell began ringing in the distance, first low and quiet, then picking up its tempo until it clanged out a furious, heavy toll. There were shouts and the sound of someone running up the stairs, then a fist pounded on their door.
“Everyone up, now!”
Avery and Arabel exchanged glances; Arabel moved for the door but it was thrown open before she could get there.
Marl, the pale guardian who kept the cellars, half-dressed with a cloak thrown over loose pants and no shirt, started for the next door over, motioning for them to follow.
“Come on—I said now.”
Avery leaped up and followed, only taking a moment to replace the stopper in her inkwell before hurrying after him. Arabel, her eyes narrowed, followed more slowly.
The Eidolons of Myrefall Page 7