by J. A. White
“Lucas?” Kara asked.
“I’m here.”
She brought the shell close to her lips and whispered, “I’m sorry I got you involved in all this. You found your family. You were happy. And I ruined it.”
“Rygoth ruined it. Besides, I wasn’t that happy.”
“Why not?” Kara asked.
Before Lucas could respond the waves crashed loudly in her ear and were immediately followed by an empty silence, the distance between them finally too much for even magic to undo.
After a short walk through a jostling crowd, the octagonal gates of the Forked Library loomed in front of them.
“Sablethorn must be right below us,” Kara said. She laid a hand on the stone pavement, as though she could feel the heartbeat of the forgotten school.
“Why bury it?” Safi asked. “Why not just knock it down altogether?”
“Because they couldn’t,” Kara said. “Sablethorn was built by Minoth Dravania himself. It was his pride and joy, protected by all manner of powerful spells—that’s what Sordyr said in his letter. The king wanted his people to forget that magic ever existed, but he wasn’t able to destroy the school—so he buried it and hoped that as the years passed people would forget there had ever been a school there at all.”
“Which they did,” said Safi.
“But on the other hand,” Taff said, “Minoth wouldn’t want any bad witches to ever find Sablethorn. There’re probably all sorts of secrets inside. That’s why my rabbit broke! There’s a spell protecting Sablethorn from being found by magic!”
“But even if this place is still there,” Safi said, “how do we get inside? Was there anything in Sordyr’s letter?”
Kara shook her head. “The library was built after Rygoth transformed Sordyr into the Forest Demon. As far as he knew, Sablethorn was still standing.”
“If there’s any sort of entrance, it will be in the basement,” Safi said. “Since the school’s underground, that only makes sense.”
“Does it?” Taff asked. “The king wanted to destroy Sablethorn. That was the whole purpose of the Forked Library. Why would he build a way to get inside of it?”
“You’re right,” Kara said. “The king would have never built an entrance. But I don’t think that Minoth would have allowed his beloved school to just vanish forever. There’ll be a way.”
Taff gasped with excitement.
“A secret passageway!”
Kara saw the idea of hinged bookcases and dark tunnels glowing in her brother’s eyes. She took his hand and they started toward the great doors. As they neared the entrance, however, Kara realized that Safi had not followed them.
“What’s wrong?” Kara asked, making her way back to the girl.
“What about Rygoth?” she asked, her hands nervously clutching at her skirt. “You were warned not to save your father. She’ll know. She always does.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I’m scared.”
“You have nothing to worry about. Rygoth needs you.”
“It’s not me I’m scared about! It’s you and Taff! Maybe if I went to her she would leave you alone like she said. . . .”
Kara knelt so she could look straight into Safi’s eyes.
“Don’t talk like that. We’re going to get through this together. Got it?”
Safi gave a brief, unconvincing nod. Kara wanted to say more but Taff, lingering along the edges of what he sensed to be a private conversation, finally lost his patience and interrupted them.
“Could we go already?”
A few moments later, the three children passed through the giant doors.
Kara knew, of course, that the library was an imposingly large structure, but nothing prepared her for the complexity of how this massive space had been used: four iron stairways winding upward to the other towers, floor hatches opened by red-robed librarians balancing stacks of books beneath their chins, a multitude of steel doors that held the threat of even more areas to explore, labyrinthine shelves stacked with books, more books than Kara had ever seen; more books than she thought could possibly even exist.
It was a forest, a kingdom, a world.
Kara loved it.
Knowing that a place such as this could flourish amid the chaos of the city filled her with a strange sort of hope. No, not hope. Gratification. She had always believed that beauty could be found everywhere, in even the unlikeliest of places, and here was all the proof she needed.
Kara longed to explore the upper towers, but that wasn’t why they were here; the entrance to Sablethorn would be located beneath them. They descended ladders and staircases, each floor more poorly lit than the one before it, until they found themselves in a section of the library packed with dust-covered volumes that looked as though they hadn’t been read in eons. Occasionally the group would be forced to slip into the shadows to avoid a passing librarian, but other than that they had the entire floor to themselves. After being thwarted by a few dead ends they found an unusual iron door with no knob or handle. There was, in fact, no way to open it at all. Next to the door stood an ancient stone tablet with boxes, circles, and seemingly random lines carved into its surface. Kara thought they might be letters, but if so, they were unlike any letters she had ever seen before.
“It looks old,” Safi said. “Really old. Maybe this is written in a language that nobody uses anymore.”
“It might tell us what’s behind the door,” Kara said, running a finger over the mysterious grooves. “Or how to open it. But that’s no help if we can’t—”
With a sudden shout of excitement, Taff swung his sack to the floor and began digging through its contents. “I know what to do!” he exclaimed. After tossing a dozen toys to the library floor—wooden paddles, a recorder with three extra holes, red yarn tangled into a misshapen ball—he finally found what he was looking for: a long kaleidoscope painted with colorful shapes. The beads sealed in its interior rattled together as Taff raised it to his eye and looked at the stone tablet.
“I found some old books in Kala Malta,” he said, slowly twisting the outer cylinder on the end of the kaleidoscope. “Nobody remembered how to read them, but Mary taught me how to use this kaleidoscope.” He twisted the cylinder clockwise, grunted, turned it in the opposite direction. “It can change any language into something you can read.” He was turning the cylinder so slowly now that Kara could barely see it move. “It’s just a matter of finding . . . the right way of looking . . . There!”
“What’s it say?” Safi asked.
Taff hesitated, slowly forming the words with his lips. The kaleidoscope had done its job translating the ancient words, but for Taff the most difficult part still remained; reading was one of the few things that had never come easily to him.
Kara squeezed the back of his neck.
“Take your time,” she said. “Do the best you can.”
A few minutes passed. Safi paced back and forth impatiently. On the floor above them Kara could hear the muffled footfalls of librarians and patrons.
Finally, Taff spoke.
“It says there was a ‘black sickness’ while the library was being built,” he said. “Many workers died. Their bones are sealed in a crypt past this point, but no one can enter here because they can still catch the disease.”
“I guess this direction’s out, then,” Safi said.
Taff shook his head, smiling.
“Don’t you get it? This is Minoth’s doing. He knew he couldn’t stop the king from burying his school, but he didn’t want all his hard work to be lost forever, so he created this ‘sickness’ to scare people away from the lowest level. And once they were scared away, I bet he built a passageway from the library into Sablethorn. This Minoth guy is smart.”
“How could he build an entrance by himself?” Safi asked. “It would take hundreds of workers to do something like that.”
“Minoth was a powerful wexari,” Kara said. “He could do it.”
“Or there really is a disea
se down there,” Safi said.
“Let’s find out!” said Taff.
He removed the wooden hideaway from his sack. Using the penknife, he filed away a fingernail’s length of the door’s surface and placed it in the box.
He closed the lid and opened it again.
They heard a muffled thunk from the other side of the door as something heavy dropped to the floor. The door creaked open with a loud grating noise. They entered and shut the door behind them. Their new location was pitch-black, so Taff removed the ball that Mary Kettle had used to guide them through the Thickety and tossed it up and down until it began to emit a soft blue glow. They were in a narrow tunnel of stone, as though they had stepped out of the Forked Library and into some sort of cave. At Kara’s feet lay a steel bar as thick as a plank of wood.
“Look,” she said, pointing to L-shaped brackets driven into the stone just beyond the outer edges of the door. “The bar was holding it shut. It would have been impossible to open from the library side—without magic, at least.”
“And no skeletons,” Taff said, raising the ball high enough to reveal the entire tunnel. “That whole disease story was made up.” He grinned at Safi. “Told you.”
At the end of the tunnel was a second door, almost identical to the first one. Taff opened it. Beyond this lay a circular room, empty save for a single hatch at its center. Just like the other doors, the hatch lacked a knob or a handle. Taff used the hideaway, and they heard something fall from the other side of the hatch, followed by a longer-than-expected silence before it crashed to the surface.
“There’s a drop on the other side,” Kara said. “Be careful.”
Gripping Taff’s shoulder for balance, Kara stomped down on the hatch door. It fell open, releasing a geyser of stale air. They peered into the darkness, Kara holding Taff as he lowered his ball of light as low as he could reach. They saw the iron bar that had kept the hatch locked lying on top of a red surface, the drop not nearly as far as Kara had thought.
“I’ll lower you two down first,” Kara said. “Then I’ll just hang down and drop. Easy.”
She started with Taff, since he had the light. Just as she was about to lower him into the darkness, however, his eyes narrowed, as they did whenever an interesting thought popped into his mind.
“Who locked all these doors?” he asked. “It had to be done from the inside, and they wouldn’t be able to get back out again. They’d be trapped down here forever.”
“That’s horrible,” said Safi.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kara said. “Whoever it was, they’re long gone by now.”
She hung over the edge of the hole and lowered Taff gently into the darkness. Safi went next, landing awkwardly on her ankle but with no serious harm done, followed by Kara herself. The roof was surprisingly small. She peered over its side. Taff’s light revealed a wall of giant rectangular stones that sloped downward in a widening series of steps.
“It’s a pyramid,” Kara said.
But neither Taff nor Safi seemed to hear her. They were too busy gazing up, mouths agape. The earth and stone that made up the foundation of the Forked Library lay just above them, suspended in the air, some sort of invisible force keeping it from crushing the building beneath it.
“What kind of magic is this?” Safi asked.
“Wexari magic,” Kara said. “The most powerful kind.”
They found the entrance easy enough, a plain wooden door that did not even require Taff’s hideaway to open. After descending a long set of stone stairs, they entered a wide hallway lined with doors. Suddenly they could see. There were no torches, no glorb-lights (though Kara supposed that the last time Sablethorn had been open, glorb-lights hadn’t even been invented yet). It was as if the school, recognizing that there were visitors, had breathed light into the very air itself.
Taff slid the magical ball back into his sack.
“What now?” he asked.
Kara was suddenly giddy with excitement. We’re in Sablethorn! After reading Sordyr’s letter time and time again the place had taken on a mythical quality in her mind. She longed to explore every room and learn its secrets.
Except there wasn’t enough time.
“We need to find where students used to enter Phadeen,” Kara said. “That should take us right to the Well of Witches.”
“Any helpful information in that letter of yours?” Safi asked.
“Actually, yes. Sordyr said the entrance to Phadeen happened to be on the lowest level of Sablethorn.”
“‘Happened to be’?” Safi asked.
“Those were his exact words. I thought them strange as well.”
“More stairs,” said Taff. “Swell.”
The hallways were wide and lined with countless doors. Kara imagined hundreds of students pressed together, making their way to their next class. Unlike De’Noran, magic would not be forbidden but a never-ceasing topic of conversation.
It must have been wonderful.
“Why isn’t this place falling apart?” asked Taff. “It’s been buried underground for the last two thousand years.”
“They used magic to preserve it forever,” Safi said. “Maybe they hoped that one day Sablethorn could be opened again.”
“Or maybe they just loved it,” said Kara. “Sometimes it’s that simple.”
There were no cobwebs, no scurrying insects. The floors weren’t even dusty. Kara opened a door, wondering if she might see students still sitting inside, their curious expressions frozen in time. All she saw, however, were rows of desks and chairs, and something that looked like a large glass sphere in the center of the room.
“Whoa,” said Taff. “What’s that?”
Kara closed the door.
“I have a feeling that if we start investigating these classrooms we’re going to get very distracted. Let’s stay focused.”
At the end of the hallway they reached a large stairwell that wound its way down to an open area, presumably the lobby. Safi found two gigantic red doors—the main entrance—and opened them to reveal packed dirt held back by the same magic that kept the Forked Library from crushing the roof. Painted directly on the wall across from these doors was a portrait of an odd-looking man wearing a green robe. He had no hair or eyebrows, and a dark birthmark swelled across the left side of his face like a half-completed mask.
The stone below the portrait was engraved MINOTH DRAVANIA, HEADMASTER.
“He’s not what I expected,” Taff said.
Safi shrugged. “He has to look like something. Why not this?”
They passed a few statues on marble pedestals, the names unfamiliar to Kara but presumably famous graduates of Sablethorn. Her favorite was a woman named Azorean, who rode a giant wolf while brandishing a wooden staff in one hand. The children passed through a large archway into a long dining hall. Circular tables were still set with empty plates and silverware. Fire pits had been dug into the walls. From a black stand in the center of the room hung a cauldron so large that any sort of cooking would require the stepladder that rested next to it. A painting of the dining hall covered the back wall, giving Kara an idea of what it must have been like here: hundreds of students packed into the benches, some talking quietly amongst themselves, others with books stretched open before them. Green-veiled figures poured water into goblets and ladled out food.
Kara’s heart sank.
“Remember what Rygoth said about not wanting to wear a green veil?” she asked. “That’s what she meant. Those who failed the Sundering became servants! They weren’t even allowed to show their faces!”
Kara didn’t want to even consider the possibility that Rygoth might have been right about something, but the thought of a student being punished with a life of servitude seemed . . .
She heard footsteps.
The sound came from somewhere above them, carrying well through the empty halls. Boot heels clicked against the stone floors. More than one person—maybe two or three. Getting closer. Luckily, the dining hall was dimly lit,
with plenty of places to hide. Kara pushed Safi and Taff toward the back of the hall and folded herself behind the cauldron stand; she wanted a position close enough to see their pursuers as they passed through the archway. The footsteps grew louder. Kara heard Safi remove the grimoire from her satchel.
They waited.
Against the far wall of the hallway came two shadows stretched as tall as giants. Kara was reminded, momentarily, of the darkeaters back in the Thickety, and then the twins from Rygoth’s tent stepped into the light. They shared a single grimoire, held open between them.
Kara turned, her back pressed against the cauldron. She was certain there was no way the twins could see her, not from their current position, but she tried to keep her breathing as quiet as possible. At the back of the hall she saw a pair of green eyes peeking out from beneath a table and waved her hands frantically: Not yet, not yet! Don’t cast a spell! Perhaps Kara was wrong, perhaps a surprise attack would have been the best plan, but the idea of engaging the twins in a magical battle terrified her. Out of all the witches in her army, Rygoth had assigned these girls to guard the entrance to her tent and then follow them to Sablethorn. Clearly Rygoth felt the twins were special. Kara had no desire to learn why.
She risked a peek and saw that the twins had entered the dining hall. All their attention was focused on the grimoire, which was good, because when Kara looked back Taff was crossing to a wide door at the rear of the hall. Hiding behind a nearby table, he motioned for them to join him. It was a short distance for Safi but still a risk. Kara, on the other hand, would have to cross an open expanse to get there. The twins would notice her for sure.
Go, Kara mouthed to Safi. I’ll catch up.
Safi shook her head. Kara pointed to the back door insistently, and then, struck by an idea, held up her finger: Wait a second. Searching the ground at her feet, she found a small piece of wood that had originally been intended to burn beneath the cauldron. Like everything else in Sablethorn, it hadn’t changed much in the intervening millennia. Keeping her arm rail straight, she arced the wood over the cauldron, toward the front of the dining hall. It clattered across a table, taking a pewter cup with it. The twins were distracted only for a moment, but it was enough. Safi dashed out of her hiding place and slipped through the door with Taff, who paused to look back at his sister with concern. Kara smiled and waved him along: Go! I’ll be right behind you!