Cursed (Codex of Enchantment Book 1)

by Briana Snow

  “Well, at least we’ve still got these.” She picked up the two heavy volumes, noticing how curiously warm that they felt to the touch, like human skin. Ugh! Why did you think of that, Penny! She grossed herself out, shaking her head as she stood up, dusted down her jeans and picked up both grimoires and held them in her hands.

  “Are we…?” Verity suddenly twigged, her face going pale with fear. “This isn’t the British Library,” she said, somewhat redundantly.

  “You’re right, this is not the British Library,” Penelope repeated.

  “This isn’t Paris either.” Verity took a step back from where she had stood, as if the floor there was unpredictable and dangerous. Only, the Special Collection Librarian could see in her friend the realization that everywhere here was unpredictable and dangerous.

  “You’re right again, this is not Paris,” Penelope concluded. “This is…”

  “Hell,” Verity whispered. “Oh my. Oh my-oh my. You know, I hate to ask this but I really have to: Why on earth did you decide to take us to hell?”

  “Bridges,” Penelope said, looking first one way and then the other in the wide tunnel, and, not coming to any clear conclusion about which way to go, chose the one that was at least going downhill a little. “It just suddenly hit me. These Luminaires open portals, right?”

  “Yes.” Verity held her head in her hands; her worst day ever clearly written all over her face as she trudged after the Librarian. “Portals to hell, I shouldn’t have to say but I am going to anyway. You know. The burning fiery place.”

  “Yeah, I am aware of how it generally works,” Penelope quipped, a little irritably. It had to be said, it was a little hot down here. “But I am also very aware of how bridges work, and I guess mystical portals too. One place has to connect with another—that is what the Luminaire minus Clavem’s are all about, right? That whenever you open them, they start automatically re-creating he ritual to open the portal between the realms, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Well, clearly,” Verity grumbled as she gestured around them.

  “So, these Luminaire are like keys in the locks, or they are like the entrances to the bridges. As long as we take them with us, then the bridge isn’t open back to earth and the normal word. The bridge is leading back here, to us,” Penelope said as if it were the simplest thing in the world, and Verity wondered if she might have gone just a little bit mad.

  “Right. So, you have discovered that the gate to hell leads… to hell. Great. Now normally I would applaud any scientific discovery but, on this occasion…” Verity started to say her voice rising as she said it.

  “No, you don’t get it!” Penelope turned and gestured at the woman with the manuscripts. “Not only is the mundane world safe while we have the rest of the bridge here, but it also means that there is one route out, one that leads to Paris and the last book!” she said. “Now, we have two out of the three volumes, and we are not about to get shot by my brother Darius. Think of this as a shortcut.”

  “A shortcut through Hell. You’re going to take me on a shortcut through hell?” Verity said. “Okay. Well, seeing as I have to agree with you anyway, I won’t argue. But there is only one thing I think that you might have overlooked here, sister,” she said in that slightly non-European accent once more.

  Great. She has to remind me just how ignorant I am, and prove that she is always in the right, again? “Yes?” said Penelope.

  “What if we need the third Luminaire open, in Paris, in order to get out of here?” Verity asked. “What if the bridges can only be opened on that side?”

  “Well, then we’re screwed,” Penelope said casually, striding forward over the rough and lumpen rocks.

  Chapter XXVI

  The pair walked for what felt like a long time in silence, and it became clear that yes, the air was indeed getting hotter, and smelling faintly of soot. Penelope wondered if all of those old legends were going to be right, if they were going to emerge into just a vast pit of fire, or a lake of fire, or a frozen lake, and the devil himself would be sitting in the middle of it, twiddling his mustache and prodding people with a trident.

  As long as she kept thinking about her current predicament in those cartoon-like terms, she could handle what they were doing. If she stopped to think at all about how terrifyingly real all of this was around her, then her stomach would flutter in terror, and her knees would threaten to give way.

  The problem is—it is all real though, isn’t it? her mind rebelled. All of that stuff to do with devils and hell. Eternal damnation. Fires of torture. Oh, she was sure that it wasn’t exactly the same as they said in the holy books. Perhaps there weren’t really such things as angels and demons. Maybe this was an alternate reality, or a parallel dimension or similar, with creatures that just wanted to colonize the earth and eat everyone’s faces. Like alien invaders—but that didn’t have to mean that this was the spiritual hell, and all of our good and bad deeds were counted for or against us at the end of our life.

  Did going to hell mean that you had automatically died, and that their bodies were still up there in faraway London, underneath the British Museum?

  And then something entirely different took her mind off from whether she was destined for this place or not. She heard voices.

  “Verity?” she hissed quickly. “Can you hear that?” She looked around to see that the Book Hunter had started to fall back, and was now ten or twenty paces behind her. She’s not taking this whole being in hell thing very well at all, the Special Collections Librarian thought.

  “Huh?” Verity looked up, and Penelope could see how despairing she was. She didn’t expect to get out of here alive.

  “I said can you hear something, voices!” the woman hissed again. “I think that if we can flatten ourselves against this wall over here…”

  “No, it’s okay. Well no, it’s not okay—but what you are hearing is something called Pandemonium. It’s the city of Hell,” Verity said.

  “Something called Pandemonium?” Penelope asked. That didn’t make any sense. “Don’t you mean a place?”

  “You’ll see,” Verity said darkly, catching up and overtaking her as they trudged ever downward.

  The tunnel started to widen out, getting slowly larger and larger until they were walking not through a tunnel at all, but a cavern. It was so vast as to enclose the entire Grand Canyon, she thought, with different outcrops and plateaus, ravines and gully’s and hills.

  “Is this Hell?” Penelope whispered, feeling awed by its size but somehow a little disappointed in an odd sort of way. She had expected to see lakes of fire and towers of ice, and devils.

  Verity squinted at the panorama around them, rousing herself from her torpor just a little. “One part of it, I think. There’s many levels and sections. I think this must be the very top.” There was a rumbling sound, seeming to come closer and closer to them over the rocky ground. “Here it comes,” Verity nodded.

  “I thought you said that pandemonium was a city?” Penelope felt the ground vibrating underneath her feet, and started to feel as though her plan to escape Templar capture had only put them into far worse danger than ever before.

  “It is,” Verity said, trudging down onto the plain, towards the noise, just as the city rounded the last bluff and started to cross in front of them.

  The city of Pandemonium didn’t travel very fast at all. In fact, it moved a little slower than an average walking speed, but the fact that it was moving at all was enough to make Penelope stare. A moment later, she realized why it was moving, and she was almost sick. The city traveled on the backs of people; poor lost slave-souls presumably.

  “The souls of the greedy and the rich,” Verity informed her, not having to follow her gaze to know just what she was looking at. “They spent their lives being carried by others, and so the legends say, they spend their damnation carrying the city of hell.”

  Pandemonium, the city of hell, was a ragtag, dissolute place, and yet it was still, clearly, a city. It was made up from al
l sorts of dissident pieces of architecture and materials. Penelope saw rib bones and skulls of creatures like whales, carved and set in place to form unholy cathedrals for the dead. There were brick walls made of the reddish black rock of the cavern itself, and there was ancient, calcified wood-paneled hovels stretching up streets carved between the buildings.

  The city rose some four or five stories into the warm airs of hell, on different terraces that reflected not so much the terrain that the tramping feet of the damned stamped across—but instead the available building materials. Penelope saw suggestions of struts and joints like rods of iron, or shards of bleached bone. As they drew nearer, Penelope could see the smokes and the humors of Pandemonium rising from cracked chimneys and hovels. Dirty, dish-washer rag pennants and flags displaying arcane districts and boroughs of the sinful were on display, and Penelope could hear the sound of the city coming closer.

  “They’re right to call it Pandemonium!” Penelope held her hands over her ears, but Verity just shrugged beside her.

  “I’m told that you get used to it after a while.” The Book Hunter, apparently, already had.

  The sound came from the city itself—the normal workings of street sellers, arguing and shouting people, fights, lovers, and city criers. But that was only the least of the city sounds. The vast majority of it came from the shuffling, tramping feet of the damned that carried it, and their own tortured screams, gasps, and cries.

  It was like walking into a cloud of anguish, approaching them. Penelope could clearly see how they were attached to the structure above them. They all wore harnesses made out of metal, belted across their hips and shoulders, and extending in rods upwards towards the foundation struts and blocks of Pandemonium above. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions trudging in torn rags and with dusty, dirt-smeared skin underneath the city, and each one of them was morning, groaning, wailing or crying of the weight on their shoulders.

  “Here, over there.” Verity pointed to where the nearest wooden ladder extended down to just a few feet off the floor. Penelope raised her head to see how it went upwards to the first stone step of a plaza, around which people milled.

  “How can they live up there?” Penelope said. “Knowing that so many live underneath them like this? How can they bare it?”

  “They are already damned,” Verity said, taking a step and hopping onto the ladder easily, as Pandemonium moved incredibly slowly. “And besides, they might be the next to join those below, if they argue or make trouble. This is Hell, remember.” Penelope watched Verity climb up a few rungs and then lean back out to offer her hand. “Come on. We might as well hitch a ride while we work out what we’re going to do.”

  I know what we’re going to do, Penelope thought, but did as Verity had suggested, awkwardly snugging the grimoires under one arm and jumping to catch a hold of Verity’s hand as she stepped onto the lowest ladder. I’m going to find the portal to Paris, and then I’m going to put all of this right.

  They climbed up onto the stone plaza, and collapsed in exhaustion.

  Chapter XXVII

  Verity had at least seemed to recover some of her grit, as they ducked into one of the red-black stone doorways and waited for some souls of the damned wearing strange little peaked caps to pass by.

  “Who were they?” the Librarian asked.

  “I don’t know. Cultists. Priests of hell. Captains of the Unholy—it could be anything or anyone, but I would rather not get caught up in the politics of the damned, especially if they found out that…” Her eyes slid to the first two volumes of the Luminaire, and Penelope nodded.

  The city of Pandemonium acted like a sort of crazy medieval city, or perhaps some bastard city from the ancient classical world. There were tiny plazas and squares where fountains were dry and collected nothing but dust. There were grander buildings made of well-dressed bone or stone, carved and shaped like chapels and cathedrals and courts—although Penelope got no sense of holiness or justice from any of them. And everywhere between, there was the hovels. Tiny buildings made up of whatever materials were at hand, either stone, wood, bone, or just canvas, rags and sticks. In these tiny ghetto districts there lay people apparently at the end of their tether, and they were passing by one such district now on their way towards a borough of the city that seemed to be much more solid and made of stone.

  “Oh my goodness!” Penelope said. “Look!” She pointed down behind them, across the narrow stairs and the roof shingles to where the men and women in peaked caps were entering the nearest tent city, and were starting to drag people out of their hovels, kicking and screaming. “What on earth are they doing?”

  “We’re not on earth remember,” Verity said darkly, turning to continue to walk upwards to the next terrace of the moving city.

  Penelope stopped to watch a little further, outraged at such deliberate malice. She saw the pointed-cap guards dragging them out of the poor district by whatever limb they had and strapping the metal harnesses onto them, despite their writhing and screaming. As each one got imprisoned into their new role, they were dragged to chutes in the floor that Penelope had thought were wells, but were actually some complicated sort of machine, like something that might be used in a factory—you put a human down it in one end, and at the other you gain a walking set of city-legs…

  “Ugh! Horrible!” Penelope couldn’t look anymore, and, when she turned around she saw that Verity had almost reached the top of the stairs, and she was in danger of losing her. She ran up the steps hurriedly, trying not to push past the other damned souls making their way, not that they seemed to care.

  Despite the constant offerings to the ground below, the city of Pandemonium was still full of souls. There seemed to be all the sorts that Penelope would expect to see in a ‘real’ historical city. There were some happy, some sad, some trying to sell bits of rags or gruel to the others, many were lazing around on the edges of the dry fountains, some appeared to be shopping or running errands. Penelope couldn’t imagine anyone at all living like this, until she remembered what Verity had said—that they were damned, and they weren’t living at all.

  The city also moved and swayed underfoot with a constant, groaning rhythm. Somehow all of the tramping and stamping feet normalized as the city marched, slowing as it crossed difficult terrain, or speeding up over flatter parts of the cavern. It felt a bit like being on a boat, Penelope thought. Only a hellish, perverted, terrible catastrophe of a boat.

  They arrived at the next terrace which Penelope saw was some type of market. Verity nodded to herself, as if she had been expecting to see this here. “There are accounts of Pandemonium, even maps—some of them are drawn by that Dante guy that you met earlier in New York,” she explained to Penelope.

  “Oh, not him. As if we can trust anything that he says!” Penelope clutched the books a little tighter to her chest.

  “We can trust his greedy little soul. He said in one of his travel guides to hell that you could find almost any cursed and unwanted thing in the free markets of Pandemonium, and I guess that would mean information as well, right?” Verity raised an eyebrow. “Like where we can get a tunnel to the Paris Library?”

  “Good thinking,” Penelope said, although secretly she wondered if it was going to be that easy. If any damned soul could just buy their way to the exit portal, then why didn’t they?

  “Over there!” Verity pointed across the market stalls, at a disappearing headdress. The headdress was the branching twigs of some kind of desiccated tree, forming a halo of dead shrubbery around the woman that the headdress was affixed to. From every limb of the tree there hung a small glass phial, inside of which could be seen rolls of paper.

  “She’s a secret-seller,” Verity explained as they started to push their way through the crowds. “She might have the secret we seek—or at least she’ll know who has got it!”

  The pair pushed their way through the market, which was shoulder-to-shoulder busy with pushing and jostling people. Each on
e was wearing dirty rags and, whether angry or supposedly smiling, bored or studious, they all had that look of despair draped over their features as they all knew that this was it for them. They had their life and now they just had to wait it out until they, too, became the cities feet below.

  They pushed their way past stalls that sold types of food, drink, and slightly better or worse rags. The smells were awful, and Penelope was sure that she passed by one stall just selling reddish damp mud. She shuddered at the sights all around her, reaching out to grab onto Verity’s hand as she fought her way through the traffic, towards the nearest secret-seller of Pandemonium.

  Chapter XXVIII

  “Secrets! Rumors! Gossip!” the woman called out from where she walked slowly through the crowd, her head swaying a little with the weight of all of the bottles.

  “Rumors,” Verity said, catching up to the woman and stopping her. All around them, the traffic of people eddied, pushed, and shoved.

  “This way.” The woman looked old and tired, her face deeply wrinkled and lined as she nodded them away from the main thoroughfare to where a smaller brick alleyway afforded them a momentary respite.

  “Payment?” The seller narrowed her eyes as she looked at Verity and Penelope. Both wore much finer clothes than any of the damned, and neither did they have the same weary, hopeless, and malnourished look to their faces.

  “I don’t suppose you take cash?” Penelope hazarded. Not that she even had much of that on her either.

  “I’ll take one of those,” the woman nodded at the two large volumes of the Luminaire that the Librarian held to her chest. “They look worth a lot of something to somebody, huh?” the woman leered.

  “No—no way, not for sale.” Penelope clutched at the grimoires tighter.

  “I was right then. They are valuable.” The seller gave the two women a calculating look. “What else you got?”