Elisabeth nodded mechanically and resumed mopping. Her limbs felt like they were made of lead. Grit and sand filled her eyes. If only Gertrude knew the truth.
By the time she’d gotten out of the Royal Library earlier that morning, the city’s bells had been ringing the fifth hour, and the servants of Hemlock Park were already bustling about their work in the predawn dark. Though she had felt perfectly awake in the archives, her two nights of lost sleep came crashing down on the return journey. Her vision had begun to blur; her steps had weaved like a drunkard’s. When she reached Nathaniel’s house and stumbled on the threshold, she dimly recalled Silas lifting her and carrying her upstairs. He had helped her get ready for work while she dozed on her feet. Then, before she knew it, she was back at the library.
It had taken all her willpower not to skip work in favor of starting on the Codex. There was nothing more frustrating than spending her morning mopping floors, knowing that Ashcroft could make his next move at any moment. But she couldn’t risk attracting attention. This was only her third day working at the Royal Library, and if she vanished right after the theft of a Class Six grimoire, Mistress Wick would take note. Better to spend her morning mopping floors than languishing in the dungeon.
So far, she hadn’t noticed any signs that the Codex had been missed. No bells began ringing; no wardens came sprinting past. The morning crept by in a woolly haze of exhaustion.
At noon, Gertrude granted her an hour off and commanded her to take a nap, then return to work prepared to earn her pay. Elisabeth carried her lunch to a room that Parsifal had shown her in the South Spire. It looked out over the grounds, the broad swaths of green hemmed in by clumps of trees resplendent in shades of red and rusty orange. It was a crisp, sunny autumn day, and the wardens-in-training were out practicing drills. She cracked a window so that the distant sounds of shouting and swords clashing drifted in on the breeze. The trainees weren’t much older than Elisabeth. Just weeks ago, she would have easily envisioned herself among them. Now she felt as though she were a ghost haunting her own body, gazing at her life through a dirty glass. She wasn’t certain where she belonged—or, stranger still, what she even wanted. After knowing Nathaniel and Silas, could she truly declare magic her enemy, and go back to the way she had been before?
She was halfway through lunch, seated at a worktable in the corner, when Parsifal appeared in the doorway. “I thought you might be up here,” he said. “Can I join you?”
When she nodded, he came over to look out the window. “I was too embarrassed to tell you the other day, but I used to come up here because the other apprentices bullied me. That’s what happens when you have a name like Parsifal. I’d fantasize about how I’d be a warden one day and make them sorry.”
She stopped chewing her apple. “You wanted to become a warden?”
“Don’t look too surprised. Of course I did. Every apprentice wants to be one. Sometimes for the right reasons, but mostly because they fancy the idea of being in charge and thrashing other apprentices for a living.”
“That isn’t true,” she protested, but then she thought of Warden Finch, and had to admit he had a point. “What made you change your mind?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s just that there’s more to life than looking grim and stabbing things with swords, isn’t there? There are other ways to make a difference.” He stood there fiddling with his key ring, as if he were working up the courage to say something. As the seconds spun on, she began to feel uneasy. “Elisabeth,” he blurted out, “I know you told the steward your name is Elisabeth Cross. But are you . . . are you Elisabeth Scrivener, from the papers?”
The blood drained from Elisabeth’s face. Her first name was so common, she thought she had been safe keeping it.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Parsifal hurried to add. “No one else knows. It’s just that I kept thinking about it the other day, when I gave you the tour, and you knew far too much about grimoires for someone who’d never been inside a Great Library before. And you see, I’d been, ah, following your story in the news.” His ears turned red. “I just—since you defeated a Class Eight Malefict, and all.”
Elisabeth lurched upright. “Has there been anything else about me in the news?”
“No—nothing! That’s why I wanted to . . . it was as though you completely vanished after the Chancellor’s press release.” He glanced over his shoulder. Then he lowered his voice. “Are you on some sort of secret mission for the Collegium? Have you been sent undercover?”
She stared.
“Right,” he said knowingly, tapping the side of his nose. “You wouldn’t be able to tell me if you were.”
“That’s correct,” she said weakly, wondering how much trouble it was possible for a person to get into in one lifetime.
He glanced over his shoulder again. “Well—I have some information for you. I overheard two wardens talking this morning. Apparently, the saboteur struck the Royal Library last night.”
“What?”
“He stole a Class Six grimoire while the wardens were performing a transfer from the vault. They’ve been keeping it quiet, because they don’t want to send the press into a frenzy. But I thought you ought to be aware. For, you know”—he lowered his voice further—“your investigation.”
“Thank you, Parsifal,” she said. “Now, I should get back to—er—” She nodded toward the window, hoping Parsifal would use his imagination.
“Oh, yes, certainly! Is this a stakeout? Are you watching for someone? Right, you can’t tell me. I shouldn’t even be here. I’ll just . . .” He inched toward the doorway. She nodded at him encouragingly and tapped the side of her nose. He hurried out of sight, looking thrilled.
Elisabeth blew out a breath and collapsed back into her chair. At least one good thing had come out of that. If the wardens believed the saboteur had stolen the Codex, they weren’t likely to cast their suspicions toward a lowly maidservant. Perhaps after a few more days had passed, she could turn her full attention to Ashcroft without distractions. Now that the Chronicles of the Dead was on its way to Harrows, the need was more urgent than ever.
• • •
She barely recalled dragging herself home and up the stairs to her bedroom. The only detail that stood out to her was that she hadn’t seen Nathaniel since his nightmare. He had remained shut inside his study all day yesterday, and judging by the emerald light that flickered beneath the door, he was still in there. She wondered if he had even left the room.
Upstairs, she lit a candle. She didn’t change out of her servant’s uniform, aware she might need the salt and iron on hand. Demonslayer went on the floor beside her, within reaching distance, but not close enough to appear threatening. She didn’t want the Codex to perceive her as its enemy.
The grimoire waited under her bed, still inside the sack she had used to smuggle it from the Royal Library. She drew it out and placed it on her lap, feeling the heavy chains clink through the fabric. Seated on the floor, with her back against the mattress, she folded aside the burlap and unraveled the chain onto the carpet. The Codex lay inert and unresponsive. She drew in a fortifying breath, her hand suspended in the air.
“I’m a friend,” she said, willing her intentions to pass down her arm, through her skin, as she placed her palm against the grimoire.
For a moment, nothing happened. No voice howled at her in rage and betrayal. No ominous pressure filled the room. All was silent. Then its pages stirred in an invisible breeze. Slowly, like an old man stretching and rising from sleep, the Codex unfolded itself into her hands.
Hope thrilled through her, followed by a quaver of apprehension. If Ashcroft had spent so much time studying this grimoire without success, why should she succeed where he had failed? Unlike him, she didn’t have the slightest idea what Prendergast’s secret might be about, and she knew next to nothing about codes and ciphers, either. Reaching this step had consumed so much of her attention that she hadn’t had time to prepare for what came afterward.
She scanned the pages that had opened to her. The words swam in her vision, and she tried blinking away her exhaustion, only to discover that her eyes weren’t at fault. It was the words that were moving, the ink bleeding in sluggish rivulets across the parchment. She flipped to a different section, past diagrams labeled with Enochian script, and found the same thing happening there, too. While the text itself was legible, the sentences had crawled completely out of order. Occasionally they aligned in such a way that a single paragraph became comprehensible:
The highborn demons hold their glittering court beneath a sunless sky. Once every fortnight they ride forth on horned white horses, clad in silks, to hunt beasts in the forests of the Otherworld with packs of baying fiends at their sides. The sound of a demonic hunting horn is not soon forgotten; for it is so beautiful, and so terrible, that it freezes the quarry of the hunt in place as if the prey has turned to stone. . . .
But the rest split apart before she could finish, the sentences meandering across the page like lines of marching ants. Frustrated, she turned to the scrying mirror and called for Katrien. When her friend’s face appeared in the glass, she looked as tired as Elisabeth felt, ashen beneath the glass’s patina of frost. They didn’t have time to catch up. They raced through the likeliest possibilities as swiftly as they could, barely pausing for breath.
“The sentences might only fully align at a specific date and time,” Elisabeth theorized, “like midnight on the winter solstice, or during certain conditions, like an eclipse.”
“But Ashcroft’s certain that he can crack it soon, isn’t he? So if that’s the case, either the phenomenon is due to happen sometime within the next two weeks, or—”
“Or the cipher has a different solution entirely,” Elisabeth finished, glum.
“Take a second look at your research,” Katrien urged. “There might be a clue that didn’t seem relevant before. Do we even know for sure that Prendergast hid his secret as a cipher, or is that just an assumption people made without evidence? In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find anything on my end.”
As their time ran out, Elisabeth swallowed back the pitiful urge to beg Katrien not to go, watching her disappear beneath the ice. Loneliness pressed in, made worse by her fuzzy-headed exhaustion. She knew she should go to bed, but she was too tired to get up from the floor and wrap the Codex in its chain.
Instead she found herself idly turning pages, hypnotized by the crawling text. As the sentences strung themselves together, she read lavish, unsettling descriptions of what the demons ate at their feasts, or what they wore to their nocturnal, weeklong balls. Though the fragmented descriptions left her feeling more and more disturbed, she was unable to tear her eyes away.
Swans poisoned to death with nightshade are considered a particular delicacy at banquets. . . .
The most fashionable garment that evening was a gown made of silver moths, pinned alive to the fabric to preserve their luster. . . .
The candle burned lower on the nightstand. Her head nodded. Disjointed images swirled behind her eyelids: demons dancing in elaborate costumes, grinning as they feasted, tearing into flesh. The nightmarish fancies seemed to take hold of her and drag her downward, like the hands of sirens gripping a shipwrecked sailor, towing him into the deep and silent dark.
Abruptly, she woke up.
Or, she didn’t wake up—for this had to be a dream.
She stood in some kind of old-fashioned workshop. Unfamiliar herbs hung in bundles from the rafters. Tallow candles flickered on every surface, spattering the stained floorboards with oily yellow wax. Bizarre items cluttered the shelves and the table in the center of the room: bird feathers, animal skulls, jars containing murky globs floating in vinegar. But that wasn’t the part that convinced her she was dreaming. The room hung suspended in a void. The broken edges of its floorboards jutted out into a black abyss, and chunks of the ceiling had fallen inward, showing the same dark nothingness above.
No—not nothingness. The shining black substance reminded her of something familiar. A rich, telltale scent of pigments filled the air. Ink.
“Who are you?” said a man’s voice behind her, harsh with anger. “What are you doing here?”
Elisabeth spun around, her heart slamming against her ribs.
The man who stood there matched how she had always imagined a sorcerer would look before meeting Nathaniel and Ashcroft. Tall, gaunt, and sallow, with glittering obsidian eyes and a closely trimmed black beard that ended in a point at his chin. He wore flowing robes, and rings adorned each of his fingers, set with differently colored gems.
“Whoever you are, I refuse to tell you anything,” he snapped. “I haven’t spent hundreds of years trapped in this place for nothing.”
Hundreds of years. He sounded serious. Now that she took in his expression, she saw that he wasn’t angry, not entirely. Underneath the anger, he looked afraid, as though she had come to take something from him by force. His robes appeared old-fashioned, and so did everything else in the workshop, untouched by time for centuries.
Whatever this place was, it wasn’t a dream. And neither was this man—this sorcerer. She glanced again at the inky void that surrounded them, her eyes widening as possibility dawned. Prendergast had hidden his secret inside the Codex.
She turned back to the sorcerer. “Are you Aldous Prendergast?”
That wasn’t the right thing to say. His face darkened, and he crossed the distance between them in several quick strides. “How did you get here?” he demanded, seizing her shoulders. He shook her until her teeth rattled. “Answer me, girl!”
“I don’t know! I was reading the Codex. I fell asleep.”
“That is impossible,” he snarled.
“A strange thing to say,” she blurted out, “for someone who’s over three hundred years old. That doesn’t seem possible to me, either.”
Prendergast’s shoulders slumped. He let go of her shoulders and gripped the edge of the table, glaring. She found to her surprise that she wasn’t the least bit afraid of him. He was so thin, she could easily push him off the end of the floor if he tried to harm her.
“What year is it?” he asked finally, directing his glare at a bottle filled with what appeared to be preserved rat tails.
Questions crowded against the back of her tongue, but she suspected he wouldn’t bother answering any of them until she answered his first. “Eighteen twenty-four.”
He digested her answer. “I’m not alive,” he said after a long, fatalistic pause. “Not in any real sense.”
Elisabeth recoiled. “Necromancy,” she gasped, seeing his hollow cheeks and cadaverous figure anew.
“No, not necromancy, you idiot child,” he snapped. “I am not a corpse. I left my physical body behind in the mortal realm, and anchored my mind to this—this—well, I don’t imagine you would understand. You are no sorcerer, clearly, unless the standards have deteriorated significantly since my time. All you need to know is that I am trapped here by my own design. I cannot leave this place. And you should not have been able to visit me through the Codex—not without my permission.”
She looked around. “Are we inside the Codex? An alternate dimension of some kind?”
His eyes narrowed. “So you do know your thaumaturgical theory.”
Elisabeth decided not to tell him that she simply read a lot of novels.
“This is an artificial plane of existence,” he went on grudgingly, “anchored to my grimoire, no bigger than the room surrounding us. To attempt to create a larger one would risk destabilizing the border between the mortal realm and the Otherworld.”
“You truly have been there, then,” she said. “To the Otherworld.”
His eyes narrowed further. “Most people didn’t believe me. They accused me of fabricating my studies.”
“Aside from one man.” She watched his expression closely. “A man who called himself your friend.”
His face convulsed. “Who are you?” he rasped.
“My
name is Elisabeth Scrivener. I am—I was—an apprentice librarian. But that isn’t important. There is no cipher hidden inside the Codex, is there? You are the cipher. You hid yourself here to escape from Cornelius Ashcroft.”
The color bled from Prendergast’s fingers, still gripping the table.
“If you hadn’t,” she continued, the truth dawning on her as she spoke, “he would have used magic to read your memories, and whatever secret you’re guarding, he would have taken it from you by force.” Seeing his widened eyes, she explained, “His descendant tried to do the same thing to me.”
Prendergast stared at her a moment longer, and then began to laugh. There was a high-pitched nervousness to his laughter that alarmed Elisabeth. She reminded herself that he had been trapped here for hundreds of years, alone, and she hadn’t reacted so differently after being taken in by Nathaniel.
“You’re lying,” he said, once he had caught his breath. “I see it now. You are in league with the Ashcrofts. There is no other way you could know . . . that you would guess . . .”
“I’m not! I swear it.”
“I know one thing for certain: Ashcrofts do not leave their victims intact.” A feverish sheen glazed his eyes. “Can you even begin to imagine what drove me to choose an eternity of isolation over the attentions of my dear old friend? I left everything behind. My real body became a mindless, drooling husk. But that is what Cornelius would have done to me anyway when he finished tearing my mind apart. At least this way I was able to thwart him, the devil.” Prendergast spoke with sudden ferocity. “He will never have it. And neither will you.”
“Have what?”
Prendergast didn’t answer. He spun and began to walk away, his robes billowing out around him, though there was nowhere he could go except deeper into the workshop, among the cluttered, sagging shelves.
“You may have outsmarted Cornelius,” Elisabeth cried, hurrying after him, “but his descendant is after your secret now. He knows you’re here, and he’ll stop at nothing to find you.”
Prendergast waved a thin hand, the gems on his fingers winking in the candlelight. “It doesn’t matter. He will not be able to—”
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