“If it helps,” Nathaniel said, “there wasn’t any trace of magic back in the arena. I don’t think anyone’s gotten past the Malefict ahead of Hyde.”
“Unless Ashcroft knows a secret way into the library,” Elisabeth pointed out. “Cornelius planned this from the very beginning. He could have had a hidden corridor built into the mountain—something only he knew about.”
“Is it possible for something like that to remain undiscovered for so long?”
“I think so. I found all kinds of secret passageways in Summershall, and the senior librarians didn’t have a clue.”
They fell silent as they stole forward. Nathaniel extinguished his flame when the reddish glow of Hyde’s torch reappeared ahead, outlining the fur draped over his shoulders. While they snuck after him, his purposeful stride rang from the naked stone. He held the torch high in one hand, the other clasping his sword, never pausing to look behind him.
Elisabeth held her breath. Any moment now . . . any moment . . .
Her heart leaped to her throat when the torchlight poured over an irregularity on the ground: a pair of boots protruding from an adjoining tunnel. Staring straight ahead, Hyde didn’t seem to notice. He kept walking.
The three of them paused, allowing Hyde to gain a few steps as they took in the sight of the warden lying collapsed in the tunnel. A woman, still armed, sprawled loosely on the ground. Her torch had fallen into a puddle and gone out. The dim, shifting light made it impossible to tell whether she was still breathing.
“She lives,” Silas whispered. “There is no injury. She is merely asleep.”
They looked at each other. The sleeping spell. The attack had already begun. And yet Hyde was nearly at the vault, and they had seen no sign of the attacker.
The truth struck her like lightning.
Elisabeth abandoned every pretense of stealth. “Stop him!” she cried, lunging after Hyde. “Stop him from getting inside the vault!”
Too late. The portcullis at the end of the passage slammed down, separating Hyde on the other side. She skidded to a halt.
He turned to face them through the grille. A smile spread across his face, grotesquely stretching his scars. The expression looked wholly unnatural on his features, yet there was something familiar about it all the same. It was a smile she had seen many times before: in the gilded halls of Ashcroft Manor, in the palace ballroom, on the rose pavilion by moonlight.
It belonged not to Hyde, but to Chancellor Ashcroft.
THIRTY-THREE
“I SEE YOU’VE FIGURED it out, Miss Scrivener,” Ashcroft said, his cultured voice uncanny on Hyde’s scarred lips. “Quite honestly, I’m surprised it took you so long. After all, you’ve met the Book of Eyes.”
The Book of Eyes.
At once, the missing pieces snapped into place. When Elisabeth had battled the Malefict in Summershall, it had taunted her with the truth of who had killed the Director. Irena herself had described the spells it contained: magic that allowed sorcerers to reach into people’s minds, read their thoughts, and even control them. How had the Book of Eyes known the saboteur’s identity? The answer was simple—it had encountered him before. Given his status, Ashcroft would have been one of the rare few trusted to study such a dangerous grimoire.
To carry out his plans, he hadn’t needed to work with an accomplice, or even leave the comfort of his manor.
“You’ve been possessing the Directors,” she said numbly. “You’ve been forcing them to perform the sabotage with their own hands.”
“Beg pardon?” Ashcroft leaned closer to the bars and frowned, rubbing Hyde’s ear. “You know, I can barely hear what you’re saying. Quite inconvenient, really. But no matter. I won’t have to wear this body for long.” Spinning the key ring jauntily on his finger, he turned and strolled deeper into the vault.
Blood roared in Elisabeth’s ears. Nothing felt real. She took in the vault as though she were dreaming: an immense natural cavern, the walls glittering with pyrite. Towering angel statues stood vigil along the walls, carved from obsidian, streams of molten iron pouring from their cupped hands to the floor below. A circular channel conducted the liquid metal around the room’s circumference like a moat. Ashcroft stepped Hyde’s body over a narrow black stone bridge, the edges of his coat wavering from the heat distortion. His movements were oddly clumsy, and once he even jerked sideways, barely regaining his footing before he pitched over the edge.
“Hyde is still in there,” Elisabeth realized in shock. “He’s battling for control.” And then she thought, This is what happened to Irena.
Without warning, a blast of emerald fire exploded past her, singeing the tips of her ears. It funneled through the grille and twisted after Ashcroft like a cyclone. But as it neared him, it fizzled out in a shower of green sparks.
Nathaniel dropped his arm and swore. “Too much iron.”
Moving in awful fits and jerks, Ashcroft flicked a residual ember from Hyde’s fur. “I know what you’re thinking, Miss Scrivener,” he said without turning. He had succeeded in crossing the bridge. “You’re wondering what it was like for dear, beautiful Irena when I entered her mind and forced her to betray everything that she loved. Poor woman—she never suspected anything. I cast the spell on her years ago in the reading room at Summershall. When you’re the Chancellor of Magic, it’s no trouble arranging a private meeting with a Director. My magic lived inside her for nearly a decade, waiting for me to activate it.”
Elisabeth sucked in a breath. As though it had happened yesterday, she recalled the choking smell of aetherial combustion that clung to the reading room’s armchair: the permanent residue of some old, powerful spell. Distantly, she was aware of Nathaniel steadying her.
“Irena struggled, too, of course. She was strong-willed, just like you. She was there with me the entire time, all the way to the vault, up until the very moment the Book of Eyes struck her down.”
A sound escaped Elisabeth, something between a scream and a sob. Ashcroft wasn’t paying attention. He had nearly reached the middle of the room.
A trio of massive obsidian columns dominated the vault’s center, stretching unbroken to the ceiling. A crossed key and quill had been carved into the floor between them. Ashcroft stepped on the symbol as he approached, raising Hyde’s torch. “Magnificent, is it not?”
At first she wasn’t certain what he was referring to. Then light flooded the nearest column. Vapors swirled inside the translucent stone, wreathing a shape that hung suspended in chains. As though agitated by Hyde’s proximity, the mist began to boil, and lightning flashed within its depths. Each flicker illuminated a grimoire’s cover, bound in glossy black scales edged with silver. The cover inflated and deflated steadily, as though the grimoire were breathing.
The columns weren’t meant to hold up the ceiling. Instead, they contained Class Tens.
“The Librum Draconum,” Ashcroft said, a hint of true awe softening his voice. “Created using the hide of a Lindwurm—the last dragon in Austermeer, hunted to extinction in the fourteenth century. The spells inside can summon cataclysmic storms and earthquakes, invoke natural disasters on a world-altering scale. . . .”
He moved on to the next column, bringing the torch close. He released a wistful sigh. Within the chains hung—nothing. No . . . there was something there, reflective and shifting, mirrorlike, its surface flowing like water. Trying to focus on it made Elisabeth’s head hurt.
“The Oraculis,” Ashcroft murmured. “Provenance unknown. Its spells allow one to see the future, or so the theories suggest, but everyone who’s read it has immediately taken their own life. A shame. I dearly would have liked to study it.”
He approached the third case. Through the translucent obsidian, the torch revealed the slick, pulsing skin of a beating heart. It clung to the grimoire’s cover like some hideous growth, its veins wrapped around the leather, sealing the pages shut. The veins bulged rhythmically, as though pumping blood—but the green glow that animated them was pure sorcery, the ma
gic of House Thorn. Necromancy, keeping the long-dead heart alive.
“Ah. The Chronicles of the Dead.” Ashcroft tapped on the case, and smiled pensively when the heart spasmed in response. “Those who try to open it instantly succumb to its magic. Except for you, Nathaniel. This book is yours. It calls out to you, no doubt. How would you like to meet your ancestor’s work?”
“Don’t,” Nathaniel croaked. He gripped the bars, his fingers bled white.
Elisabeth’s senses came flooding back on a tide of fury. “It won’t work!” she shouted through the portcullis. “You won’t be able to control the Archon! It’s going to tear the world apart. When you summon it, you’ll be the first to die!”
Ashcroft paused, peering at them, a hand cupped behind his ear. “I confess I’ve never been any good at reading lips,” he said finally. He gave a rueful laugh. “You’re asking me to stop, aren’t you? Ah, Miss Scrivener, you do not understand. You cannot understand. This is the purpose handed down to me by my father, and his father before him, stretching back three hundred years. I am part of something far greater than myself.” He tilted his head back, gazing up at the column. “With the Archon’s power at my disposal, humanity will be transformed. No more sickness, or poverty, or war. It will be a marvel—a glorious era in which all is possible, and every dream made real. . . .”
He trailed off. Emotion shimmered in his eyes. Even wearing Hyde’s form, something of Ashcroft’s natural light and magnetism shone through.
He really believes what he’s saying, Elisabeth thought, horrified. In his heart of hearts, he viewed himself not as the villain, but as the hero.
Ashcroft cleared his throat. “Let’s see.” He paced in a circle, inspecting the Collegium sigil on the floor. “Cornelius faced somewhat of a problem with this library’s construction. How does one free a grimoire from an iron-filled vault several hundred feet beneath a mountain? Fortunately, the Collegium’s own technology provided the solution.”
He moved to draw Hyde’s sword from its sheath, and stopped abruptly. Hyde’s hand had clamped around the hilt, muscles bulging with resistance. His face purpled as the two minds fought for control. Hope filled Elisabeth’s chest like a breath in the midst of drowning.
“The iron must be weakening Ashcroft’s spell.” She turned to Nathaniel, who was white as a sheet, staring at the Chronicles. She didn’t think he would hear her if she spoke to him. Instead, she asked Silas, “Is there any way for you to get inside?”
Silas stood several paces back, a ghost in the darkness of the passageway. He stepped forward, reaching for the portcullis. Alarm clamored through her, but his hand stopped a hairsbreadth from touching the thick bands of reinforced iron.
“I fear not,” he said. “This gate was designed to prevent beings such as I from entering. Even if I could, I would not be at my full strength inside the vault.”
No wonder Silas had been hanging back. In the infernal red glow of the molten iron, he looked washed out, almost ill.
A ring of metal against stone yanked her attention back to Ashcroft. He had managed to free Hyde’s sword, though in doing so he had lurched forward, nearly dropping the weapon. As she watched in dismay, he dragged the blade, scraping, until it stood vertically above the Collegium sigil, his weight bearing down upon it. And then, like a key fitting into a lock, the sword’s point slid inside a hidden mechanism in the sigil. Sweating and trembling with effort, Ashcroft twisted it to the right.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then a clank echoed through the cavern. The floor shook, gears churning unseen as the Great Library’s machinery awakened. A jagged crack raced across the ceiling. On the far side of the vault, one of the giant obsidian angels began to turn, not by sorcery but by the will of the cogs, its face motionless and serene. The stream of molten iron cascading from its hands slowed to a drip. Angled sideways, it created a blockage in the channel, and the moat slowly drained away at its feet.
In the place where the angel had once stood, a passageway now yawned. But Elisabeth had eyes only for the ceiling, where the crack had snaked across the cavern and split the rock above the portcullis. When she seized the bars and shook them, she felt a slight give.
Ashcroft was bent over now, Hyde’s face writhing grotesquely. He staggered to the Chronicles’ pillar and caught himself against it with a hand that clenched repeatedly into a fist. Using the other hand, he unsteadily raised his Director’s key toward a slot in the column.
There was still time. Ashcroft missed once, twice, the key glancing from the stone. Elisabeth threw herself against the portcullis. Metal groaned as it pushed outward an inch on one side, the grille flexing against her shoulder.
With his lips peeled back from his teeth, Ashcroft at last forced the key into place. When he turned it, a panel slid open. Green-tinted mist flowed out of it, pouring down, lapping over Hyde’s boots.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The convulsions of the dead, ancient heart filled the cavern, thudding inside Elisabeth’s bones. The stench nearly brought her to her knees. It was like standing at the entrance to a crypt, breathing in rot and stone and ancient magic, the smell of skulls crawling with beetles, of moss speckling crumbled tombs.
The portcullis screeched as she wedged her shoulder into the gap, using the passage’s wall as leverage. But she was too late.
Too late to stop Ashcroft as he reached inside, and plunged his fingers into the beating heart.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE HEART’S VEINS pulsed with emerald light. They began to spread, to grow, twining rootlike along the chains, sending branching tendrils outward. Elisabeth’s paralyzed thoughts fixed on the illustration of a nervous system that she remembered from one of Master Hargrove’s anatomical texts. The Chronicles was growing into a Malefict, beginning with its heart.
Within seconds, the Malefict’s expanding form crowded the inside of the column. Clawed fingers curled over the lip of the opening, their exposed tendons dripping ink. She remembered the shadows of those claws stretching across the Royal Library, reaching for the wardens as they wheeled its cage along the hall.
Ashcroft stumbled back, clutching his hand to his chest. Wild-eyed, he dove for the sword lying discarded beside the sigil. Not Ashcroft any longer—Hyde. Ashcroft had finished his work and relinquished his hold on the body, leaving Hyde at the mercy of the Chronicles of the Dead, just as he must have done to Irena after releasing the Book of Eyes.
The Malefict’s hand shot out. Metal rattled as it jerked to a halt mere inches from Hyde, reaching the limits of the chain wrapped around its wrist. The links warped under the strain as the claws stretched closer, grasping for him.
Determination hardened Hyde’s face. He hefted his sword. “Not on my watch,” he growled. “Not while I still live, abomination.”
“Then die,” the Malefict whispered, in a voice like wind rushing from a sepulcher. One of the claws straightened and touched Hyde’s cheek.
Hyde’s face emptied. Green light flowed up the veins in his neck, rippled through his cheek, and traveled into the Malefict’s claw. He blinked once. Then he toppled over dead, striking the floor as a blanched and withered corpse. His body exploded into dust upon impact, as though it had lain desiccating in a mausoleum for centuries.
The Malefict’s hand shuddered as the stolen life pulsed up its wrist. Cracks spiraled around the column. That was the only warning before the pillar burst, sending chunks of obsidian flying. A tall, gaunt shape unfolded from the wreckage, obscured by swirls of dust. Broken chains dangled from its wrists, and a pair of antlers crowned its brow.
Elisabeth had seen that shape before, during the night she had spent with Nathaniel in the Blackwald. The grimoire’s heart—Baltasar had torn it from one of the moss folk. A giver of life, transformed into a taker of it; she couldn’t imagine anything more profane.
As though sensing her thoughts, the Malefict’s head snapped around. Its green eyes burned through the dust. It stared at them for a long moment, perfectly still. T
hough it wasn’t much taller than the Book of Eyes, its presence exuded an ancient, festering malevolence that sent terror washing over her skin in frigid waves. Her instincts screamed at her to reach for Demonslayer, but she couldn’t move.
After a few more seconds, the monster appeared to lose interest. It turned and made for the passageway, stepping through the dry section of the channel before it disappeared into the darkness beyond.
The key ring jingled in Elisabeth’s pocket. She was shaking as though she had spent a night outdoors in midwinter. Even so, she wiped her palms on her coat and redoubled her efforts to push open the portcullis. If the Malefict were allowed to escape, countless people would die. After what she had just seen, she wasn’t certain if the wardens could stop it. What if it followed the Inkroad all the way to Brassbridge, sucking the life from entire towns as it went, leaving only dust behind?
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nathaniel staring after the Malefict. “Nathaniel,” she gritted through her teeth. “Help me.”
He didn’t tear his gaze from the passageway. “Didn’t you hear that?” he asked.
His voice sounded strange, almost dreamy. She paused, taking in his expression. He looked far calmer now than he had a moment before. But his eyes were bright, as they had been on the laudanum. Even the reddish glow of the vault failed to mask his pallor.
“The voice,” he went on. “It was speaking . . . it wanted . . . you didn’t hear what it said?”
A chill ran down Elisabeth’s spine. She glanced at Silas, who gave a slight shake of his head—he hadn’t heard anything, either. Carefully, he placed a hand on Nathaniel’s arm. “Master,” he said.
Nathaniel’s brow furrowed. He scraped a hand through his hair. “Sorry,” he said, sounding much more like himself. “I don’t know what came over me. Of course I would be happy to join you in a life-endangering act of heroism, Scrivener. You must only say the word.”
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