“Show them,” Takoda pleaded to Kovo. “Please.”
The gorilla’s eyes were still fixed on Meilin’s, with every bit of the calculating menace that she remembered. A raw surge of hatred passed through her. She could barely control the urge to attack.
Kovo shoved a chained hand at Takoda, knocking the boy back a step. Takoda let his hand drop, opened his satchel, and took out a roll of papyrus and a piece of charcoal. He placed them both on the ground in front of Kovo.
Meilin’s anger slowly drained as she watched Kovo take the charcoal in his powerful fingers, holding the tool with surprising delicacy. Avoiding their eyes, the ape concentrated on the papyrus and began to sketch.
“It’s always the same picture,” Takoda explained. “He even draws all the parts in the same order. It’s like he’s trying to get it all perfectly right. Like he’s trying to capture something that’s been seared into his mind.”
The gorilla started with a jaw, and the fangs came next. At first Meilin thought Kovo was drawing an animal—the Great Serpent Gerathon, perhaps. But it soon became clear that the jaw wasn’t attached to any creature. Instead, there were stones and grass in front of it, a rocky mountain behind, and a half moon in the sky above.
“Is it the fossil of a giant jaw?” Meilin asked.
Kovo dropped the charcoal and stared at her. Under the sudden onslaught of the ape’s cruel red eyes, Meilin fell back a step before she could remember her poise. Holding her head high, Meilin watched the ape trace an arc in the air, then walk through it with two fingers of his other hand.
“It’s not a fossil,” Takoda explained. “It’s a door. Wait, he’s not done. There’s one more part to it.”
Finally taking his gaze away from Meilin, Kovo picked the charcoal back up. On top of the fanged door, positioned right in its center, he drew a strange, disquieting symbol.
A twisting spiral.
WHO’D EVER GIVEN DOORWAYS MUCH THOUGHT? BUT now they were all Abeke could think about. As she and her friends passed through Greenhaven’s chilly stone corridors, Abeke found herself looking up at every frame and archway. Turned out that a doorway was never just a doorway. Some had shields hung above, some were splintered wood or gleaming granite, and some had frames of molding where there had once been glass.
None of Greenhaven’s doorways looked even remotely like a set of fangs.
“No one has seen anything like it,” Conor said forlornly, peering at the parchment with Kovo’s charcoal drawing.
“It feels like we’ve asked nearly everyone in Greenhaven,” Abeke said.
“Why not try the library?” Meilin asked.
The other three stared at her. “Greenhaven has a library?” Rollan asked.
Meilin rolled her eyes and led the way, bringing them down staircase after staircase. Natural light became scarce and then disappeared, replaced by the ruddy glow of guttering torches. “I came down here to study while we were training,” she said. “Didn’t you guys ever get the urge to pick up a book during training breaks?”
Abeke saw Conor blush and look away. In the last six months, he’d only just begun to learn how to read.
“Uh, yeah, of course,” Rollan said dryly. “I was reading, like, all the time. The bigger the book, the better, that’s what I always say.”
“Someday our survival will rest on knowing all about ancient Hellan rock decorating, and you’re going to thank me,” Meilin said, cuffing him on the shoulder.
“Shh!” came a low, outraged voice.
They’d arrived at the library.
At the end of a dank, dim hall at the very bottom level of Greenhaven, a doorway led into a musty space. The ceiling was so low that Conor had to duck to enter. It seemed to Abeke more like a dungeon than a library.
But once they were inside, the place had a coziness to it. Rows of short bookshelves extended in every direction. They were covered in candles that flickered in the drafty chamber, dripping wax over the worn wood. The warmth of so many ruddy flames lifted some of the chill that seeped into Abeke’s bones whenever she wasn’t in Nilo.
“Erlan?” Meilin called out excitedly. “Are you there?”
“Meilin? Is that you?” came a gruff voice from behind one of the bookshelves.
Staring at the rows of dusty leather-bound books, they edged farther into the chamber, in a reverent hush. Until, that is, Rollan promptly bashed his head on an iron chandelier, which in turn swung right into a bookcase, rocking it backward. Dusty parchment flew everywhere.
“Careful, careful!” came the gruff voice.
A tiny Niloan man came into view around one of the shelves, wearing a sea-foam-colored robe with white fur trim that merged seamlessly with his voluminous white beard.
“Hello, Erlan!” Meilin said, giving the librarian a kiss on the cheek.
“Meilin!” Erlan said, delighted.
As the librarian walked toward them, Abeke became confused: For every step the small man took forward, there was a pattering of footfalls.
She saw the reason soon enough, when Erlan stepped to one side and revealed a large tortoise, its gray-blue scales the same hue as the librarian’s robe. The tortoise blinked its rheumy eyes at them and yawned.
“It’s so lovely to see you again, Meilin. I have the new edition of Shei-Lon’s Ars Geometrica. You’ll adore it. I’m still more partial to the Niloan edition, but that could just be because that’s what I grew up reading. In any case, you won’t believe the diagrams; they’re woodcut prints, and simply gorgeous. Now, where is it?”
Erlan turned in a broad circle, searching for the book. His robe dragged against another shelf, sweeping a stack of books to the ground and spraying candlewax over the friends. Abeke and Conor followed after him, picking up the books and placing them back on the shelf as close as they could to their original order while Rollan stamped out the flaming wicks.
“I’d love to look at that book soon, but not today, Erlan,” Meilin said. “We’re here on urgent business.”
“Learning is always important business,” Erlan muttered. He kept rummaging around the shelves until the tortoise pointedly walked into the librarian’s legs to get his attention. Erlan looked down at his spirit animal, then at Meilin, and smoothed his white hair. “Sorry. Right. Urgent business, you said?”
“Yes,” Rollan said, rubbing the top of his head where it had bashed the chandelier. “Headache remedies, please.”
“Oh, sorry. I designed the library myself decades ago, and, well, I’ve never been very tall, and I suppose I forgot other people would use it, too. So let’s see,” Erlan said, scratching through his beard as he scanned the candlelit shelves. “Headache remedies. I’ll have to see what I have….”
“He was kidding,” Meilin said, scowling at Rollan.
“Says you!” said Rollan, outraged.
Meilin clamped her hand over his mouth. “Erlan, we’re looking for any reference to a doorway that looks like an open jaw.”
He rubbed his palms together. “That’s not something you hear every day.”
“Like this one,” Conor said helpfully, unrolling Kovo’s parchment and showing it to Erlan.
The old man squinted at the charcoal sketch. “Who drew this? It’s quite good, really. Exquisite use of crosshatch shading.”
“Kovo did,” Conor said. “He’s been drawing it repeatedly. He’s obsessed with it, apparently.”
Erlan instinctively recoiled. “Well, well. All the literature does point to Kovo being very smart. That was never in question.” Erlan scrutinized the drawing. “Now. What is he trying to tell us?”
After a few moments, the old man sighed. “I suppose there’s only one place for it….”
Groaning, he padded toward a candle-covered bookshelf that was already wobbling long before the librarian drew near. Abeke braced herself to leap to the rescue, but Erlan turned before ever reaching the shelf. Instead, he faced a small stretch of blank wall nestled between all the books.
Except it wasn’t a wall.
The elder Greencloak lifted a trembling hand and ran it over the bricks, finally coming to rest on one that was slightly darker than the rest. When he pressed it, ancient stones grumbled and hissed as they shifted deep in the walls, and then the bricks pivoted back, revealing a hidden room.
So many kinds of doors, Abeke thought again.
“Erlan?” Meilin said uncertainly. “You never told me there was another room here.”
“No, I didn’t,” the librarian said wearily. “I couldn’t tell anyone, not even you, Meilin. The Greencloaks have many fine qualities, but there are stories that they’d prefer to forget.”
Erlan disappeared into the room, sending a breeze of cold, stale air back out in his place. Abeke shivered.
“Much of the history of the Lost Lands is contained in here,” Erlan called out. “After the First Devourer War, the nation of Stetriol became a forbidden place, and knowledge of it was erased. It has taken me many, many years to assemble these manuscripts. Use what you discover here to help Erdas, but I’d ask you not to spread word of this collection further than you must. Not everyone would be happy to know I’ve been accumulating this information.”
A cough, a wheeze, a puff of breath. Dust plumed out of the doorway. From within its shell, the tortoise sneezed.
“But some of these histories are older even than the Lost Lands,” Erlan said, emerging from the passage with a tome bound in cracked black snakeskin. He hobbled to a broad table and laid the great book down with care. There, raised beneath the cover, was the shape of a gorilla standing on all fours.
“Kovo,” Conor whispered.
“What is this book, Erlan?” Meilin asked, mistrust lacing her voice.
“I have no idea,” the librarian said wistfully. “Can’t read a word of it. Perhaps to keep its contents secret, it was written in a forgotten tongue—or a code. I’ve lost many nights trying to decipher it. But thankfully, the author was also a skilled artist.” Erlan gently cracked open the cover of the book, turning each page with delicate precision.
“Here we are,” he said. As he turned the next page, the air in the cramped library seemed to still.
Despite herself, Abeke gasped. There, sketched onto the page in a delicate hand, was the exact door Kovo had drawn, waiting within a set of ragged jaws. It even had the strange spiral symbol.
Rollan whistled. “Well, isn’t that weird?”
Erlan grunted in agreement as he turned the next page. It was a map. A twisted ring of mountains curled into itself, dropping into a cone at the center, like the trap of an antlion. In the center of the ring, the spiral was drawn again into a stretch of mountainside surrounded by forest and ruined walls. This time the spiral was a deep crimson color. Abeke hoped it was just red ink.
“What is this place?” Meilin asked.
“The Petral Mountains, on the border between Eura and Zhong,” Erlan said quietly. “A very secluded stretch. No humans have lived there for quite a while.”
“This is all fine and moody,” Rollan said, “but we still don’t know that it’s connected to what’s happening with the Evertree. Kovo has tricked us before.”
“Kovo is not to be trusted,” Erlan said. “But in this case, I believe that the door is indeed connected to the Evertree.”
“Why’s that?” Abeke asked.
“I haven’t shown you the back cover yet.” Erlan closed the tome and carefully flipped it over.
There, raised beneath the snakeskin, was the outline of an enormous tree. But the tree was only half of the picture. A thin line bisected the image where the roots of the tree met the ground. Below the line, the roots spread out into a web of branches, as wide and tangled as the tree itself. Bundled deep within the roots, like an egg within a nest, was the familiar spiral.
“That’s why Lenori couldn’t find anything wrong with the Evertree at first,” Abeke said. “She was looking outside, but the trouble is coming from below.”
“So we have to go below, too,” Conor said. “And we have to start in the Petral Mountains.”
Now that Conor had said it aloud, the idea of journeying deep under the earth felt terrifying. They stared at each other in the candlelit gloom of the basement library. Abeke saw Rollan rub his head absently where he’d struck the chandelier. How far down did the Evertree go? If this library felt low and oppressive, what would it feel like to be miles underground? She couldn’t speak for the others, but she knew it was nowhere she’d want to be.
Erlan clapped his hands cheerfully, cutting the sudden gloom. “Glad to be of service!”
“Good thing I didn’t unpack yet,” Meilin said as the old man shuffled away. “We’ll leave as soon as we can. It’s too bad—after that sea voyage, I’d have loved a few nights in a soft bed.”
Conor shook his head and tugged unconsciously at his sleeve.
Meilin glanced from him to Abeke with questioning eyes. All Abeke could do was shrug. It wasn’t her news to tell.
“Before we make any decisions, I have something to show you,” Conor said miserably. “But let’s go back up to the courtyard. We’ll all feel better out in the daylight.”
But the daylight was nearly gone. Afternoon was rapidly declining into twilight when they returned to the courtyard, the shadows lengthening and joining as they deepened toward night.
Conor had been silent all the way out to the courtyard, and now in the waning evening light he held up a hand to stop his companions. “Takoda?” he called softly. “Would you come over here? I need your help—I don’t want to get any part of this story wrong.”
Takoda stood up, hands clasped within his stiff blue robe.
When the boy stepped away, Kovo startled and grunted loudly, making a flurry of signs. Takoda waited for him to finish, then made a simple sign back and pointed to Abeke and the others.
Kovo signed more and more emphatically, baring his teeth. Abeke felt her hands tighten into fists. Would Kovo attack Takoda, even though they were bonded?
Calmly, Takoda repeated the same simple sign and pointed at the group.
All was still for a moment, then Kovo strained against his chain and roared right into Takoda’s face, the noise echoing across the bare courtyard. Chest heaving in anger, Kovo grunted and hurled himself heavily onto the flagstones, his back to them. He punched the ground once, and Abeke heard a crack where the sturdy flagstone split in two.
Visibly shaken, Takoda crossed over. “I think he’s … concerned that you won’t heed his warning. Sorry.”
“Are you okay?” Abeke asked.
Takoda nodded, lips sealed in a straight line. “What do you need from me?”
Conor had clenched his jaw so tightly that it was shaking. Abeke put a reassuring hand on her friend’s wrist, and was relieved when he let it stay.
“When we went to get Kovo and Takoda, Zerif attacked,” Conor began. “He was … different, somehow. More intense. And here was the strangest thing: He had that spiral symbol on his forehead.” Conor swallowed. “While we were driving him back, Zerif uncorked a small black bottle. I managed to grab it from his hand.” Conor breathed out softly.
From the center of the courtyard, Kovo turned his head enough so he could stare at them, his scarlet eyes narrowed.
“What was in the bottle?” Meilin asked.
“It was …” Conor faltered.
Takoda spoke gently, answering for him. “It was alive. Some kind of worm.”
Conor nodded, casting a grateful look at Takoda. “I chopped at it as soon as it crawled out of the bottle. I thought it was dead, but a little chunk of it wriggled up my blade and entered a cut on my wrist. And that piece …”
Gritting his teeth, Conor rolled up his sleeve.
Though she’d already heard the story, this was the first time Abeke had seen Conor’s wound. She gasped. Starting at a red scab at Conor’s wrist, a tendril of gray passed up his forearm, ending slightly before his elbow. It paralleled a blue vein in the middle of Conor’s arm. But while the vein was still,
this tendril quivered like something alive, just below the skin.
At the elbow, where the living tendril ended, the knob of it throbbed and shifted, curling into new versions of the same shape.
A spiral.
REVEALING THE PARASITE WENT JUST AS CONOR FEARED it would. Abeke gasped and turned her head away; Rollan cast his eyes to the ground; Meilin gritted her teeth and forced herself to keep looking despite her obvious disgust. Conor watched all of it, his heart twisting. There was something bitterly wrong with him, and now he was going to lose the people he loved most in the world because of it.
Conor pulled his sleeve down low so it covered the creature. The creature inside of him. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “It’s been moving ever since it entered me. I can barely sleep.”
Takoda looked at him with deep pity, and Conor hated it. He felt his face twist into a humiliated scowl. His heart was racing so much, he wondered if his friends could see his veins thudding violently under his skin.
“Hey,” Rollan said, wrapping his arm around Conor’s shoulders. “We’re going to figure this out. You know that, right?”
There was tension in Rollan’s voice. He was lying. Conor was sure of it.
“Does it hurt?” asked Meilin.
Conor shrugged Rollan’s arm off his shoulder. “Not too much. Sometimes I think if I ignored it, it might go away. It’s just so … disgusting.”
Rollan wouldn’t give up. He threw his arms around his friend. “You’ve been disgusting ever since we’ve known you.”
Conor’s heart filled with relief. Who knew it could feel so good to be teased? But Rollan had always been an expert at it, making him feel loved even as he took him down.
Finally Conor could voice what was worrying him most: “Even though only a small piece of it got inside me, this thing is working its way up my arm. Zerif’s was in his forehead. I think that’s where it’s heading.” Conor’s stomach lurched. “What happens when it gets there?”
“It’s not possible for you to become like Zerif,” Rollan said flatly. “He’s got better hair, for starters.”
Spirit Animals: Fall of the Beasts #1: Immortal Guardians Page 3