scorched papers. He lifted the topmost page, lecture notes
written in a small, neat script on the use of iambic pentameter
in medieval Corovia.
A hand touched his arm.
He leapt back with a shout. In the previously empty chair
sat a woman. A strangled gasp escaped his throat.
“Hello, Carter.”
His breath hissed between his teeth. Without replying, he
lifted his sword to see her clearly. A tremor of shock ran
through his frame. His whole body turned frigid.
“Come and give your mother a kiss,” she said sweetly.
“What are you doing in the dark?”
“I have waited here so I could warn you,” she said. “Come
to me, child. Surely you remember me?”
“I remember,” Carter said. She had died when he was five.
He could scarcely breathe.
“Then let me hold you in my arms. It has been so long. So
many years. Haven’t you wanted it?”
“The dead do not arise until the appointed time.”
“My love demanded that I do so.”
She was exactly as he remembered, the slender dark
beauty, the soft voice and warm expression. “What do you
want to warn me about?”
She glanced around the assembly hall as if her eyes could
penetrate the darkness. “The Poetry Men have tapped into the
power of Chaos. They will destroy the foundation of the house
by attacking those in charge of the Balance, the members of
the Servants’ Circle. You must stop them or beauty will vanish
from the universe. No more the numbered sequence, no more
the rising and setting of the sun. No more the passing of the
minutes and hours, the footprints of time. You must prevent it.
But first, come into my arms, and I will hold you and tell you
how precious and perfect you are, and love you with a
mother’s everlasting love.” She raised her arms, beckoning.
When he mastered himself enough to speak, Carter’s
words were ashes in his mouth. He had known, of course, it
was not really her … “Such talk gives you away, Lady Order.”
The woman slowly lowered her hands to her side. “A
shame. Yet it changes nothing. I can be your mother. Serve
me. Embrace me. I can give you back your childhood. The
innocence. The love. Is that not what mortals long for?”
“If I do as you say, what a prize you would possess! What
a ruin you would make of the house with me to drive Chaos
back.”
“You have been unkind to me!” she cried, her lips pouting.
“You misuse me, letting these Poetry Men wield the essence of
Chaos. They are making him too strong!”
“Then tell me how to stop them.”
Order shook his mother’s head, the soft curls rustling in
the silence. “They must be stopped.”
“How are Doctor Armilus and Professor Shoemate
involved?”
“I do not know them. They have not touched me.”
Carter bowed his head, gathering his strength. “Very well.
Depart from this place.”
“I have been drawn here, given physical form by the Chaos
within these walls.”
“And the Master bids you leave. I will set right the
Balance so neither you nor Chaos hold the upper hand.” Lord
Anderson’s voice rose to sudden fury. “Go! I command it!”
The woman vanished. Carter raked in his breath, his eyes
swarming with tears. “Cruel, cruel Order,” he murmured.
“Such guileless deceit. How little you understand us.” Despite
her seeming intelligence, she was not alive in the strictest
sense, but a Force with a single nature.
He walked to the center of the assembly hall, and there,
where the fields of Chaos were strongest, spoke in a loud
voice. “Old Man Chaos, you have dared too much! The Master
of Evenmere orders you to release these chambers!”
A deep, booming rose from the four walls, like distant
drums. The assembly hall shook, nearly tossing Carter off his
feet. An amorphous figure took form, gray and misshapen, its
shoulders humped and uneven, one arm shorter than the other,
its long, ash-gray face liquid as melting candle wax. The
slogging form of Chaos.
“The red rose in the blue-stained glass!” it shouted, eyes
glistening. “The agents of entropy! Wild wolves in the garden.
Darkness and darkness and bitter longing! Get back! Come
forth! The world-tree enters!”
As quickly as it appeared, Chaos sank away, vanishing into
the shadows; but even as it went, Carter encountered
resistance, as if another will opposed his own.
He suddenly found himself in a different place, hurled
there with breathtaking rapidity. He stood in a circular
chamber within a tall, crimson tower. A long window revealed
rows of battlements beneath a violet sky peppered with blue,
unwinking stars. A lamp burned on an ebony desk at the other
side of the room, where sat a woman in an upholstered chair.
Though Carter judged her to be somewhat younger than he,
her hair was silver. She had deep, brooding eyes. Infinite
sorrow consumed her features as she sat reading lines of
poetry.
She looked up, placidly meeting Carter’s gaze. Without a
hint of surprise, she asked, “Are you a Seeker?”
“Who are you?”
But she only sighed and returned to her book. “Come and
see.”
Going to the desk, Carter looked over the woman’s
shoulder. With a shock he discovered that the lines throbbed
with an energy as strong as that of the Words of Power;
scanning them shook him to the core. He tore his eyes away
only with great difficulty.
“How can you read that so calmly?” he asked.
She glanced up again. “How can I stop?”
Carter abruptly found himself back in the chamber at the
College of Poets. Only a few seconds had passed since he
banished Chaos, for the room still shuddered from the effects
of the creature’s departure. Gradually, the supernatural chill
vanished from the air. The Lightning Sword dimmed. Carter
drew a lantern and flint from his pack as the last rays of the
sword died. The lamp flamed high, a sign that the Balance had
been restored to the rooms.
Shuddering, he stumbled from the chamber and back down
the stair. The exit door was locked, and so greatly was he
shaken by what he had seen, it took an effort not to use his
sword to shatter the mechanism. Instead, he drew a deep
breath, sheathed his blade, and rapped harshly. The officer
opened the door at once.
“Did you find anything, sir?”
“Enough,” Carter said. “You won’t have any more
problems with these rooms.”
The man raised his eyebrows. “Very good, sir. I will report
it to the chancellor. Are you well, sir? You look deathly pale.”
But Carter waved the man away and went to sit on a bench
beneath the rotunda. Worse even than the shock of seeing his
dead mother apparently returned to life, he had never
experienced anything like the vision of t
he woman in the
tower. It had been somewhat like entering the dream
dimension, yet different as well, somehow more real . He
could not be certain, but he suspected his physical body had
actually been transported there. It was as if power were being
siphoned into Chaos; and when he touched that power, it put
him in contact with its source. That dreadful book. It had
contained fundamental energy much like that of the
Cornerstone of Evenmere. It could create and destroy; it might
even be able to change reality. What was he up against?
Who was the woman, and what was she doing with the
book? Was she somehow the root of the Poetry Men’s might?
He had to find out. He had been able to restore the College of
Poets from its chaotic state with a word, for it had contained
but a fragment of that power, but he doubted even he could
oppose it directly.
He pulled the diary from his breast pocket, reminded of the
question Chancellor Tremolo had asked as he and Jonathan
were leaving.
What of Professor Shoemate? Carter thought, running his
hand over his mouth and staring down at the diary. What
indeed of Professor Shoemate?
The Library
Upon leaving the College of Poets, Carter returned to his
room to read the professor’s journal. The first few pages were
irretrievably scorched, while the surviving leaves were written
in what he assumed to be a foreign language. This led him to
the Linguistics Department, where he spent two hours being
passed from professor to professor. Textbooks were consulted,
theories propounded, and heads thoughtfully scratched, as the
experts eliminated, one by one, various tongues from Thedrian
to Old Iphrisian.
Finally, a short, curly-headed philologist named Reuel
appeared from the depths of the building, took one glance at
the writing, and in a clipped voice declared, “It’s not a
language, but a letter-for-letter substitution. You just have to
puzzle it through.” He promptly hobbled away, leaving the
other professors nodding their heads and saying it was
perfectly obvious. They soon created Carter a key.
Over lunch at the university commons, he set to work
translating the diary. Judging by her rapid scrawl, Erin
Shoemate had learned the system well enough to write it
fluently. Clearly, she was an intelligent woman. By mid-
afternoon, he had finished his translation.
With several of the pages ruined by fire, it was difficult to
follow some of the professor’s often-esoteric references. She
wrote of old legends and pseudo-scientific literature—the tales
of Lost Atlantis, the Centric Theories of Bromsky, even
quoting Anton Trombone’s peculiar, phantasmagorical epic,
Beyond Yonder , tying them together with a book she seemed
to have stumbled on, a “great key” she believed would lead
her into “True Poetry.”
The next section of her journal was ruined, and when it
resumed, she was preparing to seek “the portal of the book.”
The top half of the next page was scorched beyond recovery,
but the remaining section stated she would “go first to the
Palace of the Decemvirs in Jossing, and then to the Tower of
Astronomy.”
Lord Anderson closed the diary. Had Erin Shoemate found
what she was seeking?
A quick visit to the chancellor’s office soon answered the
question. An old photograph of the professors of the College
of Poetry revealed a younger version of the woman Carter had
seen in his vision, standing in the second row beside Benjamin
Armilus.
He grimaced thoughtfully. The fact that the doctor and
Professor Shoemate had worked together could not be a
coincidence. What was the connection?
As the afternoon waned, he made his way through the
paneled corridors to the university library entrance, a lobby
with tessellated tile, Ionian pillars tipped in silver, and a three-
story marble statue of King Mosiva, the builder of the first
library in Evenmere, enrobed and bearing a heavy scroll. His
hair flowed backward from his face; his serene eyes looked
down.
Carter sat on a bench and studied his inner maps, bringing
to mind the passages surrounding the library, learning the way
by heart. The complex represented a fascinating challenge, a
building in a perpetual state of growth, having expanded over
the centuries to seventy separate chambers on ten floors,
connected by a series of seemingly endless warrens. The
interior was wooden stairs, dark oak beams, and high
chandeliers. After an hour of study, Carter rose and made his
way past the doorman along the smooth marble tunnel leading
to the Stacks.
A few students milled around the front desk, but Lord
Anderson soon left them behind. He journeyed between
narrow aisles beneath cloistered ceilings of arched stone, his
boot-steps heavy on the wooden boards, the musty scent of the
volumes hanging in the air. The gas jets hissed in the silence;
moths fluttered around the flames; the corners lay hidden in
shadow.
As in the College of Poets, he sensed chaotic influences as
he ascended to the upper stories, and he wondered if he would
see Lady Order again. He passed along gloomy stairs, making
his way to the drawing room on the eighth floor.
Within a narrow corridor decorated with hanging
tapestries, he spoke the Word of Secret Ways. The room
trembled and a blue square of light appeared around a tapestry
depicting eagles in flight. Moving the fabric aside, Carter
searched until he discovered a slender button embedded in the
flowering ornamentation on the wainscot border, which caused
a section of the wall to open inward. He drew his lamp from
his pack, lit it, and slipped inside.
Cobwebs thick as string covered the corridor. Carter drew
his sword and raised his lamp high, searching for spiders large
enough to spin such strands. Seeing none, he cut through the
webs, which shriveled beneath the power of his blade. Turning
sideways to avoid the filaments, he followed the thin passage
until it ended at an intersecting corridor. He veered to the right,
following his inner maps, and soon came to a spy-hole.
Pressing one eye to it, he discovered a room lit with candles.
By his pocket watch, the time was twenty past seven.
According to the chancellor’s secretary, the poetry meetings
normally had been held at eight, so he sat cross-legged on the
floor to see if anything would occur.
He hated waiting like this. He had spent far too many
hours of his life doing so. He particularly hated waiting for
something dreadful to happen. The minutes dragged until
nearly quarter till, when a soft rustling sounded in the room
beyond.
Rising, he saw through the spy-hole a young, wire-haired
man, presumably a student, setting out pads and pencils.
Eschewing the use of the gas-jets, the man lit additi
onal
candles. He moved carelessly about the room, apparently
unconcerned that the meeting was neither scheduled nor
sanctioned by the university.
One by one, other men and women of various ages drifted
into the room, until about twenty of them stood awkwardly
around the table. Though they appeared to be strangers, they
did not attempt introductions. Several were clearly agitated.
Sweat beaded their brows; they kept clasping and unclasping
their fists. One muttered over and over, “I just hope it helps.”
“Are you certain he’s coming?” a thin woman, who could
not stop wringing her hands, asked the wire-haired man.
“I am certain,” the man replied, “or, if not he, some other
representative. He has never broken his word. I would swear
to that.”
“It’s probably poppycock,” a middle-aged fellow with
spectacles growled, wiping his brow with a handkerchief.
“You will see it isn’t,” Wire-hair replied. “If you will take
a seat, I will serve some tea.”
The group complied. With beverages before them, they fell
silent, staring into their cups.
When Carter’s watch showed precisely eight o’clock,
footsteps sounded in the outer corridor, and a Poetry Man
dressed in a green robe appeared. A mist rose from his collar,
obscuring his head, so only patches of his face could be
glimpsed through the haze. One woman gave a shriek at his
bizarre appearance, and the rest eyed each other, as if to see
who would bolt first.
“Good evening,” the poet said. Carter could not tell, either
by his looks or his voice, if this was the same one who had
tried to kill him. He noticed a chameleon, green as the poet’s
robe and tiny enough to be mistaken for a brooch, clinging to
the man’s left breast. “I will begin by asking you how you
knew of tonight’s gathering.”
The group again exchanged hesitant glances.
“Let us not be stilled by fear,” the Poetry Man said. “There
are bridges to be crossed. Out with it, have your say, if you
would find what you have lost.”
“I …” one man stammered. “A voice in the wind told me
of the meeting.”
A sigh of relief circled the table. A woman spoke, “A bird
in the Commons sang it to me.”
“It was the rustling of a cottonwood,” a man said.
So it went, one after the other, each glad to unburden
Evenmere (The Evenmere Chronicles Book 3) Page 13