“Well . . .” she began. “I think I could get it, but I would want to go with you. It is not that I don’t trust you. But it would be most unfortunate if you were to lose it.”
“Of course,” I said with a smile. I was determined to have that key for myself, but now was not the time to argue the point.
“Anyway,” Lily said, “I have chores to attend to.” Then, looking around, she said, “Meet me after dinner. I should have the key by then.” With a smile, she was off.
I was left alone. Well, more or less alone. Charles and Anna were now whispering down the table. This was not a place I wished to be, so I stood up and wandered about the high vaulted expanse. There was little to attract the eye. I had never been in a place of God with less to recommend it. Less architectural beauty, less in the way of art or sculpture.
I supposed the fortress’s history had much to do with its starkness. I leaned myself against a column and began to think. I suddenly hoped we would not be here much longer. I found it to be cold and unfriendly despite my growing affection for one of the young women who had sentenced herself to a life here. I had begun to think on whether that was an unfair judgment when I felt a presence beside me. I turned and was shocked to see it was Vladimir.
“The Abbess,” he began, “seems never to tire of questions.” He smiled at me, and then turned his head to look at Anna and Charles. “Apparently, neither does your friend. He appears to have taken an interest in my Anna. Do you think,” he continued now turning his gaze back to me, “that I should be concerned?”
I stared dumbly back at him, unsure of what to say. Vladimir chuckled.
“She is a very beautiful girl, of that I am sure. So I do not envy a man if he admires her. As long as it is at a distance, of course. I am an old man, and I realize Anna may find she has more in common with a younger set. I do not begrudge her the friendship of others. But you would be wise to ensure friendship is all that it remains.”
“Of course,” I said, with a slight bow. We stood there like that in silence for a few minutes. Then, Vladimir deigned to break that silence.
“I hope the priest returns soon with help from Czernowitz. I do not wish to remain here any longer.”
“Vladimir,” I said, determined to ease his mind and possibly save Charles’ health, “you have nothing to fear from Charles. His intentions are pure, I am sure.”
Vladimir laughed, but without humor. “It is not Charles I fear. It is this place. Can’t you feel it? The sisterhood may have taken it, but they do not own it, not yet. There is still something unholy about it. And two nights hence . . .” His voice trailed off. He did not finish.
“What?” I asked
He squinted at me with a queer look. “Your people have forgotten the old ways,” he said. “You would do well to remember them.” I simply said nothing. He frowned and continued, “We should not be here, my young friend. And in two days, it will be May Eve. Walpurgis Night. We should not be on this mountain on such a night. I have seen many things in my life, enough to not be superstitious, enough to know most can be explained. But there are some things for which one would be wise to maintain a healthy respect. This place is one of them.”
“What if he doesn’t come?”
“If the priest doesn’t come,” he said, “then we will wait it out the best we can. And hope the blessing of the sisterhood will keep us safe.”
It was a dark assessment from a man who I felt held few sentimental thoughts. I, for one, knew nothing of May Eve, of Walpurgis Night, nothing more than I had discovered in the most recent days of my travels. But the more I learned, the less I wanted to know.
Dinner came and Lily appeared, but she had no key. She apologized profusely, but the Abbess had remained in her office all morning, and there had been no opportunity to obtain it. The same story was told at supper. Charles and I returned to our room to be locked inside. At midnight the procession began again, as silently and stealthily as before.
* * *
The next morning at breakfast, Lily was nowhere to be seen. My initial reaction was to worry; there was a danger she may have been caught in the midst of our crime. If she confessed, then our conspiracy would be uncovered, and Abbess Batory might choose to banish us from the castle.
Charles was similarly put-out; that morning Batory had not sent for Vladimir. And so there he sat, hovering over poor Anna. The timid girl, so boisterous and talkative the past few days, did not dare to speak now. The mood was one of overall gloom, and the longer Lily’s absence continued, the gloomier it got. But then I saw her, standing next to a column on the edge of the room, beckoning to me. I excused myself from the table and met her.
“I was beginning to think something happened,” I said.
“Such as what?” she asked with a smile.
“Well, I thought you might have been caught.”
“Not quite,” she said, holding up a steel gray skeleton key.
“You got it!” I said, perhaps too loudly.
“I got it,” she replied. “Meet me in the outer chamber after breakfast. I have some free time before dinner, and the others will be busy. There is something I want to show you.”
“I will meet you,” I said as she stood there smiling brightly, the darkness lifting that had been hovering over me. For the first time, the first time really that is, I wished we had met in a different place.
* * *
I waited as she had asked in the outer chamber just beyond the hall in which we ate. I stood in the shadows as several groups of sisters moved about on their way to their sundry duties. Finally, there was Abbess Batory walking confidently, with purpose, through the chamber to some unknown destination.
I watched her as she went, but when she reached an outer door, I saw her stop. For a moment, I thought she would turn and find my hiding spot. I immediately began to concoct a dozen different excuses, sure in the knowledge she would see through them all. But after only a moment’s pause, she continued through the door and was gone. I stood in the hall alone for a few more minutes, but then Lily arrived.
“Come!” she commanded in a whisper. “We must hurry, and we must not be seen.”
She led me through an open hall to one of the many locked doors in the corridor. Lily produced the key and unlocked it with no difficulty. The open door revealed a long corridor. I had little time to study it before I was hurried in by Lily who quietly closed and locked the door behind us.
The hallway immediately fell dark, the only light provided by windows placed high upon the wall near the ceiling. Lily handed me one of the lanterns she carried with her, opening the vents to allow light. The corridor was blacker, dirtier, older than the one we had just left. I could tell immediately this was not an area of the castle that was often visited.
“They had planned on opening this all up,” Lily said. “To give the Order more space. You are lucky there were rooms available when you arrived. Normally, each sister would have her own cell, but here most share rooms. Yours were being prepared for sisters when you arrived. If you had come but a day later, they would not have been open. Lucky for you, I guess. I am actually lucky, as well. I am one of the few sisters who has her own room.”
We walked down the length of the hallway. There was a stairway leading down and curling back around the wall at its end. As we descended, Lily continued, “As I was saying, they had planned to open all this up. But then they found it.”
The stairway continued to descend before dead-ending into yet another doorway. But this one was different from the others. The walls around its edges were rougher, as if the once smooth stone had been chiseled or beaten away. The door itself was not the same as those we had already passed through. I would have sworn those doors had been in place for hundreds of years, but this one was new and looked as if the wood had been cut and planed only a few months before.
“When they found this chamber,” she said as she slid the key into the lock, “it was entirely blocked in. It was bricked up,” she continued, turni
ng the key, “and beyond that were boulders, as if the roof had fallen in or someone had tried to forever fill the hallway beyond. They had to use dynamite to blow through the wall. The other sisters say it shook the castle so, they thought the whole roof might fall in!” she whispered with a mischievous smile. Then she flung the door open.
A black, gaping hole was before us. It seemed to leer out at us, like the empty smile of a toothless skull. I looked at Lily and she at me.
“Shall we?” she asked. I simply nodded. We entered a narrow, downward-sloping corridor. Its walls were different, more ancient, less chiseled, more rough-hewn. I was immediately interested in the method of its construction, of whether it predated the castle. But then it opened up into a high chamber, and all my previous curiosities were forgotten.
“Oh my sweet Lord!”
“Incredible, isn’t it?”
So many thoughts entered my mind at that moment, and I must concentrate if I am to relay them in any coherent way. My first thought, after the shock of what I saw had passed, was the distinct and overwhelming certainty I shouldn’t be there. Not then, not ever. It was the sort of place no man should see. No Christian man, at least. A fearful place, a horrible place. It then struck me how young Lily must be, for only a youth could see such a thing and not recoil instantly from the sight of it.
It was a chamber, as I have said. High vaulted and massive. A great inverted bowl, seemingly carved out of the depths of the mountain. At the far end sat a table. No, not a table. An altar. That is the only word for it. A single piece of stone. Four feet high and six feet long, made out of a single block of marble, smooth at the top. It was darker in some places than others, and though it may have just been a trick of the light, at that moment I could almost see the bloodstains as black and sinister as if the slaughter perpetrated upon that slab had happened only moments before.
On the walls were symbols, runes, drawings: some older than others, some so ancient they had faded to mere outlines of the horrors they had once represented. There were winged creatures, men with the heads of animals, paintings of dead bodies, tortured men and women, decapitated children and babes.
And in the rear of the chamber was a great painting of a throne, seated in which was a familiar image. It was a winged beast with the body and arms of a man and the legs and head of a goat. Etched into his forehead was a pentagram and in his hand he held, perhaps most bizarrely of all, a cross. Opened before him was a great book, one of arcane and tenebrous lore no doubt. The golden letters seemed to shine in the dark twilight of that cavern, and I was glad the words they formed were of a language I did not understand, even if they were somehow oddly familiar.
“God, Lily . . .” I whispered. She barely seemed to notice. “Lily, we shouldn’t be here,” I said.
“No, you shouldn’t,” a high, cold voice echoed from behind us. We both turned. Abbess Batory was standing in the doorway, holding a lantern. I felt Lily move close beside me. We stood there for a second, starting at the Abbess. I felt Lily’s hand slip into my pocket, and when she removed it, my coat was heavier than it had been before.
“Lily, leave us,” the Abbess commanded. “I will deal with you later.”
“Yes, Abbess,” Lily said with a bow. She exited then, never looking up from her feet as she went, never glancing back at me or the Abbess. For her part, the Abbess never took her eyes off of me. I waited for the worst.
“Well, Mr. Lincoln, it appears your corrupting influence has taken hold over the youngest of my charges.”
“Abbess Batory, I . . .”
She lifted her hand quickly to indicate no explanation was desired. In any event, none would suffice.
“She is a child, Mr. Lincoln. And, doubly that, she is a child of God. Thus, your corruption is doubly damned. Of course, I should not expect a wanderer such as yourself to respect her commitment.”
“Is that so, Abbess?” I said, more boldly than perhaps I should. “What of yourself, then? What is your view on commitment? Or is your sudden interest in Vladimir’s travels to the exclusion of the rest of us as innocent as you feign?”
For a moment she merely stared at me, a penetrating gaze of death she had apparently perfected over her years of command. But then, surprisingly perhaps — or perhaps not — she smiled. The smile was as steely cold as her icy, pale blue eyes.
“There are,” she said, stepping down from the stairs and into the pit, “a multitude of commitments. Some holy. Some not. I do not know if I approve of your Lord Charles, but he is no Vladimir. And of Vladimir, I have no use.”
She now stood in the center of that ungodly pit, a symbol of holiness in a most unholy place.
“Well, Mr. Lincoln, I suppose this is my fault,” she said, her demeanor softening. “Your curiosity was bound to get the better of you eventually. So I will answer your questions now, to the extent you have them.”
“I suppose I would start with the obvious.”
“Yes,” she said with a smile, “I suppose you would.” She walked around the chamber looking with evident disgust at the paintings and engravings on the walls. “Every place,” she said, turning to me, “has its superstitions, its secrets. But in some places, those superstitions and secrets are true. Such it is with this mountain. This is an old place, Daniel. Where you stand now was carved into this mountain long before the birth of Christ. From it, evil has long emanated. Do you know what this is?”
“A temple of some sort?” I said.
“That is partly true, but it is more than that. The name of it is whispered amongst Christian men, and even those who serve the darkness do not speak it lightly. It is the Scholomance.”
I knew nothing of the occult then, but even I had heard the dark tidings of that place. The stories were so outrageous they couldn’t help but contain some kernel of truth. A school of the blackest, foulest magic, taught by the Devil himself. It was a focal point of evil, a den of sin and iniquity. I shuddered to think I stood in that place at that moment and such an innocent as Lily had led me there.
“I see from your face you have heard of this place,” the Abbess said as she walked along the outer wall. “Ten at a time they would admit, the scholars who would learn the Devil’s ways. But only nine would leave. That is the price of immortal knowledge. One would be sacrificed to the dark lord of this chamber.”
She rubbed her hands along an indentation that had been carved into the far wall. “They kept the books here, you know?” she said, almost wistfully. “Ancient tomes, scrolls. I wonder where they went. Burned, I hope. Burned away into dust, burned with their owners. But probably not,” she said, whipping around to face me again. “Do you know your Bible, Daniel?”
That question seemed to have become common. “Better than some,” I said. “Not as well as others.”
“Then I will quote it for you. ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the Earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.’ Gog and Magog,” she said. I simply stood there, waiting for explanation. “That all the Scriptures are truth cannot be denied, but not all truth is revealed in scripture. Do you understand now?” she asked.
I shook my head as I still did not.
She sighed, leaning against the wall. Then she said, “Revelations speaks of two great beasts, one to rule the Earth and one to rule the sea.” She quoted again, “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon.” The ancients speak of these two beasts, as well. That this is the Scholomance is truth, but what is also true is we stand today in the Temple of Gog. Gog, the beast of the Earth, and Magog, the beast of the sea. They worshiped him here, long before those words were written. They awaited his return here, and Magog’s, as well.”
“Gog and Magog,” I repeated.
“Gog and Magog, though not always by that name,” she said, stepping close to
me, so close I could feel her breath on my face and taste the fire of her words. “Perhaps here, perhaps then, he went by another name. They have a thousand names, yes? Some are lost. Some are still remembered. They ruled this world in days gone by. The darkness covered the Earth once, in the days before days, before God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and it was good. They sleep now, or so some say. Waiting to wake, waiting to retake the world that was theirs.”
She stepped back. “And we stand in their way, you and I and the builders of this fortress. We didn’t know when we arrived, of course. We found the corridor to this chamber blocked off. It looked as though the roof was caved in, but it was too methodically done to be an accident. And so we brought in dynamite and blasted our way through. It was then we found this. You can see now why we keep these corridors locked?”
“Yes, yes I can.”
“And now that I have told you these things, I will ask you again. Please do not wander aimlessly through this castle. You never know what you might stumble upon. We should go now,” she said, turning her back and climbing up the stairs. I followed her. As I did, I put one hand into my coat and felt cold metal. In the confusion, Lily had slipped the key into my pocket.
Chapter
17
“The Scholomance? Here?”
It was night. Charles and I had only been locked in our rooms a few minutes when I began to relay the events of the day. Charles had listened with growing interest, but when I mentioned the Scholomance, he could no longer remain quiet.
“And even better,” I said, pulling the key out of my pocket. “We are free.”
“Excellent, Daniel!” Charles said, plucking the key out of my hand. “How?”
“Lily,” I said, taking it back. “And I’ll hold on to that.”
“Oh, Daniel, you devil,” he said with a wolfish grin.
“Stones and glass houses, my friend. I propose,” I continued, “that once the Sisters take to their Midnight Mass, you and I do some exploring.”
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