Here was his catalyst.
He watched a bit longer―long enough to discern that there was some tension between the two―then sneaked back to the concealed door. He knew that his next critical moves must be planned carefully.
* * * * *
"Should we work together?" Cadderly offered in an exaggerated, bubbly voice.
Kierkan Rufo glared at him. "Have you any tricks planned for me now?" he asked. "Any new baubles to show off at my expense?"
"Are you saying that you did not deserve it?" Cadderly asked. "You started the battle when you brought Avery to my room."
"Pity the mighty scribe," came the sarcastic reply.
Cadderly started to respond, but held his tongue. He sympathized with Rufo, truly an attentive priest. Cadderly knew that the headmasters had pushed Rufo aside after Cadderly's success with the wizard's spellbook. The wound was too fresh to mend it here, Cadderly knew, and neither he nor Rufo had any desire to work together.
Rufo explained his logging system for the inventory so that their lists might be compatible. Cadderly saw several possibilities for improvement but again said nothing. "Do you understand?" Rufo asked, handing Cadderly a counting chart
Cadderly nodded. "A good system," he offered.
Rufo briskly waved him away, then continued his inventory, working his way slowly around the long and shadowy racks.
A flash of light in a distant comer caught the angular man's attention, but it was gone as fast as it had appeared. Rufo cocked his head, took up his torch, and inched his way over. A wall of casks confronted him, but he noticed an opening around to the side.
"Is anyone there?" Rufo asked, a bit nervously. Torch leading the way, he peeked into the opening and saw the ancient portal.
"What is it?" came a voice behind him. Rufo jumped in surprise, dropped his torch at his feet, and upset a cask as he danced away from the flames. He was not comforted when the crashing had ended and he looked back into Cadderly's grinning face.
"It is a door," Rufo replied through gritted teeth.
Cadderly picked up the torch and peered in. "Now where might that lead?" he asked rhetorically.
"It is none of our concern," Rufo said firmly.
" Of course it is," Cadderly retorted. "It is part of the library and the library is our concern."
"We must tell a headmaster and let him decide the proper way to investigate it," Rufo offered. "Now give me the torch."
Cadderly ignored him and advanced to the small wooden portal. It opened easily, revealing a descending stairway, and Cadderly was surprised and delighted once more.
"You surely will get us into even more trouble!" Rufo complained at his back. "Do you wish to count and clean until your hundredth birthday?"
"To the lowest levels?" Cadderly said excitedly, ignoring the warning. He looked back at Rufo, his face glowing brightly in the near torchlight.
The nervous Rufo backed away from the weirdly shadowed specter. He seemed not to understand Percival companion's excitement.
"The lowest levels," Cadderly repeated as though those words should hold some significance. "When the library was originally built, most of it was below ground. The Snowflakes were wilder back then, and the founders thought an underground complex more easily defended. The lowest catacombs were abandoned as the mountains were tamed and the building expanded, and eventually it was believed that all the exits had been sealed." He looked back to the enticing stair. "Apparently that was not the case."
"Then we must tell a headmaster," Rufo declared nervously. "It is not our place to investigate hidden doorways."
Cadderly shot him an incredulous stare, hardly believing the man to be so childish. "We will tell them," the young scholar agreed, poking his head through the dusty opening. "In time."
* * * * *
A short distance away, Barjin watched the two men with nervous anticipation, one hand holding tight to the security of his cruel mace. The evil priest knew that he had taken quite a chance in calling up the magical light signaling the portal's location. If the two men decided to go and tell their masters, Barjin would have to intercept them―forcefully. But Barjin had never been patient, which was why he had come directly to the Edificant Library in the first place. There was a degree of danger in his gamble, both in coming here and in revealing the door, but the potential gains of both actions could not be ignored. If these two decided to explore, then Barjin would be one giant step closer to realizing his desires.
They disappeared from sight around the barricading casks, so Barjin crept closer.
"The stairs are fairly solid, though they are ancient," he heard Cadderly call back, "and they go down a long, long way."
Appearing skeptical, even afraid, the angular priest slowly backed out of the concealed area. "The headmaster," he muttered softly and turned abruptly for the stairs.
Barjin stepped out before him.
Before Rufo could even cry out, the evil priest's spell fell over him. Rufo's gaze locked fast to the evil priest's dark eyes, held in place by Barjin's hypnotic stare. In his studies of wizardry, charms had always been the charismatic Barjin's strength. His adoption of Talona had not diminished that touch, though the Lady of Poison's clerics were not normally adept at such magic, and Kierkan Rufo was not a difficult opponent.
Nor were Barjin's magically enhanced suggestions to the enthralled Rufo contrary to the angular man's deepest desires.
* * * * *
Cadderly creeped slowly toward the open door, never taking his gaze from the enticing blackness beyond the meager limits of his torchlight. What wonders remained down there in the oldest rooms of the Edificant Library? he wondered. What secrets long forgotten about the founders and initial scholars?
"We should investigate―we'll be working down here for many days," Cadderly said, leaning forward and peering over the stairs. "No one would have to know until we decided to tell them."
Despite his consuming curiosity for the mysteries before him, Cadderly kept enough wits about him to realize that he had been betrayed as soon as he felt a boot against his lower back. He grabbed the flimsy railing, but the wood broke away in his hand. He managed to look back for just an instant and saw Rufo crouched in the low doorway, a weird, emotionless expression on his dark and hollowed face.
Cadderly's torch flew away, and he tumbled into the blackness, bouncing down the stairs and coming to rest heavily on the stone floor below. All the world fell into blackness; he did not hear the door close above him.
* * * * *
Kierkan Rufo went right from the wine cellar to his room that night, wanting to confront no one and respond to no questions. The recent events were but a blur to the charmed man. He vaguely remembered what he had done to Cadderly, though he couldn't be certain if it had been real or a dream. He remembered, too, closing and blocking off the hidden door. There was something else, or someone else, though, in the picture, hovering off to the side in the shadows just out of reach of Rufo's consciousness.
Try as he may, poor Rufo could not remember anything about Barjin, as a result of the enchanting priest's devious instructions. In the back of his mind, Rufo retained the strange sensation that he had made a friend this night, one who understood his frustrations and who agreed that Cadderly was an unworthy man.
Barjin's World
Cadderly awoke in utter darkness; he could not see his hand if he waved his fingers just an inch in front of his face. His other senses told him much, though. He could smell the thick dust and feel the sticky lines of cobwebs hanging all about.
"Rufo!" he called, but his voice carried nowhere in the dead air, just reminded him that he was alone in the dark. He crawled to his knees and found that he was sore in a dozen places, particularly on the side of his head, and that his tunic was crusted as if with dried blood. His torch lay beside him, but in pawing about it, Cadderly realized that it had expired many hours before.
Cadderly snapped his fingers, then reached down to his belt. A moment later, he popped t
he cap from a cylindrical tube and a ray of light cut through the darkness. Even to Cadderly, the light seemed an intruder in these corridors, which had known only darkness for centuries uncounted. A dozen small creatures scuttled away on the edges of Cadderly's vision, just out of the light. Better to have them scurry away, Cadderly thought, than to have them lay in wait in the darkness for him to pass.
Cadderly examined his immediate surroundings with the light tube's aperture wide open, mostly focusing on the shattered stairway beside him. Several stairs remained attached at the top, near the closed door, but most of the boards lay scattered about, apparently shattered by Cadderly's heavy descent. No easy path back that way, he told himself, and he narrowed the beam to see down the greater distances. He was in a corridor, one of many crisscrossing and weaving together to form a honeycomb-type maze, judging from the many passages lining both walls. The supporting arches were similar to those of the library above, but, being an earlier architectural design, they were even thicker and lower, and seemed lower still covered with layers of dust, hanging webs, and promises of crawly things.
When Cadderly took the time to examine himself, he saw that his tunic was, as he expected, crusted with his own blood. He noticed a broken board lying next to him, sharply splintered and darkly stained. Tentatively, the young priest unbuttoned his tunic and pulled it aside, expecting a garish wound.
What he found instead was a scab and a bruise. Although the more dutiful priests of Deneir, even those Cadderly's age, were accomplished healers, Cadderly was hardly practiced in the medicinal arts. He could tell, though, by the stains on the splintered board that his wound had been deep and it was obvious from his soaked shirt alone that he had lost quite a bit of blood. The wound was undeniably on the mend, though, and if it once had been serious, it was not now.
"Rufo?" Cadderly called again, wondering if his companion had come down behind him and healed him. There was no answer, not a sound in the dusty corridor. "If not Rufo, then who?" Cadderly asked himself softly. He shrugged his shoulders a moment later; the riddle was quite beyond him.
"Young and strong," Cadderly congratulated himself having no other answer. He stretched the rest of his aches out and finished his survey of the area, wondering if there might be some way to reconstruct enough of the stairway to get back near the door. He set his light tube on the floor and pieced together some boards. The wood was terribly deteriorated and smashed beyond repair―too much so, Cadderly thought, to have been caused just by his fall. Several pieces were no more than splinters, as though they had been battered repeatedly.
After a short while, Cadderly gave up the idea of going back through the wine cellar. The old, rotted wood would never support his weight even if he could find some way to piece it back together. "It could be worse," he whispered aloud, picking up his light tube and taking his spindle-disks from a pouch. He took a deep breath to steady himself and started off―any way seemed as good as another.
Crawling things darted to dark holes on the perimeter of the light beam and a shudder coursed along Cadderly's spine as he imagined again what this journey might be like in darkness.
The walls were of brickwork in most of the passages, crushed under uncountable tonnage and cracked in many places. Bas-reliefs had worn away, the lines of an artist's chisel filled in by the dust of centuries, the fine detail of sculptures replaced by the artwork of spiderwebs. Somewhere in the dark distance, Cadderly heard the drip of water, a dull and dead thump-thump. "The heartbeat of the catacombs," Cadderly muttered grimly, and the thought did not comfort him.
He wandered for many minutes, trying to formulate some logical scheme for conquering the tunnel layout. While the builders of the original library had been an orderly group and had carefully thought out the catacomb design, the initial purposes, and courses, of the various tunnels had been adapted over the decades to fit the changing needs of the structure above.
Every time Cadderly thought he had some sense of where he might be, the next corner showed him differently. He moved along one low and wide corridor, taking care to keep away from the rotting crates lining the walls. If this was the storage area, he reasoned, there might be an outside exit nearby, a tunnel large enough for wagons, perhaps.
The corridor ended at a wide arch that fanned out diagonally under two smaller arches to the left and the right. These were congested by webs so thick that Cadderly had to retrieve a plank from the crates just to poke his way through.
The passages beyond the arched intersection were identical, layered stonework and only half as wide as the corridor he had just traveled. His instinct told him to go left, but it was just a guess, for in the winding ways Cadderly really had little idea of where he was in relation to the buildings above him.
He kept his pace swift, following the narrow beam faithfully and trying to ignore the rat squeaks and imagined perils to the sides and behind him. His fears were persistent, though, and each step came with more effort. He shifted the beam from side to side and saw that this passage's walls were lined with dark holes, alcoves. Hiding places, Cadderly imagined, for crouched monsters.
Cadderly turned slowly, bringing his light to bear, and realized that in his narrow focus on the path ahead, he had crossed the first few sets of these alcoves. A shudder ran through his spine, for he figured out the purpose of the alcoves before his light ever angled properly for him to see inside one.
Cadderly jumped back. The distant thump-thump of the catacomb heartbeat remained steady, but the young scholar's own heart missed a few beats, for the beam of light fell upon a seated skeleton just a few feet to Cadderly's side. If this passage had been intended for storage, its goods were macabre indeed! Where once may have been stored crates of food, now there was only food for the carrion eaters. Cadderly had entered the crypts, he knew, the burial vaults for the earliest scholars of the Edificant Library.
The skeleton sat impassive and oblivious in its tattered shroud, hand bones crossed over its lap. Webs extended from a dozen angles in the small alcove, seeming to support the skeleton in its upright posture.
Cadderly sublimated his mounting terror, reminded himself that these were simply natural remains, the remains of great men, good-hearted and thinking men, and that he, too, one day would resemble the skeleton seated before him. He looked back and counted four alcoves on either side of the corridor behind him and considered whether he should turn back.
Stubbornly, Cadderly dismissed all his fears as irrational and focused again on the path before him. He kept his light in the middle of the passage, not wanting to look into any more of the alcoves, not wanting to test his determination any further.
But his eyes inevitably glanced to the side, to the hushed darkness. He imagined skeletal heads turning slowly to watch him pass.
Some fears were not so easily conquered.
A scuffle behind and to his left spun Cadderly about, his spindle-disks at the ready. His defensive reflexes launched the weapon before his mind could register the source of the noise: a small rat crawling across a wobbling skull.
The rodent flew away into webs and darkness when the disks struck full on the skull's forehead. The wobbly skull flew, too, rebounding off the alcove's back wall, rolling down the front of its former possessor, and coming to a rattling stop between the seated skeleton's legs.
A chuckle burst from Cadderly's mouth, relieved laughter at his own cowardice. The sound died away quickly as the dusty stillness reclaimed the ancient passage, and Cadderly relaxed ... until the skeleton reached down between its legs and retrieved its fallen head.
Cadderly stumbled backward against the opposite wall―and promptly felt a bony grip on his elbow. He tore away, snapped his spindle-disks in at this newest foe, and turned to flee, not pausing to note the damage his weapon had exacted. As his light swung about, though, Cadderly saw that the skeletons he had passed had risen and congregated in the corridor, and were now advancing, their faces locked in lipless grins, their arms outstretched as though they desired to
pull Cadderly fully into their dark realm.
He had only one path open and he went with all speed, trying to keep his eyes ahead, trying to ignore the rattling of still more skeletons rising from every alcove he passed. He could only hope that no monstrous spiders were nearby as he charged right through another heavily webbed archway, tasting webs and spitting them out in disgust. He stumbled and fell more than once but always scrambled back to his feet, running blindly, knowing not where he should run, only what he must keep behind him.
More passages. More crypts. The rattling mounted behind him and he heard again, startlingly clear, the thump-thump water-drop heartbeat of the catacombs. He burst through another webbed archway, and then another, then came to a three-way intersection. He turned to the left but saw that the skeletons down that passage had already risen to block his way.
To the right he ran, too afraid to sort out any patterns, too distracted to realize that he was being herded.
He came to another low archway, noted that this one had no webs, but hadn't the time to pause and consider the implications. He was in a wider, higher passage, a grander hall, and saw that the alcoves here were filled not by raggedly shrouded skeletons, but by standing sarcophagi, exquisitely detailed and gilded in precious metals and gemstones.
Cadderly only noticed them for a moment, for down at the end of the long hallway he saw light―not daylight, which he would have welcomed with open arms, but light nonetheless―peeking out at him from the cracks and loosened seals of an ancient door.
The rattling intensified, booming all about him. An eerie red mist appeared at Cadderly's feet, following his progress, adding a surreal and dreamlike quality. Reality and nightmare battled in his rushing thoughts, reason fighting fear.
The resolution to that battle lay in the light, Cadderly knew.
The young scholar staggered forward, his feet dragging as though the mist itself weighed heavily upon them. He lowered his shoulder, meaning to push right through the door, to charge right into the light.
[The Cleric Quintet 01] - Canticle Page 10
