by C. A. Gray
With that, three Jeffersons left Carlion, leaving Cole feeling as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
But he could not think about that right then. He had to find Peter.
Chapter 16
Peter left the Great Hall and headed straight for the front entrance of the castle, where he was sure to find the night guard on duty. Apparently, the shift had changed since Peter had slipped outside to the stables. Tonight, he discovered, the guard was Gerald, the same servant who had taken him to his room the night before.
“Are you going out at this hour, sir?” Gerald asked. It was nearing ten o’clock.
“No, I just came to ask a question, and this is the only place I knew I’d find someone to answer it,” said Peter, as casually as he could. “Where is Kane’s room?”
“Oh!” said Gerald, surprised. “Master Kane sleeps in the Tower Room.”
“Where is the Tower Room?”
“In the… tower, sir.”
“Well, there are so many,” said Peter, remembering the silhouette of the castle from a distance, with golden spires and buttresses flying in every direction.
“I mean the Astronomy Tower, sir. It’s at the top of the same stairs that lead to your chamber.”
Peter pasted a smile on his face. “Thanks! I just need to ask him something,” he added, hoping his cheerful tone would cast off any suspicion.
He felt Gerald’s eyes on his back as he rounded the corner towards the corridor that led to the hall.
Vaguely, Peter recalled from his dad’s stories that the Astronomy Tower had been built for Merlyn, and it had exactly four hundred ninety two steps from the ground floor. He counted them as he climbed, hoping the repetition of something as calming and steady as numbers would have a similar effect on his nerves. It was no use: with every step, he grew angrier. By the time he reached the landing, it was all he could do not to beat the door down.
He hesitated for a moment to collect himself. He did not want to lose control, partly because he needed Kane to cooperate, and partly because the thought had occurred to him that they were a very long way from the rest of the castle. If there was a struggle, well… it was possible that no one would find his body for days.
He set his jaw, took a deep breath, and knocked.
Kane opened the door a second later with a sullen expression that suddenly rearranged when he saw his guest – too bright, too cheerful.
“Peter,” he said graciously. “What brings you up to my neck of the woods this fine hour?”
“It’s your fault,” Peter said, but did his best to keep his tone even. “Because of the accident, the penumbra kidnapped my dad.”
Kane’s pleasant expression flickered as he registered what Peter had said. “Bruce is missing?” he said with as much concern as he could muster. “That’s… that’s terrible!”
“Save it,” Peter snapped. “The first thing I want is to hear out of your mouth is you admitting that you caused that accident.”
Kane’s eyebrows shot up. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you wanted to prove I wasn’t who the rest of the Watchers think I am.”
Kane’s expression twitched and he turned away. “Did Isdemus tell you that?” he said, his tone unreadable.
Peter followed him into the peculiar room of strange brass instruments, dirty clothing, and scraps of parchment written in a foreign language. These might have interested Peter at another time, but now they barely registered. He continued as if he hadn’t heard Kane, his voice beginning to escalate. “Did you even care that there were other people in that car with me? Did it occur to you that if things had turned out differently, they would have died too?”
Kane snorted once, his pleasant mask slipping. “You’re completely overreacting.”
Peter balled his hands into fists so tightly that he could feel his fingernails biting into his palm. “I’m overreacting?” he repeated incredulously. “What exactly is your problem?”
Kane’s eyes flashed, the pleasant façade gone. “Oh, you mean, why aren’t I worshipping at your feet like everyone else in this wretched place?” he snapped.
Peter’s stomach turned over. “So this is a competition.”
“Don’t flatter yourself!” Kane spat.
“It was your fault,” Peter repeated through gritted teeth. His palms throbbed, and so did his temples.
“What do you want me to say?” Kane said defiantly. “I’m sorry? It was an accident. Do you know the definition of the word, accident?”
Suddenly the images flooded Peter’s mind of what he had seen in that rainbow, what might have happened. He saw the Land Rover landing in the front seat of the BMW, crushing Thomas and Brock instantly. He saw Lily and Cole not breathing in the backseat, bleeding freely, and Peter himself… he would never forget the strange, visceral terror of observing his own mangled body. He had seen the accident so many times in that interminable meadow, from the variations of slight angles of force, one after the other: death, death, death, death, and death.
Peter didn’t think about it: he just punched Kane in the face as hard has he could.
He had never punched anybody in his life before. It wasn’t a reflex he even knew he had. It surprised him how much it hurt his knuckles. Peter looked down at his hand in awe. It was bloody, but he wasn’t sure if it was Kane’s blood or his own.
Kane sat up slowly, gasping for air, rubbing his jaw, and staring at Peter with a bizarre mixture of hatred and respect. “Feel better now?” he managed to splutter as he spit blood into the bin nearby.
“A bit,” Peter admitted.
“Is that what you came up here for?”
“No. I came here so you could redeem yourself.”
Kane regarded him for a moment, looking grudgingly intrigued. “I’m listening.”
“You know what I think?” said Peter. “I think you already knew my dad was missing this morning. The nimbi sent to bring him back arrived at the castle right after the four of us left, and said they couldn’t find him. You knew what must have happened, and you knew it was your fault. That’s why you were so freakishly nice all of a sudden. Either you didn’t want us to put two and two together and blame you, or you felt guilty and were trying to make up for it.”
Kane looked surprised at first, and then – something else. Peter couldn’t place it. “You’re right,” he sighed.
“What?”
“You’re right. I did know this morning. I suspected it last night, actually, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to scare you, and there was nothing anybody could do about it anyway.”
Peter regarded him cautiously. “And the accident?”
Kane stumbled to his feet, and muttered just loudly enough that Peter could hear, “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
“What did you expect to happen, then?” Peter demanded, his voice rising as he unconsciously balled his fists at his sides again.
“Calm down, all right? You’re not dead, are you?” Kane ran a hand absently through his unkempt hair in frustration. “The driver just happened to hit at exactly the right angle. He wasn’t supposed to flip. Nobody was supposed to die.”
“Then you admit it was your fault,” Peter said, his voice barely controlled.
Kane grimaced, and said, “Yes. So I’m sorry,” as if the words pained him. “Happy now?”
“Not yet,” Peter said through still gritted teeth. “If you really want to make up for what you’ve done, I need you to do something.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Help me rescue my dad.”
Kane’s mouth fell open just a little before he caught himself. He tried to keep his voice even, but it still trembled just a bit as he said, “You know where he is then?”
“No,” Peter admitted. “But Isdemus told me you found a secret library in the castle, where the prophecies are hidden. I need you to take me there.”
“You want to see the prophecies?” said Kane skeptically, as he retrieve
d a washcloth from his bathroom and pressed it against his lip to stop the bleeding. “Why?”
“To prove they’re not about me. I know they’re not. Eustace told me they could apply to any one of three people. If the prophecy isn’t about me, then there’s no reason for the penumbra to hold my dad.” Peter folded his arms over his chest. “I figure we’re on the same team on that one, right?”
Kane looked at Peter for a long moment as if trying to decide whether he meant it. “All right, I’ll show you where it is,” he said. “If anybody catches you, though, you didn’t find this place from me, you hear me?”
“Right,” Peter snorted, “like anybody will believe that.”
Kane brushed by Peter, who followed him onto the landing, and he locked the chamber behind him. Then turned toward Peter with what could only be described as a conspiratorial smile.
“Follow me,” he said.
Kane led Peter back down the hallway toward the staircase. Peter could hear the echoes of their footsteps on the stairs. They sounded hollow and ancient.
They got back down to the ground floor, but just as Peter thought they were headed through the main corridor again, he saw Kane turn toward a blank section of the stone wall, where he stopped. Then he began to tap in a strange pattern, not like he was knocking but rather as if he were tapping out Morse code. Peter watched him carefully. He stood five blocks to the left of the edge of the wall, twelve blocks up from the floor, and he tapped three times rapid, two long, one rapid, three long. When he put the last tap into place, much to Peter’s surprise, there was a low rumble from inside the belly of the wall, and a uniform subset of the stone blocks elevated from the surface of the wall on one end and receded on the opposite side.
“A secret door?” said Peter in disbelief.
Kane grinned mysteriously. “There’s an entire castle within the castle. The walls are much thicker than they need to be, but not so thick that anyone might suspect if they didn’t already know. The design is meant to protect the women and children and sustain them for months at a time if the castle was ever stormed and overrun. That also means that everything in the inner labyrinth is connected to everything else.”
“How did you get the door to open just by tapping? Is it... I don’t know, automated somehow?”
Kane glanced back at him and rolled his eyes. “I won’t even dignify that with a response.”
“So I could get to my room from here?” Peter persisted. “If I knew the tapping sequence you just did?” Mentally he rehearsed it in his head again, just in case he ever needed to use it. “Is it the same one in every room?”
“Yes, it’s the same. You could use the passage to get to any room in the castle if you knew the way: your room, or the Commuter Station, for instance. Anywhere.” He said it very casually, almost flippantly.
“How in the world did you find out about this?” Peter said in awe.
“Oh,” said Kane mysteriously. “You would be stunned at the things I’ve found.”
When the secret door had rotated sideways enough that Peter could see behind it, he saw a dark, narrow passageway that smelled musty and looked foreboding. For one wild moment, Peter wondered whether Kane was leading him to the dungeons, and whether he would ever find his way back out again. Kane’s swollen lip gave his grin a ghoulish appearance.
“After you,” he said.
Peter clenched his teeth, swallowed the urge to flee, and against his better judgment ducked into the inky blackness with Kane at his back. The door revolved shut.
To Peter’s relief, however, a second later Kane switched on a flashlight. Peter blinked, surprised that it was battery-powered.
“Didn’t you just make a point about not having technology here?”
“I’m an air specialist, not a photon specialist,” Kane shrugged.
Peter stopped in his tracks. “What did you say?”
He could see Kane’s eerie smile cast in long shadows in the odd angles of the flashlight. “Oh yes. Bruce didn’t make that up either!”
“He really can create photons,” Peter muttered to himself, and then after a long pause as he pondered the idea, he mused aloud, “I guess that must mean he can excite electrons so that they give off their extra quanta of energy in the form of visible light –”
“Shut up, Peter,” said Kane.
“Like... like in light bulbs that aren’t plugged in,” Peter went on without hearing him, feeling sick. “I can’t believe it. It was true. He was serious.”
“Watch your step.”
“Why don’t you get in front, since you have the light?” Peter snapped.
“The passage isn’t big enough for us to switch places.”
There was a musty odor that Peter couldn’t quite put his finger on, and the humidity in the air clung to his nose in beads of sweat, even though the air was slightly chilly. There was a bizarre whistling sound, like wind, although Peter couldn’t figure out where the wind would be coming from this deep inside the castle, nor could he feel the air moving. He shivered involuntarily.
“The library is down here?” Peter said uncertainly, struggling to make his tone sound even.
“That’s what you asked for, isn’t it?” came Kane’s voice. “We’re at about the equivalent of the second basement right now. The Commuter Station where you all came in to the castle is down this hall, to the left.” Peter could see him pointing out of the corner of his eye down a yawning black passage to the side.
They were descending steeply now, though all along the way Peter had seen halls leading off to who knew where.
“Make a hard right,” Kane said, and when Peter did so, he nearly collided with a pair of heavy, carved oaken doors.
Kane pulled a key from a piece of thread around his neck that looked just like the skeleton key Gerald had given Peter the night before, and slid it into the keyhole.
“Welcome,” said Kane dramatically, as he pushed the doors open, “to the complete and secret history of the Watchers.”
Peter blinked; momentarily dazzled by the brightness of the room after the pitch-black corridor lit only by Kane’s flashlight. Torches on the empty wall on one side lit the room, and their light reflected off the dusty spines of large volumes from floor to ceiling on the other. The ceiling looked almost as high as those of the Great Hall, and just looking at the sliding ladder that would allow him to reach the top gave Peter vertigo.
Despite the strangeness of the room, one question disturbed Peter at the moment more than any other. “Why are the torches lit in here? I thought nobody else knew about this place?”
Kane shrugged. “Not nobody else. Isdemus knows about it at least, and he’s a fire specialist. He was probably in here earlier.” He gestured at the books, and said, “You will find answers in here to just about every question you could ever hope to ask.”
“What are all these?” Peter breathed.
“History.”
“All of them?”
“In excruciating detail,” Kane nodded. “One of the jobs of the Watchers has been to record history as it actually happened.”
“Instead of how most people perceived it,” Peter finished. He felt a pang as he heard Bruce’s voice echo in his mind: Just know that in the not-so-distant future, I will be in the enviable position of saying, ‘I told you so!’
Kane nodded. “History as you’ve been taught in your schools is nothing more than a lot of agreement. Eventually anything to the contrary just… fades away. The visible world, as you know, is really only about three percent of reality. That seems to imply that people miss quite a lot.” He walked confidently further into the library as if he owned the place, pointing out sections he had identified. “The true accounts of most of the fairy tales ever written can be found here. To your left are the more accurate depictions of the rise and fall of the great empires of the world. But what you want, I believe, is over here.”
He took several more paces to the right, climbed up the ladder five shelves, and slid sideways until
he was close enough to hop onto an adjacent ladder, where he kept climbing for several shelves more. Peter followed him on the ground, wondering why Kane hadn’t just walked to the second ladder in the first place, but Kane never seemed to do anything the easy way.
“Bombs away!” said Kane, held an enormous volume just over Peter’s head, and let go. Peter’s eyes grew wide and he put his arms out, uncertain whether he should prioritize catching the book or protecting his head from the heavy-looking spine. When the book was about three inches from Peter’s head, though, it stopped and hovered. “Just kidding,” Kane said with a superior smile as he climbed down, maintaining eye contact with the book. Peter scowled at him and tried to snatch the volume from the air, but it bounced upwards just out of reach. Kane’s grin grew wider, and he beckoned the volume back into his own waiting arms when he reached the ground, and then thrust it at Peter, who thought about giving him a black eye to match his fat lip.
It looked hand-written and bound, nondescript, without writing of any sort on the cover or spine. There was nothing to attract the attention of anyone who did not already know what he was looking for.
“When you’re finished with that one, I suggest you try this next,” said Kane, pulling a volume off a shelf at a normal distance from the ground. The spine read The Life and Times of Morgan le Fay. Vaguely Peter wondered what Morgan le Fay had to do with anything, but he was too anxious to read the volume already in his arms to bother asking.
Abruptly Kane said, “Well, have a good night!” He turned to go.
Peter’s mouth fell open, and his heart beat faster. “You’re just gonna leave me here, alone?” He had no idea how far down they were, and he wondered if he would ever be able to find his way back out again.
“You won’t be alone for long,” Kane said. Before Peter could ask what he meant, Kane waggled his fingers in parting, and the door clicked shut behind him.
Peter gaped at the place where Kane had been a moment before, and then looked at the volume resting unopened in his hands. Mentally he took a moment to retrace their steps in his head while they were still fresh in his memory. He thought it had been a straight shot, though he realized too late that Kane had not given him the flashlight. There’s nothing to be done about that now, he thought. With that, he settled himself on the floor, since it would be very difficult to wield the pages of a volume as large as the one he was holding while standing upright. He breathed in deeply and brushed away a layer of grime from the cover.
