The scepticst was strong with this one. Isadora stepped lightly over to the dark girl and waved her hand about. The sparks grew stronger until, with a flick of her wrist, she sent a bolt of energy right into Ciara's face. Ciara jumped back, her hands rising up to bat away something that suddenly wasn't there. Fingers previously afraid of the shock, poked at the air no longer kicking energy out like a hamster inside a sweater. Ciara glared over at the witch, who switched her staff to her other hand and laughed.
"You're right. It is knowing more than the person you're with. Much more."
"Aldrin," Ciara asked the boy loudly, "Did your contract say what state the witch had to be in before you gave her the sword?"
As Isa rose to her full height, Ciara's fist balled up inside her mitten. She had a good half a foot on the girl, though the witch looked like she could be a scrapper. Get in fast and close before she could do any damage with her stick.
A stone skittered between the two, breaking their death glare and both turned to look at Aldrin who had his arm pulled back with another spare stone ready to launch. "We can debate the nature of magic versus science when we're warm," he said. And not under the unsettling stare of crumbling statues, he thought to himself.
The city might be dead but the stones felt alive. Like something was hiding in the mist. Something that was watching them all very closely.
Without waiting for the stalemate to be notarized, Aldrin turned and crossed the final threshold. A pair of statues, with the bat-like ears of the fabled elves, guarded the smaller side entrance with a set of scrolls. To doctors, the bill was mightier than the sword. Aldrin dropped his stone and rapped his fist upon the wooden door, about the only piece of wood left in the world of stone. He knocked again, as the mists began to swirl in the distance, obscuring the statues he'd bumped into on his way down.
"Try the handle," Ciara suggested, the chill rising.
He lifted the latch and pulled, but could only move the door an inch before a bolt rattled and stuck it fast. "No luck."
"Life, huh?" Ciara asked the witch, whose eyes darted to the edges.
Isa didn't respond to the jab. She was too busy trying to pierce the mists. Something was rising.
Aldrin pulled harder on the door, shaking its hinges but otherwise failing to budge it. "Maybe there's another entrance we can try?"
Ciara looked up at the roof, shuddering under the minor strength of the prince. It was doubtful anywhere else could have stood the test of time, much less the trial of negligence. As she glanced towards the witch, a knot thudded into her gut. The witch's eyes grew wide as she slinked closer to the teenagers, her knuckles white as she gripped her staff.
"Something tells me we should be getting inside, and quickly," Ciara said as calmly as possible.
She shouldered around Aldrin and banged her own gloved fists against the door. He knocked again himself; a still cherry "hello" for Ciara's growing "Open up in the name of 'I don't want to be eaten!'"
A witch's shoe bumped into his heel and he whipped his head around. It could be the cold digging into his brain or the macabre setting, but, for a brief moment, he thought he saw movement in the distance. Not the kind of movement one expected from an animal in full control of its senses. It was the stilted, jerky twitchings of something in its death throes. Only it was upright and coming towards them.
"Cia," he said evenly, his finger pointing out into the fog.
But he didn't need to warn her; every sense screamed that they were in the kind of mortal danger that led to feudal legends told around a summer campfire: "By the time the door was answered, no one was there, but hanging on the door handle was a solitary hand!"
She wasn't about to go down like that and threw her whole body into trying to knock the door down. One...two...
As she leaned far back, about to smash into it for a third time, the scratching of metal pulling back resounded but it was too late to stop her momentum. Just as the lock broke, she powered through the door, slamming it wide open and tumbling on top of a startled man in a blue robe. Aldrin and Isadora scampered inside after her, the latter re-bolting the door tightly and sighing. Ciara tried to push herself up off the man beneath her, who was more robe than body.
He glared at the girl rolling to her side and rising slowly, "Whate'r it is you're selling, we don't want any."
"I'm so sorry," she offered her hand but he refused it, sitting up slowly and checking for any broken bones. "But there was...something out there," she started to try to explain the gut feeling of dread but inside the flickering lights of the church foyer it seemed to have been little more than an overactive imagination.
"Ain't nothing there but the eternal sleepers," he said, referring to what his order called their failures. They weren't dead; they were just sleeping…for a really long time. And rotting a bit. It's what all the cool patients were doing these days.
The man rose fully, the bleak candlelight giving depth to an already hard worn face. Life in service of a demi-god was not an easy one, and it showed well in his stooped shoulders and talon fingers as the priest tried to stick his jaw back into place after Ciara rammed her shoulder into it.
"Whatcha want anyway? You's sick?" he covered his mouth with his hand as he asked them, forgetting the rules of his order. It'd been months since their last pilgrim.
The women looked at Aldrin, the one carrying the papers. He gulped a bit and said in as commanding voice as he could muster, "No sir, we have strict orders to reclaim a stored tome in your library."
Aldrin unfolded the letter and handed it to the man. He held the sheet to his face as if the words could jump straight to his brain, "You're...clerics? Oh dear..." he scratched his chin, bereft of beard but with the start of a day-old stubble. "We don't be messing with your kind no more."
He handed the letter back to Aldrin and lurched towards the door, his fingers trying for the locking mechanism. "You best be heading back to your master, tell him to try some other library. Ours is closed."
A gasp caught in Aldrin's throat as the priest wrenched open the rusting door and three pairs of eyes looked out into the snowy void, expecting something with sharp teeth to gnash back. Only the howling winds and mist answered. Ciara smashed her hand onto the open door, ripping it from the priest's hands and slamming it shut. He turned to glare at the sandworm who sent him careening to the filthy floor.
"We'd like to see your manager," she said coolly, "and we're not leaving until we do."
The priest opened his mouth to refuse her, but thought better of it. Best to pass the problem off, he had better shit he could be doing. And that short one was giving him the willies. The Bishop could deal with them.
"Very well then," he said, his fingers slipping the lock back in place, "walk this way." And he shuffled forward, leading heavily with his right foot.
The others fell behind, following deep down into the livable remains of the crumbled city.
"Aldrin, stop that. He didn't mean it literally."
"Don't touch that," their guide shouted for the fifth time, pointing at a brazier that flamed a curious blue. He'd been both pointing out the sights and telling them to keep as far away from them as possible.
Ciara fell silent a few steps behind Aldrin, while the witch kept her far distance. She seemed to prefer the shadows, of which there were plenty in the ancient church. They were led down a narrow hallway, which split off into small cells. Most of the tiny rooms were open, their beds unoccupied, but a handful were shut tight. Small tablets hung on the door; the first thing their friend in blue warned them to not touch.
Despite his admonitions, Aldrin drew close but couldn't find any understanding within the tablet. It looked a bit like words, carved by someone who only had a moment to glance at the alphabet before being told to copy it all down in whatever looked prettiest to him. "What's a 'membranous dysmenorrhea?'"
The priest turned on him and slapped the tablet out of his hands, "No touching!"
Aldrin staggered back, raising his
hands up, "No touching!"
The priest glared at Ciara who half heartedly raised her hands and shook them, "Yeah, no touching here."
His one good eye looked her over like a practiced hand searching for the rotten tooth, "Right." He scurried back ahead, preferring either the company of men or the uncompany of women. Ciara glanced at the witch, whose hair seemed spikier than usual.
"This is the waiting lounge," the priest said, his voice dropping to a whisper.
A lone fire cast the only light across this central room, tucked away in the corner as forgotten as every soul left there. Chairs, crumbling from first overuse and then disuse rimmed the strangely painted walls. Most of the paint had chipped off centuries ago, but it still looked a bit like an over excited rabbit offering a sweet to a moody turtle.
The air smelled of disinfectant, fretting, and boredom. Some more of those clay tablets were tossed upon the chairs, even the broken ones had piles beside them. A solitary puppet box took the center of the room. Despite the age clinging to its panels, it was the most pristine object in the room, as if no one who'd been trapped there ever dared touch it.
"There's a fruit vendor over there if you get hungry," the priest waved to what at first looked like a pile of garbage on the floor. A closer examination revealed a pile of bones, crumpled as if the body had disintegrated instantly, scattered around a rotted basket containing the mummified corpse of three apples.
"Your vendor's dead," Aldrin said, wrapping his nose to cover the mummified apple smell.
"Ah, is he now? I'm sure someone'll fix that," the priest said nonchalantly. "This way to administration."
Ciara nudged the bones with her boot. It was just enough to send the entire pile crumbling forward. Ribs crashed into vertebra and a handful of coins from men no one remembered clanked as the vendor's skull skittered across the floor. It came to rest next to Isadora's shoes. She froze, looking down at the eternal smile of a man who tried to sell people a $5 apple. Slowly she backed away, her eyes never leaving the skull that, thanks to the sloping floor, followed her foot.
A shriek began to build in her throat that would have woken the dead, but Ciara scooped up the skull and, cradling it like a diseased cat, placed it back with the other bones. The spell broken, Isa looked over at the girl who was saying a small prayer for the forgotten man. The witch adjusted the sleeve of her coat, trying to pass off her terror as little more than a bit of bunching.
"Would you ladies be joining us now?" the priest hollered down the administration hallway.
Ciara nodded at Isa and, gathering up her skirts, chased after the men who didn't bother to stop for the women. If they couldn't keep up, then there wasn't much point in waiting for them.
The priest paused outside the gilded door at the end of the hall. He licked his fingers to smooth down his eyebrows, and repositioned his hair. Aldrin, bedraggled from the trek through a wintry wonderland, tried to run his fingers through his longer hair. He hadn't had it past his shoulders since he was a toddler. It felt oddly comforting to have it that long, a disguise that also kept his neck warm.
Ciara came up behind him, her breath catching slightly as the priest turned to glare once more upon her. His eyes wandered down to the microsection of ankle she flashed from lifting her skirts and, rolling her eyes, she dropped them. Then she curtsied deeply. The priest scowled but knocked thrice upon the gilded door.
"Enter," the voice was like a cup of honeyed tea with lemon when you were fighting a nasty cold.
The gilded door swung open to reveal an oasis ages from this crumbling dead city of the ill. Deep shelves in a mahogany wood rimmed the room. They were stuffed full of books, papers, vellum, and curious contraptions.
Oh and three skulls, Isa noted. She swallowed hard and focused on the man in the middle, seated at a plush desk that spanned almost the entirety of the only sophistication in Putras. He was much younger than their guide, perhaps just passing into his fifties. His hair was stark white, the silver grey that men wore as a badge of honor instead of shame. A patrician face, with bright eyes and a hawk nose complete with the small pair of spectacles.
"Brother Balm, you bring guests to my chambers?"
"Ay yup," Brother Balm (apparently) said, stretching his aching back into proper posture for the first time in a decade.
The man closed the book on his desk and arched an impeccable eyebrow. "Why?" he prompted the priest.
"Oh, this un says he's here to see the library," Brother Balm pointed at Aldrin who felt like he'd stumbled into his Father's cleric's office. The realm of the cleric was ruled far deadlier than the blacksmith, the armory, and the poison and cake room. The one time his brother dared him to run in and touch the cleric's quill Aldrin had been slapped so silly, he was afraid he could never sit down again.
"Is that so," the man behind the desk said, "I am afraid our library is closed for the time being, but if you'd like you can still tour the..."
"I HAVE A LETTER!" Aldrin shouted and, tearing the note in his excitement, wrenched it from his pocket and smacked it down upon the man's desk.
As the man picked up the still slightly stained paper, he inched his glasses closer to his face. Aldrin slunk back, bumping into Ciara. She grabbed his shoulders and held him steady. He looked like a spooked horse about to bolt at any sudden movement or sound. The administrator's lips moved as he read through the lavish letter Medwin wrote for them. Occasionally he'd glance up and look at Aldrin. He paid no heed to the two women in the room.
"I see," he laid the letter down cautiously, "your patron was most insistent that we assist you in any way possible. He even mentioned we offer you the use of the back room, the secret back room."
An entire plague of frogs caught in Aldrin's throat, he tried to swallow them down as the man stood and moved around his giant desk.
"We are very...cautious about whom we allow within our stacks. The dissemination of words can be a most dangerous job if not employed with finesse." Aldrin nodded, feeling like he just walked into the middle of an illegal smuggling deal. The man talked about books as though they were twenty pounds of Dunner spice.
"We can be very discrete," Ciara said, cutting in for Aldrin who was lost in the piercing eyes.
The man turned upon the new voice and truly saw her for the first time. He huffed a bit and she saw the familiar thought, they'll let just about anyone in here these days, dance around his lips. Luckily, for his own safety, he never voiced them. Instead, he looked upon Aldrin, studying the boy's profile as if he could read all his secrets on that twitching face.
For his part the secret prince gulped a lot and stared down at his shoes, looking about as royal as the buffoon plucked from the streets for King's Day. The man extended his hand devoid of ornamentation aside from a simple silver band to Aldrin.
"I am Bishop Bezoar..."
The boy grasped the clammy appendage and shook it, "Corwin," he lied smoothly.
The bishop blinked at that, but didn't challenge it. Instead he glanced past the others and called out sharply, "Brother Balm, show them the library and prepare the guest room. I'm afraid we only have one that is livable at the moment."
'Corwin' kept shaking the man's hand, in disbelief that their subterfuge had worked. The matter of who'd be sleeping in the same room with whom didn't burst through the cloud of relief settling upon his brain. Maybe he'd survive the witch after all.
Brother Balm grumbled into his sleeves, but nodded to his Bishop. Arguing against the chain of command was a good way to wind up on digging duty. The priest held open the door and ushered them through.
Isadora held her head high, unfortunately getting a strong whiff of the disgusting herb and dung mixture Balm employed to keep the demons at bay. She choked back at the noxious fumes, earning a fresh glare from Balm.
Ciara took that moment to grab 'Corwin's' hand and ask him, "Do you know what was in that letter?"
He shook his head, "It was sealed."
Something tickled at the back of her neck,
warning her that the arithmetic did not add up. But then, how could anything be right in a city of the dead overseen by doctors?
Balm grunted again and waved them on, his arms flailing like hose caught in the wind. Ciara dropped Aldrin's hand and headed out into the bleak world of the rest of the order. Behind them, the Bishop pulled an old book of Peerage from his bookcase and started to flip through the O's.
Across Arda, it was common for those caught with more than five books to have boiling worms poured down their throat and be forced to sit on a salt lick for three days. More than ten got you a month in the oxen stocks. Over twenty and you were the fuel for burning witches. The people prescribed to the notion that if a little learning is a dangerous thing, then a lot must be grounds for becoming the next archdemon who giggles a lot and tries to raise "ancient horrors" in his spare time.
The library of Putras would have brought about the kind of rabid slathering of people with access to too much farm equipment and not a lot to fill their times down upon the monks like the second coming of Ranknor. There'd be paper and bits of robe and tiny statues of snakes everywhere.
Balm had barely let them toss their things into their sleeping room before he'd grabbed a torch and started down a set of rickety stairs hidden behind the "operating room;" a terrifying place filled with rusting blades, and awls, and other things Ciara yelled at Corwin to put down immediately. One had to know the door was there to see it, carved into the crumbling stone wall. A half hung banner proclaiming "everyone must wash their noses before going back to work" obscured it.
The staircase wove in upon itself, a spiral of wood creaking from the unexpected weight descending to another false end. This was a small storage space, filled with outdated equipment the Brothers never used. A large chair with straps on the arms and legs and a giant hole in the middle of the seat was tossed into the middle. Aldrin started to ask what it was for, but Ciara poked him in the back. She didn't want to add any more fuel to her growing nightmares.
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