Authors: Joseph Finley
A
s Dónall darted after Remi
through the library door, Ciarán stood stunned for an instant before grabbing the book satchel and scampering after them.
Dónall pivoted and dashed down one of the cloister’s covered walkways. Ahead, a black-robed figure ducked into a doorway. The staccato of sandaled feet echoed through the cloister. Ciarán was only steps behind.
The doorway opened into the nave of the priory church. Enough moonlight streamed through the windows to reveal rows of benches. Raving screams emanated from the left transept. Dónall dashed down the nave and into the transept, where he disappeared in a narrow alcove.
Ciarán slid to a halt. A stairwell in the alcove descended into darkness, and he could hear footfalls pattering down stone steps.
Ciarán had no time to ponder where the stairwell might lead. He could hear Dónall ahead of him, but the howling had stopped. Steadying himself against the stairwell’s damp stone wall, he slowed his pace to avoid tripping. The stairs descended to a disturbing depth, in absolute darkness. Ahead, a voice cried out. It was Dónall’s voice.
Ciarán’s heart raced. At the bottom of the stairs, a reddish glow revealed a stone floor. He rushed down the steps toward the light, when a sudden force hurled him forward.
He felt himself falling. His shoulder slammed into stone, and he tumbled and went sprawling. A stomach-turning stench filled the air around him.
Looking up from where he lay, Ciarán gasped. Against the far wall of the dimly lit chamber glowed the red eyes of some great beast. A dragon, with skin like stone and teeth as long as swords!
Ciarán started to scream, but a hand on his shoulder cut him short.
“It’s only a statue,” Dónall whispered. He knelt beside Ciarán. Next to them, Remi rocked on his hands and knees, shaking and dripping vomit from his mouth and chin.
Metal screeched against stone, followed by a loud crash, and he turned to find an iron portcullis barring the archway to the stairwell. Behind the iron bars stood the man who had pushed Ciarán down the steps and who would have poisoned them all: Lucien of Saint-Denis, the prior of Saint-Bastian’s.
Clutching his own throat, Remi glared at Lucien. “What did you do to Nicolas?” he rasped.
“He died not far from where you sit,” Lucien replied.
“But why, brother?” Dónall asked.
“Because a war is coming, and Nicolas served the wrong side.”
“And Canon Martinus?”
“He died to protect the Secret Collection—the secrets we held most dear.”
Dónall stared at Lucien in disbelief. “The Fae arts were never worth murder.”
Lucien shrugged. “You and I followed those same arts down different paths, I’m afraid. From other tomes in the Secret Collection, I learned the ways of contacting the dead from the gloom of Sheol. I thought I had found a beloved friend, who took his own life when faced with the hypocritical judgment of the Church. I spoke with him each night while you and the others slept. He told me fascinating things about the world and the black void beyond. But after many conversations, I discovered I was wrong in my assumptions. For it was not my friend whom I spoke with all those nights, but
he.
” Lucien gestured toward the statue, whose glimmering red eyes washed his face in a hellish glow.
“This is madness,” Dónall said, rising to his feet.
“Is it!” Lucien fairly screamed. “You have no concept of his power—or his greatness!
He
who led the rebellion against the greatest tyrant the world has ever known.”
“Blasphemer!”
“When did it become blasphemy to speak the truth? Your God was the most prolific slayer of innocents in all history: all life in the flood, the children of Sodom and Gomorrah, all Egypt’s firstborn. Did they deserve to die? Are those the acts of a merciful god? No, Dónall—
that
way lies madness. Yet it is precisely this tyranny that the Dragon defies. Do not believe Enoch’s lies. The world of the Dragon was the world we dreamed of in Reims: the world of Apollo and Daphne, of Jason and his Argonauts, of glorious Olympus! This is the past to which he seeks to return, like the Ouroboros, coming full circle to a greater time that once was.”
“You have forfeited your soul,” Dónall said grimly.
Lucien looked away. “I have chosen my side in this war.”
“You murdered Nicolas!” Remi cried, grimacing with pain.
“He was but a sacrifice for a higher cause,” Lucien replied coldly.
Behind Ciarán, a guttural sound began to emanate from the dragon statue, as if the thing were coming to life. Ciarán grabbed the hem of Dónall’s cowl and bent his ear toward the statue. The sound ended in a long hiss.
Remi turned his bloodshot eyes toward the statue.
“Ah, yes,” Lucien said. “Soon you will find the evidence of the Otherworld that you have sought for so long.”
The hissing grew louder, and a shadowy form seethed within the dragon’s mouth. Something clicked against the tiled floor.
“Behold,” Lucien said, “the basilisk, a creature of myth!”
In the flickering candlelight, a shape emerged, reptilian and as large as a wolfhound. A pale ridge like a cock’s comb topped its head, which bobbed and waved on a serpentine neck above a huge, scaled birdlike body.
Ciarán froze. The creature was but six paces away, cocking its head from side to side and watching them with gleaming, round obsidian eyes.
“Legend has it that the basilisk’s gaze can turn a man to stone,” Lucien said from the stairwell, “yet I think you’ll find it has far deadlier aspects than its eyes.
Au revoir,
old friends.”
The basilisk hissed, revealing a mouthful of sharp, evenly spaced teeth. Its breath stank of carrion. As Remi rose to his feet, the fear surging through Ciarán’s veins brought a strange clarity, as if time had somehow slowed. From his left, Dónall barked an order, then held out the leaf-shaped sword. Ciarán grasped it by the hilt. Using the sword against this creature seemed as improbable as taking on a wild boar with only a fruit knife. Ciarán had never even hunted game with a spear, let alone attacked something as large as the abomination that stood leering and swaying before him now.
Then Dónall spoke another word:
“Eoh.”
Blinding light exploded from the small crystal held between his thumb and index finger, and the basilisk’s head whipped to one side. The light quickly faded to a white glow, illuminating the immediate area of the cavernous chamber.
The basilisk recovered with a hissing vengeance, inching toward them, its great, curved talons clattering on the stone floor.
“Look!” Dónall grabbed Ciarán by the back of his hair, jerking his head to the side. The crystal’s glow revealed a small alcove at the end of the chamber, off to the side of the dragon’s-head statue. “A way out.”
But the basilisk blocked their path.
Ciarán brandished the sword, and the grotesque head reared back. A cry of terror rose to Ciarán’s lips, but another voice filled the chamber.
Remi was screaming at the basilisk. Then, with arms raised and fingers clutching the air, he lunged toward it. From the basilisk’s mouth streamed a jet of viscous liquid, spattering Remi just before he collided with the beast. The snakelike neck whipped about, and teeth sank into flesh. The basilisk held Remi’s chest in its great jaws, crushing the life from him.
With strangely lucid eyes, Remi looked at Ciarán and Dónall and gurgled, “
Run!
”
*
Dónall plunged into the alcove, with Ciarán a step behind. The choking smell of dust lay thick in what the illuminating crystal revealed to be a narrow passageway cut through the bedrock. Behind them, Remi’s dying screams, mixed with the basilisk’s guttural growls, filled the chamber.
The passageway widened, and the dust smell grew thicker, as did the stench of decaying flesh. The crystal’s pearlescent light glinted off a human skull. Ciarán gasped. On shelves carved in the earthen walls were rows of skulls, stacked several deep—a gallery of the dead, grimacing at all who came this way. The shelves climbed to a ceiling cloaked in shadow, perhaps twelve feet from the floor.
Feeling something crunch under his sandals, Ciarán looked down to find small bones—fingers and toes—littering the stony floor. Along the walls, more shelved recesses held entire skeletons and a miscellany of loose bones: thighs and shins, rib cages, arms with hands and clawlike fingers still attached. Dirt or grime, or perhaps the mummified remnants of human flesh, still clung to the grisly relics.
“We are in an ossuary,” Dónall said, “beneath their cemetery.” He pressed forward, the crystal’s light spilling from his palm. The passage went on as far as Ciarán could see, into the shadows beyond the crystal’s white glow. A horrifying thought came to him: what if the passage dead-ended? The basilisk would not be satiated, and they would be trapped with the hellish creature.
The scrape of metal echoed from the chamber behind them, followed by a somber chanting.
“Faster!” Dónall cried. Ciarán glanced behind them but saw only darkness and the faint outline of bones.
The chanting from the chamber behind them grew louder. It was the voice of more than one man, singing in the manner of a monastic choir. Although Ciarán did not recognize the words—for they were not in Latin or any other tongue familiar to his ears—he recognized the haunting sound of a requiem.
Something sharp bit into Ciarán’s ankle, and he cried out in pain and alarm. To his horror, a skeletal hand with dirt-stained nails protruding from fingers of bone reached out from the shelves, groping for Dónall’s neck.
“Holy Patrick!” Dónall cried as the skeletal hand tore his cowl. From the opposite side of the passageway, another hand clawed at Ciarán. A second bony hand wrapped around his ankle, and this time, he could not contain his fear.
“Necromancy!” Dónall growled.
From the piles of bones, skeletons emerged like moths bursting from cocoons. They clawed at the air. One tore the sleeve of Dónall’s habit as another tried to climb onto his back. The chanting grew louder, and the air around them seemed to pop and sizzle.
Ciarán swung the sword at one of the skeletons, cleaving off its arm and knocking it aside, but another body of bones took its place. The very walls had come alive. Ciarán and Dónall stood back-to-back as the skeletons pressed in on them like great, clattering marionettes, their mouths hung open in silent screams, vacant orbits staring balefully.
Ciarán bled from a dozen stinging scrapes and cuts. He clung tightly to the book satchel’s leather strap as a column of whispering dead five or six deep mobbed toward him. “Dónall!” he cried.
“In the name of God and Saint Patrick!” Dónall bellowed, pulling skeletons off him and kicking them asunder.
And still the dead surged forward in what looked like a final charge. Then, from the back of the column, the bones started to fly apart. Rib cages exploded, and skulls caromed off the walls and floor as arms and ribs scattered. A terrible hiss filled the passageway, and through the thinning throng stared the eyes of the basilisk.
Ciarán reached back and grabbed Dónall. “Look!” The basilisk thrashed and snapped at the skeletal forms, clearing a swath through those still blocking its path.
“Merciful God,” Dónall muttered.
Ciarán pushed Dónall forward, and using their combined strength, they punched through the pile of skeletons. More of the dead filled in behind them, clutching and clawing at their habits, but against this rearguard of bones the basilisk plowed forward with vengeful fury. Its whiplike tail twitched off skeletal arms and skulls and flung them against the walls. It knocked still others aside with its head, and a few it crushed to powder in its jaws. Its screech drowned out the chanting. “The necromancy is fading,” Dónall panted.
Ciarán pushed through the next wave of skeletons with ease, knocking them to the ground as if they were scarecrows. It was true, he realized: whatever sorcery had given the dead life had begun to wane. But behind him, too, the dead began to collapse en masse.
“They won’t slow it down!” he yelped.
“There!” Dónall pointed to one of the shelves ahead of them. Above the shelf was an opening of some sort, adorned with a row of grinning skulls. From the crystal’s glow, it appeared to lead to another passage. “Climb for your life!”
Standing by the shelf, Ciarán cupped his hands under Dónall’s foot, helping him up. Dónall swept aside the skulls and called back, “The alcove is narrow, but there’s a way out!”
Ciarán glanced over his shoulder to see the basilisk tearing through the remnant of the skeletal army that had filled the passageway. It tossed skulls and bones aside like leaves in the wind.
“Now!” Dónall reached for Ciarán’s hand as he jumped up.
The basilisk gave a fierce hiss, and a blob of its spittle soaked Ciarán’s shoulder. Droplets spattered against his face, and his cheek went numb. An icy cold invaded his veins, and the muscles in his left shoulder and arm began to cramp.
Dónall pulled Ciarán onto the stone shelf, which was barely wide enough to hold a man. A small passageway less than half a man’s height led away at right angles. Dónall ducked under first as, below them, the basilisk waded through the last of the bone barricade and scuttled toward them with terrible speed.
Ciarán’s left arm had gone limp, but his legs and right arm still had strength. Willing his body to move, he tumbled through the opening and found himself crawling on the floor of a narrow tunnel. Behind him, a snarling reptilian head burst through the hole. The basilisk hissed, thrashing and snapping its jaws as it struggled to squeeze through. Bits of stone crumbled from the opening.
“Ciarán, run!” Dónall said, tugging at his sleeve. “It’ll get through!”
“No.”
Ciarán shook his head and let the book satchel fall to the floor. Sweat beaded on his brow. He could feel a fever coming, but he fought to ignore it and forced himself to sidle along the wall, staying clear of the snapping jaws. Raising the sword, he brought it down on one of the shining black eyes. The blade sank in, and the eyeball exploded into something the consistency of blackcurrant jam.