Authors: Nicholas Kaufmann
Isaac struggled to pull the fragment out of the sarcophagus. Finally, it released with a
snap,
and he stumbled back a few steps.
I turned to Bethany as if to say,
See, it’s not just me.
She rolled her eyes.
“Two down,” I said, “one to go.”
“It makes you wonder,” Isaac said, looking around the chamber. “Who’s responsible for all this? Who broke the Codex Goetia and hid the pieces? And what about this chamber? Was it here already? Where did the sarcophagus come from? What does it mean?”
“Whoever did this would have to be very powerful,” Bethany said. “The Mad Affliction said Nahash-Dred took the Codex with him after he massacred the cult. Whoever’s responsible for hiding the fragments would have had to get it back from Nahash-Dred first. But I can’t imagine the demon handing it over without a fight.”
Neither could I. How could anyone get the Codex from Nahash-Dred without being turned into body-part stew like the cultists?
The answers, if there were any, would have to wait. We walked back to the stairs. I started up the steps first. Far above us, the door in the monument slid open again. A shape appeared silhouetted in the doorway, too far away to see clearly. He pointed down the stairs at us. As soon as I heard the high-pitched whine, I knew exactly who it was.
“Get back!” I shouted to the others.
We raced down the stairs and back into the chamber just as the blast from the Thracian Gauntlet came crackling down. It struck the wall at the bottom of the stairs. A section of the wall exploded in a cloud of dust and rubble, leaving a big, scorched divot in the concrete. A long crack tore through the floor to the center of the chamber, beneath the sarcophagus.
I drew my gun and aimed up the stairs at Arkwright, but before I could squeeze off a shot Isaac pushed past me. He motioned like a pitcher throwing a fastball, only what came out of his hand was a sizzling red torpedo that arrowed up toward Arkwright. Arkwright jumped aside. Isaac’s spell struck the doorway, obliterating a chunk of it and the top stairs. Arkwright reappeared in the opening, his gauntlet powering up again. I grabbed Isaac and threw both of us out of the way.
The second blast struck the wall in the same spot as the first, tearing through the concrete. A big hole opened into the depths of the Hudson. Torrents of freezing cold, silty river water rushed into the chamber. The crack in the floor widened and deepened. We backed up to the far end of the chamber as the water splashed violently across the floor. It was a small space, and it filled fast. The icy water was up to my thighs before I knew it. It smelled terrible, the stench of centuries of garbage and industrial waste dumped into the Hudson.
Bethany pulled a charm out of her vest, the same emerald she’d used to shield me from the Thracian Gauntlet in Chinatown. She affixed it to her hand with the leather strap, then pointed it toward the archway that separated us from the stairwell. The charm projected its translucent green barrier over it. The river water smashed against it but couldn’t pass. With nowhere else to go, the water began to fill up the stairwell instead. We’d kept the flood out, but in the process we’d cut off our only exit.
Blast after blast from the Thracian Gauntlet hit the chamber wall from the other side. Arkwright was trying to break his way through to us. He knew we had the Codex. The wall shuddered and cracked. It wouldn’t hold him, or the water, out for long.
“We have to hurry!” Bethany cried. The translucent green barrier over the archway was already starting to flicker. The emerald strapped to her palm glowed so brightly it looked hot. “The spell won’t last much longer! If we don’t find another way out soon, we’ll all drown!”
I waded forward, sloshing quickly around the chamber. I inspected the walls, but there was no other way out. I looked back at the others and shook my head. “There’s nothing. We’re trapped.”
Arkwright blasted at the wall again from the other side. The chamber floor quaked and shifted under my feet. Through the muddy river water I saw the crack in the floor grow bigger, spiderwebbing across the chamber. I expected to see more water bubble up from the crack, but instead the water began to drain through it, forming small whirlpools in the surface. Was there empty space under the chamber? Another room, maybe? If there was, and the water kept rushing through the already structurally weakened floor like that …
“Ah, shit,” I said.
A section of the floor crumbled and gave way with a monstrous noise, opening a hole into darkness beneath us. The sarcophagus fell through. Rushing water poured into the hole and pulled us with it. The emerald charm was torn from Bethany’s hand as the flood swept her up. The barrier disappeared instantly. A roaring tide of water came crashing into the chamber. Bethany and Isaac went under.
I sucked in a deep breath and held it. The current dragged me down through the hole in the floor. The freezing water closed over me. I was pulled in free fall for several long, panic-filled seconds. Then I dropped into another room far beneath the chamber we’d left. I landed on my back—but not on the floor. I hung suspended above it, floating on a web of netting over the smashed remains of the stone sarcophagus. If I hadn’t stopped, I would have broken my back on them.
Isaac stood on the floor below me. He’d saved me with a spell. Bethany stood beside him. They were both drenched, their hair plastered to their heads, their clothes sopping wet and muddy with Hudson River silt. A new fireball floated near the ceiling, lighting the chamber.
But water was still coming down on me with the force of a fire hose. I coughed, nearly swallowing a mouthful of the Hudson River. I tried to scramble away, but the force of the water was too much. I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs—
The web shifted as Isaac swung me away from the waterfall. He set me down gently on my feet on the water-covered floor. The web vanished. Then he cast another spell, up at the hole this time, and sealed it over with a big, glowing, blue disc. The water stopped.
“It won’t hold for long,” Isaac said. “We’re going to want to be gone by the time it gives way.”
I coughed more water out of my lungs. I took out my gun and inspected it. It didn’t look damaged. I tipped it forward, pouring a stream of water out of the muzzle. I didn’t know if it would fire now. The ammo was high quality, which meant it was waterproof, or damn close to it. The crimp was airtight and the primer sealed. But as my lungs could attest, that had been a hell of a lot of river water. It could have washed away the oil and injected silt into the action. When we got back to Citadel, I would have to clean it, oil it, and just to be safe, replace the ammo.
I holstered the gun again and took in the room around me. It was long and narrow with walls fashioned from marble blocks. Much larger than the chamber above, the water spread out over the floor and only came up to my shins. A row of tall, standing candelabras lined both sides of the room, unlit. At the far end, on a slightly raised marble platform, were three chairs of heavy, polished wood. The one in the middle was bigger than the other two, more ornately designed and with a taller back.
“Where are we?” I asked.
Bethany pushed her wet hair out of her eyes. “Is that a
throne
?”
“Never mind that, I found the door,” Isaac said behind us. He was standing in front of two tall, metal doors in the wall. “It’s a tight seal,” he groaned as he pushed them. They swung outward, and the water flooded out of the room. Isaac glanced up at the glowing disc on the ceiling one last time. “Come on. We should get out of here while we can.”
“Arkwright’s not going to give up that easily,” I said. “Is there any way he can follow us through that seal?”
“The Thracian Gauntlet could blast through it easily,” he said. “But in doing so, he would flood this whole place and risk losing the fragment. Let’s hope he’s more concerned about putting the Codex back together than killing us.”
Bethany and I followed him through the doors into a marble-walled corridor, sloshing through the water at our feet. My wet clothes weighed me down. The waterlogged trench coat on my back felt like a hundred extra pounds, but I wasn’t about to leave it behind. The coat had belonged to Morbius once, founder of the original Five-Pointed Star. I was probably the last person anyone would call sentimental, but I didn’t want to give it up.
The fireball floated along with us, lighting the way through the pitch-black surroundings. Other passages branched off from the corridor, their metal doors closed to our prying eyes. What was this place? And where had everyone gone? It looked deserted.
Passing through an arch at the end of the corridor, we found ourselves in a huge chamber with redbrick walls. The earthen floor was muddy from the water that had preceded us down the hall. In the center of the chamber was a wide, deep, stone pit. Dark stains painted the pit’s walls and floor.
“What is that?” I asked.
Isaac stared at the stains. “It’s blood.”
“Whatever this place is, it reeks of death,” Bethany said. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
She and Isaac kept walking. I lingered a moment, looking into the pit. If the stains were blood, there’d been a lot of it. Someone had died in there. Probably more than one person. Why? What
was
this place, a slaughterhouse? A torture chamber? The room grew darker as the fireball followed Isaac away from me.
“Trent, come on!” Bethany called back.
“Lucas,” I corrected her, so softly I barely heard it myself.
I tore my gaze from the pit and followed them. How many had died here? I had a bad feeling about this place, a terrible sense deep in my gut. I wanted to get out as quickly as I could and never think about this place again.
I caught up to Isaac and Bethany in a tunnel off the pit chamber. There was graffiti all over the walls, some carved crudely into the brick, others written in chalk. Much of it was in languages I couldn’t read, let alone identify. They didn’t look like any alphabet I’d ever seen. Only one was in English, a poem written over a large section of the wall:
Rich or poor
With most or least
You’ll never go wrong
Betting on the Beast
I didn’t know what it meant, and frankly I wasn’t interested in sticking around to find out.
Bethany pointed down the tunnel. “Look!”
In the distance, the thin shape of a ladder stood upright in the tunnel. We hurried toward it. As I passed another tunnel that branched off to the left, I glanced quickly down it. It was a habit I’d picked up while on Underwood’s crew, when I’d had to make sure no one was waiting in an alley to slip a knife between my ribs. I barely registered a tunnel extending deep into the darkness before I continued on.
Then I froze.
My heart jammed itself into my throat.
I backed up a few steps and looked into the tunnel again.
Something had been etched into the brick wall, near the tunnel’s mouth.
An eye inside a circle.
The Ehrlendarr rune for magic.
I swallowed, my throat as dry as sandpaper. I walked up to the rune. I touched it, traced it with my finger. I’d seen this before. I knew it very well. An eye inside a circle etched on a brick wall. The image had haunted me for the past year.
It was my first memory, the very first thing I’d seen after losing my identity—the Ehrlendarr rune for magic carved into a brick wall, along with sparks in the air and a wisp of smoke, as if something had just happened, something I couldn’t remember.
But this wasn’t a coincidence. This wasn’t déjà vu. This was the wall. This was the symbol. I was certain of it. I felt it in every fiber of my being.
I’d been here before.
Twenty-Two
Isaac and Bethany doubled back, rounding the corner to find me standing in the mouth of the tunnel. The floating fireball followed them, casting a brighter light on the rune etched in the brick wall before me.
“What are you doing?” Bethany asked.
“We have to go, we don’t have much time,” Isaac said. He gripped the Codex fragment tightly in one hand.
I didn’t turn from the wall to look at them. I couldn’t. All I could do was stare at that damn rune. I tried to tap into what I’d felt the first time I saw it, the confusion and fear, the sense of something having
just
happened before I woke. I tried to force the lost memories to come back, but they wouldn’t. They were gone.
“There are a thousand things I don’t remember. My family. My home. But
this
I remember,” I told them. “I’ve been here before.”
Bethany looked at me, astonished. “What?”
“This is where I woke up without knowing my name. This is where I lost my memories. I was right
here,
in
this
spot, in
this
place.”
“How do you know?” Isaac asked.
“Because of this.” I pointed at the rune etched in the brick.
Isaac came closer to examine it. “It’s Ehrlendarr. What’s it doing here?”
“It’s the symbol for magic,” I said. Though not just magic. Calliope had told me it also meant change and transcendence. “It’s my earliest memory. This rune, on this wall. I was here.”
“You’re sure?” Bethany asked.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything,” I said. But
why
had I been here, in the same underground complex as that awful, bloodstained pit? And why did I have such a strong urge to get the hell out? I studied the rune, desperate for answers.
A loud crash came from somewhere deeper in the complex. Isaac and Bethany jumped, but the noise barely registered with me. I was lost in my thoughts.
What had taken me from Norristown, Pennsylvania, to this hellhole beneath Battery Park? Why had I lost my memories here? I wanted to stay. To explore, to learn everything this place had to tell me. I needed to know why I’d been here.
“Trent,” Isaac said from a thousand miles away. He repeated it, loud enough to pull me out of my thoughts. “Trent! We have to get out of here. That noise was the seal giving way in the throne room. The water is breaking through!”