Authors: C.N. Crawford
“It won’t snap your bones.” He put his finger over his lips, looking at the chandeliers. “Unless you’ve got a fracture of some kind. That’s why it was so important that we saw the healer in Maremount—to make sure nothing was broken.” He gazed into her eyes again. “Is that what you wanted to ask me?”
“No. I saw Munroe’s mom go into the cemetery on her own. She went into a crypt, and she didn’t come out again.”
He nodded almost imperceptibly, waiting for her to say more.
“And then I saw
you
come back. What were you doing?”
“I was out for a walk.”
You’re lying.
She gritted her teeth. Since when did he lie to her? “I saw the bonfire. And it looked like there were two people out there.”
He shrugged. “Bats can’t see very well.”
She pointed at his face, her cheeks flushing. “That is a myth. Ask Mariana. Plus I have echolocation.”
“Why do you have to get involved in everything?”
Her heart raced.
What else isn’t he telling me?
“Did you have something to do with whatever was going on in the crypt?”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
You think you can trust someone, and then the next thing you know, you’re standing on their scaffold.
“Oh, you’re telling me you didn’t hear the screaming?”
Her blood pounded in her ears.
Is no one from Maremount trustworthy?
“Are you joining Munroe’s cult? You seemed quite friendly on the bus.”
His voice was cold. “Fiona. I think you’re getting a little paranoid. You need to leave this alone. Stop flinging yourself in harm’s way.”
“Fine,” she shot back. “But I’ve had enough of people lying to me. And I’m going to find out what you’re up to.”
Before he could respond, she heard the sound of footfalls behind her. It was Munroe, grinning as she stepped along the path. “Can I join your little study group?”
Fiona felt a knot of frustration in her chest. “Yeah, I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about,” she muttered before stalking off.
“There must be a way out!” Thomas’s hoarse voice echoed off the damp stones. He leaned against the wall, sinking to the floor. It must be near morning, the sky brightening to a pale blue.
The guards hadn’t returned with Oswald. Every few hours, an iron hatch slid open and a guard shoved a small pewter cup of water through.
Thomas’s legs ached from his nocturnal procession back and forth over the rushes. If the floor hadn’t been covered with them, he was sure he would have worn the flagstones several inches thinner. In the cold and silent room, he’d scanned every inch of wall by silvery moonlight. Carved into the wall were names, dates, a zodiac wheel, and even what appeared to be the likeness of a spider.
At one point, a spark of hope glimmered when he’d discovered the letter E
engraved below the zodiac wheel. In desperation, he’d convinced himself it must be the mark of
Eirenaeus
, the brilliant young philosopher. After all, William had said that
Eirenaeus refused to bow to the Throcknells
, like he was some kind of colonial-era rebel. And what if the brilliant
Eirenaeus
had left clues of an escape route in a revolutionary gesture?
But as the rising sun stained the sky orange, despair began to smother his hope. He listlessly stared at the empty fireplace. Lots of people had names that began with the letter E
,
and anyway, he had no idea how to convert a zodiac wheel into an escape route. Besides, Oswald had said no one had escaped since then.
Whatever torments Oswald was enduring, Thomas had dragged him into it with his bungled attempts at atonement. He couldn’t give up on an escape plan for Oswald.
Pushing himself up, he crossed to peer out the window. He jiggled the iron bars. One in the center was loose enough to yank free with a piercing sound of iron on stone. The others wouldn’t budge, but it was a large enough gap to fit his head through.
Vertigo overwhelmed him as he stared down at the sheer drop. It must be nearly a thousand feet down, the shining white walls as smooth as ice. The nearest neighboring tower was at least a hundred feet to his right. Without a stout rope, exiting through the window would be suicide, and he couldn’t fit more than his head through even if he decided to leap to his death.
He shoved the bar back in place, slumping down against the wall. Hunger gripped his stomach. If only he could speak to one of the Throcknells, maybe he could convince them he’d been right. He could get them to see that they’d be better off ruling over a healthy populace than a sick one. He could make them understand that torture was never effective, that they should leave Oswald alone.
As the day wore on, he tried to uncover a code from the names on the walls, arranging and rearranging anagrams. By the time the sun dipped lower in the sky, his head was filled with a jumble of senseless words, playing in a loop:
raven tower iron irony ironing rioning…
He sat cross-legged on the floor, blinking slowly.
Is rioning a word? Rioning, ravening, ranting…
His mother’s ranting episodes had always started with a discovery. She’d discovered things thrown away in the London streets—who would throw away dozens of good clocks, or the wooden dolls with painted smiles and no legs? Thomas would come home to find the living room full of boxes, and his mother’s excitement would be infectious. The clocks, you see, could be used to make a time machine that would change the world. And the discoveries always started off full of wonder. After all, little Thomas wanted to build a time machine too. But then came the sleepless nights and the paranoid ranting. She smashed the clocks and called the police to have them arrest the sky demons lurking outside the windows.
Thomas swallowed. His throat was painfully dry. He pulled the pewter cup toward him, taking a long sip. Starvation and fatigue were sapping his mental faculties.
No, I’m not like her—I’ve always looked at things logically.
He turned to inspect the zodiac wheel again. The carvings were dulled and muted, worn by time.
Think, Thomas. We need to approach this rationally.
The wheel was made of two roughly carved concentric circles, the inner one filled with crisscrossing lines.
Perhaps the inner circle represented the earth—a relic of a geocentric model of the Solar System. In the center, the lines joined up at points that corresponded with seven of the twelve star signs. He chewed on his nub of a fingernail.
Why only seven points? Why not one for each sign?
He rose, walking to peer out the window again. He stared at the gleaming white towers and mentally tallied the number—seven towers.
Seven points, and seven towers.
Just as an idea was beginning to form, the lock clicked in the door, and Thomas jumped at the noise. The door creaked open, and three guards stood in the entrance, light streaming in from behind them.
A dark-haired guard with an enormous gut spoke first. “King Balthazar wishes for you to join the court for dinner.”
It was the golden hour, Jack’s favorite time of day, and the setting sun bathed the graves outside in honey. He’d have to keep this beautiful light in place when he rewrote the material world.
He sipped the remains of his herbal tea, inhaling the scent of chamomile and hawthorn. Steam from his cup clouded his window. His father had often grown angry when he spent too much time admiring the sunlight, and Jack would pay for it with the skin off his back. After all, idleness and time-wasting were sins.
He turned, leaning against the window and pulling out his golden pocket watch to examine its etched surface. He had all the time he needed now. Still, he couldn’t escape the feeling that someone was watching him.
Probably a relic of my early days.
As he took a final sip of tea, he glanced at his new companion, Alexandria. She sat hunched over her laptop on his dusty green sofa. Her wavy hair and heart-shaped face reminded him of Fiona.
He had full confidence that she would be able to decode the Voynich manuscript. Other code-breakers before her who’d failed to unravel the mysteries of the ancient alchemical text hadn’t been sufficiently motivated. But of course, they hadn’t been as desperate for meaning as Alexandria.
Staring at the screen, she toyed with her lip ring. Her eyes were different than Fiona’s. Fiona’s were amber, framed by long lashes, but Alexandria’s almond-shaped eyes were a deep brown.
“Will wine interfere with your work?” He walked over to the kitchen that adjoined his living room. “Pinot noir is your favorite, right?”
“Yeah, sounds good.” She stretched out her legs, resting her bare feet on his coffee table. Silver rings decorated two of her toes.
He pulled out two long-stemmed glasses and uncorked a bottle of an oaky 2007 Oregon pinot, pouring out two large glasses. He hadn’t been feeling himself lately, and this might revive him.
“You said you were going to tell me more about this project,” she called out before turning to look at him. “And teach me magic. How have you learned so much? You look younger than me.”
He crossed the room and handed her a glass, joining her on the sofa. His watch was set to eighteen years—his physical prime. There were times that it would be convenient to look a bit older, especially in this modern world where childhood stretched out ever longer: no drinking until twenty-one, no children until after thirty. People had been lucky to
live
past thirty when he was a boy. But he didn’t feel eighteen today. He felt—old.
“I look young for my age,” he said, smiling. Of all the things he could say to her, this was the truest. He took a sip of wine, leaning back to savor it. “The project, since you asked, is to find something that’s been lost for a long time. The most important object in the history of the world, in fact. Cracking the Voynich code will tell us where it’s been hidden.”
“Is it like the Holy Grail?”
He leaned back into the sofa’s armrest, gazing at her. “Some call it that.”
“What did you mean about rewriting all of creation?”
“Death, mostly. I want to conquer it. I want to save everyone. The gods made us in their image, except they put us in rotting bodies. It’s a travesty they should atone for. And I’d like to fix it.”
She squinted in the sunlight angling in through the window. “Okay, but… the world will be wildly overpopulated if nobody dies. There wouldn’t be enough food or space. The whole ecosystem would be in chaos.”
He leaned forward with a wry smile. “You see, Alexandria? This is why I need you. You think of these things. But you’ve got to think on a larger scale, too. With the Grail, we can remake everything just the way it should be. There’s no heaven waiting for us after we die. That’s a lie designed to breed complacency.” His cheeks grew hot as he spoke. “We have to make paradise ourselves. No disease, no starvation. No children dying from cancer, no plagues to eat at our brains as we grow old. Just paradise.”
“Wow. You really think you can do this?
He tilted his head down, a few dark curls falling into his eyes. “I think
we
can do this.”
She toyed with her shirt’s low neckline. “What is the Voynich, exactly?”
He rubbed his chin. “It’s a coded history book. It was written by alchemists in the fifteenth century. At one point, it belonged to Queen Elizabeth’s great alchemist, John Dee. Many of his books have been lost, but this one survived. Only no one has been able to read it. And somewhere in its pages, it details the Grail’s secret location. All I know right now is that it’s somewhere in Europe.”
She beamed. “Are we going to Europe?”
“Assuming you get back to your coding at some point, I don’t see why you shouldn’t join me when you’re done.”
She grinned, folding herself back into a cross-legged position to resume work, and Jack rose to stare out at the dusky graveyard, sipping his wine. There were still things to take care of here before he could even think of going to Europe. He still needed to pay a little visit to Virginia.
Thomas’s jaw dropped. “What?”
They must be joking.
“They’re going to send you home in gratitude for your help with Rawhed.” The guard’s bulbous gut gave him the look of a penguin. He looked Thomas over, surveying his dirt-stained woolen garment. “We’ll have to get you cleaned up first.”
Thomas shook his head. “What about Oswald?”
“Returned to Tuckomock Forest.”
Part of him wanted to fall to his knees and thank God for his release, but Oswald’s warning about trusting the Throcknells tickled the back of his brain. He scratched the stubble on his chin, crossing toward the door.
A dizzying feeling nearly knocked him backward as he looked past the guards, disoriented as though his head were swelling and contracting. The guards stood not in a dank stone stairwell as he’d expected, but in an enormous, sun-filled hall.