Page 26 of Tomb of Ancients
He looked beyond her and into the hovel. The candle she carried illuminated a series of strange markings on the plaster walls. I was not meant to know them, but they turned my stomach to behold. All of them, strange stars and crude characters, were drawn in blood.
“I do not fear what lies within,” Henry assured her. “And we will not be a bother to your master. We merely wish to ask a few questions.”
The White Keeper stared at him for a long time, then shifted her gaze to me and finally to Ara, who fidgeted and muttered with boredom while the decision was made. Then the Keeper flicked her head once, and Baki held the fabric cover aside while we ducked inside.
The hovel smelled overwhelmingly of incense, a wild, purple smell that could have only one purpose: concealing the true stench of the place, the reek of old bones and human decay. The blood on the walls was fresh, though dried markings lurked below, thenewer signs having been applied recently. They glittered in the candlelight, releasing a wet-coin smell that tightened the knot in my guts.
I confess, I wanted to flee. Henry followed the old woman with a bounce in his step, but I could not match his enthusiasm. Something was very wrong with this place, I felt it deeply, and it was not just my Upworlder aversion to the ways of Henry’s people.
This was a place of evil.
There was almost nothing in the hovel, just a single spit for cooking and a few lumpy cushions. The floor was dusty with sand and dried flecks of blood, and all of us had to duck our heads to avoid the ceiling. The White Keeper led us down a passageway at the back of the house, clay stairs built into the ground, perhaps predating this neighborhood or even the city itself. The air ought to have grown colder as we went, but instead I found myself tugging at my cowl, fighting off the feverish heat that became almost intolerable as we descended.
“Why is it so bloody hot?” I muttered.
It was then that I noticed that Baki had stayed behind. At his height, he might not have even fit in the passage. Yet his absence filled me with unease. He knew these people better than we did. Why had he remained outside?
At last, the White Keeper stopped. The wide arch of a doorway lay ahead, carved into the pale rock below the city, a flimsycurtain swaying back and forth in front of it. The light of a hundred or more candles blazed on the other side. Something soft tickled against my toes, falling onto my sandal. I picked it up and turned it in front of the glowing curtain. A feather, long, brown, and sharply pointed.
“How peculiar,” I whispered.
“The master is within,” the White Keeper rasped at us. “Do not test his patience.”
Then she was gone, leaving us in the stench and heat of that unholy den. I looked to Henry, but his eyes were wide with childlike pleasure, and he drifted toward the curtain. Had I wanted to, I could not have stopped him from gently pulling the fabric aside. Even Ara seemed fascinated, sidling up next to him, her breath coming short. Inside Henry’s pack, the pup gave a low, sad howl.
That howl startled the creature. It had made a kind of small citadel for itself, a dark church of candles and straw. The floor was littered with feathers like the one I had found. The creature had great, tawny wings with hooked talons at the points. And it was a man of sorts, narrow of frame and muscular, wearing the torn and bloodstained tunic of a much larger adversary. Thick strands of black beads hung from around his neck, and his skin shone with fissures, haphazard cracks in the flesh, red-gold light blazing from within.
It hurt to look at him, and my stomach roared with pain.
“Šulmu, Gallû,” Henry said, taking a step into the creature’slair and bowing.Greetings, Demon. He sounded positively cheery. “Faraday, I presume? Although by the looks of it, that isn’t quite right, is it? More likely Faraz’ai, the name lost to time. Or Furcalor or Focalor... Let us settle upon that name. Focalor, Great Duke, the Abandoner, Leader of the Thirty Legions, and most importantly dead, last I heard anything of it. How did you come to be here, and what do you know of the books, of the binding?”
Faraday—or Focalor, as Henry had called him—swiveled to face us completely. His face might have been unbelievably handsome were it not for the cracks of light splitting it into strange shapes. He spread his gryphon wings wide and held out his hands to us, tears rolling down his cheeks. His right hand was missing two fingers; his other had lost the pinkie.
Focalor’s voice was like pipe smoke, rich and intoxicating, a young singer’s voice, but sad, a voice made only for dirges.
“Oh, yes, Dark One, I have gone to the white plains. I have gone to the salt to meet a Binder, and the journey took everything from me.”
Four and then five days lurched by with no word from the owl, Wings. There were precious few distractions in the Deptford safe house, and we were left to do nothing but lick our wounds and wait. Niles had decided tojoin us, seeing as he was without employment now that Cadwallader’s had burned down, and we agreed to take him with us to Coldthistle House. From there, he would continue on to Derridon to reunite with his brother.
Under ordinary circumstances, a delay of this length would not be troubling, but Dalton had assured us that the owl should have returned with word by now, if indeed there was word to send.
“Ach, Louisa, but something is mightily wrong.”
Mary and I were allegedly playing whist, but in truth her full attention was in taking the carved wooden fish from Chijioke out of her pocket and fussing with it, thinking I did not know what she was doing underneath the table. The tension inside the cellar was suffocating. Fathom was worried we would be followed and found again, and so we were staying belowground as much as possible.
“Do you think they could be ignoring us on purpose?” I asked Mary. “Maybe they’re cross with us for leaving.”
I had won the last trick and it was Mary’s turn, but she failed to notice. She shook her head, looking through her cards listlessly. “Chijioke wrote me all summer long. I would know if he was angry.”
“What do you think we will find there?” I asked. I had told her little of Dalton’s diary. What I had read so far seemed somewhat promising. Maybe Mr. Morningside had found his own way of summoning Binders, working from Focalor’s experiences.They had been following Mr. Morningside’s fancy and chasing down the origin of the strange books, and now that I had met a Binder, I knew well they had great power, power enough even to remove Father from my spirit without killing me.
“It pains me to speculate,” she murmured. “My heart aches whenever I allow myself to imagine...”
I watched her match a suit, and then I reached for a card on the stockpile, inhaling through my teeth when the edge of the card scraped the raw marking on my palm. Mary had taken me through exactly what had happened from her perspective during the ritual. In her eyes, I had gone nowhere, simply kneeling on the carpets with the stranger. Then, abruptly, I had started screaming, throwing myself on the ground and rolling, thrashing my arms. She hadn’t understood why I’d had such a bizarre reaction to a bit of sage being burned. And I was speaking a horrid language, she said, hardly even sounding like myself, screaming things that made no sense to her or anyone in the room. They were black, evil words, she told me—there was no mistaking that.
It had grown worse when the stranger took my palm and began tapping ink into it with the bone needle. The stranger had spoken the same frightening tongue, and her eyes had rolled back in her head, the white flickering as she blindly scored the ink into my skin.
I flipped over my hand and regarded the inky lettering that remained there. It seemed to change each time I beheld it. Ablack and evil language. Even though I knew from the Binder that the marking meant “willing,” it looked awfully sinister.
