Evan Burl and the Falling, Vol. 1-2 Page 11

CHAPTER NINE

  Sometimes I make the letter from my father disappear, like the pages of that little leather book get stuck together. Or like they've been wiped clean. Then, the letter is back again, like it's been there all along. Like it was just hiding for a spell.

  After visiting all the Roslings, I let my feet take me where they wanted for a while. Eyes drooping, I found myself turning down a narrow hall that sloped upward into the heart of the castle. My feet were worried. They were taking me to the Elusian—the one place Mazol and the Warts could never find me. The place where the book was hidden.

  My feet wanted to know, would I find the letter if I looked tonight?

  The sound of footsteps echoed behind me.

  I stared back. Alone—at least, alone as I ever was in this place. Always lonely—never alone. How can you be truly alone if you have a terror living inside you? Rain echoed on the roof, tiny chanting voices or marching feet—that's what I must have heard. Just the rain.

  Stepping inside the broom closet at the top of a long, steep stairwell—more of a ladder really—I shut the door and felt the back wall. A bronze switch protruded at the base. I stepped on it. A small door swung outward. Air whistled through the gap below the door behind me as wind whooshed past.

  I had found nineteen hidden rooms in Daemanhur. Some were entered through fireplaces. Others, through the ceiling of the room below. A few, through furniture like towerclocks or false dressers. Entrance sometimes required codes or combinations or piano keys struck in just the right order. One of the trickiest was accessed by stepping inside a claw-foot tub, drawing the curtain and turning the hot faucet to the left. Instead of water squirting out, a door in the tile wall opened, barely large enough to crawl through.

  But the Elusian was the best discovery of them all.

  Long and tall, the room was capped by thick wooden trusses and beams. The only light came through high gable windows jutting out of both sides of the roof and a flickering, humming light I couldn't explain that hung from the wall—tiny red glowing tubes formed letters: the word Elusian in large script, and below it, smaller script, Fine Spirits. The room sealed perfectly from the rest of Daemanhur; Mazol wouldn't have heard me yelling if he stood in the closet I'd entered through. Equipped with a hidden firewood elevator, it was possible to stock wood from a small basement six floors below without carrying it through the castle. And there was a rickety ladder that led to the roof entrance I had intended to use the night Pike died.

  Moonlight filtered through the windows. Water dripped from the ceiling into a dozen overflowing barrels and buckets around the room—an orchestra of rhythmic melody that made me feel slightly less lonely. On one wall, a ceiling height fireplace was stacked with wood. Another pile of logs sat near an overflowing barrel of water. I struck up the fire with flint and kindling.

  On the far wall lurked a hutch. Inside, the book I stole from my uncle. Now that the book was so close, I wasn't sure I wanted to see anymore. The hutch—that chained animal—seemed to rattle on its feet like something dangerous hid inside—something that wanted to escape.

  Again I heard footsteps. The door to the closet swung open. Hadn't I closed it? My eyes darted around the room, watching. Had one of the Roslings followed me up?

  "Is anyone there?"

  No answer. I clicked the door shut, locking both bolts this time.

  Limping toward the oppressive hutch, I felt eyes watching from the dusky fog. All kinds of critters and insects called the Elusian home. The eyes I felt must be theirs. No one but Henri knew about this place. And Henri was still in the entrance hall, wasn't she? I imagined Henri and Mazol whispering after I left her this morning, her agreeing to spy on me in exchange for ending her punishment early and receiving a few mouthfuls of bread—

  I shook my head. Stop imagining things.

  Passing shelves and stacks of old things I'd collected over the years, I shuffled—a stalling, dreading sort of jaunt—toward the hutch where the book waited for me. An assortment of shoes, each with spikes sticking out the heel—I laughed when I'd found them, hundreds of pairs in several closets. What could they be for? Punching holes in the ground? Several boxes of inky drawings so realistic they looked like real people were trapped inside—I imagined they jumped off the page whenever I wasn't looking. My collection of books—almost the entire set of Natural History with 19 of 21 volumes about everything from anthropology to zoology. If I could find a way to sell them, I'd probably be richer than a Lictor.

  I taught myself to read with those books; Dravus helped of course. Besides Dravus, those books were the only reason I knew anything about the outside world, though I wasn't convinced everything in them was real. Things like elk: large brown-skinned animals that grew racks of horns on their heads. Or snow: white fluffy stuff that fell from the clouds. The book even had drawings of clankers that flew through the sky like birds; clankers so huge people actually lived inside them.

  I glanced at the black hutch in the corner. With every step it grew larger, shaking and rattling and groaning. Sounds echoed off the hardwood walls, unseen guests watching from the darkness. Would the book stop calling me if I made it wait long enough? Could I make it forget what was written inside the pages?

  I examined what remained from my collection of toys, ninety-eight of them, if you counted each of the marbles separately. I used to have more than I could count, but Mazol sold them all long ago. Life-sized toy soldiers that shot oranges out of cannons, train engines you could ride that poured real smoke out of their stacks, and balls that bounced so high they could hit the ceiling in the great hall.

  The first day I showed Henri around the castle, I gave her a knit doll that could talk. She laughed—probably because I was ten and she was practically an adult and I obviously had a crush on her. But she took the doll. It tilted its head up as she cradled it in her arms and said, "Mama." Looking back, I can't believe how much she put up with my make believe. Henri and I would pretend, or I would at least, that Little Saye was our baby. She was the one I'd carried up the tower the night Pike died.

  Henri and I found Little Saye hanging from the rafters in the top of the great castle tower this morning. Mazol said she killed herself. Six-year-old Little Saye, covered with bruises. How did she get all those bruises?

  If there was a murderer in the castle, the only suspect I could think of—besides the monster—was my uncle. I didn't want to believe he was bad. He was the only real family I had left. Then I remembered the look on Henri's face as I left her on the stool. Guilt. Maybe she was hiding something from me about Little Saye. Maybe Mazol was making her keep a secret.

  My feet bumped into the base of the dirkwood hutch. I stared at the single, knob-less drawer at its center. A scorpion disappeared into the shadowed corner of one of the shelves. The keyhole seemed to transform into a fanged mouth.

  "Feed me," the mouth said.

  The key.

  Reaching behind the hutch, I brushed aside cobwebs to find a long iron key with a dozen scrolled notches along one side. I pushed the key into the mouth. It snapped shut. Swallowed. Moaned.

  Click.

  So precise. So different from the clankers—oiled gears and mirror-polished cherrywood adorned the hutch. Like the masterwork of craftsman who woke up early every morning to sharpen their skills.

  The drawer slid open. Inside the cherry-lined drawer was a single item.

  The leather book.

  I saw Pike's face again as he read the words to me. Then, his face as he fell from my grasp into the mist below. My chest blistered as I turned the brown leather book in my hands. It should have shown signs of wear from that year of weather on the roof—yet it was flawless. I breathed in the smell of pulp and cowhide, traced my hand down the spine, feeling every groove of embossment on the leather. Words of another language were stamped on the edges amidst a geometric pattern that seemed to have more meaning than I could ever hope to understand. Around the book was a thin leather cord, wound tight to keep the page
s from running away.

  I untied the strap, flipping slowly through the two hundred and nineteen perfectly white pages—the only blemish was that the first twenty or so pages appeared to have been torn out. The paper was made from flecks of fiber, its edges torn. Each page was one-of-a-kind in thickness and variation.

  Holding my breath, I rubbed the first few together, making sure to pull them apart properly. Ink. Words. The letter.

  I let out my breath, like one of Dravus's runners facing a night in the jungles alone. I limped across the room to the blaze, unable to resist the book's call. Slumping against the wall, I traced my finger along the scrawled black letters.

  Salve Xry Mazol,

  Until today, I never realized how foolish it was to allow Evan Burl to live.

  When I reached the end, I stared at the countdown below my father's signature.

  355 days, 12 hours, 47 minutes until the falling.

  Yesterday, it read 356 days. Tomorrow it will read 354. The numbers were counting down to zero.

  If the letter was true, I was a sapient, like Henri said in the closet. But it also meant the falling was coming in 355 days, when I would finally turn into a monster. If Mazol didn't lynch me first.

  Falling, according to Natural History volume six: dishonored, disgraced, defeated, moral death. What kind of a beast would I become? A physical monster? Morally dead? I wanted to have faith like Henri—believe the parts I liked, the parts about being a sapient, and forget the parts about becoming the Disgraced One; but I couldn't. Either the whole letter was true, or none of it was.

  I stared into the coals, watched Pike's hand slip from mine, watched him melt into the fog. Then I saw myself falling, my bones turning to dust as I struck the ground. And from the dust rose a shadow.

  A bead of sap exploded and sparks landed on my leg. I had put in too much wood; the fire was getting hot. Someone could push me in if they wanted—but I was alone, wasn't I?

  I thought of Henri, standing on the stool. Thirteen hours had passed. At least three more to go. For a terrible moment, I felt comfort at the thought of her standing there; wishing she was standing there instead of lurking around the castle doing Mazol's secret bidding. I pressed my hands against my skull, tried to push the stampede of thoughts away. The Roslings were starving. Why didn't the Warts feed us more? Where did all the money go? And the shipments of goods. Huge shipments of who knows what. We worked day and night on Mazol's clankers, and yet we never had enough. Those runners took off with the delivery that morning; now we had even less. Could we survive if the people in town believed the runners? And why didn't Mazol seem to care that I'd chased the runners off?

  I squeezed the book until my knuckles went white. If I looked again, would I find another letter? Another clue? Nothing at all?

  I started to flip through the pages then threw the book into an empty bucket. It tumbled over. Someone's presence grew cold behind me. Words in my ear. Read it again. I spun around. No one.

  The footsteps. The feeling someone watched me from the darkness. The voice. Was this the monster?

  Jumping up, I piled more wood on the bonfire. I tossed on a painting I'd stolen from Yesler and smiled as it went up in flames. I worked until my clothes were soaked with sweat and my muscles ached. As I threw the last log on, I nearly tumbled in myself. The flames licked up high above my head into the flue at the top of the ceiling-high fireplace.

  I looked at the book, feeling its condemnation stare back. I used to hope my father would come for me. I used to watch the front gate for hours, sure he'd come if I waited just a minute longer. An hour longer. A year longer. He'd realize he was wrong. Eventually.

  I lifted the book. Found the pages that held my father's letter and—before I realized what I was doing—ripped them out.

  No, said the voice in my ear.

  I crumpled the letter. Threw it on the blaze.

  My shoulders straitened. My head felt a little more clear.

  My eyes fell to the book.

  I could throw the whole thing in. Just the flick of my wrist and I could be rid of it forever.

  Yes, the voice said.

  I watched my hand, as if it belonged to someone else, jerk toward the flames. But my fingers held tight; they didn't want to let go. My hand jerked again. My fingers pinched tighter.

  Do it, said the voice. You're going to regret this, but do it anyway.

  I threw the book, forcing my fingers to let it go.

  The book landed on the logs, splaying open. The top few pages of the book lit. They seemed to resist the flames. The book fought for its life. But one by one, the pages curled up, edges glowing bright as coals.

  I was angry. Guilty. Ecstatic.

  I listened for the voice. Sweet silence. Had I really done it? Had I killed the nightmare?

  I grinned. The letter was wrong about me. I wasn't a sapient. I was just an orphan.

  My smile grew.

  More of the pages caught fire. Black smoke billowed over me.

  Tears ran down my cheeks.

  I seized a poker. Pushing it into the inferno, something caught my eye. I poked the book with the iron tip. The burnt pages flipped. Something was there I'd never seen before.

  Writing.

  New words appeared, letter by letter, as if someone was writing them at that very moment. I squinted, trying to make out what the words said.

  Urgent. Lectito statim.

  Xry Mazol, I received the results of the test regarding Evan Burl—