Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(88)

Thomas knew Heron would be very disappointed in him right now.

The crystal chimed again. Thomas had the strange idea that it was trying to help him. He found himself humming and realized something: he did know something useful after all. A tone was just a waveform, no different than waves in the ocean, waves on a string. Sound traveled in waves. Frequencies were mathematical.

He lowered the note he was humming until he heard no opposing waves in the sound between that and the crystal’s, and hummed it louder. He didn’t dare sing it for fear of going off-key, but perhaps humming . . .

The first crystal chimed twice. It was a warning. He was going in the wrong direction.

Go back, he thought. Start over. Think it through.

Getting back was torture; he had to twist himself carefully, so carefully, around every jutting crystal so as not to wake any more vibrations. When he arrived back at the first, he took a moment just to breathe. The mask he wore was frustrating and confining, and he dripped with sweat; before he thought why he shouldn’t, he pushed it up to gasp for breath.

The air smelled . . . fresh.

He waited, heart pounding, for any sign that he’d made a fatal mistake, but nothing happened. The air continued to taste, smell, and function just as normal. With a relieved sigh, he shoved the mask in his pocket, wiped the sweat from his face, and tried to compose his thoughts.

Sound was just mathematics. If he approached it that way, perhaps he could do this. Clearly, he was looking for harmonics. Waveforms that complemented one another.

He carefully tapped the first crystal, and a pure, singing tone sounded. It almost sounded encouraging. Look at the forms. These were organic crystals, yes, but at the same time they had been somehow planned. He tried to ignore the glittering facets, the deadly spikes, and unfocused his vision.

Something emerged out of the chaos.

Color. He’d noticed the variations, but there hadn’t seemed to be a pattern; when he looked at the crystals without really seeing them, he realized he was looking at a rainbow. The first crystal he’d struck had a slight reddish hue. What did he know about red? It has the longest light wavelength.

This wasn’t simply a puzzle of music. It was music and light, and the light was a clue.

The problem was, he’d never really noted the order of colors in a rainbow. Was it red, orange, yellow, blue—no, it couldn’t be. Yellow and blue made green, green had to come after yellow, simple logic. Then blue, indigo, and violet. But the problem was that the hues kept shifting as he moved. From one angle the scheme was clear, but as soon as he moved, it vanished.

Move until it’s clear again.

The hues gleamed again, and he looked carefully. Orange. He tapped it. The first crystal hummed in harmony with the second. He carefully edged around a particularly dense jutting of crystal and found the yellow. It added a rich tone to the chorus. Halfway through. Only three more shades to go.

But when he touched the green—or what he thought was the green—it hit a discordant note. Dissonance.

And the crystals shot toward him at a terrifying rate. No, no, no, surely green comes after yellow, it has to . . . but then he took another breath, steadied himself, and unfocused his eyes again. Looking at the blurry colors without looking.

Green was a trap. Green was being filtered through another, false crystal. The real green lay behind it.

He had to start over, edging past crystals that left shallow cuts all over him and tattered his coat to a ragged mess. His breath came in short, unconscious sobs. Despite his concentration, he was afraid. He started with the red crystal. Found the orange. The yellow. Edged oh so slowly and carefully to twist himself around the concealing clear crystal to the green behind it.

Harmony.

It was then he noticed the bones. Human bones, dry and white. They littered the ground around the green crystal. A skull sat impaled on a jutting clear spike.

Slowly. Go slowly.

It was terrifying, this puzzle, but he had the key now. Unfocus his eyes, find the color, make absolutely certain he was touching the right crystal. The last two fell without triggering another reset, though the violet crystal—the last—was located in a whole forest of disorienting, faceted fakes that he checked five times before deciding to risk his final choice.

The harmony blended, and the crystals’ rich, pure chord rang through the chamber. It built and built to an almost painful level, and the colors flashed bright enough to blind.

The crystals retracted completely into small, gemlike stubs. One still dripped his blood.

There was another door standing beyond the last crystal outcropping. Another keyhole with no key in sight, but it had a very particular shape. He thought about trying the lockpicks, but then realized what it was. Obvious, really.

He went back and searched the crystals until he found the correct shape, and the instant he touched it, it broke off from its stem. He inserted it in the lock, and the wall rolled aside. With it came a powerful, awful stench.

The smell of death.

Thomas wasn’t sure what it was, but he grabbed the mask from his pocket and put it on, in case there was something truly dangerous waiting for him. Like toxic gas, which seemed eerily likely.

Another sphinx sat beyond it, the identical twin of the last. Thomas, despite the pain in his pierced hand and the burning cuts, took a moment to simply admire it before he said, “May I pass?”

Its eyes turned blue. “Who makes me has no need of me. Who buys me has no use for me. Who uses me cannot see or feel me. What am I?”