The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)(63)

“Can Goliath join too?” asked Tristan.

The three of them groaned.

As the door opened, a lightless staircase spiraled out below, yawning into the darkness.

“Honestly,” muttered Enrique as he hoisted himself down. “Why can’t Goliath be on a leash? He’s nearly the size of a cat.”

“I can hear you,” scolded Tristan.

“Good. Start thinking about tarantula leashes.”

The staircase twisted off to the side and seemed to stretch out for nearly a kilometer. After a while Enrique looked up to see how far they’d gone and whether they could still see Tristan. It was too dark. And it didn’t help that the staircase was wet. As he walked, his shoes slipped out from underneath him.

Laila shivered. “It’s freezing here!”

Enrique agreed through chattering teeth.

They were approaching the bottom of the staircase. Enrique had expected the staircase to lead down to the grand library, but this place looked more like a gigantic atrium. Wet cave walls glistened in a rough, oval shape. Roots dangled above them. When he breathed, a slick, mineral scent coated his throat. At the center of the atrium, a round pedestal protruded like a boulder. Three metal sticks poked out of it. They reminded him of levers, though he couldn’t imagine why they would be there. He couldn’t even tell if that’s what they were. There was no light, save for the small flare Zofia held out, which barely cast more than a puddle of light around them.

“Where’s the library?” asked Laila.

Zofia waved the flare. It spread across the cave walls, then disappeared.

“A tunnel,” breathed Enrique. “Maybe it’s down there?”

He was still looking down the tunnel when he took his foot off the staircase and touched the ground. Hardly a second had passed before he felt it … a tremor in the earth. Enrique took a step back, until both feet were firmly planted on the last step.

“Do you feel that?” he asked, his voice suddenly high.

“Do you see that?” retorted Zofia.

She pointed up ahead. In the tunnel, a torch flared. The light of its fire caught on the outlines of an amber door.

“That must be the entrance to the library,” breathed Laila. A huge grin broke out on her face, and she leapt down the last two steps.

“Wait, Laila—”

There was something strange about the floor. As if it had read their presence. But he couldn’t stop Laila in time. She landed with both feet on the ground. That same tremor returned, shaking the stairs this time. Enrique tripped, his arms flailing as he landed on the hard earth. Zofia fell beside him, her flare rolling across the ground.

Light—far too grand to belong to Zofia’s pendant flare—streamed across the floor.

Slowly, Enrique lifted his gaze. The tunnel was gradually brightening. Where there had been one torch, now there were hundreds. And they weren’t alone. That tremor belonged to something … a great stone ball rolling through the tunnel. With each rotation, it caught fire from the torches, blazing hot and illuminating the stone atrium. Enrique scanned the rest of the atrium. A grooved, spiral path wrapped around the room, winding to the center.

Enrique pushed himself off the ground. “On second thought, I’m completely fine with the dark and cold.”

Laila grabbed his and Zofia’s wrists, tugging them to the other side of the atrium.

“If we just move out of its trajectory, then it can crash into the wall, and we run to the tunnel and get to the door,” she said. “It’s not as if the floor is going to—”

The floor snapped.

Enrique’s shoe snagged on a crack in the ground that had not been there a moment ago. The crack spidered across the stone floor, as if it were nothing more than a pane of ice. Enrique fell hard. He scuttled backward, only for his hand to slip.

Inches from his fingers was a plummeting drop. An icy river flowed beneath the ground, rushing dark and roaring. The floor plan must have been Forged to fit together like a puzzle piece, framed above a river so that any trespassers would either die by fire or by water. The only good thing that could be said about the fireball moving closer was that at least he could see what was around him.

“We’re moving!” called Zofia.

She was sprawled on a narrow slab of rock not too far from him. Laila stood on the other side, lightly balancing on a piece of the floor no bigger than a dining plate. Far in the tunnel, the fireball gained speed, following a corkscrew pattern that would soon catch up to them.

Enrique glanced at the river. His position had changed. He watched as the room slowly turned. All of the shattered pieces, including the ones they perched on, drifted in a slow rotation around the pedestal in the center of the room.

“All defensive Forged things legally have a somno!” he shouted over the din of the river and the fireball. “We just have to find it! That center pedestal must be the key. Laila, you’re getting to the pedestal first. Be ready to tell us what it says!”

Laila nodded. She leapt again, gracefully springing from one slab of rock to another, closing the distance to the pedestal.

Enrique cast about the room. This was not like the auction’s holding room. There was no onyx bear with its teeth caught around someone’s wrist. No stone body to skim his hands over and find the divots and markings of a release. He was too far away from the cave walls to see if they had any writing. And the rock slabs, as far as he could tell, were nothing but rock.