A Poison Dark and Drowning (Kingdom on Fire #2)(22)

Words of jibberish had also been carved into these walls with a childish, uneven hand. Most of the words were not English, but two phrases were clear, yet frightening.

All hail the Kindly Emperor read one sentence. Then, beside it in screaming block letters, WITNESS HIS SMILE.

My brain throbbed in my skull, the pressure too intense. I clamped my hands over my ears, and that eased the pain somewhat. Apart from the swirls of runes and jagged writing, only two other things were in this room.

One was a cage, about as large as would hold a person. The bars were bent and mangled, rotted with rust. The door appeared to have been blasted open from the inside. My eyes tracked to the second thing: a body, stretched out on the floor.

At least, it had been a body. The remains were skeletal. The gaping skull’s mouth grinned, teeth crooked and yellow. My eyes tracked over the clothing, now moldering and moth-eaten. The puffed sleeves and doublet looked familiar, like those in the painting Magnus had just stolen.

“Hello, Ralph Strangewayes,” I whispered.

The body of the father of English magicianship lay at my feet, and I doubted his death had been natural. The shredded back of his doublet suggested something had ripped into him. Likely, whatever had been trapped in that cage. I placed a handkerchief to my mouth and continued looking about the room. The others had arrived but would not enter. Magnus stood in the doorway, his mouth hanging open. In the pulsating firelight, he looked wraithlike, his shadow warping over the floor. “Don’t come in,” I said, my voice throaty and hoarse.

“I won’t,” he said. “Howel, get out of there. It feels…evil.”

I stopped burning, plunging the room into that thick darkness once more. It was broken only by Magnus’s candle, which he’d somehow kept alive. Crossing to him, I took the candle and raised it over my head, examining the room more thoroughly.

There was something here; I could feel it. I spotted a dagger hanging off Strangewayes’s belt. It was an odd-looking metal, tinted gold-orange, but not rusted in the least. As quickly as possible, I unhooked the belt from around the skeleton’s middle. I’d never stolen from a dead man before, and I hoped never to repeat the process.

There. Surely that was what I came here to find, wasn’t it? I wanted to get out of this room, but as I made to leave, something wedged in beside the cage caught my eye.

It was a book. Ordinary as anything, yes, but still a book. Unable to resist, I yanked it out and I hurried from the room, throwing the door shut behind me. The pounding in my head eased the minute I left that cursed place and handed Magnus his candle. Blackwood had helped Maria to her feet, though she still had her hands over her ears.

“What is this place?” he said.

“Strangewayes had something captive in there, and it took its revenge,” I said, handing Blackwood the book. As one, we all hurried back the way we’d come, following the impossible turns of the hall. What if we became lost in here? What if we wandered forever, until we became of the dark, and the dark became us?

Where had that thought come from? We ran until light pierced the darkness ahead and we reemerged into the Ancients’ showroom. Magnus kicked the door shut. Panting, I swore to myself never to go down there again. Cold sweat beaded on my forehead, and my hands were clammy. I had felt like a small child again, clutching the blankets and waiting for storied monsters to come for me out of the dark corners of the room.

Blackwood stepped away from us and turned the book’s pages, his expression blank. Putting an arm through Maria’s, I walked her about the room. Color began to return to her cheeks.

This horrible place was a monument to Strangewayes’s perversions, nothing more. What had we gained by coming here?

“My God,” Blackwood murmured. He turned the book toward me. “Look.”

Sketches of the monstrosities Strangewayes had left hanging in his display room graced the pages. But I saw what had caught Blackwood’s eye: a bloblike form, bristling all over with dark hairs. It looked—no, it was exactly like Molochoron, the great jellylike Pale Destroyer. I snatched the book from his hand and read, my mouth falling open.

To drive away, employ cariz, the book said, the script somewhat legible. What “cariz” was, I’d no idea. There were arrows showing points of attack onto Molochoron’s body, porous areas I had never noticed before.

Drive away. Flipping another page, I found an illustration of a chain, one that fitted itself rather nicely around the leg of some lizard-like creature.

Ralph Strangewayes had not only written a book about the Ancients; he had shown us how to defeat them.





“What the devil does he mean by a car-whatsit?” Magnus looked over my shoulder and pointed at the page. My hands trembled as I leafed through the book. I had to be delicate; the paper felt fragile beneath my fingers.

“This, I believe.” I showed Magnus and Blackwood, now standing about me. There was a sketch of a flutelike instrument with an oddly formed mouthpiece.

Blackwood took the book from me and flipped through it. “Does it say anything about R’hlem?” He searched the pages, but no. For some reason, the Skinless Man was the only one of our Seven Ancients who did not appear in Strangewayes’s book. What did that mean?

“Look back at the weapons,” I said, pointing to more sketches. One weapon resembled a wicked sort of scythe, with multiple metal teeth on the edge of the blade. It looked oddly familiar. “Wait a moment.” I turned back to the walls.