Hafiza shrugged, studying but not touching the ancient texts shelved before them. “That was all my predecessor told me: They are not meant for human eyes. Oh, once or twice, I’ve been drunk enough to debate opening up the books, but every time I take out this key …” She toyed with the long necklace, the key of blackest iron hanging from it. A match to the cabinet. “I reconsider.”
Hafiza weighed the key in her palm. “I do not know how to read these books, nor what this language is, but if those scrolls and books were in the library itself, then the fact that these have been locked up here … Perhaps this is the sort of information worth killing for.”
Ice skittered down her spine. “Chaol—Lord Westfall knows someone who can read these markings.” Aelin Galathynius, he’d told her. “Perhaps we should bring them to her. The scroll, and these few books.”
Hafiza’s mouth tightened as she closed the iron doors to the cabinet and locked it with a heavy click. “I shall have to think on it, Yrene. The risks. Whether these books should leave.”
Yrene nodded. “Yes, of course. But I fear we may not have much time.”
Hafiza slid the iron key back under her robes and returned to the worktable, Yrene trailing her. “I do know a little of the history,” Hafiza admitted. “I thought it myth, but … my predecessor told me, when I first came. During the Winter Moon festival. She was drunk, because I’d plied her with alcohol to get her to reveal her secrets. But instead, she gave me a rambling history lesson.” Hafiza snorted, shaking her head. “I never forgot it, mostly because I was so disappointed that three bottles of expensive wine—purchased with all the money I had—got me so little.”
Yrene leaned against the ancient worktable as Hafiza sat and interlaced her fingers in her lap. “She told me that long ago, before man stumbled here, before the horse-lords and the ruks above the steppes, this land indeed belonged to Fae. A small, pretty little kingdom, its capital here. Antica was built atop its ruins. But they erected temples to their gods beyond the city walls—out in the mountains, in the river-lands, in the dunes.”
“Like the necropolis at Aksara.”
“Yes. And she told me that they did not burn their bodies, but entombed them within sarcophagi so thick no hammer or device could open them. Sealed with spells and clever locks. Never to be opened.”
“Why?”
“The drunk goat told me that it was because they lived in fear of someone getting in. To take their bodies.”
Yrene was glad she was leaning on the table. “The way the Valg now use humans for possession.”
A nod. “She rambled about how they had left their knowledge of healing for us to find. That they had stolen it from elsewhere, and that their teachings formed the basis of the Torre. That Kamala herself had been trained in their arts, their records discovered in tombs and catacombs long since lost to us. She founded the Torre based off what she and her small order learned. Worshipped Silba because she was their healing god, too.” Hafiza gestured to the owls carved throughout her workroom, the Torre itself, and rubbed at her temple. “So your theory could hold water. I never learned how the Fae came here, where they went and why they faded away. But they were here, and according to my predecessor, they left some sort of knowledge or power behind.” A frown toward that locked bookcase.
“That someone is now trying to erase.” Yrene swallowed. “Nousha will kill me when she hears those books and scrolls were taken.”
“Oh, she might very well. But she’ll likely go on the hunt for whoever did it first.”
“What does any of it mean, though? Why go to so much trouble?”
Hafiza strode back to her tonic, the hourglass nearly empty. “Perhaps that is for you to learn.” She added a few more drops of liquid to her tonic, grabbed the one-minute glass, and flipped it over. “I shall consider the books, Yrene.”
Yrene returned to her room, flung open the window to let in the breeze to the stifling chamber, and sat on her bed for all of a minute before she was walking again.
She’d left the scroll with Hafiza, figuring the locked bookcase was safer than anywhere else, but it was not scrolls or ancient books that filled her head as she turned left and headed downstairs.
Progress. They had made progress on Chaol’s injury, significantly so, and returned to find their room trashed.
His room—not theirs. He’d made that clear enough earlier.
Yrene’s steps were unfaltering, even as her legs ached from nearly two days’ worth of riding. There had to be some connection—his progress, these attacks.
She’d never get any thinking done up in her quiet, stuffy room. Or in the library, not when she’d be jumping at every footstep or meow from a curious Baast Cat.
But there was one place, quiet and safe. One place where she might work through the tangled threads that had brought them here.
The Womb was empty.
After Yrene had washed and changed into the pale, thin lavender robe, she’d padded into the steam-filled chamber, unable to help looking toward that tub by the far wall. Toward where that healer had cried mere hours before her death.
Yrene scrubbed her hands over her face, taking a steadying breath.
The tubs on either side beckoned, the bubbling waters inviting, promising to soothe her aching limbs. But Yrene remained in the center of the chamber, amid all those faintly ringing bells, and stared up into the darkness high above.
From a stalactite too far in the gloom to see, a droplet of water fell—landing on her brow. Yrene closed her eyes at the cool, hard splash, but made no move to wipe away the water.
The bells sang and murmured, the voices of their long-dead sisters. She wondered if that healer who had died … If her voice was now singing here.
Yrene peered up at the nearest string of bells hung across the chamber, various sizes and makes. Her own bell …
On bare, silent feet, Yrene padded to the little stalagmite jutting from the floor near the wall, to the chain sagging between it and another pillar a few feet away. Seven other bells hung from it, but Yrene needed no reminder of which was hers.
Yrene smiled at the small silver bell, purchased with that stranger’s gold. There was her name, etched into the side—maybe by the same jeweler Chaol had found for the amulet hanging from her neck. Even in here, she had not wanted to part with it.
Gently, she brushed her finger over the bell, over her name and the date she’d entered the Torre.
A faint, sweet ringing leaped away in the wake of her touch. It echoed off the rock walls, off the other bells. Setting some of them ringing, as if in answer.
Around and around the sound of her bell danced, and Yrene turned in place, as if she could follow it. And when it faded …
Yrene flicked her bell again. A louder, clearer sound.
The ringing flitted through the room, and she watched it, tracked it.
It faded once more. But not before her power flickered in answer.
With hands that did not entirely belong to her, Yrene rang her bell a third time.
And as its singing filled the room, Yrene began to walk.
Everywhere its ringing went, Yrene followed.
Her bare feet slapping against the damp stone, she tracked the sound’s path through the Womb, as if it were a rabbit racing ahead of her.
Around the stalagmites rising from the floor. Ducking under the stalactites drooping from above. Crossing the room; slithering down the walls; setting the candles guttering. On and on, she tracked that sound.
Past the bells of generations of healers, all singing in its wake.
Yrene streamed her fingers along them, too.
A wave of sound answered.
You must enter where you fear to tread.
Yrene walked on, the bells ringing, ringing, ringing. Still she followed the sound of her own bell, that sweet, clear song beckoning onward. Pulling her.
That darkness still dwelled in him; in his wound. They had beaten it so far back, yet it remained. Yesterday, he’d told her things that broke her heart, but not the entire story.
But if the key to defeating that shred of Valg blackness did not lie in facing the memories alone, if blind blasts of her magic did nothing …
Yrene followed the silver bell’s ringing to where it halted:
An ancient corner of the room, the chains rusted with age, some of the bells green from oxidation.
Here, the sound of her bell went silent.
No, not silent. But waiting. Humming against the corner of stone.
There was a small bell, hanging just by the end of the chain. So oxidized that the writing was nearly impossible to read.
But Yrene read the name there.
Yafa Towers
She did not feel the hard bite of stone as she fell to her knees. As she read that name, the date—the date from two hundred years ago.
A Towers woman. A Towers healer. Here—with her. A Towers woman had been singing in this room during the years Yrene had dwelled here. Even now, even so far from home, she had never once been alone.
Yafa. Yrene mouthed the name, a hand on her heart.
Enter where you fear to tread …
Yrene peered up into the darkness of the Womb overhead.
Feeding. The Valg’s power had been feeding off him …
Yes, the darkness above seemed to say. Not a drip sounded; not a bell chimed.
Yrene gazed down at her hands, lying limp at her sides. Summoned forth the faint white glow of her power. Let it fill the room, echo off the rock in silent song. Echo off those bells, the voices of thousands of her sisters, the Towers voice before her.
Enter where you fear to tread …
Not the void lurking within him. But the void within herself.