Caleb stepped back and wrapped his hands around the gate, pulling then pushing them, but they didn’t move.
“So how do we get in?” I asked.
Caleb took my light from me and set to examining the gate and the arch.
“Maybe you need a secret decoder ring from the Pope,” he said. “I don’t know. All I do know is that we need to find a way in.” He continued his investigation, his face inches from the wall where the arch met the gate. “Oh great.”
“What is it?” I asked, straining to notice what he might be looking at but failing to see jack.
“Mr. Locke might not let your average Joe down here, and it seems he’s had some extra precautions installed.”
“Like . . . ?” I moved closer, watching Caleb as his fingers traced along the surface of the stone wall.
“I’m not sure, exactly,” he said. He reached out and took my hand in his. If I weren’t already panicked about being discovered, I might have taken a moment to enjoy it, but the desire passed as Caleb raised my hand and pressed it to the stone. He placed his hand over mine and guided my fingers along the stones of the archway.
“Feel that?” he asked.
I nodded, pulling my hand away and focusing on the spot as my eyes finally tuned in to what I hadn’t seen at first.
“It looks like a language,” I said.
“Runes,” he corrected. “More specifically: runes of warding. Meant to keep us out.”
Both my eyebrows raised. “Did Locke do this?”
Caleb snickered. “These religious types don’t like to dirty their hands dabbling in magic,” he said. “Too above it all, but you know what they’re not above? Hiring freelancers to do their dirty work. I’m just a little hurt he didn’t ask me.”
“Do you know how it’s meant to keep us out?”
“Not exactly,” he said, “but by the style of the carving, I can pin who did it. The Witch and Bitch Society. You know, like the Stitch and Bitch knitters.”
“O . . . kay.”
Caleb let out a long sigh. “I wish I could say it was just a clever take on a sewing circle name, but I’ve had a run-in or two with them. Not all that fond of their work, mostly because they cut into my profit margin in competitive freelancing.”
“But can you break this ward?” I asked. “Can you get us in?”
“Maybe,” he said, and started poking through the contents of his jacket.
Nerves getting the better of me, I couldn’t stand waiting, and as a thought occurred to me, I pressed past Caleb toward the gate. I grabbed the latch, which he had completely ignored, feeling resistance, but more of the kind that came with aged metal. I jerked the latch upward, and the gate swung freely into the room beyond.
“Look at me,” I whisper shouted. “I’m a wizard!”
“Or we could try that approach, sure.”
Triumphant but still full of nerves, I pressed on into the room beyond. Much like the gated area above, rows of shelves filled the room, a large maze of books and artifacts stacked high on each of them. Row after row continued down the line, and at the end against the back wall lay a small, carved basin set half in the floor and half into the wall.
“A well?” Caleb asked.
“It’s a stoup,” I said. “It’s a Roman Catholic architectural thing. The more ornate ones are set at the front of the church by the doors, but I’m thinking the Libra Concordia is keeping a ready supply in case they have to deal with any of the nasty toys they might have gathered here.”
“Is it holy water?” Caleb asked, stepping back from it.
“Afraid you might get burned?” I asked.
Caleb ignored me and set off down one of the aisles. I picked another and headed into it. If my great-great-grandfather’s secrets were somewhere in the church as the notes had said, this had to be the place.
There was little hope in determining the point and purpose of much that was here, not without some kind of reference material, but I slogged on through the aisles for half an hour or so before something on the shelves caught my eye.
“Caleb!” I called out to the next aisle as quietly as I could, and he came running.
“Find something?” he asked.
I raised my light, shining it on the small, sculpted building that sat on the shelf.
Caleb reached for it, pulling it from under several books that were leaning against it.
“This is where we are,” he said. “It’s a scale model of this very church.”
“This isn’t a scale model of this church,” I said, taking it from him.
Caleb eyed me with suspicion. “It looks like one to me,” he said.
“It’s a puzzle box,” I corrected. “One of my great-great-grandfather’s, to be precise. What it is doing here apart from the rest we kept at the Belarus Building is a mystery.”
“Maybe Desmond Locke took it,” he said.
“I’ve never seen it before. It must have gone missing from the collection before I was born.”
“It’s pretty elaborate,” Caleb said, still staring at the miniature in wonder.
I looked up at him, a little perturbed. “All Alexander Belarus knew how to make were elaborate things. You’ve met Stanis, right?”
“I’m just saying,” he said. “As far as nonmagical things go, if that’s a puzzle box, it’s also an amazing miniature architectural wonder.”
I ignored him, continuing to look it over. By its heft alone, I could judge that the miniature of the church was itself actually comprised of stone. I doubted that simply trying to smash it on the ground was going to make it divulge its secrets to us.
“We had lots of these in his art studio,” I said. “Nothing quite like this, mind you, but I had worked my way through all those puzzles over time, so hopefully this one won’t take me too long to figure out.”
As I set to examining the miniature church closer, Caleb moved past me back out into the main aisle, looking around.
“The sooner, the better,” he said. “Not sure how long we have before someone discovers we’re down here.”
“Puzzling as fast as I can,” I said, and turned the church over and over in my hands.
Alexander might have been a Spellmason, but the core of that practice was his artistry and, in this specific case, his flair for architecture. The real trick of his work was in knowing what to look for. My great-great-grandfather was a logical man, and if you paid attention to the things he had created—arcane or not—there was a sense to them. With that in mind, I set the church back down on the shelf to ponder its mysteries.
I tapped at it on all sides, hoping to hear a hollow part, but the damned thing seemed as solid a piece of stone as it looked.
“Damn Alexander and his old-world craftsmanship,” Caleb said, shaking his fist at the miniature church.
Think, Lexi, think!
“Craftsmanship . . .” I repeated, the word striking a chord in me. “Whether in miniature or not, the principles of architecture should hold true.”
“Principles of architecture?”
“Things such as the classical-ideals stuff that sprung out of the Roman Empire, like the arch.” I pointed at the one over the door of the tiny church. “What’s the most foundational item in supporting a structure like this church? If you wanted to build something tall out of stone, it had to be sturdy.” I spun the model around and pointed to another arch. “Tensile stress of open space is taken up by compressional stress.”
“Compressional?”
I spun the model again, pointing to another arch, dragging my finger to the top of it, pointing at the stone there.
“Keystones,” I said, turning the church back to its front face.
I ran my thumb over the keystone above the main doors of the church and it felt solid to my touch, but when I pressed hard against it, the tiny keystone slid inward with a click. I rotated the church, moving from arch to arch, activating all the rest of the keystones I could find. The last two were along the top of the steeple, and once pressed, the base of the model came free, sliding out and away from under it.