“Did anyone see you come down here?” Albrec asked him.
“What’s this? Are we a conspiracy then?”
“We are discreet. Think about that concept, Avila.”
“Discretion—there’s a novel quality. I’ll have to consider it. What have you dragged me down here for, my diminutive friend? Poor Columbar looks on the verge of a seizure. Have the ghosts been leaning over his shoulder?”
“Don’t say such things, Avila,” Columbar said with a shiver.
“We’re looking for more of the document that Columbar unearthed, as you know very well,” Albrec put in.
“Ah, that document: the precious papers you’ve been so secretive about.”
“I must be going,” Columbar said. He seemed more uneasy by the moment. “Gambio will be looking for me. Albrec, you know that if—”
“If the thing turns out to be heretical you had nothing to do with it, whereas if it is as rare and wonderful as Albrec hopes you’ll be clamouring for your sliver of fame. We know, Columbar.” Avila smiled sweetly.
Brother Columbar glared at him. “Inceptines,” he said, a wealth of comment in the word. Then he stomped away into the darkness taking one of the dips with him. They heard him blundering through the tumbled rubbish as his light grew ever fainter and then disappeared.
“You had no call to be so hard on him, Avila,” Albrec said.
“He’s an ignorant peasant who wouldn’t know the value of literature if it sat up and winked at him. I’m surprised he didn’t take your discovery to the latrines and wipe his arse with it.”
“He has a good heart. He ran a risk for my sake.”
“Indeed? So what is this thing that has got you so excited, Albrec?”
“I’ll tell you later. For now, I want to see if we can find any more of it down here.”
“A man might think you had discovered gold.”
“Perhaps I have. Hold the lamp.”
Albrec began to poke and pry at the crevice wherein Columbar had discovered the document. There were a few scraps of parchment left in it, as broken and brittle as dried autumn leaves. Almost as fragile was the mortar which held the rough stones surrounding it together. Albrec was able to lever some of them loose and widen the gap. He pushed his hand in farther, trying to feel for the back of the crevice. It seemed to run deep into the stonework. When he had pushed and scraped his arm in as far as his elbow, he found to his shock that his hand was in an empty space beyond. He flapped his fingers about, but the space seemed large. Another room?
“Avila!”
But Avila’s strong hand was across his mouth, silencing him, and the dip was blown out to leave them in utter night.
Something was moving on the other side of the subterranean chamber.
The two clerics froze, Albrec still with one arm disappearing into the gap in the wall.
A light flickered as it was held aloft and under its radiance the pair could see the grotesque shadow-etched features of Brother Commodius scanning the contents of the chamber. The knuckles which were wrapped about the lamp handle brushed the stone ceiling; the light and dark of its effulgence made his form seem distorted and huge, his ears almost pointed; and his eyes shone weirdly, almost as though they possessed a light of their own. Albrec had worked under Commodius for over a dozen years, but this night he was almost unrecognizable, and there was something about his appearance which filled Albrec with terror. He suddenly knew that it was vitally important he and Avila should not be seen.
The Senior Librarian glared around for a few moments more, then lowered his lamp. The pair of quaking clerics by the north wall heard his bare feet slapping on the stone, diminishing into silence. They were left in impenetrable pitch-blackness.
“Sweet Saint!” Avila breathed, and Albrec knew that he, too, had sensed the difference in Commodius, the menace which had been in the chamber with his presence.
“Did you see that? Did you feel it?” Albrec whispered to his companion.
“I—What was he doing here? Albrec, he looked like—”
“They say that great evil can be sensed, like the smell of death,” Albrec said in a rush.
“I don’t—I don’t know, Albrec. Commodius, he’s a priest, in the name of God! It was the lamplight. The shadows tricked us.”
“It was more than shadows,” Albrec said. He withdrew his hand from the wall crevice, and as he did something came out along with it and clinked as it struck the stone floor below.
“Can you rekindle the light, Avila? We’ll be here all night else, and he’s gone now. The place feels different.”
“I know. Hold on.”
There was a rustling of robes, and then the click and flare of sparks as Avila struck flint and steel on the floor. The spark caught the dry lichen of the tinder almost at once and with infinite care he transferred the minute leaf of flame to the lamp wick. He picked up the object that had fallen and straightened.
“What is this?”
It soaked up the light, black metal curiously wrought. Avila wiped the dust and dirt from it and suddenly it was shining silver.
“What in the world—?” the young Inceptine murmured, turning it over in his slender fingers.
A dagger of silver barely six inches long. The tiny hilt had at its base a wrought pentagram within a circle.
“God’s blood, Albrec, look at this thing!”
“Let me see.” The blade was covered in runes which meant nothing to Albrec. Within the pentagram was the likeness of a beast’s face, the ears filling two horns of the star, the long muzzle in the centre.
“This is an unholy thing,” Avila said quietly. “We should go to the Vicar-General with it.”
“What would it be doing down here?” Albrec asked.
Avila put the lamp against the black hole in the wall. “This has been blocked off. There’s a room beyond these stones, Albrec, and the Saint only knows what kind of horrors have been walled up in it.”
“Avila, the document I found.”
“What about it? Is it a treatise on witchery?”
“No, nothing like that.” Briefly Albrec told his friend about the precious manuscript, the only copy in the world perhaps of the Saint’s life, written by a contemporary.
“That was here?” Avila asked incredulously.
“Yes. And there may be more of it, perhaps other manuscripts—all behind this wall, Avila.”
“What was it doing lying hidden with this?” Avila held up the dagger by the blade. The beast’s face was uncannily lifelike, the dirt rubbed into the crevices in its features giving it an extra dimension.
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out. I can’t take this to the Vicar-General, Avila, not yet. I haven’t finished reading the document for one thing. What if they deem it heretical and have it burned?”
“Then it’s heretical, and for the best. Your curiosity is overcoming rationality, Albrec.”
“No! I have seen too many books burned. This one I intend to save, Avila, whatever it takes.”
“You’re a damn fool. You’ll get yourself burned along with it.”
“I’m asking you as a friend: say nothing to anyone of this.”
“What about Commodius? Obviously he suspects something, else he would not have been here.”
They were both silent, remembering the unnerving aspect of the Senior Librarian’s appearance a few minutes ago. Taken together with the artefact they had found, it seemed to shake their knowledge of the everyday ordinariness of things.
“Something is wrong,” Avila murmured. “Something is most definitely wrong in Charibon. I think you are right. We were not frightened by shadows alone, Albrec. I think Commodius was . . . different, somehow.”
“I agree. So give me a chance to see if I can get to the bottom of this. If there is indeed something wrong, and Commodius has something to do with it, then part of it is here, behind this wall.”
“What are you going to do, knock it down?”