“Seems like he stays busy.”
Gabe huffed a brief laugh.
She peered at him from the corner of her eye as they made their quiet way across the green, the walls of the Church looming up ahead to block the thin morning light. Gabe held his lips pursed, contemplative. Lore wondered if talking about his friend’s life before he joined the Presque Mort made Gabe think of his own, of the boy who had a father and a home and two working eyes.
The Church door opened on soundless hinges, and they stepped into the quiet darkness inside. Gabe went in the opposite direction he’d taken on the day of the Mortem leak. The highly polished wooden rafters reflected the light of the stained-glass windows.
Six such windows lined the hall they walked down. The first was Apollius, in shades of white and gold, dark hair flowing around His shoulders and blood on His hands. The second was Hestraon, god of fire, pictured bent over a forge and engulfed in orange flame. Lereal of the air was third, Their face upturned to the drifts of iridescent wind carved into the glass above Their head. Then Caeliar of the sea, Her arms outstretched in a sparkling blue wave, followed by Braxtos of the earth, flowers sprouting from His hands. At the end of the hall was a window made of nothing but panels of dark glass, deep blues and purples and shimmering black.
Lore frowned as they passed, the light dappling her skirt. “It’s strange that you have depictions of the other gods. I thought Apollius was the only one you were allowed to revere?”
“Depiction isn’t reverence,” Gabe said quietly. His eye swung to the dark window, then away.
The hallway ended in a short wooden staircase; Gabe jogged up and turned to an arched doorway on the right, rapping a knock.
Lore came up the stairs much more slowly. The walk from the Citadel had left her winded; that week abed was doing her no favors.
The door creaked open. Malcolm cocked his head curiously. “Gabe? Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“We have some questions,” Lore said, trying not to sound as out of breath as she felt.
“Questions that will probably involve a lot of religious theory and other technically heretical pursuits,” Gabe grumbled.
The head librarian grinned. “Then you, my friends, have come to the right place.”
He pushed the door wider and beckoned them inside.
The Church library rivaled the one within the Citadel, as far as sheer volume went. It was just as beautiful, too, though in a different way. Where the Citadel library was bright and airy, the Church library was austere, everything made of dark, gleaming wood and lit with the golden glow of gas lamps. The room was at least four stories high, though the upper floors were reached by a sliding ladder rather than clever staircases. Long tables ran the length of the room, and down the center of each was a domed glass lane with small hinges placed at equidistant points. A few ancient-looking books rested beneath the glass, where they could be read but not touched. A small door set into the shelves opened on what looked like a reading room, with another glass-covered table. The shelves in that room were full of much thinner books, with covers embossed in gold lettering too ornate for Lore to make out from a distance. Small potted plants had been placed along the bookcases, green tendrils snaking over shelves. There were no windows to provide sunlight, so Lore didn’t know how they grew, but they all appeared to be in perfect health.
“Religious theory, you say?” Malcolm walked to one of the books on the long tables and opened a small door in the glass above it. He slipped his hands into a pair of pale gloves before gingerly reaching in to close the cover, then picked the book up with the care of a father to an infant. “That’s a rather broad topic. Narrow it down for me.”
“Information on Spiritum,” Gabe said. “Mostly theories on how it might manifest.”
“Easy enough.” Malcolm opened one of a series of drawers on the back wall and gently placed the book inside before soundlessly sliding it closed again. “That’s the same thing Anton’s been researching.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Answers mean nothing without the right questions.
—Kirythean proverb
The next week fell into an easy routine. Gabe and Lore would wake up, eat breakfast, and go to the Church library. Then they’d spend hours poring over old manuscripts and bound copies of notes from the years after the Godsfall, Compendiums translated from Eroccan and Kirythean and even old Myroshan, from before Myrosh was subsumed by the Kirythean Empire and the language was outlawed. The mentions of Spiritum, when they found them, were brief. Still, they came every day, looking at the books Malcolm had already procured for Anton, trying to find something to make everything—Bastian, the bodies from the villages, what August and Anton were planning—coalesce into sense.