“We don’t have to.” I rolled my neck on my shoulders and stretched my arms overhead. “There’s a much easier way.”
I activated the Army of a Thousand Eyes discipline and lashed connections to every rat I sensed within range. The last of the New Moon clan had concealed the history of the Eclipse Warriors inside the Stacks. I’d revealed it by feeding jinsei into the New Moon insignias in that ancient book-dumping ground.
I hoped my extinct predecessors had hidden other information from the Church of the Grand Design.
“Find the moons,” I whispered to the rats bound to my core.
I didn’t have to wait long for results. The rodents who lived in this part of the School were as familiar with its corridors and chambers as the rest of us were with our dorm rooms. A small army of squeaking emissaries arrived to lead the way a few minutes after I’d called them.
“That,” Clem whispered, “is a lot of rats. Please tell me they’re with you, Jace.”
“No,” I said, “they’ve come to eat us.”
“That is a joke,” Abi said. “Tell me that is a joke.”
The rats had gathered around us in a circle of inquisitive little faces, twitching whiskers, and slithery tails. None of my friends seemed amused by my army.
“Yes, they’re with me.” I chuckled. “Let’s follow them.”
The rats turned tail and scampered down the hall. We followed along behind them.
“That’s not funny,” Eric called from the back of our group. “Like, at all. Rats have big teeth.”
We all burst out laughing at that. I couldn’t imagine Eric, who was already under contract as a prizefighter in one of the Battle Federations, would be afraid of any number of rats. He could summon fire out of his hands, for crying out loud.
“If you’re scared, you can come hold my hand,” I said. “I won’t let the mice hurt you.”
“Hilarious,” Eric shot back. “But I’m not getting anywhere near those rats.”
The rats led us on a twisting path down crooked hallways and through wide, cobweb-filled corridors. We arrived at a narrow doorway set into the side of an even narrower hallway. The walls that surrounded it seemed hewn from raw stone. Loose shards of rock covered the floor, and drifts of dust occupied the corners. Without the rats to guide us, we’d never have found this place.
I reached up above the door and touched the circle of obsidian embedded in the wall. It was smooth and cool under my fingertips. A tremor of emotion rippled through me when I realized this was a connection to the oldest memories of the clan that would one day become the Shadow Phoenixes. A member of the New Moon, one of my true ancestors, had put this here.
And then the Flame had ordered their destruction. Their deeds vanished from the history of the Earth, their accomplishments forgotten by almost everyone.
“Jace?” Clem asked. “You okay?”
The heavy weight behind my eyes told me they’d gone black again. It was hard to swallow the anger those memories had brought to the surface. I choked it down, bit by bit, until the darkness left my gaze. I took a breath to purge my aura of the anger aspects, and gave Clem a smile.
“I’m all right,” I said. “A lot of memories down here. None of them good.”
My friends knew I’d been imprisoned beneath the School during most of the last half of my first year here. What they didn’t know was how hard that time had been on me. Or how close I’d come to losing myself to the darkness.
The door swung open at the touch of my hand. The room beyond was pitch black, and I pushed the glowing sphere of jinsei ahead to light our path.
“Did you see that?” Clem asked. “Back the light up.”
The small lantern floated back toward the entrance, more slowly than it had entered the room.
“There.” Clem crouched down and peered at something a few inches off the floor. She summoned a smaller light of her own and revealed a thin strand of wire strung slightly above ankle height across the doorway. “If there hadn’t been a little dust on this, I would have missed it.”
“Nice work finding that,” I said with a nervous sigh. Stepping on that thin piece of wire could have easily ended this quest. The trap might have caused the roof to collapse, or the floor to break open to reveal a pit of spikes, or a jinsei explosion, or—
“We didn’t trigger it,” Abi said in a calm, reassuring voice. “Everyone be careful, and we won’t, either.”
“I’ll give us more light,” I said, and fed jinsei into my lantern. “Keep an eye out for any other traps. If you see anything, give a shout.”
With that, I cycled my breath to steady my nerves, and carefully raised my foot over and past the tripwire.
Stepping into the museum was like entering a lost time capsule. Everything seemed preserved, just as it had been when the last person had closed the door and left it behind. The only difference was the fine layer of grime that covered everything and the spiderwebs strung across the high corners. As we followed the light ahead, the denizens of those webs retreated into the darker corners and vanished into narrow cracks in the ceiling.
“This is amazing,” Clem said, her voice pitched low and solemn.
It was. As far as I could tell, the museum was a single room packed wall to wall and floor to ceiling with display cases, bookshelves, paintings, statues, and other artifacts that exuded the weight of ages. Every item in this museum looked centuries, if not millennia, old.
“Okay,” I said. “Spread out. Look for anything related to the Umbral Forge or the fours on the map: minds, winds, elements, or kings. Be careful. We don’t want to break anything we might need. And we really don’t want to trigger any death traps.”
“I’m not touching anything,” Eric said. “I’ll blow the dust off the display cases, but that’s it. I’m a klutz.”
We
