“You’ll have to show me how that works,” I said. “What happened to the guard?”
“Probably wondering where that pretty little girl went,” she said, and batted her eyebrows at me. “Don’t worry about him. He’s fine.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Abi, you find anything with that stand?”
Abi shrugged and gestured toward the carved bone atop the wooden platform. “There are some designs on it, very small. They look unfinished though. Come take a look.”
We all gathered around the display stand and leaned in close to see what Abi wanted to point out. His finger hovered an inch away from the bone carving, as if afraid touching it would cause the whole thing to crumble to dust. “See right here? There’s a symbol here. It looks unfinished, though, like someone stopped halfway.”
The rune that Abi pointed out looked like someone had drawn the top half of a square and then got bored and quit. Another mark I saw was made up of an uneven pair of strokes that formed a V shape. It was weird, and it couldn’t be an accident. I held the green shard in the sun and peered through it at the nearest symbol on the wall. That one was the lower half of a circle, with a line across the lower third capped by two shorter, angled lines. Weird.
“Hey, Clem, you still have that rubbing?” I asked.
“Of course.” She removed the scrap of paper from a pocket inside her robes and gingerly unfolded it, careful not to smudge the rubbing. “What are you looking for?”
I peered at the runes that stood out white against the rest of the rubbing. There were five symbols, all but one made up of simple straight lines. One, though, stood out from the others: a triangle, point up, inside a circle. The bottom half of that symbol looked an awful lot like what I’d seen on the wall. I grabbed the bone heart off the display stand and carried it over to the spot on the wall.
“Jace,” Clem whispered, “do not break that. It’s ancient. If we lose it—”
While the item was hundreds of years old, threads of jinsei woven into its structure made it every bit as strong now as when it had been carved. Maybe even stronger. “Don’t worry, this thing was built to last,” I said, and carefully aligned the lower half of the rune on the wall with the upper half on the heart.
It took a bit of fiddling, but I finally got the two halves arranged correctly. A spark of jinsei leapt between them, and a faint click sounded from within the wall. The spot on the wall faded away. One down.
“What was that?” Eric asked. “It better not be a trap.”
“I don’t think it is,” I said. “There are markings on the wall I can only see through the shards we got from Saito’s cavern. They look like the other halves of the markings on the heart. I just lined up two of them and something happened.”
“What, exactly?” Clem asked.
“Not sure,” I admitted. The second set of markings lined up easier than the first had, and I was rewarded with another click.
“Whoa,” Abi said quietly. “I felt a change in the air just now.”
“Me, too,” Eric said. “Like something moved right behind me.”
Eric was leaning against the wall, which made it awfully unlikely anyone had been behind him. I chalked it up to whatever hidden mechanism had responded to the interaction between the wall and the heart. I moved on to the next symbol.
A deep rumble accompanied the third click, and the floor vibrated beneath our feet. A rasping metal-on-stone sound came from the doorway.
“We’re locked in,” Clem announced after she’d checked the door. “And it sounds like the security guard is back. He’s having a meltdown out there.”
“Almost done,” I said as the fourth symbols aligned. I hurried to the fifth and final spot and went to work. “Get ready for anything.”
The floor turned counterclockwise under our feet, and all four of us scrambled to keep our balance. The display stand sank into the floor as we rotated around it again and again. Within seconds the stand had vanished and left behind a round hole in the center of the floor.
“Huh,” Eric said as he peered out over the edge, “it’s a spiral staircase.”
“Lead on, fighter boy,” I said. “I’m too banged up, or I’d take point.”
“Uh-huh,” Eric laughed. “It’s okay, you can admit you’re a scaredy cat.”
He shot finger guns at me, then descended the tight turns of the staircase, Abi right behind him.
“You sure you’re okay?” Clem asked, her eyes shifting to where my hand was still pressed against my side.
“I’m fine,” I assured her, doing my best not to wince when I removed my hand. The bullet shifted every time I moved, and the jagged mushroom head trapped between my skin and muscles was chewing me raw. The sooner I got the thing out of me, the better.
“Mm-hm,” Clem said, unconvinced. “You bring up the rear, then.”
“You know it,” I said, and forced a smile past the annoying pain.
The staircase was so narrow my shoulders brushed the walls on both sides as we descended. Thankfully, silver lights ignited ahead of Eric, banishing the darkness from the stairway. The dry air grew staler with every step we took down the claustrophobic corkscrew, leaving us all panting for breath when we finally spilled out into a square chamber far larger than the tower above us.
“Well, that doesn’t look good,” Eric said.
He pointed to the far end of the room, where a skeleton wrapped in tattered rags was bound to an obsidian plinth by thick wire bands wrapped around iron spikes driven deep into the stone. The bones were attached to one another by copper wire, and several of them had been broken and then wired back together. The eerie display sent chills racing through my core. It was clearly a ritual murder of some kind, and none of us wanted to approach the remains.
“Who do
