Avila struck a light and their shadows leaped at them from the walls as the lamp caught. They threw back their hoods and shook snow from their shoulders.
“We are alone,” Albrec said.
“How do you know?”
“I know this place, winter and summer. I can feel when the library is empty—or as empty as it ever becomes, with its memories.”
“Don’t talk like that, Albrec. I’m as jumpy as a springtime hare already.”
“Let’s go then, and stay close. And don’t touch anything.”
“All right, all right. Lead on, master librarian.”
They navigated the many rooms and halls and corridors of the library in silence, tall cases of books and scrolls looming over them like walls. Then they began to descend, taking to narrow staircases which to Avila seemed to have been built into the very walls of the building. Finally they hauled up a trapdoor of iron-bound wood which had been concealed by a mat of threadbare hessian. Steep steps going down into uttermost dark. The catacombs.
They started down, the weight and bulk of the library hanging over and around them like a cloud. The fact that it was a winter-dark and wolf-haunted night outside should have made no difference to the darkness in here, but somehow it did. A sense of isolation stole over the pair as they stumbled through the accumulated rubbish in the catacombs and coughed at the dust they raised. It was as if they were two explorers who had somehow chanced upon the ruins of a dead city, and were creeping through its bowels like maggots in the belly of a corpse.
“Which wall is the north one?” Avila asked.
“The one to your left. It’s damper than the others. Keep to the sides and don’t trip up.”
They felt their way along the walls, lifting the lamp to peer at the stonework. Chiselled granite, the very gutrock of the mountains hewn and sculpted as though it were clay.
“The Fimbrians must have been twenty years carving out this place,” Avila breathed. “Solid stone, and never a trace of mortar.”
“They were a strange people, the builders of empire,” Albrec said. “They seemed to feel the need to leave a mark on the world. Wherever they went, they built to last. Half the public buildings of the Five Kingdoms date from the Fimbrian Hegemony, and no one has ever built on the same scale since. Old Gambio reckons it was pride brought the empire down as much as anything else. God humbled them because they thought they could order the world as they saw fit.”
“And so they did, for three centuries or so,” Avila said dryly.
“Hush, Avila. Here we are.” Albrec ranged the lamp about the wall where there were mortared blocks instead of the solid stone of the rest of the place. The light showed the crevice in which Albrec’s precious document had been discovered.
“Light the other lamp,” the little Antillian said, and he reached into the crevice with a lack of hesitation which made Avila shudder. There might be anything in that hole.
“There’s a room on the other side of this, no doubt about it. A substantial space, at any rate.”
Avila found a staved-in cask amid the wreckage and rubbish. He set it on its end and placed the two lamps upon it. “What now? The mattock?”
“Yes. Give it here.”
“No, Albrec. Valiant though you are, you haven’t the build for it. Move aside, and keep a look out.”
Avila hefted the heavy tool, eyed the wall for a second, and then swung the mattock in a short, savage arc against the poorly mortared stonework.
A sharp crack which seemed incredibly loud in their ears. Avila paused.
“Are you sure no one will hear this?”
“The library is deserted, and there are five floors of it above us. Trust me.”
“Trust him,” Avila said in a long-suffering voice. Then he began to swing the mattock in earnest.
The old mortar cracked and fell away in a shower. Avila hacked at the wall until the stones it held began to shift. He picked them out with the flat blade of the mattock and soon had a cavity perhaps six inches deep and two feet wide. He stopped and wiped his brow.
“Albrec, you are the only person I know who could cause me to break sweat in midwinter.”
“Come on, Avila—you’re nearly through!”
“All right, all right. Taskmaster.”
A few more blows and then there was a sliding shower of stones and powder and dust which left them coughing in a cloud that swirled in the light of the lamps like a golden fog.
Albrec seized a lamp and got down on his knees, pushing the lamp into the hole which suddenly gaped there.
“Sweet Saints, Albrec!” Avila said in a horrified whisper. “Look what we’ve done. We’ll never block up that hole again.”
“We’ll pile rubbish in front of it,” Albrec said impatiently, and then, his voice suddenly hoarse: “Avila, we’re through the wall. I can see what’s on the other side.”
“What—what is it?”
But Albrec was already crawling out of sight, his shoulders dislodging more stones and grit. He looked like a rotund rabbit burrowing its way into a hole too small for it.
H E was able to stand. Hardly aware of Avila’s urgent enquiries on the other side of the wall, Albrec straightened and held up his lamp.
The room—for such it was—was high-ceilinged. Like the catacombs he had just left, its walls were solid rock. But this chamber had not been carved by the hand of man. There were stalactites spearing down from the roof and the walls were uneven, rough. It was not a room but a cave, Albrec realized with a shock. A subterranean cavern which had been discovered by men untold centuries ago and which at some time in more recent history had been blocked off.
The walls were covered with paintings.
Some were savage and primitive, depicting animals Albrec had heard of but never seen: marmorills with curving tusks and gimlet eyes, unicorns with squat horns and wolves, some of which ran on four legs, some on two.
The paintings were crude but powerful, the flowing lines which delineated the animals drawn with smooth confidence. There was a naturalism about them which was totally at odds with the stylized illustrations in most modern-day manuscripts. In the flickering lamplight one might almost think they were moving, coursing along the walls in packs and herds and following long-lost migrations.
All this Albrec took in at a glance. What claimed his attention almost at once, however, was something different. A shape jumped out of the shadows at him and he almost dropped his lamp, then made the Sign of the Saint at his breast.
A statue, man high, standing at the far wall.
It was of a wolf-headed man, his arms raised, his beast’s mouth agape. Behind him on the stone of the wall a pentagram within a circle had been etched and painted so that the lamplight threw it into vivid relief. Before the statue was a small altar, the surface of which had a deep groove cut in it. The stone of the altar was discoloured, stained as if by ancient, unforgivable sins.
There was a rattle of loose stone which made Albrec utter a squeak of fear, and then Avila was in the room brushing dust from his habit and looking both stern and amazed.
“Saint’s blood, Albrec, why wouldn’t you answer me?” And then: “Holy Father of us all! What is this?”
“A chapel,” Albrec said, his voice as hoarse as a frog’s.
“What?”
“A place of worship, Avila. Men paid homage here once, in some dark, lost time.”
Avila was studying the hideous statue, holding his lamp close to its snarling muzzle.
“Old stonework, this. Crude. Which of the old gods might this one be, Albrec? It’s not the Horned One, at any rate.”
“I’m not sure if it was meant to be a god, but sacrifices were made here. Look at the altar.”
“Blood, yes. Hell’s teeth, Albrec, what about this?” And Avila produced from his habit the pentagram dagger
