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I rolled over to face the altar and tapped in the exact sequence I once saw the Stella’s priests complete. I didn’t wait for the mechanisms to finish working before I threw myself down on top of it. With ropes whirring as they unspooled, I dropped into the darkness of the crypt below and felt the air crushed out of me on impact with the floor.
I scrabbled to Urso’s sarcophagus, the only light a square of red from the altar opening in the chapel above. His stone coffin was carved in sombersweet stalks: This had to be it. This had to be where the Ilithiya’s Bell had been hidden for three centuries.
I put my feet against the stone alcove wall and pushed my back against the heavy lid, screaming as I further tore the wound in my side with the effort. The lid scraped ajar and fell to the side of the sarcophagus with a crash and a cloud of dust.
Inside, Urso’s bones—Mathuin’s bones—were resting quietly, arranged in a beatific facsimile of prayer. He had been buried with beads and baubles and a band of gold around his head dotted with stars in the arrangement of the constellation after which he’d named himself: the bear. But despite my frantic digging, there was no sign of what I was looking for. There was no bell.
No bell—but there was a book. From under his bony, folded hands, I pulled Galantha’s green leather grimoire. It had been with them in the Cradle the night they raised Rosetta. It had to have come back with him then. This was no mere copy—it was exactly the same book I’d last seen with Rosetta in the library. It appeared to have been unmoved since it was laid in here, at Urso’s burial.
I didn’t have time to wonder at the mystery; Arceneaux had dropped into the crypt now, landing hard on her feet and twisting her ankle. Grimoire in hand, I tried to slip past her as she limped from the square of light. A shadow had begun to form behind her, and a red glow began to gather in her eyes.
I spun on my heel and sprinted to the door to the bell tower, blood marking my path in a serpentine stream. I threw myself at the door, and it gave way, sending me tumbling onto the wooden stairs.
“Where are you going?” Arceneaux screamed. But she knew.
I was going to the top of the bell tower. And then I was going to jump.
One or the other.
It was going to be me.
I couldn’t be sure this would save Zan, but at least this would give him a chance.
Him, and all the world besides.
I had made it only to the second spiral when Arceneaux burst into the bell tower behind me. Her fingers were curled into claws that tore at my cloak. The black smoke was clinging to her skin now, burrowing below it.
“Where are you going?” she asked again, but her mouth spoke with two discordant voices. I kicked at her, again and again, feeling the stairs heave and sigh with every move.
I
was running out of strength, energy flagging. Even the magic in my blood seemed to have grown quiet and subdued with the imminence of my departure. But I remembered Zan’s drawing of the tired horseman and took the next stair, then the next, without stopping until I reached the top.
Arceneaux, her eyes now black, caught my cloak in both hands. With a cry, I managed to wrench myself from her grasp and dash to the open window’s edge, overlooking the whole of Greythorne, from the body-ridden village to the manor, now fully engulfed in flames. Heat and ash scoured my face as I climbed onto the edge.
The clock above my head turned to midnight, and the bells began to clang.
Up here the noise was piercing and ponderous, a wave of vibration that blocked out every sense, every thought.
I looked up at the carillons, their clappers all turning on the wire in the same prescribed order they had for nearly four hundred years.
Urso’s bells.
No—Mathuin’s bells.
And then I saw it. The last bell on the line, barely bigger than a thimble. It was made of gleaming metal and a wintry-white jewel fashioned into the shape of a sombersweet blossom. And against the sonorous tones of the most cavernous carillons, this bell’s call was like a single drop of rain in a still pool, sending ripples out from all sides.
And finally, finally, I understood everything.
At the red moonrise, one of two dies. Those two lives were not mine and Zan’s. Not mine and Arceneaux’s. No.
They were both mine.
The Ilithiya’s Bell had been here, waiting out the centuries in this drafty tower, for this moment.
Waiting for me. To give me this last, desperate chance.
So I reached out, and I took it.
