4.53: Secret Library

“Max?” I said.

“I know, I know; you’re mad at me for running off, and I’m really sorry, but can you be mad at me later? I said I’d find the answer, didn’t I? This solves everything! Come look!”

“Max, you’re, um, bleeding a lot.”

He glanced down at his hands. “Only a little bit. Can we focus?”

I glanced at Kylie. She was staring at Max with iron hard eyes. I shrugged off my backpack, left it at her feet, and cautiously approached. “Can we talk about this up in Duniyasar?” I asked.

“We can’t see it up in – ”

“There’s nothing there!”

Max looked at the wall, the blank, smooth rock wall, then back at me. He frowned. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Am I… Max. Look at me. Whatever you’re seeing, this is just a wall. Can we move?”

“I can’t leavethe library,” he said, in a tone like I’d just suggested jumping off a cliff. Come on, look here. Look at this bit. You see?” He prodded the wall, leaving a bloody smear.

“There’s nothing – ”

“Oh! Right. Sorry. The dead water’s a bit hard to see through.” He started clawing at the wall with his bare hands. Close up, I could see why he was bleeding, and it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. His fingertips and nails were torn to pieces. Bloody streaks across the wall suggested why; he’d been clawing at it a lot. Three of his nails were completely missing, torn from their beds. So far as I knew, none of that should be dangerous, provided it didn’t get too badly infected. I could wrap it up with what was in my kit and let Malas handle the rest. But it should be extremely painful, and Max acted like he didn’t even notice. He dragged a raw nail bed across rough rock without even flinching.

“Max, Max! Stop! I believe you!” I grabbed his wrist, but he didn’t stop, no matter how hard I tugged. I knew for a fact that I was stronger than Max, so… some kind of magical effect? No. Hysterical strength, more likely. That explained the apparent immunity to pain, too. I wasn’t going to be able to overpower him, and trying would probably just hurt both of us even more. Hysterical strength wasn’t suppose to last long, in the realm of a handful of seconds usually, but in Max it showed no signs of wavering. That couldn’t be good for his body.

I didn’t have any potions in my kit that could help with this. I had to snap him out of whatever was going on, somehow. “Look,” I said, “I can’t see anything through the blood, can I? Let me wrap up those wounds, and then you can show me.”

He glanced at his fingers, then shook his head. “No, you’ll need the blood. On, um, glass. Not stone. Remember to do it on glass.”

“I’ll need the blood?”

“No, not you! You won’t be there! I mean, that would be pretty difficult, wouldn’t it?”

“Uh…”

“The prophet needs the blood.” He frowned. “Well, not the Prophet. Not the true Prophet. The foreigner needs the blood. Ight need some help with it, too; bring some assistants. The true Prophet will probably be in… uh… hmm. Haven’t figured that part out yet. But you’re all smart, you have Destiny on your side, you’ll figure it out. Tell the Prophet to bring blood and ichor, alright? Do them in the reverse of the last time.”

“Max, what, by every single Point of Power, are you talking about?”

“No, you only need one Point of Power. And the dead water for the vessel, of course. The blood is a distraction.”

“What is dead water? What are you – ?”

“Mineral deposits.” He handed me a flake of rock that he’d managed to pry off the wall. “Water moving over stone leaves its minerals behind, they build up over time. Stalacmites, stalactites, smooth surfaces.”

I cautiously took the flake from him. It was, indeed, something smooth and milky coloured, like a bit of a stalacmite. Closer inspection of the wall showed that this is what he’d been peeling off as he’d torn his fingers apart clawing at it.

“You see under it now?” he asked, pointing excitedly to the stone. It was just bare stone.

“Sure,” I said. “But, uh, if we have to take all this off, I have a hammer and some spikes in my bag. It’d be more efficient than fingernails.” I took his elbow and gently tried to pull him back down the tunnel. He didn’t move.

“No, I can’t leave the library. You’ll need to take it with you, understand?”

“Sure, sure,” I lied. “I understand. But let’s go and get the – ”

“You’ll be able to do it much faster than me. I can’t carry it; nobody can carry it any more. There’s too much dead water.” He went back to clawing at the wall. “It’s so hard to even see the secrets behind it, but I know you can do it. You can hold it, can’t you?”

“Of course I can. We should – ”

“No!” He stopped clawing at the wall and just stared at me for a moment. “No, you can’t. You’re not ready yet.” He put his hands on my shoulders, adding bloodstains to the general damage that this journey had caused to my robes, held me at arm’s length, and looked me up and down. “You have been making very good progress, though. You’re getting bigger, but you’re not large enough.”

“Hey, I might’ve put on a little weight but – ”

“Or thick enough. You’ll need stronger walls to… hmm. Okay, I see what you’re doing. You’ll finish growing and then finish hardening. Yes, that’s a good strategy.”

“What does any of that mea – ?”

“But that means that it’s too early to fight the water. So we… hmm. I miscalculated the timing, I think.” He let go of me and looked around like he was seeing the tunnel for the first time. “We’re not in the library, are we?”

“We’re in an old tunnel at the bottom of a well,” I said. “If you want to find a library, we need to get out.”

“No, it’s further down. I’m sure of it.” He grabbed my arm and started pulling me down the passage. I tried to pull away, but his grip was too strong; I dug my heels in and he just dragged –

Slap!

Max released me nurse his reddening cheek and stared, dumbfounded, at Kylie. Kylie shook her hand in pain and glared back. “Maximillian Acanthos, never in my life had I been so disappointed in you,” she lectured. “I will never understand how a veritable genius can be the stupidest boy I have ever met. Your decision to come down here by yourself was reckless, foolish, and betrayed an insulting lack of trust in both myself and Kayden, as well as showing us that – and I never, ever thought this would be possible – we can’t trust you! And when we come all the way down here to check on you, you scare poor Kayden here and manhandle him, dragging him about through the tunnels?”

“I’m not scared – ”

“Shut up, Kayden. Max, I simply cannot believe you!”

“I know you’re angry that I came down on my own, and you have every right to be, but I coulnd’t bring – ” Max stopped talking as Kylie raised her hand.

“I don’t care. I don’t care what grand revelation or great leap forward you think could possibly justify this behaviour. Tomorrow you can make whatever snivelling little excuses you want, but for now, you are going to apologise, and then you are going to shut up, and you are going to quietly leave this place with Kayden and I, and you are going to come to Malas and receive medical attention for your hands. Do you understand me?”

“But the fate of – ”

“Do you understand me?!”

“Yes,” Max mumbled. “Sorry, Kylie. Sorry, Kayden.”

“Sorry for what?”

“Sorry for running off by myself through the catacombs under the school and making you come and rescue me a second time, even though I explicitly promised multiple times to never do that again.”

“Very good. Let’s go, then.” Kylie spun on her heel and headed back toward the well, muttering angrily under her breath in her own language. Max followed meekly after her.

I stared after them. What the hell was that?

“Kayden?” Kylie called. “Are you coming or not?”

“Y-yeah, I’m coming!” I shouldered my bag and hurried after them. I didn’t want to fall behind. Then Kylie might become very disappointed in me, and I absolutely didn’t want that.

But after several minutes of tense walking, I noticed something that I kind of had to speak up about. “Um,” I said. “Is this path different to the one we took to find Max?”

Kylie stopped suddenly, and Max and I nearly bumped into her. She frowned. “It does seem longer, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, well, we were worried for Max when looking for him, so maybe it seemed to take less time? Actually, the journey to him was weirdly short, given that he’s been here for so many hours, right? I would’ve thought he’d explored more.”

“Max?” Kylie asked.

“Mmm?” He glanced back from the wall he’d been inspecting.

“Did you explore much down here before we found you?”

“Of course. The library wasn’t going to be easy to find. There were a lot of tunnels, some of them had caved in so I had to plot around them, and I couldn’t use the ones underwater of course. Only the most worthy can find – ”

“We’re not in the library,” I reminded him.

“Right. Right.’ he frowned at the wall again, like he’d find a helpful note there to explain things or something.

“There’s only one line of chalk arrows,” Kylie muttered. “We followed it in and we’re following it back. If we’re lost, then something down here is fucking with us.”

She was probably right, but I was more worried about Max. When I’d had my… whatever had happened on the rope, Kylie’s voice had snapped me out of it prety quickly. I’d realised that I wasn’t hearing things underwater and the whole illusion had collapsed pretty much immediately. But we’d convinced Max that he wasn’t in a library a couple of times, and physically removed him from the location, and he was still… not one hundred per cent. Did something stronger have him? Or was this an entirely different thing?

He seemed… mostly aware, if not completely himself. He reminded me a bit of my grandfather, in his last couple of years, when he’d had dementia. Like his brain was working with limited information, or different information, but not like a full illusion, like what I’d been in. Maybe different kinds of spells were influencing him, or maybe…

“Okay,” Kylie said. “Okay. We’ve done stupid underground maze things before. How do we – ?”

“We follow the directions,” Max said.

“We are,” Kylie said. “They’ve changed. The path has changed. That’s the point.”

“Not my directions,” Max said, irritated. “Of course human directions written in three dimensional space won’t hold consistent! Those directions!” He pointed at the wall.

“Max, that’s just a wall,” I reminded him, a lot less patiently this time. “Look at me. Look at me. Right. Now. Listen. We are in a tunnel. We are not in a library. There are no directions anywhere. Whatever you are seeing is some illusion that spells are making to fuck with you; it’s not… it isn’t…” I trailed off. Stared. “Wait. Max. What do you see in the walls?”

“Kayden?” Kylie asked. Warily. Like she thought Max’s delusions might be catching, or something. But I wasn’t delusional; I’d just noticed what was wrong with Max.

“Kylie. Look.” I pointed.

“What are you – oh!”

I was pointing at Max’s right eye. At the white of his eye, a little to the left of his iris, was something new. It looked like a second, smaller iris; a small black dot, marring the white.

A witch mark.