The Annex
“‘Here lieth the bones of that foul serpent which once infested our shores. Let no hand disturb these unholy remains, on peril of your soul,’” Jenkins recited. “Or words to that effect.”
The entirety of the inscription was now transcribed onto a whiteboard mounted in the office across from the conference table. Marker in hand, Jenkins stood before the board while the Librarians and their Guardian listened intently to his translation, courtesy of the snapshots taken by Ezekiel at the site in Ireland. The dire, if cryptic, warning struck the immortal caretaker as definite cause for concern.
“I managed most of that,” Stone muttered, “more or less.”
“Which was impressive in its own right,” Jenkins assured him. “Ogham is an extremely odd and obsolete alphabet; people who can accurately translate it in the field are even rarer today than people who know how to use apostrophes and semicolons properly. Even my ogham is rusty, and I’m old enough to remember when it was trendy.”
“It was a team effort all around,” Baird stressed. “So now that we have the inscription, what do we think it means?”
Jenkins admired Baird’s ability to stay on point. Beyond keeping the Librarians’ bodies and souls in one piece, she also excelled at corralling her occasionally distractible charges and getting them to function like a well-oiled machine.
Well, semi-oiled at least.
“The bones of a foul serpent?” Ezekiel echoed. He had showered and changed into fresh clothes after returning to the Library bedecked in dirt and grime. “Who’d want to dig up something like that?”
“Maybe it’s not a literal serpent,” Cassandra suggested. “I mean, there aren’t any actual serpents in Ireland, are there?”
“Not since Saint Patrick,” Stone joked.
Jenkins stiffened as though he had just been bitten by a snake. There was an ominous hiss at the back of his mind as a long-slumbering memory stirred and began to uncoil, prodded by the Librarian’s flippant remark. He wheeled about in response. “What did you just say, Mister Stone?”
The intensity of his query seemed to catch Stone off guard. “Um, I made a crack about Saint Patrick, since, you know, he supposedly drove the snakes out of Ireland.”
“Of course!” Jenkins smacked his forehead, figuratively kicking himself for not making the connection earlier. Granted, his memory was almost as overstuffed as the Annex itself, and the annals of the Librarians’ long history were voluminous in their own right, but the clues had been right there in front of him. “Not snakes,” he said gravely. “Serpents … as in the Serpent Brotherhood.”
Gasps and stricken expressions greeted his invocation of that infamous name. Jenkins judged that to be an entirely appropriate response. The Serpent Brotherhood had been the Librarians’ archenemies for longer than even he had walked the Earth; unlike the Library, which was dedicated to keeping magic safely contained, the Brotherhood saw magic as a power to be used to impose their will on the world—and to shape the course of history as they saw fit. Moreover, they were utterly ruthless when it came to achieving their ends, as too many past Librarians had discovered, to their sorrow.
“Those jerks again?” Ezekiel said. “I thought we were done with them.”
“If only, Mister Jones,” Jenkins replied with the dour solemnity of an undertaker. “It’s true that the Brotherhood have been keeping a low profile since you and your associates successfully thwarted them a few years ago, but this would hardly be the first time—or the fifty-first—the Brotherhood made a comeback, possibly under new leadership.”
A pang stabbed his eternally beating heart as he recalled the downfall of the Brotherhood’s most recent mastermind. Dulaque, as he was known in this century, had let his misguided ambitions turn him into a villain, not to mention a mortal threat to the very fabric of reality, but Jenkins still mourned the man Dulaque had once been—and wished that there had been another way to stop him.
“Back up,” Baird said. “What makes you think the ‘serpent’ in the inscription refers to the Serpent Brotherhood?”
“A long-ago chapter in the Library’s history that, alas, slipped my mind until now,” Jenkins said. The pieces were finally coming together, adding credence to his theory, but he appreciated Baird’s insistence on reviewing the evidence at hand. “I will need to retrieve the relevant documents from the archives, but I seem to recall that there was an incident in Ireland, back in the fifth century, when the Librarian of the time—Erasmus, I believe he was called—sent the Serpent Brotherhood packing … with the aid of a certain Christian missionary whom history would remember as ‘Patricus.’”
“Patricus … Saint Patrick?” Cassandra reacted much as she had upon discovering that Santa Claus was not a myth: with wide-eyed surprise and delight. “Are you saying that the whole story about Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland had to do with a Librarian … and the Serpent Brotherhood?”
“That is precisely what I’m saying, Miss Cillian. There have never been any actual snakes in Ireland; being cold-blooded, they were unable to cross over from the mainland during the Ice Age, and the sea has cut them off from Ireland to this day.” The real story was slightly more complicated than that, involving a Pre-Diluvian pact between rival totem spirits, but Jenkins chose to avoid any unnecessary tangents. “But the Serpent Brotherhood did make their way to Ireland more than fifteen hundred years ago, only to be repelled by a Librarian and his allies, including the future Saint Patrick.”
“Fifteen hundred years ago,” Stone observed. “That’s about right for the ogham stone. Or at least it’s within the right window for inscribing a monument in ogham.”
“Nor is that the only telling point of fact,” Jenkins said, as another portion of the puzzle fitted into place. He pulled a world atlas from a bookshelf and opened it to a detailed map of Ireland and its environs. A magnifying glass, retrieved from his work area, helped him locate a small dot in the blue water to the left of Ireland, amidst many other similar dots of varying sizes. His finger pointed out the dot that mattered. “This is the small, inconspicuous island you just returned from. Tell me—during that excursion, were you perhaps able to glimpse a large gray mountain on the other side of the bay?”
“Yes!” Cassandra raised her hand in the air like an overeager schoolgirl dying to be called upon by the teacher. “I did see that! A big, cone-shaped mountain way over on the mainland.”
Jenkins nodded, unsurprised. His finger shifted to the mountain marked on the map, about an inch to the right.
“That would be Croagh Patrick, loosely translated ‘Patrick’s Stack,’” Jenkins said. “Legend has it that it’s where Patrick famously banished the snakes … or Serpents … somewhere around 441 A.D.”
“Whoa,” Stone said.
“Whoa indeed, Mister Stone.” Jenkins left the atlas open for their inspection. “That the uprooted monument bearing that worrisome inscription just happens to be within sight of Croagh Patrick is unlikely to be a coincidence, particularly given the Clipping Book’s interest in alerting us to the matter.”
Baird glanced briefly at the map before rendering judgment.
“Okay, I’m sold,” she stated. “I’ve launched missions on flimsier evidence, and if there’s even a possibility that the Brotherhood is back, we need to assume the worst.” She looked at Jenkins with a steely expression that reminded him of a Crusader girding himself for battle. “What else do you recall about this business with Saint Patrick way back when?”
“Nothing personally, I’m afraid. The fifth century was … tumultuous.”
Painful memories rose unbidden from the vaults of his memory: a sundered Round Table, a fallen king, a quest, a grail, a witch, a father’s grievous sin.…
“I was otherwise occupied at the time.” He pushed the old sorrows back down into their dungeon. “As a result, whatever I know about that bygone incident is what I’ve run across in my studies of the archives, and the finer points of that particular episode elude me. It will be necessary to unearth the original records to give us a fuller picture of what actually transpired in 441.”
“Understood,” Baird said. “Well, this is a library, so there was bound to be some research involved. I assume we can count on you to help with the homework?”
“Consider me already on it, Colonel.”
“Thanks, Jenkins. The more info we can gather about that earlier incident, the better we may be able to anticipate what we’re up against.” A pensive look came over her face. “Any chance you remember what exactly the Serpents were after back in the day?”
Jenkins paused to rifle through centuries of study and contemplation, flipping through his recollections like the pages of an encyclopedia. Now that he knew where to look, the story was starting to come back to him.…
“If memory serves, Colonel, it was a pot of gold.”
“Yes!” Ezekiel enthused. “Now we’re talking. I’ll take a pot of gold over some old bones any day.”
“Don’t take this matter lightly,” Jenkins said sternly, employing his most cautionary tone. He swept his gaze over the all-too-fragile mortals seated around the table. “I’m certain I don’t have to remind any of you just how merciless and resourceful the Serpent Brotherhood can be. If they have indeed resurfaced, countless innocents may be in extreme jeopardy. As of this moment, determining their whereabouts and objective is our first and only priority. Nothing can be allowed to distract us.”
Which made it the worst possible moment for the doorbell to ring.