Auchinmurn Isle
The Middle Ages
Solon lifted the key from under his tunic, unlocked the arched wooden door of the Abbot’s tower and slipped up the stone steps. He had no idea what might be waiting for him at the top.
How many times had he skipped up these stairs for lessons? He had learned what it meant to be a member of the Order of Era Mina from Brother Renard, but from the Abbot he had been taught how best to prepare a skin so that it absorbed the monks’ illuminating inks slowly and evenly; how to fight with a knife and a sword; and perhaps the best gift of all: how to read.
A strange stench filled the spiral staircase. It reminded Solon of the cabbage water that his mother saved in clay pots on the shelf above the hearth, for use whenever any of the children were gripped with illness. Nothing was moving. Not even a breeze from the sea penetrated the arrow slits in the walls. Everything was eerily still.
The first door Solon reached after two flights of stairs was the Abbot’s bedroom. He nudged the door with his toes and it swung open. The canopied bed was empty, but someone had slept in it recently: the heavy brocade quilt was bundled at the foot of the bed and the pillows were on the floor. Monks were nothing if not fastidious, and the Abbot was no exception. He would not have left his bed unmade.
Out of respect, Solon shook out the quilt and spread it neatly across the bed. When he picked up the pillows and tossed them on top of the quilts, each filled the air with a red chalky cloud.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
Something was climbing up the tower steps. Solon ducked behind the door. Slipping his bronze dagger from its sheath, he wiped his palms on his tunic and prepared to attack.
When a black cockerel lurched into the room on scrabbling claws, Solon almost laughed with relief. Sheathing his dagger again, he climbed up the last flight of stairs to the Abbot’s study.
This room had been torn apart, the furnishings smashed to pieces. The Abbot’s chair and desk were upside down in one corner. The tapestry that the Abbot had spent years supervising was in shreds on the floor.
Solon swallowed his pain. He could not do anything about the broken furniture but he could at least restore the desk and chair to their rightful positions.
As he pulled the desk back on to its feet, he noticed a piece of parchment peeking out from underneath a splintered panel of wood. Solon carefully freed the Abbot’s ledger, its pages filled with elegant columns and figures. The Abbot had clearly been working on the monastery’s accounts when Matt’s father had taken control.
Solon sank into the Abbot’s chair, holding the ledger to his chest. He couldn’t carry it with him while he and Matt searched the rest of the monastery, but it was too valuable to leave here. He needed to find a safe hiding place.
Outside he heard the hoot of an owl and the strange drone that he and Matt had heard echoing beneath the catacombs. Time was running out.
As a young novice in the monastery, the Abbot had been a carpenter. Solon got to his feet again and scanned the room for some kind of secret compartment. He walked carefully round the room three times, tapping, stomping and listening for hollows in the floor. The walls were rock solid. There was nothing.
Solon returned thoughtfully to the Abbot’s chair. It had been the Abbot’s prize and glory, carved when he himself had been an apprentice to the Abbot before him.
Examining the detail in its carvings – the story of the twin perytons etched into the wood on the high back panel – Solon first tried to manipulate the arms of the chair. When nothing happened, he set it on its side and played with the legs instead, tapping and twisting them. Then he noticed something puzzling.
Viewed from underneath, the back of the chair was thicker than it looked when the chair was upright.
It took only seconds for Solon to discover that pressing and then turning the image of the white peryton on the tall back panel released a series of tiny gears. The gears whirred, clicked – and slid open.
Solon felt such a rush of adrenaline that it set him back on his heels. A manuscript wrapped in leather lay securely tucked into the secret cavity.
He lifted the manuscript out. As he did so, he was hit with a roar of sound so loud that he bit his tongue. Scrambling backwards in pain and shock, he dropped the folio on to the floor. He knew what he had found.
My master dedicated his life to finishing this, he thought, gazing at the leather-bound manuscript with troubled eyes. But now he is too frail for the task.
Carefully untying the leather straps, he opened the book.
The last beast that old Brother Renard had illuminated was the griffin, with the head of a giant eagle and the body the size of ten lions. According to the text, the griffin was a ferocious guardian who could gallop on the ground faster than any other beast of the land. Its speed in the air was second only to the peryton.
Solon closed the book and fastened the leather straps again. After a moment’s thought, he decided to put it back in its little chamber, together with the ledger. It was clear that no one else had discovered the chair’s secret. It would be safe there a while longer.
Next, Solon did his best to re-create the chaos he had found when he’d entered the study. He turned over the chair and the desk again. He cleared his mind as far as he could of any thoughts of the Abbot, the griffin, and most of all, The Book of Beasts.
Then he left the room. He needed to find Matt.