For maybe the second time since I’d been working there, Calder left work on time. I’d returned from putting away books, and he was straightening up his desk.
“Heading out already?” I asked, teasing him for all the times he’d said that to me for staying only an hour or two late.
He lifted his head quickly, his gray eyes surprised. “I have an important dinner engagement, so I can’t maintain my usual schedule. Are you comfortable locking up, or would you like to leave with me so I can lock up?”
“I have a little bit left to do. I can finish it and lock up, no problem.”
“If you’re certain,” he replied, and he was already taking long strides toward the door.
I waved after him, but he never looked back. “Have a fun night!”
As soon as he was gone, I did exactly what I said I would—I rushed around finishing up the work I had left. The very second I was done with that, I ran back to the supply room and grabbed the heavy brass keys hidden behind the emergency candles. I’d been left alone with the keys to the castle, and like Sylvi said—I had to make my time here count.
It was actually Hanna’s words I was reminded of as I unlocked the cellar-style doors. She’d been so focused on the fairy tales and Adlrivellir. I had to find out why.
I had never been in the catacombs before. Calder said the access was limited to those who required it. Since I felt like I might require it, that meant it wasn’t exactly off limits.
The Catacombs of Fables were located directly underneath the archives. From what I gathered from Calder’s grumbled answers, they had been created as a dungeon of sorts, to house prisoners back when the Mimirin had been solely under Vittra rule and still held prisoners (mostly those who had committed treason, traitors, and enemies of the kingdom).
The catacombs were intended for a specific type of criminal, one that the Vittra architects found particularly odious, so they were designed with the explicit purpose of being an unusually cruel punishment.
“The catacombs,” Calder had told me once in his uniquely raspy voice, “were meant to drive us mad.”
They were several stone boxes, underground and windowless, connected by winding tunnels. The walls were made of thick stone to hold the dead. When they executed prisoners, they encased them in the walls.
The interior was a claustrophobic maze, with the paths narrowing as the walls expanded with the dead. Living prisoners were thrown down here, and the only contact they’d ever have with the outside world was when random pieces of food were dropped through holes in the ceiling (now long since closed up).
After their use as a prison, the catacombs were transformed into a book dungeon. All the books that the Styrelse found dangerous or confusing, because the stories blurred our reality with human fiction and even our own fairy tales.
Presumably that’s why all the books about Adlrivellir were kept here. The powers that be didn’t want anyone mistaking the fiction for fact. But I thought I could handle it.
I went through the cellar door and down, down, down the many narrow steps into the catacombs. The steps had been worn from centuries of use, leaving smooth divots and sloping the stone downward. Other stairs in the Mimirin had been updated and replaced, but these had been left dangerously slippery.
The thing that hit me most was the smell—a damp earthiness that instantly brought me back to the crypts. That’s where we’d gone after Finn’s father died last fall; he’d been buried in the crypts high in the bluffs of Förening. It was a wet, rainy autumn day, so the younger kids stayed at home, out of the rain and mud. But I had been there, with Hanna and Liam, as Finn led us through the family tombs. Finn came from a long line of elite trackers, and that earned them plots in the Trylle royal crypts.
“Why are you showing us all of this?” Liam had been doing his best not to sound as uninterested as he obviously was, but it was hard for him, at only six years old, to hide it well. He’d dug his toes into the mud and pulled at a loose thread on his shirt.
“Liam, stop!” Hanna had hissed and elbowed him in the ribs. “You shouldn’t disrespect the dead.” She’d been standing beside him, hanging on Finn’s every word.
“It’s not disrespectful to ask questions,” Finn had admonished gently. “I’m showing you this because these are your ancestors, this is your history. It’s important to know where you come from to help find where you should go.”
The memory was instantly shattered when a big, fat spider dropped down in front of me, dangling from a gossamer tendril of web. I jumped, slamming hard into a bookcase, and my back collided painfully with the splintering wood.
It was another unfortunate case of my strength getting the best of me when I was startled. In my fear, I’d jumped forcefully enough into ancient bookshelves that they snapped. An avalanche of books rained down on me, and I fell to my knees and covered my head with my arms until it finally stopped.
I pushed the books off me and slowly sat up. My body already ached from my earlier work, but now I could add stinging cuts and splinters poking into my skin, and a book had struck me right in the temple, causing a big gash along my eyebrow.
“Ah, crap,” I muttered, surveying the dusty carnage around me.
And then I spotted a familiar cover. My cell phone—which I’d dropped during the commotion—lay at an angle, and the light from it hit a shimmering emblem on the front of the book. The triskelion symbol with the vines.
As I reached for the book, the spider dropped down on the pile. I watched it from the corner of my eye.
I realized this wasn’t just another book with the Älvolk symbol. This book—bound in soft fabric with lightweight vellum pages—was the same book I’d seen in Hanna’s grandfather Johan’s study. Not the exact same copy, of course, but it was the same edition as Jem-Kruk and the Adlrivellir, although the title page was missing.
I flipped through the book to read more, but I noticed movement. The spider was scurrying around, and now I realized it wasn’t the same spider. This one was larger—a lot larger, actually. Long, spindly legs stretched out from a bulbous body marked with a jagged strip of dark emerald green down its back.
There were multiple huge spiders crawling around, my head was bleeding, and I felt dazed and sore all over. I knew I had to clean up the mess, but just then I needed to get out of there.
Clutching the book under one arm, I wielded my phone like it was a holy cross warding off a vampire. Unfortunately, the spiders did not react like vampires.
In fact, an even larger one crawled out of a gaping crack in the wall. A massive spider with an abdomen as large as an apple, and a dozen opalescent eyes reflecting the cell phone’s flashlight.
Before I could scream, I was running, racing frantically away from the spider. The faster I ran, the more horrifyingly apparent it became that it was futile—the halls were endlessly winding, I couldn’t remember the way I had come, and more spiders were lurking around every corner—some of them as large as house cats.
“Why isn’t anybody talking about all the damn spiders?” I asked—shrieked, really—into the claustrophobic tunnels as I slowed, catching my breath and pressing my hand against the stitch in my side.
Maybe it wasn’t something they put in brochures, but it really seemed like the kinda thing that leads to gossip and rumors.
But that wasn’t really my most pressing concern. I was trapped, stumbling through the catacombs with no cell reception and giant spiders crawling everywhere. They weren’t chasing me, but it still felt like they were closing in.
“How am I going to get out of here?” I whispered into the darkness.
I heard footsteps slapping gently on the stone floor, and in the dim light I saw a shadow dancing along the wall.
“Hello?” I asked, and the shakiness of my voice surprised me, but it probably shouldn’t have. My skin crawled, like a thousand tiny legs were dancing all over it, and I didn’t know how to get away. It took all my restraint not to devolve into hysterical screaming.
And then the shadow was taking form—a sliver of a troll, tall enough that the figure had to stoop beneath the ceiling. It barely even looked trollian—it was more like someone had been stretched out until they became a semi-opaque waif. But their dark eyes looked like they belonged to the baby Holmes twins Lissa and Luna. A look far too innocent, wide, and … trollian to belong to something so unearthly.
They were an Ögonen, and they were extending their long slender fingers toward me.