Page 25 of The Half King
Seeing no other option, she decided to be direct with him. “Lord Calatris told me there are catacombs and archives below the sanctuary. If that’s true, I would love to see them.”
If her words surprised the high priest, he didn’t let it show. “That’s true. But I’m afraid the catacombs aren’t as intriguing as they sound. There’s not much down there except urns and dust and a few scrolls of parchment too ancient to read.”
“That sounds intriguing tome…”
“Would you like me to give you a tour?”
“I would, Father. If you please.”
“Well, then,” he said and strode around his desk to present a gentlemanly arm to her. “We will go and see them at once.”
He escorted her into the sanctuary, which was beginning to stir with activity as the priests returned from lunch for their afternoon prayers. The men gathered kneeling cushions and dropped them onto the floor. Very few of the priests took note of Cerise, not even Father Bishop, whose eyes were closed in worship. But when she and Father Padron passed the altar and continued to the great stone wall on the other side of it, she felt the sensation of being watched and turned to find every gaze in the room fixed on her.
Not on her. On Father Padron.
“They’re staring at you,” she whispered to him.
He stopped in front of the wall and lifted a haughty chin. His pride took her by surprise because she had considered him above it. He was the high priest of Shiera, the most powerful man alive. Why would he crave validation from ordinary priests?
“They love to watch me open the catacombs,” he murmured. “I’m the only one who can do it alone. The others have to pool their energy.”
A charge thickened the air and raised the tiny hairs along the back of her neck. She had never felt magic so strong. It covered her in chills and sent a pleasurable shiver down her spine. The wide section of stone in front of her made a grinding noise as it separated from the wall. It inched forward and then slid aside to reveal a dark entrance that smelled of damp air.
So this was the entrance to the archives. She never would have found it on her own.
She peered into the shadows and saw that the slate floor sloped on a gradual decline, leading deep belowground. With one last flicker of energy from him, dozens of wall sconces caught flame and illuminated the passage. She drifted forward, her hand still resting on Father Padron’s forearm, which hadn’t so much as tensed during the ordeal of moving the wall.
“May I ask you something, Father?”
He patted her hand. “I have told you, Cerise—you may ask me anything.”
“It’s about your gift,” she said over the crunch of dust and light debris beneath her shoes. “Was it always this powerful, or did it grow with training?”
“In a way, it was both,” he said. “When a priest receives his gift, it manifests at full strength from the onset. Each of us is born with a finite amount of transformable energy. My supply happens to be larger than most. Training helped me use my gift to my fullest ability, but it only increased my skill and my efficiency, not my power.”
She nodded. It was the same for Seers. An oracle’s gift of foresight, however weak or strong it was, remained consistent for life. “Did your gift manifest early?”
“Actually, no, it arrived the morning of my Claiming Day. I suppose you could say I was late to bloom.” He slid her an amused glance. “Much like someone else I know.”
An unexpected jolt of hope lightened her step.Maybe she was a late bloomer instead of a weed?
The corridor led to a stone archway constructed from alternating black and white blocks of polished marble. They passed beneath it and emerged into what appeared to be a mausoleum. Hundreds of silver plaques were affixed to the marble walls in many rows from floor to ceiling. Each plaque bore an engraved name.
“This is the Arch Sanctum,” Father Padron said, his voice echoing in the chamber. “Every high priest who has served the Mortara dynasty rests in this room. One day, my ashes will join my brethren who came before me. To be interred here is the greatest honor the Order can bestow upon a man.” He teasingly added, “Though I’m in no hurry to accept it.”
Cerise glanced around by the light of a flickering torch, searching for relics or scrolls but seeing only cobwebs and dust. For the Order’s highest honor, the priests didn’t keep the mausoleum very clean. Perhaps they thought the dead didn’t care about cobwebs. “You mentioned ancient scrolls?”
“Yes, over here.”
He released her hand and strode to the rear left corner of the crypt, where he used his energy to create a slim doorway to another room. She joined him in the antechamber, which bore a slight resemblance to the tomb, only in miniature. Its marble walls, also dulled by neglect, had been hollowed out to create shelves, some of which were lined with leather-bound books. Others were heaped high with scrolls of parchment lying haphazardly on top of one another. She didn’t know what the scrolls contained, but the Order must not have considered them important. She could tell by the thick, undisturbed carpet of dirt on the floor that no one visited the room. Still, she took the time to peruse the volumes and found that most of them were a compilation of names and dates.
“These aren’t the original sacred scrolls, are they?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” Father Padron said, laughing. “Those are kept in Calatris, under so many protective enchantments that not even I could read them.” He jutted his bearded chin at the shelves. “These are mundane records that have long since been transcribed—births and deaths and such. We only keep them because it seems a shame to destroy anything so ancient.”
Another failure. Another dead end. If the answers weren’t down there, she couldn’t imagine where else they would be.
“Is there anything else?” she asked.
