Hollowpox The Hunt for Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend Page 0,32
burning hunger to know more. She felt a tiny little smile creep around the corner of her mouth. ‘Yes.’
It must have been quite a grand school once upon a time, Morrigan thought – much grander, in fact, than the floors that housed the Mundane and Arcane schools. On the other side of the wooden door, she and Rook stood at one end of a long, broad hallway made entirely of white marble from floor to ceiling. There were no other doors, only tall open archways leading to vast, uninhabited chambers left and right. It was so cold their breath clouded in the air.
Rook led her past chamber after empty chamber, their footsteps echoing. Morrigan peeked through each archway, trying to get some idea of what these spaces might once have held. Were they classrooms, laboratories, workshops? But there was no furniture anywhere, just vast, empty space.
There were words carved into the arches also, and as Morrigan and Rook passed each one, they lit up on cue, glowing golden from within the stone. But they didn’t give much away. They were just words in languages Morrigan didn’t understand, like Kalani and Hamal and Zhang and Siskin and …
Wait, she thought, pausing outside one of the rooms to stare up at the glowing sign. I know that word.
Siskin.
Morrigan frowned. She’d read it somewhere. It was a name.
‘Juno Siskin!’ she cried, and her voice bounced around the space. ‘Oh – oh! Kiri Kalani! They’re all Wundersmiths – these rooms are all named after past Wundersmiths, aren’t they?’
‘Not just any Wundersmiths,’ Rook called from up ahead, without slowing down or waiting for her. ‘The original nine.’
Morrigan ran to catch up, checking each sign that blinked into life along the way. Every name she recognised gave her a strange sort of thrill. It was like walking through history. Her history.
She’d read about some of these people in the awful class she’d been made to take last year, A History of Heinous Wundrous Acts, with Professor Onstald. She’d had to study his book – Missteps, Blunders, Fiascos, Monstrosities and Devastations: An Abridged History of the Wundrous Act Spectrum. Onstald’s book didn’t have anything good to say about Wundersmiths, but Morrigan now knew for certain that at least some of his book – and possibly all of it – was an absolute fiction.
Magnusson. Tyr Magnusson, according to Onstald, tried to stage a political coup. He occupied the Lightwing Palace for seventy days, taking the entire royal household hostage and starving half of them to death in the process.
Williams. That had to be Audley Williams, Morrigan thought, the Wundersmith who supposedly invented the measles by accident.
Vale. Vivienne Vale, who’d lived for several Ages as a hermit, trying to write the world’s first objectively perfect song, but instead wrote one that went down in history as the most annoying earworm of all time. It sent dozens of people clinically insane and was banned throughout the realm. (The song went unnamed in Onstald’s book for fear of it getting stuck in the reader’s head forever.)
Had Onstald’s book been right about any of them? It was wrong about Odbuoy Jemmity, who created Jemmity Park, and about Decima Kokoro, who built Cascade Towers. Jupiter had proven that by taking her to those places and showing her how profoundly brilliant they were. There were even plaques there, left over a hundred years ago by the Committee for the Classification of Wundrous Acts. Jemmity’s secret theme park had not been classified a Fiasco, as the book would have had her believe, but a Spectacle, a thing of joy for deserving children. And Cascade Towers was a Singularity; an original work of absolute genius.
If Tyr Magnusson, Audley Williams and Vivienne Vale were as dreadful as Onstald believed, would the Wundrous Society have celebrated them with grand marble halls in their names? Morrigan doubted it.
At the farthest end of the hall, they took a sharp right into the tenth and final chamber, the smallest she’d seen so far but, in contrast to the other mausoleum-like chambers, it was comfortable and welcoming, warmly lit by gas lamps and an enormous fireplace.
The walls were littered with photographs of odd creatures, beautiful buildings and famous Nevermoorian landmarks. There was a huge, colourful map of the Wunderground, and one entire wall was covered with gilt-framed oil paintings, mostly portraits.
There was one long farmhouse-style table in the centre of the room and – a surprise to Morrigan after the deathly silence of the other empty rooms – actual people sitting at