The Sleeping Prince - Melinda Salisbury Page 0,107

when you see it. Don’t take your hand off the wall until you do.”

Then he’s gone, leaving Twylla and me staring at each other.

Outside our room, everyone is running in the opposite direction from the one Silas told us to follow. Staying close together, we place our left hands on the wall and begin to walk. Alchemists and their partners, people of all ages and sexes run past us, some armed, some holding children, all ignoring us. Above us there is another boom, and I see a trail of dust fall from the ceiling.

“Hurry,” Twylla says from behind me. Without taking our hands from the wall we start to run. The ground begins to slope gently, then more steeply, the turns becoming sharper, the path narrower. The grating sounds far away now; I can hear nothing but our breathing and the occasional drip. As the air gets colder, the sconces are spread further apart, leaving patches of shadow. Each one makes my heart skip. Eventually we come to a door – not a curtain but a door, made of dark, grainy wood. Burned into it are two circles, one overlapping the other. In the centre is a small silver crescent moon.

“This must be it,” Twylla says, taking a deep breath as she pushes it open and enters. I follow her, pulling the door closed behind me.

And then I stop. And stare.

I’d expected another small cave, possibly a meeting hall of sorts. But the chamber I’ve walked into is the size of a cathedral, the ceiling a hundred feet above me and studded with white, glittering stalactites, twice my height, pointing down like a thousand swords over my head. The walls, though, are studded with bones. Hundreds, possibly thousands of skulls stare out of the walls at me, stacked neatly on top of one another. Some of them have symbols on them, the symbols for salt, for fire, for air etched in gold on their foreheads.

More bones, perhaps from arms and legs, are arranged into intricate patterns, hearts, circles and stars, embedded in the walls. On the far left wall a rose has been constructed from a group of pelvises; on the right a chalice is made from ribs.

Above my head a chandelier made out of human bones hangs from the impossibly high ceiling: skulls clutched in whole, clenched skeletal fists, candles inside the eye sockets, lighting the room and simultaneously casting eerie shadows. Long, sturdy leg bones make up the joints between the skulls and hands. Entire spinal columns weave in and out, holding the structure together, and below them, small bones hold up strings of tiny ones, threaded like beads.

It’s beautiful and macabre and I shiver. An underground temple. And a crypt, all at once.

I know, without being told, that every single bone in here belonged to an alchemist. And I know that this temple, this ossuary, was built long before the Conclave hid down here; perhaps is the reason it is underground. This is the work of centuries, young bones and old bones all combined to make this place. It’s awful but beautiful, and every time I feel disgust rising, appreciation beats it down as I spot some new, impossible pattern.

I wonder whom the marked graves in the graveyard belong to, but the answer comes to me immediately. Silas said the alchemists married non-alchemists. They can’t be part of this place, but their place in the alchemic world is marked, subtly, on their graves.

Down near the altar, Twylla has disappeared behind a screen, and I can hear voices. I follow the sound, walking down an aisle lined with pews. I touch each one as I pass. None of them is the same; all different woods, different sizes. Some are heavily carved and decorated with the symbols of the old Gods, Holly and Oak. Some are simple and plain. All of them are worn, grooved where generations of bottoms have warmed them and worshipped on them; where people have sat and looked up at their ancestors.

The altar is the only space not adorned with bones. Instead a large metal sculpture – two discs, one made of gold, one silver – is mounted above it. The silver disc overlaps the gold, making a crescent, and it reminds me of the moon. The altar is laid with flowers and burning candles. The air smells of incense, and something else, not a scent, precisely, but a weight, a presence. The bones. I can feel them, as surely as if a thousand alchemists