his status, Ashcroft would have been one of the rare few trusted to study such a dangerous grimoire.
To carry out his plans, he hadn’t needed to work with an accomplice, or even leave the comfort of his manor.
“You’ve been possessing the Directors,” she said numbly. “You’ve been forcing them to perform the sabotage with their own hands.”
“Beg pardon?” Ashcroft leaned closer to the bars and frowned, rubbing Hyde’s ear. “You know, I can barely hear what you’re saying. Quite inconvenient, really. But no matter. I won’t have to wear this body for long.” Spinning the key ring jauntily on his finger, he turned and strolled deeper into the vault.
Blood roared in Elisabeth’s ears. Nothing felt real. She took in the vault as though she were dreaming: an immense natural cavern, the walls glittering with pyrite. Towering angel statues stood vigil along the walls, carved from obsidian, streams of molten iron pouring from their cupped hands to the floor below. A circular channel conducted the liquid metal around the room’s circumference like a moat. Ashcroft stepped Hyde’s body over a narrow black stone bridge, the edges of his coat wavering from the heat distortion. His movements were oddly clumsy, and once he even jerked sideways, barely regaining his footing before he pitched over the edge.
“Hyde is still in there,” Elisabeth realized in shock. “He’s battling for control.” And then she thought, This is what happened to Irena.
Without warning, a blast of emerald fire exploded past her, singeing the tips of her ears. It funneled through the grille and twisted after Ashcroft like a cyclone. But as it neared him, it fizzled out in a shower of green sparks.
Nathaniel dropped his arm and swore. “Too much iron.”
Moving in awful fits and jerks, Ashcroft flicked a residual ember from Hyde’s fur. “I know what you’re thinking, Miss Scrivener,” he said without turning. He had succeeded in crossing the bridge. “You’re wondering what it was like for dear, beautiful Irena when I entered her mind and forced her to betray everything that she loved. Poor woman—she never suspected anything. I cast the spell on her years ago in the reading room at Summershall. When you’re the Chancellor of Magic, it’s no trouble arranging a private meeting with a Director. My magic lived inside her for nearly a decade, waiting for me to activate it.”
Elisabeth sucked in a breath. As though it had happened yesterday, she recalled the choking smell of aetherial combustion that clung to the reading room’s armchair: the permanent residue of some old, powerful spell. Distantly, she was aware of Nathaniel steadying her.
“Irena struggled, too, of course. She was strong-willed, just like you. She was there with me the entire time, all the way to the vault, up until the very moment the Book of Eyes struck her down.”
A sound escaped Elisabeth, something between a scream and a sob. Ashcroft wasn’t paying attention. He had nearly reached the middle of the room.
A trio of massive obsidian columns dominated the vault’s center, stretching unbroken to the ceiling. A crossed key and quill had been carved into the floor between them. Ashcroft stepped on the symbol as he approached, raising Hyde’s torch. “Magnificent, is it not?”
At first she wasn’t certain what he was referring to. Then light flooded the nearest column. Vapors swirled inside the translucent stone, wreathing a shape that hung suspended in chains. As though agitated by Hyde’s proximity, the mist began to boil, and lightning flashed within its depths. Each flicker illuminated a grimoire’s cover, bound in glossy black scales edged with silver. The cover inflated and deflated steadily, as though the grimoire were breathing.
The columns weren’t meant to hold up the ceiling. Instead, they contained Class Tens.
“The Librum Draconum,” Ashcroft said, a hint of true awe softening his voice. “Created using the hide of a Lindwurm—the last dragon in Austermeer, hunted to extinction in the fourteenth century. The spells inside can summon cataclysmic storms and earthquakes, invoke natural disasters on a world-altering scale. . . .”
He moved on to the next column, bringing the torch close. He released a wistful sigh. Within the chains hung—nothing. No . . . there was something there, reflective and shifting, mirrorlike, its surface flowing like water. Trying to focus on it made Elisabeth’s head hurt.
“The Oraculis,” Ashcroft murmured. “Provenance unknown. Its spells allow one to see the future, or so the theories suggest, but everyone who’s read it has immediately taken their own life. A shame. I dearly would have liked to study it.”
He