of her attention that she hadn’t had time to prepare for what came afterward.
She scanned the pages that had opened to her. The words swam in her vision, and she tried blinking away her exhaustion, only to discover that her eyes weren’t at fault. It was the words that were moving, the ink bleeding in sluggish rivulets across the parchment. She flipped to a different section, past diagrams labeled with Enochian script, and found the same thing happening there, too. While the text itself was legible, the sentences had crawled completely out of order. Occasionally they aligned in such a way that a single paragraph became comprehensible:
The highborn demons hold their glittering court beneath a sunless sky. Once every fortnight they ride forth on horned white horses, clad in silks, to hunt beasts in the forests of the Otherworld with packs of baying fiends at their sides. The sound of a demonic hunting horn is not soon forgotten; for it is so beautiful, and so terrible, that it freezes the quarry of the hunt in place as if the prey has turned to stone. . . .
But the rest split apart before she could finish, the sentences meandering across the page like lines of marching ants. Frustrated, she turned to the scrying mirror and called for Katrien. When her friend’s face appeared in the glass, she looked as tired as Elisabeth felt, ashen beneath the glass’s patina of frost. They didn’t have time to catch up. They raced through the likeliest possibilities as swiftly as they could, barely pausing for breath.
“The sentences might only fully align at a specific date and time,” Elisabeth theorized, “like midnight on the winter solstice, or during certain conditions, like an eclipse.”
“But Ashcroft’s certain that he can crack it soon, isn’t he? So if that’s the case, either the phenomenon is due to happen sometime within the next two weeks, or—”
“Or the cipher has a different solution entirely,” Elisabeth finished, glum.
“Take a second look at your research,” Katrien urged. “There might be a clue that didn’t seem relevant before. Do we even know for sure that Prendergast hid his secret as a cipher, or is that just an assumption people made without evidence? In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find anything on my end.”
As their time ran out, Elisabeth swallowed back the pitiful urge to beg Katrien not to go, watching her disappear beneath the ice. Loneliness pressed in, made worse by her fuzzy-headed exhaustion. She knew she should go to bed, but she was too tired to get up from the floor and wrap the Codex in its chain.
Instead she found herself idly turning pages, hypnotized by the crawling text. As the sentences strung themselves together, she read lavish, unsettling descriptions of what the demons ate at their feasts, or what they wore to their nocturnal, weeklong balls. Though the fragmented descriptions left her feeling more and more disturbed, she was unable to tear her eyes away.
Swans poisoned to death with nightshade are considered a particular delicacy at banquets. . . .
The most fashionable garment that evening was a gown made of silver moths, pinned alive to the fabric to preserve their luster. . . .
The candle burned lower on the nightstand. Her head nodded. Disjointed images swirled behind her eyelids: demons dancing in elaborate costumes, grinning as they feasted, tearing into flesh. The nightmarish fancies seemed to take hold of her and drag her downward, like the hands of sirens gripping a shipwrecked sailor, towing him into the deep and silent dark.
Abruptly, she woke up.
Or, she didn’t wake up—for this had to be a dream.
She stood in some kind of old-fashioned workshop. Unfamiliar herbs hung in bundles from the rafters. Tallow candles flickered on every surface, spattering the stained floorboards with oily yellow wax. Bizarre items cluttered the shelves and the table in the center of the room: bird feathers, animal skulls, jars containing murky globs floating in vinegar. But that wasn’t the part that convinced her she was dreaming. The room hung suspended in a void. The broken edges of its floorboards jutted out into a black abyss, and chunks of the ceiling had fallen inward, showing the same dark nothingness above.
No—not nothingness. The shining black substance reminded her of something familiar. A rich, telltale scent of pigments filled the air. Ink.
“Who are you?” said a man’s voice behind her, harsh with anger. “What are you doing here?”
Elisabeth spun around, her heart slamming against her ribs.