Forbidden Read online

  “Stop gawking.”

  “I’ve never been in the Citadel before.”

  “Maybe you haven’t, but Cleric Remko has. So stop it.”

  Two guards stood at a post halfway to the palace. He kept his gaze averted, his head bowed beneath the cowl, but his heart stalled as he wondered if they might be the same guards who had come into his home and killed his mother. Those faces would haunt his dreams forever.

  He marveled at the way Neah strode past them without a glance. She entered through a side door, led him down a hall and into a small side office occupied by four desks. Even here the building seemed to bear the secrets of times before Null Year, the weight of the centuries saturating the walls.

  “This is where you work?” He had always been under the assumption that Neah held an elevated position in the Citadel. But now he saw that she was one among four in a space the size of his old bedroom, populated by scratched desks and chairs that were probably older than he was.

  “That’s my desk, the one in the corner,” she said, closing the door without meeting his gaze.

  “It…looks very nice.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” She crossed the room to a small coat closet, pulled open the door, and gestured him in.

  “What?”

  “I have to go find out where they’re holding your keeper, and sometimes the cleaning crew comes late. They don’t bother with the closets, so you should wait in here. We can’t risk them recognizing you.”

  Rom stepped inside, where there was just enough room for him to stand between several large boxes.

  “Hurry.”

  “I will,” she said, encasing him in darkness. He heard the outer office door close, the sound of her key in the lock.

  She’d locked him in the office? Panic rose in his chest. He told himself he would have done the same. That he was safer in here than out there.

  The minutes, measured only by the sound of his own breathing, crept too slowly. When had he ever been this impatient? When had images of every possible disaster ever plagued him as they did now? At last, unable to wait another moment, he opened the closet door. Darkness.

  Rom made his way in the direction of the office door, banged his knee on a desk, cursed in a whisper. A key sounded in the door. He didn’t have time to find the closet, so he crouched behind the desk.

  The door opened, and the light flicked on. A form strode past him toward the closet, but stopped short before its open door.

  A whisper: “Rom?”

  Neah.

  He stood.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “What took you so long?”

  “It’s not like the instructions to find the keeper are engraved on the walls,” she snapped.

  “You found him?”

  “No. But I found out the way to the dungeons. I even got a key.” She held it up.

  Relief washed over him. “How did you get it?”

  “I said I needed to get a priest down to the lower level as a matter of Order. Come on.”

  They left the building through a different door, away from the palace. The way was far less well lit, the paths narrower. They passed through a lower garden and approached the mouth of an old grotto. It was situated between two landscaped beds of stunted trees and lichen-covered statues, some so broken that they seemed not so much ancient as amputated. A torch glowed somewhere farther within, giving the entire cavern the feel of one faintly glowing maw.

  It smelled like rain and gutter water. Even in the absence of the chill breeze, the temperature seemed to have dropped.

  “How far?” His voice echoed.

  “Straight in and down through here—this is the main entrance.”

  “If this is the main entrance, I’d hate to see the back one,” he muttered.

  They reached the lone torch sputtering in its iron bracket against the wall. Beyond it, Rom could make out the heavy iron bars of an expansive double gate. A huge lock requiring a key far larger than the one in Neah’s hand hung on the front of it.

  “Hades.” He meant it. The place looked like the entrance to the underworld itself.

  Neah went to the outer edge of the gate, and now Rom saw a smaller door cut into the stone. She worked the key in the lock for several seconds before finally getting the latch to turn.

  “I should have taken one of the torches,” she said.

  “There’s another farther ahead. See? Come on.”

  Now that they were here, at the entrance to the Citadel’s darkest corridors, his heart surged. With fear, yes, but also with anticipation.

  They hurried down a long stairway cut into the stone so long ago that the steps themselves drooped where so many feet had worn them down. The stair ended some forty feet beneath ground level at the mouth of a broad tunnel.

  Except for the torches every twenty or so yards apart, he could have easily believed no one had been here in a hundred years. “I can’t imagine anyone comes this way.”

  “The guard I asked said that this is the supply entrance.”

  Sixty yards and two more stair drops farther, the corridor ended at a heavy iron door. A guard standing to the side moved in front of it at their approach.

  Rom lowered his head so that the cowl obscured his face.

  “I’ve got a priest here on business,” Neah said, flashing him her badge.

  “I didn’t receive any orders about a priest,” the guard said. “Come back in the morning with papers.”

  Panic rose in Rom’s chest. Morning was a wealth of hours away. They would never get this close during daylight, not with his picture plastered on the front of every newspaper in Byzantium.

  “Then you can be the one to explain why the priest didn’t get here in time,” Neah snapped. “Midnight, they said—we’re already late as it is. Maybe too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that he was summoned. Something about an old man.”

  “Old man?”

  “Isn’t this where the old man’s kept, the one they call the keeper? You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you? And you’re questioning me? Fine. It’s your job on the line, not mine.”

  The guard chewed his lip. “I’ll get the paperwork. You go on.” He pulled the ring of keys from his belt and unlocked the door, which opened more smoothly than Rom would have guessed by looking at it.

  The moment they stepped through, Rom could feel a slight movement of air that had not been present in the tunnel on the way down. The space in front of them wasn’t only cavernous, but modernly regulated. Ahead of them, low electric light illuminated rows of stainless-steel and glass lab equipment. The entire place was part laboratory, part warehouse, with two rows of what appeared to be storage containers forming a dark aisle down the middle.

  “Where is he?” Neah demanded, but her voice had lost a fraction of its edge.

  “At the end through the tunnel,” the guard said. He closed the door, leaving them alone in the dim light.

  Somewhere from the main room, a voice sang. A bit of melody, broken off, followed by a trilling laugh.

  Neah grabbed his arm. Her hand was cold.

  “Let’s go.” Rom took her hand and led her along the back wall of the chamber toward the corridor indicated by the guard. Its rock walls were illuminated by a low torch, its glow glinting off the steel bars of a cell.

  “That must be it,” Neah said, her face pale even in the darkness.

  “It must be,” he murmured, heart pounding.

  “I’ll stay here and keep watch. Rom?”

  His attention was fixed on the last cell. “Yeah?”

  “Hurry.”

  A faint wheezing issued from inside the cell as Rom approached. He moved up to the barred door. It was too dark to see inside.

  “Hello?”

  The wheezing stopped. Silence.

  “Hello?”

  “I don’t need a priest,” a voice rasped.

  Rom pulled back his hood.
“I’m not a priest.”

  “Then why are you dressed like one? Trying to trick an old man? You think I’m a fool?”

  “I’m more interested in tricking the guards.”

  Silence.

  “Are you the keeper?” Rom asked.

  “Am I?”

  Rom moved closer to the cell bars. “You’re the one they call the Book?”

  “Am I?”

  “Please! I didn’t come here for fun. If you only knew what was at stake.”

  The grizzled face of an old man appeared at the bars. Torchlight darkened the furrows of his face. His unkempt hair was dingy gray. The old man’s eyes widened. He shoved himself against the cell bars and stared at Rom.

  “Elias?”

  For a moment Rom couldn’t speak. “Then it’s true! You knew my father! Elias Sebastian was my father.”

  “Son of Elias?’” the man said.

  “Yes!”

  “He said you could be trusted.”

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  The sound of those words momentarily overwhelmed Rom, and tears flooded his eyes. Tears of grief—all these years, and he had never known the truth. Tears of relief—that he did now.

  “But what’s this in your eyes? What have you done?” the keeper asked, voice suddenly more urgent than before. “Boy, what have you done?”

  “I drank some blood,” he blurted.

  Even with the grime upon it in the dark, the man’s face went white. He moved his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  “I drank the blood and now I feel the world on fire and I’m here for answers.”

  “Maker!” the man squawked. Then again, in a raspy whisper, “Dear Maker.”

  “I don’t know if it’s the Maker. I only know that I need help.”

  “Then it’s here. It’s time. Do you know what you’ve done?”

  The old man reached a gnarled hand through the bars and touched his cheek. “Flesh and blood,” the keeper said. “Life. Mortality. By the Maker, it’s true.” He withdrew his hand. “Tell me what happened. Everything! Quickly.”

  The old man seemed to have shed his crazed disposition as if he’d shrugged out of a cloak.

  “An old man found me. He said he knew my father. And now by your own reaction, I know it’s true. He gave me the vial wrapped in vellum and told me to find you.”

  “What happened to him? Where is he?”

  Rom shook his head. “They killed him. I saw it.”

  The man dropped his hand. He withdrew from the door, out of the torchlight. Rom pressed closer to it.

  “Sir, please. I need answers!”

  From inside the room, he could smell the rancid stench of old food, of urine, of the man himself. Now, his eyes adjusted, Rom could see him faintly in the corner, hear his piteous moan. But then he was back on the other side of the barred door, having seemingly thrown himself against it.

  “Your father came to live in the city, as none of us has for a very long time. We have kept in hiding for centuries. He came to live as an informant because we knew the time was coming. He could tell you nothing, you understand? It would have endangered your life. And your mother’s.”

  “They killed her, too. Yesterday.”

  The old man hesitated. “I’m sorry for it, boy. These are only the first deaths of many.”

  “What do you mean, the time was coming?”

  “The time. The time, boy. That we have waited for! And now I am the last. But there is you. Are there five of you?”

  “Five?”

  “There was enough blood for five.”

  “Yes. No. There are only four. And only half a portion left.”

  “Only four? Are you well trained? Learned? You’re the son of Elias. You must be.”

  “I…Not necessarily, no. Well, one of us is a fighter of sorts. In training with the Citadel Guard.”

  “Four hundred and eighty years. Forty generations, as per the twelve-year cycles of Rebirth. That’s how long we’ve waited for this moment. Do you know what this is?”

  “That’s why I came!”

  “Because you know?”

  “No, because I don’t know. Because the old man insisted I come. Because I don’t know what to do!”

  “You truly don’t, do you? And yet you now know more than I.”

  “What?”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “To not know?”

  “To feel, boy! To be the first man in nearly five centuries to have true emotions. To feel more than the fear that even now courses through my own veins. How does it feel?”

  Rom opened his mouth, but how could he explain the rush of emotions he’d felt? The sadness, the love, the hope, the desire?

  So he just said, “Terrible. And great. All at once.”

  “It’s the remnant. The remnant that was before all this Order madness. There was a day when man truly lived. And now the remnant lives again. In you. In these other three. Who are they? Never mind.” He waved a hand. “So many times I wondered if I would live to see it—if anyone would.” He reached out through the bars with both hands, took Rom’s hand, and clasped it tightly.

  A tear slid down the front of the old man’s face, making a clean track on his dusty skin.

  “Forgive me, Maker, for doubting,” the man whispered softly. “Do not count it against me on that day.” He seemed to have fallen into prayer, forgetting Rom despite the fact that he clasped his hand.

  “But how is this?” Rom said. “You’re crying. You feel more than fear? Then you’ve drunk the blood yourself?”

  Had his father?

  The man shook his head. “No. No. The keepers don’t know the blood firsthand. We knew it was never for us. We’ve kept its knowledge and remembered its ways. We’ve practiced and lived—and behave—as though we have it, in a foreshadowing of our hope to come. Hope. You see. I use that word though I have never made hope’s acquaintance. But we’ve spoken and lived as though that day had come, in anticipation of it. And someday…someday…”

  “But you must feel something. Other than fear, that is.”

  The old man thought about it and shook his head. “No. No, I don’t think I do. We keepers spend much of our lives imagining feelings beyond fear, and so in a way I suppose we do, if only the way one might see his reflection in a cloudy mirror.”

  Rom shook his head. It was amazing. He had never seen anything like it. Like the deaf, mimicking words they could not hear, with more precision, even, than those who did. If anything, the keeper seemed to overdisplay emotion without firsthand knowledge of it.

  “You called it a remnant,” Rom said. “A remnant of what?”

  The man lifted his head. “Of pure blood.”

  “What blood?”

  “They call it the Age of Chaos, when all humans were truly human. They lied, and now the world knows no better. It’s life! The real blood will bring life.”

  “How?”

  The old man released Rom’s hand and gripped the bars with white knuckles. “What is your name? Tell me.”

  “Rom.”

  “Rom, son of Elias. Then you must know, Rom, that there is a boy. You are tasked. You and these others.”

  “I don’t understand. What boy? Tasked with what?”

  Neah came several steps into the corridor. “Rom!”

  The man’s eyes darted her way, then back. “You have to find the boy. We tried but failed. They’ve taken us all. None of the candidates has fit, but he’s out there, he has to be!”

  “Hurry!” Neah rasped. “I hear someone!”

  Rom turned back to the man and yanked out the vellum. He quickly unwrapped it. “What about these writings, here on the vellum—”

  The man’s eyes had gone to the vial, and Rom wasn’t sure whether to let him hold it or keep it out of his reach. “Do you know what it says?”

  “You have less than one full dose left?”

  “That—that was an accident. What about the code?”

>   “Twenty-one,” the keeper said. “Vertical.”

  “What?”

  “Remember that. It’s in Latin.”

  “Latin? How does that help?”

  The old man stared at him, blinking. “You need a mathematician.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a woman named Feyn,” the keeper said.

  “Feyn? As in…Feyn, the Sovereign?”

  “She’ll riddle the vellum for you.”

  “What? That’s impossible! Why can’t you? Just tell me—”

  “She’s trained to be loyal to the truth. If you can win her confidence, she will help.”

  “What do you mean, win her confidence? You’re talking about the next Sovereign! Why would she help me? She’s the head of the Order! No, no, you have to tell us what we’ve done and what it means and what will happen to us!”

  “Don’t you understand? This isn’t about you! And yet you are the one who must usher in the moment or all will be lost. All I’ve lived for, and every keeper before me. All that your father lived for. All that Alban died for. That was his name, the man who gave you that. You must usher it in, or we’ll all live in this death!” Spittle flew from his mouth.

  “Rom!” Neah again.

  “Rom, son of Elias, do you know what you’ve inherited?”

  Neah was running toward him. “They’re coming!”

  “They’re coming,” the man said, eyes darting in her direction again.

  “But I need more answers!”

  “The vellum. Nothing is more important than this! You’ll bring life, if you succeed. Go, son of Elias!”

  “Rom!” Neah grabbed his hand and tugged. “Run!”

  Together they ran, chased by the keeper’s last words: “Find the boy, Rom, son of Elias! Find him!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Neah tugged Rom into a room that appeared to be a lab, keeping to the back wall as two guards ran into the tunnel they had just exited. A door at the far side flew open and two more guards burst into the giant chamber.

  “That way!” Rom urged as soon as the guards had passed, veering for the shaft of torchlight that shone through the open door. Neah had no clue where that passage might lead, but exiting the way they’d entered would surely be a mistake.

  “That way!” a female voice shrieked. “That way!”