“Thomson?” Dawes asked. “I don’t know much about him. He was Scottish, but he’s not widely read anymore.”
“But Book and Snake use it at the start of their rituals.” Beneath the arch was a stone hourglass, another memento mori. It might be a signpost. It might be nothing at all. Except … “Dawes, look.”
The arch beneath the Tree of Knowledge led into a corridor. There were glass display cases on the left, and on the right, a series of windows emblazoned with yellow and blue stained glass. Each column between them was decorated with a stone grotesque, students bent over their books. Most
were playful—some kid drinking a jug of beer and looking at a centerfold instead of his work, another listening to music, another sleeping. One of the open books read U R A JOKE. Alex had just walked right by them without noticing, focused on the papers she had to write, the reading yet unread.
Until Darlington had pointed them out.
“I feel like he’s here with us,” she said.
“I wish he was,” Dawes replied, trying to find the correct page in her old Gazette article. “Architecture is his specialty, not mine. But this…” She gestured to the particular grotesque Alex had pointed out. “The only description is ‘reading an exciting book.’”
And yet they were staring straight at Death, skull peeking from his cloak, one skeletal hand resting on the stone student’s shoulder. There studious let me sit and hold high converse with the mighty dead.
“I think we’re being led down the corridor,” Alex said. “Where does it go?”
Dawes frowned. “Nowhere really. It dead-ends in Manuscripts and Archives. There’s an exit there that would take us out of the building.”
They walked to the end of the corridor. There was an odd vestibule with a high ceiling. Ironwork mermen with split tails gazed down at them from the windows. Were they chasing phantoms? If demons loved games, maybe Darlington had given them just enough clues to get them stuck wandering Sterling, hunting secret messages in the stone.
There was another archway ahead, but it was strangely bare of decoration.
To their right there were two doors and a panel of small square windows that looked they belonged in a pub. Some of them were decorated with illustrations on the glass—the Barrel Maker, the Baker, the Organ Player.
“What are these?” she asked.
Dawes was flipping through the Gazette. “Whoever wrote this made it impossible to find anything. If it isn’t deliberate, it’s a crime.” She blew a stray strand of red hair off her forehead. “Okay, they’re woodcuts by someone called Jost Amman.”
As soon as the words were out of Dawes’s mouth they both went still.
“Let me see that.” Dawes handed over the Gazette. Dawes had pronounced Jost as Yost, but seeing it spelled out on the page, there was no mistaking it.
She remembered begging Darlington to tell her if he knew where to find the Gauntlet—and the odd desperation in his voice when he’d answered: Would that I did. But I am just a man, heir to nothing. He’d wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t. He’d had to play the demon’s game and hope that they would solve his puzzle.
Just a man. Jost Amman. They were in the right place.
So show me the next step, Darlington. To their left was a little stone mouse nibbling at the wall. To their right, a tiny stone spider. Was that a nod to fire-and-brimstone Jonathan Edwards? Alex only knew the sermon because it was a joke in her residential college. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. It was why their intramural teams were called the JE Spiders. How’s that for Sunday school, Turner?
“Where do these doors go?” Alex asked. There were two of them, awkwardly wedged into a corner.
“This one goes to the courtyard,” Dawes said, pointing to a door with Lux et Veritas engraved in stone above it. Light and Truth, Yale’s motto, just like the figures embodied in the mural that had led them here. “That one goes to a bunch of offices.”
“What are we missing?”
Dawes said nothing, gnawing on her lip.
“Dawes?”
“I … well, it’s just a theory.”
“We can’t spend years hammering this one out like a thesis. Give me anything.”
She tugged on a strand of her hair, and Alex could see Dawes fighting herself, always seeking perfection. “In the records of the Gauntlets I could find, four pilgrims enter together—the soldier, the scholar, the priest, and the prince. They make a circuit, each locating a doorway and taking up their posts. The soldier is the last and completes the circuit on his—or her— own.”
“Okay,” said Alex, though she was struggling to see what that had to do with anything.
“At first I thought … well, there are four doors that lead out into the Selin Courtyard. One at each corner. I thought maybe the clues were leading us around the courtyard. But…”
“But there’s no way to complete the circuit.”
“Not without leaving the building,” Dawes said. She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what comes next. Darlington would. But even if we figure it out … Four murderers, four pilgrims. We’re running out of time to find them.”
“You think the circle of protection won’t hold?”
“I’m not sure, but I … I think our best chance is to perform the ritual on Halloween.”
Alex rubbed her eyes. “So we’re breaking all of the rules at once?” No rituals were allowed on Halloween, particularly anything involving blood magic. There were too many Grays drawn by the excitement of the night. It was just too risky. Not to mention Halloween was only two weeks away.
“I think we have to,” said Dawes. “Rituals work better at times of portent, and Samhain is supposed to be the night the door opens to the underworld.
There are theories that the first Gauntlet was built at Rathcroghan, in the Cave of Cats. That’s where Samhain originated.”
Alex didn’t like any of it. She knew what Grays were capable of when drawn by blood or powerful emotion. “That barely gives us any time to find two more killers, Dawes. And the new Praetor will be installed by then.”
“I’m not a killer.”
“Okay, two more reluctant but efficient problem solvers.”
