Page 170 of Terror at the Gates

I was a little disappointed. I’d hoped Lisk would make it easy on us and be just as careless with his three blades as I’d been with my one, but of course, we weren’t getting that lucky.

I turned my attention to the bookshelves, which were lined with leather-bound editions. At first, I thought the archbishop had all his books rebound to match, green with gilded spines, but when I took one from the shelf, I discovered they were just bound, solid wood.

I hadn’t actually expected Lisk to read much beyond theBook of Splendoror other supporting texts written by past archbishops. I had been a great reader when I was younger, but as I’d gotten older, books became less and less accessible. They weren’t about great adventures or thrilling mysteries. They were about the glory of the church and the consequences of sin. Sometimes I wondered if the people of Eden would flock to Nineveh for entertainment if they were allowed a little more escapism in their daily lives.

Though the books were fake, I decided it was best to check them. Maybe there was a safe hidden behind the volumes, or maybe one of them was some kind of disguised lockbox, but as I neared the end, neither of those things turned out to be true.

I was starting to feel anxious, thinking I wasn’t going to walk away with anything useful, when something caught my attention, or rather the absence of it did. There was an empty space at the end of Lisk’s sixth shelf. I might havethought nothing of it if the other five hadn’t fit so perfectly from one end to the other.

Something was missing.

I turned, scanning the study, but the only surface left in the room was a round table between two oversize chairs in front of the fireplace.

“Find anything useful?” Zahariev asked.

I jumped at the sound of his voice and whirled to face him.

“Fuck, Zahariev! Don’tdothat!”

“You should really be more aware,” he said. “We are trespassing in someone else’s house.”

“I was just concentrating,” I said, frustrated. I knew he was right. “There’s a book missing from this shelf. Most of these are fake, but what if the one missing isn’t?”

Zahariev’s gaze darted to the fireplace. “It’s not the one on the mantel, is it?”

I turned, finding the book sitting on its side.

“I hadn’t looked there yet,” I said, crossing the room.

“Let’s not pretend you pay attention to anything above your line of sight.”

“That’s not true. I pay attention to you,” I said as I retrieved the book from its place.

I knew it was real the moment I picked it up. It was heavier than the fake ones and floppy. When I opened it, I half expected to find the center carved out, but instead, I found the book was actually a journal.

The pages weren’t full of any kind of daily narrative. They were notes. The handwriting was messy, almost like whoever had written them couldn’t keep up. With just a glance at the page, I recognized some familiar things. The Seventh Gate, the names Eryx and Ashur, and a drawing ofa fiery sword. The Deliverer, if I had to guess.

“Well,” Zahariev said. “Anything useful?”

“These are notes about the gods behind the gate…”

I turned the page and found a list of words I didn’t recognize. Maybe they were names:Iprus, Arcturus, Lamassu, Mahari, Irkalla, Syriac. There was another word,Ziru, written at the bottom, but it was crossed out. The final word wasSeine, which I recognized as the mountain range that housed the Seventh Gate.

“But also…shapes.”

Zahariev looked over my shoulder. There was a drawing on the opposite page. It was a cluster of nine circles. The one in the middle was connected to the eight around it by lines. A few of the names from the other side were written there, but not all.

When I moved on to the next page, I found the handwriting had changed. It was far more legible, like someone else had taken over. I read the words quietly aloud.

She will ascend from the womb of her enemy,

A temptress cloaked in night, a nightmare bound in chains.

Her cries will rattle the earth.

Her blood will break the gates.

“That sounds like something from theBook of Splendor,” said Zahariev.