The Unwritten King

15. Rhythm

The forbidden archive, as Nicholas came to call it, was not nearly as exciting as the nickname suggested. He had tried it out in several voices in the hopes that a sense of drama would make this all more bearable, then registered that he hadn't been down here long enough to start talking to himself and stopped mid-whisper.

He thought it was his third day. He couldn't be sure.

The torches never went out; he went to sleep and woke up in the same orange light. There was no way to measure time. The best he could do was to pass it. And the only way to pass it was to read.

He supposed that was what Rayan wanted.

There was a large stack of books near the sofa. He had spent his first day painstakingly scouring half of the shelves, picking out anything that mentioned witchcraft within the first page. The rest of his time had been devoted to moving through the pile itself, struggling with faded script, curly handwriting, and the sort of language he had hated reading in his old literature classes. He would never finish if he went word-for-word, but he couldn't afford to skim too light and miss anything, either, and towing that balance had left him with a permanent headache.

So far, he had learned the names and life stories of several autobiographical and heavily poetic witches, how to hide his budding magical abilities, so many potion recipes, recipes that didn't seem to have anything to to with witchcraft at all, the geographical distribution of kova zem, the date and method of many Maesian executions...

He had gathered in bits and pieces that there were more zem than the nine he had invented, and that the control of these alternative stones constituted "witchcraft." But any mention of them was closely followed by words scratched off the paper, or paragraphs covered by ink spills, or even entire pages torn from the binding.

Nicholas was losing what little hope he'd had to begin with. He kept his water-wrinkled pad of sticky notes at his side to mark pages that might be even remotely helpful and hadn't used a single one. His pile of discarded books was growing, and yet the original pile hardly seemed to have shrunk at all. He wasn't any closer to unearthing how he had gotten here or how to leave. And he wasn't any closer to saving Rayan.

He wasn't sure how much he wanted to. The fact that he was contemplating his own morality over a storybook villain irritated him to no end. But if the events in the journal really were set in stone, Rayan would die by Nicholas' pen. No matter how awful he was, that didn't feel right, not now that he had become flesh and bone and breath. Maybe it was because of how awful he was- or, how awful he wasn't. Unkind, warmongering, temperamental, sure. Absolutely the cause of most of Nicholas' problems. But bad enough to die?

Nicholas wasn't sure Rayan had done enough to deserve that. Either way, he didn't like being the one to decide.

The only place to sleep was the sofa, tucked into a reading nook across from the stairs. It was long enough if he bent his knees. There was an armchair, too, but he only moved to it when he felt himself fossilizing in place. Three times a day, he was fed like a hungry circus lion in a cage. The ceiling opened up, a guard floated a tray of food down onto the stairs, the ceiling closed again. Those were the only glimpses of daylight he got.

He had a lot to be pissed about, but that particular hit tipped him over the edge.

On that third day, he did his reading from the stairs, as high up as he could sit without bending his neck against the ceiling. The shurta who appeared holding his dinner didn't outwardly flinch, but there were instantly four conical blades hovering threateningly above the hole in the ceiling. The ceiling where Nicholas had laid his hand so that it couldn't be magically closed.

"I'm not gonna leave," he said dryly. "I'm not dumb."

"Could have fooled me," said the guard. "If you're so smart, you'll distance yourself from the exit."