“The Keeper said all of the old residents left or died.”
“Or disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Zachary repeats and the cavern around them echoes his echo, breaking the word into fragments and picking its favorite: Appear, appear, appear.
“Do me a favor, Ezra,” Mirabel says. “Don’t wander too far down.”
She turns and kisses him on the cheek and walks up the stairs.
Zachary takes one last look into the darkness and then follows her.
He knows their conversation is over before he reaches the top, but she gives him a little parting tip of her empty glass when he walks past and continues across the expansive ballroom.
He can feel her watching as he goes and he doesn’t turn around. He does a little pirouette in the middle of the empty dance floor and he hears her laugh as he continues on.
Everything feels okay, suddenly, even in the ballroom emptiness and the crackling of one fire that should be a dozen.
Maybe everything is burning, has burned, will burn.
Maybe he shouldn’t drink things down here, as a general rule.
Maybe, he thinks as he ascends the stairs at the far end of the ballroom, there are more mysteries and more puzzles down here than he can ever hope to solve.
As Zachary reaches the top of the stairs a shadow passes by the end of the hall and he can tell by the hair that it’s Rhyme. He tries to catch up but she manages to stay ahead of him.
He watches as she dims some lamps and ignores others.
Curious both in general and about where Rhyme goes when she’s not floating through the halls lighting candles, Zachary continues to follow her from a good distance.
He follows her down a hall filled with delicate carvings and large statues as she lights candles held out toward her by marble hands.
Rhyme stops abruptly and Zachary steps back into a shadowed alcove, tucked behind a life-size statue of a satyr and a nymph frozen in an impressively acrobatic embrace. He can see Rhyme through a window of thigh and arm. She’s stopped in front of a carved stone wall. She reaches up and presses something against it and the wall slides open.
Rhyme steps inside and the wall slides back into place behind her, like the wall behind the candle painting.
Zachary goes to look at the wall but he can’t see the door now that it is closed. The carved pattern in the stone is all vines and flowers and bees.
Bees.
Most of the carving is raised but the bees are intaglioed, highly detailed bee-shaped vacancies in the stone.
He tries to remember where Rhyme had pressed the door and finds a single bee.
She must have had a bee to place in it. Like a key.
Maybe this is the acolyte-access-only Archive Mirabel mentioned.
The wall moves again and Zachary ducks behind the statue.
Rhyme comes out from the wall and touches the door again. She does have something in her hand, something small and metallic that Zachary guesses is bee-shaped.
In her other hand is a book.
Rhyme waits for the door to close and then she turns around. She looks over at the statue of the nymph and the satyr and she holds up the book. She puts it down on one of the tables.
Rhyme looks at the statue again, pointedly, then walks away.
Zachary goes to pick up the book. He can’t decide if this turn of events makes him better or worse at following people.