CHAPTER TWELVE – PELL
It takes me a good while to find the blacksmith shop because the sanctuary is so full of tombs, the entire property is like a giant maze. I haven’t been out in the thick of the tombs for decades—probably more than a hundred years, if I’m being honest—so I had no idea how crowded it had become.
There are so many tombs. So many statues of monsters. And Pie’s innocent questions from those first days come back to me now.
Who are they and why are they here?
I’m both confused, and slightly embarrassed, that I never asked these questions myself. I know the answers I gave Pie. There were always tombs inside the sanctuary and the new ones appeared gradually over thousands of years.
And on the surface, this does make sense. One becomes accustomed to the way things work. One just accepts these things as normal. It’s just the way of the world.
But now that I’m able to see it from an outside perspective, I see how unnatural it really is.
Because these tombs have to have a purpose. And, of course, the main purpose is to hold the bodies—or, at the very least, some kind of essence—of the monsters depicted by each of the statues outside.
But why do they need to be contained?
The obvious answer to this question is that they are dead and the tombs simply contain bodies.
But if that’s true, why are they kept behind walls? Why must Saint Mark’s exist in the first place?
Again, I have an answer for this. It’s about the battle—the Great Divorce. And Ostanes’ desire to hide her powerful book of magic.
But the tombs keep coming.
Where are they coming from?
I’m currently up on the roof of the blacksmith shop, kicking back, getting some air, and waiting for the forge to get hot enough to work some iron. So I have a pretty good view of the tombs right now and that brand-new black one catches my eye from across the compound. It’s slightly elevated. On a bit of a hill up near the cathedral. A pretty nice spot, if you ask me. One that was absolutely not empty before this new tomb appeared.
Which tomb is missing? And where did it go?
Did it just move backward into the maze?
Or did it disappear altogether?
Even though I have probably walked past the now-missing tomb a thousand times, I can’t even begin to imagine what it might look like. Or the monster contained inside, for that matter.
Was it that guy with the long mane and tail?
Or was it the one with the goat beard and tattooed horns?
Maybe it was that guy with the alabaster marble inlay on his hooves?
I make a mental note to take a closer look at this when I go back tonight.
I look down at the pipe in my hand, then puff on it for a moment, wondering how I forgot I used to love smoking this pipe. I must’ve left it behind the last time I was in the smithy shop. And it’s funny—before this morning I hadn’t thought about my blacksmithing days for centuries. But I was a pretty damn good blacksmith when I was younger. I made complete sets of chainmail in the Dark Ages of the Old World. And during the American Revolution, I made muskets. My caretaker was a French arms supplier for the Colonists in his former life and he wasn’t inclined to let a little curse stop him from making a profit.
Another memory hits me—shoes. I used to make horseshoes for the horses we kept back then. And once I made a pair for me. Heavy, iron shoes that made a thundering clop when I walked.
I made a lot of things in this shop, now that I think about it. I smile a little, still puffing on my pipe, enjoying the memories of crafty, skilled younger me.
The shop wasn’t anywhere close to where I last left it. It’s on the very edge of the property now, almost overrun with trees. I didn’t notice it before, but all the original buildings are on the perimeter—almost pushed up against the wall.
The old kitchen is out here too, a big outdoor oven made of bricks and stone. Something that was quite nice back in semi-arid and hot Italy, but serves no purpose here in Pennsylvania. It’s crumbling, anyway.
There’s an old stone barn with a thatched roof as well. The first caretaker I had here in the New World was a shepherd and kept sheep. He loved those stupid sheep and used to make a very fine wool that he traded for meat at the local market—trying to keep his debt down, probably. There was no Granite Springs back then. That place popped up sometime in the late nineteenth century. But there were small clusters of farms and an outpost where people gathered for trade.
The stone walls of the sheep barn are also crumbling and the roof has almost disintegrated.