It couldn’t be… an Arclight.
But it was. Exactly like the one Macon had given my mom, except milky white instead of midnight black.
“Where did you get that?” I walked toward the shelf.
He darted in front of me, snatching the sphere. “I told you. I’m a collector. You could say a historian. You mustn’t touch anything in here. The treasures in this room cannot be replaced. I’ve spent a thousand lifetimes collecting them. They are all equally valuable,” he breathed.
“Yeah?” I looked at a Snoopy lunch box full of pearls.
He nodded. “Priceless.”
He replaced the Arclight. “All sorts of things have been offered to me at the Gates,” he added. “Most people, and non-people, know it is only polite to bring me a gift when they come knocking.” He stole a look at me. “No offense.”
“Yeah, sorry. I mean, I wish I had something to give you—”
He lifted a hairless eyebrow. “Besides a rock and a crow?”
“Yeah.” I scanned the rows of leather books lined up neatly on the shelves, the spines inscribed with symbols and languages I didn’t recognize. The spine of a black leather book caught my eye. It looked like it said… “The Book of Stars?”
The Gatekeeper looked pleased and rushed to pull it down from the shelf. “This is one of the rarest books of its kind.” Niadic, the Caster language I had come to recognize, looped around the edges of the cover. A cluster of stars was embossed in the center. “There is only one other like it—”
“The Book of Moons,” I finished for him. “I know.”
His eyes widened, and he clutched The Book of Stars to his chest. “You know about the Dark half? No one in our world has seen it for hundreds of years.”
“That’s because it isn’t in your world.” I looked at him for a long moment before correcting myself. “Our world.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because I was the one who found it.”
For a moment, he didn’t say a word. I could tell he was trying to decide if I was lying or crazy. There was nothing in his expression that made it seem like he actually believed me, but like I said, there wasn’t really too much to go on—his face not really being a face and all.
“Is this a trick?” His dull green eyes narrowed. “It wouldn’t serve you well to play games with me if you ever expect to find the Gates of the Far Keep.”
“I didn’t even know The Book of Moons had another half, or whatever you said. So how would I know to lie about it?”
It was true. I had never heard anyone mention it—not Macon or Marian or Sarafine or Abraham.
Is it possible they didn’t know?
“As I said, balance. Light and Dark are both part of the invisible scale that is always tipping as we hang on to the edges.” He ran his crooked fingers over the cover of the book. “You can’t have one without the other. Sad as that might be.”
After everything I had learned about The Book of Moons, I couldn’t imagine what was within the covers of its counterpart. Did The Book of Stars yield the same kind of devastating consequences?
I was almost afraid to ask. “Is there a price for using that one, too?”
The Gatekeeper walked to the far end of the room and sat down in an intricately carved chair that looked like a throne from an old castle. He lifted a Mickey Mouse Thermos, pouring a stream of amber liquid into the plastic cup, and drank half of it. There was a weariness in his movements, and I wondered how long it had taken him to amass the collection of intangibly valuable and valueless items within these walls.
When he finally spoke, he sounded like he’d aged a hundred years.
“I have never used the book myself. My debts are too steep to risk owing anything more. Though there is not much left for them to take, is there?” He threw back the rest of his drink and slammed the plastic cup on the table. Within seconds, he was pacing again, nervous and agitated.
I followed him to the other side of the room.
“Who do you owe?”
He stopped walking, pulling his robe tighter, as if he was protecting himself from an unseen enemy. “The Far Keep, of course.” There was a mix of bitterness and defeat in his voice. “And they always collect their debts.”
CHAPTER 17
The Book of Stars
The Gatekeeper turned his back to me, moving instead to a glass case behind him. He examined a collection of charms—amulets hanging from long leather cords, crystals and exotic rocks that reminded me of the river stones, runes with markings I didn’t recognize. He opened the cabinet and took out one of the amulets, rubbing the silver disk between his fingers. It reminded me of the way Amma touched the gold charm she wore around her neck, whenever she got nervous.
“Why don’t you just leave?” I asked. “Take all this stuff and disappear?” I knew the answer even as I asked the question.
Nobody would stay here unless they had to.
He spun a large enamel globe on a tall stand next to the cabinet. I watched as it turned, strange shapes spinning past me. They weren’t the continents I was used to seeing in history class.
“I can’t leave. I’m Bound to the Gates. If I venture too far from them, I’ll continue to change.”
He stared down at his bent, gnarled fingers. A chill rushed up my back.
“What do you mean?”
The Gatekeeper turned his hands over slowly, as if he had never seen them before. “There was a time when I looked like you, dead man. A time when I was a man.”
The words were swimming around in my head, but I couldn’t find a way to make them true. Whatever the Gatekeeper was—however reminiscent his features were of a man’s—it wasn’t possible.
Was it?
“I—I don’t understand. How—?” There was no way to say what I was thinking without being cruel. And if he was a man somewhere inside there, he had suffered more than enough cruelty already.
“How did I become this?” The Gatekeeper fingered a large crystal hanging from a golden chain. He picked up a second necklace, made of rings of sugar candy, the kind you could buy at the Stop & Steal, smoothing it back down inside its velvet-lined case. “The Council of the Far Keep is very powerful. They have powerful magic at their disposal, stronger than anything I witnessed as a Keeper.”
“You were a Keeper?” This thing used to be like my mom and Liv and Marian?
His dull green eyes stared back at me. “You might want to take a seat.…” He paused. “I don’t think you told me your name.”
“Ethan.” I’d told him twice now.
“It’s nice to meet you, Ethan. My name is—was—Xavier. No one calls me that anymore, but you can if it makes things easier.”
I knew what he was trying to say—if it made it easier to imagine him as a man instead of a monster.
“Okay. Thanks, Xavier.” It sounded funny, even coming from me.
He tapped the case with his fingers, some kind of nervous habit. “And to answer your question, yes. I was a Keeper. One who made the mistake of questioning Angelus, the head—”
“I know who he is.” I remembered the one named Angelus, the Keeper with the bald head. I also remembered the ruthless expression on his face when he had come after Marian.
“Then you know he’s dangerous. And corrupt.” Xavier watched me carefully.
I nodded. “He tried to hurt a friend of mine—two, actually. He brought one of them to the Far Keep to stand trial.”
“Trial.” He laughed, only there was nothing like a smile on his nothing like a face.
“It wasn’t funny.”
“Of course not. Angelus must have been making an example of your friend,” Xavier said. “I was never given a trial. He finds them dull compared to the punishment.”
“What did you do?” I was afraid to ask, but I felt like I had to.
Xavier sighed. “I questioned the authority of the Council, the decisions they were making. I never should have done it,” he said quietly. “But they were breaking our vows, the laws we swore to abide by. Taking things that were not theirs to Keep.”
I tried to imagine Xavier in a Caster library somewhere like Marian, stacking books and recording the details of the Caster world. He had created his own version of a Caster library here, a place filled with magical objects—and a few unmagical ones.
“What kind of things, Xavier?”
He glanced around the cavernous room, panicked. “I don’t think we should be talking about this. What if the Council finds out?”
“How would they?”
“They will. They always do. I don’t know what more they could do to me, but they would think of something.”
“We’re in the center of a mountain.” My second one today. “It’s not like they can hear you.”
He pulled the collar of the heavy wool robe away from his neck. “You would be surprised at what they can find out. Let me show you.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant as he moved past a heap of broken bicycles to another glass cabinet. He opened the doors and took out a cobalt-blue sphere the size of a baseball.
“What is that thing?”
“A Third Eye.” He held it in his palm carefully. “It allows you to see the past, a specific memory in time.”
The color began to swirl inside the ball, churning like storm clouds. Until it cleared, and a picture came into view…
A young man was sitting behind a heavy wooden desk in a dimly lit study. His long robe appeared to be too big for him, much like the ornately carved chair he was sitting in. His hands were clasped together as he leaned heavily on his elbows. “What is it now, Xavier?” he asked impatiently.
Xavier ran his hands through his dark hair and over his face, his green eyes darting around the room. It was obvious that he was dreading the conversation. He twisted the cord of his own robe in his lap. “I’m sorry to bother you, sir. But certain events have come to my attention—atrocities that violate our vows and threaten the mission of the Keepers.”
Angelus looked bored. “What atrocities are you referring to, Xavier? Has someone failed to file a report? Lost a crescent key to one of the Caster libraries?”
Xavier straightened. “We’re not talking about lost keys, Angelus. Something is going on in the dungeons below the Keep. At night I hear the screams, bloodcurdling screams you can’t—”
Angelus waved off the comment. “People have nightmares. We can’t all sleep as blissfully as you. Some of us run the Council.”
Xavier pushed back from his chair and stood. “I’ve been down there, Angelus. I know what they are hiding. The question is, do you?”
Angelus whipped around, his eyes narrowing. “What is it you think you’ve seen?”
The rage in Xavier’s eyes was impossible to ignore. “Keepers using Dark power—Casting—as if they are Dark Casters. Conducting experiments on the living. I’ve seen enough to know that you must take action.”