Obidias pulled the hood off his hand, and the snakes hissed and struck one another. “Do you know who did this to me? A ‘bunch of Keepers’ who caught me trying to steal my page from the Chronicles.”
“Lord have mercy,” Aunt Prue said, fanning herself with her handkerchief.
For a second, I didn’t know if I believed him. But I recognized the emotion playing out on his face, because I was feeling it myself.
Fear.
“Keepers did that to you?”
He nodded. “Angelus and Adriel. On one of their more generous days.” I wondered if Adriel was the big one who had shown up in the archive with Angelus and the albino woman. They were the three strangest-looking people I’d seen in the Caster world. At least until today.
I looked at Obidias and his snakes.
“Like I said, what can they do to me now? I’m already dead.” I tried to smile, even though it wasn’t funny. It was the opposite of funny.
Obidias held out his hand, the snakes jerking and stretching as they tried to reach me. “There are things worse than death, Ethan. Things that are darker than the Dark Casters. I should know. If you are caught, the Keepers will never let you leave the library at the Far Keep. You will be their scribe and their slave, forced to rewrite the futures of innocent Casters… and Mortal Waywards who are Bound to them.”
“Waywards are supposed to be pretty rare. How many can there be to write about?” I had never met another one, and I’d met Vexes and Incubuses and more kinds of Casters than I ever wanted to.
Obidias leaned forward in his chair, cloaking his cruelly deformed hand once again. “Perhaps they aren’t as rare as you think. Maybe they just don’t live long enough for the Casters to find them.”
There was an undeniable truth in his words that I couldn’t explain. I guess there was some part of me that knew a lie would have sounded different. Another part knew I’d always been in danger, one way or another—with or without Lena.
Whether I was meant to jump off a water tower or not.
Either way, the fear in his voice should’ve been proof enough.
“Okay. So I won’t get caught.”
Aunt Prue’s face was filled with concern. “Maybe this isn’t the best idea. We should go on back ta my house and think on it. Talk ta your mamma about it. She’s waitin’ on us, I reckon.”
I squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, Aunt Prue. I know a way in. There’s a Temporis Porta in an old tunnel beneath Wate’s Landing. I can get in and out before the Keepers ever realize I was there.”
If I could walk through walls in the Mortal realm, I was pretty sure I could step through the Temporis Porta, too.
Obidias broke the end off a thick cigar. His hand was shaking as he lit the match and held it up. He took a few puffs, until it glowed a steady orange. “You can’t enter the library at the Far Keep through the Mortal realm. You have to enter through the seam.” He delivered the news as calmly as if he was giving me directions to the local Stop & Steal, to pick up some milk.
“You mean the Great Barrier?” It seemed like a strange place for a door to the Far Keep’s inner sanctum. “I can handle it. I did it once, and I can do it again.”
“What you’ve done is nothing compared to what you’re about to do. The Great Barrier is just one place you can get to from the seam,” Obidias explained. “You can cross into other worlds from there that will make the Barrier feel like home.”
“Just tell me how to get there.” We were wasting time, and every second we sat around talking was another second away from Lena.
“You have to cross the Great River. It runs through the Great Barrier, all the way to the seam. It forms the border between the realms.”
“Like the River Styx?”
He ignored me. “And you can’t cross unless you have the river eyes—two smooth black stones.”
“Are you kidding?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. They’re very rare and hard to come by.”
“River eyes. Got it. I can find a couple rocks.”
“If you get across the river, and that’s a big if, you’ll still have to make it past the Gatekeeper before you can get into the library.”
“How do I do that?”