Marcus Sedgwick - The Book of Dead Days

“Boy!” said Valerian, fishing in his pocket. “Where’s my bottle?”

“Here,” said Boy, bringing it to him. “We just fed you a little of it. We thought it might help.” He couldn’t hide the smile on his face as he saw Valerian on his feet again, and as Valerian took the bottle back from him with his good arm, he smiled back.

Boy felt good, strong and happy.

Valerian looked at the bottle. It was half empty.

“You were right,” he said, “but there is little left. Still, it is time we were about things.”

He put a hand out to Boy’s cheek for a moment, then seemed to remember himself and instantly pulled it back. It happened so fast that Boy wondered if he’d imagined it.

“But what can we do?” said Willow.

Valerian turned to her, his bad arm swinging loosely at his side.

“Come now, Willow, it’s not like you to be weak! It’s usually the boy here.”

Boy laughed. He didn’t even mind Valerian making fun of him. He felt good and that was all.

Valerian began to circle the crypt. He prowled, a smile growing on his face.

“There is more to this church than we know,” he said. “There has to be-it is far too big a place for a tiny hole of a village like Linden.”

He rested his hand on top of the sarcophagus.

“Listen!” he said. “Listen! Can you hear it? Listen!” hissed Valerian, wobbling slightly on his feet. “No! Look!”

He pointed at the wall of the crypt, the short wall opposite the one where Willow had placed the torch.

There again were those mysterious words.

Non omnem videt molitor aquam molam praeterfluentem .

“The miller…?” began Boy.

“… sees not all the water that goes by his mill,” finished Willow.

“And outside the churchyard, there stands… Boy! What?”

“A mill!” he said confidently.

“Exactly!” declared Valerian.

“I don’t understand,” cried Willow. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” said Valerian, “it means it is more than a motto! Place your ears to the sarcophagus and listen!”

“The-the what?” asked Boy.

“The sarcophagus, Boy! You do know what a sarcophagus is, don’t you? From your Greek! Eater-of-bodies. Flesh-eater. Sarco-phagus.”

Boy looked blankly at him.

“The stone coffin, Boy!”

Willow stood on tiptoe to put her ear flat against the lid of the sarcophagus.

“I thought I heard something as I lay on the floor. It’s faint, but you can hear it better through that.”

Boy ran over to Willow. It was true; you didn’t even have to put your head close to the stone box to hear the sound of water flowing somewhere underneath.

“Valerian!” Willow said. “Valerian! Look! Is this…?”

She was staring at a pattern engraved in the lid of the coffin.

“Yes. The pattern that Kepler had dug into his cellar floor, repeated here on the lid of this supposed grave!”

Indeed, the lid of the sarcophagus was deeply cut with a manic pattern of lines crossing, recrossing, intersecting and splitting. Without remembering exactly, Willow could recognize it.

“What is it?” Boy asked.

“These marks,” she said. “It’s what the doctor had dug into his floor and filled with water. Water that flowed by the aid of a machine. And above it on the wall were those words.”

She pointed.

“Ah!” Boy said. “The mill outside-not all of the water goes past it. Some goes here. So the miller…”

“… sees not all the water that…”

“Exactly!” cried Valerian. He stared at them, a little mad, a little proud, waiting for the moment to deliver his final piece of wisdom.

“See that long line that comes out of the pattern, straight down the length of the sarcophagus lid?”

They nodded.

“What would you say that is, at the end of it? That symbol?”

There was a circle with short lines radiating out from it.

“It’s a mill wheel!” said Boy.

“Just so!” said Valerian. “Now, you two, lift the lid and let’s be away from here!”

Willow turned to him.

“I am not dealing with any more corpses,” she said. “Is that clear? I’ve had enough!”

Valerian smiled at her infuriatingly.

“But there will be no corpse inside here,” he said, tapping the lid. “There will be no bones, no flesh, no decomposing material of any sort whatsoever. There will be simply a way back to the City.”

“You’re mad,” she said.

“I thought Kepler was mad,” Valerian said, “but I was wrong. I should have realized sooner what we were looking at in his cellar. This is a map. It is a map of the ancient canals under the City. And this is our way back.”

“There are no canals in the City,” said Boy.

“Not in the City, under it,” snapped Valerian. “Under the City is an ancient network of canals. They were once exposed to the sky but were slowly bridged, then built over and rebuilt over, until only the rumor of them remains. I myself explored a tiny fraction of them one evil day when I was a student. I quickly became lost. It took me a day to find my way out and I never dared go back.

“It is said they feed into the river, or that the river feeds into them. Few know where their entrances lie. And now I believe we have found one, here, in this stinking village. The millrace must run underground and join the canals!”

Valerian fetched the torch from the wall.

“Hurry! There is no time to be lost.”

“But we don’t even know if you’re right,” protested Willow. “There may be nothing inside here at all.”

“I am right,” said Valerian. “And you two must open the lid. I cannot. Hurry!”

Willow looked at Boy, and Boy looked at Valerian, who glared at him so that he jumped and started to try to shift the heavy stone lid. It didn’t budge.

“Wait!” said Valerian. “We ought to copy this map.”

He tapped the lid once more.

“I have some paper!” said Boy proudly, and pulled a leaf of folded parchment from his pocket. Delighted at being useful for once, he smiled as Valerian took it from him.

“Boy, you astound me! What is this? Have you been studying at last, or…?”

Valerian stopped.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

“It’s mine!” said Boy, wishing he had left it in his pocket.

It was the paper he’d found on the viewing table of the camera obscura in the Tower room, the one with his name at the top and the strange words and symbols underneath.

“It is not yours,” shouted Valerian. “It is about you.”

He turned and looked at Willow.

“Here,” he said. “I have a stub of charcoal. Use the reverse of the paper to copy the map. Do it well!”

So by the flickering torchlight Willow set about trying to copy the lines onto the back of the paper, using a piece of soft charcoal that kept on breaking.

“I can’t see!” she complained, but she kept at it.

“You’ve missed a bit,” said Boy. “Look, there! And that line joins that one, not that one.”

“You do it if you’re so-”

“Boy will not do it,” said Valerian, holding the torch. “You will. You’ll be quicker and neater.”

But it was hard to concentrate with Valerian glaring at her.

“Hurry!” he said. “God knows how long those thugs will be away for.”

“They’re just people,” said Willow. “We offended them. They’re angry. Perhaps if we had just asked to-”

“To what?” interrupted Valerian. “Asked to smash a hole in the floor of their church and dig up the remains of one of the local gentry? I think you should concentrate on what you’re doing.”

“There!” said Willow. “I’ve finished.”

“Are you sure?” said Valerian, comparing the engraved lines with the drawing Willow had made.