Chapter Two: Thirty Centimetres
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Marco put it down.
He put it down on the floor in front of him, stepped back, and looked at it. Then he looked at the shelf it had come from, and the clear ring in the dust where it had sat, and the child's drawings fading on the wall above.
Then he looked at the box again.
Then he picked it up again, because he'd already picked it up and the damage was done.
He carried it to the centre of the room where his headlamp could get a proper angle on it and crouched down and turned it over in his hands, very slowly. The craftsmanship was better than he'd thoughf at first. The carvings in the low relief were actual scenes with figures and landscapes and not just decorative pattern like he'd thought prior. Worn smooth from decades of handling but still legible if he tilted the light right. He could make out what looked like a forest on one face.
Something that might have been a battle on another.
On the third, figures standing in a circle with their hands raised. He spent a while on the fourth face and couldn't really work out what it was depicting.
The latch was a simple hook-and-eye. Old brass, gone slightly green at the edges, but still nonetheless solid. The hinge was where the clover was and he kept going back to it.
Four petals, a short stem. Freehand, but careful.
He photographed it. All four faces, the hinge, the latch, the crank. He photographed the shelf and the dust-ring and the drawings on the wall, because he'd seen enough forum posts about provenance disputes to know that documentation was important for finds, given the headache he'd get without it.
He put his phone away and sat with it for a minute.
The room was warmer than the corridor. He'd noticed it when he came in and filed it away as something to think about later but. sitting here now it was slightly harder to ignore.
. . . Not warm like a heated room; there was no source, no vent, just a few degrees above what the stone usually holds. He'd been in here twenty minutes and hadn't gotten any colder.
The box was warm too. He'd thought it was his hands at first but it wasn't.
it was the box.
He set it carefully into his bag, nestled between the tiles and the candlestick, and stood up and looked around the rest of the room.
There wasn't much.
The shelf, bare. A set of iron hooks on the wall near the door, empty. Two windows, both too narrow and too high to do much.
The floor was the same fitted stone as the rest of the castle, swept at some point in the distant past and not since.
In the far corner, half hidden by a shadow his headlamp had skipped over when he first came in, there was a low wooden chest.
He crossed to it. The latch was rusted shut and he had to work at it for a few minutes with the flat of his multi-tool before it gave. Inside? nothing useful. A length of heavy dark fabric, folded badly, that dissolved slightly at the edges when he held it. Something that might have been a book at some point and was now a block of fused pages. A small clay figure, unglazed, shaped like an animal he couldn't exactly identify, with one leg broken off at the knee.
He took the clay figure. And left everything else.
He stood in the middle of the room again and looked at it.
The drawings, the empty hooks. The chest with its rusted latch. The clear ring on the shelf.
The room had the quality of a place that had been left in a hurry, or a place that had been left with great care by someone who knew they weren't coming back anytime soon. He couldn’t tell which.
Both, maybe. He thought about the monsters packing up after the barrier came down, carrying things out into the light for the first time in centuries, and tried to imagine what you took and what you left. What you couldn't bear to bring and what you couldn't bear to throw away.
He thought about the box sitting on the shelf while all of that happened around it.
. . .
He should go. He'd been down here for almost five hours and he had what he came for, more or less, and his water was most of the way gone and his knees were starting to make noises about all the crouching.
He picked up his bag. And stood in the doorway.
The thing about the crank was that it moved. He'd tested it when he first picked the box up. Just to check, and it had turned a fraction and caught. He'd felt the resistance in it. Something wound tight inside, holding. The latch was still down. There was no reason it would do anything if he tried the crank again.
He'd already tested it. It had just been the mechanism catching on itself. Probably.
He stood in the doorway for a moment more.
Then he went back.
He didn’t decide to, he was just there, standing in front of the shelf again. And took the box back out of his bag and set it down in the ring where it had been, because it seemed right to have a surface under it, and because his hands were already doing it before he'd quite caught up with what he was doing.
The crank was on the right face. Small, iron, a simple handle on a short stem. He put two fingers on it. The warmth of the box came up through his knuckles.
He turned it.
The resistance released all at once and the lid flew open and Marco had about half a second of nothing happening before the box exhaled.
A long slow breath of air that smelled like rain and something green, completely wrong for a room that had been sealed for years, and then his headlamp flickered, and the weight in his hands shifted violently, and he dropped it.
It hit the floor and split along one seam.
What came out of it came out like water. And Marco went backward until his shoulders hit the wall and stayed there.
. . .
She landed on her hands and knees on the stone and didn’t move.
Marco's headlamp went over her once and he looked at the ceiling. He found the crack running northeast and the water stain and studied both of them in considerable detail.
She was breathing. He could hear it; ragged at first, then evening out slowly, like it was remembering the rhythm. Then she coughed, long and deep, and spat something onto the floor, and went quiet again.
A long pause.
" HƼer is þās. "
The words landed strange. Not a language Marco could place a finger on. Nono. something old, something with weight to it, the shape of it familiar the way a song is familiar when it's played too slowly to name. Her voice was wrecked and hoarse. Scraped down to almost nothing.
She said something else. Shorter. Like a curse from how severe it sounded.
Then silence. Marco kept looking at the ceiling. Outside, far above, something that might have been wind moved through the mountain, and the stone of the walls made a low sound that wasn't quite a sound, and the headlamp flickered once more and held.
" Is war over."
Different language this time. The accent was thick and old and sat in unexpected places but it was English, or close enough to it.
Not a question. The flat declarative of someone checking whether a fact they already half-know is true.
Marco opened his mouth. Closed it.
"y. yes," he said, to the ceiling. "y. yeah. It's over."
She didn’t say anything after that. He heard her press her palms to the floor. Heard the slow shift of her weight as she sat back on her heels. He kept his eyes up and his back against the wall and tried to think about what you were supposed to do in a situation like this, and came up blank, and stood there.
The box lay where it had landed with its lid cracked open and the painted clover on the hinge facing the ceiling and the room was still warm, warmer than it should have been, warmer than any of this should have been.
Neither of them said anything for a while.