Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow Read online

  Nor was it Dearborn.

  The changes wrought on their shared body to create this third person were subtle, yet utterly transformative. Murgatroyd’s murky mud-flat eyes had sharpened not to Dearborn’s cool blue but to a deep slate, framed by thick black lashes and heavy brows. Her spine had straightened, shoulders broadened, jaw squared. The stripped-white hair had not returned to silver, but had darkened instead to pewter and smoothed into long, thick waves. She was younger than Murgatroyd, plainer than Dearborn, taller than both. And she peered down at Morrigan with a mingled expression of academic curiosity and wolfish delight.

  “Wundersmith,” the woman greeted her. Her voice was not icy, like Dearborn’s, nor was it guttural and rasping like Murgatroyd’s. It wasn’t a voice that needed to be any of those things to be unnerving. It didn’t need to shout or snap or growl. It was low and calm. Weighted and sure of itself. The kind of perfectly pleasant voice Morrigan imagined a dragon might speak with, just before it ate you.

  The dark eyes blinked placidly, surveying Morrigan from head to toe before landing at last on her pale, frightened face.

  When Morrigan spoke again, it was in a voice as thin as paper.

  “Who are you?”

  “Rook.” Her eyes gleamed almost black in the dark. “Rook Rosenfeld. Scholar Mistress for the School of Wundrous Arts.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BASEMENT NERDS

  Wundrous… Arts,” Morrigan repeated.

  The phrase was brand-new and yet somehow entirely familiar. Like the bit in all of Dame Chanda’s arias when everything got louder and higher and more dramatic, and you knew it was coming, but even so, it sort of took your breath away when it arrived.

  She waited for Rook to elaborate, but Rook did not. Instead, she turned and began to descend the stairs into darkness. She didn’t ask Morrigan to follow, and for a moment, the sensible voice in Morrigan’s head told her to get back inside that railpod, go straight upstairs to the dining hall, sit herself down with a nice cup of hot chocolate, and pretend this never happened.

  But an odd thing about living in Nevermoor, and joining the Wundrous Society, and having Jupiter North as her patron, and being best friends with Hawthorne Swift, was that the sensible voice in Morrigan’s head seemed to be getting quieter by the day. Some days she could scarcely hear it at all.

  Morrigan sighed, already annoyed at herself before she’d even taken a step. Of course she was going to follow the scary stranger down a dark stairwell into a secret basement. Of course.

  The stairs curved around and around in a wide spiral, and Morrigan had to go slowly and trail one hand along the cold stone wall so that she didn’t trip and tumble all the way down. When they reached the bottom, she followed Rook along a chilly, narrow, pitch-black passage for what felt like an age but was probably more like a minute.

  Morrigan shivered and tried to convince herself it was because of the cold. “Where exactly are we going?”

  Rook didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Morrigan flinched as somewhere up ahead of them, a letter T—tilted on its side—began to glow in bright, luminescent gold, piercing the near-perfect darkness. More letters followed, blinking into life one by one, until they formed an enormous sign carved into a stone arch above a wooden door.

  The second-to-last word had gashes and scorch marks all over. It looked as if someone had tried to violently remove it, first with a blade or chisel of some sort, then with fire, and finally they had simply crossed it out and painted over the top.

  Rook looked at the sign and gave a small, unimpressed grunt. “Ignore the vandalism.” She lifted her hand as if to push open the door, then paused, glancing at Morrigan with a slight incline of her head. “Ready?”

  Morrigan stared up at the golden words. A tempest had begun to gather in her stomach. Of nerves, and excitement, and more than anything, a burning hunger to know more. She felt a tiny little smile creep around the corners of her mouth. “Yes.”

  It must have been quite a grand school once upon a time, Morrigan thought—much grander, in fact, than the floors that housed the Mundane and Arcane schools. On the other side of the wooden door, she and Rook stood at one end of a long, broad hallway made entirely of white marble from floor to ceiling. There were no other doors, only tall open archways leading to vast, uninhabited chambers left and right. It was so cold their breath clouded in the air.

  Rook led her past chamber after empty chamber, their footsteps echoing. Morrigan peeked through each archway, trying to get some idea of what these spaces might once have held. Were they classrooms, laboratories, workshops? But there was no furniture anywhere, just vast, empty space.

  There were words carved into the arches also, and as Morrigan and Rook passed each one, they lit up on cue, glowing golden from within the stone. But they didn’t give much away. They were just words in languages Morrigan didn’t understand, like Kalani and Hamal and Zhang and Siskin and…

  Wait, she thought, pausing outside one of the rooms to stare up at the glowing sign. I know that word.

  Siskin.

  Morrigan frowned. She’d read it somewhere. It was a name.

  “Juno Siskin!” she cried, and her voice bounced around the space. “Oh—oh! Kiri Kalani! They’re all Wundersmiths—these rooms are all named after past Wundersmiths, aren’t they?”

  “Not just any Wundersmiths,” Rook called from up ahead, without slowing down or waiting for her. “The original nine.”

  Morrigan ran to catch up, checking each sign that blinked into life along the way. Every name she recognized gave her a strange sort of thrill. It was like walking through history. Her history.

  She’d read about some of these people in the awful class she’d been made to take last year, A History of Heinous Wundrous Acts, with Professor Onstald. She’d had to study his book—Missteps, Blunders, Fiascoes, Monstrosities, and Devastations: An Abridged History of the Wundrous Acts Spectrum. Onstald’s book didn’t have anything good to say about Wundersmiths, but Morrigan now knew for certain that at least some of his book—and possibly all of it—was an absolute fiction.

  Magnusson. Tyr Magnusson, according to Onstald, tried to stage a political coup. He occupied the Lightwing Palace for seventy days, taking the entire royal household hostage and starving half of them to death in the process.

  Williams. That had to be Audley Williams, Morrigan thought, the Wundersmith who supposedly invented the measles by accident.

  Vale. Vivienne Vale, who’d lived for several ages as a hermit, trying to write the world’s first objectively perfect song, but instead wrote one that went down in history as the most annoying earworm of all time. It sent dozens of people clinically insane and was banned throughout the realm. (The song went unnamed in Onstald’s book for fear of getting stuck in the reader’s head forever.)

  Had Onstald’s book been right about any of them? It was wrong about Odbuoy Jemmity, who created Jemmity Park, and about Decima Kokoro, who built Cascade Towers. Jupiter had proven that by taking her to those places and showing her how profoundly brilliant they were. There were even plaques there, left over a hundred years ago by the Committee for the Classification of Wundrous Acts. Jemmity’s secret theme park had not been classified a Fiasco, as the book would have had her believe, but a Spectacle, a thing of joy for deserving children. And Cascade Towers was a Singularity: an original work of absolute genius.

  If Tyr Magnusson, Audley Williams, and Vivienne Vale were as dreadful as Onstald believed, would the Wundrous Society have celebrated them with grand marble halls in their names? Morrigan doubted it.

  At the farthest end of the hall, they took a sharp right into the tenth and final chamber, the smallest she’d seen so far, but, in contrast to the other mausoleum-like chambers, it was comfortable and welcoming, warmly lit by gas lamps and an enormous fireplace.

  The walls were littered with photographs of odd creatures, beautiful buildings, and famous Nevermoorian landmarks. There was a huge, colorful map of the Wunderground, and on
e entire wall was covered with gilt-framed oil paintings, mostly portraits.

  There was one long farmhouse-style table in the center of the room and—a surprise to Morrigan after the deathly silence of the other empty rooms—actual people sitting at it, at least a dozen, maybe more. They were hunched over papers and surrounded by enormous stacks of books and piled-up teacups, everyone still and quiet and concentrating. This was a room for study.

  As they entered, Rook cleared her throat. The group looked up and then leapt to their feet, practically knocking over book piles and lamps in their haste. Morrigan wondered if this visit had been sprung on them, and if they were terrified of Rook or just excited to see her. Should she be terrified of Rook, she wondered? She didn’t seem anywhere near as bad as Dearborn.

  It took Morrigan a moment to realize that none of them were, in fact, looking at the Scholar Mistress. They were staring at her. And to complete this entirely unlikely scenario, they burst into applause.

  “Welcome!” cried one of them, and another shouted, “Bravo, Morrigan!” (Bravo for what, exactly, she didn’t know.)

  “Mr. O’Leary!” Morrigan said, suddenly noticing a familiar, smiling face. She stared at her Opening a Dialogue with the Dead teacher, an elderly gentleman with bright, piercingly blue eyes. He leaned on a handsome carved walking stick, and his snow-white hair was combed neatly and parted down the side.

  “You might as well call me Conall, Wundersmith,” he told her, eyes twinkling with merriment. “We don’t indulge in formalities down here.”

  Rook gestured vaguely at the group. “Morrigan Crow, meet the basement nerds. Basement nerds, Morrigan Crow.”

  Conall arched an eyebrow at the Scholar Mistress. “I can only presume you meant to introduce us by what you well know is our actual name—the Sub-Nine Academic Group.”

  “Presume away,” Rook said, staring back at him.

  Morrigan found that she recognized a few of the group members, by faces if not by names. Next to Conall O’Leary stood a young man Morrigan had seen on the Arcane floors, who might have been a senior scholar, or a very recent graduate, and there were a few teachers she’d seen around Proudfoot House. Rounding out the group, a foxwun wearing a coat of burgundy velvet sat calmly on the floor in front, watching her with a polite curiosity.

  “Welcome!” shouted the teenager, making his way to the front of the group to shake Morrigan’s hand, a little too eagerly.

  “Inside voice, please, Ravi. We don’t want to scare her off,” said the foxwun kindly. She looked up at Morrigan and nodded. “Hello. I’m Sofia. Unit 897. I hope you don’t mind the ambush, Morrigan, it’s just that we’re so happy to be meeting you at last. It’s truly an honor.”

  Morrigan looked around at all the faces beaming back at her and was shocked to find that she believed that improbable statement. Nobody had ever been honored to meet her before.

  “Sofia, Conall,” said Rook, beckoning the pair of them, “I think we’ll take Morrigan to the Liminal Hall. The rest of you just… carry on nerding.”

  Morrigan followed Rook, Sofia, and Conall from the warmth of the study room and back to the cold marble hallway. They turned left into one of the cavernous chambers, and the word Williams lit up above the doorway as they entered. They didn’t stay in Williams, however, but crossed the floor into another room called Muhrer, which led to another called Treloar.

  “I can’t tell you how thrilled we were to learn that the Wundrous Society would have its own Wundersmith once again,” Sofia continued as they walked. “We wanted to speak with you—to congratulate you—as soon as you made your announcement. It truly was so brave of you.”

  “But Elder Quinn said we had to wait until after your first C&D meeting,” said Conall.

  Morrigan looked up at him. “So the Elders are in charge of the School of Wundrous Arts too?”

  Conall, Sofia, and Rook exchanged a look.

  “Let’s just say there’s an extremely unofficial understanding between the Elders and us,” said Conall carefully. “It suits them to ask us no questions, so we tell them no lies. We think they must understand that what we’re doing in the Sub-Nine Academic Group is important, even if they don’t know much about it. They let us carry on quietly, so long as we don’t cause them any trouble.”

  Morrigan smiled at that. She found she liked the thought of the Elders not knowing about everything that happened in the Society. “What exactly is the Sub-Nine Academic Group?”

  “It was the School of Wundrous Arts,” said Sofia. They’d entered a fourth chamber now: Gibbs. Every room had so far looked the same: white marble floors and walls without windows. “But you can’t have a school without any scholars, so after the last Wundersmith was exiled from Nevermoor, this floor lay empty and abandoned for a very long time. Until a few Ages ago, when the Sub-Nine Academic Group was founded here in the name of research and the preservation of important Wundersmith history.”

  “We are a cooperative of like-minded scholars and researchers,” said Conall, “with a passionate interest in the Wundersmiths. We work largely in secret, to salvage and preserve Wundersmith history, and there’s no better place to learn about them than here on Sub-Nine, where they once were educated. The School of Wundrous Arts.”

  “How many of you are there?” asked Morrigan.

  “About fifteen or so at Proudfoot House,” he said. “But there are others like us, dotted all around the Seven Pockets. We share information sometimes. Not many of us are audacious enough to study the so-called Wretched Arts under the Society’s own nose. Though it’s all academic, of course.”

  “Not for me it isn’t,” said Morrigan.

  “No. Not for you,” he agreed, smiling. “How extraordinary.”

  “And you three are the leaders?”

  Conall and Sofia shared a look.

  “Well… we don’t really have leaders, as such,” said Sofia slowly. “And as for Rook, well… she, erm—”

  “Oh, I’m not with them,” Rook interjected, a little disdainfully.

  There was a brief, awkward silence while Sofia and Conall seemed to search for the best way to explain.

  “Rook just sort of… showed up one day,” Sofia said finally. “About a year ago. We knew Dearborn and Murgatroyd, of course, but, well… we’d never met Rook. We weren’t sure why she was here. I’m not sure she knew herself, really—”

  “I felt like it,” Rook said simply.

  “But she kept showing up and one day, a couple of months ago, it all fell into place. The day after Hallowmas. The day we learned we had a Wundersmith among us, for the first time in over one hundred years.”

  “We realized then that Rook had first appeared around the time of your inauguration,” Conall explained, casting the woman a brief look of baffled wonderment. “When the School of Wundrous Arts somehow realized it would be needing a new Scholar Mistress.”

  Morrigan’s brain stumbled a bit on that information. She glanced at Rook. “Where… um… sorry, but where were you… before then?”

  “Oh, you know. Around. Keeping busy,” Rook replied vaguely. She fixed Morrigan with an owlish look. “You can’t have a school without any scholars, but you only need one.”

  They entered yet another room. Morrigan was trying to keep up as they moved briskly from chamber to chamber, one leading on to the next; she’d counted six so far. Sub-Nine was like a maze.

  “And you’re going to teach me the Wretched—sorry, the Wundrous Arts? Even though you’re not Wundersmiths yourselves?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Conall.

  “For now, Morrigan, we just wanted to bring you here to try something. But your proper lessons will begin tomorrow,” said Sofia. “We’ve spent weeks with Rook devising what we think will be a rigorous and challenging curriculum, and we’re excited to begin.”

  “I can’t be here all the time, for obvious reasons,” Rook explained. “I’ll drop in when I can, but I’ve appointed Conall and Sofia to supervise your daily studies. T
he rest of the nerds are not to bother you and you’re not to bother them. Understood?”

  Morrigan nodded distractedly. They’d finally stopped outside a closed wooden door; the only one she’d seen so far. The name carved above it had lit up like the others as they approached, as if it could sense their presence.

  “The Liminal Hall,” she read aloud. There was a small metal circle set in the center of the door. But nobody moved to touch it. Morrigan looked from Rook, to Sofia, to Conall. “Are we… going in?”

  “We can’t open it,” said Rook. “Everyone here has tried their imprint… and we’ve also tried just about everything else, short of a battering ram. No luck.”

  “What’s in there?” asked Morrigan.

  Conall cleared his throat. “We’re not… entirely certain,” he admitted.

  It took Morrigan a moment to realize that the three of them were watching her eagerly, expectantly. “Oh! Should I, er…?” She wiggled the W imprint on her index finger.

  “Try it,” urged Sofia, nodding.

  Morrigan felt a nervous, excited flip in her middle. She reached out and pressed her trembling index finger to the circle, and—

  Nothing.

  She tried again, pressing harder.

  Still nothing.

  Her excitement deflated. She should have known nothing would happen. The ring was cold and unlit, after all. The only time she could open the circular seal on the door in her bedroom was when it was warm and gently pulsating with light.

  She turned reluctantly to face their disappointment. Rook pressed her mouth into a line and said nothing, but Conall patted Morrigan consolingly on the shoulder.

  “Ah well,” he said in a bracing tone. “Never mind.”

  “Maybe I could… try again tomorrow?” she suggested feebly.

  “We thought that would probably happen, Morrigan,” Sofia added. “It’s quite all right.”