Brother Leon tread carefully down the stone steps to the dungeon rooms, where the brothers studied and slept. At the landing he checked left and right down the dusty, torchlit corridor. He saw none of his brothers, but his thin, grey-veined hand still moved to conceal the note in his robe pocket.
The others knew nothing of his origin, or of his true role in that place and time. It was a secret he was sworn to keep – the Academy had decided the brothers of his Order were not ready for that knowledge, except in the most dire of circumstances.
Brother Leon did not know if the circumstances were dire or not. The instructions he had received were extraordinary in their sparseness. On the note in his pocket, which he had found inside Charles Renault’s book, a single line had been written: Donnez ceci au petit frère aux cheveux noirs et au dos bosselé.
Give this to the small friar with black hair and the humped back.
The sentence could describe any number of the friars in his charge. But only Brother Geoffrey could read the language of the book, so he had guessed and assigned him to it.
Now he moved softly down the corridor to Brother Geoffrey’s door. He regretted locking him in with the book, but, until he knew its purpose, he couldn’t allow communication with the others. And he suspected that study of the book could have strange, hard-to-explain consequences.
He placed his hand on the wood – cringing as always at the sight of his aged, nearly translucent skin – and brought his ear close. He heard nothing, beyond a few chanted prayers that seeped out from other rooms. After another moment, he pulled an iron ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door.
He opened it only a crack, at first. “Frère?” he called. Silence. He swung the door back. The torches inside waved in the draft, throwing the table shadow toward him and then back. The table was bare, except for Brother Geoffrey’s quill and ink cup, and the pallet in the corner was vacant too. The room looked undisturbed. “Frère?”
There was no answer. He bent to look under the table and scanned the ceiling in all four corners. Mon Dieu, Brother Geoffrey was gone. Had the book taught him to jump dimensions? It wouldn’t shock him, but it would irk him if he had failed to recognize Brother Geoffrey’s untrained ability. He had studied for years at the Academy to learn how to identify dimension jumpers; how had he missed the signs?
He left the room, cautiously locking the door behind him, and hurried down the corridor, to where a shallow grotto had been set in the wall. Inside the brothers maintained a shrine to Notre-Dame du Salut, Our Lady of Salvation. A polished, rosewood statue stood atop an ornate gold cabinet, which was draped with a gold-embroidered white silk. Brother Leon didn’t pause to cross himself; he knelt on the wood kneeler, threw back the silk, and opened the cabinet’s double doors.
Inside three simple field stones were arranged in a triangle atop a chalked white circle. Brother Leon’s heart sank, because the circle was empty, and there he had hoped to find further communication from the Academy. He pulled the note from his pocket, and, glancing over his shoulder, reached inside his robe for the lanyard that held his ink pen. With the little English he had, he scrawled his own message: He has gone?
He placed the note inside the circle; then he rotated the three stones clockwise, each one replacing the next until all three had been moved. As the last stone took the first one’s place, they began to glow a dull red, as though they had been heated beneath a bonfire. He closed the cabinet, and in moments a brilliant white light strobed out of the gap between the doors.
When the light went out, he cracked one door to check – the circle was empty; the note had been transported.
Next Chapter
Or start with Chapter 1
Base image from Pixabay, by geralt: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/
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Cool story! I love magical mystical stuff. So the book is gone too?
Yes. The friar has the book with him. I'll need to consider if Brother Leon should note that when I revise. Thanks for asking that.
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I enjoy reading your work 😊😊
Thank you.