“Here we are. Last one,” said Porzia. “‘Vous avez des ennemis? Mais c’est l’histoire de tout homme qui a fait une action grande ou crée une idée neuve.’”
“No idea,” said Faraz.
Porzia scrunched up her face, trying to dredge up the memory. “Ugh, it’s so familiar! I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
Leo chewed his lip. “What if we came at it from a different approach? Which famous French writers are we missing?”
“Zola? No, it doesn’t sound like Zola,” Porzia said, immediately rejecting her own suggestion.
Porzia’s gaze locked with Leo’s and they said at the same time, “Hugo!”
She leaned close and spoke the name. “Victor Hugo.”
The stone slid away and clicked into place. For a minute, nothing happened. They all exchanged questioning looks—had they missed an inscription somewhere? What exactly should they expect? Elsa feared that Porzia might have gotten one of the quotes wrong, or perhaps they needed to be triggered in a particular order. Year of publication, perhaps?
Then the ground shuddered, stone grating against stone, the courtyard echoing with the noise of it. Slowly, the inner portion of the courtyard sank into the ground, each paving stone lowering to a different height so that the spiral pattern became a spiral staircase.
As soon as the shaking stilled, Leo stepped close to the edge and peered into the dark hole. “Now there’s an ominous sort of invitation if ever I saw one.”
Elsa joined him at the top of the spiral stairs. Grabbing his arm for support, she tested the first step to make sure it would take her weight. “Not an illusion, at least.”
Somewhere in the depths below, lights came on, as if the labyrinth knew they were there. With the bottom of the stairs bathed in gaslight, Elsa could guess the depth of the hole to be five or six meters—close to two stories. Letting go of Leo’s arm, she stepped down to the second stair. The stones were thick, making the steps uncomfortably far apart, as if they were designed for a giant.
“Nope, not creepy at all,” Leo muttered before following her.
There was no handrail on the inside of the spiral, and enough empty space in the middle to allow for a very quick trip to the bottom, so Elsa hugged closely to the outside wall as she descended. The cold of the stone seeped through her sleeve like icewater.
A few steps above, Porzia said, “By all means, let’s walk into the trap.” Her voice echoed weirdly in the stairway column.
Halfway down, the column opened up into an underground cavern. Elsa hurried to the bottom of the stairs, feeling precarious and exposed without the wall beside her, but she saw no slavering monsters lying in wait to attack them. Curious. She paused at the bottom and held up a hand to stall the others. There was something off about the air down here. Not the smell—though it was unpleasantly musty—but the way it felt when it filled her lungs. The density, maybe, or the temperature, as if she were breathing soup. Elsa took another deep breath, trying to analyze it better, and spots began to swim in her vision.
She spun around. “Get back outside. Quick!”
Ushering the others before her, she rushed back up the stairs, thighs burning with the effort. Above in the courtyard, she went to her knees on the flagstones, expelling the bad air from her lungs. Her vision tunneled, and she heaved a few deep breaths to compensate, her corset stays digging into her bruised side with each attempt.
Leo crouched beside her. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Elsa shook her head, focused on breathing. When her vision finally cleared, she said, “There’s no oxygen down there. Porzia’s right—it’s a death trap.”
“That’s fantastic news,” Faraz said in earnest. “It means the book is almost definitely down there.”
Porzia gave him a look. “Death trap, Faraz. Death. Trap.”
Leo said, “We need a breathing apparatus, like Fleuss designed for those construction divers on the Severn Tunnel project.”
The names Fleuss and Severn meant nothing to Elsa, but she was already thinking of oxygen tanks. “It shouldn’t take long to build a few. Here, hold this,” she said, handing the laboratory book to Porzia.
She raised her eyebrows. “Seriously? You want me to just stand here holding the worldbook?”
“I need Leo and Faraz for this.”
Porzia shook her head, exasperated. “Fine. But if I get eaten by another wolf-monster while you’re all off playing in the lab, I shall be very put out.”
Elsa set the coordinates and ported into her laboratory world with the boys in tow. Faraz and Leo looked around curiously, as if they’d never seen a laboratory before. Clearly, since it was her work space, she’d have to take charge.
“All right. Leo, we’ll need gas canisters, tubing, something to work as a face shield. Go through that door for mechanical supplies,” she said, pointing. He nodded and went, and she turned to Faraz. “If we’re constructing it as a closed system—inhaling from and exhaling into the apparatus—we’ll need a chemical to scrub carbon dioxide from the air we breathe out. What do you think, limewater? Caustic potash?”
He nodded. “We’ll need something porous to suspend it in. Make a sort of air filter.”
With three brains and three sets of hands, the construction process flew by. This project wasn’t nearly as difficult as the tracking map she’d designed with Porzia, but the same principle applied: with the right help, everything went faster. Soon they were shouldering four newly invented rebreathers and carrying them back through the portal.
“Look, you’re still alive,” Elsa said brightly, accepting the lab book back from Porzia.
“Alive and bored,” she said, taking the fourth rebreather off Leo’s hands. “Oof, this contraption weighs a ton. You call this quality engineering?”
Leo replied, “I swear, you could find something to complain about in paradise.”
“The oxygen balance is going to be high at first, so shallow breaths,” Faraz warned. “We don’t want anyone hyperventilating and passing out down there.”
Elsa adjusted the oxygen tank’s strap across her shoulders, held the facemask over her nose and mouth, and took an experimental breath. Everything seemed to be in working order, so she tied the facemask in place. She exchanged a nod with Faraz, who detached Skandar from his shoulder and—with some difficulty—convinced the beast to wait for them in the courtyard. Then the humans took the stairs down again.
“So what now?” Leo said, looking around the cavern. His voice came through the facemask, muffled but still audible.
Porzia said, “We investigate until we find another clue, like we did above.”