A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [203]
With a few whispered words Satu lifted me from the floor and propelled me with carefully directed gusts of wind out of the hall and down a flight of curving stairs that wound into the depths of the castle. She moved me through the castle’s ancient dungeons. Something rustled behind me, and I craned my neck to see what it was.
Ghosts—dozens of ghosts—were filing behind us in a spectral funeral procession, their faces sad and afraid. For all Satu’s powers, she seemed unable to see the dead everywhere around us, just as she had been unable to see my mother.
The witch was attempting to raise a heavy wooden slab in the floor with her hands. I closed my eyes and braced myself for a fall. Instead Satu grabbed my hair and aimed my face into a dark hole. The smell of death rose in a noxious wave, and the ghosts shifted and moaned.
“Do you know what this is, Diana?”
I shrank back and shook my head, too frightened and exhausted to speak.
“It’s an oubliette.” The word rustled from ghost to ghost. A wispy woman, her face creased with age, began to weep. “Oubliettes are places of forgetting. Humans who are dropped into oubliettes go mad and then starve to death—if they survive the impact. It’s a very long way down. They can’t get out without help from above, and help never comes.”
The ghost of a young man with a deep gash across his chest nodded in agreement with Satu’s words. Don’t fall, girl, he said in a sorrowful voice.
“But we won’t forget you. I’m going for reinforcements. You might be stubborn in the face of one of the Congregation’s witches, but not all three. We found that out with your father and mother, too.” She tightened her grip, and we sailed more than sixty feet down to the bottom of the oubliette. The rock walls changed color and consistency as we tunneled deeper into the mountain.
“Please,” I begged when Satu dropped me on the floor. “Don’t leave me down here. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t know how to use my magic or how to recall the manuscript.”
“You’re Rebecca Bishop’s daughter,” Satu said. “You have power—I can feel it—and we’ll make sure that it breaks free. If your mother were here, she would simply fly out.” Satu looked into the blackness above us, then to my ankle. “But you’re not really your mother’s daughter, are you? Not in any way that matters.”
Satu bent her knees, lifted her arms, and pushed gently against the oubliette’s stone floor. She soared up and became a blur of white and blue before disappearing. Far above me the wooden door closed.
Matthew would never find me down here. By now any trail would be long gone, our scents scattered to the four winds. The only way to get out, short of being retrieved by Satu, Peter Knox, and some unknown third witch, was to get myself out.
Standing with my weight on one foot, I bent my knees, lifted my arms, and pushed against the floor as Satu had. Nothing happened. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus on the way it had felt to dance in the salon, hoping it would make me float again. All it did was make me think of Matthew, and the secrets he had kept from me. My breath turned into a sob, and when the oubliette’s dank air passed into my lungs, the resulting cough brought me to my knees.
I slept a bit, but it was hard to ignore the ghosts once they started chattering. At least they provided some light in the gloom. Every time they moved, a tiny bit of phosphorescence smudged the air, linking where they had just been to where they were going. A young woman in filthy rags sat opposite me, humming quietly to herself and staring in my direction with vacant eyes. In the center of the room, a monk, a knight in full armor, and a musketeer peered into an even deeper hole that emitted a feeling of such loss that I couldn’t bear to go near it. The monk muttered the mass for the dead, and the musketeer kept reaching into the pit as if looking for something he had lost.
My mind slid toward oblivion, losing its struggle against the combination of fear, pain, and cold. Frowning with concentration, I remembered the last passages I’d read in the Aurora Consurgens