“Where are we now?” I asked, trailing him down another long cement hallway. At the end of this one, we hit a rusty metal door, locked, of course, but Kanin put his shoulder to the metal and bashed it open.
“We,” he replied, stepping back for me to take in my surroundings, “are in the basement storage of the city’s old museum.”
I gazed around in wonder. We were standing at the edge of the largest room I’d ever seen in my life, a warehouse of cement and steel that stretched farther than even my vampire vision reached. Rusting metal shelves created a labyrinth of aisles, hundreds of narrow corridors that vanished into the back of the room. The contents of those shelves were covered in sheets or stored in wooden boxes, wrapped in a thick film of spiderwebs and dust. If I took in a breath I could smell the choking stench of mold and fungi, growing everywhere, but surprisingly, the shelves seemed fairly intact.
“I can’t believe this place is so…unbroken,” I said, as we started down one of the narrow aisles. Under a filthy sheet, I caught a glimpse of yellow bone and lifted the corner to reveal the skeleton of some kind of enormous cat, frozen in a crouch. I stared at it, amazed, wondering why anyone would want to keep the dead bones of an animal. It was kind of creepy, seeing it like that, without skin and fur. “What the heck is this place anyway?”
“Before the plague, museums were places of history,” Kanin explained as I hurried away from the cat to catch up. His voice echoed in the vastness. “Places of collected knowledge, places where they stored all the items, memories and artifacts of other cultures.”
I paused, catching sight of a mannequin dressed in furs and animal hide. Feathers poked out of its hair, and it held some kind of stone ax. “Why?”
“To remember the past, to not let it fade away. The customs, histories, religions and governments of a thousand cultures are stored here. There are other places like this one all around the world, hidden and forgotten by man. Places that still hold their secrets, waiting to be discovered again.”
“I can’t believe the vamps haven’t burned this place to the ground.”
“They tried,” Kanin replied. “The building above us has been destroyed, no trace of it remains. But the city vampires are mostly concerned with what happens on the surface—they rarely venture down into the tunnels and the secrets below the earth. If they knew about this place, you can be sure they would have burned it to ashes.”
I scowled, hating the vampires again. “And humans will never know about it, will they?” I muttered, following Kanin down an aisle, feeling morose. “All this knowledge, right under their feet, and they’ll never know.”
“Maybe not today.” Kanin stopped at a shelf holding a long, narrow wooden box. Faded red letters were printed on the side, below all the cobwebs and dust, but it was difficult to read. “But there will come a time when man is no longer concerned only with survival, when he will once more be curious as to who came before him, what life was like a thousand years ago, and he will seek out answers to these questions. Maybe it won’t happen for a hundred years or so, but humans’ curiosity has always driven them to find answers. Even our race cannot keep them in the dark forever.”
He broke the box open and rummaged through the contents. I heard the clink and scrape of metal, and then he pulled something out.
It was a sword, a long, double-edged blade with a black metal hilt that looked like a cross. Kanin held it in one hand, but the blade itself was huge, probably close to five feet. With the hilt, it was a few inches taller than me.
“Two-handed German greatsword,” he said, giving me, and it, a scrutinizing look, sizing us up. “Probably too big for you.”
“You think?”
He replaced it and opened another box from the shelf overhead, this time pulling out a large, spiked ball on a chain. It looked extremely nasty, and I was intrigued, but he let it drop with barely a second glance.
“Hey, what was that?” Easing forward, I tried peering into the box on tiptoe, but he shouldered me away. “Oh, come on. I want to see the big-spiky-ball thing.”
“You do not need a flail.” Kanin scowled, as though imagining what I could do with it. I tried peeking into the box again, and he gave me an exasperated look, warning me back. I glared at him.
“Fine. Then tell me, oh, great one. What are we looking for? What do I need?”
He pulled out another weapon, a spear with a long metal tip, and put it back with a shake of his head. “I’m not sure.”