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Chapter Fifty-Six



Druadaen had just begun wondering if the journey to the bottom of the stairs might require several whole days when they came to the first landing. And the first skeletons. Or rather, what was left of them.

Elweyr passed the lantern to Druadaen, who sheathed what the others had started calling his “dragon-sword” and drew his shortsword instead. Once Elweyr had relaxed into a better posture from which to construct thaumates, he glanced at the remains. “Since the bodies were never removed, I’m guessing the invaders must have won.”

Ahearn shouldered his sword as he kneeled to get a closer look. “I don’t think there were any invaders. Their gear is all the same, more or less.” He picked up a bronze shortsword with a wide, leaf-shaped blade. Its hilt was intact, although the leather wrapping on the grip crumbled at his first touch.

Elweyr frowned. “So maybe these were rebels and loyalists who killed each other during a coup?”

Ahearn shook his head. “I’d bet more than spare coin that what killed these poor bastards didn’t use a weapon to do it: no sword marks on the bones. They’re all in pieces. Splintered.”

“Broken apart for the marrow?” Umkhira’s tone was matter-of-fact.

Ahearn looked up. “No: by the force of the blow. Or, judging from the marks, the bite.” He stood again, gesturing around them. “And see? They’re all lying in a fan, just as they came down to the landing. Or backed up to the stairs maybe, because there are none on the down-side.”

Umkhira nodded. “They were killed by enemies that came up from below.”

Druadaen frowned. “Since there are no remains of the attackers, perhaps it was just one large enemy.” He considered the dark maw where the staircase continued its descent and raised the bull’s-eye cover: the narrow beam winked away, was replaced by a wide circle of light. He shook his head at Ahearn’s irritated glance. “The beam was just as likely to give us away. It is more important now that all of us can see all our surroundings. Particularly since Umkhira’s eyes are unlikely to see much contrast down here.”

She shrugged. “Druadaen is correct; all things are the same temperature. And the river ambush taught us that we cannot rely on my eyes alone. We could miss many important details.”

“You mean, like this?” Elweyr asked.

They turned to discover the thaumantic standing near the wall, looking at a vertically mounted crystal tube. He glanced back across the landing, pointed at a matching tube on the opposite wall. “I wonder what—?”

“Step away,” snapped S’ythreni.

“Wha—?”

“Step away! There’s light growing inside it!”

Ahearn squinted at the tubes. “I can’t see anyth—oh!”

An extremely faint glow was now visible inside each tube, running from the top to the bottom.

“I started noticing them a while ago,” S’ythreni said. She returned the stares of the others. “They just appeared to be a strange kind of cresset,” she muttered. “Something that would protect a flame against wind or damp.”

Druadaen studied the faint green glow. It was growing slowly, but also, very evenly. I wonder…? He glanced at Umkhira. “Is it getting warmer?”

She shook her head. “If so, I cannot see it.”

Druadaen looked to Elweyr, who had raised his palm and was frowning. “No manas, either.”

“So,” Ahearn said, frowning. “If it’s not flame, and it’s not mancery—?”

“—then it’s either a chemical that is reacting to the light. Or—”

“—or small animalcules, the kind that glow in the sea,” S’ythreni interrupted, peering very closely at the tube. “It is filled with liquid. Maybe they are reacting to our light.”

“Or,” continued Druadaen, “maybe they are reacting to our movement. Elweyr got close to it just a few moments after I took the sleeve off the lantern. Either could have caused it to react.”

“Assuming it’s not reacting to something else,” S’ythreni muttered darkly.

Ahearn stared at her. “Such as?”

“Food. By which I mean, us.”

Elweyr sighed. “I think I liked you better as an optimist.”

No one even smiled.

Druadaen and Ahearn exchanged glances. The swordsman shrugged, looked away. “Up to you.”

Druadaen nodded. “From here, the decision must be up to each individual: go down or go back. I must continue. But whichever you choose, my high opinion of you will remain unaltered.” He allowed himself a small grin. “Well, that is not entirely true. My opinion of you will change if you go back: I will know that you are eminently sane.”

Smiles sprang up.

Ahearn rolled his eyes. “Godsblocks, will yeh just muzzle yerself and lead?”

* * *

The stairs seemed endless. As did the corpses.

The lower they went, the more crystal tubes started glowing to light their way, and the more landings they found littered with the bodies of those who had descended before.

The remains became steadily more substantial. The skeletons that predominated at first slowly gave way to desiccated corpses, some of which were largely intact. They were also increasingly varied in terms of their origins. One landing was filled with bodies dressed in crumbling furs, half of whom carried copper and even stone weapons. The very next held remains of several different species, all accoutred in fine gear, including one Iavan wearing perfectly preserved sheath armor. S’ythreni murmured her respects but increased her pace, impatient to reach the bottom of the stairs.

What they discovered there, almost an hour after beginning their descent, was strangely anticlimactic: a single body, mummified by the dry air, leaning against the open half of a wide brazen portal. In one hand it held the jagged remains of a broken vial, whereas the other had ossified into a literal death grip around the hilt of a broadsword.

Druadaen asked Elweyr to light the second lantern and, once that was accomplished, slid the bull’s-eye sleeve back into place on his own. He shone the beam into the dark beyond the portal.

A vast chamber, with broad-bellied pillars. From what little they could see, they and the walls had both been painted. In the case of the latter, there seemed to be designs, or possibly frescoes, layered between wide bands of color.

“Well,” murmured Elweyr, “no bodies, at least.”

“We haven’t seen the whole room, yet,” countered S’ythreni.

“Ah, there’s yer natural optimism shinin’ through, High-Ears,” Ahearn whispered. But he made no move to cross the threshold. “Of course, there’s no reason to be hasty.” He held up a hand when Druadaen made to slip past him into the room. “That goes for you, too, mate. We’ve come this far; we can wait a few minutes while Elweyr uses a bit o’ mancery to see more of what’s inside.”

But Elweyr was shaking his head. He pointed up at the portal’s ornate lintel; sigils streamed along it like an arabesque of engraved serpents. “A warding barrier.”

“Well, can’t yeh get past it?”

Elweyr sounded as though his molars were clenched. “Not without knowing more about the constructs that are bound into it. I know the characters—well, some of them—from the surviving fragment of the earliest known thaumantic codex.”

“How old?” Druadaen asked.

“Pre-First Consentium, pre-Ballashan. So, twenty-four hundred years. At least.”

Druadaen found Ahearn’s arm stretched out in front of him yet again. “All the more reason to be all the more careful,” he said patiently, but firmly. “For all we know, that portal could do more than just keep Elweyr’s mancery out. It could give us a lethal love tap if we try to cross it.”

“Let’s not debate this, Ahearn.”

“Ah, then if we’re not to discuss, let’s remember who’s the captain when we’re making decisions of the moment, yeh? So it’s my judgment that—”

He flinched as Druadaen’s bracelet unfurled itself into the velene, already on the wing. It flitted through the portal into the darkness beyond.

“Now that’s not fair!” Ahearn muttered, leaning into Druadaen’s face.

Who smiled. “It wasn’t my doing, but I think we can enter safely, now.” He led the way.

There were no remains in the room, but Druadaen hardly noticed that. The size of a small arena, the frescoes on its longest, facing walls were divided into two narrative threads, each of which spanned multiple generations, possibly multiple centuries. Running parallel to those walls were two rows of the portly columns, bracketing a wide walkway that ran from the center of the smaller wall on their left to the center of its counterpart to the right. But it was what waited at the end of those two walkways that fixed Druadaen’s attention.

In the center of the left wall was a set of narrow yet immensely tall doors. Druadaen could not read the flowing script that ran up one side of their marble frame and down the other, but the lintel clearly communicated the nature of the room beyond; it was a single slab of white marble carved in the shape of an open scroll, the bells at the ends of the two rods glinting gold in the lantern light. Surely they had found the library that gave the island its name.

But at the end of the walkway that led to the right-hand wall there was a much more enigmatic structure: a perfectly round, sigil-wreathed portal that opened unto darkness. And directly in front of it was a perfectly round pool of exactly the same dimensions, cut into what appeared to be a gigantic block of onyx that protruded just a few inches above the level of the floor, thereby providing a slightly raised rim.

“I do not like that,” Umkhira almost growled when she saw the strange structure to the right.

As they approached it, they discovered that the pool was filled with an almost opaque amber liquid.

“I like that even less,” Ahearn muttered, staring at the still surface. “Although I can’t exactly say why.”

Druadaen nodded. “I can. From extensive personal experience, I can tell you one thing about all that liquid.”

“What’s that?”

He turned and pointed. “It doesn’t belong anywhere near books or scrolls.” Seeing their long-suffering looks, he shook his head. “You misunderstand. My concern is not that it constitutes any immediate danger to the library. Rather, I am concerned that those who built this library placed it here at all. It was not merely illogical for them to put a reservoir so near their collection; it is disturbingly perverse.”

The velene sped past his nose, swooped until it had his attention, and then glided straight to the library doors. Where it landed and sat. Patiently.

Druadaen nodded. “Let’s get what we came for and then get back to the ship.”

* * *

As with the secret entrance now far above them, the tall doors proved extremely easy to open, thanks to a clever counterweight system concealed within the walls. And if Tharêdæath had been mistaken in asserting that the ruins had never been entered before, his assertion proved to be correct about the library itself: it was undisturbed and pristine. Even the ladders to reach the uppermost shelves still stood ready, although they collapsed at first touch.

However, to call the storage space “shelves” was a misnomer. Rather, they were row upon row of stone gridworks. The square cubbies along the bottom were largest, those at the top the smallest, and just below each, three symbols had been incised into the rock. So, the room had at least ten thousand separate receptacles for scrolls. And almost all of them were full.

Elweyr’s calculations matched Druadaen, leading him to assert that it would take the two of them weeks, maybe months, to track down mentions of Saqqaru. And although both of them had basic facility in a number of the ancient and dead languages which no doubt predominated in the collection, there were almost certainly others in which they had no skill or had never seen before. In short, the mantic concluded, they couldn’t do more than sample a few hundred in the hope that they would be lucky to run across something that one or the other of them recognized as pertinent.

Although Druadaen had not expected so massive a collection, he had foreseen the problem of translation and held a thoroughly modern scroll out toward the mantic. “Here,” he said, “use this.”

“What is it?” Elweyr said, face screwing up as he scanned down the unfamiliar words and, in some cases, unfamiliar character sets.

“The words for ‘Saqqaru,’ ‘Cataclysm,’ and two or three others in all the languages Tharêdæath and I knew which date back to the approximate time that Imvish’al was sundered. That includes predynastic Saqqari.” He stared up at the stone gridworks surrounding them. “The code on each receptacle seems to progress as would numbers.”

Elweyr glanced at the characters chiseled beneath each block in the nearest grid. He nodded. “So they had a directory of some kind. But unless we can find the directory—and read it—it does us no good.”

Druadaen smiled and pointed to three nearby marble lecterns, gestured to others further away. “Unless I miss my guess, we’ll find a copy of the main codex at all or most of them. Assuming at least one doesn’t turn to dust the moment we touch it, we can scan the entries for the words on the list I just gave you.”

Elweyr raised an eyebrow. “Well, the sooner we get to it, the sooner we’ll have some idea of how long this is going to take. And then we’ll have to find out if Tharêdæath can keep his ship waiting that long.”

Which echoed Druadaen’s greatest worry from the moment he’d seen the size of the library: whether their Iavan patron would ironically be the one who had to call a halt to the process of discovery he himself had enabled. Which simply reprised life’s one indisputable lesson:

That Fate’s favorite tool was irony.


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