The Archives occupied a vast room of Ephyran marble, one of the most beautiful of the entire Redoubt. His mouth turned up in a knowing smile. It was only fitting that the late wizards of the Directorate would have made this sanctuary one of the most sumptuous and secure of all the chambers in this amazing complex.
The square room measured at least two hundred meters on each of its four sides, and was seven stories high. Each story had a railing that overlooked the central area. Each level was lined with books from top to bottom, and a magnificent set of curved, mahogany stairs with a brass railing ran up and around to each of the floors, giving access to the thousands of works.
The floor and ceiling of the Archives were of the most delicate, dark green marble, shot through with swirling traces of gray and magenta. Several hundred finely carved desks, reading tables, and beautifully upholstered chairs were tastefully arranged on the bottom floor, and the delicate, golden light was supplied by a combination of oil chandeliers, sconces, and desklamps, all enchanted to burn eternally. The entire chamber smelled pleasantly of must, knowledge, and the thrill of discovery.
“I’m afraid this one won’t do either, Nicodemus,” Faegan said affectionately, rubbing the cat beneath the nape of his neck. “But we will keep trying, won’t we? The stakes are too high to give up.”
He narrowed his eyes at the book, and it rose into the air and floated to the fifth floor, to glide gently back into place between two equally imposing volumes.
Ever since he had witnessed the amazing connection between Shailiha and the fliers of the fields, Faegan had known that there would be only two ways to explore the incredible, unexplained phenomenon. One would be to continue to go to the aviary with the princess and see what happened through a process of trial and error with the fliers. The other was to come here, to the Archives, to discover all he could about such connections—especially with those untrained in the craft. It had consumed his mind even to the point of having stopped trying to research Joshua’s birds of prey. Something in his heart told him that the fantastic bond between Shailiha and the fliers was going to become even more important.
“Time to go searching again.” He sighed softly and wheeled his chair over to the rather odd-looking desk in the center of the floor. Wigg had shown him how to use it before leaving for the Caves with Tristan, and Faegan had found it to be a marvel of the craft. It was called the Index of the Ages, and it was the key to negotiating the complexity of the Archives. Once activated, it provided the location and document number of any book or scroll, depending on the subject matter or author.
Faegan closed his eyes, relaxing his mind. “Open,” he commanded softly.
As the familiar glow built around the desk, its marble surface slowly separated from top to bottom into equal halves, which slid to opposite sides. He opened his eyes and looked down into the seemingly limitless, azure depths that had been left behind.
“Forestallments,” he said. “Both event- and time-activated. Of and relating to endowed blood only, and the possibility of bonds that may be created with nonhuman creatures.” He waited.
From the depths rose the glow of the craft. Swirling as it came, it finally stopped spinning at the level of his eyes and coalesced into gleaming, azure letters of the Eutracian alphabet. They hung there silently, like long-forgotten, dead ghosts of language. It was a list.
He slowly ran down the titles of the hundreds of related documents, seeing that he had already examined many of them. Most had not been helpful. And then, at the bottom of the shimmering list, was an entry that had not appeared with his previous queries:
A Treatise on Forestallments and Their Possible Uses
Author: Egloff, of the Directorate of Wizards
The Vault of the Scrolls
Sixth Floor
Section 1999156
Document 2037
Date of completion:
Seventy-Third Day of the Season of New Life, 327 s.t.
Faegan closed his eyes and recalled all he could of Egloff. The highly precise wizard had always worn spectacles. He had been slight in stature but great in intellect, with a rather diminutive head and an incongruously long nose. He had also been highly respected among the wizards as a master of the Tome.
Faegan opened his eyes again and reread the words that hung there, motionless in the silence of the room. And then it hit him.
The blood stalkers and screaming harpies, the horrific tools of the Coven that had been revisited upon Eutracia just before the sorceresses returned, might have been brought forth from their hibernation by Forestallment, the same aspect of the craft Faegan suspected the princess’s bond with the fliers to be!
The wizard’s blood raced as the possibilities whirled through his mind like pinwheels. He placed his cat on the floor, turned his chair toward the only section of wall that was not lined with books, and raised his hands. “Open,” he ordered.
The marble wall separated down the center, becoming twin doors opening to either side. Wasting no time, the master wizard wheeled his chair through—into the Vault of the Scrolls.
The Vault of the Scrolls was constructed of black marble, and held countless racks of ancient, dusty rolled-up parchment.
Searching his mind, he retrieved the section number: 1999156. The level upon which the scroll was to be found was represented by the last number of the series. He therefore needed to be on the sixth floor. Since the winding staircase was useless to him, he levitated his wheelchair up to the appropriate floor and over the railing, coming to a gentle landing in the appropriate alleyway between racks.
The first three digits of the section number indicated the number of the alley: 199. The fourth, fifth, and sixth digits were indicative of the particular section of racks in which the document could be found: rack 915.
Finally stopping in front of the correct section, he reached into his memory and retrieved the number of the individual scroll he wished: document 2037.
Once he spotted its resting place, above his reach, Faegan used the craft to call the scroll to him. Slowly, one of the parchment tubes began to slide itself out from among its brothers and gently floated down into the wizard’s lap.
Faegan looked at it for some time, feeling overcome by emotion. Having been isolated in Shadowood for so long, he had not read a true scroll of the craft for over three hundred years. And this particular scroll had been written by Egloff, one of his old friends who was now buried in a nameless grave.
The golden tag that traditionally hung from the leather strap surrounding the scroll was still there. Glistening as if new, it was engraved with Egloff’s signature. He always did prefer scrolls to books. As he unrolled it, he felt old, dusty memories tugging at his heart. His friend had had a beautiful script, and preferred to write in red ink. The treatise was very long and detailed—just as he would have expected it to be.
It is truly a window to Egloff’s intellect, Faegan told himself. Then his heart skipped a beat. What he had been searching for was the method by which one could empirically prove the existence of a Forestallment in another. And he had just found it.
The existence of a Forestallment residing in another can be proven by the subject’s blood signature! His gray-green eyes continued down the parchment, searching for more clues. Finally, near the end of Egloff’s treatise, came the answer. That’s it! he realized.
At the bottom he saw Egloff’s signature, the accompanying signature of one of the many consuls of the Redoubt needed to authenticate it, and the document’s date of completion. The air went out of his lungs in a rush as he reread the date, the importance of which had eluded him until now.
The Seventy-third day of the Season of New Life, 327 s.t.
The treatise had been written the same day as the attack by the Coven. The very day Egloff and all of the other wizards of the Directorate, except Wigg, had been murdered.
That would explain why the other wizards of the Directorate had never learned of Egloff’s findings, Faegan realized. There would have been no time to te
ll them. They would all have been preparing for that evening’s coronation of the prince, and Egloff no doubt had planned to tell them afterward. Faegan sadly looked away from the parchment, trying not to think of all Wigg had told him of that fateful day. But Egloff never got the chance, he thought.
It was forbidden to remove any document from the Archives or the Vault of the Scrolls, so he decided to make a copy in the event that Wigg would want to study the scroll as well.
Opening the drawer of a desk he found sheets of extra parchment. Carefully he laid a clean sheet directly over the original, then closed his eyes.
Almost immediately the glow of the craft appeared and the words from the original began to bleed upward into the developing copy, creating an exact duplicate. When the process was complete, he rolled the fresh copy up and placed it in his robes. The original rolled itself up and, with a thought from Faegan, floated gently upward to replace itself in the spot from which it had come.
Faegan levitated his chair over the railing and wheeled himself out of the Vault of Scrolls and into the Archives proper, where he retrieved Nicodemus. He gave the cat an affectionate scratch under the chin, and Nicodemus stretched to ask for more.
“We have found it, my friend,” Faegan whispered. “This could change everything.”
In his excitement he allowed himself to use the craft again to levitate his chair. Cackling with glee, he went sailing down the halls of the Redoubt in search of the princess.
CHAPTER
Twenty
Tristan carefully followed Wigg down the narrow, curving steps and into the bowels of the Caves. The radiance stones glowed more softly here, and the deeper they went, the colder it became. Moisture seeped visibly from the walls, and the air grew increasingly musty. There was no sound save that of their boots on the unforgiving rock. Tristan thought the journey would never end, his sense of apprehension growing with each pace downward.
After what seemed leagues Wigg stopped short and held up his hand. He turned around in the stairwell to look at Tristan with a silent expression of complete disbelief, then beckoned the prince to follow him into the room at the bottom of the stairs. What Tristan saw staggered him.
Embedded in the walls of the large stone chamber was a continuously circling vein of azure. Glowing brightly, it pulsated and throbbed as if it had a life of its own—as if wishing to free itself from this place in which it was imprisoned. At the opposite end of the room was another door.
The vein’s amazing glow bathed the entire room; it was perhaps the most beautiful thing Tristan had ever seen. But the look on Wigg’s face told him that it was also something terrible.
In horror, he watched the wizard fall to his knees before the vein, a tear rolling down one of his cheeks. “So this is where it is being taken to!” he exclaimed. “And as the vein grows, our world above collapses around us!” His hands were balled up into fists, his knuckles white with tension.
“What are you talking about?” Tristan asked gently. He walked to the wizard and placed a hand on the old one’s quivering shoulder.
“It has to do with the stone,” Wigg whispered. Tristan was not sure when he had ever seen Wigg so distraught.
“The vein you see here, this abomination of the craft, is in some bastardized way the true physical embodiment of the power locked within the Paragon,” Wigg said sadly. “I’m sure of it! The power of the stone is somehow being drained off, attracted to the Caves, and captured within these walls. And as the vein grows, the stone weakens.” He shook his head in disbelief.
“Do you see how the vein undulates, its power clearly evident?” he asked the prince. “When the process is complete and the stone is colorless, this vein will imprison all of the power that the Paragon once held. The power gleaned from the stone will then be at the disposal of the one who drew it here, and completely unavailable to us.”
“I still don’t understand,” Tristan answered. “How do you know all this?”
“There’s no way you could understand,” Wigg responded, slowly coming to his feet. He wiped the tears from his cheeks. “Faegan and I barely understand it ourselves. There is a passage in the Tome that mentions a method of drawing the power from the stone without removing it from its human host. It says that someone will eventually come who will be capable of such a feat. That person, however, would have to be of such immense power that we had always thought it could only be you, or your sister Shailiha. Therefore our concern regarding this issue was not great. But we were obviously very wrong.” He paused, lost in his thoughts.
“There is now one who walks the earth who has far more power than any of us,” the wizard continued slowly, half to himself. “The superiority of this being is without precedent, and his or her strength grows every day, just as the stone weakens. I need not tell you how dangerous this—”
He was interrupted by the eerie, grating scratchiness of stone on stone. As the prince spun around to see where the sound came from, another marble wall came shooting down, blocking the entrance to the stairway from which they had just come. Tristan instinctively turned to the door at the opposite side of the room. It remained unblocked, and on it glowed the sign of the lion and the broadsword.
Whoever is controlling these events does not want us to go back the way we came, Tristan thought.
Then the voice of Morganna filled the stone room. “Tristan, you must hurry. There may already be too little time.”
The prince looked to the wizard, who was also listening intently.
“Why must we hurry, Mother?” Tristan asked. “What is it we are to do?”
“There is not time to tell you why, my son,” the voice said, already starting to fade. “But take the wizard and go quickly through the other door, before it is too late.”
Wigg nodded, and they began to run.
As they approached the portal Tristan heard scratching, scrabbling sounds. He drew his dreggan with a swift pull, the ring of its blade bouncing off the stone walls. Tossing the heavy sword into his left hand, he reached back to his knives, loosening the first of them. Then he threw the dreggan back into his right palm again and looked down to where the sounds seemed to be coming from.
A pair of dark gray hands were beginning to dig their way out of the ground. First only the fingertips were visible. Then came the fingers themselves, and finally the entire hands and upper arms. They agonizingly twisted and turned their way up and out, loosened particles of dirt sprinkling eerily back down as they came. Their skin was gray and bleak, the folds of the knuckle joints black, the nails broken and torn. And then from the dirt came another pair, and then another and another.
Wigg came to stand cautiously next to Tristan as the things continued their inexorable climb from the earth. The wizard and the prince watched in horror as the ground before each of the pairs of hands seemed to obligingly open even wider, the rents created in the earth becoming deep, dark crevices.
Then bodies rose from the earth, heads and shoulders first, until they were standing directly before the wizard and the prince. Tristan stood aghast, not wanting to breathe, as if that simple act would somehow bring the awful things closer. They were consuls of the Redoubt.
It had taken the prince several moments to recognize them for what they were. It was only their dark blue robes, torn and covered with dirt, that gave a clue to their identity.
Their faces and hands appeared to be quite bloodless. Loose, sallow skin hung down from their bones in horrible, sagging folds. Their eye sockets were sunken and dark; the whites of their eyes were a sickly, bloodshot yellow, and the irises were inky spheres that seemed to be vacant, looking at nothing. Their gaping mouths were red and drooling, their teeth black, their expressions utterly empty.
Now other pairs of hands were beginning to claw their way to the surface. It was painfully clear to the prince that they would soon be surrounded. Then one of them spoke.
“You are to come with us,” it said. The lifeless consul’s voice seemed to crack with the strain of si
mply trying to speak. “Our master wishes it,” he rasped, his blank, doll-like eyes still looking at nothing.
Tristan turned to look at the wizard, and then back to the consuls. “I don’t think so,” he hissed. He raised his dreggan slightly.
“Who is your master?” Wigg asked, taking a step forward. “Why does your master wish to see us? Does he wish us harm?”
“You will not be killed,” the consul said emotionlessly. “Of that you may rest assured. But before you will be allowed to stand before him, you must first be prepared.”
“I do not understand,” Wigg said cautiously. “How is it that we must be prepared?”
Tristan looked around the room to see that several dozen more of the gruesome pairs of hands had broken through the dirt floor.
If we are to fight our way out of here we must start now, before we are completely overcome, he told himself urgently. Why is Wigg hesitating?
“Your preparation is to be completed by others,” the consul said. His arms outstretched, he began to walk slowly toward Tristan and Wigg. “You must come. It has been ordered.”
The lifeless thing opened its grotesque hands, attempting to grasp the wizard. Tristan had now withstood all that he was able.
Raising his dreggan, he slashed straight across the center of the thing’s body, cutting it in half. With a great scream it tumbled to the floor in two separate parts, gray matter spurting from the cleaved portions of its torso. Suddenly, the rest of the consuls were upon them.
Sensing several behind him, Tristan turned on his heel and swung the heavy sword in a great arc. The razor-sharp blade sang shoulder-high through the air, slicing cleanly through the necks two of the horrible things at the same time. Their heads rolled off their shoulders and onto the floor, and putrid gray matter shot into the air from their headless bodies, its stench coming to his nostrils for the first time. Some of it landed sickeningly upon his whirling arms as he completed the cut. For a brief moment the headless torsos staggered aimlessly about the chamber, walking crazily into the rock walls before finally falling to the earth.
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