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Damn that quicksilver. Without it, he wouldn’t have been able to grip the tiny ridges of stone to drop from the window above to this one. And without his arcane eye, his scouting of the palace—yesterday to find the tunnels and today to find this room—would have been much more difficult.
The workroom, much like its extravagant owner, managed to look both busy and lavish. A book, its cover embossed with gold, lay on a table beside a sumptuous armchair draped with a purple silk robe. A towering bookcase held more valuable tomes. A rich carpet softened the floor, stretching from the armchair to a large worktable.
A shelf above the table was crowded with jars filled with powders of every color, plant matter, dead beetles with iridescent carapaces, an assortment of precious metals, and semiprecious stones.
Atop the table lay a book that appeared to have been subjected to tests of some sort. An arcane magnifying device was positioned over the book, and several colored powders dusted its leather cover. In a glass bowl filled with amber liquid, there floated a clipping of a page.
But it was the book itself, not the tests, that seized Raider’s attention. Rather, it was the intricate, gold-leaf symbol worked into the book’s cover.
Many weeks ago, when Raider had pressed Seth about the book that Julian had stolen in connection to the murder of a fellow scholar, Seth had described this very symbol. It was unmistakable: the moon overlaid with the eye. That image set within the sun as it burst through a triangle.
He’d told Seth. He’d fucking told Seth there was something going on here.
Malik had approached them so damn quickly after their arrival in Aqarat. He’d been so damn eager to help Seth with his mission—because he’d been aware of that mission from the start. Malik had already encountered Julian. Malik, somehow, had gotten this book from him.
Was Julian in the palace? Raider had yet to locate the dungeons. Maybe Julian was there. Or was he a guest here, hidden from Seth and Raider, somehow in league with Malik and Rahim? If so, for what purpose?
Whatever the case, this book was exactly the proof that Raider had needed. Seth would have to listen to him now.
Raider’s sense of satisfaction, however, lasted only a moment, only until he picked up the book and looked inside. He opened to a random page, curious about what kind of book was worth killing for. Seth had described the book’s cover, a detail apparently given to him for his hunt, but Seth had known nothing of the book’s contents.
At least … that was what Seth had said.
But that conversation looked very different—everything with Seth looked very different—when Raider started paging through the book.
A few of the drawings could have been found in any anatomy text. The body’s branching network of arteries and veins. The interconnecting structures of muscle and tendon and bone when the skin was peeled back.
Those, Raider could dismiss, even if they made him uncomfortable.
But the next one …
To anyone but Raider, the image would likely have looked as innocuous as the others. It was simply a diagram of the human form with silver dots marking a number of points on the body and silver lines connecting them. It could have meant anything.
To anyone but Raider.
He closed his eyes, but the image there was worse: his own body, seen from above, cut open, the skin peeled back. It had happened sometimes during the surgeries. He would seem to leave his body and hover above it, looking down at the living silver threading along the bloody pathways of his exposed muscles and nerves.
No. It couldn’t be. He was misunderstanding the diagram. Raider opened his eyes, refusing to read the handwritten notes, and flipped to another random page, desperate to be wrong—
A shiver went down his spine.
The eye. His eye. If it could even be called his, given that another had created it.
Beautifully rendered in fine ink, the drawing showed the eye’s layers and intricacies. And the notes, which Raider could no longer ignore, detailed its function. The telescopic zoom. The numerous receptors that made the eye more sensitive to light and enabled Raider’s keen night vision.
Numbly, Raider started flipping through the book. So many pictures. So much fucking detail. It all blurred together until Raider wasn’t sure whether the images he saw were on the page or in his mind.
Raider found himself suddenly on his hands and knees, breath raking through his lungs, the room spinning around him. He didn’t remember falling, didn’t remember dropping the book. It lay several feet away, the cover open to the book’s title page.
Raider already knew whose book it was, what book it was, even before his vision clarified, even before that traitorous arcane eye zoomed in on the boldly inked title.
The Masterwork of Kahzir.
Raider lunged toward the book and flipped it shut. But it was too late, of course, too fucking late to deny the truth.
Kahzir’s book was the one that Julian had stolen.
Kahzir’s book was the one that Seth was after, the one Seth was to take back to the Arcanum.
