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Tobias didn’t miss the demure smile, or the offer. “We’ll not be stopping early tonight.” He lifted his nose as he took a deep whiff of the cold air. “She’s so close I can almost smell her.”
Richard counted the landings on his way down so he would be able to find their way back. He thought he could remember the rest of it because of the sights along the way, but the inside of the tower was disorienting. It smelled of rot, like a deep bog, probably because water that came in the open windows collected in the bottom.
At the next landing platform, Richard saw a shimmering to the air as he approached. In the light coming from the globe he was holding, he could see something standing to the side. Its edges glowed in the humming light. Though the thing wasn’t solid, he recognized it as a mriswith standing with its cape drawn around itself.
“Welcome, skin brother,” it hissed.
Berdine flinched. “What was that?” she whispered urgently.
Richard caught hold of her wrist as she tried to put herself in front of him—she had her Agiel in her fist—and pulled her to the other side of him as he continued on. “It’s just a mriswith.”
“Mriswith!” she whispered in a hoarse tone. “Where?”
“Right here on the landing, by the rail. Don’t be afraid, it won’t hurt you.”
She clutched his black cape after he forced down her arm with the Agiel. They stepped onto the landing.
“Have you come to wake the sliph?” the mriswith asked.
Richard frowned. “Sliph?”
The mriswith opened its cape to point with the three-bladed knife in its claw down the stairs. When it did so, it became solid and fully visible, a figure of dusky scales and cape. “The sliph is down there, skin brother.” Its beady eyes came back up. “She is accessible, at last. Soon, it will be time for the yabree to sing.”
“Yabree?”
The mriswith lifted its three-bladed knife and gave it a little wiggle. Its slit of a mouth widened into sort of a smile. “Yabree. When the yabree sing, it will be the time of the queen.”
“The queen?”
“The queen needs you, skin brother. You must help her.”
Richard could feel Berdine trembling as she pressed against him. He decided that he should be going before she became too frightened, and started down the steps.
Two landings down, she was still hanging on to him. “It’s gone,” she whispered in his ear.
Richard looked back up and saw that she was right.
Berdine muscled him into the recess of a doorway, flattening his back up against a wood door. Her penetrating blue eyes were intense with agitation. “Lord Rahl, that was a mriswith.”
Richard nodded, a little puzzled by her ragged panting.
“Lord Rahl, mriswith kill people. You always kill them.”
Richard lifted a hand toward the landing above. “It wasn’t going to hurt us. I told you that. It didn’t attack us, did it? There was no need to harm it.”
Her brow furrowed with concern. “Lord Rahl, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Now, come on. Maybe the mriswith gave us a good hint of what we might be looking for.”
She shoved him back against the door when he tried to move. “Why did it call you ‘skin brother’?”
“I don’t know. I guess because it has scales, and I have skin. I think it called me that to let me know it meant no harm. It wanted to help.”
“Help,” she repeated incredulously.
“It didn’t try to stop us, did it?”
She finally let go of his shirt, but it took longer for her blue eyes to release their hold on him.
At the bottom of the tower, a walkway with an iron railing ringed the outside wall of the tower. In the center lurked black water with rocks breaking the surface in several places. Salamanders clung to the stone below the walkway, and rested partially submerged at the rocks. Insects swam through the thick, inky water, skittering around bubbles that occasionally ascended to send out rings as they burst.
Halfway around the walkway, Richard knew he had found what he was looking for: something not ordinary, like the libraries, or even the strange rooms and corridors.
A wide platform in the walkway before where a door had been was littered with sooty stone fragments, chips, and dust. Chunks of wood from the door now floated in the dark water beyond the iron railing. The doorway itself had been blown away, and was now perhaps twice its previous size. The jagged edges were blackened, and in some places the stone itself was melted like candle wax. Twisting streaks on the stone wall ran off in every direction away from the blasted hole, as if lightning had flailed against the wall and burned it.
“This is not old,” Richard said, running his finger through the black soot.
“How can you tell?” Berdine asked as she peered about.
“Look. See here? The mold and slime has been burned away, scoured right off the rock, and hasn’t had time to grow back. This happened recently—sometime within the last few months.”
The room inside was round, perhaps sixty feet across, its walls scorched in ragged lines as if lightning had gone wild in the place. A circular stone wall took up the center, like a huge well, nearly half the width of the room. Richard leaned over the waist-high wall, holding out the glowing globe. The smooth stone walls of the hole fell away forever. He could see the stone for hundreds of feet before the light failed to penetrate farther. It looked bottomless.
Above was a domed ceiling nearly as high as the room was wide. There were no windows or other doors. To the far side, Richard could see a table and a few shelves.
When they rounded the well, he saw the body, lying on the floor beside a chair. All that was left were bones inside a few scraps of cloth robes. Most of the robes had long ago rotted away, leaving the skeleton encircled by just a leather belt. Sandals remained, too. When he touched the bones, they crumbled like baked dirt.
“He has been here a very long time,” Berdine said.
“You’re right about that.”
“Lord Rahl, look.”
Richard stood and looked to the table where she pointed. There was an inkwell, dry for perhaps centuries, a pen to the side, and an open book. Richard leaned over and blew a cloud of dust and stone chips from the book.
“It’s in High D’Haran,” he said is he held it up next to the glowing sphere.
“Let me see.” Her eyes moved from side to side as she studied the strange characters. “You’re right.”
“What does it say?”
She carefully took the book in both hands. “This is very old. The dialect is older than any I have ever seen. Darken Rahl showed me an old dialect that he said was over two thousand years old.” She looked up. “This is older.”
“Can you read it?”
“I could only understand a bit of the book we found when we came in the Keep.” She considered the last page with writing on it. “I understand much less of this,” she said as she turned some of the pages back.
Richard gestured impatiently. “Well, can you understand any of it?”
She stopped turning and scrutinized the writing. “I think it says something about finally having success, but that success means he would die here.” She pointed. “See? drauka. That word is the same I think—‘death’.” Berdine looked at the blank leather cover, then turned back through the book, scanning the pages.
Her blue eyes came up at last. “I think it’s a journal. I think this is the journal of the man who died in here.”
Richard felt goose bumps dance up his arms. “Berdine, this is what I was looking for. This is something not ordinary, not a book others have seen, like in the library. Can you translate it?”
“A bit, perhaps, but not much.” Her features sagged with disappointment. “I’m sorry, Lord Rahl. I just don’t know dialects this old. It’s the same problem I would have with the book we saw at first. I don’t know enough of the words to be able to fill in the blanks correctly. I would only be guessing.”
R
ichard pinched his lower lip as he thought. He looked down at the bones, wondering what this wizard had been doing in this room, and what had kept it sealed, and worse yet, what had unsealed it.
Richard twisted back to her. “Berdine! That book upstairs—I know that book. I know the story. If I helped you, telling you what I remember of what it says, could that help you decipher the words, and then use those translated words to help translate this journal?”
As she considered, her face brightened. “If we worked together, it might. If you could tell me what a sentence says, then I would be able to know the meaning of words I don’t recognize. We might be able to do it.”
Richard carefully closed the journal. “You hold on to this with your life. I’ll hold the light. Let’s get out of here. We have what we came for.”
When he and Berdine came through the doorway, Cara and Raina practically leapt out of their skin with relief. Richard even saw Ulic and Egan close their eyes with a sigh and a silent thank-you to the good spirits for a prayer answered.
“There are mriswith in the Keep,” Berdine told the other two women at their tumbling questions.
Cara gasped. “How many did you have to kill, Lord Rahl?”
“None. They didn’t attack us. We weren’t in danger from them. But there were enough other dangers.” He waved off her furious questions. “We’ll talk about it later. With Berdine’s help, I found what I was looking for.” He tapped the journal in Berdine’s hands. “We need to get back and start translating it.” He picked up the book from the table and gave it to Berdine.
As he started for the doorway out, he stopped and turned back to Cara and Raina. “Uh, while I was down there, and I was thinking that I could be killed if I did something wrong, it came to me that I didn’t want to die without telling you two something.”
