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“Books?” he called into the hole.
“Yes. A lot of books. It’s dark, but it looks like a big room with books.”
“I’m coming in,” he said.
He had to take his pack off and push it out ahead as he crawled in. It turned out not to be as worrisome as he had feared, and he was soon through. When he stood on the other side, he realized that the huge stone block lying at an angle across the passage had once been a door. It looked like it had been designed to slide out of a slot cut into the side of the wall, but at some point the massive door had broken along a fault in the stone, and it had toppled over. As Richard inspected the mess, he brushed the dust away and saw one of the metal plates that activated a shield.
The idea that these books had been behind a shield made his heart race faster.
He turned back to the room. The warm light from the glowing sphere did indeed show a chamber full of books. The room ran at odd angles, seemingly without reason. Richard and Jillian walked along the passageway, looking at all the books. Most of the shelves were carved into the solid rock, the way the resting places for the dead had been cut out to make room.
Richard held the sphere up as he started scanning the shelves.
“Listen,” he said to Jillian, “I’m looking for something specific: Chainfire. It might be a book. You start on one side, and I’ll take the other. Make sure you look at each book’s title.”
Jillian nodded. “If it’s in here, we will find it.”
The ancient library was discouragingly huge. As they inched along and rounded a corner, they encountered a chamber lined with aisles of shelves. The search was slow going. They had to work in the same area so that they could both see.
For several hours, they painstakingly made their way through the room. Partway through, they encountered side chambers, smaller than the main room, but still full of books. From time to time they each had to blow dust off some of the spines.
Richard was tired and frustrated by the time they came to a spot where he saw another of the metal plates. He pressed the flat of his hand against it and the stone wall in front of them began to move. The door wasn’t big, and it quickly pivoted open into blackness. He hoped that the shields keyed off what they recognized of his gift, and didn’t actually work by making his power answer some silent, unfelt call. He’d not like to be down in the catacombs and have the beast materialize.
Richard stuck the light into the darkness and saw a small room with books. There was also a table that had long ago collapsed because some of the ceiling had come down on top of it.
Jillian, deep in concentration, ran a finger along the spines of the books as she read each while Richard took five strides across the room to the far wall. He saw another metal plate there and pressed his hand to it.
Slowly, another narrow door in the stone began pivoting away from him into the darkness. Richard crouched lower as he stepped into the doorway and held the light partway in.
“Master, you wish to travel?” a voice echoed.
He was staring at light reflecting back off the sliph’s silver face. It was the well room, where they had come in. The doorway was on the opposite side of the steps from where they had found the first metal plate that had opened the ceiling.
They had just spent most of the night going around in a circle, ending up right where they had started.
“Richard,” Jillian said, “look at this.”
Richard turned back around and came face-to-face with the red leather cover of a book she was holding up.
It said Chainfire.
Richard was so stunned that he couldn’t talk.
Jillian, grinning with discovery, came into the sliph’s room with him as he backed in, taking the book from her hands.
He felt as if he were somewhere else, watching himself hold the book named Chainfire.
Chapter 62
“Richard?” It was Nicci’s voice.
Still startled to actually have found Chainfire, he walked to the steps and looked up. Both Nicci and Cara, silhouetted by dawn light, were peering down at him.
“I found it. I mean, Jillian found it.”
“How did you get down there?” Nicci asked as Richard and Jillian started up the steps. “We just looked in there and you weren’t there.”
“Jillian?” It was a man’s voice.
“Grandfather!” Jillian raced the rest of the way up the steps and flew into an old man’s arms.
Richard climbed the steps after her. Nicci was sitting on the top step. “What’s going on?”
“This is Jillian’s grandfather,” Nicci said, lifting out a hand in introduction. “He is the teller of these people, the keeper of the old knowledge.”
“Glad to meet you,” Richard said, embracing the old gentleman’s hand. “You have a wonderful granddaughter. She just helped me out immensely.”
“You would have found it if I hadn’t seen it first,” Jillian said, grinning.
Richard smiled back.
He turned to Nicci. “What happened to Jagang’s men?”
Nicci shrugged. “Night fog.”
As Jillian went with her grandfather to greet Lokey on a nearby wall, Richard spoke confidentially to Nicci and Cara.
“Fog?”
“Yes.” Nicci interlaced her fingers around a knee. “Some kind of strange smoky fog drifted past them and made them go blind.”
“Not just blind,” Cara said with obvious delight, “but burst their eyes right in their sockets. It was a bloody mess. I quite enjoyed it.”
Richard frowned at Nicci, wanting an explanation.
“They’re scouts,” she said. “I know these men and they know me. I didn’t want them seeing me. More than that, though, I wanted them to be useless to Jagang—the ones who live, anyway. From what Jillian’s grandfather tells me, he doubts that many of them will make it back to Jagang’s forces, but I made sure they were near enough to their horses so that their animals will carry them back. I want the ones who live through the ordeal to be able to report only the horror of the fog coming down from the hills—that they were blinded in a strange, forbidding, and haunted land. Such news will send a fright through his men.
“Raping, pillaging, and slaughtering the helpless is all perfectly entertaining for Jagang’s army, but they rather don’t like things like this. Dying for the Creator in a grand battle and going to their reward in the afterlife is one thing, being taken by something they can’t see coming out of the darkness and ending up helpless in this way is quite another matter.
“I expect that Jagang will decide to skirt this land rather than allow some unknown out here to give his men a fright that could change their minds about fighting for the glory of the Creator and the Imperial Order. That means they will have to continue on south for a good distance. It will add time to their journey before they can finally swing around and come up into D’Hara.”
Richard nodded thoughtfully. “Very good, Nicci. Very good.”
She beamed. “What do you have there?”
“Chainfire.” He moved up on the steps to sit between Nicci and Cara. “It’s a book.” He hesitated in opening the cover. “In case this is some kind of prophecy or something, I’d just as soon you looked at it first.”
Concern settled in her exquisite features. “Of course Richard. Give it here.”
Richard handed her the book and stood. He didn’t want to risk glancing at it and too late discovering that he shouldn’t have, only to discover the beast about to tear into them. Especially not now, not when he was so close to getting answers.
Nicci was already scanning the book, Cara looking over her shoulder.
“It makes no sense,” Cara announced as she read from Chainfire.
Richard didn’t think that Nicci shared that opinion. Her face was draining of color. “Dear spirits…” she whispered to herself.
As she kept reading, not saying anything to them, Richard sat on a rise of ground to the side, under an olive tree. There was a vine growing ar
ound the trunk. He reached out to idly pluck a leaf from the vine.
He stopped, his hand inches from the dusky, variegated leaves.
Icy gooseflesh prickled up his arms.
He knew what that vine was.
From The Book of Counted Shadows, the book that his father had him commit to memory before they destroyed it, the words flooded into his mind: And when the three boxes of Orden are put into play, the snake vine shall grow.
“What’s the matter?” Jillian whispered to him as she leaned close. “You look like you’ve seen a spirit.”
“Have you ever seen this plant growing here, where your people live?”
“No, I don’t believe I have.”
“She’s right,” Jillian’s grandfather said in a puzzled voice. “I’ve lived in these parts all my life. I don’t recall seeing that vine before, except for a spell almost three years back, I believe it was. That’s right, three years this coming autumn. Then it died away. Haven’t seen it since.”
Richard didn’t see any pods on the newly sprouted vine. He reached out and carefully plucked a sprig.
“Richard, this is an incredibly dangerous book,” Nicci said in a gravely troubled voice. She was preoccupied, still reading, and not paying any attention to the rest of them talking. “This is beyond dangerous.” She was reading as she spoke. “I’m only in the beginning, but this is…I don’t even know how to begin…”
Richard rose to his feet, holding the sprig of the vine out, staring at it.
“We have to go,” he said. “Right now.”
Something in the tone of his voice made Cara and even Nicci look up.
