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I just . . . really want to go home now, I thought, clinging to Pritkin.
“He swore a formal oath. He can’t hurt you,” Pritkin told me. “He will be using an ancient spell to allow us to see what you saw. If you agree?”
I nodded.
I wanted to get this over with.
We all sat back down. Adra reached over the desk again, to hover a finger above my right temple. “Concentrate on this book,” he told me. “See it clearly in your mind.”
And the next thing I knew, there it was, sitting in the middle of the desk, as perfect as when I first saw it, the black cover shining in the low lighting. Only that wasn’t right, was it? There should be—
Six or seven large ruptures, I thought, jumping a little as they suddenly appeared in the surface, almost before I’d finished the thought. They exploded out of the leather like someone had shot it. Only they weren’t from a gun.
Damage from the fey’s spear, I realized.
Man, he’d really done a number on it.
And then the cover grew swimmy and faint, almost blurry.
“Concentrate,” Adra told me. “See it as you first did, when it was whole.”
I tried, I really did, but I hadn’t been paying much attention. I hadn’t been interested in the book, but in what it contained. Which was nothing, I realized, as Adra began flipping through the pages.
All of which were blank.
“You didn’t open it, I take it?” he asked.
“No. I mean, I saw inside the front cover, but I wasn’t paying attention . . .”
Which was probably why, although the first page had color and some faint lines on it, none of them were readable.
Adra closed the cover again and looked at it instead. It was beautiful in a Goth-y, I-am-probably-evil sort of way. A little scuffed up, and one of the buckles on the straps was missing. But there was about an acre of beautifully tooled black leather; a ring of shiny black jewels, each as big as my thumb; and the other straps, all of which were undone at the moment, I guess because that was how I first saw them.
There was also a title in faded gold, but I couldn’t read it, either. Every time I tried, it writhed and morphed, showing different things that might be letters, although not in English, or sometimes just squiggles that weren’t letters at all. I tried to focus, to recall whatever it had been, but I couldn’t. The words simply hadn’t registered.
“It’s all right,” Adra said. “You’ve done well.”
Funny; it didn’t feel that way. And what was so important that it needed an Ancient Horror to guard it anyway? And how had somebody trapped one of them? From what I understood, even the demons themselves were scared of those things.
“I thought the Ancient Horrors were superpowerful old demons that scared the bejeezus out of everybody, so you locked them all away,” I said.
“That is . . . a strangely accurate assessment,” Adra agreed, smiling slightly.
“Then how could one have been in there? The shop owner—”
I stopped, because Evil Santa had just materialized, too, along with his oily smile and be-ringed hands. I hadn’t realized I’d even noticed those. It was like my brain was more observant than I was.
Adra sized the man up, and then he waved a hand, and the weird little guy dissipated like smoke. “My people shall see him presently,” he said. “After they have spoken with these witches of yours.”
“The shop owner,” I continued stubbornly, “said that the Ancient Horror was imprisoned by some mage in order to secure the book. To create an unbreakable lock or a cypher that nobody could decrypt.” Adra nodded. “But how could a human mage have done something like that?”
“They trap our people occasionally for such uses, or to create golems,” he murmured, his hands ghosting over the surface of the book. It felt solid and real under my fingertips, when I dared to touch it, too, just at the edge. But like this morning, I didn’t get anything from it. Maybe I would have if the cover had been opened, but with the lock spell in place, I’d felt nothing.
And it didn’t seem to be doing much for Adra, either.
“But they don’t trap Ancient Horrors,” I pointed out. “The amount of power it would take to do something like that—” I stopped, because I didn’t know. But I didn’t think it was something the average mage would have
lying around.
