“You should stay away,” she said.
He moved around her, and she held her breath waiting for the hand that slipped around her waist, over her hip. It didn’t come. He smiled with that wicked way he had. “You should give yourself a little more space.”
She frowned. That didn’t sound like him. “Do you want me to show you what I’ve done?”
“I want you to …” It was as if her mind turned over, as if other thoughts spilled into this one, and suddenly the air was Neverwinter’s all over again, all humid and threatening storms. “Run, darling,” Lorcan said, urgent and fearful. “Run fast and run far.”
She blinked hard. “What?”
Lorcan crouched a distance away and scratched a rune into the layer of frost and dead moss: a sinuous thing of smoothly angling lines that seemed to suggest a much more complex symbol, as if there were lines to it that Farideh couldn’t perceive.
“You still think like a soldier,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “Remember, darling.” And his voice shifted, turning into Tam’s. “There’s nothing here worth dying for.”
Farideh jumped away from him, and once more she was in the lost library, alone and standing in a dusting of powdered stone. Her footsteps alone marred the dust-she’d walked twenty feet, back the way she’d come.
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and cursed. She’d been so sure the poison had passed, but to see things this mad … If she told Tam, he’d be after her to lie down and give up the pact for the rest of her days. And then what would become of Lorcan?
Lorcan … She would have been embarrassed to admit just how real the hallucination had seemed. How much she had been waiting for his hand on her wrist, his arm around her waist, his breath on her neck …
She blinked up at the ceiling, as if she were waking from a second dream, and cursed under her breath. It was the spell she was remembering, she told herself firmly. The echo of the dream. Everything else was just her being silly. She was through with that. They were … comrades. And she owed Lorcan her life. Get the scrolls, she thought, then go and lie down.
She found the door to the antechamber easily enough, noting the maps and charts for Mira’s sake, as she pressed the smooth stone inward. The hinges moved silently, admitting her to a room packed with scrolls.
“Karshoj,” she swore. She could be hours searching all of it. She pulled a scroll from near the door and unrolled it-something about a city made of brass. She pulled one a few feet farther in-details about the fauna in a plane of ice. She kept on, pulling scrolls from different shelves, looking for anything that might hint at a way to link to the Nine Hells. There were notes on planes that housed gods and planes full of nothing at all; worlds of flame and stone and metal; a dimension where nothing stayed on the ground and another that could be sailed to by launching a ship across the stars. Planes above and below and just to one side of Toril.
The next scroll she pulled was rolled as thin and tight as a reed. Open it stretched only the length of her arm. But there, in vibrant shades of red and violet and stark black was a map of the Hells, each layer spiraling down into a smaller, more concentrated realm. Avernus, the Last Outpost. Dis, the Iron City. Minauros, the Endless Bog. Phlegethos, the Heart of Flames. Stygia, the Frozen Wastes.
Malbolge, the spidery writing read, two-thirds of the way down. The Tyranny of Turmoil. Be cautious and do not …
The runes dissolved into gibberish before her eyes, and Farideh cursed and nearly crushed the parchment in her frustration. The ritual had run out. She’d have to go back to the camp to recast it.
“Think like a soldier,” she murmured, recalling Lorcan’s words. “Take what you might need and sort it out later.”
There were at least a score of scrolls in the same niche as the map had come from. She pulled every one out and scanned the foreign marks for familiar signs-eleven bore the cluster of runes that seemed to mean Malbolge. She gathered these in her arms and left the rest in a tidy pile where she could find them later.
It was a start, she thought, making her way back to the camp at the center of the library. She knew better than to hope the arcanist’s notes were less confusing than a ritual scroll like the one Havilar had found. But it was a start-a better start than she’d had in the last month-and she dared to hope she’d found the solution.
A month … and her spells still worked. She wouldn’t pretend she understood the ways of the Hells, but having seen Lorcan’s monstrous sisters at battle, it seemed strange she might still have a chance to save him. If someone had asked her before Lorcan had vanished, she would have said the erinyes would surely have slaughtered anyone they took prisoner.
She remembered watching one slice a man in half, so quick he had time to grasp for his legs, as if he might pull them back on like trousers-before Lorcan turned her face away.
Maybe he is dead, she thought. Or maybe someone else has already rescued him. She held the scrolls closer. Maybe he’d decided to be done with her.
Farideh took a deep breath and pressed on. She wouldn’t know until she tried, and if she was wrong, at least she would know. She owed him that much. And if he was free, well, he would have found her, and said so. Wouldn’t he?
She walked more quickly, as if she could outpace the worries that wouldn’t stay down.
As she passed an open aisle, she glimpsed her sister. Havilar sat on the floor beside a hole left by the slab of polished limestone she’d somehow levered out of place. In its absence, the workings of the pressure trap were laid out like a strange skeleton. She disconnected one of the pieces, a copper spring made verdigrisy with age.
“Hey,” she called as she drew nearer. Havilar looked up at her. “I … talked, I suppose, to the Book.”
“Which book?”
Farideh frowned. “The … talking one?”
Havilar tilted her head. “Did you? Was it more interesting than before?”
“I suppose,” Farideh said. “It’s odd talking to a thing, you know?”
“I guess. Aren’t you supposed to be reading the scrolls and stuff though? I thought Mira said to forget the weird book for now.” She held up the spring. “Isn’t this odd? It’s as if there’s air flowing under the floor.”
Farideh shook her head and let it go. “How many have you dismantled?”
“Three,” she said. “This one nearly got me.” She pointed with her chin at the nearby shelf, now plastered with a sticky ooze. “Mira’s going to have a fit, isn’t she?”
“She’ll understand,” Farideh said. “How many other traps are there?”
Havilar shrugged. “I found two others that are magical. I’m not fussing with those. I think there’s something over on the east side. There’s a big rune on the wall there.”
“Didn’t the Book tell you where they were?”
“No,” Havilar said, prying one of the levers from the mechanism. “Why should it?”
Farideh did not press and made her excuses. Given the world of questions Havilar might have asked the Book, she supposed as she wound through the maze of shelves, one that would give her less to do to distract her from worrying about Mehen or Brin, or maybe even Farideh probably wouldn’t rank high …
Farideh stopped in the middle of the shelves, the hairs on her neck on end and sure as she’d ever been that someone was watching her. “Well met?” she called, looking back the way she’d come. “Is someone there?” Only quiet.
Havi, sneaking around again, she told herself, her eyes locked on the darkness. Mira, being quiet. Maspero, creeping around like Mehen does.
There was a thickness to the air. A strange quality she almost recognized-as if something were about to be there. As if something had just left.
“Is someone-”
A hand fell on her shoulder, and she spun, scattering scrolls across the aisle.
Tam flexed his hand and winced. It had taken Brin several more tries, and though the skin was healed over, and the bones were all set, it was stiff and aching. Not worth wasting a healing on, he thought, but it annoyed him nonetheless. He eased himself to the ground and pulled down another batch of books.