“That is the sort of talk which led to your censure,” I said to him.
He replied, “It is the sort of talk all you fools are thinking. Thinking, but not brave enough to speak. Burn the lower cities if it gives you greater insight. Melt the mountains down and boil away the rivers if it shows the gods what greatness we can achieve without them. There will always be more-mountains, rivers, men.”
I said, “I think you forget yourself. You are talking of humans. Of our subjects. You can’t treat them like simple gnomes or elves.”
I shall never forget his answer: “They are as far from us, Emrys, as they are from the gods.” And then he showed me the scroll on which he had written his own spell-one which would take a relatively small amount of magical effort, applied just so, and tap into the planes in such a way as to create, if not a volcano, then its near simulacrum. I have copied it to the best of my memory on the following pages, because of what came next.
We fought. He accused me of envy. I accused him of callousness. I warned him I would turn him over to the council. I left, but I did not go to Sadebreth. I told myself it was merely Tarchamus’s temper and if he were allowed to cool, things would return to the way they had been.
The next morning the ground beneath the city of Tenish had erupted, burning Arion’s fortress from the sky, and laying waste to his vassals below.
“Gods’ books,” Dahl muttered. If the arcanist was truly the misunderstood scholar that the Book had painted for Dahl, there was a lot of explanation missing from Emrys’s diary. His thoughts turned circles trying to find a way to understand Tarchamus’s actions as anything but horrific. Perhaps this Arion had been a greater threat? Perhaps someone had stolen Tarchamus’s spell and used it? Perhaps it had gone off by some accident?
But stilclass="underline" he had crafted a spell to destroy vast tracts of land and had not cared if it killed those who stood in its way.
He could not help but wonder what Jedik would have thought of it-a thought experiment for a novice loremaster if Dahl had ever seen one. If knowledge was not meant to be hidden or hindered, how did one act when the freedom of some knowledge led to death and destruction?
“The knowledge is not to blame,” he murmured, as if at lessons, “only the use of such. The actor controls the action, not the potential for action.” A pretty answer, but Dahl-perhaps, he thought bitterly, since his fall-found it hard to accept. A spell to birth a volcano from the fields might well sit quietly on a shelf, an example of one wizard’s careful, brilliant study … but that counted on the goodwill and self-discipline of a great many people who weren’t known for such things.
He turned the page to see Emrys’s scribbled diagrams, full of questions and strange symbols he’d marked as provisional. Dahl rubbed his eyes-even with the ritual’s help, the pages were barely comprehensible.
The voices that carried through the door on the other hand-
“It’s right!” he heard a man shout in Netherese. “It’s right! There’s the old bastard. Pull the wizard out, you idiots.”
Dahl slammed the book shut and pressed his ear to the door. Movement-plenty of bodies. More muffled Netherese. And then a voice he had been sure that he’d never have to hear again.
“Well done,” Adolican Rhand said, so close, Dahl could picture him admiring the garnet in the arcanist’s pendant. “Get them open.”
Dahl scrambled back from the door, one hand on his sword and his ears ringing with nerves. The doors started to shudder with the impact of a ram. The green magic held them shut and whole, but they’d soon realize that and try other means-he had as long as it took Rhand to come to drastic measures. And he couldn’t sit here and wait.
Dahl snatched up the heavy haversack and tossed it back down the tunnel, before pacing out a distance between the doors and the point where he’d have to cast the ritual. He yanked the bag open, digging through the bottles and vials and pouches for the right pieces, stringing together in his head the two rituals he needed, and the way to cast them both as one.
The sentry was simple-a spell for a student, a spell he could have taught Farideh and been done by highsunfeast. He set the two components-crushed quartz and basilisk spines-to one side. The other, the amplifying ritual was much trickier and would take all his concentration.
Or, he thought, all he could give while the rhythmic crashing of the ram demanded his attention.
Salts of copper, powdered silver, the splintered roots of a Feywild tree, and a chip of diamond the size of a flea. He worked feverishly, fighting to keep his focus on the spell and not the door, not the boom, boom, boom and the inevitable point when the ram stopped its futile efforts and the wizard went to work.
The sentry came together quickly, an invisible watcher left in sight of the doors but as far down the tunnel as possible. It wouldn’t see Dahl or the others but it would be very quick to spot the Shadovar.
The second half took longer, the broken strands of the Weave fighting against Dahl as the spell pulled them together, winding them down into the secret substance of the sentry, down around the core of its spell. The booming slowed.
Dahl’s grip on the magic started to slip. He spoke the last words of the ritual in a rush, all gasped together in one breath of air. The magic snapped tight around the sentry, and a flash of colorless light filled the tunnel. Dahl dropped to his knees, panting.
What he’d told Farideh before was true: ritual magic wasn’t for fighting. But the amplification spell he’d been part of creating back in Procampur would make a simple workaday ritual feed into itself, casting at a hundredfold its prior power without changing the intent of the original spell.
In this case, the sentry would scream when its range was breached. Hopefully loud enough to shatter Rhand’s ear drums and echo off the farthest walls of the library. It would buy them time to prepare.
The ram stopped. He scooped his components and books back into the haversack. He had to get back to the others. But first, he had to find Farideh.
Dahl sprinted out into the stacks, and had no more than hit the last stair before he heard Farideh’s cry of alarm echo through the library.
“Shit,” he cursed.
With only a vague idea of where she’d gone, he followed the nearest to the wall, calling her name. He shouldn’t have to pay attention to her comings and goings. He shouldn’t have been asked to play nursemaid. Damn it, he thought easing around one of the enormous columns-if anything happened …
Gods, he hoped this was just her being foolhardy and easily excited. Could one of the ghosts have lured her away? Could they have killed her the way they had the scouts? Or gods, worse-what if the shadar-kai found a way in? What if they didn’t need to breach the doors?
You ignorant fool, he thought at himself. Tam would skin him alive.
The pathways through the library twisted onto themselves, throwing shelves up into his path and dwindling into dead ends with dead-eyed statues. The farther he went, the more worried he became. He’d sneered at the notion of the ghosts. He’d not believed they were in danger, and now he’d lost Farideh and himself in the maze of the library-
There. Voices. Farideh and … someone else.
Calm voices, he noted, and he slowed down, easing his way toward the sounds. What did the illusions look like from the outside? Would he know?
Who else would she be talking to? he wondered. He came around the corner, his sword at the ready, and froze.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN