"It's this one here," said Seregil, stopping before an unremarkable door halfway down the passage. "Stay here, I'll go find a custodian to let us in."
Alec leaned against the door and looked about. The walls and floors were made of stone slabs, laid smooth and tight together. Ornate lamps were fastened in brackets at intervals, giving enough light to see clearly from one end of the corridor to the other. He was just wondering whose job it was to keep all those lamps full when Seregil came back with a stooped old man in tow.
The custodian rattled the door open with a huge iron key and then handed Alec a leather sack. Inside were half a dozen large lightstones.
"No flames," the old man warned before creaking off again about his business. "Just leave them outside the door when you've finished."
The chamber was a large one, and filled with closely spaced shelves of books and scrolls.
Holding one of the stones aloft, Alec looked around and groaned. "It'll take us hours to find anything here!"
"It's all very logically arranged and docketed," Seregil assured him, pointing out little cards tacked to the shelves here and there. On each, a few words in faded script indicated general subject areas. "Histories of the Great War" took up several bookcases at the back of the room. Judging by the undisturbed layers of dust on most of them, there had been little interest of late in the subject.
Seregil clucked his tongue disapprovingly. "People ought to make more use of these. The past always sets the stage for the future; any Aurenfaie knows that."
Alec looked at the closely packed tiers in dismay. "Maker's Mercy, Seregil. I can't read all these!"
"Of course not," said Seregil, climbing a small ladder to inspect the contents of an upper shelf. "Half of them aren't even in your language and most of the others are ponderously boring. But there are one or two that are fairly readable, if I can just remember where to look. You browse around down there; stick to things less than two inches thick to begin with—and see if you can read them."
If there was a system to the arrangement of the books, it eluded Alec. Books in Skalan stood check by jowl with those in Aurenfaie and half a dozen other languages he couldn't begin to guess at.
Seregil appeared to be right at home, though.
Alec watched as his companion went busily to and fro with his ladder, muttering under his breath as he went, or exclaiming happily over old favorites.
Alec had already extracted half a dozen suitably slim volumes when the ornate binding of a thicker one caught his eye. Wondering if it had illustrations, he pulled it out. Unfortunately, this one served as a sort of keystone, for the ones on either side of it let go and most of the shelf cascaded to the floor at Alec's feet.
"Oh, well done!" Seregil snickered from somewhere beyond the next shelves.
Alec set his books aside with an exasperated sigh and began replacing the others. He hadn't been all that interested in the war in the first place; his simple query was turning out to be considerably more trouble than it was worth. As he slid a handful of books back into place, however, he noticed something sticking out from behind some others.
Curious, he carefully pulled it free and found that it was a slim, plainly bound book held shut with a latched strap. Encouraged by its size more than anything else, he tried to open it, but the catch wouldn't give.
"How are you making out?" asked Seregil, wandering back with a book under his arm.
"I found this in back of some others. It must have fallen in behind." On closer inspection, he saw that it was actually a case of some sort. There was no writing anywhere on it to suggest what its contents might be. "I can't get it open."
Alec jiggled the catch a last time, then handed it to him.
Seregil glanced it over and passed it back. "There's no lock; the catch is just corroded good and tight. It can't have been opened for years. Oh, well, it probably wasn't anything very interesting anyway."
He gave Alec a challenging grin, one Alec had seen often enough before.
"What, here?" he whispered in surprise.
Seregil leaned against a bookcase and gave a careless shrug. "It's not much good to anyone that way, is it?"
After a quick, rather guilty look around to make sure the custodian hadn't returned, Alec drew the black-handled poniard from his boot and worked it under the strap. The deadly sharp blade cut easily through the leather. Sheathing it again, he gently opened the cover and found a loose sheaf of parchment leaves inside. They were badly stained and scorched along the bottom edge, some burned half away.
Small, close-packed script covered each on both sides.
"Aura Elustri!"
Grinning excitedly, Seregil lifted out the first sheet. "It's in Aurenfaie. It looks to be a journal of some sort—" He read a few lines. "And it's definitely about the war."
"It's so weathered I can hardly make it out," said Alec, taking up another page. "Not that my Aurenfaie's all that good to begin with."
"Anyone would have a hard time making this out." Seregil squinted down at the cramped text a moment longer, then closed it and tucked it under his arm with the other book he'd chosen. Sorting through the ones Alec had selected, he discarded all but two and hurried Alec upstairs again, obviously eager to tackle the journal.
Back at Wheel Street again, they retreated to Seregil's chamber with a supply of wine and fruit. When the fire had been replenished and the lamps lit against the early evening gloom, they began sorting through the sheets on the hearth rug.
Taking up a page, Seregil studied it closely. "Do you know what this is?" he exclaimed with a smile of pure delight. "These are fragments of a field journal kept by an Aurenfaie soldier during the war. Alec, it's an eyewitness account of events six centuries old! Just wait until we show Nysander. I'll bet no one even knew this was there, or it would have been in a different vault."
The pages were badly shuffled in places and it took some doing to sort them out. The translation from Aurenfaie to Skalan was easy enough; deciphering the crabbed and often smeared writing while searching through mismatched pages was another matter. Seregil finally found what appeared to be the earliest entry and settled back in a nest of cushions on the floor to read it aloud.
They soon pieced together that the author had been a young archer, part of a regiment of well-to-do volunteers raised by a local noble. He'd been a faithful diarist, but the entries dealt mostly with skirmishes and fallen comrades. It was clear that the Aurenfaie had hated their Plenimaran adversaries, who were consistently depicted as harsh and brutal. There were several mercifully terse descriptions of their barbaric treatment of captured soldiers and camp followers.
The first series of entries ended with a detailed description of his first sight of Queen Gerilain of Skala. Referring to her as "a plain girl in armor," he nonetheless praised her leadership. He spoke only Aurenfaie, it seemed, but quoted several lines of a powerful rallying speech she'd given before the Third Battle of Wyvern Dug, which someone had translated for him. He described the Skalan soldiers admiringly as "fierce and full of fire."
Stretched out on the carpet, watching the shadows playing across the ceiling, Alec let the words paint scenes in his imagination. As Seregil read about Gerilain, the first warrior queen, he found himself picturing Klia, although she was anything but plain.
The second fragment had been written in Mycena during the battles of high summer, when the regiment had been joined by a contingent of Aurenfaie wizards. This was followed by an intriguing line about "the necromancers of the enemy," but the rest of the page had been destroyed.