“Give the torch to me,” Mikulov said. He took the burning brand and strode forward, stepping over the rubble with Cain close behind. The old man’s breath caught in his throat. In spite of the danger, he was enthralled by the prospect of the books he had caught a glimpse of on his last visit; he couldn’t wait to get his hands on them. He felt sure the secret of Al Cut could be found somewhere among their brittle pages.
The library did not disappoint him. It was even more impressive than he remembered. The thrashing about of the unburied had taken several shelves down and strewn their contents about the room, but most were intact. Torchlight revealed shelf after shelf of rare texts, many of them in nearly perfect condition. The air held a faint hint of rot, but there was no sign of the creature, and the rooms beyond were dark and silent. Cullen and Thomas righted the table and began to gather the books on the floor, stacking them carefully. Egil stood in the doorway, motionless, an odd look on his face as he surveyed the damage.
Cain let his fingers drift over the spines of the nearest texts, taking some of them down to peruse more closely, losing himself in the familiar, heady scent of old paper; here were original documents from the church of Zakarum, next to texts on the history of the Horadric order, the Vizjerei, and the priests of Rathma. His heart beat faster. Some of them he had seen before; others he had not. An Ammuit treatise on illusion and the bending of planes of reality sat next to a reproduction of a Taan book on divination. There were ancient writings from spellcasters and witches; formulas for healing potions; curses, powders, and spells; and tomes on shape-shifting and elemental magic by the druids of the northern forests. Other texts were written about the umbaru witch doctors from the jungles of Torajan, outlining concoctions of tree root and herbs of which Cain was only vaguely familiar.
On a lower shelf, he found a folded piece of parchment. Bringing it closer to the light, Cain found it to be a map of the tunnels under Gea Kul. He saw the very rooms where they were standing, sitting above the spokes of a wheel-like design that stretched beyond the entire town to the sea. There were other notations that he could not make sense of at first; they looked like buildings of some kind, buried beneath the earth. The map was detailed and carefully drawn, and he tucked it into his rucksack for safekeeping.
Cain returned to the shelves and paused, astonished, staring at a volume as he drifted back through decades of memories. Could it be? He took the book down with trembling hands, blowing dust from its cover.
A history of Westmarch and the Sons of Rakkis, a copy of the same text his mother had burned in front of him when he was just a boy.
This one is not part of your destiny . . . Your proper texts are with Jered’s belongings, when you choose to read them.
Cain was alarmed to find himself close to tears. An old man like me shouldn’t cry for what’s past, he thought. There’s not enough time left in these bones for that.
“Rau was a scholar at heart,” Thomas said, breaking the hypnotic spell that had seemed to fall over Cain as he lost himself in the library’s contents. “He was always focused on the pursuit of knowledge, driving us to collect whatever we could find. He studied these texts and learned from them.”
The range of knowledge was remarkable. The First Ones must have spent years collecting them, and even then, the breadth of the collection almost defied belief. Yet Rau had left it all behind. And that led to an important question: what other, more disturbing texts did he have in his possession now?
Cain could not help but see the parallel between himself and Garreth Rau. But what had caused Rau to veer off the path of righteousness? Cain had regretted the years he had lost before he had found his true calling, convinced that he could never make up for them. But perhaps they had done something important in giving him the wisdom of time and the perspective to keep from making the same mistakes and being tempted by the seductive power of evil.
You must come to belief in your own way, in your own time.
Mikulov had found a lantern on the wall; he lit it with the torch, handing the flame to Egil to hold. The room grew brighter, the yellow flame illuminating the rows of books. The men had brought large sacks with them, and Cain began to direct Thomas and Cullen on which books to gather up and take with them.
It was Thomas who found it. On the floor, near where the table had been overturned, he discovered the companion text to the one in Cain’s rucksack.
The bindings were identicaclass="underline" hand-sewn leather, with the Horadric symbol branded into the cover, with the mark of Tal Rasha inside. Cain had Mikulov bring the lantern closer and opened the brittle book as carefully as he could, scanning its contents. The writing was dense, as if its author had tried to cram as much as possible onto each page. Rather than a continuation of the prophecies from the first text, much of this one was a recounting of the Mage Clan Wars and the founding of the Horadrim by Tyrael, and Cain’s excitement slowly turned sour as he flipped through it.
In the second half of the book, the pages were blank.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. The range of texts from the library could take him months to read, and there was no guarantee he would find any answers, even then.
No. He studied the blank pages more closely. It did not make sense that they would be empty. Words were hidden here: he was sure of it.
Cain removed the book of demon-summoning magic from his rucksack, searching for the reveal spell he had used before to locate these very chambers. He felt the dark power flow through him once again as he spoke. The lantern flame guttered and then flared up, and something unseen seemed to enter the room; he heard the others gasp with fright, but he did not look up, his eyes bound to the blank page as words began to appear there, as if freshly written.
The text described an ancient battle from the Mage Clan Wars many centuries before, fought over a forgotten city. The brothers Bartuc and Horazon, leaders of the Vizjerei sorcerers, gathered thousands of followers each; light and dark clashed, and the streets ran with blood, their vast powers nearly splitting the land in two before Bartuc prevailed in this particular battle and slaughtered what remained of Horazon’s followers. The two brothers escaped the killing fields, leaving the dead sorcerers to rot where they had fallen.
A short time later, Bartuc returned to the city under the cover of darkness and used his demonic powers to cover up what he had done and sink the city deep beneath the ground, burying it forever and erasing it from history with a powerful spell. But the dead sorcerers from the battle remained, entombed in the ruins of ancient buildings and tunnels that connected them.
A drawing scratched into the text’s pages, this one more crudely done, filled Cain’s heart with fear.
The lost city’s name was Al Cut. And its location was chillingly familiar.
Gea Kul had been built directly on top of it.
The notations from the other map came back to him; they marked the spots where Al Cut’s buildings lay, entombed forever beneath the sands of time.
“Al Cut,” Cain breathed softly. The revelation was like a thunderbolt. “It’s not a man; it’s a city.”
“Where’s Egil?”
The urgency in the voice broke the spell that had fallen over Cain. He looked up to find Thomas looking frantically around the room and Cullen still packing books into his sack with a frenzy that made him seem almost mad with fear. Something had terrified the two men. The lantern no longer gave their surroundings a warm yellow glow; the gloom crept out from the corners, seeming to eat the light, and the cold had returned like the touch of icy, dead fingertips.
Cain remembered the odd look on Egil’s face as he had stood in the entrance to the library. He glanced at Mikulov, who shook his head, then nodded in the direction of the only other way out of the library—the archway from which the unburied had appeared several days before. The torch Egil had been holding was tucked neatly into a bracket on the wall.