A chuckle escaped Chaol’s throat, though he reined it in at Hasar’s glare. Nesryn smiled, inclining her head in good-willed apology to the princess.
Yet Sartaq watched them closely over the rim of his golden goblet. Chaol asked, “Are you able to fly Kadara much while you’re here?”
Sartaq didn’t miss a beat as he nodded. “As often as I can, usually near dawn. I was in the skies right after breakfast today, and returned just in time for dinner, thankfully.”
Hasar muttered to Nesryn without breaking from the vizier commanding her attention, “He’s never missed a meal in his life.”
Kashin barked a laugh that had even the khagan down the table glancing their way, Arghun scowling with disapproval. When had the royals last laughed since their sister’s passing? From the khagan’s tight face, perhaps a while.
But Sartaq tossed his long braid over a shoulder before patting the flat, firm stomach beneath his fine clothes. “Why do you think I come home so often, sister, if not for the good food?”
“To plot and scheme?” Hasar asked sweetly.
Sartaq’s smile turned subdued. “If only I had time for such things.”
A shadow seemed to pass over Sartaq’s face—and Chaol marked where the prince’s gaze drifted. The white banners still streamed from the windows set high in the walls of the hall, now caught in what was surely the heralding wind of a thunderstorm. A man who perhaps wished he’d possessed extra time for more vital parts of his life.
Nesryn asked a touch softly, “You fly every day, then, Prince?”
Sartaq dragged his stare from his youngest sister’s death-banners to assess Nesryn. More warrior than courtier, yet he nodded—in answer to an unspoken request. “I do, Captain.”
When Sartaq turned to respond to a question from Duva, Chaol exchanged a glance with Nesryn—all he needed to convey his order.
Be in the aerie at dawn. Find out where he stands in this war.
10
A summer storm galloped in off the Narrow Sea just before midnight.
Even tucked into the sprawling library at the base of the Torre, Yrene felt every shudder of thunder. Occasional flashes of lightning sliced down the narrow corridors of the stacks and halls, chased by wind that crept through the cracks in the pale stone, guttering the candles in its wake. Most were shielded within glass lanterns, the books and scrolls too precious to risk open flame. But the wind found them in there, too—and set the glass lanterns hanging from the arched ceilings swinging and groaning.
Seated at an oak desk built into an alcove far from the brighter lights and busier areas of the library, Yrene watched the metal lantern dangling from the arch above her sway in that storm wind. Stars and crescent moons had been cut from its sides and filled with colored glass that cast splotches of blue and red and green on the stone wall before her. The splotches bobbed and dipped, a living sea of color.
Thunder cracked, so loud she flinched, the ancient chair beneath her creaking in objection.
A few feminine yelps answered it, then giggles.
Acolytes—studying late for their examinations next week.
Yrene huffed a laugh, mostly at herself, and shook her head as she focused again upon the texts Nousha had dug up for her hours ago.
Yrene and the Head Librarian had never been close, and Yrene was certainly not inclined to seek out the woman if she spotted her in the mess hall, but … Nousha was fluent in fifteen languages, some of them dead, and had trained at the famed Parvani Library on the western coast, nestled amid the lush and spice-rich lands outside Balruhn.
The City of Libraries, they called Balruhn. If the Torre Cesme was the domain of healers, the Parvani was the domain of knowledge. Even the great road that linked Balruhn to the mighty Sister-Road, the main artery through the continent that flowed from Antica all the way to Tigana, had been named for it: the Scholars’ Road.
Yrene didn’t know what had brought Nousha here all those decades ago, or what the Torre had offered her to stay, but she was an invaluable resource. And for all of her unsmiling nature, Nousha had always found Yrene the information she needed, no matter how outlandish the request.
Tonight, the woman had not looked pleased when Yrene had approached her in the mess hall, apologies falling from her lips for interrupting the librarian’s meal. Yrene might have waited until the morning, but she had lessons tomorrow, and Lord Westfall after that.
Nousha had met Yrene here after finishing her meal, and had listened, long fingers folded in front of her flowing gray robes, to Yrene’s story—and needs:
Information. Any she could find.
Wounds from demons. Wounds from dark magic. Wounds from unnatural sources. Wounds that left echoes but did not appear to continue to wreak havoc upon the victim. Wounds that left marks but no scar tissue.
Nousha had found them. Stack after stack of books and bundles of scrolls. She’d piled them on the desk in silence. Some were in Halha. Some in Yrene’s own tongue. Some in Eyllwe. Some were …
Yrene scratched her head at the scroll she’d weighted with the smooth onyx stones from the jar set on each library desk.
Even Nousha had admitted she did not recognize the strange markings—runes of some sort. From where, she had no inkling, either, only that the scrolls had been wedged beside the Eyllwe tomes in a level of the library so deep beneath the ground that Yrene had never ventured there.
Yrene ran a finger over the marking before her, tracing its straight lines and curving arcs.
The parchment was old enough that Nousha had threatened to flay Yrene alive if she got any food, water, or drink on it. When Yrene had asked just how old, Nousha had shook her head.
A hundred years? Yrene had asked.
Nousha had shrugged and said that judging by the location, the type of parchment, and ink pigment, it was over ten times that.
Yrene cringed at the paper she was so flagrantly touching, and eased the weighting stones off the corners. None of the books in her own language had yielded anything valuable—more old wives’ warnings about ill-wishers and spirits of air and rot.
Nothing like what Lord Westfall had described.
A faint, distant click echoed from the gloom to her right, and Yrene lifted her head, scanning the darkness, ready to leap onto her chair at the first sign of a scurrying mouse.
It seemed even the library’s beloved Baast Cats—thirty-six females, no more, no less—could not keep out all vermin, despite their warrior-goddess namesake.
Yrene again scanned the gloom to her right, cringing, wishing she could summon one of the beryl-eyed cats to go hunting.
But no one summoned a Baast Cat. No one. They appeared when and where they willed, and not a moment before.
The Baast Cats had dwelled in the Torre library for as long as it had existed, yet none knew where they had come from, or how they were replaced when age claimed them. Each was as individual as any human, save for those beryl-colored eyes they each bore, and the fact that all were just as prone to curl up in a lap as they were to shun company altogether. Some of the healers, old and young alike, swore the cats could step through pools of shadow to appear on another level of the library; some swore the cats had been caught pawing through the pages of open books—reading.
Well, it’d certainly be helpful if they bothered to read less and hunt more. But the cats answered to no one and nothing, except, perhaps, their namesake, or whatever god had found a quiet home in the library, within Silba’s shadow. To offend one Baast Cat was to insult them all, and even though Yrene loved most animals—with the exception of some insects—she had been sure to treat the cats kindly, occasionally leaving morsels of food, or providing a belly rub or ear scratch whenever they deigned to command them.
But there was no sign of those green eyes glinting in the dark, or of a scurrying mouse fleeing their path, so Yrene loosed a breath and set aside the ancient scroll, carefully placing it at the edge of the desk before pulling an Eyllwe tome toward her.
The book was bound in black leather, heavy as a doorstop. She knew a little of the Eyllwe language thanks to living so close to its border with a mother who spoke it fluently—certainly not from the father who had hailed from there.
None of the Towers women had ever married, preferring either lovers who left them with a present that arrived nine months later or who perhaps stayed a year or two before moving on. Yrene had never known her father, never learned anything about who he was other than a traveler who had stopped at her mother’s cottage for the night, seeking shelter from a wild storm that swept over the grassy plain.
Yrene traced her fingers over the gilt title, sounding out the words in the language she had not spoken or heard in years.
“The … The …” She tapped her finger on the title. She should have asked Nousha. The librarian had already promised to translate some other texts that had caught her eye, but … Yrene sighed again. “The …” Poem. Ode. Lyric—“Song,” she breathed. “The Song of …” Start. Onset—“Beginning.”
The Song of Beginning.
The demons—the Valg—were ancient, Lord Westfall had said. They had waited an eternity to strike. Part of near-forgotten myths; little more than bedside stories.
Yrene flipped open the cover, and cringed at the unfamiliar tangle of writing within the table of contents. The type itself was old, the book not even printed on a press. Handwritten. With some word variations that had long since died out.
Lightning flashed again, and Yrene rubbed at her temple as she leafed through the musty, yellow-lined pages.
A history book. That’s all it was.
Her eye snagged on a page, and she paused, backtracking until the illustration reappeared.
It had been done in sparing colors: blacks, whites, reds, and the occasional yellow.
All painted by a master’s hand, no doubt an illustration of whatever was written beneath it.
The illustration revealed a barren crag, an army of soldiers in dark armor kneeling before it.
Kneeling before what was atop the crag.
A towering gate. No wall flanking it, no keep behind it. As if someone had built the gateway of black stone out of thin air.
There were no doors within the archway. Only swirling black nothing. Beams of it shot from the void, some foul corruption of the sun, falling upon the soldiers kneeling before it.
She squinted at the figures in the foreground. Their bodies were human, but the hands clutching their swords … Clawed. Twisted.
“Valg,” Yrene whispered.
Thunder cracked in answer.
Yrene scowled at the swaying lantern as the reverberations from the thunderhead rumbled beneath her feet, up her legs.
She flipped through the pages until the next illustration appeared. Three figures stood before the same gate, the drawing too distant to make out any features beyond their male bodies, tall and powerful.
She ran a finger over the caption below and translated:
Orcus. Mantyx. Erawan.
Three Valg Kings.
Wielders of the Keys.
Yrene chewed on her bottom lip. Lord Westfall had not mentioned such things.
But if there was a gate … then it would need a key to open. Or several.
If the book was correct.
Midnight chimed in the great clock of the library’s main atrium.
Yrene riffled through the pages, to another illustration. It was divided into three panels.
Everything the lord had said—she had believed him, of course, but … it was true. If the wound wasn’t proof enough, these texts offered no other alternative.
For there in the first panel, tied down upon an altar of dark stone … a desperate young man strained to free himself from the approach of a crowned dark figure. Something swirled around the figure’s hand—some asp of black mist and wicked thought. No real creature.
The second panel … Yrene cringed from it.
For there was that young man, eyes wide in supplication and terror, mouth forced open as that creature of black mist slithered down his throat.
But it was the last panel that made her blood chill.
Lightning flashed again, illumining the final illustration.
The young man’s face had gone still. Unfeeling. His eyes … Yrene glanced between the previous drawing and the final one. His eyes had been silver in the first two.
In the final one … they had gone black. Passable as human eyes, but the silver had been wiped away by unholy obsidian.
Not dead. For they had shown him rising, chains removed. Not a threat.
No—whatever they had put inside him …
Thunder groaned again, and more shrieks and giggles followed. Along with the slam and clatter of the acolytes leaving for the night.
Yrene surveyed the book before her, the other stacks Nousha had laid out.
Lord Westfall had described collars and rings to hold the Valg demons within a human host. But even after they were removed, he’d said, they could linger. They were merely implantation devices, and if they remained on too long, feeding off their host …
Yrene shook her head. The man in the drawing had not been enslaved—he’d been infested. The magic had come from someone with that sort of power. Power from the demon host within.
A clash of lightning, then thunder immediately on its heels.
And then another click sounded—faint and hollow—from the dim stacks to her right. Closer now than that earlier one had been.
Yrene glanced again toward the gloom, the hair on her arms rising.
Not a movement of a mouse. Or even the scrape of feline claws on stone or bookshelf.
She had never once feared for her safety, not from the moment she had set foot within these walls, but Yrene found herself going still as she stared into that gloom to her right. Then slowly looked over her shoulder.
The shelf-lined corridor was a straight shot toward a larger hallway, which would, in three minutes’ walk, take her back to the bright, constantly monitored main atrium. Five minutes at most.
Only shadows and leather and dust surrounded her, the light bobbing and tilting with the swaying lanterns.
Healing magic offered no defenses. She’d discovered such things the hard way.