That was how it all had gone so bad in Ervanon.
Royce had slipped into the Crown Tower as delicately as a moth through a window. Yet unlike on the previous night, the room was not empty. A priest sat in the small outer chamber. It did not matter, as he had not seen or heard Royce, but then Hadrian blundered in. The man screamed. They ran—Royce one way, Hadrian the other. It was a coin flip that Hadrian won. The guards came around the tower on Royce’s side. While they were busy chasing and wrestling Royce down, Hadrian made it back to the rope. He was safe. All he had to do was climb back down, retrieve his horse from the thickets, and ride away. That was exactly what Royce expected him to do, what Royce would have done in his place, but back then Royce did not know him.
Hadrian heard the three taps from inside the library and, grabbing the lantern, crept inside. It was black and he was met with a terrible confluence of smells. The dominant odor was a thick burnt-wood scent, but a more pungent rotted-meat stink managed to cut through. From the darkness, he heard Royce say, “We’re clear, light it up.”
Hadrian lifted the lantern’s hood to reveal a scorched hall. Burned black and filled with piles of ash, the room was still beautiful beyond anything else Hadrian had ever seen. Four stories tall, the walls circling him were marvelously crafted tiers of marble arcades. Towering pillars ringed the coffered dome and supported the great arches joining the arcades to each other. Around the rim, a colonnade of white marble was interspersed with lifelike bronze statues of twelve men, each of which had to be at least twenty feet tall. From the floor they appeared life-sized. Great chandeliers of gold hung around the perimeter. The black cracked remains of tables formed a circular pattern of desks with a great office in the center. A fresco painting of wonderful scenes of various landscapes formed the lower part of the dome, while the greater portion, made of glass, now lay in shards scattered across the beautiful mosaic floor.
In the center of the room, near the office bench, was its only inhabitant. Surrounded by a few singed books, papers, quills, three lanterns, and an oilcan lay what remained of an old man. He was on his back, his head resting on a knapsack, his legs wrapped in a blanket. Like Bernie, this man was dead, and as he had Bernie, Hadrian recognized him.
“Antun Bulard,” he said, and knelt beside the body of the elderly man he had befriended in Calis. He was not as ravaged by death as Bernie—no sea crabs here. Bulard, who had always been pale in life, was now a bluish gray, his complexion waxy. His white hair was brittle and spectacles still rested on the end of his nose.
“Bernie was right,” Hadrian told Bulard. “You didn’t survive the trip, but then again, neither did he.”
Hadrian used the old man’s blanket to wrap him up and together they carried his body out and set it off to the side under a pile of rocks. The smell lingered, but it was not nearly as pungent.
When the others arrived, they stared with disappointment, Myron most of all. Exhaustion won out and they threw their packs down while Royce relocked the door.
Myron looked up, his eyes scanning the tiers and countless aisles where books must have once lay, but now they housed only piles of ash, and Hadrian noticed the monk’s hands tremble.
“We’ll rest here for a few hours,” Royce said.
“Here?” Gaunt asked. “The smell is awful, charcoal and something else… What is that disgusting—” Gaunt asked.
“We found a body,” Hadrian told them. “Another member of the last team the Patriarch sent in, from the same group as Bernie, from the Harbinger… and a friend. We took his remains out.”
“Was he burned?” Myron asked fearfully.
“No.” Hadrian placed a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t think anyone was here when it caught fire.”
“But it was burned recently,” the monk said. “It wouldn’t still smell like this after a thousand years.”
“Perhaps our resident sorceress can do something about the stench?” Gaunt asked.
This brought stern looks from Hadrian, Alric, and Mauvin.
“What?” Degan asked. “Are we to continue to tiptoe around it? She is a magician, a mage, a wizardess, a sorceress, a witch—pick whatever term you prefer. Beat me senseless if you like, but after our little boat ride, there is no debating the reality of that fact.”
Alric strode toward Gaunt with a threatening look and a hand on his sword.
“No.” Arista stopped him. “He’s right. There’s no sense hiding it or pretending. I suppose I am a—Did you say wizardess? That one’s not too bad.” As she said this, her robe glowed once more and a mystical white light filled the chamber with a wonderful brilliance, as if the moon had risen in their midst. “That’s fine—best that it is out in the open, best that we can all say it. Royce is an elf, Hadrian a Teshlor, Mauvin a count and a Tek’chin swordsman, Alric a king, Myron a monk with an indelible mind, Magnus a dwarven trap smith, Degan the Heir of Novron, and I—I am a wizardess. But if you call me a witch again, I promise you’ll finish this journey as a frog in my pocket. Are we clear?”
Gaunt nodded.
“Good. Now, I am exhausted, so you will have to live with the smell.”
With that, Arista threw herself down, wrapped up in her blankets, and closed her eyes. As she did, the robe dimmed and faded until at last it was dark. The rest of them followed her lead. Some swallowed a handful of food or a mouthful of water before collapsing but no one spoke. Hadrian tore open another packaged meal, surprised at how few he had left. They had better find the horn soon or they might all end up like Bulard.
What happened to him?
It was the question he drifted to sleep on.
Hadrian felt a nudge and opened his eyes to Mauvin’s face and wild hair hanging over him.
“Royce told me to wake you. It’s your watch.”
Hadrian sat up groggily. “How long and who do I wake?”
“You’re last.”
“Last? But I just fell asleep.”
“You’ve been snoring for hours. Give me the chance to get a little sleep.”
Hadrian wiped his eyes, wondering how he could best estimate the length of an hour, and shivered. He always felt chilled when he woke up, before his blood got running properly. The cool subterranean air did nothing to help. He wrapped his blanket around his shoulders and stood up.
The party all lay together like blanket-shrouded corpses, bundles of dark lumps on the floor. Each had swept the broken glass back and it clustered in a ring marking the border of their camp. The lantern was still burning, and off to one side, near where he had found Bulard’s body, huddled in a ball and wrapped in his hooded frock and blanket, sat Myron.