He gave her a look, cocking one eyebrow. “It’s all in the wrists.”
They entered a corridor formed of stone blocks and plank flooring that led to a second door, this one less formidable. Aphen led the way through, and they found themselves inside the stone well of the furnace chamber. Its circular walls rose into the body of the Keep, where heating ducts carried warmth to the various rooms of the fortress, and dropped away into the pit where the earth’s fires provided that warmth. Once, tenders had been used to mind those fires and control their output. But during the time of Grianne Ohmsford, the Druids had devised a system that tended the fires automatically. With the Keep deserted, the heat was diminished and the fires reduced to a dull red glow.
A long circular metal stairway, its interlocking sections connected by catwalks and platforms that formed ramps and thresholds to dozens of closed doors, wound in serpentine fashion about the stone walls.
“We need to go up,” Woostra advised.
They began to climb, ascending the steps at a cautious, steady pace, listening for sounds and watching for movement that would signal danger. But as the minutes drifted past, nothing happened save for the echo of their footfalls on the stairs. The pit was silent, and the Keep empty of everything but ghosts.
When they reached a door that opened onto the ground floor of the fortress, Aphen took the lead, her magic summoned and poised at her fingertips. They stepped out of the furnace room into a long corridor where dozens of bodies lay piled atop one another, twisted into positions that clearly indicated they had suffered an agonizing death. Federation soldiers, all of them, clumped against the walls for as far as the eye could see. From the marks on the stone and the damage to their hands, it could be deduced they had died trying to claw their way out. Some of them had worn their fingers down to the first and second knuckles. Some of them had torn out their own throats.
Aphen bent close to her companion. “Can we find a way to go other than through this?”
He nodded wordlessly and led her into a short corridor that branched off to the right and from there through a doorway to a narrow set of stone steps leading upward. Again, they began to climb. There were still no sounds, no signs of life anywhere. But Aphen sensed something once again—the warning stronger this time. A presence, unseen but lurking close. She hunted for it as they ascended, but couldn’t track it. The magic, she thought. It was there, and it was aware of them.
They reached the floor on which the Druid Histories were housed and made their way down the empty, cavernous hall, pressing through the weight of the silence.
Aphen.
The voice whispered in her head.
A voice she knew well.
I am here.
She kept moving, saying nothing to Woostra, who might have heard it as well but wasn’t acknowledging it.
Aphen. She caught her breath. I see you.
This time Woostra glanced over his shoulder, and there was no mistaking the look he gave her.
Reaching the door to the archive room, the old man released the locks and let them inside. Then he carefully closed the door and relocked it. He led the way through his office and a series of reading rooms into the storage vault—a box with bare walls and a massive wooden table set at its center. Once upon a time, only Druids had been granted access to this chamber and possessed the magic that would reveal the hiding place of the books. But Grianne Ohmsford had changed that, too, when she had become Ard Rhys. Now there were keepers of the records who were not Druids themselves but in service to the order. Woostra was the most recent of these, and like his predecessors he knew the secret of the books and the magic that would reveal them.