Nicci hammered at the thing with another fist of air. The creature staggered. Books tumbled off the shelves, their pages flapping. In response, the shaksis stretched out tangled limbs and seized another scholar who tried to slip away to safety. Vines and thorns curled around the young man, snapped his neck, then tossed his discarded body up against the wall, knocking down an entire shelf of books.
Struggling to control the level of destruction, Nicci called a single bolt of lightning that struck and splintered the thing’s thick left leg, rendering it unbalanced. Even though it smoked and smoldered, the tottering creature regrew itself.
Nicci and Nathan stood shoulder-to-shoulder as a barricade, refusing to let the creature past—but it did not want to pass. It wanted to kill them. With a thrashing of uncontrolled branches and dry leaves, along with a buzzing of hungry insects, it pushed back against Nicci’s blasts of air. Nathan hacked again, splintering the encroaching branches.
From behind her, Thistle said, “I’ll get a torch to light that monster on fire.” She darted away, but she didn’t get far.
The shaksis reacted to her movement, and a long whip of its thorny arm extended. Even though Nicci’s magic shoved against the thing’s body core, the deadly elongated arm seized Thistle. Sharp finger-thorns pierced the girl’s skinny leg and drew blood. She kicked and fought, trying to pull away.
Rage rose within Nicci. She didn’t hesitate, did not exercise caution in the confined corridor. This monster had to be stopped. She summoned a ball of flame—normal flame, since wizard’s fire could have been catastrophic—and exploded the blaze into the shaksis.
Flames immediately caught inside its torso, raging through its skeleton of bent branches and dried vegetation. Roasting insects burst or fled. Worms squirmed out, sizzling. Even as the shaksis burned, in a surge of desperation it plodded forward and extended its blazing arms toward Nicci. She shoved back with a blow of solid air and knocked the living inferno against the wall. Some splintered, charred pieces of the forest golem still clattered and twitched, grasping out for any victim.
The forest construct broke into flaming ashes, finally dead. But the embers scattered among the clustered books and stacked scrolls. Because of the speed of her attack and the rush of the air she had unleashed, the volumes quickly caught fire, their pages blackened and curled. Flames raged along the shelves, spreading from one to the next. The fabric door hangings in front of the private quarters also ignited.
Despite her bleeding leg, Thistle ran to their quarters and yanked down the door hanging and tried to put out the spreading fire. Nathan did the same as they yelled for more scholars to help, and they all worked together to stop the inferno.
Nicci released more magic, calling upon the air again, summoning moisture to douse the larger flames. She stole air away to starve the fire until it guttered down to a low smolder.
Cliffwall scholars rushed from other chambers and corridors to aid in quenching the blaze before it could spread to the larger libraries and vaults of books. Seeing their murdered comrades, some of them gasped, halted in their efforts to fight the insidious fire, but others swallowed hard, faced the crisis, and turned their attention to saving the books, the scrolls, the library itself.
One woman, sniffling, struggling to control her weeping, knelt by the first dead and broken scholar. She adjusted his body, his head, and began to pick up the blood-spattered books strewn on the floor from the splintered shelf.
When they had the fire under control, Nicci turned her attention to Thistle and saw that her thigh was bleeding heavily. Without asking, Nicci pressed her palms hard against the deep wound, and released magic to heal the girl and remove the pain.
Thistle laughed with relief. “I knew you’d save me.”
The wizard shook his head. His face was smudged with soot. He plucked a squirming beetle grub out of his white hair and crushed it between his fingertips.
Then, just after the ruckus died down, Bannon returned to Cliffwall, gasping and disheveled, weary from an ordeal of his own. His eyes shone with excitement as he pushed his way through the crowded corridor.
“I just got back. Sweet Sea Mother, you won’t believe the night I’ve had!” He ran his hands through his bedraggled red hair, and he finally noticed the destruction and turmoil around him for the first time. “Oh! What happened here?”
CHAPTER 66
The attack of the shaksis made clear Victoria’s ruthless intent. The next morning, with an odd smile, Nicci nodded with satisfaction. “That means she is afraid of us.”
“And well she should be, my dear sorceress,” Nathan said as they worked their way into the tunnels beneath the damaged prophecy tower. “I would feel much more confident, though, if we can find the hidden volume that holds the means to destroy her.”
“It’s down here,” Mia said, winding them through the twisted, claustrophobic tunnels.
Down in the dusty vault, where the damaged ceilings were slumped and alarmingly uneven, Mia brought them to a small room where stone walls had melted like candle wax over stacks of books. With an intent expression, the mousy researcher pointed to one thick tome fused partway into the rock. She couldn’t hide her excitement. “This one! See the spine? It is exactly the book we’re looking for. It matches what was on the list.”
Nicci touched the volume and felt its extreme age. “The pages will be difficult to read,” she said, “since it is part of the wall.”
Nathan gave a futile tug, but could not break the grip of the stone. He looked at her. “Mia has a small amount of the gift, and I would generally encourage her to practice. In fact, under normal circumstances I would just do this myself.” He frowned at the trapped book. “But because of the importance, Sorceress, and since you are the only one with the proper control of magic, could you manipulate the stone and release the volume for us?”
“Agreed. This is not an instance where one should resort to dabbling.” Nicci ran her fingers over the binding, touched where the pages had seamlessly blended into the stone, and released her magic. A small flow pushed aside the rock, but did not separate the paper and the leather-bound cover from the stone matrix. She concentrated harder, working to extricate the fused elements. “The bond is not easily separable.”
“You never shy from difficult things,” Nathan said. “You can do it.”
“Yes, I can. Just not perfectly.”
She moved the fundamental grains of rock and released the locked pages, but some of the fibers remained intertwined. When she finally withdrew the damaged book from its rock prison, some of the pages were still stiff and powdery, as if the last reader had been a sloppy bricklayer with mortar on his hands. Nevertheless, Nathan took the volume from her and pored over the words with an eager Mia close beside him, under the glow of a flickering hand light.
“This is it. This is the deep life spell!” Mia grinned. “Just what we were looking for.”
“Good,” Nicci said. “Now tell me how we can neutralize Victoria.”
Nathan looked at her in alarm. “Dear spirits, it is not so simple as that!”