I couldn’t be truly annoyed though. At least not right now. I no longer had access to whatever had allowed my denizens’ Faith or mana auras to manifest, but it was obvious that the gnomes’ morale had received a huge boost this night. At first I attributed it to the successful defense of the camp followed by the rescue of the kidnapped girl, but then I recalled that something similar had happened when the badgers first appeared in the Grotto. New animal residents—young ones at that, whom the gnomes could protect and raise alongside their own—seemed to really boost the entire tribe’s morale.
Whether that would last beyond the owls growing large enough to swallow their rescuers whole remained to be seen. But there was plenty of distance to cover before now and then.
Assuming we all survive that long.
Movement at the edge of the camp drew my eye, but it was just Coll. The big warrior crawled from his tent, yawning. He rubbed his eyes. “What did I miss?”
Thirty-Three
The Librarinth
Tiri
She’d come to think of it as the ‘Librarinth.’
She’d been here for hours, and even Tiri’s cartographer skills couldn’t determine a pattern to its layout. There must be magic involved; she’d tried retracing her steps to no avail, simply finding herself in yet another unfamiliar row of towering shelves.
After following the passage from the pyromancer’s office for maybe an hour, Tiri was forced to admit she was lost.
That was, for most cartographers, the very definition of failure. But given the nature of this particular maze, Tiri found she didn’t mind as much as she probably should.
The corridors were defined by rows and rows of bookshelves taller than she was. And there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how it was all organized. Passages branched off into dead ends, while others somehow circled round and back to where they began.
It pained her no end when she realized none of the shelves’ contents followed any established system of categorization. Forget the complex number system used by the Academy’s librarians; these books weren’t even arranged logically, not by title, author, subject or—philosophers forbid—color.
Not that the latter would have helped much. Many of the books looked identical, ponderous tomes bound in brown leather and embossed with faded golden titling. In short, it looked exactly like you might expect a long-forgotten library to look.
Though ‘long-forgotten’ is probably a bit of an understatement.
Among the regiments of dull brown spines were other more mismatched pieces, texts that spanned centuries as well as civilizations judging by the languages in which they’d been written. They ranged from old to unthinkably ancient.
Rolled-up scrolls of skin-thin papyrus lay in piles atop cracked clay tablets. Rods of gold engraved with delicate symbols glinted when the light from Tiri’s chemsphere washed over them, forcing back the shadows of the painted vases behind which they were half-hidden. She even glimpsed what she suspected to be the lost Stones of Mosalis arrayed on a shelf near the floor, but an ominous hissing rattle from beneath the shelf discouraged her from examining them more closely.
This is incredible.
Though she was lost, she also couldn’t help being awestruck. This was a treasure trove of lost knowledge, a stash of forgotten history. Its cultural and intellectual worth was incalculable. It was almost impossible to believe it had existed beneath the very feet of the Adventurers’ Guild since… well, probably since before it was even built.
And I’m the only one to have experienced its wonders.
She turned a corner and halted.
Well, maybe not the only one.
A finger-width of dust had coated the floor and shelves of everything she’d seen so far, clinging also to the ragged spiderwebs that adorned every corner like lacy drapes. But the dust before her now had been disturbed. Clearly this place was not entirely forgotten.
Her head jerked up at an unexpected sound.
Is that… voices?
She glanced around, wondering whether to extinguish her chemsphere. It was giving out the dimmest amount of light possible, but even that was beginning to make her eyes sting, and her head throb after being immersed for so long in the oppressive dark. But without it she’d be blind—an academic’s worst fear.
Ready to extinguish the light at a moment’s notice, she worked her way through the maze in the direction of the sound, hoping she hadn’t imagined it. Losing one’s mind was, after all, an academic’s second-worst fear.
No longer distracted by the wonders of this lost treasure trove, she realized her eyes were dry, gritty, irritated. Inhaling the dust and stale air for so long had left her chest tight and her breath uncomfortably wheezy, and her nose was sore from how many times she’d itched it. Her throat hurt when she swallowed. When was the last time she’d eaten or drunk anything?
She recalled the waterskin in her satchel. I’ll just check out these voices, then I’ll take a sip.
Turning sideways, she squeezed herself through an improbably narrow gap between two towering bookshelves. It was barely passable, and Tiri found herself thanking all the philosophers that the bulky, heavily armored Coll wasn’t with her. Or Benin, for that matter. He’d probably have gotten claustrophobic and burned the entire place down hours ago.
Thinking of Benin reminded her of Professor Knox’s slumped corpse. It lurked at the back of her mind, a macabre reminder that her friend was in danger.
She froze again. She’d definitely heard voices that time.
With a thought, she extinguished her chemsphere. The darkness seemed to physically press against her eyes as the light went out.
She realized she could still pick out the shapes of the shelves, and even the outline of the pale spiderwebs in the corner above her. There was still light, but it was coming from somewhere else.
And that means there’s a way out.
A few more twists and turns and she’d found it. A staircase, leading up. Wall-mounted chemspheres glowed every few steps. They were the automated kind; like those
