So that Pernika was between them and the pit.
“Move!” Mira shouted. “They’re ghosts!”
The mercenary dived at Havilar, slashing out with her sword, but the ghosts were prepared. The blade seemed to pass right through Havilar. The one that looked like Brin shot forward, catching Pernika off balance and knocking her to the ground.
Mira pulled her own knives and sprinted toward her partner. Could a blade even harm a ghost? Hrast. Havilar looked up, saw her coming, and seized the shelf beside her, yanking it down with inhuman strength. Books scattered, tumbling into the pit as the heavy structure hit the floor, blocking Mira’s path. She turned and raced around the other side.
Pernika’s sword slashed across Brin’s midsection-but as it connected, the ghost became incorporeal, dissolving into a cloud of shifting lights. Havilar took the opportunity to kick the side of Pernika’s head, and when the mercenary rolled away, the ghost in the tiefling’s form bent down, seized the knot of Pernika’s hair, and leaped into the pit, hurling a screaming Pernika over the side with her.
Mira cried out and stopped in her tracks.
“This is what comes of hubris,” a voice said behind her. She turned and saw something like and wholly unlike Farideh standing there. “You thought he could be stopped. You thought he could be silenced. You forget why they call him ‘the Unyielding.’ ”
“The arcanist?” Mira said, her blades high. “He’s dead.” She wet her mouth, easing around the pit. Keeping the ghost from coming around her flank. This wasn’t some spectre intent on luring her away. Threatening to bruise her and frighten her. “Do you know he’s dead?”
Someone else’s smirk showed through on the tiefling girl’s mouth. “Death is no impediment to a true archwizard.”
There was a whoosh like the sound of a fireball catching, and someone shoved Mira forward with a force like a charging bull. She fell to her knees, the knives skittering from her hands. She rolled to her back as the one that looked like Brin, solid once more, came at her with hands lengthening into claws. She kicked out and caught it in the stomach-her foot glancing off as if it were made of something both soft and resilient like old jelly. The ghost leaped aside, looking startled. As if it hadn’t expected her to fight back. As if it expected her to be weak.
Mira snatched up her knives and rolled back to her feet. The ghosts slid around her, trying to pin her between them. A shimmer of light rose up from the pit, taking shape as it drifted over the edge, until Havilar’s double stepped out of the air.
“You’ve given up your knowledge,” she said. “Time to give up your life.”
The only advantage Mira had on poor Pernika was knowing it was coming. She hadn’t the mercenary’s skill with a sword. There were three ghosts and not two. She was dead.
Mira stared down the ghost who had taken Pernika over the edge. She wasn’t going quietly. “Come and take it then,” she said, her knives ready.
The other two came up along her sides. The one that looked like Farideh sprang at her, latching on to Mira’s right arm with a grip like a street dog’s bite. Mira slashed at it with her knife, dragging the blade across the same viscous, not-quite-solid flesh. The ghost hissed and held her tighter, twisting the knife out of her hand. Another whoosh, and the Brin-shaped one was on top of her, pushing her toward the pit again. She struggled as the edge neared …
A corona of light seared Mira’s eyes. The ghosts dissolved with a shrill whine. Mira blinked, eyes watering, and, as the light faded, saw Tam closing the distance, his chain shining with holy light. It lashed out and struck the ghost that had looked like Brin, sending sparks through the cloud of light.
“Move!” he shouted. Mira picked up her fallen blade and started toward the door. A cloud of crackling lights formed in her path, taking the shape once more of Havilar. Momentum carried Mira into it, and its arms wound around her, tight as steel bands.
She struggled and kicked and bit and thrashed-but the ghost reacted to her frantic strikes as though she were a child, having a tantrum. The edge came closer.
Light flashed again as Tam clapped a hand filled with the blessings of the moon goddess to the side of the ghost’s head. The ghost howled and turned into light and shadow again. Mira stumbled free. Tam caught her arm and pulled her past him, toward the door. Toward where the rest of the party were descending the stairs. Realizing there was trouble.
And in the process, he turned his back on the third ghost.
Mira heard only the thud of him hitting the ground, the sound of the air going out of her father. She turned. The third ghost, leaking wafts of vapor and light where the blessings had hurt it, gave her a wicked smile, took hold of one of his legs, and dragged him into the pit.
His fingers scrabbled at the edge. Mira cried out and dived forward to catch his hands. She missed. She glimpsed only his terrified expression before he slipped over the edge and into the darkness of the pit, chased by the insubstantial forms of the remaining ghosts.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE LOST LIBRARY OF TARCHAMUS
Tam couldn’t recall hitting the ground or the snap of bone. The fall, opening his eyes, struggling to draw a breath in lungs shocked from impact, and a pain so intense he could hardly think to calm himself; that much came to him in a rush. His ribs screaming where they’d hit the floor. The sharp edges of rocks and debris under him. His leg, the thighbone, the muscles contracting over the shattered limb. He was shouting, he realized, screaming on borrowed air.
Calm, hrast you, calm. He managed short pants, bringing his breath back into himself, mouthful by mouthful. Cooler air, stirring air. A bad taste. He looked around him and saw bones and bones and bones. An arm in leathers, an arm with a sleeve of tattoos attached to another body. Screaming that wasn’t his.
Pernika lay bent and broken, farther away than his chain would have reached. Her arm was folded under and gravely dislocated. Her leg had broken at the shin, and a lump of bone protruded into her leathers. More than a body’s worth of blood was thick and drying on the stones. Clumps of dark hair and sticky tissue spattered on the edge of a dais he could just make out, along with the jawless, half-skinned head of a man with matted hair.
And worse.
Sitting there, on the dais, a horror like everything the shade’s notes had implied, was the mummified body of a man. He was folded into a pose of contemplation, his hands, like shriveled roots, set skeletal fingertip to skeletal fingertip and painted black with dried blood.
Around his neck was the garnet pendant every image had repeated. The arcanist, Tarchamus.
The arcanist lifted his head at Tam’s curse, the empty sockets of his skull taking on an otherworldly green light.
Above him Dahl and Farideh were shouting, but to Tam’s ears they sounded so far off, so garbled, they might as well have been shouting through the water that had brought them to this Hellish place.
“Don’t come down,” he tried to shout back. “It’s not safe.”
He might have bellowed or he might have only whimpered, but for certain one person heard Tam Zawad. The arcanist turned to look at him.
Tam struggled to sit up, to pull himself onto his good leg, but the pain was astounding. Magic crackled and shot over the arcanist’s sinewy arms and legs, spidering like lightning over his protruding ribs, as he unfolded and came to his full horrible height.
In life, the arcanist might have been the elderly man the doors all depicted-but the magic that had given rise to the creature moving toward Tam had swelled and strengthened the arcanist’s frame. He was as big as a dragonborn, and even if his muscles were dry and his skin leathery, it was clear the mummy could tear a person apart.