“Don’t change the-” He broke off with a jaw-splitting yawn.
“Go to sleep,” Farideh said. She sighed. “Being this tired just makes you surly.”
Tam looked as if he would have liked to argue, as if there were a lot more he intended to say on the subject. But the tea was already seeping into his thoughts-his eyelids drooped and it seemed to take all the effort in the world just to blink. Farideh remembered the feeling. She left, and within a few steps, he had dropped to sleep.
“I do hope,” Lorcan said coldly, “that he appreciates my silence. For all the good it did.”
The devil sat seething in his silvery prison, passing the rod back and forth between his hands. His wounds hadn’t been dressed, she noticed, but he seemed to pay them no mind. Farideh drew nearer to the binding circle. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, cozy,” Lorcan said. “I see the paladin got over his aversions.” He smirked across the camp at Dahl, who was half-watching them, half-reading a slim blue book. “Some of them anyhow. Aren’t you lucky?”
“Leave him alone,” Farideh said wearily. “We’re in enough of a mess as it is.”
“So it seems.” He looked down at her, his black eyes cruel. “Once again, out of the frying pan and into the fire? Between this and Neverwinter, it hardly seems fair that I’m the one in the binding circle.”
Gods, Farideh thought, pursing her mouth. Back to this. Back to sulking, sneering Lorcan. Why had she ever thought he’d be different? “I’m sorry you have to be in there. I didn’t have time to find a solution yet.”
He stopped passing the rod back and forth and glared at it in his hands. “Unfortunately things got rather heated on my end. I couldn’t wait.”
“Well, I’ll keep looking,” she said, and she turned to go deal with Dahl.
“How is your leg?” Lorcan asked. He was still looking at the rod as he spoke to her. “You were limping before. Is it all right?’
“Just a turned ankle,” she said, waiting for the twist, waiting for him to spring some other nonsense on her. “Some bruises. I tripped on a skull.”
“Well, that’s … good, I suppose.” He started fidgeting with the rod again.
“Can I have that back?” she asked.
Lorcan blew out a breath. “No. Not yet.”
She frowned at him. “Why?”
“I need it.”
Farideh started to protest, to demand to know what exactly he needed with a warlock’s implement anyway, to insist he give it back-because what was he going to do from inside a binding circle if she just took it? — when Dahl came up behind her, still holding the little blue book.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Now.”
Lorcan gave him a wicked smile. “Sounds serious. Best do as he says, darling.”
“We are not done,” Farideh whispered to the cambion. She followed Dahl back across the camp, to the very edges of the circle, as far from Lorcan and Mira and Tam as he could get. Glancing back at the others, Dahl whispered, “You destroyed one of the runes.”
Farideh felt the shadow-smoke start to pulse off her, the powers of the Hells stirring it up, ready for a fight. “I didn’t know. I thought they were door locks.”
“Because the Book told you.”
“It’s not that absurd.”
“I’m not blaming you!” He ran a hand through his hair, glanced back again, and pulled her out of the circle and around the corner of the shelves. “I … I broke one too. The Book said it powered a trap I had to get past.”
The shadows dropped back. “You did?”
“As you said, it’s not that absurd.”
“We have to tell them,” she said. “What if there’s a way to repair them?”
“Can you cast runic magic?” he asked. “I don’t think any of them can. What’s done is done. But … Look, what were you trying to get from the Book? What’s it been telling you?”
She felt the blood burning up her neck. “I was using it to figure out something. A ritual.”
“The ritual to pull the devil from the Hells,” he said flatly. “Don’t be coy. I was there. It drew it out? Had you coming back a lot?”
She nodded. “And … it sounds strange, but it lied about things, as if it wanted me to trust it and keep coming back. I have ancestors it claimed to know about, and it told me their history. Exactly what I wanted to hear.” How stupid had she been to believe a word of it? And how terrible, she thought, would it be to tell Havilar the truth?
Dahl’s face clouded. “It did the same to me. It … It gathered I had a problem,” he said delicately, “and sent me to find a book that suggested it was none of my doing. That it was others manipulating me.” He shook his head. “That I was like the arcanist.”
“Was Lorcan right?” she asked softly. “Were you a paladin?”
Dahl studied the runes on the limestone tiles. “Once,” he said. “I was dedicated to the god of knowledge.”
Farideh knew if she told him she was sorry, he would snap at her and say he didn’t want her pity. If she asked what made him fall, he would take it as taunting him. If she offered the parallel, the way her fear of losing her pact made her think of his losing his powers … well, that would only end badly, destroying the modicum of camaraderie they’d built up.
And if she said nothing, she would regret it.
“It sounds like something you were very suited to,” she told him.
Dahl sighed. “Listen to the rest of what I have to tell you before you decide that. We’re not dealing with just some old wizard.” He opened it to a spread of pages covered with a hurried diagram and littered with notes. “This is a diary of one of Tarchamus’s friends. I’m fairly sure this is a copy of the spell Mira’s looking for. Only it’s not an exaggeration. He really did burn a city out of the sky and destroy all the people living below it.” He flipped back through the book. “Here: ‘Tarchamus will not see me. He has not taken the council’s intercession well-who would?’ ” Dahl looked up. “They blocked him, the other arcanists and priests of the goddess of magic, from using the Weave after he destroyed that city. ‘But his apprentices still come and go, visiting his former friends and rivals. Today, Nyvasha, who Tarchamus lured away from Tenish, came to see several of my own apprentices, carrying a tome of absurd thickness that she must have dug out of Tarchamus’s attics for all the dust it carried.’ ”-Dahl gave Farideh a significant look-“ ‘When I asked after her master, Nyvasha was suddenly quite shy of me and danced around an answer. When I asked if I might see Tarchamus, she was quiet and said only it would be a few years more, she suspected, before anyone saw him. Sadebreth tells me Lorull, the old man who has been Tarchamus’s apprentice for such long years he must have more loyalty than sense, has flown for the mountains …’ Wait, there’s …” Dahl paged ahead. “Ah, here, the arcanist disappears and he gets ahold of his notes-’the structure this suggests is not so much a hoard as a trap, a pit into which Tarchamus’s hungry rivals may fall. It would take the likes of Tarchamus’s eruption to breach it, but I must do as I can because within rests the only copy of the eruption spell, the last scroll bait for every fool arcanist in Netheril.’ ” Dahl looked up. “Everything after that is notes about finding the place and trying to convince others to stop looking for it. I think he died here.”
Farideh turned the pages back to the diagram, studying the runes. “This one,” she said, tapping the center mark. “It’s part of a spell I know.”
“One that makes a lot of fire?”
“Lava. Not enough to burn a city out of the sky, but enough to do some damage,” she said. The scrawlings surrounding the rune reminded her of the scrolls the Book had sent her hunting. “Have you shown it to Mira?”
Dahl shook his head. “There wasn’t time before. And now …” He paused and wet his lips. “I’m afraid we might need to destroy this place. I’m sure we need to be ready for it.”