Not the shelves and not the shadows-Lorcan’s eyes focused much nearer. His breath had shifted, and his wings widened. Alarmed, Farideh thought, coming to her feet. Like his worst memories were happening all over again.
“Illusion!” Farideh reached for the rod and cursed as she found it missing. She grabbed hold of the strap that ran across the back of Lorcan’s armor and pulled him away from the spot at which he was staring. He lost his footing and stumbled back, throwing both hands up and filling them with angry light.
“It’s just an illusion,” Farideh said, taking hold of his arm. “It’s only-”
Dahl shouted, his eyes focused on something missing four feet in front of him. Farideh cursed and threw a small book at him, clipping his thigh.
“Ow!” Dahl clapped a hand to his leg. “Gods damn it.”
Farideh started to warn him, but he was suddenly gone. The books, the library, the menacing ghosts, the cambion, and the paladin-all of it was gone. She stood on an icy mountainside, sword in hand, while Clanless Mehen ran her through another set of exercises at which she couldn’t match his standards.
“Listen!” Mehen shouted. “Listen, please. You haven’t got time. You need the words. The parchment.” Something stung Farideh’s arm. The image shivered and skipped across Farideh’s vision. Vanished.
The library was back. Dahl was pinching her arm.
“What the shitting Hells is this?” Lorcan demanded.
“Stop it!” Farideh said, swatting at Dahl. “I think it knows what we’re looking for.”
“About the scroll?” Dahl said. “How can a trap know about anything?”
Farideh started to answer, but again the library vanished and she was standing in the middle of Adolican Rhand’s ballroom, behind the settee where she’d been sick and where the page had fallen from the wizard’s grasp. Dahl was still there, his arm splattered with vomit.
“Oh gods,” she said, pulled into the illusion. “I’m sorry about that.”
“The scroll,” he said. “I know where the scroll is. I’m Emrys. You have to listen.”
Farideh blinked. “Who’s Emrys?”
Dahl’s face shifted, fiercely annoyed at her. “The arcanist. The library. You know this. You don’t have the words. I can’t … I can’t …”
The library. The arcanist. The diary Dahl had found. His gray eyes were boring into her, as if imploring her to hear the things he wasn’t saying, the way Lorcan’s had … when? Never. That had been an illusion … Like this was.
“You’re the ghost of the other arcanist,” she said.
“I have to show you,” Dahl said. “This works poorly. You don’t have the words. What possessed you? What possessed you to …?”
The world upended and she was lying on the floor of the library, looking up at Dahl and Lorcan crouched over her, their swords and spells ready.
“Emrys,” she said. “Let me up. Let me up!” She struggled past them. “The illusions aren’t a trap, they’re another ghost. The diarist. The arcanist who knew Tarchamus.” She dropped her voice, in case the apprentices could hear her. “He knows where the scroll is. He wants to show us. But he can’t build an illusion for it, not out of our memories.”
Dahl shook his head. “What’s he going to do?”
“I think he has to possess one of us.”
“No,” Lorcan said, still searching for signs of this new threat. “Darling, you know how that ends. This is a very bad idea.”
I know how this ends too, she thought. With all of us dead under a mountain and Mehen always wondering what became of us. She pushed past them both to stand in the open space of the wider aisle. “Show me,” she said. “Show me where it is.”
The face of a sad-eyed, bearded man flashed before her eyes. Then the rush and roar of the ghost’s magic drowned out the shouted protests of Dahl and Lorcan and her vision went dark, her senses overtaken by the burnt tallow and spilled ink scents of another library, another wizard, another time.
Brin considered the sealed doors at the end of the tunnel. Was it his imagination, or had the light filling the doors’ seams grown paler? Dimmer? He couldn’t recall.
Havilar twisted her neck, trying to find an angle around her horn that would let her lay her ear flat against the wall. “It sounds like wizards,” she whispered. Maspero gave Brin a quizzical look.
“What do you mean?” Brin asked.
She straightened and blinked at him. “Dunno. There’s maybe four of them all chatting and disagreeing about things. And someone chanting something. That seems like wizards.”
Casters anyway. They’d given up on bashing down the doors.
“At least it’s holding,” he said.
“The light looks different,” Maspero noted. “Bunch of fallen bookshelves won’t stop Netherese wizards.”
“It will give them something to use up their spells on, though.”
“There are some traps I didn’t undo,” Havilar added. “We could funnel them toward the nearer ones.” She thought a moment. “There’s a sticky one and a pit trap near here. I put books around them to keep people off. If we have time to make them wind around a bit, there’s a panel that shoots arrows. I couldn’t figure out where it was reloading them from,” she added apologetically. “I left a note in chalk on the floor. ‘Don’t walk here.’ ”
Brin shook his head. “It can’t hurt, I suppose. It seems like they’ll have someone skilled at spotting traps though.”
Maspero considered the doors, his dark brows furrowed. “Not,” he said, “if they’re too busy destroying barricades of fallen books. Come on.”
Havilar fell into step beside Brin. “It’s lucky he’s so devious,” she said, pointing her chin at Maspero. “This will be interesting.”
“Are you even a little afraid?” he asked. “I mean, we still might die down here.”
“Terrified,” she admitted, and she slipped an arm through his. “But we’re not dead yet. And it’s Farideh and you and Tam and devious Maspero, and maybe Mira and Dahl will be useful too. And Lorcan. I guess he made some difference in Neverwinter.”
“I suppose,” he said, glad she thought he was useful. He felt as if all he’d been doing since he got down into the caverns was getting in the way and being a prize for Zhents to fight over. “If you’re going to be trapped between Shade and a monster and a mile of stone, it’s not a bad roster.”
She sighed. “But I do wish Mehen were here. Just in case.”
Brin pulled her in a little nearer. “I know. Me too.”
“That is how I know you’re brave,” she said with a little smile. “Even I’m not looking forward to Mehen finding out we kissed.”
Farideh opened her eyes and found herself standing outside the doors of the library, looking up at the silver-edged depiction of Tarchamus. The rest of the entry cave was empty-no Shadovar and no flood of water.
She turned back to the doors and suddenly there was a man standing there beside her-the same bearded man she’d glimpsed in the illusion before. He looked younger than Tam, but the same grit and shrewdness showed in his face and in the stiff lines of his shoulders. “Are you Emrys?” she tried to say. But there was no sound. It was as if she weren’t even there.
Emrys held a wand in one hand, a sword in the other, and stood as if steeling himself to do battle against the jeweled arcanist. He’d counted Tarchamus among his friends, she realized, the dead arcanist’s memories filtering into her own. He’d known Tarchamus wouldn’t be pleased by the intercession, the reminder that none of them are truly all powerful. But Emrys hadn’t realized the chain of events it would set off.
He pushed through the doors, and Farideh followed him, down through the tunnel and across the much sparser library. The number of dead arcanists, both masters and apprentices, approached hundreds-talented wizards fooled by the promise of Tarchamus’s eruption scroll and the lure of strange and wonderful magic.
The ghosts paced him, slipping through the spaces in the shelves. They took the forms of fallen colleagues and called out to him, to stay, to talk, to tarry. He pressed on. They took the shape of living rivals and taunted his efforts. He wouldn’t leave here alive.