Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [208]
They moved on, through a space that was more cavern than tunnel, in whose distant recesses water dripped with agonizing slowness. Now and then a noise would drift down to them, echoing through some flaw in the stone overhead. Soldiers’ voices, issuing orders. Animals’ howls, the cries of the dying. It was good that they could hear such things, Damien told himself. It was when the noises stopped that they would be in real trouble.
They came to another door, this one so finely worked that it seemed out of place in the rough stone corridor. Tarrant touched a ward at its center, which may have been meant to unlock it; the polished wood pushed easily inward, and the two men moved into the room beyond. Damien’s lantern light revealed a modest chamber, shelf-lined, which might have been a library in another age. Tarrant’s workshop, no doubt.
Utterly devastated.
He could feel the sight of the destruction strike Tarrant like a physical blow, and he flinched himself as he gazed about the room. Books had been hurled down from the shelves and mangled. Manuscripts had been shredded and wadded up like garbage. Leather covers, ripped from their volumes and scored with claw marks, reeked of urine and decay. He could hear the Hunter’s indrawn breath as he gazed upon the wreckage of his storehouse of knowledge, and he sensed that in some bizarre way this pained him more than Amoril’s other betrayals, or even the loss of the Forest itself.
You believed that knowledge like this would be sacred, he thought. You thought that even the Evil One, being man-made, would respect its value. He shook his head sadly. Welcome to the real world, Gerald.
There was a large trestle table in the center of the room, now overturned. Silently Tarrant moved to one end and reached down for a handhold; Damien put down his lantern and hurried to the other end to do the same.
“At least your people hate fire,” he offered, as they righted it. “If they’d burned the place there’d be nothing left at all.”
Tarrant made no comment. Reaching down into the mess that was under his feet, he brought up a single page, torn and crumpled and crusted with something brown. For a long time he stared at it, and Damien sensed that he was watching how the fae clung to the paper, how the current responded to the words that were on its surface. Then his hand clenched tightly, crushing it.
“We’ll never find the right pages in time,” he muttered. Damien could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “Not without a Locating.”
“Of course we will. We have to, right?” He spotted several whole notebooks on one of the shelves and pulled them out. “Hell, my desk in Ganji looked worse than this.”
For a moment Tarrant’s eyes met his. For a moment he could sense the utter despair welling up inside the man, not a product of this one moment or even of several moments past, but of everything he had experienced since they’d started on this God-forsaken mission. Even the Hunter’s indomitable spirit had its limits, he realized. And there was no sorcery left to sustain him now.
In the distance there was a louder sound; voices arguing, it seemed to Damien, and the impact of metal on stone. It seemed uncomfortably close.
“Come on,” he urged. He put the notebooks down on the table and began to search for more. “We’ve got a lot to go through here.”
He didn’t look at Tarrant again, but focused on the shelves surrounding him. Whoever had ravaged the hidden library might have worked with enthusiasm, but he lacked efficiency; there were several dozen volumes still intact, and he pulled them free and shook them off and brought them to the table. There Tarrant searched through them page by page, sorting through the diaries