The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [122]
Fist-size spiders and what looked like centipedes the length of farm carts scuttled or perambulated silently across the floor ahead as they went… and under the shelves, where the darkness was deepest, there were many small pairs of watching eyes. They were white, glowing orbs, not the eyes of rats or mice. Ahead of them a crack as wide as a man's hand wandered across the floor… and at some time in the past, something that left a white trail of slime, now long since dried, had crawled into or out of the fissure. The trail went wandering off through the shelves, through thick spider-webs-and unpleasant-looking solid lumps hanging here and there in those webs. A few of the webs were quivering, as if something unseen, somewhere else, was plucking at them or struggling in their grip.
Embra decided she really didn't ever want to have to lie down in the library to try to sleep-at the very thought her skin seemed to crawl from slimy, or scaly, or just coldly foreign touches, all over-and she wasn't the only one to have that thought, just then.
Watching for men in leathers, snakes, and worse, the Four moved cautiously forward, toward the center of the dome.
It was a vast, open area, those shafts its only brightness. In the light of their eerily serene glow, the stone vault could be seen curving up unbroken, pierced by no windows. As the four companions advanced, the glows of the shafts showed them that the inside of the dome was encircled by a balcony above where they were now. It ran above the ranks of shelves, all around the circle, an empty ring with an ornately carved inner railing. Scrolling leaves, and soaring bird shapes, entwined with what looked like ribbons or sashes and snarling lion faces… all of stone, and obscured by thick coatings of dust. Many doors opened off the balcony, and a handful stood open. Now that they were nearer, faint light could be seen through these open doors-illuminating clouds of gently drifting dust. Three spiral stairs of slender stone, spaced around the central circle, reached from its tiles to pierce the inner balcony rail.
The open center of the dome held only dust, cobwebs, small scatterings of rubble, and here and there small heaps of dark, dried unpleasantness where a bird or small scuttling creature had met its end, and there rotted.
Soaring darkness; a tomb waiting here in the green wilderness above the baronies of Aglirta. A tomb wizards and their guards seemed to be converging on, only to find the secrets they sought gone, Ehrluth's library long ago…
"Plundered," Embra murmured, staring all around with wondering eyes. "How many books were there in all this hall, I wonder?"
Craer touched her wrist and put a finger to his lips warningly. As if in reply to her question, there was a scrape of an uncautious boot on stone somewhere in the shelves well around to their right-and then, off to the left, a sudden, startlingly loud commotion of steel, snarled curses, a gasp, and a heavy thud… and then silence.
The procurer leaned close to Sarasper and Embra and murmured, "We move one row back, and then along one aisle away from here; follow Hawk."
He moved his hands in a sign to the armaragor, and they moved, creeping along in careful stealth. Somewhere else a door opened, and sunlight flooded briefly into the room. "By the Three-," someone said, startlingly loud, and someone else urgently shushed the first someone.
Urgently, but not swiftly enough. A bow twanged, there was a wet thump, and an unseen man gasped, choked, and crashed to the floor, his armor ringing. Another arrow hummed; another man fell.
"Stars and shards!" someone else snarled, voice high with the fury born of fear, and then chanted something that could only be an incantation.
Light bloomed in the dusty, midair heart of the dome-high, bright, and sudden. The Band of Four found themselves blinking at each other. They had just reached the new aisle, and could