Lesser Evils

CHAPTER TWENTY

The shelf where Dahl had found the strange list of succession held book after book after book of things and places and people who lived long after the arcanist had built the library, ending with a collection of bindings that could only have come from the current expedition. More, Farideh thought, than could be accounted for by someone forgetting a book they’d brought in or playing an ill-conceived prank.

Specifics of the Zhentarim cells and leadership along the Sword Coast and beyond. A dictionary of Tymantheran Draconic with notable gaps. A detailed and scattered text of strange secrets and underground knowledge set over the last twenty years that had the cadence of Tam’s voice. A red-bound volume, in several hands, describing the current state of the city of Neverwinter lay open on Farideh’s lap.

“Lords and gods damn it,” Lorcan swore. Fire bloomed in his hands, illuminating the face of the ghost who’d taken on Havilar’s form, skulking up the aisle. She bared her teeth and turned insubstantial again. The creatures had tailed them here, taking Brin and Havilar and Farideh’s shapes, mocking them and trying to block their path, trying to herd them back to the arcanist. Then Lorcan had casually thrown a ball of fire at the one that had Farideh’s shape, setting a rack of scrolls aflame and wounding it badly. The ghosts were more circumspect after that.

Farideh hoped they weren’t giving Havi and Brin more trouble. Dahl set the book back on the shelf and wiped his hands on his breeches. “Shadar-kai’s,” he said, grimacing.

“It doesn’t seem as if it takes every stray thought,” Farideh said. “At least there’s that.” She pulled down a book as thin as her ring finger, bound in deep crimson. Mechanics of the Infernal Pact. The frontispiece read, above an illustration that resembled a shirtless cambion reaching for the title. She slammed it shut and shoved it back where she’d found it. She didn’t want to know which of her thoughts the magic had deemed important. “But it’s enough. We’re going to be looking forever at this rate.”

“Oh, shit and ashes, kill me now,” Lorcan said. Farideh bit her tongue, still furious Lorcan hadn’t told her how the spell would end. If Lorcan had to stay six steps from her always, she wasn’t sure if she would die first of anger, embarrassment, or want.

He was much easier to deal with, she thought, just as furious with herself, when he was just a rosy memory, wasn’t he?

“You could have stayed in the circle,” Dahl told the cambion. He took a step back, staring up at the enormous, half-filled shelves. “So the Book and the ghosts are working together to fill the library. And then they kill anyone who finds it.” He shook his head. “I wish I knew what that thing was. Like a mummy, but too powerful. Like a lich, but dumb. Like an eidolon, but made of flesh. I don’t doubt it was the arcanist, but what did he make himself into?”

“The Book would know,” she said. “It would know about the scroll too.”

“And then it would know we were making a run for the vents. And then the ghosts would know.” He sighed and glared at the spines in front of him. “I should have asked the Book about Emrys from the start. We should have asked about the page.”

Farideh turned around. “We didn’t have a reason to.”

“All the same …” Dahl frowned at Lorcan. “What are you looking at?”

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.

Emrys knew that was a possibility-and the memory, tainted by the ghost’s long years, echoed with the sad knowledge that it was inevitable, that it had always been inevitable. Farideh hurried along beside the arcanist, watching as he crafted the six runes around the edge of the library, the warding structure that made a net over the hidden tomb. With each one she felt the magic take hold, sealing off the space from the world beyond. Keeping outsiders from scrying it. Hopefully blocking any other explorers until he could rescue the books and stop Tarchamus.

Or what remained of him. Emrys had seen the schemas, the remains of his friend’s notes and spells. He knew what he’d been too late to stop: the four apprentices arrayed around Tarchamus’s tomb, the Fugue Plane brushing near enough to steal some of its power. The flood of magic that would have overtaken the corpse of his former friend.

And the corpse … That was the part Emrys was most afraid to face. The scroll, he knew, would be down in the crypt, where those foolhardy enough to fall into Tarchamus’s trap met their ends. The notes spoke of a ritual three years in the making-long and grisly and intricate. Changing the body as it slowly died. Emrys imagined, not for the first time, Tarchamus’s last days, sealed in the stone box and channeling the scraps and spurts of wild magic that slowly overtook his body, saturated by his rage. The day he did not wake enough to respond to Lorull’s knocking. The day his most trusted apprentices opened the case, and the body-no longer alive, but not quite dead-was buried for another year in sand and the torn pages of powerful spellbooks. Biding its time. Changing slowly. Changing without the magic they had barred him from.

The day the four apprentices performed the ritual around the mummified creature, waking it to life and becoming its undead guardians. Emrys had not been there to see it, but his memories of the apprentices-lovely, quiet Nyvasha; gaunt Bois; clever Kelid with her long fingers; Lorull, who was old enough to be an arcanist in his own right, old enough to have gray at his temples-and his memories of the notes were powerful. As the arcanist strode back through the library, toward the Book’s alcove, the ghosts’ taunts whipped the imagined scenes to the forefront of his thoughts.

As one, the apprentices would have spoken the words of the spell. The runes around their feet would have lit with an otherworldly glow and thickening illusions would have surged up out of the stone to encircle them. When the last grains of the hourglass fell and the planes drew near, as one, the apprentices would have finished-as one, plunging the knives to the hilt, up under the ribs to nick the heart, just as Tarchamus would have taught them three years earlier.

Fountains of blood would have sprayed out, drenching the mummified corpse of Tarchamus, the scroll, and the pages of the open Book.

Farideh may have been no more than a ghost in this illusion, but her stomach twisted all the same. The apprentices would have fallen to their knees, the illusions leaping over and into their bodies like waves over a rock. They would have screamed, even though they weren’t supposed to, even though the sacrifice was necessary, even though the process was a trifle-Emrys knew Tarchamus well enough to be sure of his blind assurances. They would have thrashed against the magic that clutched at them, and the geysers of blood would have wet everything. Four lives ended so that they in turn could claim countless others. He knew this now-the ghosts still remembered.

And all because, Emrys thought, approaching the Book on its pedestal, of Tarchamus the Unyielding.

“What have you done?” Emrys asked the empty air. The ghosts all settled in the corners, making the air hum with a noise that was no noise. For long moments there was no answer to his sad question.

Then the Book spoke. You blame me? I am as much a victim in this as Arion and his tragic vassals. It’s him you want. Downstairs.

The corpse-and Emrys’s memories shivered with the simultaneous fear of what he might find, and knowledge of what he had found. “You were the architect more than that creature. I’m not the same sort of fool.”

That man is gone, the Book said. And I am left with memories and the knowledge of a wide world he never dreamed might hold value or the slightest interest. So which of us is the victim? Which of us suffers?

“You will suffer more,” Emrys said. “You’ll trap no one else here. You’ll take no one else’s knowledge.”

My but you’ve grown honorable all of the sudden, the Book said. What happened to “the might of those willing to seize the power”? What happened to “the heirs of the gods”?

“Your words,” Emrys said.

You agreed at the time. Perhaps you grow envious.

“I do not envy a dead man. Nor the echoes of him.” He wanted the Book to tell him-what? That it hadn’t been because of the censure or the intercession? That it hadn’t been because Emrys betrayed him? That, perhaps, this evil had always been lurking in Tarchamus, under that clever and biting facade? But even if any of those had been true, it would still mean Emrys had failed-he knew that now. He had caused it or hadn’t seen it, and his fellows had died in scores.

And Farideh found herself thinking of Lorcan, of all the times he’d been wicked and dangerous, and all the times he’d been sweet. Where was the line, the point he couldn’t come back from, and would she see it before something as horrid as Tarchamus’s lost library came to pass? Would they ever come near such a point?

She found herself thinking of Bryseis Kakistos, and the laughing witch in her dreams who looked like Havilar.

I suspect, the Book said, sounding bitter, you soon will. You can’t imagine you will stand against him.

“You can’t imagine I won’t try,” Emrys said.

You could take me. We could flee this place and its magic. There’s such a lot of world I never saw.

Emrys shook his head. “Farewell, my friend.”

Down, down into the floor with the spellbooks-the shelves all still in place, the books fewer and more neatly stacked. The arcanist cast a spell and he floated down the sheer drop as gently as a falling leaf. The ghosts streaked past, all light and fury. The bones on the floor were fewer, scattered and largely whole.

The mummy was worse than he’d imagined-no part of the mummy resembled Tarchamus, and when he raised his head from his position of repose, if he recognized Emrys as anything more than a walking meal, there was no sign.

The scroll sat on a pedestal between the pit and the mummy, bait for the trap. The mummy unfolded himself, ponderously slow-slow enough to miscalculate, but Emrys was ready. Farideh had no names for the spells he cast, no understanding of the magic he wielded, but one thing was absolutely clear: he meant to destroy Tarchamus.

The mummy screamed the same beams of green magic and hurled balls of lightning. The ghosts swooped and dived, landing long enough to take solid form and hurtle around the battling arcanists, aiming to knock Emrys from his feet. The air sizzled and popped with magic as Emrys’s spells shaped walls of flames, brought angels to earth, and made the bones rise from the ground and fight for him. Farideh found herself flinching at each remembered missle, each phantom blast that came near. Especially those which struck her guide.

Now bleeding, dizzy, and favoring a burnt and broken hand, Emrys might have meant to kill what was left of his friend, but it was quickly apparent that he could do no such thing. Tarchamus had been powerful when he died, and what he made of himself was meant for nothing so much as permanence. There was no spell in Emrys’s book that could destroy the strange mummy. There might be no spell on the plane that could.

And so he cast a spell that split his form into three, and three again, and three again, overwhelming the space with Emryses and weaving between them as Tarchamus’s horrible beams of green light vaporized the doubles in great swaths. It was enough to get the scroll in hand-the spell that had begun all of this. Emrys took it and ran for the exit.

Another spell lifted him up the shaft, chased by the howls of Tarchamus and the fearsome threat of his apprentices. They streaked ahead, took shape, and lunged at Emrys, digging great gouges into his flesh, and knocking him off his feet and into traps. Arrows pierced him. Flames leaped after him. Still Emrys ran.

The door was locked, much as it had been for them, and Emrys was failing fast. He tore down the aisles, the scroll clutched to his chest. The screams of the arcanist rattled through the library.

Farideh’s blood ran cold-Tarchamus was no longer in the pit.

Emrys came to the little clearing with the wizard’s statue. He needed time, he thought, he needed to rest. There was one spell left, one desperate spell. He wove the words and gestures and strands of the Weave together and the stone of the wall grew pliable and peeled back, making a little pocket the size of a man.

The ghosts were coming, and quickly. The screams of the mummy grew nearer and nearer. But Emrys kept his focus as the secret room widened to admit him-and the traces of Farideh that rode with him-and sealed the wall where he passed. He traced the rune-the one Havilar had found-and the wall lit with its power.

He’d meant to rest, to regain his strength and study his spells again. To be ready to find his way free of the library. To stop the ghosts and the mummy and somehow free the knowledge Tarchamus had stolen and hidden away. But the arrows were poisoned, and Emrys was already wounded and weak. As Farideh watched, the arcanist died, shivering and fevered and clutching the scroll tight in the failing light of a conjured orb.

This is the legacy of Fallen Netheril, the voice whispered in her thoughts. The privilege of power, the claim to all knowledge, the right to the Empire. If they can set hands on it, then it is theirs. Tarchamus was not the rarity I thought. I did not see it in time …

There was no saving the library, Farideh realized. She reached out to close the dead man’s eyes, but her hand only passed through the memory his face and the darkness swallowed them both.

Farideh’s eyes were a sliver of silver and a sliver of gold beneath heavy lids. She was there and she was not, her body limp on its feet. Lorcan did not watch for ghosts the way Dahl did. He watched for the ghost in Farideh. He wondered what would happen to the protection if the ghost didn’t let her go.

Buried under a mountain, he thought, watching the unchanging curve of her eyes, menaced by an undead monstrosity capable of slaughtering Bibracte and both her underlings. And some godsbedamned Book putting ideas in her head-and pulling others out.

“This is a very bad idea,” he said again.

“It’s already done,” Dahl snapped. “You should have talked her out of it.”

As if it would have made a difference, Lorcan thought. Clearly the paladin didn’t know Farideh as well as he thought he did. She’d made Lorcan keep his distance from the books they were searching, claiming the need for a sentry, but she was a terrible liar. He wondered if the paladin had managed to see any of the texts that blasted Book had made out of Farideh’s thoughts.

Then her lashes fluttered. Her mouth twitched, as if she were struggling to speak.

“Darling?” Lorcan said. “Are you in there?”

Her breath hitched. She swayed on her feet, mumbling. Arguing with someone.

“Farideh?” he tried again.

With a great gasp, her eyes shot open, unseeing, and she lurched forward. Lorcan caught her as she stumbled, as if she were learning to walk all over again. Slumped in his arms, she looked up at him, wide-eyed and horrified for a moment, as if she did not know him, as if she’d never known anything like him. Then she seemed to focus and her eyes narrowed. A smile eased itself across her mouth. Lorcan tensed.

A smile that was not Farideh’s.

She blinked at him languorously. “Caisys?” she said and chuckled.

Lorcan’s blood froze. Not the ghost you were expecting, he thought. Oh Lords of the Nine-

“Farideh!” he shouted.

A jolt went through her, her lax muscles all tensing together, taking the weight of her body off his arms. She blinked, then blushed and scowled in equal measure. “What are you doing?”

Let her go, Lorcan told himself. You’re imagining things, anyway. You have to be. “Would you rather I let you fall over?”

“Did it work?” Dahl asked, coming nearer.

“I saw the scroll.” Farideh rubbed her head, pulling out of Lorcan’s embrace. “I saw him fighting the arcanist’s mummy-we’re not going to beat it. But worse, it’s not trapped down there. It can get out.”

“Son of a barghest,” Dahl cursed. “How?”

“I couldn’t see.” She pursed her mouth. “But if we’re going to get past, I think we need to find out. Dahl, truly-it wasn’t even trying before. What it did before was nothing. We won’t be able to kill it. We need to get around it. We need to find the trapdoor.”

“What in the Hells do you think you’re going to do?” he said. “Ask it to come out?”

“No,” Lorcan said, because he did know Farideh entirely too well. “She wants to try and trick that Book.”