Erin Evans - Lesser Evils

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.