Beyond the stairwell to the vault was a large stone arch, into which was set a thick oak door banded and studded with iron. Like the previous door, it had a metal plate inscribed with a spell, instead of a lock or handle. Now that Josh had the candle lit, he could see that the spell marks on the door plate were completely different from the druid sigils. For a start, they included writing, or at least symbols, although not in a script that he could read. It was also laid out differently, in a more linear sequence, whereas the druid sigils were more concentric. He wished he’d bought materials to make a rubbing with, so that he could copy it.
He wasn’t here to study enchantments, tempting as that was. He needed to try and get through the door.
The door at the top of the stairs had been protected by the wormspider as well as the arcane lock. This door just had the lock, so it might have a second layer of extra, hidden protections. Like traps. Maybe Josh had played too many tabletop and video games and was just being paranoid, but better paranoid than dead, even temporarily.
He had stopped on the last step of the stairs, and now he studied the flagstones in front of the door carefully, in case one of them was a pressure plate or something, but they were all closely fitted and worn down in a pattern that suggested they hadn’t moved since they had first been laid down.
Next, he looked at the door itself. Aside from the arcane lock, it looked like any other large, heavy, iron-studded door, the kind you got in old castles. The oak was dark with age, and he didn’t see anything trap-like about it.
Last, he studied the frame and the wall surrounding the door. He almost didn’t notice it, because the holes were randomly placed, instead of in a pattern. They were tiny, less than half a centimetre across, and scattered over the wall to the right of the door. They looked just big enough to hold poisoned needles or darts.
How were they set off? Was the mechanism mechanical or magical?
Josh strained his senses as far as possible. He could feel the magical buzz of the doorplate, but also lots of tiny individual prickles of magic where the holes were.
He hesitated, then stepped closer, keeping out of the line of fire of the holes. He could feel more magic now, a thin string of it leading from the door plate, which separated out and became even finer strings, like individual hairs, each one leading to the little prickles of magic behind the dart holes.
He thought he knew what he was looking at. The moment the door plate magic was disabled, it would somehow release the darts. The librarians must have some way to prevent that, though, if they wanted to go through the door themselves. Would Josh be able to work that out if he got closer?
That would put him in the line of fire from the darts.
He hesitated and then went back up the stairs, and cautiously opened the door to the atrium. There was no sign of the spider hanging from the chandelier in the centre, and he hadn’t felt a flicker from his alarm spell, so it must still be in the restricted section. He put the candle on the floor, removed the colourful cloak he had used to disguise the magic cloak, and jammed part of the fabric underneath the door to hold it open.
Then he crept cautiously into the atrium, his eyes on the archway to the restricted section. There was no movement, and no sign of the wormspider.
He reached the first row of desks, and picked up a desk as quietly as he could. It was made of solid hardwood, and it weighed a ton. He staggered back towards the vault doorway with it, ready to drop and run at the first sign of the wormspider, but maybe the monster found the heat spot more interesting than any slight sounds he was making.
He retreated behind the vault door, still bearing his prize, with a sense of relief.
A few minutes later, he was ready. The desk had been carried down the stairs and tipped on its side, so that the solid wood surface covered the dart holes in the bottom half of the wall. Josh was crouched down behind it, with the door plate at eye level.
He studied the spell. It felt different to the one on the door above, which had been a fairly simple ball shape. This one was more diffuse, with more outlying areas, and more fuzziness. He stared at it, trying to see it in greater detail, but it was like trying to see writing that was too small to read. After a while he felt the tightness in the back of his neck and his temples that normally preceded a headache, and decided he should probably give up and just use Chi Siphon to rip the whole enchantment off.
And then there was a sudden blurring in his head, his mind going fuzzy, and everything shifted, like a camera coming into focus, and he could suddenly see the mechanism in more detail. It was like some imaginary magical clockwork edifice, a spell of many interlinked parts. He didn’t have a hope of understand it. It was like scrolling down lines of computer code in a language you didn’t know.
That idea gave him a hint, though.
A magic spell like this might be constructed like a computer program. Was the language or structure it used composed as a series of linear steps, or was it more modular?
He studied it again. It seemed to be in the shape of multiple loops, which suggested modularity. Even as he stared at it, he realised it was in two parts. There was the part that seemed to be superimposed over the door plate and the jamb, and the part that was connected to the threads leading to each dart. There was only one narrow thread connecting the two.
If he could get Chi Siphon to target just the part of the spell on the doorplate itself, and not the part that connected to the darts, maybe he could disrupt it without setting off the trap.
The problem was that he couldn’t control the parameters of Chi Siphon. His experiments in changing the sigils hadn’t yet borne fruit.
He thought about how Chi Siphon worked. It couldn’t remove a base enchantment, only the charge on that enchantment. So if Josh cast Glow on a feather, it then became permanently enchanted, but the glow effect would only show if he kept charging it with small bits of magic. Chi Siphon could remove that charge, but not the original Glow spell.
Josh had used Chi Siphon to remove the magic from the door plate at the top of the stairs, but it hadn’t removed the original spell, and to re-engage the arcane lock all he would need to do was push magic into it again.
Additionally, Chi Siphon would only remove enchantments from very close range. You had to hold the spell paper within a centimetre or two of the object you wanted the suck the power out of.
That gave Josh a possible solution.
If he held the spell paper close enough to the door-locking part of the spell, would it ignore the dart-throwing part of the spell?
At least if he got it wrong, he would be protected by the desk.
He situated a Chi Siphon spell paper close to the fuzzy ball around the doorplate, on the opposite side of the magical threads, took a deep breath, and cast it.
The surge of bright energy that rushed into him nearly made him fall back in surprise. There was a metallic taste in his mouth, and his vision was odd, as if everything around him was pulsing in bright, primary colours, outlined with a nimbus. His heart hammered away at what felt like hundreds of beats per minute. He slumped on the floor.
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Maybe sucking magic out of enchantments was a bad idea. The door upstairs hadn’t felt like that.
Was this because the lower door had a bigger, more powerful enchantment on it?
It felt like the worst kind of sugar and caffeine rush, but without the high, just the weird physical side-effects. He wasn’t sure how long it took, but eventually the overloaded feeling began to fade somewhat. He sat up and inspected the desk and the holes in the walls. The magical threads and the little magical sparks inside the holes were still there, but half of the door plate enchantment had gone.
It had worked!
Although what would have happened if he had siphoned off the entire enchantment? He might have hurt himself badly. He needed to be careful when testing this stuff.
Josh crouched behind the desk again, just in case, and cautiously pushed the inner vault door open. The enchantment thread just sat there, and no darts slammed out of the holes. He picked up his candle from the floor, and stepped into the room.
It was an old cellar, lined with brick and divided into separate spaces by arched columns, with stone flagging on the floor. There were lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and several storage crates and chests arrayed against the walls. Josh stayed by the door for some time, but no monster jumped at him out of the darkness.
He went a little further in, and raised the candle.
There, at the far end, was the thing the wormspider had been protecting. It sat on a wooden plinth, underneath a glass dome that was etched with spell work. Josh walked towards it, watching the flagstones carefully for pressure plates, or trip wires, but there were no other traps. As he got closer, and the light from the candle slid over it, he saw that it was a small metallic object, about the size of his palm. One end consisted of a flat triangular shape, like the head of a pin, and sticking out from that was an ornate stick, covered in bumps and protrusions and twists. Like the glass dome that protected it, it had tiny spell-writing all over it.
It looked like one part of a key that had been cut lengthways into three segments.
You cannot be serious, Josh thought. It was such a stupid cliché. A powerful arcane key separated into three parts, and presumably each third hidden away in the different part of a country.
What kind of treasure would the whole key unlock?
Elder Tharn had said that, after Tylas’s first campaign, he had been defeated by the Seven Heroes and bound by the chains of Weyland. Was this the key to those chains, and if so, what did they now hold?
Tylas the Undying’s power, Josh realised. It was the only think he could think of.
Josh was tempted, really tempted, to take the key.
But that would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, piled on top of all the incredibly stupid things he had already done today. If he stole the key, it would be noticed. The librarians would raise the alarm, and there would be a city-wide hunt for the thief. No doubt the librarians would remember the youth who had entered the library, with a colourful cloak over his arm and a letter of recommendation from the Abbot of High Howe Priory. Josh would be a prime suspect.
And he didn’t know, with any certainty, that the key did unlock the chains of Weyland, or that the latter held anything relating to the Dreamer. He also didn’t know where the other two parts of the key were, or even if it had been broken into three pieces rather than four.
He should establish that first. Now that he knew how the library safeguards worked, he could come back and take the key fragment at any time. Wait, no, in the morning the librarians would know someone had broken in. The first thing they would do would be to increase the protections around the key fragment, or move it to a safer location.
Could he keep watch on the library the next day, and follow them?
He gave the key a regretful glance, then backed away. He hated to leave it, but there were too many unknowns and if he took it now he would be on the run with limited funds and no-one to turn to.
He crouched down behind the door again, and carefully poured a dribble of magic into the door plate to re-engage the arcane lock. It took surprisingly little effort to prime, compared to the druid sigils. Even that small amount of magic, however, made the fuzziness from the Chi Siphon spell recede a little from the edges of his vision, which gave him an idea for using Chi Siphon in future.
Except right now he should be concentrating on getting out of here instead of letting himself get distracted.
He replaced the desk, once again keeping a careful eye out for the wormspider. Close to the vault door, set into one of the alcoves, was the side door he had heard the librarians leaving from earlier in the evening. This was an ordinary door, and when he tested it, he found it was unlocked. It led to a short corridor, with other doors leading off from it. One was a small room which reeked of the wormspider, and which had a large cage in the corner. This must be where they kept the monster during the day. The cage was on a wide, thick stone slab, below which was a cavity containing cold ashes. On the opposite side of the room from the cage was a large fireplace.
That must be how they lured the wormspider back into its cage. If it liked warm spots, all they had to do was light a fire, and then shovel the ashes into the cavity below the slab to heat the slab up.
Josh went back into the corridor, and saw how the door to the wormspider’s room could be used to block off a section of the corridor, which he could then stand in. A convenient lever would allow him to open the door to the atrium from this position, thus luring the wormspider out of the library and back into its cage without ever being in danger from it.
He felt a flush of excitement and relief run through him as he realised that he could put the library back to how it was, so that the librarians would never know he had been here.
It was a simple matter to cast another couple of Heat spells on the slabe below the cage, and the work of a minute to set the doors into the arrangement that would allow the wormspider to be lured into its room.
He closed the door on it hastily, the moment it had gone through, and dropped the heavy bar that secured it. He felt almost dizzy with relief.
The first thing he did was re-lock the vault door at the top of the stairs. Next, he found all the books he had thrown or chucked off the shelves, and put them back, and if they didn’t go on in quite the right order, at least it didn’t look as if an intruder had been anywhere near them.
At this point he could leave, but he had one more thing he wanted to do, and that was look for books on magic. It felt like he had spent an eternity in the library already, but it had only been a few hours, and it was still the middle of the night. He had time, and he needed to know more about the language of spell casting. The desk that separated the atrium from the restricted section had a shelf that stored paper and ink, so he would be able to take notes.
There weren’t any spells, but there were books that discussed the theory of magic, and a primer of the language used to create spells, which was the next best thing. By the time he was ready to leave, he had a sheaf of papers full of notes stuffed underneath his shirt.
The wormspider had become fractious once the effect of the Heat spell had faded. Maybe it expected to be fed or something, but Josh didn’t have anything to give it, and had no idea what it ate. He gave a shudder of disgust at the thought. Did it eat like a real spider, by wrapping its prey up in a cocoon and dissolving it into soup?
He hoped he would never have the opportunity to find out.
He released it back into the atrium, ensured the atrium door was properly shut, and then went to the side door that he thought would be the way out.
It was locked.
He’d known that. Of course it would be locked. He’d just forgotten in the excitement of finding books about magic.
He looked around the corridor. There was the door to the wormspider room, the door to the atrium and the outer door. However, there were two others which he hadn’t investigated. One of them was also locked, but the second turned out to be a workroom of some kind. After inspecting the workbenches and supplies laid out, Josh decided it must be where the librarians repaired or rebound books, and maybe also copied them.
The best thing about it was a small, high window set in the far wall, which overlooked an alleyway. It was just big enough to allow him to climb through it. It was barred on the inside, which meant he wouldn’t be able to close it properly after him, but hopefully the librarians would just think they had accidentally left it open the night before.
He bundled up the cloaks and threw them into the alleyway, hoping they hadn’t fallen in anything too noxious, although this was a better part of town, and the streets were swept regularly. It had surprised him when he had first arrived that there hadn’t been raw sewage running in the gutters, or chamber pots being emptied out of windows, which he had a vague idea would have been more likely in a real medieval city. Granted, some of the poorer parts of the town were grubbier, but not stomach-churningly so.
Josh climbed up onto the shelf below the window, stuck his feet through, and wriggled out. It was a tight fit, and the window frame scraped against his back, but he made it, landing on the cobbles and scooping up the bundle of cloaks.
The town was quiet, and from what he could see the streets were empty of people. Now he just needed to get back to the boarding house.
He had just turned the corner onto the main street when a bag went over his head and tightened around his neck. At the same time, someone punched him hard in the kidneys and that hurt, badly enough that he would have screamed if the string on the bag hadn’t been choking him.
He was still gasping and trying to recover when he felt rough hands pick him up, bind his wrists behind his back, and sling him onto something hard.