The Complete Twilight Reign Ebook Collection (412 page)

‘They had to break down the study door as well; it had been barred from the inside. Mage Archelets told my mother the last pictures he’d created had used greater magic still and in them could be seen my father.’

‘Yes, my father who was by then on the king’s highway to Narkang. My father who was standing there in the same pose as he always adopted in the pictures, for ease of comparison. But he wasn’t alone in the pictures – there were other figures. One was Archelets’ mother, another a man he guessed from the stature to be the Hall’s previous owner.

‘Except now, each was facing my father – looking straight at him and reaching out. In the very last, the other figure had almost touched the image that was my father’s echo. My mother never discovered what was etched in the pictures in Narkang, only that there were three of them. The last was still in the broken picture-box when my father’s body was found. He never saw what was on it.

‘Around that time I came down with a fever. For a week I sweated and raved, close to death. When I recovered, my sight was already failing, but of that week I had only one memory. It was the dream of a room where the furniture was all covered by dust-sheets and a figure stood facing me – a shadow with claws, reaching for my eyes.’

Gennay Thonal got up from her desk and stretched. Somewhere behind her, muffled by a heavy drape, a window shutter rattled its bolt under another gust of winter wind outside. On her desk the flame of her oil lamp leaned slightly away, as though under the breath of someone who’d been sat beside her, but Gennay was quite alone in the still library.

The fire nearby hissed lazily and for a moment the curtain of shadows around the walls drew back, before settling comfortably back into position. It was dark there with only two lamps and a fading fire to light the large, empty room, but neither the chilly breath of night nor the gloom on the ground floor were enough to disturb Gennay a shred.

She reached up towards the timbered ceiling with a slight moan of effort, but the stiffness in her back wasn’t enough to stop a smile from stealing over her face. Young and supple, Gennay felt the ache fall away as she continued the movement around and down again until her fingers brushed the rug underfoot. The exercise was one she’d done most days for more than a decade and proved no difficulty even now.

As a little girl she’d nagged her father into allowing her professional training rather than the staid, formal version girls of breeding were normally permitted. It had instilled an athletic grace few of her peers possessed and even fewer of their mothers would approve of.

‘Ah, Father, you dangerous progressive,’ she said with a grin, looking over the balustrade beside her with a burgeoning sense of pride. ‘First allowing such unwomanly behaviour, now bringing learning to the unwashed masses.’

On the floor below there was a mess of boxes and workmen’s tools, but in Gennay’s eyes it was a dream slowly taking shape. Shelves on the walls, drawers waiting to be filled – she could picture the finished product in her mind and had been able to for months now.

On the point of collapse less than a year ago, the old building had been derelict and damp. This winter might have seen it all fall inwards under the stinging ocean breeze and freezing temperatures, but the roof was now repaired and strong once more; the marauding cold of Narkang’s streets tamed to a manageable chill.

‘New life,’ Gennay whispered to the hush of the empty building, ‘we’re breathing new life into this city, whatever they might say about us.’

The young woman pulled her shawl back up over her shoulders and stepped closer to the fireplace. The library was a massive building and from her desk Gennay could observe proceedings in the large central hall around which everything else had been built. Despite the repairs, Gennay still worked with a shawl over her head and fingerless woollen gloves. After nightfall the fire took an edge off the cold, nothing more, but that made all the difference to a woman forced to work later than her employees.

Once a guildhouse for shipping merchants, the building was in three distinct parts – not quite forming three sides of a square, while an eight-foot wall penned the remaining ground to form a cobbled courtyard. This part, the largest of the three, consisted of the oversized hallway over which Gennay now looked, to serve as a library in conjunction with what had once been a large meeting chamber just off the main room. Behind Gennay were another few rooms to be used for private study, while the newer north wing would house the three school rooms where the best and brightest of the city’s children would be educated.

The oldest part of the building, the guildsmen offices, would house the scribes and copyists who would earn the money required to keep the library going, penmanship and learning always being in demand in a trading port. Gennay’s father, Count Bastin Thonal, had bought the building and paid for its renovation, in addition to amassing the books and scrolls for the library, including copies of his entire personal collection.

It was to be his legacy, his gift to the city he’d found wealth in, but – ever the businessman – he’d decided against an annual drain on his income, preferring to force the library to be self-sufficient whether or not his eldest child was its administrator.

Gennay reached out to the fire and warmed her hands for a moment longer before returning to her desk to pack up. It could easily be left for the morning, the night watchman would not disturb anything, but still she tidied every night. She ordered and stacked her correspondence then arranged the books and papers so even the strictest of her childhood nannies could have found no cause for complaint, all ready for her return. One pile for each of the library’s functions with a fourth for the building works, each consisting of half-a-dozen or more sheaves bound with coloured ribbon.

Before she stood again from the desk, Gennay’s eyes lingered on one of the piles, the one concerning the school. The matter grew more complicated every time she considered what would be taught, how and by whom. Narkang was not presently a centre for learning and even finding capable secular teachers was proving a struggle.

‘A shame my brother doesn’t have patience for the efforts of others,’ Gennay said to the library at large. ‘He would make this so much easier.’

She spoke without rancour, loving Emin unreservedly, but the young man had always been irritated by people failing to grasp concepts as quickly as he did, let alone his few attempts to teach anyone. When Emin was young his father had been forced to beat him for throwing an apple at a cousin, because the man hadn’t been able to keep up with an explanation given so rapidly it was barely intelligible.

‘And that’s typical of my brother,’ Gennay said with a laugh as she lowered an iron cover over the fire’s embers. ‘How many beatings are given with a slight sense of pride? At the age of twelve Emin blackens a man’s eye from over a dozen yards away – earning himself a new bow and the finest instructor the following week.’

She picked a lamp up from the desk and started off down the wide stair that curled around the north end of the hall, eyes on the new stone lintel above the main door to the south wing. Halfway down however she stopped, sensing a slight gust of wind run up the worn steps towards her. Gennay looked around and frowned. Up on the mezzanine the shutter rattled its bolts again like the gentlest of unquiet spirits, but that was the only sound.

‘No, there can’t be a window or door left open,’ she surmised after a moment of silence. ‘We opened few enough today and I bolted them all myself before Sarras left.’

To confirm her thought she twitched open one of the long drapes that covered the enormous windows on that side of the hall. Through the mullioned windows she saw a few fat flakes of snow fall at an angle. Clearly the breeze was strong enough to throw around any window that had been left open, not just make it tremble.

The young woman hesitated and returned in her mind to a few hours previously when the former lay brother, Sarras, had come up to her desk. Having been brought up in a monastery, the tall man was wary of any strong-willed woman and tended to creep up to her desk like a deer ready to take flight, even more bundled up against the cold than Gennay.

They had checked the rooms together as always, moving methodically through the library to check the bolts on each window and lock the remaining doors until at last, Gennay would unlock the main entrance and lock it again behind Sarras. It was a ritual that was less necessary now the main building work had been done, but one she felt a curious pleasure in its monastic formality – quite aside from reassuring the young woman that she was secure there when alone after nightfall. With so much work to do before the official opening of the library, she couldn’t afford to only keep to the few daylight hours of winter. The night watchman had been instructed to arrive only when the Hunter’s Moon was above the rooftops so for a few hours she was, unusually for a woman of noble birth, quite alone in the library.

At the bottom of the stair Gennay stopped again, setting the lamp on a nearby table and cocking her head to listen. After half a minute or more she let her breath out in one long puff, satisfied there was no breeze or movement coming from any of the open parts of the library. She wove her way around the workman’s tables where shelving and desks were being constructed and opened the peephole set into the great main door. She had to stand on her tip-toes to look out and flinched when she did as a gust of icy wind rushed through the grille to catch her unawares.

A second try revealed the courtyard just as she had expected; empty of people, with an icy sheen on the cobbles and a little snow drifted up against the right-hand wall. Gennay could just about pick out the swirling descent of a few snowflakes in the faint starlight and felt surprised that not more had fallen. As yet it was only a scattering, but the temperature had dropped dramatically today and Narkang was readying itself for a sustained siege of white.

‘My thick boots tomorrow, I think,’ she said to herself, preferring to speak aloud and break the silence.

She snapped the peephole cover shut again, then whirled around. Somewhere behind her there had come a sound, barely audible over the closing hinge but distinct none the less.

‘Or was it?’ Gennay muttered. ‘Am I just imagining things at long last?’

She took a step forward, arms wrapped around her body until she realised she was acting like a frightened little girl. ‘Oh Gennay, if Emin was to see you now you’d never hear the end of it. It’s a rat if anything at all – no bolts are going to stop them getting into a building of this size.’

She stamped her heel against the flagstone floor and listened to the echo race around the empty library. No scuttling sound followed it, no scrabble of a startled creature or anything else.

‘Well, there you are, it was your imagination,’ she declared loudly.

Despite her assurance, Gennay’s fingers went to a pocket in her dress and closed around the comforting shape of a knife handle. It was something Emin had quietly insisted that she carry, despite the fact she was be escorted to and from the library each day by Pirn, her father’s most trusted retainer.

As soon as he’d heard she would be alone in the library with Sarras, Emin had given her a small dagger to keep on her person. Gennay’s protests that the timid scribe, Sarras, was terrified of her had drawn only a sardonic smile from her younger brother and she’d eventually agreed to keep Emin from worrying. Now, however, she felt glad he’d insisted, however sure she was about Sarras.

It was a strange little weapon; its blade no longer than the handle with a gently rippled edge that was sharp enough to shave with. With her thumb Gennay slipped off the toggle that kept it in its leather sheath and advanced a few steps, listening all the time.

Once she reached the centre of the hall she stopped, knife still in her pocket. There were three doors ahead of her, each flanked by an empty bookcase that protruded out from the wall. To the left was a thick door that led to the kitchens and store rooms behind, all currently unused. From where she stood, Gennay could see the bolts were closed, so she discounted that. It was thick enough to mask most sounds and any thief stood behind it was going to stay there. The rear rooms did have access to the other wings, but it only took Gennay a moment to confirm that the doors leading from each were just as securely fastened.

The sound came again, a slight scratching on the edge of hearing, no louder than the whisper of fingers brushing a page – except the reading rooms were empty. The shelves in two had been completed and the first scrolls set upon them, but she’d checked and shut the doors herself. No one could have got in without her hearing from her desk, almost directly above the door.

‘Which means it’s a rat,’ she said with slight relief. She didn’t like the creeping creatures of course, but they were unavoidable in a sea-port and Gennay had seen enough not to be frightened. Just to be sure, she went to fetch her lamp and moved it to a shelf where it would cast its light inside the room. Ever mindful, she checked it was secure and out of the way in case the rat ran out and startled her, then moved forward and gave the door a thump.

Nothing happened, there was no sound from within at all. Gennay pulled her knife from her pocket and held it ready while she unlocked the door and pushed it open. It swung easily enough to reveal a dark room four yards by six, containing a high shuttered window and a table in the middle. On the table was a small pile of books, one of which had half-slipped from the top and lay open at an angle down the side of the pile.

‘A draught on the pages?’ Gennay wondered as she took a cautious pace forward. The room was steadfastly empty of living creatures, the only movement was her shadow stealing over the shelves. ‘Ah, it must have slipped and the pages slipped one by one, rustling as they did so.’

In a flash her courage returned and Gennay marched into the room, closing the book with a firm snap and setting the pile straight. They were the first works to have been delivered by her most unlikely resource, the Knights of the Temples.