In the space of a few moments something had descended upon forty wagoners and their families, killed them and their horses and dragged them away into the woods. It couldn’t have happened without a sound. There must have been screams of terror and pain. Yet, only a few hundred yards away, Elphons had heard nothing. And how could ice form in this cloying heat?
Elphons followed the blood trails for a little way. Dead birds littered the ground, frost upon their feathers.
Lares crossed the blood-covered ground. The young man was trembling. ‘What are your orders, sire?’
‘If we skirt the lake to the north how long till we reach Carlis?’
‘By dusk, sire.’
‘Then that is what we shall do.’
‘I cannot understand how we heard nothing. We had the woods in sight all the time.’
‘Sorcery was used here,’ said the Duke, making the Sign of the Protective Horn. ‘Once my family is safe in Carlis I’ll return with Aric’s forces and a Source priest. Whatever evil is here will be destroyed. I swear it.’
It was still early when Waylander strolled into the North Tower library, climbing the cast-iron spiral staircase to the Antiquities section on the third floor. The three acolytes of the priestess Ustarte were sitting at the central table, examining tomes and parchment scrolls. They did not look up as he entered.
Strange men, he thought. Despite the thick stone of the tower the heat was already rising within the chamber, and yet they were garbed in heavy grey-hooded robes, silk scarves around their necks, and each wore thin grey gloves. Waylander did not acknowledge them as he moved past, but he felt their eyes upon his back. He allowed himself a wry smile. He had never been loved by priests.
Waylander paused and scanned the shelves. More than three thousand documents were stored here, ancient skin-bound volumes, fading parchments, even tablets of clay and stone. Some were beyond deciphering, but still drew scholars from as far afield as Ventria and the distant Angostin homeland.
His search would have been so much easier had the old librarian, Cashpir, not succumbed to a fever and taken to his bed. His knowledge of the library was phenomenal, and it was through him that Waylander had gathered so many of the precious tomes. He tried to recall the day he had read of the shining swords. There had been a storm raging, the sky black and heavy. He had sat where the priests were now, reading under lantern-light. For three days he had been racking his mind for any bright shard of memory.
He glanced towards the open window, and the new wooden shutters. Then it came to him.
The old shutters had been leaking, and water had splashed to the shelves close by, damaging the documents stored there. Waylander and Cashpir had moved some of the scrolls to the table. It was one of these he had been idly scanning. The area of the shelf closest to the window was still empty. Waylander walked across the chamber to the small office used by Cashpir. The place was a mess, scrolls scattered everywhere, and he could hardly see the leather-topped desk beneath the mass of books and parchment. Cashpir had an amazing mind, but no talent whatsoever for organization.
Waylander walked round the desk and sat down, picking through the parchments that lay there, recalling what had pricked his original interest on the day of the storm. One of the scrolls had told of giant creatures, melded from men and beasts. Waylander himself had been hunted by just such creatures twenty years before – sent to kill him by a Nadir shaman.
He studied the scrolls, examining each one before laying it on the floor at his feet. Finally he lifted a yellowing parchment and recognized it immediately. The ink had faded badly in places and one section of the parchment had been stained by fungus. Cashpir had treated the rest with a preservative solution of his own design. Waylander took the scroll back into the main library and walked to the window. In the sunlight he read the opening lines.
Of the glory that was Kuan-Hador there are only ruins now, stark and jagged, testimony to the fruitless arrogance of man. There are no signs of the God-Kings, no shadows of the Mist Warriors cast by the harsh sunlight. The history of the city is gone from the world, as indeed are the stories of its heroes and villains. All that remains are a few contradictory oral legends, garbled tales of creatures of fire and ice, and warriors with swords of shining light who stood against demons shaped from both men and beasts. Having visited the ruins one can understand the birth of such legends. There are fallen statues that appear to have the heads of wolves and the bodies of men. There are the remains of great arches, built, as far as one can ascertain, for no purpose. One arch, named by the Historian Ventaculus as the Hador Folly, is carved from a sheer cliff of granite. It is the most curious piece, for when one examines it one finds that the pictographic carvings upon the inner arch pillars vanish into the rock, almost as if the cliff had grown over it like moss.