Stalking Darkness

and Nysander suddenly looking at him with a stranger’s eyes as he warned—
if you let slip the slightest detail of what I am about to tell you, I shall have to kill all of you
.
    He pushed the memory away before it could show in his face. “No, of course not. What would I be angry about?”
    Leaving Nysander’s chambers, Alec followed Seregil back down through the warren of stairways and corridors to the ground floor.
    “The Orëska library is actually scattered all over the building,” Seregil explained as they went. “Chambers, vaults, closets, forgottencupboards, too, probably. Thalonia has been the librarian for a century and I doubt even she knows where everything is. Some books are available to anyone, others are locked away.”
    “Why, are they valuable?” asked Alec, thinking of the beautifully decorated scrolls Nysander had lent him.
    “All books are valuable. Some are dangerous.”
    “Books of spells, you mean?”
    Seregil grinned. “Those, too, but I was thinking more of ideas. Those can be far more dangerous than any magic.”
    Crossing the atrium court, Seregil swung open the heavy door to the museum. They hadn’t been in here since Alec’s first visit during Seregil’s illness. As they passed the case containing the hands of the dyrmagnos, Tikárie Megraesh, Alec paused, unable to resist peering in at them in spite of his revulsion. Recalling the trick Seregil had played on him last time, he kept his friend carefully in sight.
    The wizened fingers were motionless, but he could see freshly scored marks in the oak boards lining the bottom of the case beneath the cruel nails.
    “They look quiet enough—” he began, but just then one of the hands clenched spasmodically.
    “Bilairy’s
Balls
, I hate those things!” He shuddered, backing hurriedly away. “Why do they move like that? Aren’t they and all the other pieces of him supposed to be dying?”
    “Yes.” Seregil looked down at the hands with a puzzled frown. “Yes, they are.”
    Alec followed Seregil through a stout door at the back of the museum and down two sets of stairs to a series of corridors below the building.
    “It’s this one here,” said Seregil, stopping before an unremarkable door halfway down the passage. “Stay here, I’ll go find a custodian to let us in.”
    Alec leaned against the door and looked about. The walls and floors were made of stone slabs, laid smooth and tight together. Ornate lamps were fastened in brackets at intervals, giving enough light to see clearly from one end of the corridor to the other. He was just wondering whose job it was to keep all those lamps full when Seregil came back with a stooped old man in tow.
    The custodian rattled the door open with a huge iron key and then handed Alec a leather sack. Inside were half a dozen large lightstones.
    “No flames,” the old man warned before creaking off again about his business. “Just leave them outside the door when you’ve finished.”
    The chamber was a large one, and filled with closely spaced shelves of books and scrolls.
    Holding one of the stones aloft, Alec looked around and groaned. “It’ll take us hours to find anything here!”
    “It’s all very logically arranged and docketed,” Seregil assured him, pointing out little cards tacked to the shelves here and there. On each, a few words in faded script indicated general subject areas. “Histories of the Great War” took up several bookcases at the back of the room. Judging by the undisturbed layers of dust on most of them, there had been little interest of late in the subject.
    Seregil clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “People ought to make more use of these. The past always sets the stage for the future; any Aurënfaie knows that.”
    Alec looked at the closely packed tiers in dismay. “Maker’s Mercy, Seregil. I can’t read all these!”
    “Of course not,” said Seregil, climbing a small ladder to inspect the contents of an upper shelf. “Half of them aren’t even in your language and most of the others are ponderously boring. But there are one or two that are fairly readable, if I can just remember where to look. You browse around down there; stick to things less than two inches thick to begin with and see if you can read them.”
    If there was a system to the arrangement of the books, it eluded Alec. Books in Skalan stood check by jowl with those in Aurënfaie and half a dozen other languages he couldn’t begin to guess at.
    Seregil appeared to be