Free King of Assassins: The Elven Ways: Book Three by Jenna Rhodes Page A

his eyes lined more than Bistane remembered, and there was a gauntness about his hands that seemed new as well. He leaned forward and fell into a long pause, as if drawing his thoughts from a great well. The mulled wine had stayed mostly warm, if not piping hot, and imparted a good feeling against the knifing effect of the wind. Bistane kept his silence as promised, even when the quiet between them stretched for a very long time. Finally, Azel stirred, lifting up an ink-stained great mitt of a hand.
    “I have sifted through it and there’s no easy way to say it. No way to tell the tale that won’t have you wondering if I have lost my mind. So here it is. There is a . . . thing . . . skulking about the immediate grounds. And somewhat in the forest, too, although my lumbermen aren’t talking about it. I’ve had a scholar lad or two, scarcely babes, blurt something out, but these others, their fathers and brothers, are hard men, few jobs more risky than cutting and processing timber, and they don’t like being taken for cowards. The saw mills and paper mills still run, but the workers are scared.” Azel paused, leveling his eyes upon Bistane. Bistane nodded to show he understood.
    “There is a dead man haunting.” Azel let his breath out in a great puff and sat back. “I’ve said it, there. Incomprehensible as it is. Perhaps not dead, but Undead. Walking. Hiding. He has a smell not unlike the books from centuries ago: dry, musty, faintly decaying.”
    “Hurt anyone?” Bistane couldn’t keep silent a moment longer.
    “I’m not certain. There’s nothing like this in our tales, and I hadn’t run across it much in the stories of Kerith, but it does crop up from time to time. A soulless, unloving thing that exists only to bring disaster upon the living.” Azel’s gaze bored into his. “Even so, I wouldn’t have believed it until I saw it myself.”
    “Where?”
    “In these Halls. Attempting, so it seemed, to gain entrance into the inner sanctum.”
    Where his father’s journal lay, among countless others, rumored to hold the truth and nothing but the truth as written by the Vaelinars themselves. If rumors were true.
    “And did it?”
    “No. Although that brings me to another part of my tale. The black mold which corrupted many of my texts is gone, thanks to the preservative invented by Tolby Farbranch and the tireless efforts of my students, but it left something insidious in its wake. The books are simply disintegrating.”
    “What? No fungus and yet we’re losing them? How can that be?”
    Azel nodded sadly, his great face drooping in folds of defeat. “Little more than crumbles. So far it hasn’t hit the
Books of All Truth
, but it might. It could.” He turned away, unable to look at Bistane any longer. “
It will
.”
    “What then?”
    “We don’t copy those books because the magic that lies within them comes from the hands that have penned the pages. When they are gone, there is nothing. We lost a few to the black mold, but very few in the inner sanctum, by Tree’s blood, and none of the All Truth yet. This new contagion has different . . .” Azel stopped. He lifted both hands in entreaty, searching for a word and then giving up. “Rules, for lack of a better word.”
    “And you surmise this dead man might have something to do with it.”
    “I couldn’t say. It can’t get into that part of the collection, but who’s to say . . . who’s to say what it is and what it can do.”
    “And you are scholars, not swordsmen.”
    Azel’s eyebrows lowered ponderously. “Yes.”
    Bistane rocked back in his chair, now empty napkin over one thigh, his cup in his hand. “Two things.”
    “Yes?”
    “I want a book in the early stages of this disintegration wrapped and packaged, to be taken to Tolby Farbranch, with all due caution. Can such a thing be done?”
    “All right. I don’t know if we can do it, but we can certainly try.”
    “And I want the
Books of All Truth
separated.