Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(66)

He sounded irritable, and she knew why: Eskander had never asked for this power and didn’t enjoy the responsibility, either. He’d spent too many years a hermit to gladly bear regular interruptions. Especially now, when so much hung in the balance.

She nodded and left his spare, dusty office; he’d set up his desk in an old storeroom instead of the silk-and-velvet nest that generations of other Obscurists Magni had used. The only spectacular thing in this place was the view from the wide window, but just now it only showed growing, oppressive clouds.

Annis was not in the kitchens (which was, indeed, a good guess), and the workers there hadn’t seen her recently. Nor was she in the Iron Tower’s library room, though a few other Obscurists were there, taking comfort in books while they rested from one difficult task and prepared for another. Everyone worked today. Everyone.

Which was why it was strange she couldn’t find Annis.

Perhaps she’s with one of her lovers, she thought, but rejected the idea immediately. Annis did have a number of them, but she also took her duties seriously. This wasn’t the time or place.

After checking in every busy workstation, Morgan was even more concerned. Why would Annis be hiding? She wasn’t ill, or in her rooms, or anywhere else she ought to be.

Morgan set out to look in the unlikely places.

It was in the twelfth room that she found her: a dusty old laboratory that had been long abandoned. It was crowded with old and broken equipment, discarded furniture, trunks of personal belongings from long-dead Obscurists.

Morgan heaved a sigh of relief when she caught sight of Annis’s flood of curling red hair from the back. It looked as if the older woman was bending over to look at something on the floor. “There you are,” Morgan said, and came into the room. “I was worried, you know.”

No answer. And no reaction. Annis’s hair swayed a little in the cool breeze from a fan vent above, but otherwise she was completely motionless. Why would she be standing in that awkward position? What—

It all came together for Morgan in a terrifying, frozen moment. Annis was upright because she was tied to a strong wooden post. The only things that stopped her from collapsing to the floor were the ropes wrapped around her body and the ones securing her wrists behind the post.

“Annis?” Morgan’s voice had gone soft and strange. “Annis?” She felt robbed of breath, of energy, until it all returned to her in a terrific jolt of fear. Her heart, which had hardly seemed to beat, began to hammer painfully, and she fought against a wave of instinct to run from this place. She couldn’t. Her friend needed help.

But she knew she was too late. She knew even before she carefully pulled back Annis’s hair and saw her death pallor, the gaping wound in her throat. The blood that had soaked down the front of her Obscurist’s robes and pooled thickly around her feet. Strange that she hadn’t seen the blood until after the wound, as if her mind simply wouldn’t allow her to notice.

Morgan pressed trembling fingers to her friend’s throat.

Her pulse was quiet.

If I scream, no one will hear me in here, she thought, and then dismissed the thought because fear was useless; fear was a distraction. Annis had been murdered. In the Iron Tower. Why? By whose hand? Why?

She heard the door swinging shut, but when she whirled to look, it was moving on its own. No one there. But she felt the aura of power, and saw it next, a shimmer like glitter dropped from the air to cluster around the edges.

Then a burst of raw energy, and the door changed to a wall.

She was trapped.

She turned as another sunburst of power ignited behind her, and saw a doorway being created this time—a stone arch, darkness behind it. And an Obscurist stepped through it.

She recognized his face—how could she not, as scarce as the Obscurists were these days, barely a few hundred in this vast tower—but she didn’t know him. He was ten years or so her elder, a thin, balding man who was utterly medium in all aspects. Medium brown hair. Medium skin tone that could have been traced to fifty different ethnicities. A forgettable arrangement of features, eyes the color of dried, dark mud. Even his height and weight were average.

But one thing about him seemed exceptional now. He’d concealed his power. She’d never had the impression of real force from him in the small interactions they’d had, but it took expert manipulation of quintessence, and prewritten formulae, to reconfigure walls. Especially in the Iron Tower.

He didn’t speak to her at all. He just came for her, and she backed up quickly, glancing around for a weapon and finding none . . . but as she dodged his grasping hands, she remembered that Annis commonly carried a knife strapped to her forearm, even at home. She’d always claimed it was for cutting fruit and trimming threads. But the important thing was that it was sharp, and it was here.

Morgan lunged for her friend’s body and ripped her sleeve in her haste; she had a wild urge to apologize, a flash so out of place it nearly blinded her, and her fingers grazed a leather sheath. She grabbed for the knife.

It wasn’t there.

It was in the hand of the nameless Obscurist, who was lunging at her.

She slipped in Annis’s blood and fell backward, and it was a lucky thing; the knife cut air half an inch from her throat as she lost her balance. Morgan fell into a stack of glassware and sent it crashing around them, but one thick vase-shaped vessel—alembic, her mind automatically supplied—rocked but stayed on the table. She grabbed it by the neck, turned, and shattered it against the man’s head with as much force as she had in her body, and he staggered sideways and dropped to one knee.