Both looked around to see what these cellars held. Gath brightened his light, casting a glare on the stone walls and illuminating their steps. Every surface in this cellar was coated with dust and powder. The first level had been rather obviously plundered, but long ago from the untouched layer of dust on cracked barrels broken open with crude blows. Euris supposed the powder must be some kind of sawdust. She was mostly surprised at how dry the cellars were, since she would have expected them to be dank and moldy. But as they walked, their boots caused clouds of powdery sawdust to rise off the floor. She ran her finger along the top of a barrel which had never been opened, leaving a thick line in its wake.

“Is that why the archives are down here, because it’s so dry?” Euris whispered. Something about being in the dark, underground, made her whisper even though for all she knew they were the only two people within miles. Still, it felt natural to whisper. Euris began to feel her nose itch, and suppressed a sneeze. The chamber wasn’t very cool either, with a warm, stuffy, stale smell in the air. Gath had told her to wear a cloak, since deeper down the temperature would be uncomfortable without one.

“Yes,” Gath said, “the lower levels were carved into solid rock and magically reinforced.” Gath was not whispering, but kept his voice low. Of course, Euris thought, he always kept his voice low, so she did not know if he was particularly concerned with being overheard or not. Gath’s light caused shadows to play along the walls, as he moved, and behind them the darkness closed in. Gath moved through the debris and jetsam, deeper into the cellar. Euris followed mutely. Nothing in this cellar was of any worth at all. She saw, amid parts of ruined barrels and boxes, only a few fragments of cloth so dusty their original color was obscured, and what looked like two iron ingots. Odd, to her, was an old worn, leather shoe behind a barrel. How many centuries had it been down here, and where was its mate? The shoe was missing any laces. One barrel had the lid removed, and it was full of small wooden discs, and Euris could not think of what these discs could be used for. Neither, apparently, had the plunderer, since the barrel was full. Finally, Euris let out a ferocious sneeze, having been completely overcome by the dust. She weakly smiled at Gath, who looked back at her with a grin of his own.

At the very back of the cellar they were in, Gath found a wall that had no visible door or passageway. It was made of small gray bricks tightly mortared together. Gath stopped, considering. “This is the wall,” Gath finally said mysteriously, looking around at different bricks, as if he was searching for a specific one. He reached up about as high as he could on his tiptoes, and pushed a brick which seemed, to Euris, to be no different from any other. Nothing happened. Gath moved to the other end of the wall, found a similarly high brick, and nothing happened. Gath muttered to himself, and then felt down low in the center of the wall and pressed another brick. Nothing happened. Gath frowned, and scratched his chin with the hand not holding his light.

“Are you sure this is ‘the wall’?” Euris finally asked. She was somewhat on edge because of the silent, underground chamber, and nettled that Gath saw no reason to explain what he was doing. She tried to fight down the urge to be impatient and irritated, and reminded herself that she was currently involved in the Quest for which she had waited her whole life. Somehow, sneezing in an underground cellar filled with sawdust had never entered into any of her daydreams about her life’s biggest achievement. Actually, as she thought about it, she had never quite imagined the Quest itself. She had imagined the celebration afterwards, and the rousing sendoff of cheering people, which had never materialized in reality, but not the Quest. Were all Quests like this? Did the people whose adventures were captured in the long ballads go though mundane things like this? Maybe that’s what the true Quest was, Euris ruefully thought, to show the people who daydreamed what reality was like.

“Of course I’m sure,” Gath answered, as he stood back and looked at the wall again. “I think.” That last admission wasn’t as certain sounding as his earlier proclamations. Yet, he regarded the wall one more time, and scratched his chin one more time. He produced a small hammer out from under his cloak which Euris had not seen him get out of their gear before coming down, and she wondered where it came from. Gath took the hammer, went back to the original brick he had first pressed, and whacked it soundly with the hammer. The wall creaked and a crack formed along the mortar line between some of the bricks. “I was right the first time, but it was stuck. I guess we’re the first people to use the door in centuries.” He shrugged, giving her a lopsided grin that expressed his own bemusement at his effort to open the hidden door.

He pushed along the crack, and the wall swung backward with a sliding creak that raised goose bumps along Euris’ arms. Beyond the door was an inkwell of blackness. After glancing into that void, Euris noticed the hammer Gath had used wasn’t in his hand, and seemed to have disappeared. Gath poked his lit walking-stick down into the darkness behind the wall, and they could see steps leading down. “This,” Gath informed her, “is the entrance into the archive level.” The light seemed less able to penetrate the darkness in the stairwell, and Gath made it even brighter. He held it low, so they could see where to place their feet. Each step looked to be in good repair, and they encountered no loose stones. Euris was extra careful, for fear of messing up the Quest with a turned ankle before they had even really started.

Gath led her down the steps, without looking back. As Euris followed, she had a nervous thought. “Does that door close?” she asked. “Can it be opened from this side?” She looked back, and already the outline of the hidden door was almost impossible to see above them.

Gath made a little humming noise, and then said: “Yes, it was actually meant for people to come up if they needed items from storage.” Euris briefly wondered if he knew that for a fact, or had made it up to make her feel better. Why couldn’t he tell her more? She checked her impatient impulse, knowing the oppressive underground darkness and pressing stone were getting to her. No one was down here but them, after all, so why was there any reason to worry?

“No one is down here but us, right?” she asked Gath.

His voice came back to her as he walked ahead on the steps. “No, not near us. I feel some presence far off in the distance, many levels below where we are going. We won’t get near it.”

“Presence?” That was a curious word to use, after all. What could he have meant?

Gath looked over his shoulder quickly at her. “Hard to say what it is for sure. But it is not a person, so we should have nothing to worry about.” She wished he would not look back at her while still walking down the steps, but he did not seem to change his stride at all. She was worrying too much. He went on: “Some sort of lingering magic. I expected to encounter things like that here, but hopefully we will not have to deal with them directly.”

Gath led them out of an arch at the bottom of the stairs, into what he said was the archive level. The first archive level looked a lot like the storeroom above, filled with barrels and crates, but had not been looted. Gath said this was storage for the archivists who worked on the deeper levels where they were now heading. The various containers were, for the most part, stacked orderly, and Euris saw numbers branded onto some of the wooden planks. “What’s in these?” Euris asked Gath as they passed through another room of crates.

“Probably nothing of use now,” Gath replied. “Most likely dry goods for the archivists, like thread for tapestries, parchments, and so forth. Ink powder. Probably all of it is rotten by now. These corridors are magically braced, so at least these areas aren’t infested. I couldn’t imagine two centuries of rats breeding down here!” Euris could have gone all day without him saying that.

They came to a stairway leading down to the third level below ground. This one was in the T junction where the passage they were following met up with a perpendicular passage. Gath immediately went down the stairs, not even considering the other passages. She looked to the right and to the left, but could see nothing in the blackness once Gath’s light had entered the stairs. “We’re getting closer,” Gath said. “Those two side passages go to more storerooms. No point in going there.” Euris wondered how he knew his way around so well. She had studied the maps of the above-ground lands, and had a good idea of where they were geographically, but could not remember seeing any maps of cellars. Not exploring side branches made Euris uneasily realize that there were now places behind them which they had not investigated, so the potential now existed for the first time since they entered these passages for someone to be behind them. Her back tightened involuntarily, and she fought down the image of something jumping on her back in the dark.

As they got to the bottom of the stairs, they saw a large hall lined with bookshelves. The hall was easily as large as one of the rooms in the Great Library, although it was little over ten feet high and most of the shelves were built from floor to ceiling. Stone pillars reinforced the chamber occasionally, but the bookshelves were all wooden. Each one was filled to overflowing with big leather volumes, most lined up spine to spine as if they were still in use every day. Some shelves sagged in the middle under the weight. Gath gave her a wide smile. “Now we’re getting there.” He looked eagerly at the books, to see what they were.

Euris could not match his enthusiasm after seeing the books. “Are we going to have to look at every one of these books to find the Book of Ages?” She thought of herself, old and feeble, still down here in fifty or sixty years, looking at these stacks.

“I hope not! Something as important as the Book of Ages would be in a special place.” Gath paused, looking at another shelf. “Looks like there’s nothing here the Great Library doesn’t already have. These are mostly an old, of course, since Morran has been in ruins for a long time, edition of the Kings’ History. The College Library itself probably donated this old edition to them back then! If we brought these back, we’d never hear the end of it!” Gath smiled at her, and she gave him a weak smile back.

They went on through the shelves, with Gath occasionally shining his light on the spines of books. He saw nothing that interested him enough to cause him to purloin a volume, and Euris didn’t have the courage to ask him if he could put all these books where he got the hammer and his walking-stick. She did not notice any books of interest herself, and she saw that, as he said, most of the books were the five-thousand volume Kings’ History. At the College of Swords, a few of her classes had forced her to read a few passages from this monument to boredom in her own studies, especially the egregiously detailed breakdown of the Battle Of Raun Falls, the site of King Worallad’s grievous tactical errors that left his flank exposed, and she could only think that consignment into a tomb was a fitting end to such tediousness. Was it only last year she had sat by the fire in the Stony Knob, writing a paper on King Liggier’s siege of Eannin, sipping the dark, rich ale? Her dusty throat could use a swig at the moment, she realized, and tried to press the memories to the back of her mind. Certainly, the deep understanding she had unlocked of King Liggier’s approach to siege warfare was not helping her much now.

Gath saw, ahead, an archway, and picked up his pace, ignoring the rest of the books. Euris perked up a little. They went through the arch into a corridor, which had no side passages. As they walked, off in the distance a wailing arose which chilled Euris down to her bones. She had never heard anything like it before. The wail sounded vaguely human, and musical, but was cold and sharp. They both stopped. Gath stared off into the distance for a moment, and the light flickered once. He must have been magically probing the air. “What is that?” Euris whispered, becoming unnerved. She could not tell what direction the wail had come from. It seemed to seep through the rocks themselves.

“We are on a Quest,” Gath reminded her, “not a vacation. Things were going too smoothly, I knew it.” He sounded mad at himself. “But, we have to press on. We’re almost there. Whatever is making that wail is not near us, despite how loud it sounds. We should not need to get near it.” His face took on the intense look she remembered from the first time they had met, which reassured her. He was not afraid, and no one got to be a Journeyman without having magical power, no matter how frail he might seem to her at times.

Euris alternatively got closer to Gath for reassurance, and dropped back to have room to fight in case of an ambush. Gath, she noticed, carried himself with an equanimity she never would have suspected, always moving purposefully, carefully and slowly, noting where he was at all times. She wondered if Mattak would have been as methodical and serious if tasked with such a Quest, and how he would have reacted to the wailing sound. Gath was brave, even if he wasn’t a lot of other things, and Euris had a flash of insight into what “other mitigating factors” the Gray and White Masters had seen in him. She liked these factors a great deal, and found her heart fired up by the thoughts of danger. Somehow, the Quest had just become real to her. This was what she had trained for. This was what all those sleepless nights wondering if she would pass some impossible test of her strength, skill, or bravery were for. Steeling her for this moment. Her spirits felt light and buoyant, and for a moment she almost laughed at the wailing. The feeling receded, leaving her back in the dark stone corridor with Gath.

They found another stair leading down, which Gath purposed for them to follow. Euris stopped him by a question: “How much farther down into these passages are we going?” Although she had felt ready to face anything, at least for a moment, but her uneasiness had returned, and she thought the deeper they got, the worse any problem would be. She nervously tried to mentally retrace their steps, in case they had to flee, to make sure she knew how to get out.

Gath pointed down the stairs, as he said, “If I’m right, we’re now in the third level underground, which is the second hall of the archives since the first level was just general storage. This stair will take us to the fourth level, the third archive level, which by the accounts is where the room with all the important books are. We should find the Book of Ages there, if it still exists.” His expression did not betray a lot of hope that what he speculated would come true. Euris bit back the hundred other questions she wanted to ask, since none of them really mattered. Fallir had taught them on day one of the College that every mission had an objective, and the leader made a plan to achieve the objective, and contingencies in case it didn’t work. The soldiers followed the plan. Gath was the leader, he had his plan, and they were following it. Questions she might have would not change this no matter what their answer was. Of course, the second lesson Fallir had taught them is that once the fighting began the plan itself was completely forgotten and it was every man for himself. She wished she had remembered only the first part, and mentally retraced the way to the surface again.

The stonework on these stairs and in the passage at their foot looked rougher in Gath’s magic light. The blocks of stone themselves were bigger, and in places they fit around natural juttings of rock. The passage at the bottom of the last stairs they had descended looked to be carved wholly out of solid rock. It was small and enclosed, and was completely straight, with no branching passages. The ceiling dropped much lower here, sometimes low enough to cause them to lower their heads in a couple of places. Euris was exceptionally tall for a woman, almost six feet, and Gath only a few fingers’ width shorter. She definitely did not like the thoughts of four levels of rock above her, pressing down on the small open passageway.

At the end of the passage, which was long enough that they could not have seen the other end even if Gath’s light had reached that far, they were stopped completely by a dead end. The stonework had stopped, leaving only a narrow cavern of rock. She saw that the passage they had just taken was a vein that led to a natural underground gallery. Embedded in a stone arch which sealed off the tunnel they were in was a metal door. Seemingly made of solid steel, it had crosspieces with rivets which had been melted into the door by heat Euris could not imagine. On the top crosspiece, a metal bar had been mounted. Euris could not see any hinges, so she assumed the door opened out away from them. “This is it,” Gath said, pointing to the door. “That’s the sealed room where the important books were kept. Or, I hope, are still kept.”

Gath reached out and took hold of the metal bar, and Euris began to wonder what feat of magic Gath would have to work to open the huge slab of imposing metal, which was no doubt locked both by magic as well as a more mundane mechanism. Gath pushed. The door simply opened inward into the room, without making a sound. That took Gath aback. “I would expect it to be locked. This area doesn’t look like it was plundered like the upper level did. This isn’t a good sign.” His face was shadowed by the first worry she had seen out of him, but he masked that with determination and went through the door.

Inside the door was a small vault, which had been carved out of solid stone. It was the same height as the passage outside, but with a smooth ceiling and smooth floor. The sides were rough, unfinished rock. The left and right of the room were bare stone, but in the back were three medium-height bookshelves barely as high as Gath’s shoulders. In the middle of the room stood a reading lectern, made of some polished hardwood which had no scratches or blemishes, but it was empty of anything to read. There was no place to put a light at all, candle or lantern, since the lectern was slanted and had only a small lip at the bottom to keep books from sliding off. Perhaps only mages with their floating lights had come to this room to read. The wailing sounded far off again, still loud. The shelves had only a few books, which relieved Euris. She now decided she wanted them to get above ground with the most expeditious haste they could manage.

Gath went to the back of the room, and began to look through the leftmost of the three shelves. He examined one book after another, carefully but quickly. “I’ll look over here,” Euris volunteered to speed up the search, and she went to the rightmost shelf.

“No,” Gath told her, “stand watch at the door. These books are mostly in Old Elvish, which you couldn’t read, anyway.” Euris squeezed Gath’s shoulder as she went by, perhaps thinking to reassure him, but mostly wanting to reassure herself by touching him. She stood in the entrance to the vault, looking out. Since Gath had the light with him, she couldn’t see much, but had her hand on her sword anyway.

Creeping dread came over her, and she wished she could look for a book, or do anything at all, instead of waiting. The chamber was shrouded in a silence as intense as the darkness at its mouth. She almost wished she could hear the wailing so that she would know that the origin of the wailing was still far away. But she didn’t want to hear the sound, either. The most fear she had ever had before this moment was when she’d agreed to duel with Prince Muilin. The two were the only apprentices in the College of Swords who could give each other a strong match, and they’d once foolishly agreed to fight with real weapons, until first blood. She had not slept at all the night before, running through every possible scenario that could happen to her. But her fear was silly, she realized now, silly fear of embarrassing herself or something. The day of the contest, she had suspended her fears and everything else, and had wielded her sword with a cold precision and no emotion at all. As had he. Neither had drawn blood by the time they were both too tired to continue, and they had called it a draw and headed to the Stony Knob for lunch. That was fear? True fear was gripping her sword’s hilt with a sweaty palm in the dark, in an underground chamber far from the sunlight, with a magical wailing from an unknown presence echoing in her mind.

With excitement, Gath exclaimed: “I found it!” Euris jumped, despite herself, at his outcry of delight. She abandoned her post at the door and went back into the circle of Gath’s light, where he was holding up a book. Euris was excited as well, and smiled at him, but her excitement was not for the same reason as Gath’s: Euris was simply excited they had accomplished the mission and could begin the ascent to the surface. He was excited about the book, thumbing through it hurriedly. She tugged at his arm, encouraging him to postpone his glance. The Book of Ages was small, half the size of one of the King’s History volumes they’d seen earlier. The book had a leather cover which had the smooth look of frequent use. Gath tucked it somewhere safe inside his cloak.

On to ... Chapter Five: Ghosts