Page 118 of Deadly Maiden

“They told you it was a place for wars.”

“But was it always that? Or was it just how they saw Slaedorth?”

He wrenches open the next door. “A library?”

And there it is, an immense room filled with tall shelves of dusty books, reading tables, benches, and several desks. This is my goal. This is where I could surely learn about necromancy, if any of them ever wrote down a thought.

“It is promising, but let’s keep going, check three more, then we can sit down and eat.” I open the first, which leads into a bathroom? Stained mirror on the wall. Bathtub. Buckets. Towel rack.

The second door reveals a small, square room with levers on the wall. Labelled levers. I backtrack to read the sign attached to the door. Rorsyd has beat me to it and he swipes dust from the letters to make them legible.

“Power and Light Room.”

“So…” I re-enter the room and find the lever with a white sign above it.LIGHTS 1. “Dare I?”

Rorsyd nods.

Gingerly, I crank the lever downward and light glows from a palm-sized circle high on the wall. And when I check the corridor, it also glows with spots of light.

“We may not need this.” He wiggles the etharum light.

“I wouldn’t want to be lost in here, in the dark. Who knows if this will last? These have to be etharum powered?”

“Or gheist. You should look for the source, Wyntre. It must be somewhere inside the fortress. It’s being piped to these lights.”

Another task to occupy me. What I really, really want to do is check the books in the library.

I thumb toward the four other levers. “Those are labelled Power and Lights two, three, and four. They can stay off, for now.”

“Sure.”

Third door is a huge room with altars? “Maybe they experimented on the dead here?”

“Or…” Rorsyd says, leaning past my ear. “A religion where they sacrificed cows for dinner? I’m hungry, by the way. It could be anything.”

Now I am curious. The corridor is almost at an end.

“We may as well keep going.” He hands me the etharum torch for added illumination.

I turn the next knob.

A bedroom with a large bed.

The door after the bedroom opens onto a…a nursery?

Throat closing in, I hold the torch just inside the door. There’s a crib. Tiny shadows float on the wall behind a dangling decoration with several little carved animals—deer, dragon, frogs, a skeleton. A memory flashes to me of watching a ceiling spin and little animals rotate above my head. I wonder if it came from here. I was just a baby. Surely too young to recall anything. Am I imagining this?

I shut the door before Rorsyd looks. “Nothing.” I stride onward.

Rorsyd checks the final side door. Inside is an armory with racks of weapons. Beside a nursery? Odd.

Spears, swords, axes. Did they arm the undead? Was the nursery an afterthought?

Slaedorth must have other storage rooms, but that early cross-corridor can wait.

This corridor’s end has a door set into it similar to the entrance door—silver, but this time it’s etched with animals. Eldritch animals with far too many teeth and tentacles. I love the wicked creepiness, and I trace the long, slanted teeth of a bloated fish.

Then I turn the handle and swing the silver door inward. A late thought comes to me: what if those animals are on the other side.

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