“Pull!” The islander cried.
At first, nothing happened. Hadjar thought that they would end up dangling above the abyss until their demise. No matter how strong the islander’s silk belt normally was, it was already beginning to tear under their combined weight. The two friends sank lower and lower, toward the precipice, with every second that passed.
When the monsters’ jaws snapped shut so close to him that Hadjar had to curl his legs to avoid losing his feet, they began to rise. Slowly at first, but as the crackling of the silk increased, their ascent became faster.
Einen was the first to be pulled up to the stone ‘balcony’. He reached down and grabbed Hadjar by the collar and yanked him up as well. Hadjar spread his arms wide to embrace the cold stone and laughed nervously. Einen sat down beside him. He reeled in his torn belt.
“By the Evening Stars,” Glen said, “this trap is at the top of my personal ranking.”
“I liked the waterfall of acid, myself.” Karissa patted her pocket, where she now kept a small bottle filled to the brim with that acid.
For several hours, they had continuously struggled out of the clutches of death caused by one trap only to fall into another, even deadlier one right after. These adventures had left them in bad shape: they were ragged, covered in blood, bruises, and abrasions, not to mention the several bandaged wounds. They had almost lost their nerve. Tilis hadn’t said a word in the last three rooms, which was unheard of for her. Glen made fewer jokes and only frowned at Hadjar and Einen sometimes. Ramukhan held his glowing staff tightly enough to make it creak.
The room with the bridge and the lizards had been a nightmare for them. They’d gone through a room where they’d had to solve complex puzzles while standing waist-deep in the rising water. They’d navigated mazes filled with a variety of small traps. They’d leapt over precipices teeming with deadly creatures, or boiling lava, or tar, or acid — just name it, they’d probably leapt over it.
The last room had been the quintessence of their whole journey through the area so far. First, they’d had to solve a puzzle while dodging fireballs. That had involved making a huge hieroglyph out of different stone pieces and placing it in a groove. They’d managed to do so only thanks to Einen’s help. The islander had run around the room like a monkey and deflected the fireballs. They left behind liquid flames, igniting the water, which had kept rising. Tilis had turned it to ice, sweating from the strain. She’d barely managed to handle the increasing amount of liquid and the growing heat.
After the hieroglyph had been assembled, the floor beneath them had cracked and collapsed. They’d fallen toward sharp rocks, but had managed to grab onto some hanging vines. Using them to move forward, leaping from vine to vine, they had moved to the other side and entered a new maze. In addition to the traps, there’d been an odd lizard creature inside it as well. One that was almost as large as the golem they’d encountered in the desert. For the first time since he’d met Azrea’s mother, Hadjar had come face to face with a beast whose power was equal to the dead tigress’ own. It would’ve been useless to try and fight such a monster. In addition, the pathways of the maze had kept narrowing. So, they’d run from one dead end to another, listening to the lizard’s growling coming from behind them, once again solving puzzles and racing their own deaths.
In the center of the maze, they’d found a trapdoor that had led them to the bridge, which, as soon as their feet had touched its surface, had begun collapsing, exposing a chasm full of small lizards.
They were now once again standing on a stone ‘balcony’ with a door in front of them. It was made of stone and decorated with the same exquisite carvings and intricate ornaments they’d seen pretty much everywhere thus far.
“There must be a secret mechanism somewhere,” Glen said, scratching his head and touching the door.
“No, we’ve dealt with one already,” Ramukhan, crouching down, began to fumble around on the floor. “Let’s look for a lever.”
“We’ve dealt with a lever, too,” Karissa said, and began to study the ornaments. “Perhaps we need to connect the lines of the patterns to make some kind of symbol.”
Hadjar didn’t bother reminding them that they had encountered such an obstacle before. Right after the hall with the statues of animals that had come to life and spit out all sorts of junk, in fact. It was so long ago that Hadjar had almost forgotten what had set the columns in motion in the first place.
For about half an hour, the squad tried to open the door, but failed. They tried everything: finding a lever, fiddling with the ornaments, which really did move. However, whatever patterns they made, nothing happened. The door stood unmoved, and in the background, the lizards roared and tried to climb up to the ‘balcony’.
Glen was about to hit the door with his sword, but the rest stopped him. They didn’t want to find out what would happen if they tried to brute force the ancient puzzle. Hadjar suddenly came up with such a simple, but at the same time, not exactly obvious, guess. Taking a deep breath, he said:
“Open.”
“Are you-”
No one was surprised that Tilis didn’t get to finish her sentence. The ornaments on the door moved. Only they didn’t move because of their tinkering, but acted as if they were alive. They assumed the form of an unknown hieroglyph. A bell rang with a heavy, noisy clang, and the door opened. At first, because of the abundance of blue light, they had to close their eyes against the glare, and then everyone let out a groan of relief and an exclamation of surprise.
They saw a bridge of the finest workmanship and great beauty. Made of the same stone as everything else so far, it still somehow gave the illusion of being a tree. Swaying to some unseen breeze, it led down into a sea of blue light, where thousands of shelves stood. They were tiered and had many columns, walls, display cases, shelves… It all looked close to infinite.
There were books everywhere: they stood in neat rows, lay in piles, flew through the air, and some were even encased in spheres of blue light. In addition to the books, they saw numerous scrolls, clay tablets, stone tablets, even ropes with knots, which were obviously a kind of text too.
“How many books are there?”
They were crossing the bridge as the door closed behind them.
“Seventeen million, one hundred and thirty-two thousand, fifty-three... fifty-two... fifty-one.” A thin, childish voice responded.
Both Hadjar and Einen started when they heard it. While the others assumed defensive stances, they looked around carefully. Ahead of them, on one of the shelves, stood a little girl. She was staring at a book floating inside a blue sphere.
“Serra?” Hadjar’s voice trembled.
Tilis looked at him in surprise.
“No,” the girl said without turning around, “I’m her sister, Erra. The Keeper of Knowledge. Since you’re standing here, you’ve passed all the tests and are worthy of receiving the knowledge that suits you. I’ll be very happy to help you with that. What would you like to know?”
Chapter 402
The squad members looked at each other. There was excitement and greed in their eyes. Ordinary practitioners had just been given the chance to peruse the library of an ancient, powerful civilization! However, Hadjar remained calm. Remembering the sorceress, he knew that the library had a very different kind of value. Future magicians and sorceresses had been taught the truly vital knowledge by some of the ‘wisest’. The library was more like a simple database of information. It was a kind of living history of the nation. And this nation had treasured wisdom, its history recorded in a variety of books and scrolls.