Severed Souls (29 page)

Unless you wanted to know about that event.

Say, the great war and the fate of Emperor Sulachan.

Mohler shrugged. “I rarely have any way of determining chronology, Lord Dreier, so we use the subject as the category.”

Ludwig realized instinctively that all of this work was virtually for nothing. There was no real way of determining what a prophecy was really about simply by reading the words. Prophecy was almost always occulted, the true meaning hidden. The words were largely only a trigger for one properly gifted. Often the words of the prophecy were meant to disguise the true meaning.

All of this work, Mohler's entire lifetime of work, had in reality been for nothing. The categories would be meaningless unless gifted or occulted talents were used to see into the vision of the prophecy to determine the true, hidden, subject and therefore where it actually belonged.

Ludwig supposed that the bishop didn't really care that he was gradually wasting the scribe's entire life on meaningless work. It gave him a place to go look at prophecy as he wished, all written out in the same hand for easy reading. Hannis Arc would have likely completely ignored Mohler's categories.

Before he went to the books of prophecy to inspect them, to see what prophecy Hannis Arc could have gotten from other sources, something on the large desk caught his attention. He decided that he could look at the books later. They probably contained nothing more than redundant prophecy, prophecy Ludwig already knew about because he was the one who had collected prophecy on the subject if it was important enough. The rest couldn't be as valuable as the ones Ludwig had discovered and sent to the citadel, so they could wait.

At the cluttered desk, he went to the ancient-looking scroll that had caught his attention. Unrolling it partway on the desk, he saw a complex tapestry of lines connecting constellations of elements that constituted the language of Creation. Ludwig frowned as he leaned in, studying the writing on the scroll.

“This is a Cerulean scroll,” he whispered in astonishment as he straightened. He looked over at the old man watching him. “This is a Cerulean scroll,” he said again, louder.

The old scribe showed no reaction. “If you say so, Lord Dreier. I don't know of such things. I can't read it. I only record the regular prophecy. Hannis Arc was the only one to work with items like this. They were his specialty.”

His specialty.

A very dangerous specialty.

“You mean to say there are more of these?”

Mohler licked his lips. “I'm not sure. As I say, that was Hannis Arc's specialty. I believe that this is one of the few, at most, with these symbols. But he had other written oddities, Lord Dreier, that might be similar.”

“Show me.”

Ludwig followed the hunched man as he headed to a cabinet against the stone wall. On the way, Ludwig stopped abruptly. An icy chill ran through him.

“Spirits…” he whispered.

“Lord Dreier?” Mohler asked, turning back.

Ludwig looked up. “Spirits have been in this room. I can feel the essence trail they left behind.”

Mohler looked a bit uneasy as he glanced around, as if he expected them to pop out of thin air. The four Mord-Sith back near the door watched but had nothing to offer. Erika, standing nearby, looked around and then shrugged.

“What do you know of the spirits that have been in this room?” Ludwig asked the old man.

“Spirits? Nothing, Lord Dreier.” He hesitated, then added a thought. “I can tell you that there have been times when I have had the feeling that this room was haunted.”

“I've been in here with the bishop before,” one of the Mord-Sith back by the door said, “and I have had that same feeling—the feeling that this room was haunted.”

“That's because it has been haunted,” Ludwig said.

Mohler looked around again, as if fearing there might be invisible spirits about to alight on his shoulder. “So it really is haunted, then?”

“Has been, I said. Not now. Before. Spirits have been to this room.”

Mohler blinked. “If you say so, Lord Dreier. I wouldn't know of such things. The bishop never spoke to me of spirits.”

Ludwig knew that Hannis Arc would not have spoken to his humble scribe about such matters as he discussed with beings from another realm.

He nodded as he gestured for the old man to continue with what he had been going to show him. Mohler turned and opened a cabinet door to reveal a wall of cubbyholes, nearly all of them holding scrolls.

Ludwig withdrew one with an age-darkened edge. He opened it carefully so as not to damage it. As he thought, it was another Cerulean scroll. He didn't recognize the azimuth angles. He was familiar with the language of Creation, though, and he was disturbed to see that the scroll spoke of prophecy.

Not prophecy, as in revealing prophecy, but about prophecy itself almost as if it were a living thing.

The scroll spoke of a time when prophecy itself might be ended.

 

CHAPTER

40

Ludwig replaced the scroll and hurried over to one of the huge books lying open on a pedestal. A table nearby held some of the scrolls that he recognized as being ones he had sent to the citadel.

Not all had been opened.

“I was working there last,” Mohler said as he lifted a hand toward the book, “entering the most recent prophecies.”

Ludwig set aside his thoughts about the death of prophecy spoken of in the ancient scroll and instead turned his attention to the book lying open before him. He saw a prophecy that he recognized. It was a prophecy he had recently sent to the bishop. He was satisfied, to a degree, that the prophecy had at least been entered in a book. He had begun to wonder if it had all been left to sit around unopened.

He began carefully lifting the large pages and turning them back, scanning the prophecies, going back to the older things written in the books. He saw prophecy he didn't recognize. Important prophecy.

Growing more suspicious, Ludwig went to the nearest table with the scrolls. He set unopened ones of his own that he had sent to the bishop aside, and pushed the ones he didn't recognize to the other side. Once the scrolls were separated, he selected one of the latter and broke a seal he didn't recognize, opening the prophecy that had come from another source.

As Ludwig read, his mood darkened.

While he didn't recognize the scroll or the hand that had written it, he knew the prophecy all too well.

It was a prophecy he had withheld from the bishop. It was one of the prophecies that Ludwig had uncovered himself and considered too important to send to Hannis Arc.

He quickly broke a seal and opened another scroll and again it was an important prophecy that Ludwig had withheld from the bishop. Quickly opening several more of the scrolls only added to his alarm. One was a trivial prophecy he had submitted to the bishop, but the rest of the prophecies were ones he had extracted himself and deliberately kept from the bishop's eyes.

Someone else, though, had been providing the bishop with those divinations that Ludwig and Erika had discovered by taking people to the cusp of death. Such foretelling had taken great effort to retrieve. He couldn't imagine how anyone else had managed to discover the same prophecy.

While Ludwig had kept to himself what he had discovered, someone else had turned them over to Hannis Arc.

He knew it couldn't possibly be Erika. What he was reading was beyond her ability to reproduce. Mord-Sith didn't understand complex magic such as prophecy, and it was far too detailed for her to remember.

Such writings took his occult talents to transcribe.

Besides, she was with him almost all the time. She was his bodyguard, as well as his assistant. In those brief times when she wasn't at his side, she would never have had the time to write out even this one scroll, much less all the others.

More than that, there was no way she could have gotten the scrolls out of the abbey and to the citadel. Ludwig had known every coming and going to the abbey. His occult abilities would have alerted him had anyone been sneaking anything out.

No, it had not been Erika. But if not her, then who? No one else at the abbey could have produced these scrolls; no one else had been present to hear the prophecies. No one could transcribe what they had not been there to hear. He would have known if anyone had been using gifted talent to hear the prophecy given by the ones on the cusp of death.

These scrolls containing such important prophecy had come from somewhere else. Hannis Arc had someone else also providing him with prophecy. But who, and more importantly, how?

Ludwig gritted his teeth in anger.

He went to other books on pedestals and scanned a few of the pages. There were prophecies in them that should not be there, prophecies he had not wanted Hannis Arc to see, prophecies that Ludwig had discovered and withheld.

He cast a dark look at the old scribe as he pointed to the table of scrolls he had examined. “Where did these come from? Who sent them?”

Mohler's face paled at the look Ludwig was giving him. “I'm sorry, Lord Dreier, but I don't know. Sometimes soldiers brought in a scroll for the bishop. Sometimes when I arrived in the morning, the bishop was already here and he told me that there were more prophecies that had arrived in the night for me to record. He never said where they had come from and I knew better than to question the man.

“I knew the scrolls that had come from the abbey because I recognized the messenger who brought them, and sometimes you brought them yourself. Even if I had not been around to see them arrive, I recognize the scrolls written in your hand. But I don't know about the others. I can tell you that they are written by at least half a dozen different people and apparently arrived from different places.”

“From different places? More than one place? Are you sure?”

Mohler shrugged nervously. “I don't know for sure, Lord Dreier. It could be that they all came from the same place but were written out by different people. Being in different hands, I assumed they were from different places.”

That made the most sense, he supposed. Ludwig always worked alone, but that was because he'd had ulterior motives in the prophecy he collected. Other places wouldn't have had that need to work alone, and might have employed a staff, all collecting prophecy from the same source.

Ludwig paced as he considered. This was not good news. Not good news at all. It was going to take a lot of work to catalog all of the prophecies to see which ones Ludwig had withheld that had somehow been provided to Hannis Arc anyway.

He needed to know how much Hannis Arc knew. He didn't like surprises. He needed to know what he wasn't aware of. Prophecy was a blade that the man used to cut down opposition. Ludwig needed to know how sharp was the edge on that blade.

As he paced, his attention was caught by something in a cabinet.

There, on a glass shelf, was a knife. The knife was speared through a withered hand.

But not just any hand.

It was the hand of a spirit, with a faint glow about it, caught and frozen in corporeal form.

The door of the case squeaked as he opened it and took out the knife. He held it up, showing Erika the skewered, mostly transparent hand.

“I don't know for sure what that is,” she said, “but I think you have found some pretty convincing evidence of ghosts having been in this room.”

“More importantly,” he said with a smile, “I have also found a knife that interacts with them.”

He pushed the hand off the blade, and once free it vanished in a twisting wisp of vapor. The blade had apparently trapped it in the world of life.

Satisfied that the knife was what he thought it was, he slipped it under his belt until he could look around to see if he could find the sheath for it. The knife was far too valuable to leave lying around. He wondered what other things of such profound value he would find in the room. He wondered, too, what items Hannis Arc might have taken with him.

Ludwig let his gaze roam across the books of prophecy lying open all throughout the room. Prophecy that he had not wanted Hannis Arc to see. But despite his efforts, the man had seen it.

Ludwig sighed.

“Is it going to be a problem?” Erika asked, seeing his worried look at the prophecy.

“The die has already been cast,” he said, looking into her steely blue eyes. “Events have already been set into motion. There is no calling them back, now. Hannis Arc has a demon by its tail. It is no less perilous a problem for the spirit king. They need each other. I need neither of them.

“Chaos has now been loosed on the world, but I will rein it in.”

Just then, he felt something giving off the slightest tingle at his waist. He reached inside his coat and ran a thumb under his belt until he found the hidden pocket.

Slipping his finger into the pocket, he scooped out his journey book. He flipped open the black leather cover and turned over the first page. He always erased the previous messages as a precaution.

There, he saw new writing.

“My, my, my. Now isn't this interesting.”

“What is it?” Erika asked.

“It would seem…” he murmured to her as he read the message again to himself, “that things are suddenly looking up.”

 

CHAPTER

41

Richard heard someone screaming at him.

They were screaming at him to breathe.

When he tried, he realized that he couldn't draw a breath. He tried again, pulling harder, but it wouldn't come. His lungs burned and it felt like he had the weight of a mountain pressing down on top of his chest.

He felt a hard shock, like a jolt of lightning slamming into him.

The woman screamed again, louder. “Breathe!”

He sat bolt upright and gasped. His eyes popped open.

He sucked in another desperate breath, as if he had been sinking under dark, black waters and unable to breathe and now he had finally gotten his head back up above the water.