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She put the pendulum away as I pulled out the key and looked at it. The Armourer had made a point of giving me the key, even though he had to know I could just armour up and kick the doors in. Was the key a clue of some kind? To some secret he couldn’t quite bring himself to say in person? I studied the key with my Sight, and there was a second spell written on it so clearly even I could tell what it was. A spell to work a hidden lock, to open a hidden door. Here, in the library? There’d never been even a whisper about a secret door in the library…
I turned the key back and forth, and the spell flared up briefly when it pointed in one particular direction. I followed the key through the stacks, Molly trotting along at my side. Until finally we came to the old portrait on the southwest wall.
It was the only painting in the library. A huge piece, a good eight feet tall and five feet wide, contained in a solid steel frame. It was centuries old, older than the Hall itself, some said; artist unknown. The portrait depicted another library whose many shelves were packed with massive leather-bound volumes and parchment scrolls tied with colourful ribbons. There were no people in the painting, no symbolic objects, no obvious arrangement of important items. No meaning, no message; just the old library. Molly and I stood before the painting, considering it.
"I’m no expert," said Molly, "But that…is a seriously boring painting. Is it significant to the family?"
"Sort of," I said. "This portrait shows the old library, the original repository of Drood knowledge. In this first library was held all the early history of the Droods, perhaps even knowledge of our true begi
"There’s something weird about this painting," Molly said slowly. "I can feel magic in it. In the frame and the canvas, in the paint and the very brushstrokes. Can you feel it?"
I studied the painting closely with my Sight, holding the key tightly in my hand, and the whole portrait seemed to blaze with an i
The old library wasn’t lost, wasn’t gone, just hidden in plain sight. Hanging in front of all our eyes, for all these years. The old library, real and intact, all its ancient history and knowledge preserved after all. (Preserved for whom? No. Think about that later.) I stood very still just inside the doorway, looking about me. The old library stretched away in every direction, endless towering stacks and shelves packed with books and manuscripts and scrolls for as far as the eye could see. I looked behind me, and beyond the open space of the doorway I could see more stacks, more shelves.
I walked slowly forward down the aisle before me, almost numb with shock. The greatest tragedy in my family’s history was a lie. I shouldn’t have been surprised, after everything else I’d learned, but to deliberately conceal so much knowledge, so much wisdom…was a sin almost beyond understanding. I took down some of the oversized books, handling them very carefully, and opened them. The leather bindings creaked noisily, and the pages seemed to exhale dust and ancient smells. They were handwritten, illuminated manuscripts, the kind monks laboured over for years. Latin mostly, some ancient Greek. Other tongues, equally old or obscure. There were palimpsests and parchments and piles of scrolls, some so delicate looking I didn’t want even to breathe too heavily near them.
"There’s some kind of magic suppressor field operating in here," Molly said suddenly. "I can feel it."
"I’m not surprised," I said absently, absorbed in a scroll concerning King Harold and the Soul of Albion. "Must be a security measure, to protect the contents."
"I could probably force through a few small magics, if necessary," said Molly. "If we have to defend ourselves."
"Will you relax?" I said. "We’re the only ones in here."
I rolled the scroll up again, retied the ribbon, and carefully put in back in its place. The answer to my earlier thought was clear. The only people who could have hidden the old library like this…were the i
"All this was here," I said finally. "And I never knew it. My family’s true heritage, stolen away from us by those we were always taught to trust and revere. This should have been made freely available to all of us. We have a right to know where we came from! Who our ancestors were, what they did, and why they did it. It makes me wonder what other secrets the i
"The answer?" Molly said carefully. "Which particular answer is that, Eddie?"
"To how it all started! Where we came from. Where the armour came from. How we became Droods." I looked at Molly. "I did wonder, sometimes, if maybe my ancestors made some kind of deal with the Devil."
"No," Molly said immediately. "If that was the case, I would have known."
I decided I wouldn’t ask. This was no time to get distracted. I looked around, using my Sight. A complex latticework of protective spells lay over everything, some of them quite impressively strong. And nasty. Some books and scrolls shone brightly on their shelves, radiating strange energies. And one blazed like a beacon, full of ancient power. It turned out to be a simple scroll, words inked on roughly ta
"Any idea what that is?"
"The answer," I said.
"Well, yes, but apart from that…"
"Only one way to find out," I said, and touched the wax seals holding the scroll closed with Oath Breaker. The activating Words just popped into my mind from the old ironwood staff itself, and as I said them, one by one, the protections around the scroll shattered and disappeared. I unrolled it very carefully, and the dark ink on the interior stood out clearly against the coffee-coloured hide. The text was Druidic, from Roman times. Which was unusual in itself, because Druidic learning was strictly an oral tradition, passed down mouth to mouth from generation to generation. Never written down, in case it might fall into the hands of enemies. But they’d made an exception for this; and I could see why.