“What kind of book?” Nick asked Malthan.

Malthan looked at Nick, but his eyes failed to meet the younger man’s gaze. “The photographs were taken by a former associate of mine. I didn’t know she had this book. It burned of its own accord only minutes after the photographs were captured. Half the plates also melted before I could get them far enough south.”

“What was the title of the book?” asked Nick. “And why ‘former’ associate?”

“She burned with the b-b-book,” whispered Malthan with a shiver. “I do not know its name. I do not know where Raliese might have got it.”

“You see the problems we have to deal with,” said Lackridge with a sneer at Malthan. “He probably bought the plates at a school fete in Bain. But they are interesting. The book was some kind of bestiary. We can’t read the text as yet, but there are very fine etchings—illustrations of the beasts.”

The professor stopped to unlock the next door with a large brass key, but he opened it only a fraction. He turned to Malthan and Nick and said, “The photographs are important, as we already had independent evidence that at least one of the beasts depicted in that book really does exist—or existed at one time—in the Old Kingdom.”

“Independent evidence of one of those things?” squeaked Malthan. “What kind of—”

“This,” declared Lackridge, opening the door wide. “A mummified specimen!”

The storeroom beyond was cluttered with boxes, chests, and paraphernalia. For a second, Nick’s eye was drawn to two very large blowups of photographs of Forwin Loch, which were leaning on the wall near the door. One showed a scene of industry from the last century, and the other showed the destruction wrought by Orannis—the Destroyer.

But the big photographs held his attention for no more than a moment. There could be no question what Lackridge was referring to. In the middle of the room there was a glass cylinder about nine feet high and five feet in diameter. Inside the case, propped up against a steel frame, was a nightmare.

It looked vaguely human, in the sense that it had a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs. But its skin or hide was of a strange violet hue, crosshatched with lines like a crocodile’s, and looked very rough. Its legs were jointed backward and ended in hooked hooves. The arms stretched down almost to the floor of the case, and ended not in hands but in clublike appendages that were covered in inch-long barbs. Its torso was thin and cylindrical, rather like that of a wasp. Its head was the most human part, save that it sat on a neck that was twice as long; it had narrow slits instead of ears, and its black, violet-pupiled eyes—presumably glass made by a skillful taxidermist—were pear-shaped and took up half its face. Its mouth, twice the width of any human’s, was almost closed, but Nick could see teeth gleaming there.

Black teeth that shone like polished jet.