The prospect of an ordinary end, in battle or in his bed, did not trouble him. That fate claimed everyone. What he feared was worse. It required him to do more than choose death. It would eradicate him from the world.

He had three gifts. The first had been given to him by his parents, who loved him enough to devise the code of taps to ease the burden of his deafness and deformity. It had served him well. The second was an instinct for swift violence. On occasion, it had served the Repository well. But the third—

Ah, the third. It was an obscure ability to read texts that meant nothing to other sorcerers and scholars. For that reason, it was fatal.

He could not explain it. Those books were written in plain language. And in themselves, their secrets were only knowledge, neither a blessing nor a curse. Nevertheless he understood why those particular volumes resisted comprehension. They enabled a form of sorcery that made any Decimate look like a child’s toy.

Under better circumstances, Magister Rummage might have enjoyed his gift. He liked power. Now it horrified him. He was always angry because he was always afraid.

His gift required the deliberate surrender of his reasons for living.

Again and again, he asked himself one question. How could a man loved by his parents, a man respected throughout the Repository, a man with one friend as dear as a brother: how could such a man kill himself?

He had no answer.

Instead, he had striven to forestall that choice. Of course, he had studied what he grimly called the arts of warfare. But he had concentrated more on the library’s long history, reading about those occasions across the millennia when it had been attacked and forced to flee. Although those assaults had failed, each of them had exposed more of the Repository’s powers. And that exposure had invited subsequent attacks, efforts predicated on what the previous failures had revealed.

The Great God must have studied those histories as well, or other versions of them. He would seek to know how or why earlier tyrants had failed. To understand their mistakes so that he would not repeat them. He would take a new approach.

Some of the differences were already apparent. He had brought a larger army. He had far more sorcerers. He had expended more effort on spies to learn the weaknesses of the people who stood in his way. But his most threatening innovation was his use of the eighth Decimate. Through his instruments, and by his own power, he had perfected and extended the sorcery of coercion. His control over the horde demonstrated his strength. No tyrant before him could have done so much.