A heartbeat behind them, Magister Rummage did the same. But he was sure of himself now. He knew the passage of the text that he wanted. He caught up with the priests before they began to read.

The power was in the words. They did not need to be spoken. They simply had to be read. Even in silence, a voice was nothing more than a way to declare the reader’s purpose. Magister Rummage’s purpose was as vivid as sound in his mind.

Ward yourself, butcher. I mean to kill you.

As the priests read, the hunchback recited the same words to himself.

While the three of them went through the necessary portions of the text, nothing happened. The Magister’s heart beat faster. He expected death.

Soon, he assured himself. Soon.

He and the priests finished together. At their last word, he felt an instant of absolute confirmation. Every particle of his identity became fire. Every yearning of his crippled body and thwarted heart found its release in an astonishing blaze of light. For a tiny sliver of time, he saw himself and was satisfied.

Then his gift claimed him, and he burned. Shedding flames, he was gone. Nothing remained except ashes until the winds swept away.

From the edges of the balcony, the librarian and her people saw that Magister Rummage had both succeeded and failed. His Decimate did not touch the Great God, but it counteracted one of the priests. That man died in fire as his power rebounded against him. His sorcery harmed only him.

Nevertheless the second priest achieved his god’s purpose. With his death in conflagration, he tore down a long chunk of the balcony and destroyed Magister Threnody’s workroom. During its single instant, his Decimate ripped open the keep’s thick wall from the battlements down to the breach made by the first blast.

After the earlier concussion, a crowd of servants, students, and even a few scribes had come out onto the upper plateau to watch the battle. They must not have heard Magister Oblique’s warning. Falling rubble crushed them. Bloody chunks of granite covered the porch as if a portion of the Wall Mountains had collapsed.

If the Great God had ever meant to enter the library, his forces would have to spend days clearing the way. But that was not the end he desired.

At a distance from her hiding place, the Queen watched Prince Jaspid and Lylin hurrying upward. She ached to call out to them, but she forbade herself. She did not truly desire to make them hear her. She wanted them to answer.

Where is Bifalt? Is my husband alive?

The Prince and the devotee might not know.

When they had passed out of sight, climbing toward the Repository, she looked back down at the fighting and bodies below her, searching for some sign of Bifalt.