Chapter 39

Startled beyond the limits of his fragile wits, Kosha scrambled backward and struck the back of his skull against the opposite shelf with a vicious crack.

The impact snapped his jaw shut and drove his teeth deep into his tongue as he struggled to suppress a scream of pure terror.

“What was that?” Mailot’s harsh whisper carried from the distant entrance. “Is something wrong in there?”

The sharp, metallic taste of fresh blood flooded Kosha’s mouth.

Swallowing against tears of pain, he shook his throbbing head vigorously, though Mailot could not possibly see the gesture through the darkness.

“N-no,” Kosha rasped. “Just… just a sneeze.”

“Be careful, would you? We are not here to play games,” Mailot grumbled.

Kosha scarcely registered the reprimand. His entire universe had contracted around the impossible glowing creature sitting serenely upon the book.

He generally harbored a deep and abiding loathing for anything covered in scales. During the heartbreaking early days of raising his beloved geese, several prized chicks had been bitten to death by vipers hiding in the tall grass.

Yet this particular creature seemed unlike any lizard he had ever seen.

Was it even a lizard at all?

Its smooth, faintly damp skin and rounded snout made it resemble an aquatic salamander far more than a reptile. It was impossibly small, displayed none of the threatening posture of a venomous predator, and, most remarkably, emitted its own magical light.

It was a glowing lizard, and the sheer absurdity of the discovery briefly eclipsed his fear.

Kosha remained frozen in the dusty aisle, dazed and neglecting his urgent task, when the tiny creature suddenly leaped onto the back of his trembling hand.

It scrambled along his forearm, climbed over his shoulder, and launched itself fearlessly across the gap to the opposite bookshelf.

The physical sensation astonished him. The lizard felt utterly weightless, as though it possessed no mass and consisted of nothing more than a solid fragment of incorporeal light.

Upon reaching the opposite shelf, the creature hung upside down from the spine of a tightly wedged tome. It stared at Kosha, its intelligent yellow eyes seeming to demand that he inspect that particular volume.

Moving with the sluggish obedience of a man trapped beneath a powerful compulsion, Kosha reached out and pulled the heavy book free.

The spectral lizard proceeded to become his personal supernatural archivist, darting among the shelves and identifying several more volumes in exactly the same manner.

To Kosha’s mundane eye, some of its selections did not even appear to be magical grimoires. Nevertheless, he submitted to the creature’s silent instructions with a strange, unquestioning compliance that defied all reason.

He had just stacked the eighth heavy volume in his arms when the lizard sprang onto the pile, its tiny head snapping toward the entrance.

Kosha followed its gaze and looked over his shoulder.

At that exact moment, a violent commotion erupted near the main doorway. Above the agonized groan of ancient hinges being forced open, Eydric’s normally composed voice rang out with sharp urgency.

“You need to leave the archive immediately. Ah, damn it.”

The distinct shhhnk of steel clearing a leather scabbard echoed through the stone corridor.

Mailot’s vile, panicked swearing followed a fraction of a second later.

Then a booming, authoritative voice shattered the night’s silence from farther down the outer hall.

“Who goes there? Halt!”

“You son of a bitch. Magic… hah!” someone grunted amid the ensuing struggle.

Heavy armored boots thundered across the floorboards, rapidly closing the distance to the open doorway.

Even burdened by his famously dim wits and complete lack of tactical awareness, Kosha immediately understood that they had stumbled headfirst into a catastrophic political disaster.

Trapped deep within the library’s oppressive maze, he clutched the towering stack of eight heavy books against his chest. Atop the uppermost leather cover, the spectral green lizard hopped in frantic, agitated circles.

For one fleeting and surreal moment amid the rising terror, Kosha finally understood the practical purpose of the brutal magical “drills” Lucien had forced him to endure over the preceding weeks, even if surviving a royal heist had never been the prince’s original pedagogical intention.

“Stand down immediately! We are from the Palace Department of Internal Affairs,” the booming voice commanded as the heavy footsteps halted directly outside the archive.

Listening to the escalating confrontation between the armed guards and Mailot, Kosha felt his heart hammering in a frantic, irregular rhythm.

Can I truly use spatial magic to teleport heavily enchanted objects such as grimoires?

Panic tore through him.

How am I supposed to calculate the necessary mana vectors for eight distinct magical signatures at once? Would the resulting feedback even be safe?

“The Department of Internal Affairs?” Mailot called from the doorway, his voice dripping with impertinent, casual disdain. “Prowling through the East Wing at this ungodly hour?”

“I carry official orders to collect the grimoires designated for the diplomatic gift inventory ahead of the upcoming summit with the Magic Tower,” the guard captain retorted.

Beside Kosha, the luminous lizard leaped again and scratched its incorporeal claws against the leather binding.

A sickening realization sank into Kosha’s stomach like a stone.

They had run out of time.

He no longer possessed the mental clarity to calculate the arcane risks safely. Cold logic and academic caution were luxuries he could no longer afford.

Pressing both trembling palms against the towering stack of stolen texts, Kosha closed his eyes and violently channeled every fragment of desperate will he possessed.

A raw, agonizing surge of magical energy drained from his fragile core.

Nausea seized him as the solid stone floor beneath his boots seemed to dissolve into a bottomless abyss.

For one fractured instant, the green lizard’s luminous body flickered violently. Its solid geometry turned strangely translucent, becoming hauntingly ethereal.

Then, with a soundless concussive pulse, the local fabric of space crumpled and folded like discarded paper.

The massive stack of eight grimoires vanished from Kosha’s arms, leaving nothing but empty air where their considerable weight had rested a heartbeat earlier.

Deprived of his physical anchor, Kosha lurched violently forward as the sudden absence of mass destroyed his precarious balance.

“I have received no such official notice from the Chamberlain,” Mailot countered, stalling with desperate brilliance.

“Do you honestly believe a glorified caretaker such as yourself would be entrusted with the classified logistics of a secret diplomatic summit?” The guard captain spat the words, his voice tightening with suspicion. “Whatever your lofty claims, scholar, not a single artifact leaves this archive without the Princess’s express written permission. Step aside.”

“Ha!” Mailot barked a harsh, mocking laugh. “Does Her Esteemed Highness even intend to return to the castle and provide it?”

The stale air inside the library seemed to thicken, growing heavy and dangerously volatile as the tension between the armed men approached its breaking point.

Crouched in the shadows of the fourth aisle, Kosha felt a primal prickle of dread race over the back of his neck. It was the same visceral warning that always came just before he accidentally touched a lethal mushroom in the untamed forest. He knew with terrifying certainty that if Internal Affairs discovered a rogue mage trespassing inside the royal archives, the political consequences for Lucien would be catastrophic.

Since catastrophic misfortune appeared to be the natural state of Kosha’s existence, he also knew the outcome would not be anything so mercifully simple as execution. It would be infinitely and creatively worse.

The spectral lizard tore him from his spiraling panic with an enormous leap. It spun in midair, landed on the floor, and scrambled down the darkened aisle at a frantic pace. Its unnatural gait, particularly the rhythmic wiggle of its blunt tail, seemed deeply peculiar for a reptile, but Kosha had no time to contemplate biological abnormalities.

Muffling his ragged breathing as best he could, he dropped to the filthy floorboards and crawled on his hands and knees after the retreating point of green light.

A fresh wave of heavy footsteps thundered near the main entrance. Angry voices spilled into the archive as the guards inevitably overcame Mailot and Eydric’s attempts to stall them.

The frantic pounding of Kosha’s heart drowned out their tactical orders until the imminent threat of capture became little more than a senseless buzzing in his ears.

When the lizard reached the curved exterior wall of the tower, it stopped abruptly and turned its glowing yellow eyes toward Kosha. It began probing the apparently solid masonry with its tiny foreclaws until an ancient mechanism caught with a sharp clack.

A small stone block slid outward from the wall. Seamlessly integrated into the masonry, it resembled a concealed mechanical lever.

Moving on blind and terrified instinct, Kosha reached out and pressed his fingertips against the trigger. The instant the stone depressed, the floor beneath his knees vanished.

Kosha flung his arms outward, initially believing another mana-induced fainting spell had overtaken him. The sudden drop, however, was no illusion of internal vertigo. The stone floor was physically sinking into the foundations.

Ancient gears ground and clattered beneath him as a concealed chute opened.

“Oh,” Kosha gasped, his jaw falling open in pure, unfiltered shock.

The instant his mouth opened, the glowing green lizard launched itself through the air and dove directly between his lips. It felt as though a thick plug of solid light had been forced down his throat, instantly paralyzing his vocal cords. Unable to draw enough breath to scream, Kosha pitched forward over the edge and tumbled helplessly into the lightless abyss.

Fortunately, the descent was not the bone-shattering plunge he had anticipated.

To his absolute astonishment, his speed diminished almost at once. He drifted through the shaft with agonizing slowness, descending as gently as a molted feather caught in a mild updraft.

Suspended within the antigravity field, Kosha stared upward with surreal detachment as the trapdoor closed seamlessly above him, shutting away the shouting guards and plunging him into absolute darkness.

A few moments later, his boots touched solid ground.

The landing was soft, languid, and entirely painless.