whispered, his fingers tightening around the grip of his knife.
He looked back at the other end of the room, almost certain that for a moment he’d seen someone stood in the corner there - a grey figure - but it remained steadfastly empty. When he inspected the mirror that too looked fine, free of dust or dirt that might blur the image.
Again he heard a tiny whisper somewhere behind him, this time more like the rustle of pages, and so faint it was nearly drowned out by the frantic drumming of his heart. Each of the tallboys had glass-fronted shelving at the top, filled with leather-bound books. Nothing within them moved.
He waited a while, standing still and listening until he was forced to breathe deeply. Immediately there came a different sound, like fingertips being brushed gently against the wallpaper of the far wall. When he looked the sound faded to nothing, leaving him uncertain whether he’d heard anything at all.
‘Ah, my imagination’s playing tricks on me now,’ Cardinal Eleil declared rather more boldly than he felt. ‘You’re a foolish old man whose hearing isn’t as good as it once was, nothing more.’
He opened one of the glass cases and ran his fingers down the spines of the books. ‘I refuse to pander to my imagination,’ he said aloud, finding the book he was looking for, ‘so I’ll look up that rune instead.’
He flicked through the pages of the book with forced briskness, finding the section he was after easily enough. His familiarity with Elven runes was only very basic, limited to what he’d learned over the years within the Serian. The knife he kept in hand, underneath the book. It was an ornate weapon with a slim guard, gaudy but wickedly sharp.
Heretical academics frequently used the runes in their correspondence to each other, often using them for code, though sometimes the cardinal suspected it was mere pretension on their part. The closeted idiots had no conception of the dangers their research could result in. The Serian had saves thousands of lives over the course of his service, stopping reckless and foolish academics playing with forces far beyond their control.
‘Aha,’ he announced to the empty room, ‘here we are. Azhi? Azhai?’ he read, fumbling slightly over the pronunciation since the book was written in Farlan, ‘and it means . . . oh. Well, not a lot.’ He sighed and glanced up at the room to check. It was still empty.
‘Azai; a concept requiring context, potentially implying weakness or absence,’ he read aloud. ‘Other possibilities are substitution, usurpation, manipulation or corruption. At its most basic it can mean the shadow of something.’
His eyes flicked up to the mirror and he gave a gasp. At the corner of his vision he saw a faint movement on one side - too quick to catch, indeed, could have been the flash of an eyelash or trick of an ageing eye - but it had looked as though someone peeking through a window had ducked to the side of it.
He checked the room again, knife held ready, but there was absolutely no one there ... but still he imagined soft whispers on the edge of hearing from the far corners of the room. Heart hammering, feeling both foolish and terrified at the same time, he moved back to the mirror and edged carefully around it, as though wary of something reaching out from the reflection. There was nothing there; the reflection showed an empty room and nothing more —
He turned away, but as he did so he glimpsed a face, grey and formless in the glass, as though staring straight over his shoulder. Cardinal Eleil yelped with terror, dropping the book as he tripped over his own feet in his haste to turn. Behind him there was nothing, no man or shadow beyond those cast naturally.
The room was grey now, a layer of gloom covering everything as twilight began its reign over the Land. With shaking hands Cardinal Eleil looked down at the book, but he couldn’t bring himself to retrieve it. It could stay there for the night happily enough. Only his trembling knees that threatened to give way underneath him prevented him from fleeing the room entirely.
The ageing cardinal gripped the mantelpiece in an effort to steady himself, but as he did so the whispers from the far corners of the room increased. A fresh lurch of panic surged through his body. He looked into the mirror and for a moment thought he could