A Painted Goddess by Victor Gischler Read Free Book Online Page B

been lucky in one respect: if Titan and the cart had fallen back down the shaft with the lantern, they’d have nothing . They’d be crawling through the dark with no food or water.
    Brasley saw Olgen standing at the edge of the shaft, looking back down. “Careful. It’s a long drop.”
    “One of the legendary engineering feats of the Great Library. A perfectly balanced and self-contained system of weights and pulleys,” Olgen said. “And we wrecked it.”
    “Never mind,” Brasley said. “It brought us here, and anything this high up must be important. Maybe we’ve had a lucky accident. Come. Let’s see what Talbun’s found.”
    They came up behind her where she stood looking up at a set of tall double doors, carved from some black stone. There was a golden circle at the center of the doors. It was covered in ancient runes Brasley couldn’t hope to read. Golden chains went from the circle to the four corners of the door.
    “It’s a seal,” Talbun said. There was a faraway quality to her voice.
    “Sealed? Damn,” Brasley said. “So we can’t get in.”
    “It’s not a seal to keep us out,” Talbun said. “It’s to keep something in.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Miko hung on the tiller, guiding the scow along a narrow passage between two islands. He seemed to know where he was going, or at least Tosh hoped so because he certainly had no idea where they were.
    He’s crazy but you’ve got to trust him , Tosh thought. He knows the Scattered Isles like the back of his hand .
    Tosh hoped.
    How had he been drawn into this? A common soldier, then a deserter, then a cook in a whorehouse, and now on a mission he didn’t completely understand for a duchess hundreds of miles away, in a foreign land so hot it made him sweat between his thighs until he had a rash.
    Tosh sighed. He didn’t much like boats either.
    “Tosh,” Lureen called from the prow. She pointed ahead of them to a small island.
    Tosh squinted into the waning light. A twisting pillar of smoke rose into the air. A campfire maybe.
    He turned back to Miko. “A settlement?”
    Miko shrugged. “Maybe.”
    “Cannibals?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Should we avoid it?” Tosh said.
    “No,” Miko said. “We go there.”
    “What for?”
    “This place is the place,” Miko said. “From the gypsy-girl map.”
    Shit .

    Nobody paid much attention to the man in the cloak as he hobbled through the marketplace. He made a slow circle of the Great Library, looking for a likely place.
    Traffic in and out of the Great Library was limited to the front gates. There were no side doors, no rear entrance. There was nothing special about the other three sides of the huge structure. The city of Tul-Agnon went on as usual. He’d passed through a fetid slum and kept circling and now found himself in a market. It was closing up now, getting late into the evening. A few taverns would stay open, but none of the shops. Good. He could attend to his business without prying eyes upon him.
    He ducked into an alley between two closed shops that had been built right up against the wall of the Great Library, paused a moment to listen. When he heard nothing, Ankar threw off his cloak. If anyone had been there, they would have seen a hulk of a man, covered head to foot in exotic tattoos. All except for one metallic leg that gleamed in the moonlight. He’d had the leg made by one of the university’s best engineers. It would never be as good as his old leg, but he was surprised how well it worked. He’d been practicing with it, and his limp was only very slight now. In battle, he doubted whether it would hamper him very much at all.
    Ankar climbed the side of one of the shops. This was the easy part.
    Once upon the roof, he ran a hand across the smooth stonework of the ancient builders. Ankar would not need the permission of the university scholars to enter the Great Library. He had his own methods. No ordinary man could hope to scale the smooth outer surface of the library.
    Ankar was no