Angrily stuffing the rag back into his robe, he walked purposefully up to the demonslaver in charge. The monster bowed.

"Status report," the wizard ordered simply.

"All goes well," the grotesque servant replied. "The store of new weapons grows daily, and ever more slavers come to take them up. There have been no further suicide attempts by any of the workers."

Satisfied, Krassus cast his dark eyes around the room, trying to find the slave that Janus had told him about. Finally Krassus found him standing on the far side of the room, his hands tied behind his back.

"Bring him to me," he said simply. The head slaver immediately obliged, walking over to where Twenty-Nine stood supervising another slave. Grabbing him by the throat, the slaver manhandled him over to where Krassus stood waiting.

Krassus walked completely around the loin-clad slave as if he were examining some beast of burden he might purchase. Then he grasped the slave's dirty chin and turned his face this way and that in the orange-red glow of the hearths.

Confused as to why he had been singled out, Twenty-Nine wondered who this frightening man with the long white hair and the piercing eyes was. He just as quickly found himself hoping that he would never have to face him again.

"So you're the one who gave us so much trouble by trying to take your own life," Krassus said softly. "Did you really think it would be so easy, my friend? I'm glad to see that you have been properly restrained and are giving us no further concern. But as you will soon learn, nothing here in this chamber, including you and the weapon smiths you supervise, will matter very much longer." He turned back to the head demonslaver.

"I was on my way to the Scriptorium on more urgent business, but I decided to stop here to tell you something," he said. "I have ordered that no more slaves be taken from Eutracia, for our requirements have been filled. Therefore, after you have fully armed all of the forthcoming demonslavers, you may shut this place down."

Turning on his heel, Krassus crossed the room and walked out, the door closing behind him with finality.

As he strode down the open halls lining the manicured courtyard, he took in the crisp afternoon air coming in off the sea and listened for the strangely comforting screams. It was not long before he heard them.

The farther he walked, the louder the screaming became, finally reaching its crescendo behind two huge marble doors that he briskly passed by. As he walked on, the insane wailing faded, then disappeared altogether.

There was no need for him to stop and inspect what was occurring behind those doors, because as long as the screaming could be heard, everything in that chamber was going according to plan. Besides, he had other, far more pressing matters to attend to just now, in a different area of the Citadel.

The room he finally entered was in stark contrast to the one he had just left. This was the Scriptorium, the chamber in which so much of his mission had already been accomplished by the consuls in the dark blue robes-those of the craft who had been freed of their death enchantments, turned to the Vagaries by the son of the Chosen One, and left for Krassus to command. This was also the chamber in which so much of his mission was still to take place, and in which long-held, dusty secrets would be revealed.

The Scriptorium was very large, taking up the entire second floor of this section of the Citadel, and its light, airy appearance belied the gruesome nature of the important work that went forward here. Sunlight streamed in through the many wide, open windows lining three of the four long walls, overlooking the restless Sea of Whispers below. The air in the room was odorless, the environment bordering on a cold sterility.

The Scriptorium's size was deceiving. It was in fact a collection of rooms separated by short, curving walls with openings but no doors. In this way, Krassus' consuls could not only move easily from one chamber to the next as they went about their labors, but they could also maintain a high degree of privacy, so that their concentration would not be broken.

The only room that could be sealed off from the others was Krassus' personal study. Large in size but plain in appearance, it held only an ornate desk and bookcases full of texts and scrolls. It was lit by a single window.

Approaching the door to his private chamber, Krassus narrowed his eyes, calling on the craft. The lock turned over once, then twice more, and the door slowly revolved on its hinges. After opening the window behind the desk, Krassus sat down. Almost immediately the consul in charge of the Scriptorium appeared before him, awaiting his master's orders.

The moment he had arrived at the Citadel with the Scroll of the Vagaries, Krassus had turned it over to the consuls so that they might begin the necessary research. Despite the fact that Nicholas had made Krassus fully aware of the purpose of the Scrolls of the Ancients before his death, there was still a great deal of investigation that would need to be done before the Scroll of the Vagaries would give up the particular secret they were searching for. To this end, Krassus had driven the consuls mercilessly. The research had gone on unabated, both day and night.

So far the going had been difficult. Although Nicholas had known what he needed gleaned from the scroll, even the son of the Chosen One had been unaware of where it had been placed among the seemingly countless other calculations and inscriptions so elegantly written on the very long, uniform piece of vellum. Each calculation the scroll relinquished had to be tested on a person of untrained, endowed blood-an R'talis slave-to determine whether it was the one they were looking for. The one magnificent calculation that-in its unparalleled, awesome power-would finally and irrevocably smash everything the wizards of the Redoubt stood for had so far eluded them.

Krassus looked up at the consul standing obediently before him. "Your report?" he demanded.

"For purposes of security," the consul answered, "it seems the writers of the scroll chose to bury this most powerful of calculations somewhere deep within the body of the text and leave it untitled. Although hundreds of useful Forestallments have now been mapped and recorded, the one we search for, the one shown to you by Nicholas, still eludes us. To narrow our examination, we are now putting into use only the untitled calculations." He paused. "It seems that the Heretics of the Guild did not make our task a simple one."

Growing ever more impatient, the wizard scowled. Saying nothing, he rose from his desk and left the room, followed by the obedient consul. Striding across the length of the Scriptorium, he stopped before a particular entryway, through which doorway the azure glow of the craft seeped out. Anxious to view the process, he walked in.

The room was large. Along one wall lay a long, rectangular table covered with reams of parchment. More than a dozen consuls were seated there, recording their observations with ink-laden quills.

Hovering before them in the stillness of the room was the glowing, partially unrolled Scroll of the Vagaries.

The engraved golden band that had once been secured around its center had been removed, and the scroll was unrolled to reveal the beautiful, elegant script spread across its ancient surface. One by one the consuls selected portions of the script. The passages began to glow as they were chosen, lifting themselves from the parchment and hovering in the air before the consuls.

The consuls read the Old Eutracian script floating before them, first deciphering and then recording what they read onto sheets of individual parchment. When each was satisfied that his translation was correct, he ordered the glowing words back to the scroll. Then the name and use of the spell, if given, was recorded on the parchment and passed to a waiting demonslaver, who took it from the room. The consul would then begin anew, selecting the next available passage from the scroll.