Severed Souls (Sword of Truth 14)

That was one of the ways he had managed to remain hidden under Hannis Arc’s nose for so long—he didn’t use his power when he didn’t absolutely need to. No one was going to come chase him away from Hannis Arc’s office door. The whole place belonged to Ludwig, now. So he continued to wait patiently.

Mohler looked up. “Sorry, Master Dreier—”

“Lord Dreier.”

“Yes,” Mohler said, absently, his head bobbing, “Lord Dreier, I meant to say.”

Erika lifted the lantern from the man’s hand so that he could use both hands to search through his fat ring of keys. Glancing up from time to time, nervous, fearing to be too slow, he sighed with relief when he at last found the key he was looking for. He tried to poke the trembling key in the lock, but he missed several times. Erika finally took hold of the man’s gnarled hand, steadied it, and fed the key into the lock.

He looked up. “Thank you, Mistress. I’ve been opening this door nearly all my life.” He hesitated. “I’ve just never had to open it for anyone other than…”

“Understandable,” Ludwig said, peering down at the sparse gray hair that lay over the top of the hunched old scribe’s bald head. “But you are still opening it for your master.”

Mohler looked up and blinked. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

The man smiled at the notion as he started turning the key in the lock, jiggling it in a way that he apparently knew the old lock needed in order to give up the secrets beyond. With the proper touch of the scribe’s experienced hand, the bolt finally clanged back, freeing the door. Mohler pushed the door in as he stood aside to admit the new master.

Inside, the scribe took his lantern back from Erika as he plucked a long sliver from an iron holder on the wall near the door. He lit the sliver in the flame of his lantern, dropped the glass cover back down, and then rushed around the room using the flaming sliver of fat wood to light candles and lamps.

The recording room was far more expansive than Ludwig had expected, with a high beamed ceiling but no windows. Even with all the candles and lanterns Mohler was lighting, it was rather dark and gloomy. Ludwig scanned the odd collection of various things standing on display.

Those displays were all placed in an even grid pattern, almost resembling pieces placed on a chessboard, and yet the way the cabinets, cases, statues, and pedestals were mixed together randomly made no logical sense, except perhaps as a representation of chess pieces of a game in play.

Ludwig found the confusing arrangement rather obnoxious. He realized, then, that if he wanted, he might have them lined up together in an orderly manner, or placed against walls. He thought it would make more sense if he grouped like things together. As he walked through the room, he mentally began redecorating the place, placing specific things together and making it more convenient to find particular items.

He didn’t know how Hannis Arc had worked in such seeming chaos. He supposed that he had lived here his entire life and was used to it. And, of course, Hannis Arc was an advocate of chaos, so in an odd way it did seem fitting.

But it also told Ludwig something important about the way Hannis Arc thought. He was in certain ways brilliant, and in many ways highly focused, while in other ways incredibly powerful, effective, and dangerous, yet he wasn’t necessarily logical. At times, he went about things on whim, or became fixated on one thing to the exclusion of all else, such as his obsession with the House of Rahl.

Ludwig saw that the glassed cabinets he walked past held an odd mixture of rarities such as bones from strange creatures, or small statues, mechanical devices, and even round tubes with carved symbols all over them. The symbols resembled those tattooed all over Hannis Arc. They were called story tubes and they had been written in the language of Creation. Ludwig knew that items with those symbols were ancient and exceedingly rare. Lives had been traded for such rare treasures.

There were a number of stuffed animals in various places around the room. Besides the more common creatures in common poses—deer standing in an oval display of grass; a family of beavers on a mound of sticks; and raptors, wings spread, on bare branches—there was a large bear towering up on its hind legs, jaws spread wide, with its claws raised so that it looked perpetually ready to attack.

The things that really drew Ludwig Dreier’s attention, though, were the dozens of pedestals evenly spaced in various places throughout the room, conforming to the grid pattern. Each pedestal held an open book. The books were all enormous, with heavy leather bindings that showed great age and wear all around the edges. They would have been hard to move because of their sheer size, but also because they looked quite frail, so they appeared to have permanent homes on their pedestals, rather than on some of the bookshelves against the back wall.

Tables near the book pedestals were piled with disorderly stacks of scrolls. Ludwig recognized many as scrolls he had sent to the citadel—to Hannis Arc—to be recorded in the books of prophecy.

Some of those scrolls still had unbroken seals as they sat waiting their turn to be opened and recorded. Ludwig found that irritating. He had gone to enormous trouble in both time and effort to collect each and every one of those prophecies, to say nothing of the people who had given their lives in that work.

Mohler held out a hand of gnarled, arthritic fingers. “This is my work, Lord Dreier. These are the books you asked about.” He gently laid his hand on one of the open books with a kind of reverent affection. “This is where I write down all the prophecy brought to the citadel.”

Ludwig frowned. “You mean the prophecy that I sent to the citadel.”

The old scribe stroked the knuckle of his first finger back along his gaunt cheek. “Well, yes, Lord Dreier, those, and others.”

Ludwig’s frown deepened. “Others. What do you mean, others? I was Bishop Arc’s abbot. I am the one who uncovered prophecies on his behalf and sent them here, to the bishop.”

Mohler dipped his head. “Yes, but there were others.”

“Others? What others?”

The old man shrugged his hunched shoulders, hands opened out to the sides. “I am sorry, Lord Dreier, but I was not privy to such things.” He gestured to one of the tables piled high. “Scrolls and books are brought in, and I record what is in them here, in these books.”

“And only you record prophecy? You recorded all of what is in these books?”

He again placed a deformed hand on one of the books on a pedestal. “These books are my work, but they predate me, of course. They contain the work of many who came before me. All of it is recorded here. I have entered all the prophecy found in these books since Bishop Arc entrusted me with the task back when I was still young. I have worked at this my entire life.”

Ludwig realized that Hannis Arc was not the only one privy to prophecy. Ludwig was sure that in all those many years of working with the books, Mohler would have had to go through the books and read what had come before. This unassuming old man probably knew more prophecy than just about anyone else alive.

That made the man useful. Or dangerous.

Ludwig had a sudden thought. “How do you know which book to write the prophecy in? Do you fill one book and then go on to the next?”

“No, each prophecy must go in its proper book.”

“How in the world do you determine that?”

Mohler frowned at the expanse of pedestals throughout the room that held books. He seemed confused by the question. “Well, Lord Dreier, each prophecy must be recorded where it belongs.”

“How do you know where a prophecy belongs?” he asked patiently. “Did the bishop tell you?”

“No … no, that was my job.” He gestured at the scrolls. “As you can see, he did not open them beforehand. He would review them after I had entered them. He said that it was easier for him to read it all once it was in my hand. Some of the writing is sloppy, or rushed, or poorly done so they can sometimes be quite difficult to read, so he always waited until I recorded them. It is my job to figure out what they say and then wri

te it down clearly for the bishop.”

“But what makes you decide to enter any given prophecy in a particular book?”

“The subject, of course,” the scribe said with simple sincerity. “I put them where they belong. That way, if the bishop wanted to review a particular subject, he could go directly to that book, rather than spend time searching through everything.”

He gestured to a particular volume not far away. “For example, all the prophecy in that volume is about the House of Rahl. Of course, it is often difficult to categorize prophecy because it is usually about more than one thing. So, I must use my discretion. I try to determine the thrust of the prophecy, what it pertains to, and then I put it in the proper book.”

“That’s complete lunacy,” Ludwig said half to himself.

“Lord Dreier?”

He frowned at the scribe. “That means they would not be set down according to any chronology. There is nothing—no chronology—to link all of these subjects and events.”

Ludwig knew quite well that chronology was what mattered most. What did it matter what prophecy had to say about a particular event meant to happen thousands of years ago?

Unless you wanted to know about that event.

Say, the great war and the fate of Emperor Sulachan.

Mohler shrugged. “I rarely have any way of determining chronology, Lord Dreier, so we use the subject as the category.”

Ludwig realized instinctively that all of this work was virtually for nothing. There was no real way of determining what a prophecy was really about simply by reading the words. Prophecy was almost always occulted, the true meaning hidden. The words were largely only a trigger for one properly gifted. Often the words of the prophecy were meant to disguise the true meaning.

All of this work, Mohler’s entire lifetime of work, had in reality been for nothing. The categories would be meaningless unless gifted or occulted talents were used to see into the vision of the prophecy to determine the true, hidden, subject and therefore where it actually belonged.

Ludwig supposed that the bishop didn’t really care that he was gradually wasting the scribe’s entire life on meaningless work. It gave him a place to go look at prophecy as he wished, all written out in the same hand for easy reading. Hannis Arc would have likely completely ignored Mohler’s categories.