Shadow Prowler by Alexey Pehov

many soldiers were given nicknames to replace their real names. The nickname described the man, and men earned them for the specific quality of their service, actions, knowledge, or character. The Wild Hearts took pride in their new names.
    Crossbow Bolt. So in former times the old man must have been a good shot.
    We walked down into a dark hall that was small, but even so the torchlight was too feeble to illuminate it fully. The old man reached out one hand into the darkness, there was a loud click somewhere up above our heads, and the room was flooded with blinding sunlight. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut in sudden surprise.
    “Aha, frightened, eh?” The old man giggled with delight. “Come on now, don’t be afraid. Come on, open those peepers.”
    I slowly got used to the bright light. Like the large hall up above, this small one was crammed absolutely full of books and scrolls on metal shelves. And hanging from the high ceiling there was a blindingly bright round sphere, like a little sun.
    “The dwarves invented it. Did you think they run around in the dark in those caves of theirs, smashing their foreheads against the walls? Oho noo . . . They put up magic lamps like this. Magic! Our Order’s never even come close to anything like it. The charlatans! But the dwarves put one of these candles in here, and about ten of them in the basements of the royal palace. Of course, I’ve got no idea how much money they took for it. But it’s handy all right.”
    I nodded.
    “Right, then. Stay here, and don’t touch anything or stick your nose into anything. I’ll go and get what you want.” The old man gave me a menacing look to make sure I understood what he’d said.
    As soon as he was gone, I instantly shed my harmless pose and started strolling about, looking at the titles of the old volumes. My eyes slid along until they suddenly came to rest on a small shelf of magic scrolls. The following words were written in immense, ornate letters on the wallbeside the shelf: BATTLE SPELLS! RUNE MAGIC. THESE SCROLLS MAY ONLY BE USED BY ARCHMAGICIANS OF THE ORDER, WHEN PERMISSION HAS BEEN GRANTED BY THE COUNCIL!
    I couldn’t understand why rune-magic battle spells would be lying there so openly, entirely unprotected. Any light-fingered rogue—like me, for instance—could easily make off with these rolled-up sheets of parchment.
    Carelessness will destroy the world yet. Just you mark my words!
    I glanced round quickly, grabbed one scroll, with a black ribbon, out of the dusty heap and stuck it inside my shirt. Then I moved away, to wait for the old man. I’d acted like a petty thief, but I thought to myself that no one else was going to need the scroll for a long time, and it might come in handy in Hrad Spein.
    The trouble with scrolls is that you can only use them once. After you’ve chanted the formula and worked the spell, you can simply throw the useless parchment away. The magic destroys the words, erasing them from the scroll and from the reader’s memory. But at least you don’t have to be a magician to work magic that has been written down on paper. You only need to know how to read.
    I heard Bolt coughing somewhere behind the shelves, and then he himself appeared, carrying two books in his hands. One was huge and thick, in a brown buffalo-skin binding with worn gold embossing, the other was small and so old that I thought it would crumble to dust under his fingers.
    “An ogre almost grabbed me back there,” the old man muttered, handing me the books I wanted. “The brute was hiding under the shelves. I had to give it a couple of kicks to frighten it off. Well, why are you just standing there like a block of wood?”
    “Is that all?” I asked Bolt in amazement as I looked at the two books. I’d been expecting more.
    “That’s enough cheek from you. The big one is plans of Avendoom, drawn four hundred years ago, and the little one’s about Hrad Spein. Written quite recently, but it’s in a terrible