The library in the Glaive estate spanned a huge, low space, with rank upon rank of shelves stretching away into the gas-lit chamber. Gliss slid her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket, following Capper inside, her eyes roving up and down the trove of books. It had a lot to live up to when placed against the monumental archive of her home, but that wasn't surprising. Her clan back in Iron Hollow had staked its whole future on digging into the past.
Guarding the gridiron arrangement was a thin-framed individual with a shaven head and a long beard the colour of iron. The coat he wore stretched from his neck to his ankles, but had no sleeves, revealing the interlocking blade tattoos that completely covered his arms. He saw them coming and one eyebrow rose in amusement.
"Well, well," he chuckled softly. "Capper, what brings you down to my little treasure trove?" His voice had a soft, warm lilt to it, as though each word were glazed in sugar.
"Ah, as it happens, her." He indicated Gliss with a jerk of his thumb. "This is Gliss Raynor."
"Our guest from the northern barrens?" The vampire smiled and Gliss caught sight of unnaturally long fangs concealed in his mouth. "A pleasure."
"You too," she answered uncertainly, shaking his hand when he offered it.
"My name is Rune, Keeper of the Records. Or librarian, if you prefer."
"I think Rune will do just fine."
"Good. Well then, Gliss Raynor, what can I do for you? Anything that drags Capper down into the archives certainly has my interest."
She grinned and looked at Capper.
Her companion gave an exasperated sigh. "I'm not much of a reader, alright?"
"More's the pity," Rune chuckled. "But never mind. Now that you've got someone leading you down the right path, what can I help you find?"
"We're looking for texts on ancient clan history," Gliss explained, trying not to laugh at the expression on Capper's face. "I figure I'm going to be here for a while and I thought Capper might be able to tell me a bit about Glaive's past. As it turns out, he doesn't know a whole lot so...here we are."
"Ha, should've paid more attention back in the day, eh, Capper?"
"Yeah, yeah," Capper grumbled. "Can you help us or not?"
"I think so." Rune flashed his long fangs again and beckoned them to follow. "Come with me."
They fell obediently into step behind the librarian, and as they walked through the ranks of shelves Gliss had to admit a level of admiration for how clean Rune had kept the records. Many of the archives in her home were so huge and sprawling that they turned into enclosed dust-ridden tunnels. The organisation was formidable, with tomes organised in a formidable array of looming walls, illuminated by small, evenly spaced gas-lamps.
They journeyed deeper into the phalanx of shelves, passing half a dozen other vampires as they went. Most ignored their presence – deeply engrossed in books of their own – and one or two cast suspicious glances at her. Gliss ignored them, her eyes roving up and down the spines of the surrounding tomes. The section they now walked through was filled with older leather volumes with archaic names – chronicles from deep in the city's history that today's generations no longer acknowledged. There were clan names she recognised from her studies in the historical academies of Iron Hollow – ones she knew had died with the march of time.
It seemed that while many here had let their history slip away, Rune was not one of them.
"So what, in particular, are you looking for?" the librarian asked as they turned down another corridor of shelves.
"I was hoping to find records that pre-date the city, if you have them?"
"Before Veridian Shores?" Rune's voice was incredulous. "I may have some volumes but I won't vouch for their accuracy. Many of them are written in ancient Vampyr – a tongue few can still-"
"I can," Gliss said, cutting him off. She caught Capper's surprised glance and shrugged. "We all have hobbies. You play with axes – I play with words."
"A scholar then?" Rune grinned. "Very well, this way."
The librarian led them to a section where the volumes grew in size – the shelves heavily laden with ancient, metal ribbed spines, locked with heavy clasps. Gliss slowed, eyes widening in anticipation. This was more like it.
"Well here they are," Rune told them, making a dismissive gesture to the volumes. "Everything I have that chronicles the era pre-dating the founding of the city. Again, I can't promise anything more than myths and legends."
"Myths and legends will do nicely," Gliss replied, still gazing at the books.
Rune nodded. "Very well. I must return to my duties. I'll nearby if you need me."
The slender record keeper padded off into the bowels of the archive, leaving them alone with the ancient histories of Veridian Shores. Gliss ran her fingers gently over the spines, feeling every millimetre of the age-old contours, the richness of the leather, the cracks and crevices in every spine. Beside her she noticed Capper looking rather sheepish.
"What is it?" she asked.
"What exactly are we looking for?" he replied, indicating the books with a nod. "I can't read ancient Vampyr – I'm not sure how much use I'll be."
"Look for any records that reference the First, or the Keystone," Gliss answered. "My clan traced it to the city, but we need specifics."
He didn't seem convinced but he started looking anyway, frowning his way around the shelves. Her hand stopped on one volume etched with the ancient coils and spirals of the Vampyr – the ancient vampires that existed long before the clans of Veridian Shores. Learning the language had been a necessity back in Iron Hollow but here no one seemed to care. No one understood what it represented. Seeing Capper blindly fumbling his way through the archive like a lost child filled her with a sense of sadness. He was missing so much about what it was to be a vampire.
Pushing the sensation to the back of her mind, she slid the heavy tome from its position on the shelf, moving slowly and carefully. She admired Rune's devotion to preservation – the book was in immaculate condition – and with gentle motions she unclipped the clasp holding it shut.
The thick vellum moved easily under her delicate touch and she drank in the lines of archaic glyphs, her mind converting the old symbols into words. The world closed off around her as she drank it in. Rune had been right – the tome was filled with lurid tales – wild imaginings of mythical beings that could crack the earth and boil the sea. This particular passage illustrated the legend of the Twelve-Fanged, a creature out of the deepest fictions of vampire society. She smiled wryly.
For what seemed like hours they sat there, dredging the depths of history – or what passed for history of those dark times before the clans. She had only a vague concept of just how long ago that was – dozens of millennia at least. Page after page of wild stories filled her head, giving a strange window into that murky world, but none of it mentioned the First, or the Keystone.
Capper, for his part, had collected a pile of books written in the common tongue and sat diligently trawling through them without complaint. She smiled at the expression of slight bewilderment that stayed stamped on his features as he read. For someone who didn't take to reading he certainly seemed to be embracing the quiet solitude of the library now. She wondered if there was a certain someone he was hiding from.
"So, what's the deal with you and Brooke anyway?" Gliss asked as she leafed gently through another heavy volume, a hint of mischief in her voice.
Capper looked up from his book. "Huh?"
"You and Brooke – there's always something weird whenever you see each other."
"That's what you want to talk about right now?"
"I'm just curious."
"Why?"
"Nobody here likes me, but she's the only one who seems to hate me." She stopped turning the pages at looked at him. "And I figure it's got to be something to do with you."
"Fine, fine." He sighed, closing the book in front of him. "It's just some scheme from the Elders to keep the Glaive line strong."
"How's that?"
"Jocasta's my sire. She was sired by Urda, one of the other Elders. If we meld our blood it will strengthen us – anyone who we turn will be stronger as a result." He grimaced. "But I didn't want that. A melding...it changes you."
"But she does?"
"Brooke wants what's best for the clan," he replied. "She's all about her duty, the duty of the Elder-bloods to keep the clan strong. So she'll go along with it. Maybe she's attracted to me – I dunno. That's not the point. If I'm going to go through that I want it to be my choice, not because someone picked for me."
Gliss raised an eyebrow. "But if you're attracted to Brooke...isn't it a win win?"
"Suns...I don't know how I feel about Brooke," he muttered, shaking his head. "Sometimes she's nice, sometimes she's tearing my head off because I apparently don't care enough. Whatever she does, I never know if it's what she wants to do, or if it's just what she thinks she has to do." He dug a hand through his hair in exasperation. "Honestly, I'm sick of all of it."
She pressed her lips together, staring hard at her companion. A faint flutter of excitement lit in her chest at his words. So everything between him and that stuck up dandelion was for show. The little voice in the back of her mind told her that she shouldn't be thinking about personal matters now, but she couldn't suppress a sense of triumph.
"So what are you going to do?" she asked eventually.
"Well I'm supposed to be taking her to the Synod," he said, voice heavy with dread. "A nice public show of unity among the Glaive Elder-Bloods. But I'm trying not to think about that too much right now." He glanced at her and forced a smile. "So how about we just get to the bottom of your little riddle – okay? If you're right the Synod will be the least of our problems."
Gliss nodded, turning her attention back to the text. She got the distinct impression that he wasn't willing to talk about Brooke any more, and she'd gotten the information she wanted. In any case, the current volume certainly seemed to be more along the track she was searching for. She noted oblique references to the 'first sire', passages that spoke of a plague of blood-drinkers radiating from the north. Some of that rang true from the histories her clan had pieced together, cross referencing the records of ancient human monks against their own annals.
It didn't have anything more specific, however, and didn't progress much into the reign of the First. And it didn't mention the Keystone. She immediately started hunting through similar volumes. While she couldn't identify them by date owing to the haze that hung over those ancient years, she could match up roughly by the calligraphy of the spines and the variations of the hand within.
It took another hour of skimming the volumes as fast as her amplified vision would allow before she finally found what she was looking for. An account from an aeon-old Vampyr wanderer told the tale of a dark shadow that spread across the coast of the continent, a shadow with a weapon that devastated all before it. Something that sounded an awful lot like the Keystone spoken of in the volumes in Iron Hollow. She flicked another page over and her eyes lit up.
"Now we're getting somewhere!" Gliss declared. "This passage has a map opposite it that roughly matches up to the area that eventually became Veridain Shores."
Capper slammed shut the book he was reading and stood up, crossing the room to look over her shoulder. "Really?"
"Oh yeah." She looked at him, a triumphant smile on her face. "Look here – it's virtually a route map. It starts about halfway between Iron Hollow and Veridian Shores and goes straight south."
"Well, it's a start." Capper smiled thinly. "Any way to narrow this down?"
"Maybe...there are places, names that I don't recognise." She ran her fingers over the lines of text. "They dot around on the way toward to the coast. A lot of nasty stuff from the sounds of it."
"And this Keystone of yours?"
"It's mentioned but there's no description of what it actually is." She indicated a line, acutely aware of Capper's scent as he leaned closer, close enough for her to feel his breath on her shoulder. "This passage here, it reads 'and with the stone in hand the Wanderer drove all before it, through the blood roads of the south'."
"Blood roads?" Capper gave her a dubious look. "Sounds ominous."
"Just an old euphemism for feeding grounds."
"Okay. Then what?"
"It goes on, a few place names – old settlements I guess. Then something changed. There's a word here – it translates to betrayal-of-the-flesh. The Wanderer lost his stone here." Gliss tapped her finger against the map, the ancient trace of land that now was home to the seething urban heart of Veridian Shores. She squinted at the page for a moment, making sure she had the pronunciation correct.. "According to this the stone was then sealed in something called...the Drűcatta." Her brows creased into a frown. "I don't recognise the name. Mean anything to you?"
She looked at her companion and saw that his face had dropped. His eyes closed and a long, deep sigh slithered from his mouth. She stepped away, turned to face him with the book still lying open in her hands.
"Capper...what is it?"
"Oh...I just wish you hadn't said that," Capper said
"Why? Do you know where this...Drűcatta is?"
"Yeah, I know where it is." Capper slumped down in a nearby chair, slinging his feet up onto the table and pulling a cigarette from his pocket. She waited impatiently as he tossed it towards his mouth, caught it deftly between his lips and lit it.
"Well?"
"It looks like you were right," he said through a puff of smoke. A rueful smile slid across his face as he looked at her, his turquoise eyes glimmering in the light of the gas-lamps. "The place you're describing? It's right underneath the Baelock mansion."