Since her coming to this world in the wake of the rising of the Dark, Gil had guarded Ingold's back. The stable crypt opening into the vaults had been half torn apart by the Dark Ones, and Gil's hair prickled with the memory of those bodiless haunters as she picked her way after him through a vestibule whose mud floor was broken by a sea-wrack of looted chests, candlesticks, and vermin-scattered bones. An inner door gave onto a stairway. There was a smell of water below, a cold exhalation like a grave. "When the vigilantes started hunting the city for books-for archives, records, anything that would burn-Maia let them have what he could spare as a sop and hid the rest." Ingold's voice echoed wetly under the downward-sloping ceiling, and something below, fleeing the blue-white light that burned from the end of his staff, plopped in water.

"He bricked up some of the archives in old cells of the episcopal dungeon and sounded walls in the vaults to find other rooms that had been sealed long ago, where he might cache the oldest volumes, of which no other known copy existed. It was one of these vaults that he found the Cylinder."

Water lay five or six inches deep in the maze of cells and tunnels that constituted the palace vaults. The light from Ingold's raised staff glittered sharply on it as Gil and the old mage waded between decaying walls plastered thick with slunch, mold, and dim-glowing niter. The masonry was of a heavy pattern far older than the more finished stones of Gae. Penambra predated the northern capital at Gae; predated the first rising of the Dark thousands of years ago- long predated any memory of humankind's. Maia himself came to Gil's mind, a hollow-cheeked skeleton with arthritis crippled hands, laughing with Ingold over his own former self, a foppish dilettante whose aristocratic protector had bought the bishopric for him long before he was of sufficient years to have earned it.