The lift carried us higher, past floors I hadn't seen on the way up. Somewhere around the two hundred and tenth, the mana in the air thickened until it pressed on the inside of my skull like a change in altitude.
"A warning," Paul said, as we slowed. "The archive is a lot to take in the first time. Some of what we keep down here, most necromancers think is a myth."
The doors opened onto a corridor unlike anything else in the Tower. The walls weren't stone here. They were containment fields, layer over layer of them, humming at a pitch I felt in my teeth.
At the far end waited an old man in plain grey robes. Tall, thin, silver-haired, with the stillness of someone who had spent a very long time among things that could kill him if he moved carelessly. The aura around him was quiet and enormous.
"Master Valdris," Paul said. "Our curator."
