by Grace Martin
In the centre of the table in front of us there were three Librarians who appeared to be of higher rank than the others. They didn’t feel it was necessary to introduce themselves to us, but some of them I already knew. It gave me a grim satisfaction to realise that I knew every member of the Order of Guardians by name. None of these Librarians would survive the Ruin of Cairnagorn.
Master Darragh’s replacement sat on one side of the centre, and the woman with grey hair beside him. Garbhan, the man with the big beard joined the woman in the central double throne, and a devastatingly handsome man sat on his other side.
The handsome senior Librarian – and I use the word senior lightly – I gave an arbitrary name that I would much rather not tell anyone. He was about nine hundred and seventy years younger than the other creepyguardians, oops, sorry, Librarians. His skin was tan and the thick lock of dark hair curled over his forehead, but I suspected the rakish look it gave him could also be attributed to the way he leaned back in his throne, one arm over the back of the chair.
The way he looked at me was like we were sharing a private joke. As I looked at him and labelled him, he raised his eyebrows at me, aware of my scrutiny. I looked down at the floor, as the creepyguardians had always taught me to do.
The Librarians just sat there and waited for us to speak. I had no idea what to say. I had been trained from earliest childhood not to speak to creepyguardians unless I was on my knees and had already asked permission to speak. Words deserted me. I clasped my hands in front of me and held them very tightly.
I had completely forgotten that Aoife had grown up and spent her whole life in the Imperial household. For all that she was mean, nasty, even cruel, she knew how to speak in public. I was surprised. If I heard Aoife speak like this and had never met her personally, I would have followed her to the ends of the earth.
She spoke about the threat posed to the world by the sudden re-emergence of the dragons. She spoke about the need for unity in these troubled times. She spoke about family, about friendship and ancient bonds and alliances. She spoke about our dire situation and entreated passionately for all of us to work together, otherwise the world would soon lie in ruins.
The Librarians seem to consider this for a few minutes. They spoke very quietly amongst themselves, then Garbhan turned to us.
‘How does this affect us?’
I don’t think it had even occurred to Aoife that they wouldn’t listen to her. She stared at them blankly. I was more used to this than she was. The moment that I saw that the Librarians carried the insignia of the creepyguardians, I knew that there was very little they would listen to. I’d spent my life trying to get them to listen.
Since Aoife was temporarily dumb, I spoke up. ‘Well, if the world is destroyed, they will kind of affect you, as part of the world,’ I said, in my most snarky voice.
‘We are deep within the mountain here, Princess,’ Garbhan said. ‘In three hundred years nothing has penetrated the tunnels of Cairnagorn. The dragon will not affect us.’
‘You must be kidding yourself,’ I said. ‘I can tell you right now that unless you join with us, Cairnagorn will be razed to the ground. In six months, there will be nothing left of Cairnagorn except the tunnel we just walked through and a few rooms beyond, those that are deepest inside the mountain. And every last one of you will be dead.’
‘How do you know this?’
I wasn’t sure what to say, but I wasn’t going to tell them that I was from the future, because I didn’t fancy being locked up as part of the collection. ‘I’ve had a vision,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen the future.’
Hot Stuff laughed out loud (okay, I had to use his name, but I feel stupid about it). He disguised it very quickly by sitting up straight in his chair and clapping his hand over his mouth and trying to wipe away the chuckles.
Garbhan looked at me sharply. ‘What do you know of the rooms beyond these tunnels, deeper into the mountain?’
‘In my visions I have walked through these tunnels, through these chambers, many times,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound eldritch and mysterious as possible. Deep in some private part of my mind, I was thinking of the Portal, and of Elisabeth who was somewhere beyond it.
It wasn’t just a matter of reaching the Portal. I didn’t want to go even further into the past. I needed access to the collections, to find a book to tell me how get back to my own time. I certainly wasn’t going to tell them that I had come through the Portal not three months before, killed several Librarians and been clothed in a featherskin. I was the favoured of the Empress now, but I didn’t want to find my fingers feathered again.
Hot Stuff quirked his eyebrows at me and grinned at me from behind his hand.
‘What visions have you seen regarding Cairnagorn?’ the woman asked sharply.
Hot Stuff leaned forward, resting an elbow on the table. ‘Yes, Emer, tell us all about your visions of the future.’
‘Cairnagorn will be utterly destroyed,’ I said. ‘The city outside will be burned to cinders, the houses will be flattened, the roots of the caverns will collapse. The gardens will never flower again and all beauty will be gone from this place. It will become a place that is accursed and mothers will frighten their children by threatening to take them to Cairnagorn and leave them there among the ghosts of those who died because they were cowards.’
I was on decidedly shaky ground here, but I wasn’t going to back out now. I looked around the room. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ I said, trying to sound casual and confident all at once. ‘In this room, I mean. Look at all the beautiful furnishings, look at the lovely tapestries on the walls. Look at yourselves, all dressed up in your ceremonial robes, sitting behind tables carved with esoteric symbols, secure in the knowledge that your Order will last forever.
‘I’ll tell you the truth. I was surprised to see it like this. I had expected, perhaps, half a dozen Librarians. I had no idea that your Order was so large. In my visions, you see, your Order is reduced to a dozen members who meet once a year on the winter solstice, crawling out of hiding, travelling under fake names, keeping your insignia hidden, because to be identified as a Librarian is death.
‘Once Cairnagorn falls, you will no longer be respected. You will no longer even be tolerated. You will be outlawed, hunted through the streets at midnight, tied to stakes and burned alive because people will say “magic brought this disaster upon us. The Librarians could have saved us, but they chose not to, therefore we will no longer allow them place in the world that they stood by and allowed to be destroyed.”’
If Aoife was good at being diplomatic and encouraging the Librarians to join our cause, I was pretty good at giving them a smack in the face. The grey-haired woman certainly looked like I had smacked her. Garbhan began to bluster. It was Hot Stuff whose reaction was the most interesting.
He didn’t look shocked. He didn’t even look mildly surprised. If anything, he looked like it was all big joke. He grinned at me. Then I realised that when I was introduced to the Librarians, Aoife had introduced me as the Empress’s heir, as the Bach Chwaer. She had introduced Caradoc by name, but at no point had she ever used my name. Hot Stuff had addressed me by name. He hadn’t called me Princess; he hadn’t called me Bach Chwaer. How had he known my name?
Hot Stuff turned to the other senior Librarians. ‘Well,’ he said in a casual, cheerful voice, ‘that’s two of us who’ve had visions of a disastrous future for Cairnagorn. How many times will you need to be told before you will stand up to prevent your own destruction?’
‘We will need to discuss this further, and privately,’ Garbhan snapped. He stood up, his fingertips still resting on the table. ‘You are dismissed. Guards, escort them to the holding rooms and make sure they do not leave.’
Guards appeared at each side and behind us. I hadn’t even seen them in the room. None of us was particularly inclined to struggle, so we went with them quietly. I recognised the room they took us to, of course. I had spent a whole year crawling around these tunne
ls and caves. I didn’t know why I bothered to try and get them to save themselves. They had brought me nothing but pain and suffering. What did I care if they were wiped out?
Aoife was annoyed, though I could hardly blame her. She had probably spent quite some time drafting that speech, trying to build a relationship with the Librarians that would bear fruit for the Empire. Then I blundered in, gave a speech about the destruction of the city, the decimation of their Order, and the end of everything they had worked for the last three hundred years. I certainly hadn’t made any friends in the room.
‘You fool!’ Aoife cried, rounding on me the minute the door closed behind us. ‘You fool, you have damned us all!’ It was like she was so mad she couldn’t think of a name terrible enough to call me, so she fell back on old standards.
She rounded on me, raising her arms to strike me. Caradoc grabbed her arm from behind and pulled her away from me. ‘Get your hands off me, you animal!’
‘Not until I’m sure that you’re not going to hurt anyone,’ Caradoc gritted. ‘Get control of yourself. This isn’t over yet.’
‘You have no idea what you have done here, you piece of filth!’ It wasn’t entirely clear from the epithet whether she was talking to me or him. ‘You know nothing about diplomacy. You may as well have ridden in on the dragon’s back. The Librarians are the most powerful magi in the world. If we don’t have their cooperation then we are all doomed, every last one of us, every person in the Thousand Counties. We are all dead now, because of you. If I killed you now, it would only be a matter of anticipating the inevitable.’
The guard sat in the corner of the room and smirked, making himself comfortable on a chair but keeping a good grip on his spear. I had a pretty good idea if Aoife tried to kill me, while Caradoc would intervene, the guard would just sit by and allow it to happen. No one likes a bearer of bad news. I wondered about Hot Stuff, and the vision he had mentioned. While I knew that I was telling the truth about the future, I wondered if he had really had a vision, or if he was just playing some game.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I muttered. ‘I’m getting out of here.
‘You can’t do that!’ The guard levered himself out of his chair in a hurry. He hadn’t expected that any of us would actually try to escape. Of course, we weren’t prisoners, but if we tried to escape then we had the option of becoming prisoners.
‘Just watch me,’ I snapped. I strode to the door and pulled it open.
Aoife sat back to watch me, just as I’d suggested. I suppose she thought this was a good way of killing me as any. The objective was to get rid of me. It turned out all she had to do was to wind me up and I’d killed myself. She’d even enjoyed it.
Caradoc leapt forward and tackled the guard from behind. ‘Emer, for God’s sake, stop!’
But I’d had enough. Being in Cairnagorn freaked me out to the point of no return and I was going to get out of here, if it meant I had to die to do it.
I knew where I was. I turned down the corridor towards the path that would lead to outside. The guard couldn’t get away from Caradoc, but Caradoc couldn’t stop him shouting. I still heard the guard yelling after I left the room, calling for the other guards to apprehend me. They appeared quickly, coming out of places that I had never considered would be a guard post. I was used to Cairnagorn being deserted. I was used to Cairnagorn holding only one monster.
I was fast, though. I was used to running, and running for my life gave me great incentive. I reached the enormous stone doors that closed off the tunnel from the outside world. The guards yelled behind me, ‘She won’t be able to get through the doors!’
Little did they know. As I ran, I raised my arms and opened my palms towards the stone doors. In my time, the door opened reluctantly, slowed by more than a dozen years of neglect. Now that it was well maintained, I misjudged the amount of power I would need to open it.
The door not only opened, it flung itself backwards so fast that it hit the wall of the tunnel behind it. There was a crash so loud that the whole tunnel shook and a crack appeared in the door from top to bottom. Behind me, the guard shouted out in fear. They yelled for Librarians, like children calling for their mummies.
I kept running, skidding around the corner beyond the gates. There, standing calmly in the middle of the tunnel was Hot Stuff. I had to stop so suddenly I nearly ran into him. He put his hands up to catch my shoulders.
‘Emer, Emer, Emer,’ he drawled while I tried to get my feet back under me. ‘You always were so predictable.’
Hot Stuff steered me swiftly to another set of rooms, not so deep within the mountain as the holding room had been. It opened out onto a private courtyard full of perfumed flowers, a fountain dancing in its centre. He must be nearly as important as he thought he was.
When the guards caught up with us, he just waved them away, and they went. I didn’t feel frightened of him. I suppose I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose. If he did anything that frightened me, I was going to kill him ‒ and/or myself.
Once the door was closed behind us, Hot Stuff went to a sideboard and poured a glass of wine. ‘Would you like some?’ He turned to me with a polite expression on his face.
‘No, thanks,’ I positioned myself so that I was between him and the door to the courtyard.
‘Water? Juice, perhaps?’
‘No, thanks.’
He laughed. ‘Emer, you don’t think I’m going to poison you, are you?’
‘I wouldn’t put anything past a creepyguardian.’
‘Creepyguardian?’
‘I told you I had a vision of the future,’ I said, edging closer to the courtyard. ‘In my vision, the Librarians are no longer even called Librarians, since the Library no longer exists.’
He laughed again and I wished that he’d stop doing that. It was probably supposed to be charming, but it was nothing short of creepy. He sat down in an overstuffed leather armchair and indicated the chair opposite him. ‘Emer, do be my guest, sit down, relax. Nothing bad is going to happen – unless, of course, you should decide that you enjoy that kind of thing. We were always friends, you and I.’
‘I hate to be the one to break it to you mister, but we’ve never met.’ I stayed near the courtyard door, another small step closer to freedom.
‘What?’ He sat forward, looking at me closely. ‘Emer, how old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
He was still examining my face. ‘Eighteen,’ he mused. ‘Yes, I always thought eighteen was right. You only mentioned it once and that was about a hundred years ago for me.’ He took a sip of the wine, but he didn’t take his eyes off my face. ‘Actually – when was your birthday?’
‘I’m surprised you don’t know. How do you know my name?’
‘I know that your birthday is on the winter solstice. I know that every year of your life you were brought here to Cairnagorn for a new name and a new guardian and a new life. I also know, aha,’ he took another sip of wine, ‘I also know that you don’t have visions of the future. You’re from the future. And I believe I can hazard a rather accurate guess that your mother is still in the holding rooms.’
‘You have visions?’ I asked.
‘No.’ He leaned back in his chair again, but still watched me very closely. ‘I don’t have visions of the future. I tell the other Librarians that I do, simply because there is no other way to explain how I know what is going to happen.’
‘So, it’s some psychic thing, then? Not very different from having visions, is it?’
He laughed again and I wished like blazes he’d stop it. ‘Emer, I’m not psychic. I’m a mage, the same as you are, though at my age I have had a good deal more practice. I do not have visions, neither do I have feelings about the future. I know what will happen because I am from the future, the same as you are.’
I took a few cautious steps forward and sat in the chair had indicated. ‘Did you come through the Portal too?’
‘Certainly I did. I went through the Portal with you, in fact
. As I’m coming to realise, however, that hasn’t happened for you yet. You are still the, shall we say, relatively innocent Emer that you were when you walked around the ruins of Cairnagorn holding Elisabeth’s hand. You and I will meet soon, despite the fact that we have already met today.’ He grinned. ‘Believe me, time travel gets very confusing.’
‘Do you know how I can use the Portal to get back to Elisabeth?’
‘Ha! Don’t you think if I knew how to use the Portal to go to a particular time, I wouldn’t be back in my home, supping at the excesses of the White Queen’s table? I had a lot to lose when I followed you through that Portal and it has taken me a hundred years to grow comfortable again.’
‘I have to get back to Elisabeth. She’s in danger.’ I didn’t mention David, but I wasn’t going to leave him with Maldwyn, not now that I was taking control of my life.
‘You don’t say.’ He took another sip of his wine. ‘It’s one thing to be carried along in the river of time, it’s another thing learning how to swim upstream. There was only ever one person who could move against the current of time, and that was the person who created the Portal. If you want to be able to control the Portal to go back to a time of your own choosing, you will need Umbra.’
‘The hero? How am I supposed to get hold of a mage who’s been dead for five hundred years?’
‘Umbra, while perhaps not precisely dead, is not precisely alive either. Before she died, Umbra transferred her spirit, her soul, if you will, into a crystal. That crystal, in accordance with her wishes, was affixed to a shaft of silver, turning it into the most powerful wand in the world.’
‘Oh,’ I sighed, leaning back in the chair which was actually very comfortable. ‘If no one knows where it is, what use is the wand to me? Anyway, the Empress has nominated me as her heir. Until the dragon is defeated, I’m not going to be able to move one step to the left or one step to the right without her permission.’
He put the wine glass onto a small table next to him and leaned forward. ‘If your dear Empress believes that the Librarians can help her in the fight against the dragon, then surely it would be an easy thing to convince her that to obtain the wand would strengthen her power and achieve the victory.’
