The Destruction of the Books

by Mel Odom

  But Juhg couldn’t stop himself. He had lived as a slave for fourteen years before Grandmagister Lamplighter had freed him and brought him back to Greydawn Moors. “Librarians offer so much more than merely readers and writers. They hold storehouses of knowledge, hold keys to information that many would consider to be magic, and ways of understanding that can give people access to worlds. Real worlds as well as made-up ones. Where would civilization be without biographies, volumes on agriculture, sailing, and construction? Where would the imagination be without the heroes in stories? Where would the heart be without passionate tales of love and loneliness and sacrifice?”

  “Avast there, matey,” Raisho said. “It’s not me ye’re in need of convincin’.”

  Juhg slumped back in the rickety wooden chair. He nearly tumbled off the worn cushion his height had forced him to use in order to reach his meal. “I thought the captain was an ally.”

  “The cap’n is an ally.” Raisho scowled. “Ye’ll find none truer than Cap’n Attikus an’ the crew of Windchaser.” He paused. “He just weren’t very happy about takin’ on someone so … so…”

  “Short?” Juhg supplied with just a hint of sarcasm to point out his friend’s poor attempt to excuse the sea captain.

  “New to the sea,” Raisho said.

  “I am a skilled sailor,” Juhg protested. “I learned my skills aboard One-Eyed Peggie when the Grandmagister returned from the mainland all those years ago.”

  “The cap’n didn’t know that.”

  Juhg stopped for a moment. His advent to Greydawn Moors had been almost thirty years before. As a dweller, he was still young, not even of middle age before he hit his fiftieth birthday. But thirty years was most of a lifetime to a human. Few humans probably still lived who remembered the story, and humans rarely lived on Greydawn Moors.

  “You’re right,” Juhg said.

  “Cap’n Attikus,” Raisho pointed out, “likes to run a tight ship.”

  Juhg knew that as well. During the past few weeks, Captain Attikus had impressed the dweller.

  “Even with what I said,” Raisho went on, “I doubt the cap’n would have taken ye on if’n it hadn’t been fer the Grandmagister talkin’ to him.”

  “Wick…” Juhg caught himself using the Grandmagister’s name with such familiar abandon and stopped at once. “The Grandmagister put in a good word for me?”

  “Aye.” Raisho nodded. “Several, in fact.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I don’t think either the Grandmagister or the cap’n wanted much known about it. If’n I hadn’t been aboardship finishin’ up some sail an’ riggin’ repairs, why, I wouldn’ta known it either.”

  Juhg pondered that. Grandmagister Lamplighter had acted loath to lose him from the Vault. Was that an act? Was I really a mistake that he had made but couldn’t admit to? The questions pounded at Juhg’s mind. During the nearly thirty years he had been at the Great Library and studied under the Grandmagister and the other First Level Librarians, he had never felt as if he belonged.

  “Don’t get all caught up in them names an’ the circumstances of how ye came to be aboard Windchaser,” Raisho said. “Ye’re aboard her, an’ ye’re doin’ a powerful good job of mendin’ sail an’ keepin’ the ship tidy. An’ Cook? Why, Cook says he’s never in all his days had a finer helper. Nor one who knew more recipes than him.”

  “That was a gracious compliment,” Juhg acknowledged. Not that Cook would ever bestow it upon me.

  “It were.” Raisho nodded, obviously feeling the conversation was once more safely out of treacherous waters. But being Raisho, he couldn’t leave it there. “What I was a-gettin’ at was that maybe ye ain’t as done with that part of yer life as ye thought ye was.”

  “I’m done,” Juhg said decisively, but he felt the declaration was more for himself than Raisho. Still, his inner turmoil would subside somewhat if his friend made no further mention of the Library.

  “The Grandmagister, why, he told Cap’n Attikus that ye was a natural to … to that trade. He seemed right sad to lose ye.”

  “And I was sad to lose him,” Juhg admitted. “But my life is not there on that island. After everything I’ve been through, Raisho, after everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve read, I want a bigger world.” He shook his head and lowered his voice in shame. “Librarians aren’t supposed to want that. They’re supposed to want books and tea and the occasional bowl of pipeweed.”

  “Mayhap,” Raisho said, nodding.

  “I can’t do that.” But he had wished that he could, pleaded with himself to be happy with a small life. He used the search for his missing family only as an excuse to leave, and guilt stung him over that. “Greydawn Moors is just too … too … small.”

  Raisho nodded for a moment and took up a chunk of pricklemelon. “Seems to me that the Grandmagister gets around a lot fer a dweller. Never heard of a Grandmagister afore him that left the island.”

  “Never,” Juhg agreed. Grandmagister Edgewick Lamplighter had been like no other head of the Vault of All Known Knowledge who had ever gone before. Juhg didn’t know the reason for all of Wick’s adventures to the mainland, but he knew the reason for some of them.

  When he had found Juhg, Grandmagister Lamplighter had been seeking the truth to the legend of the Jade Basilisk. Both of them had barely escaped from the Arena of a Thousand Blades only a half step ahead of death. If Cap’n Hallekk and the crew of One-Eyed Peggie hadn’t been waiting along the coast, they would have never gotten free of the Darkling Lands and mad King Kuthbart.

  Thinking of Grandmagister Lamplighter put a lump in Juhg’s throat. Juhg had been taken from his parents at a young age when the goblin slavers had descended upon their village. He hadn’t truly known them, other than to remember them. But he had gotten to know Grandmagister Lamplighter.

  When Raisho said that Juhg was like the son that the Grandmagister had never had, Juhg knew that wasn’t true. More accurately, Juhg was thought of as kindly as a favored nephew. The Grandmagister had several of those, as well as nieces, and he was a favorite uncle among his family.

  Knowing that the Grandmagister thought so highly of him had made leaving the Great Library harder. Still, Juhg had loaded his pack on the night that he said he would, and had made his way down to the Yondering Docks in a borrowed wagon the following morning. When Windchaser slid out into the harbor under the pull of the breezes, Juhg had spotted the Grandmagister among the crowd that had turned out to see the ship off.

  “Mayhap Grandmagister Lamplighter wasn’t cut out to stay on the island neither,” Raisho stated.

  “If Grandmagister Lamplighter would have had his druthers,” Juhg said with full confidence, “he would have been content to stay on the island, in the Vault, and visit Hralbomm’s Wing on a regular basis.”

  Hralbomm’s Wing was where the Librarians kept all the epic poems and works of fiction in the Great Library. The Grandmagister had admitted that in his youth, before his promotion to Second Level Librarian, he had spent far too much time among those stacks. But Juhg knew that the Grandmagister still spent considerable time among those books.

  Juhg did not feel the same about the romances and lighthearted adventures captured between the covers of those books. He had lived the harsh lives of those who had suffered in those tales, and he did not like having to relive those experiences in any form. Heroes, in the real world, didn’t often come along.

  “All I’m sayin’,” Raisho said in a quiet voice as he glanced over his shoulder, “is that mayhap ye keepin’ yer hand in at writin’ an’ such ain’t a bad thing.”

  “Unless I get caught at it and put to death for it, of course,” Juhg reminded.

  “Well, that’s like not to happen, what with me keepin’ a weather eye peeled on ye.”

  Juhg started to point out Raisho’s engagement with making a profit when he’d fallen victim to the lure of the clean white pages of the journal. During the long days of the voyage across the Blood-Soaked Sea, espec
ially after seeing some of the monsters that lived in the murky purple-red depths that he had not before seen, Juhg had crafted himself a book. He’d boiled rags for the paper himself down in the ship’s galley, then cured and cut the paper. Making ink was an easy task.

  And after that, he’d willingly filled page after page with drawings and narrative about the things he’d seen and done.

  All of that was at the tip of his tongue when Herby entered the Broken Tiller with a concerned look on his young face and the flea-infested spider monkey riding across his shoulders. Juhg only hoped that some merchant or sailor or longshoreman who had just found his purse picked clean wasn’t a step or two behind the pair.

  2

  The Thief’s Story

  A pensive look pinched Herby’s features. He was eleven years old, little more than a child by human standards. Unkempt dark hair stuck out all around his head. His brown eyes were set too close together and he had a pointed nose. Despite the length of time he’d spent at sea, his skin remained fair and always looked fresh-burned.

  Most people passing him by on any street in a well-to-do city would have thought him nothing more than a beggar boy out trying to earn a few coins to escape another beating at the orphanage where he lived. The stained and worn breeches, cloak, and shirt he wore promoted that illusion. He went barefoot, not because he had no shoes—Juhg knew the boy did—but because climbing was easier with his feet unencumbered. The thick calluses on Herby’s feet proved resistant to the cracked oyster shells that covered the tavern’s earthen floor. Mud caked the boy’s toes and spattered up his legs and breeches.

  His spider monkey was a gaunt thing hardly as big as one of the cats that roamed Windchaser’s decks and holds as mousers. Charcoal gray fur covered the monk’s skinny, lanky body, but left an oblong of white fur around his pink-ash flat face. One rear paw was white as well, but the other three were clad in dark fur. His tail darted back and forth across Herby’s narrow shoulders.

  Herby called his amiable companion Gust, but that had been shortened from the crew’s appellation, “that disgustin’ monkey,” when they complained to the captain about the beast. Gust also suited him because when a sailor got aggravated at him and started throwing things, the monk would be gone as quickly as loose canvas carried off by a gust of wind. There were other names the sailors called the monkey, but the captain would allow none of the names, no matter how hard Herby tried to get by with it. On occasion, Herby still called the monkey by the foul names the ship’s crew had given the beast, but never within Captain Attikus’ hearing.

  “Boy,” Raisho growled, scowling mightily. “What have ye done?”

  Juhg knew that the bald bartender behind the scarred counter kept a covert eye on them.

  “Nothin’,” Herby shot back as if offended. He snuffled and wiped at his nose with a grimy hand. The spider monkey mimicked the gesture, snuffling even louder than the boy. “I ain’t done nothin’.”

  “Cap’n Attikus,” Raisho said, “might be somewhat soft in the head over ye, but I ain’t, boy. Ye get caught stealin’ so much as a pie here in this town, why, a hangman’ll stretch yer neck fer ye. An’ I’ll let ’em.”

  “I ain’t done nothin’,” Herby repeated as Raisho continued to stare harshly.

  On his shoulder, the spider monkey stood and shook his tiny fist at Raisho, raising his voice in furious chittering. Gust looked as though he was set to leap from Herby’s shoulder and launch into a blistering attack on Raisho. Some of the tavern patrons deep in their cups laughed at the monk’s screeching antics and called out encouragement to the creature.

  Juhg sank back into the shadows with the tavern wall at his back. Going there to eat as a patron in spite of the fact that he was a dweller was one thing, but drawing extra attention could prove even more dangerous.

  “I don’t believe ye,” Raisho declared.

  Herby’s lower lip stuck out petulantly. “Wasn’t ye I come here to see, Raisho.” He nodded toward Juhg. “’Twas the little dweller.”

  Little? Juhg thought, knowing he was almost the same height as the boy when he drew himself up. Curiosity scrambled through him. He remembered the teachings of Irnst Voggal, one of the great body language experts who had specialized in haggling and was the author of Quivers and Gestures: The Secret Language of Successful Trade and Barter, whom he had studied in the Vault before leaving Greydawn Moors. According to the passages and examples in that tome, Herby’s widened eyes and careful focus were classic examples of a person wanting to close a deal.

  “Ye’d best be a-watchin’ yer mouth an’ yer manners,” Raisho warned.

  Gust stood to his full height on Herby’s shoulder. The monk clutched the boy’s hair in his tiny fist and shook his other hand at Raisho as he yammered in full voice.

  “Juhg,” Herby said in a soft voice that carried no farther than the immediate table, “there’s something I should tell ye, but this tavern, why, it ain’t the place fer it. Not fer none of it if’n we want to live.”

  Juhg hesitated only for a moment. The natural curiosity of a dweller possessed him, but he lacked a lot of the caution that seemed consistently paired to that trait. He’d lost some of his fears while in servitude to the goblins. Waiting for his death every day in the mines or at the end of a barbed whip had worn that dread of death from his mind and flesh, given way to an acceptance that such a thing might occur at any time. Occasional trips with Grandmagister Lamplighter to the mainland had worn away other fears.

  Raisho looked at Juhg.

  Making his decision, propelled by his curiosity and Herby’s earnestness, Juhg nodded. “We’ll go outside.” He produced a waterproof cloth and wrapped choice bits of food from his plate. As a dweller, he hated to see a meal go unfinished. Especially now that he was back on the mainland and less in control of his life than he had been in decades.

  Eyeing his ale mug, Raisho made an obvious decision not to pursue the drink after being chastised. He pushed up from his chair, causing the spider monkey to lean back fearfully. One of the animal’s forearms wrapped under Herby’s chin and around his throat as he hid behind the boy’s head.

  “Disgustin’ monk,” Raisho snarled.

  Tucking his pouch of food into his cloak, Juhg followed Herby back through the crowd. His mind chafed at the possibilities the boy’s appearance represented. Although Captain Attikus liked the boy, Herby seldom brought good news to the crew.

  And why would Herby come to me instead of Captain Attikus? Juhg wondered. Suspicion occurred to him because of his dweller nature, but pursuit of hidden meanings was his through his Librarian training.

  * * *

  The wind outside the Broken Tiller blew crisp and clean from the north. Chill mist rose from the Sea of Frozen Teeth out in the harbor, named so because four months out of the year icebergs drifted down constantly from the northern reaches during the spring when the Frozen Ocean thawed, and peppered Juhg’s face and hands like the pecking of tiny birds’ beaks. The breeze washed away the stink of pipeweed, stale ale, and food that clung to the dweller’s clothing from the tavern. Already growing cold, he pulled his traveling cloak a little more tightly about his shoulders.

  Fur ruffled by the wind, Gust quickly clambered beneath Herby’s loose cloak. A moment later, the monk turned and thrust his face out, obviously curious. Light from the oil lantern mounted on the tavern wall beside the door behind Juhg turned the little beast’s eyes the bright orange of Vendorian coins.

  Rickety wooden stairs zigzagged twenty feet up the side of the rocky outcrop that held the tavern above the broken reefs that encircled the port area. The Broken Tiller perched near the water’s edge. Only a narrow lip of rock, little more than an animal’s run, jutted at the bottom of the twenty-foot drop. The tide exhumed the bedrock beneath the lip, hollowing away the loose soil and creating small caverns that echoed with the booming splash.

  No level ground truly existed in Kelloch’s Harbor. The town builders had hung, perched, jammed, and piled their busine
sses and homes in the crags and broken spaces between the twisted shards of the Razor Mountains. None of the larger cities or trade guilds dared follow a pirate ship into the port for fear of pirates attacking in the narrow confines of the harbor.

  From a distance out at sea, the civilized places—and that, Juhg thought after seeing the place, required callous disregard of the term—pocked into Kelloch’s Harbor looked like a collection of flotsam and jetsam that had washed up on the craggy beach from a flotilla of dead ships. The builders had used few fresh-cut timbers. When Juhg had arrived in the predawn hours that morning, the businesses and houses had been dark. Now lanterns ensconced in hurricane glass and flickering fireplaces devouring driftwood and firewood hauled from the other side of the mountains lit those places.

  Like glimmerworms coiled in the empty sockets of a jumbled pile of skulls, Juhg couldn’t help thinking with a chill that cut more deeply than the howling winds. From time to time, he realized that having a good vocabulary and an imagination to match were detrimental to a feeling of security.

  “All right, then,” Raisho growled to Herby. “Let’s have it. I don’t fancy standin’ around out here freezin’ meself stupid.”

  Herby wiped at his runny nose and snuffled, echoed a moment later by the monk. “It’s important, Raisho. Unbeliefable important.”

  Raisho hissed angrily between his teeth. Gray vapor spewed into the air before him, but the breeze ripped it away.

  “It is cold out here,” Juhg said in a reasonable voice before his friend could give vent to his temper. And dangerous. Juhg watched the shadows below them constantly, wondering when one of the regular denizens of Kelloch’s Harbor would take it upon himself to come up and rob them at sword’s point. Thankfully, the rickety stairs that swayed in the wind rendered such a venture dangerous for a would-be robber as well. And Raisho was big.

  “It’s a goblin ship,” Herby said.

  Lifting his head, feeling the old fear return to him in a blaze, Juhg gazed out into the harbor. He took an instinctive step back and bumped into the tavern wall behind him as he sought deeper shadow.