The Destruction of the Books

by Mel Odom

  The dwarven pirates scrambled up and made for the door immediately. Despite the fact that he was a bird, Critter enjoyed all the rank and privileges of a member of the crew. Currently he served as Third Mate under Captain Hallekk.

  Critter turned his one-eyed attention to Juhg. “Squawk! Ye get movin’, too, ye mangy cur!” The rhowdor had few true friends on this ship, but he was a fine Third Mate, proving himself both irascible and unyielding. “Cap’n needs ever’ hand. Ever’ able body he can get. We’re even takin’ dwellers.”

  Juhg capped his inkwell, placed his quill into the box of writing instruments he had, closed his book and tied it shut, then shoved everything into the waterproof rucksack hanging from the back of his chair with his traveling cloak. He pulled on the cloak, then hoisted the rucksack over his shoulder.

  “Ye think ye remember how to handle yerself?” the rhowdor challenged.

  “Yes,” Juhg answered, loath to get into an argument with the mean-spirited bird. “It hasn’t been overlong since I was aboard this ship.”

  “Then why are ye here a-jabberin’ to me when ye should be topside?”

  Exasperated, tense, and fatigued from not sleeping well and worrying about the Grandmagister’s whereabouts for the last month, Juhg stared at the short-tempered and unkind bird. He was tired of getting pushed around. For the last month, Craugh the wizard had kept Juhg with his nose buried in work, penning one book and making copies of it. The wizard had also ducked every question regarding how the Grandmagister had ended up in the hands of their enemies at the battle for Greydawn Moors.

  More to the point, Juhg was tired of carrying around the guilt that he was more to blame for the Grandmagister’s predicament than any of the others. Perhaps Edgewick Lamplighter and Craugh had schemed together to put the Grandmagister in a position of vulnerability, but Juhg had cost the Grandmagister his way out by getting captured and needing rescue himself. The Grandmagister hadn’t hesitated and had immediately given Juhg the potion that had gotten him free of the goblinkin ship. One-Eyed Peggie had swooped in and picked him up from the sea almost immediately.

  But the Grandmagister had been left trapped with his foes. The three ships had made straightaway for the mainland, toward the South where the goblinkin forces were strongest. Alone and in dangerous waters, One-Eyed Peggie and her crew of dwarven pirates hadn’t been able to effect the Grandmagister’s rescue.

  Then again, with Craugh not talking to him much over the past month, Juhg wasn’t even sure that was the plan.

  “What are ye a-starin’ at?” the rhowdor demanded.

  Juhg didn’t know what to say. The bird didn’t deserve all the rancor he felt compelled to unleash on him.

  “Keep it up,” Critter threatened, “just keep it up an’ I’ll peck yer eyes out for ye, I will.”

  Ignoring the bird, knowing that he could never win an argument with Critter—or, if he did, that the bird would never admit it—Juhg headed for the door.

  One-Eyed Peggie lurched again, and this time the sound of a timber cracking shot through the waist. The report was enough to cause a sailing man’s stomach to knot.

  Caught off-balance, Juhg flailed for the table. The table, like the benches around it, was secured to the floor by trunnels. The wooden nails made certain the furniture would not move. He fell across the table hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs.

  Critter narrowly avoided being flattened. He ran awkwardly across the table on his mismatched legs, flapping his wings and cursing the whole way. His fork pegleg slipped out from under him suddenly and he fell in a rolling tangle of feathers. Crimson and yellow down puffed out around him. He flared his wings at the last second and took to the air.

  The ship lurched back the other way as she was hammered once more. Critter banged into the wall and went down with an undignified plop. He cursed terribly and got himself up once more. He rubbed a wing on his head and his good eye squinted in pain.

  “What’s going on?” Juhg demanded as he righted himself. The ship wasn’t striking something. He knew that now. Something was striking the pirate ship.

  “Ye’ll find out, dweller.” The rhowdor flapped for the doorway. “Just ye hurry topside. There’s things to be done, an’ scribblin’ in them books ain’t gonna much help keep ol’ Peggie afloat.”

  The ship lurched again, twisting violently as she fought the water, the wind, and whatever was hitting her. Critter sailed into a wall, struck his head on a lantern, and cursed in a manner that would have made even the most callous dwarven pirate aboard the ship blush.

  With the rucksack hanging over his shoulder, Juhg made his way through the hallway to the ladder leading up to the deck. Dwarven pirates ran through the waist, already carrying out Captain Hallekk’s orders.

  Has it come to this, then? Juhg wondered. Have we come all this way only to be sunk in unfriendly waters by the mainland?

  He tried to put the bitter and depressing thoughts out of his mind. But he couldn’t. He knew that back in Greydawn Moors people died every day while defending their island home and the remnant of the Great Library from the goblinkin ships that remained lurking in the Blood-Soaked Sea.

  And all he’d done was make three copies of a book no one might see. If he hadn’t been trapped aboard One-Eyed Peggie and hadn’t felt so responsible for the Grandmagister’s current situation, he wouldn’t have stayed. The feeling of futility filling him was one of the reasons he’d tried to leave the Vault of All Known Knowledge and his life as a First Level Librarian. Only the book he’d found with Ertonomous Dron had pulled him back to the island.

  All those lives wasted, Juhg thought bitterly, thinking of the sailors aboard Windchaser who had died to acquire that book, only to deliver a trap into the Library.

  It was too much to live with during the time he worked on the books. All while they helplessly pursued the goblinkin ship that had taken the Grandmagister captive during the battle for Greydawn Moors. So far, the three goblinkin ships had remained together, too strong for the dwarven pirates to take, but neither did the goblin captains know that they were followed by the mystic eyeball that gave One-Eyed Peggie her name. The monster’s eyeball, taken by Peggie herself (who had been one-legged), had the power of watching over every sailor who crewed aboardship.

  “Are we holed?” Juhg asked one of the passing pirates who hurried toward the hold that led to the cargo area with an armful of tools.

  “She’s cracked,” the pirate admitted. He was scarred and thick, a sailing man who’d seen more than his share of rough seas and ill luck. “We’re takin’ on water, but we’ll get her shipshape again soon enough. Long as that beastie don’t find a way to smash us to pieces first.”

  “What beast?” Juhg asked. The Blood-Soaked Sea was filled with all manner of creatures.

  The pirate waved him off, then dropped down the hold.

  Feeling the impulse to go see for himself how bad the damage was, then reconsidering because he didn’t know enough to help and because he really didn’t want to know how bad things were if they were bad, Juhg pulled himself up the simple wooden ladder.

  Rain splashed his face before he reached the deck. The world was dark gray overhead and dull gray all around him. Dwarven pirates ran along One-Eyed Peggie’s deck wearing hooded rain slickers and carrying harpoons.

  When had it started raining? Juhg didn’t know. He’d been committed to writing down everything he could remember about Imarish, the city where the Grandmagister had left something, he’d said, for Juhg to find.

  Craugh the wizard had insisted that be done so others could perhaps find the something the Grandmagister had left there for him in case he got killed along the way. The statement, especially while on a sea full of monsters frenzied by blood, hadn’t offered Juhg any comfort. But Craugh, as always, was a rocky shoal of pragmatism.

  “All hands keep a sharp lookout!” Critter crowed from the mid ’yards. “Stick ’im in the eye if ye gets the chance! That thrice-blasted beast won’t like that no
ne, I’ll warrant!”

  Juhg gazed toward the stern bridge, thinking he would see Hallekk or Craugh there. Instead, only the helmsman stood at the great wheel. A dozen dwarven pirates flanked him, all of them peering down into the swirling gray-green water that surrounded them.

  Thick fog pressed upon them, flitting in layers across One-Eyed Peggie’s rain-slick deck. Juhg could scarcely see either end of the ship. Lanterns were lit fore and aft so that she might be seen by other ships. However, getting seen was one of the last things anyone aboard the pirate ship wished for. They were in dangerous waters. Goblinkin in their stolen vessels and true human pirates sailed these seas, always searching for the valuable trade shipments the south mainland made with the north.

  “Dreezil,” a familiar voice barked, “do ye see anythin’? Anythin’ at all?”

  “No, Cap’n Hallekk. I see water boilin’, but no hide nor hair of no creature.” Dreezil stood watch in the crow’s nest high above the deck. He was lost in the thick fog, and Juhg didn’t think the young dwarf could even see the deck from where he was.

  Another blow struck One-Eyed Peggie, rolling her over to starboard. Again, the impact came from below the waterline. Juhg thought about the crew down in the hold working to repair the cracked timber. How fast were they taking on water? He remembered the three times he’d tramped through rising water to help seal a puncture in the cargo hold of a ship. None of those experiences had been pleasant. Twice the ship had gone down despite their best efforts, and Juhg had never gone down once himself.

  “Well,” Cap’n Hallekk bawled in frustration, “it ain’t gone away, now has it? It’s still knockin’ us about like we was a child’s toy. There’s a monster down there, an’ I want it found.”

  Holding on to the railing, getting more soaked by the minute, Juhg made his way forward. The ship rolled slowly from side to side as she recovered her balance.

  On the forward deck, Hallekk stood braced and ready with a harpoon in one massive hand. The dwarven captain was nearly as broad as he was tall, carrying massive shoulders and standing a few inches taller than most dwarves, though still shorter than most humans or elves. His fierce beard trailed down to his belly, woven with bits of yellowed ivory carved into the shapes of fish and other sea creatures. Gold hoops hung from his ears. Scars marked his face and arms, testifying to the long and violent years he had put in as a Blood-Soaked Sea pirate. The pirates’ reputations were often earned with a weapon and bravery.

  When the Builders had first caused the island to be raised from the sea floor so they could hide the Great Library there, they’d also set up lines of defense to prevent its eventual discovery. The first and most fearsome had been the monsters they’d loosed in the waters, and the second had been the volunteers who had taken up lives and battles under the skull and crossbones. Mainland ships stayed away from the heart of the Blood-Soaked Sea.

  Pirates were plentiful after the Cataclysm. During Lord Kharrion’s time, goblinkin had captured ships and harried rescue efforts transporting books from the mainland. But those efforts had been few because the Unity Army had known leaving the mainland to the goblin forces would have meant Darkness had prevailed. In the end, they’d managed to stand and bring the Goblin Lord down.

  Mostly, the volunteers from Greydawn Moors had been humans. Their natures, short-lived and determined ever to be wanderers and conquerors, suited the humans for the sea and the promise of combat. It helped that not a few of them gained substantial wealth from their efforts.

  Still, a few dwarves and elves had taken to ship occasionally. Generally they tended more toward joining ships for a time. Dwarves liked to go a-roving for gems and chances to work metal in different smithies, and brought back news of the mainland. Elven warders brought back new stock—plants and animals—to keep the island’s plant life and wildlife healthy and hardy. None of them talked about the island or the Great Library while they were about. All of them had families there who would be forfeit the first time they let slip the secret they protected. Strangers were seldom welcome at Greydawn Moors because strangers didn’t have much investment in the city or the people who lived there.

  But there had been exceptions. Juhg had been born on the mainland, had never known about the Great Library until Grandmagister Lamplighter had freed him from slavery at a goblinkin gem mine.

  One-Eyed Peggie was unique, the only ship in all of the Blood-Soaked Sea under a dwarven captain. Captain Hallekk had taken over the ship after Captain Farok had died in the Grandmagister’s arms during their escape from the undersea port of Callidell after tracking down and stealing the fabled Gem of Umatura. Callidell had been located in the dead heart of a volcano. The carved facets of the Gem of Umatura, once identified and translated, had unlocked a dead language in books long forgotten that had set the Grandmagister off on another whirlwind quest through the history and dangers of the mainland.

  Lurching with the motion of the rolling ship, feeling the dreaded heaviness to her now that told she was taking on water, Juhg went up the stairs to the forward deck. The task was made even harder because One-Eyed Peggie bucked and twisted instead of cleanly cutting through the sea. He gazed around, struggling to make sense of the sky and the sea since they insisted on being very nearly the same color.

  “There!” a pirate shouted, pointing to port.

  Juhg turned at once, staring out at the gray-green sea. At first he saw nothing, then his keen vision tracked the underwater movement despite the rain pinpricking his eyes and peppering the rolling mountains of the ocean.

  An undulating mass of deep purple and red scales moved beneath the sea. The mass was gone, disappearing under the ocean surface, almost as quickly as he’d spied it.

  “What was it?” Hallekk demanded.

  “A monster,” someone replied.

  “What kind of monster?”

  “Big.”

  Hallekk growled a curse as he prowled the prow. “Big? I knowed it was big. From the way it was a-smashin’ up Peggie, why I didn’t need to see it to know it was big. What I need to know is how we’re a-gonna deal with it.”

  “We can throw meat in the water. Maybe the beastie will chase the meat to the bottom an’ leave us alone.”

  Juhg stood at the back of the bridge, leaving Hallekk plenty of room to pace. The big dwarf kept the harpoon at the ready.

  “Meat won’t help,” a calm voice said. “That’s a bearded hoar-worm. You can throw every morsel of meat aboard this ship into the water and that creature won’t go break away from us. It feeds on live prey, and it lives to hunt.”

  Moving forward to peer around the triangular jib sails straining in the strong winds, Juhg spotted Craugh the wizard on the other side of the bridge.

  TOR BOOKS BY MEL ODOM

  The Rover

  The Destruction of the Books

  Hunters of the Dark Sea

  “Just as aged Bilbo Baggins gives way to a new hero, Frodo, at the start of The Lord of the Rings, so does elderly Edgewick “Wick” Lamplighter, now a Grandmagister at Great Library, leave center stage to a youthful progeny, the pint-sized Juhg, in this Tolkienesque sequel, set nearly a century later, to Odom’s The Rover (2001). In the tradition of Fritz Leiber’s immortal Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Juhg and his burly human friend, Raisho, set out on a series of fantastic adventures … The narrative moves along at a snappy pace, with much good humor, zest and color,… the magic lies in the details, where books and wizards, both good and evil, glimmer.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The battles are ferocious … As before, plenty of humor tempers the wild action.”

  —Booklist

  “Odom’s bouncy, funny, cliff-hanger adventure is perfect for the Potter crowd, with enough puns, wry asides, and satirical send-ups to amuse Tolkien fans.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

 
; THE DESTRUCTION OF THE BOOKS

  Copyright © 2004 by Mel Odom

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 0-765-34649-4

  EAN 978-0765-34649-0

  First edition: July 2004

  First mass market edition: June 2005

  eISBN 9781466845961

  First eBook edition: April 2013