The Kingless Land

by Ed Greenwood

  “Don’t pull away,” she pleaded, and poured her pain into them, urging it down trembling arms as she drew in the racing tide of magic from the vanished knick-knacks and sent it raging down into them. Almost immediately she felt Sarasper steering the flow, twisting and tugging at it as he sighed out relief and satisfaction. Cool healing flooded all three of them, and its intense pleasure made them gasp, sigh, and shudder in unison.

  “If you’re all quite finished,” Hawkril growled from somewhere near at hand and yet a world away, “we’d best get on and into yon library. Folk—and mages, too—are trying to kill each other a mite too energetically.”

  Craer sprang up, all trace of harm gone, and chuckled. “When did you become so talkative, Tall and Mighty?”

  “When I saw how far it took you in life,” Hawkril growled, as they trotted through the last wisps of smoke to the library door.

  It was an oval twice as tall as even the massive armaragor, and its stone surface had once been sculpted to present some sort of elaborate face or scene to the world. Unfortunately, years of weather had cracked and worn most of that impressiveness away; it was impossible now to say for certain what the door had looked like or proclaimed.

  “Looks like a tomb,” Hawkril grunted.

  Craer lifted an eyebrow. “A tomb for words?” he commented archly—and then, not bothering about traps or stealth, swung wide the door, and darted in.

  It must have been counterweighted and finely carved indeed; the huge slab of stone pivoted easily and without a sound. The procurer had ducked into the gloom within crouching low, and Hawkril knew his first act, if what was within allowed it, would have been to spring sideways, out of the way of the door. Probably to the right.

  “Duck low and go left,” he grunted to Sarasper and Embra. “Nothing clever.”

  The armaragor went last, casting a quick look around at the various battles raging in the ruins. Had the door banged closed behind him a single breath later than it did, he’d have seen two wizards staggering along through the rubble toward him, their robes held up like aprons before them around ungainly bundles of weaponry.

  “Swords are bebolten heavy,” Markoun snarled, stumbling for the sixty-third time. “Can’t we just drop them?”

  “No,” Klamantle snapped, his eyes on the door ahead. “Hurry.” A moment later he caught his foot on a loose stone and fell headlong with a mighty crash.

  “Yes,” he amended grimly, staggering to his feet without any of his scavenged weapons before Markoun could open his mouth to say anything. “We’ll have to move quietly in there, I’ll be bound.”

  Markoun shrugged, grinned, and let his own weapons spill out onto the ground in a rushing clatter. Bound would be a good state for Klamantle—bound and gagged, even better. That thought carried him right to the door, and Klamantle’s gentle opening of it and gesture for him to enter.

  Enter yawning darkness whence the Lady Silvertree and her three armed companions had gone, only moments ago. Markoun swallowed, came to a sudden halt—and earned himself a hard look from Klamantle.

  He smiled, shrugged, and stepped into the waiting darkness. Ready to hurl deadly magic? Of course. As always. Might I have a target, please?

  * * *

  “Spread out and keep low and quiet—but stray not far,” Craer murmured in their ears and watched as they did his bidding. Crouching silent and motionless in the gloom, the Band of Four peered around.

  It was like a vast, dark cavern, low overhead where they stood, and rising to dusty, cobwebbed heights ahead. Craer held out his hands for silence, and the Four kept as quiet as they could, Sarasper jamming two fingers up his nostrils to quell a sneeze.

  Dust and the reek of mold were everywhere. This must be the library of the dead wizard Ehrluth, unless there’d been other domed libraries in Indraevyn of old. On all sides of the crouching adventurers were bookshelves … empty bookshelves.

  Dark, smooth spans of fluted wood, their runs broken by stone columns. Curving, concentric circles of shelves, pierced by straight aisles that radiated from a circle of bare tiles under the center of the dome—where six pillars of faintly glowing air stretched from floor to the high ceiling—to many sets of outer doors. Closed, dusty, dark. Yet somehow aware, waiting. Something small—a pebble?—fell or clattered, very faintly, in the distance; the sound echoed around the dome. Indeed, they were not alone.

  This might just be their waiting tomb, a deathtrap to swallow them all with ease. The Four exchanged glances and then began to silently point at things in the gloom that seemed most interesting … or ominous.

  Those central pillars of light seemed too soft to be sunlight, throwing too little illumination outside their confines. There were lesser glows in the vast chamber, too—glows that moved. Slowly and silently, undulating or creeping along and down some of the shelves. Craer raised one hand in a “stay here” gesture, and then pointed at Hawkril and the door they’d come through, reminding the armaragor to be ready for other arrivals. An instant later, the procurer crept around the corner of a shelf like a supple spider and moved to where he could get a better look at the nearest glow.

  It seemed to be some sort of man-length caterpillar, or furry snake—a long, fuzzy segmented body, gleaming pale white, shot through with wandering pink veins. It looked raw, like a grave maggot or a shellfish torn out of its shell.

  Craer stared at the thing as it traveled patiently down a shelf, its head—if it was a head—waggling about in an obscene, silent questing after … what?

  Flesh? Paper? Leaves? The more he looked at it, the more it looked like a caterpillar; the most monstrous such thing he’d ever seen. Craer moved a few paces closer—and then crouched down, swiftly drew back, and went scuttling back the way he’d come.

  Embra almost put her dagger into his face when he reappeared suddenly around the corner of the shelf. She let out an indrawn breath in a trembling sigh of relief, and he gave her a grin and tapped her shoulder with a few fingers in silent reassurance.

  His words took that feeling away again. “Man in leathers, atop the shelves yon,” he murmured. “Saw me looking.”

  Sarasper drew a knife and Embra took another knick-knack into her hand; Hawkril already held steel in both hands and was looking and listening intently, head questing from the door behind them to the gloom all around.

  The ceiling hung close above the tops of the tall bookshelves around them but soared up to form the dome nearer to the center. Their eyes were getting more used to the gloom, now, and by unspoken agreement they began to move forward, half crouched and as quietly as possible.

  Fist-size spiders and what looked like centipedes the length of farm carts scuttled or perambulated silently across the floor ahead as they went … and under the shelves, where the darkness was deepest, there were many small pairs of watching eyes. They were white, glowing orbs, not the eyes of rats or mice. Ahead of them a crack as wide as a man’s hand wandered across the floor … and at some time in the past, something that left a white trail of slime, now long since dried, had crawled into or out of the fissure. The trail went wandering off through the shelves, through thick spiderwebs—and unpleasant-looking solid lumps hanging here and there in those webs. A few of the webs were quivering, as if something unseen, somewhere else, was plucking at them or struggling in their grip.

  Embra decided she really didn’t ever want to have to lie down in the library to try to sleep—at the very thought her skin seemed to crawl from slimy, or scaly, or just coldly foreign touches, all over—and she wasn’t the only one to have that thought, just then.

  Watching for men in leathers, snakes, and worse, the Four moved cautiously forward, toward the center of the dome.

  It was a vast, open area, those shafts its only brightness. In the light of their eerily serene glow, the stone vault could be seen curving up unbroken, pierced by no windows. As the four companions advanced, the glows of the shafts showed them that the inside of the dome was encircled by a balcony above where they were
now. It ran above the ranks of shelves, all around the circle, an empty ring with an ornately carved inner railing. Scrolling leaves, and soaring bird shapes, entwined with what looked like ribbons or sashes and snarling lion faces … all of stone, and obscured by thick coatings of dust. Many doors opened off the balcony, and a handful stood open. Now that they were nearer, faint light could be seen through these open doors—illuminating clouds of gently drifting dust. Three spiral stairs of slender stone, spaced around the central circle, reached from its tiles to pierce the inner balcony rail.

  The open center of the dome held only dust, cobwebs, small scatterings of rubble, and here and there small heaps of dark, dried unpleasantness where a bird or small scuttling creature had met its end, and there rotted.

  Soaring darkness; a tomb waiting here in the green wilderness above the baronies of Aglirta. A tomb wizards and their guards seemed to be converging on, only to find the secrets they sought gone, Ehrluth’s library long ago …

  “Plundered,” Embra murmured, staring all around with wondering eyes. “How many books were there in all this hall, I wonder?”

  Craer touched her wrist and put a finger to his lips warningly. As if in reply to her question, there was a scrape of an uncautious boot on stone somewhere in the shelves well around to their right—and then, off to the left, a sudden, startlingly loud commotion of steel, snarled curses, a gasp, and a heavy thud … and then silence.

  The procurer leaned close to Sarasper and Embra and murmured, “We move one row back, and then along one aisle away from here; follow Hawk.”

  He moved his hands in a sign to the armaragor, and they moved, creeping along in careful stealth. Somewhere else a door opened, and sunlight flooded briefly into the room. “By the Three—,” someone said, startlingly loud, and someone else urgently shushed the first someone.

  Urgently, but not swiftly enough. A bow twanged, there was a wet thump, and an unseen man gasped, choked, and crashed to the floor, his armor ringing. Another arrow hummed; another man fell.

  “Stars and shards!” someone else snarled, voice high with the fury born of fear, and then chanted something that could only be an incantation.

  Light bloomed in the dusty, midair heart of the dome—high, bright, and sudden. The Band of Four found themselves blinking at each other. They had just reached the new aisle, and could see that the outer door it ran to was blocked by the twisted, stunted tangle of a tree trying to grow past the ceiling. The flagstones of the floor had been heaved up at crazy angles by its hungrily coiling roots, and as they peered at what lay before them, something small, dark, and long-tailed among the roots scurried under a shelf, out of the light.

  The next aisle over must be blocked, too—much of the room above it had fallen long ago, collapsing down onto those library shelves in a large and untidy fall of stone. Stone ceiling tiles hung down, bulged and discolored, like some sort of gigantic, petrified infection. The arc of shelf leading in that direction was dark with the ashes of a long-ago fire that had been small but fierce. Hawkril and Craer exchanged glances, and the procurer led the way up their new aisle, two rows closer to the center.

  Here there were still tomes on the shelves. Embra made a little eager sound and tried to push past the procurer—but the blade of his slim sword barred her way, and even as she pressed against it, hissing her frustration at him, she saw that the books were in truth books no more, but a quivering flood of fleshy brown and black mushrooms, their spores drifting around them in a lazy, ale-hued cloud.

  The Lady of Jewels made another small sound, this one of disgust and dejection. A moment later, she almost jumped out of her skin when Hawkril’s large and heavy hand descended without warning on her shoulder.

  “If it’s books you want,” his deep growl said almost lovingly into her ear, “look into yon shafts of light—up high off the floor here, mind.”

  Embra moved to where she could see past a tangle of cobwebs, and looked … and saw. Inside each of the six glowing columns of enchanted air, hanging high out of reach of normal-size folk standing on the floor, floated an open book of massive size. “Oh,” she gasped, and started forward without thinking.

  Hawkril’s gripping hand and Craer’s raised sword reached her at about the same time—which was also when something swooped in the central darkness, there came a flash, and a figure in robes tumbled out of the high gloom, plunged past the books in their lighted shafts, and struck the floor with an ominous thud and cracking sound.

  The Silvertree sorceress swallowed in the firm grasp of the Blackgult men. Together they saw another mage come into view, darting through the air like a gigantic, wingless wasp. He peered down at one book, hanging in the light, and reached for it.

  His grasping hand seemed to pass right through it. Even as he frowned down at it in astonishment, crossbows snapped from three places among the shelves on the far side of the dome. Quarrels sped, a transfixed body jerked with a grunt, flung up its arms wildly, and slumped down, sinking swiftly out of sight.

  “By the Three,” Embra murmured, shaking herself as if emerging from an unpleasant dream. Another of the glowing caterpillar-things slunk slowly into view along shelves to their right; shelves that were empty of all but heaps of pulp dripping with mold. It had fleshy horns on its head, which curled and uncurled in constant, almost lazy motion as it undulated along. When it saw them, it reared up, as if to survey them, and then suddenly turned and slid from view, its body passing along the shelf in an impossibly long procession of palely glowing segments. The Lady of Jewels stared at those sagging heaps of discolored pulp. “What’s written, I wond—”

  There was a thump on their right, very close by, and a swift, light metallic grating or scraping. The Four barely had time to stiffen before two plate-armored figures, as tall and as broad of shoulder as Hawkril, burst around the end of a shelf. Their faces were hidden in full war helms, but their intentions were clear enough. They thrust forward the long and heavy swords in their hands as they came, jabbing the air viciously and charging swiftly enough that the air they were lancing could not help but soon contain one or more of the Band of Four.

  Hawkril hesitated not an instant but shouldered through his fellows to meet the warriors. He drove those stabbing blades aside with ringing blows of his own war sword, and in an instant the aisle was a crashing confusion of grunting men, clashing steel, and hulking warriors spinning and darting about like dancers at a revel.

  “A deadly sort of revel,” Sarasper murmured aloud, as that thought struck him, and Embra jostled him hard into a shelf.

  “Old man, how can I loose a spell if you’re—” she hissed, and then spun around with a little scream of alarm.

  The tentacles that slapped and tore at her midriff were flailing the air in front of the healer’s face by then, and he swore and backhanded them away from his throat, feeling the numbness of life-seeking magic where they touched his skin.

  Beyond the tentacles that coiled and glided in search of their deaths stood their source: a tousle-haired young man in wizards’ robes, the badge of Ornentar on his shoulder and excitement flaming in his snapping brown eyes. From his extended hand, surrounded by a roiling glow of fresh magic, the writing tentacles ran. He laughed softly as the tentacles came at Sarasper and Embra in a flailing forest and said, “Die, whoever you are—die!”

  A tentacle slapped around one of Embra’s wrists, and she shrieked and tried to pull away. Sarasper saw another of the rubbery things reaching for her face or throat and lifted his dagger to stab awkwardly at it, wishing he …

  A head lolled over the edge of a bookshelf, followed by a limp, dangling arm. Blood dripped from its fingertips as it swung gently, back and forth—and that grisly movement had barely caught Embra’s eyes when a swift shadow sprang out of the darkness above the corpse, a familiar, hurtling silhouette that plunged feetfirst into the aisle, kicking the tentacle-mage’s head sideways into a shelf.

  Bones cracked, blood flew, and the mage’s stare became glassy before he
slid down the shelves, his head leaving a dark and bloody trail in its wake. Craer landed, plucked something like a cluster of fused gems from the man’s belt—a cluster in whose depths small lights were winking, ever-faster—and peered at it.

  “Aleglarma,” he read aloud, and those inner lights burst into flames, racing to meet each other in the lambent depths. The procurer straightened and threw the egg of gems in one smooth movement, hurling it over the heads of Hawkril and his two foes into the central, open area.

  “No! You fool!” Embra screamed. “It’ll…”

  The fury of the sun seemed to burst momentarily at the base of the six light shafts, and the entire building rocked and boomed around them as the Four were flung off their feet. The two armored warriors tumbled helplessly down the aisle, through their midst.

  When the shaking and shuddering stopped, Hawkril was on his back amid the drifting dust, with a warrior atop him. Embra rushed forward with a scream, tearing at the man’s helm with her bare hands, but Craer was swifter. He drove a dagger to the hilt into the man’s neck, and then peeled him away from the armaragor, grunting with the effort.

  He needn’t have bothered. The man hung heavy and limp, and dark liquids rushed out of him as they lifted him a little off Hawkril’s chest—enough to see that the entire length of their friend’s war sword was buried in the man’s belly, where an armor plate had fallen away, and must have run up inside his body to his throat.

  “Hawkril?” Embra asked, her voice not entirely steady. “Are you—”

  “Hurt?” the armaragor growled. “Don’t think so. The blast impaled the bastard on my blade … wrist still numb…”

  There was a steely sound behind them, and the procurer and the sorceress whirled around—in time to see Sarasper calmly drive his knife hilt-deep through one eyehole of the helmed warrior who lay in a dazed and helpless heap beside the healer.

  A vast silence fell in the library then … a stillness broken only by the grunts and scrapings of Hawkril finding his feet again and feeling gingerly along his ribs. Embra took one hesitant step toward the center of the library, and then another.