by Tuson, Mark
As it turned out, the secret library, while small contained a lot more books than Peter had initially realized. In fact, there weren’t only more books in there, but there was a far wider variety of books in there than he had imagined there would be: altogether. Granted, in the week following its revelation to him, he hadn’t got round to reading a whole shelf, let alone the whole library. He had spent that week dazedly reading all the titles and introductions – those of the books which were in a language he could recognize, at any rate – and attempting to compile some crude kind of index; a habit he had acquired when doing his degree, the better and quicker to be find information on a given topic when he needed to.
The index was nearly complete after the week, or at least as complete as he could make it, given the number of books in there which had been written in either unrecognizable ancient dialects of English (‘there are letters here I don’t recognize… how the hell do I pronounce “þ?”) or else Norse, Latin (non difficile quoque), or some even more ancient – and therefore totally incomprehensible – languages and modes of writing. He was half-surprised that there wasn’t any Elvish in there, but it was only a matter of time, he joked with himself.
Eventually, he found the book Eddie had told him about; a tutor in that archaic language. As excited as he was at the prospect of learning it, once he had the tutor in his hand the excitement lost a fair amount of its edge: the book had been handwritten nearly two-hundred years beforehand, and the handwriting was an old-fashioned kind of cursive script which would in itself be something of a translation exercise. After sitting and reading at it for four solid hours one afternoon, he concluded that, rather than actually try to study from it, he would be better served by copying it afresh into another, blank, book. That way he could get used to reading that mode of handwriting, and once he had completed it he would have his own copy to study from, and afterwards to keep.
The lamp flickered three times and snuffed out. In the pitch black, Peter licked the wick with the ignition spell. It gave a single flicker and died again. He squeezed the wick in his finger and thumb. It was warm and completely dry.
‘Crap,’ he said. He always prided himself on his eloquence in these situations. He held his wand in one hand and cast a small spell to throw out some dim light from the end, and left the room, ensuring that the door was locked on his way out.
Usually, replacing oil in a lamp by hand wasn’t something that needed to be done manually; the lamps around there were generally kept supplied with oil using an adapted gas pipe system, but apparently they had learned early on that using gas as fuel for lamps in an enclosed area where a lot of magic is likely to be used might not be the wisest thing to do, and so they had returned to using oil. Using magic for lighting likewise wasn’t viable, partly because of the vague likelihood that the ambient magic could interfere with other spells, and partly because even magic had, ultimately, to adhere to entropy and the laws of thermodynamics: the energy has to come from somewhere, and magical batteries were little more than Leyden jars, which couldn’t store enough to be useful in theory, let alone in practice.
In the case of the secret library, however, the lamp was “off-the-grid:” its very existence would have been exposed had there been a traceable pipe leading into it.
Peter had found this out in further scattered and brief conversations with Eddie over the last week, and while it was interesting enough in its own way, as an historical curio, in practice it was a pain in the balls. Usually he didn’t run out of oil, because he would fill a large phial in the morning on his way to the library, and while he had done that this morning, he had been working for longer than usual, and it had run out.
As he walked toward where the oil was stored, he thought he might as well stop for a coffee on his way – while he was up and about, it wouldn’t do him any harm. Usually this would have been where he had gone somewhere for a cigarette, but he had long since run out of what he had bought and not bothered to replace it; his relapse hadn’t lasted very long.
There weren’t all that many people in the refectory at this time, just the last few stragglers from dinner who were clearing their plates and slowly ambling their collective way out. There wasn’t anybody here whom Peter knew other than by sight, but as he passed a few he wondered – not for the first time – what was normal for people here to do to pass their time, when they weren’t working. For the most part, he didn’t even know what a lot of people did for their work here.
The notion of food suddenly reminded him of how hungry he was; as much as he liked food, and as much as he often was the first person in the room to get hungry, sometimes when he was thoroughly engrossed in what he was doing he would forget to eat – or even to consciously register the sensation of hunger. But thinking about it now, he felt faint with hunger.
Luckily, there was still something left, in the form of a thick Chinese-style chicken and sweetcorn soup, which made him feel warm and satisfied. After he had finished, he dropped his spoon into the bowl with a certain degree of abandon and thought that perhaps he should turn in for the night: there wouldn’t be much to be gained from secluding himself in the library even longer into the night.
His sleep that night was well-earned and deep, and when he awoke the following morning he felt more prepared to conquer more of his work than he had until that point. The books he had been reading were teaching him things, though mostly mundane things compared to the ultimate goal of his researches. His Latin had actually proven to be better than he had guessed it would be, probably owing to the five years he had spent being made to study French and Spanish at secondary school; thankfully he wasn’t needing to compose in Latin, but he could read it almost fluently by now. Of the older flavours of English, he hadn’t been able to tackle anything older than some of the mid-fifteenth-century Middle English, and even that had been a struggle.
It was a hell of a corpus, he thought as he went for his breakfast and then for an extra-large fill of oil for the lamp. From what he could see, the secret library not only recorded a hell of a lot of history, but a hell of a lot of linguistic development; there were books there in English that were so old that the English they were written in was just a dialect of German. There were books there in Gaelic. There were even what he assumed to be records in there inscribed in what appeared to be Oghams, recording what he suspected to be Pictish. The further back he looked among the books, the more diverse the languages were.
He arrived back in the library and lit the lamp, stashing a second bottle of oil under the table, just in case. He had decided on his way in that he would dedicate only the mornings to copying, and the afternoons to studying the books he could more readily read. That would ensure he didn’t fry away too much time doing what wouldn’t be immediately productive.
By lunch time, his eyes were aching for a break and his wrist felt like the bones inside it had been worn almost completely away. As he ate his lunch, he remembered that he was a magician, and hence he could dull the pain with a spell; he could use the spell he had used when his arm had been broken. He decided against doing that, however, on the grounds that pain like that was meant to warn a person that they were doing too much in one go.
Okay, the copying would just have to not happen for a few days. That was a pain: he hated set-backs, especially ones that were his fault and that could have been avoided.
On his return to the library after lunch, he picked up the next book back from the one he had finished the previous day before starting to copy. It was slim, with a slightly limp leather binding that made Peter think of some pocket Bibles he had seen in years gone by. The leather was soft to touch and the pages were stained with the light tan sepia colour of age, but the ink was as sharp and crisp and black as though it had just been written.
This one actually had something interesting and relevant in it. It was, it turned out, a treatise – or maybe digest would be a better word – on the Guild’s purpose and history, written by another Steward from about four centuries p
rior, called Bartholomew Hansill.
Apparently Hansill had read all of the books at some point himself, and had written this one as something of an instruction to future successors to the Stewardship regarding what the business of the Guild was. It started immediately by describing what was chronicled in the libraries – both the main library and the secret library – the events surrounding the beginning of Werosain and the establishment of the Guild.
It interested Peter that while this book was nearly a whole century older than the grammar of Old Common European he had been copying, it was far easier to read. The writing was in a graceful but purposeful hand, which seemed almost feminine with its inviting round sweeps and lovingly formed single letters: the author had been very careful to avoid abbreviations and even any leaning toward cursive script. Bartholomew Hansill, whoever he was, had written this book to be read. And reading it was a pleasure, like reading memoirs by his grandparents.
Werosain had been called into existence using some unknown, but extremely powerful, form of magic, by a young man whose personal name was unknown. He had assumed the title “Rechsdhoubnom;” the title was a dialect of some ancient language and likely translated to something like “King of this world.” How original, thought Peter. This had been approximately twenty thousand years prior to the present day as recorded then.
Rechsdhoubnom himself had apparently been a very accomplished magician, especially for his age, and a well-respected priest under his father, who was the tribe’s god-king and shaman. There had been some sort of event, some terrible crime, resulting in Rechsdhoubnom being stripped of his priesthood and the heirship to his father’s role, which had been the motive for him killing his father and creating his own world. The act of a child in the throes of a dangerous tantrum, said Steward Hansill in a footnote. Damn’ skippy, thought Peter.
The whole population of the tribe to which Rechsdhoubnom belonged had been kidnapped en masse and taken to the newly-formed Werosain, though nobody seemed to have ever known by what means. There were a few who resisted, a few of the other people who had known some limited magic, and while most of those were killed by either Rechsdhoubnom or the few whose minds he had taken control of, a handful survived and escaped.
Those who had escaped founded the earliest incarnation of the Guild, as a pseudo-tribe whose purpose was to defend the border, as they understood it, between this world and that. Magic was more commonly known about and practiced by those tribes to which it had been exposed, and thus the ancient Guild had had no problems finding people who would be able and willing to assist in this effort.
Steward Hansill explained in another footnote how, while there had been no written records prior to around seven thousand years ago, a lot of the early histories had been preserved in the form of oral records; poetry passed from person to person, Steward to Steward. Peter looked around the library. Logically, those poems and oral histories must have been preserved in writing, and if they were they would in all likelihood be among these books. He sighed. The more he had learned, of late, the more he found he hadn’t really learned anything.
As it turned out, Steward Hansill had had something of a reputation, in his day, as an academic, which immediately made Peter want to learn more about him. There was almost no biographical information about him anywhere that Peter could find, but there were other books that he had written here and there, including the main library, and they were on a wide array of topics. Peter had even, at one point, mentioned finding his Consolidated History of the Guild of Magicians in the secret library to Eddie, who had smiled and said that, yes, Bart Hansill had been one of the cleverest men to have been part of the Guild.
That being said, there were massive gaps in the histories, and almost exactly nothing of magical theory. By this point, Peter had been studying in the secret library for two months, and finding anything new was becoming ever-more a grind. It reminded him of his childhood, playing role-playing computer games, where the higher the experience level he attained, the more he would have to do to attain the next. Eventually it always turned out to be asymptotic and pointless.
But now, of course, there was more at stake, if Eddie had been right about everything; Peter was working toward something infinitely more… well, just more…
The grinding, boring nature of his continued reading had made Peter’s mind wander more and more of late, and while he understood that there was more and more yet to do, he was going to need to occupy himself in other ways to alleviate the boredom. The interest and challenge would, he was sure, return once he had picked up enough of those old languages to be able to read the more ancient of the books in there, and then there were those written in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, but it seemed now like reading those would merely be a formality as, lo and behold, he had discovered and read translations of most of the early books by Steward Hansill.
Eventually, he realized that he was allowing his magical abilities to stagnate again. That was what the feeling of fatigue and boredom were, he decided one afternoon, and so he resolved to begin practicing in earnest again, if only to keep his abilities there. He was a magician, after all. Not only that, but he had actually started to find some descriptions of different spells that were interesting enough for Peter to want to work toward attempting; they were large, high-powered spells that were similar, apparently, to some of the spells that protected the Guild’s main headquarters, and most of their outposts. Outposts, plural: Peter couldn’t help being interested in knowing how many there were and where they were.
These spells, however, were on an order of power he would have to work toward, and even if he were able to perform them, he would probably need a large space to be able to use (practice, he corrected himself) them safely.
Thus, he found himself one Wednesday afternoon in the practice room where a lot of magicians met, deciding a “back-to-basics” approach would probably be the best way to build a good foundation for the more powerful magic he had been looking at. Not that he’d ever been particularly powerless as a magician.
He hadn’t been here in what must have been six months now. There were new people here: some he recognized from around the Guild, mostly from the refectory, and a couple of people who appeared to newbies. One was a singularly nervous-looking man of about his own age, and the other was a girl who looked like she must have been all of seventeen.
In fact, when he saw the girl he found himself unable to believe that she was a magician until she actually performed a spell. He watched as she started sparring with Caroline, and was surprised at how well she seemed to have mastered some of the more basic combat spells. She wasn’t tall, maybe five feet, and she had black hair and dark eyes, and seemed to cast with only a slight edge of concentration on her face. When he thought back to his own time as a student of Caroline’s, it seemed he always needed to apply himself as hard as he could.
He started sparring with someone else he hadn’t met before, and before long he was thinking about the spells and the strategy more than he was about the girl, or the histories, or anything. His mind was flexing muscles that he had forgotten it had, even when he had had his altercation with the Werosaians during his time away. After he had lost his first duel, his head ached slightly and his blood was pumping merrily in his veins: the exercise had woken him up a little, his magical strength was being tested.
The rest of the afternoon was spent sparring and talking to people about various techniques and spells, and when evening came, Peter felt rather refreshed. That was clearly something he should do more often; as often, perhaps, as he could. Not that it should take him away from his studies, but he should make the effort at least. As far as looking for somewhere of his own to start practicing some of the more powerful spells, he figured that wouldn’t be necessary just yet. He could keep his eyes open, but he was learning now that if he became too ambitious about something, he would invariably end up making no progress at all.
After going to the refectory for some dinner, he found that he was actua
lly more tired than he had thought at first, and he was going to have to go to bed. On going to bed, he fell asleep almost immediately, and slept like the dead.
The following day, he found his head was still aching a little, but it eased off after a short time as the caffeine from the two mugs of strong coffee he had drunk slowly trickled into his brain, and then he was back to studying in the library. He picked up a new book from the shelf, and immediately was bowled over by what he saw there, in one of the first sentences:
Of course, it has known well among some of us that people from Werosain have stayed in our own world for reasons separate from their initial reasons for coming here. Some have sought asylum, and some have tried to remain hidden, though for obvious reasons we have always maintained a close watch on them in case they were operating under occluded motives.
That was… something of a strange notion. And exciting. He read on, but there was little detail about what occasions on which this had happened, nothing specific. He carried on reading more, forgetting the time, insatiably searching through the book for whatever more he could find about it, but there was nothing. How annoying.
That was the problem with the library all being on paper, bound in books: as beautiful as a book is, having information digitized and readily searchable using a computer, or the Internet, turned looking for what he wanted from a month-long task into a five-minute one.
He read the whole volume in one sitting, which took him until a little after the end of lunchtime – thankfully, there would still be something there when he got there – and after having still found nothing, he returned the book to its place and left the library.
This was something of a new direction; something new to search for, a definite outcome he could achieve, at least in theory. If he could find out about any people who had stayed in our own world following traveling from Werosain, he could maybe talk to them and find out if they knew anything that was worthwhile. That was, however, something of a long-shot: the book Peter had first found that reference in made it seem as though this only happened once in every handful of generations, and thus was more likely than not that it wouldn’t have happened within his lifetime, and wouldn’t happen again until his lifetime was spent.
