Lord of the Libraries

by Mel Odom

  Frenzied now, feeling that he was near to bursting, Juhg studied the letters, moving them around in his mind, seeking words. By the Old Ones, he’d never really paid attention to how many words were his to lay claim to—even when he limited himself just to the common tongue. Then he saw it, and he couldn’t believe that he hadn’t seen it before.

  He marked through the letters.

  R

  Feeling more inspired, he wrote the new word down. Poem.

  “A poem?” Craugh asked.

  “Yes,” Juhg said. “It has to be. You were right, Craugh. And Jassamyn must be right as well. The Grandmagister had to have left the name of a poem that I would remember.”

  “How many poems do you know?” the wizard asked.

  “Thousands,” Juhg answered. “And bits and pieces of thousands more.”

  “Then it’ll be like searching for a grain of sand on an ocean beach,” Cobnor grumbled. “No telling how long that will take.”

  “No,” Craugh said. “Don’t think that the task is impossible or even near to it. The poem Wick will have left will have double meaning, apprentice. It will serve as both the key to the coded journal and to some special occurrence between the two of you. What poem did you have in common?”

  “Several,” Juhg answered, trying not to give in to the knot of apprehension swelling within his belly. “Many of them are mnemonics designed to remember tables and charts and bodies of work.”

  “Then it won’t be that,” Craugh said. “Something simpler.”

  Suddenly, the letters moved in Juhg’s mind though they didn’t move on the page. The answer was suddenly clear as Sambaanian crystal, and it was as simple as Craugh had suggested. The quill in his hand moved almost of its own volition.

  Juhg leaned back in his chair, trembling with relief.

  “Fort Yuar?” Craugh read. The dark scowl on his face made it clear that he didn’t understand the reference.

  “‘Fort Yuar’ is a dwarvish poem.” Cobner grimaced. “Though you’ll find no true-blooded dwarf that will term it so. What it actually is, it’s a war song of the Ruhrmash dwarves of the Smoking Marshes.” After being introduced to the Grandmagister and all the knowledge that the Grandmagister had known, the warrior had become something of a romantic when it came to dwarven histories. “They built iron ships and fought the goblinkin of the Smoking Marshes for the iron mines they needed to survive. They won, too. Until Lord Kharrion rose up and triggered the Cataclysm. I’ve been through there with the Grandmagister, and a few times later on my own. Those iron ships still sit at the bottom of the marshes. Few know about them.”

  “Why is that poem important?” Craugh asked.

  Juhg smiled. “It was the first piece that the Grandmagister taught me. We were running from goblinkin after he freed me from the mines. I had caught him at his journal and he had given in and told me what he really was, and told me all about Greydawn Moors. When we came upon the Smoking Marshes, I was bitten by a thorn adder.” Memory filled his head and he relived those days for a moment. “I thought I was going to die. I begged the Grandmagister to leave me because the goblinkin were all around us. I knew if they found us they would kill me out of hand rather than try to nurse me back to health, and the Grandmagister would be hauled back to the mines where he would not find a second escape so easily.”

  “But he didn’t do that, did he?” Jassamyn asked, smiling.

  “No.”

  “It’s not in Wick’s nature to desert a friend.”

  “Sometimes,” Craugh said, “I think that the better part of a dweller’s survival skills missed him.”

  “He’s a warrior at heart, he is,” Cobner affirmed. “I taught him everything he knows.”

  “I lay near to death,” Juhg said, “burning up with fever, and the Grandmagister promised me he would teach me to write if I would follow him home to Greydawn Moors.” He swallowed hard at the memory. “I had no home of my own. I don’t know what would have happened to me if he hadn’t taken me in.”

  “You would have died, of course,” Cobner growled. “You weren’t ready to take care of yourself.”

  “During my recovery, the Grandmagister taught me to recite ‘Fort Yuar,’ and to write it in his journal, and the history of the Ruhrmash dwarves’ battles against the goblinkin. The poem was the first thing I ever wrote.”

  “But how does that help you with the journal Wick left?” Craugh asked. “It’s still encoded.”

  Feeling slightly ebullient, Juhg opened the journal. “The poem detailing the victories of Fort Yuar holds a particular resonance and cadence. Knowing the code the Grandmagister used it is much easier to decipher. I can eliminate most of what’s written in the journal because it’s gibberish, just there to confuse the uninitiated. I’ll recopy the journal using the cadence of the poem and do the translation from that.”

  Craugh nodded. “How soon, apprentice?”

  “Soon,” Juhg promised, and he eagerly got started.

  10

  The Drowned City

  “From the journal of Edgewick Lamplighter, current Grandmagister of the Vault of All Known Knowledge—”

  Dearest Juhg,

  See, I will always address you in such a manner Jot personal correspondence!

  Salutations and my blessings.

  Juhg’s throat tightened a little as he read his transcription of the coded journal. He hurried on and hoped that no one else noticed.

  They all sat around him in the small upstairs living room of Sharz’s bead shop. Little Nyia sat on Jassamyn’s knee and partially drowsed after the big breakfast her mother had prepared.

  If you’re reading this, then it means that I am not with you and we are separated by circumstances beyond our control. Not that I expect much control in this situation. I had planned to be with you, of course, because I wouldn’t want you involved in the dangerous endeavor on your own. Alas, I’ve often found in my life as Grandmagister—and before!—that things all too often fall outside my ability to plan.

  I have instructed Sharz to deliver this book into your hands or my own.

  And not Craugh’s? Juhg wondered. Why was he excluded? He stumbled a little while he was reading as the thought occurred to him, but he thought that the audience he read to would think only that he’d been overcome by emotion.

  We’re at a point when so many secrets are about to spill out. You’ve heard of The Book of Time. I know that you have. I’ve mentioned it to you on occasion and I know that you seldom forget anything I’ve told you.

  So many people think that the book is only a myth. Who could possibly organize time, after all? But the book is real. I have read about it for these past months, and I’ve wanted to talk to you at length about everything I’ve discovered. Unfortunately, you seem to be caught up in your own life at the moment.

  Juhg, I know you sometimes feel guilty about living when your parents did not. Thaskale wrote a number of works about “survivor’s guilt” that I would like to recommend to you.

  The Grandmagister had, Juhg remembered, but he’d always found projects that kept him too busy to read most of them. Instead, he’d just drawn further into himself and begun preparing his departure from the Library to attempt a life as a merchant with Raisho aboard Windchaser.

  I don’t know your pain, Of course. That would be egotistical and rude and presumptuous of me to even suggest that I do. But I’ve dealt with pains of my own. Over the years, I’ve lost a great many friends who have been with me through fierce adventures.

  Captain Farok dying in my arms, so small and frail and afraid, after I had been terrified of him when he’d been One-Eyed Peggie’s master, stays with me. I miss Brandt fiercely as well, though his death was calm and peaceful because he was taken away by years and not by violence. So many, by the Old Ones, there have been so many that I have lost through the ages.

  Ah, and listen to me prattle across these pages like we had all the time in the world for this discourse. We don’t, of course, because all the tim
e in the world is exactly what we are after.

  That is what our enemies are after, too. After all, The Book of Time, is the single most powerful thing in existence, and—for the time at least—it is in our world and accessible to those who would use it for good and those who would use it for evil or simply their own power.

  Juhg couldn’t help but glance at Craugh. Bright interest stirred in the wizard’s green eyes.

  I have found The Book of Time, Juhg. Or rather, I have found where I believe it to be. All that reading I have done here in the Library has led me to it.

  Surprisingly, it was legends I encountered while indulging in the guilty pleasures of Hralbomm’s Wing that turned the key. Perhaps, if previous Grandmagisters—or even Librarians, for that matter—had indulged in those selfsame guilty pleasures, The Book of Time would have been found much sooner.

  I don’t know.

  Perhaps, as has been suggested in those legends that I read, The Book of Time chooses its own moment of discovery. I admit that I am uncomfortable with that thought. But, if one were to believe—as Zakoth proclaimed to in his treatise Time Shall Move Your Cheese—that everything that ever was, ever is, and ever will be is written in The Book of Time, then perhaps the book even holds record of its discovery and the discoverer.

  I want to see it. I am so curious.

  Can you even guess what it must be like, Juhg, to know everything? I can’t wait. Truly, I can’t.

  However, the date of my death—especially the happenstance of it—is something I’d rather not know. Particularly if that death is violent or gruesome.

  It strikes me that perhaps I am already dead as you read this. I hope not. For your sake. But probably more for my sake. I would hate to miss out on the best book that has been written, is being written, and will be written. I’m not exactly sure how that works out.

  if I am, then read it over my grave to me. (Surely I will have a grave. I am Grandmagister, after all. Hmmm. Unless one of the monsters of the Blood-Soaked Sea or another like it has gulped me down while I was not looking. I do try to look. Cobner has always and forever been after me to be aware of where I am at all times.)

  “That I have,” Cobner commented. “He has the right of that. And he’s gotten better, he has. Much, much better.”

  As I have been led to believe, the narrative and Juhg continued, before the rise of Lord Kharrion and the time of the Cataclysm, The Book of Time entered our world from a place simply referred to as the In-Betweenness.

  I found the account in Hralbomm’s Wing, as I has said, in a romance called Cockleburr’s Beastiary and Other Tales. Cockleburr was a traveling thief pre-Cataclysm who made money stealing as well as writing. He specialized in fictional accounts of monsters he’d met and outwitted. They were grand tales, too. I heartily recommend them because Cockleburr had an acerbic sense of humor that I found to be a delight.

  There was one story in the collection, though, that Cockleburr insisted was a true tale, not one he’d created of whole cloth or embellished mightily upon. During one of his adventures near Hargis’s Crossing, that meeting place of oceans far to the South, Cockleburr had chanced upon a bearded hoar-worm that had claimed it had once been a human wizard named Methoss.

  The hoar-worm insisted that—as a human—he had traveled to the In-Betweenness, confronted the Gatekeeper of Time, and helped steal The Book of Time. The creature had gone on to claim that he had even helped kill—or attempt to kill—Lord Kharrion.

  The mention of Lord Kharrion was a conundrum, I tell you. Purely coincidence, I thought. For Cockleburr’s account was written nearly nine hundred years before Lord Kharrion rose to prominence among the goblinkin tribes and began the Cataclysm.

  Curious, naturally, because I know of no other mention of Lord Kharrion’s name outside of the Goblin Lord, I researched the name Methoss, which is also not in much use. Certainly not in the time Cockleburr wrote of. Then I found out why.

  As it turns out, Methoss was one of a group of bloodthirsty and power-mongering villains that ran rampant along the mainland. I read about those people, Juhg. They are the reason that children are no longer named Methoss or Ladamae or Zorrocks or Pean or Ybarris. There are other names, but there’s no need to list them here.

  The atrocities they committed will live in history forever. Some of them killed each other. Others, according to Methoss, were lost in the In-Betweenness. A few more simply vanished from record. I can only hope that they met with the harsh ending they all deserved and did not live out their lives in comfort and peace.

  Across the room, Craugh pushed the cat from his lap and stood as if wanting to stretch. But he walked away from the others, stopping at the window to peer out.

  Juhg alone knew how much the Grandmagister’s words had to have hurt the wizard. For a moment, looking at Craugh’s back and seeing the slump of his shoulders, Juhg’s heart went out to Craugh.

  The Grandmagister loved the wizard like a brother. They were close. But Craugh had managed to keep his other life from the Grandmagister. For the first time, Juhg had to wonder at the cost of that secrecy.

  Was that why you were so often gone from the Grandmagister’s side, Craugh? Because you felt ashamed? The Grandmagister is so good, so willing to share and to give of whatever he has. And you—you were a taker, a bandit, a thief, and a murderer. How did you think the Grandmagister would feel when he, found out your secrets?

  “Juhg,” Jassamyn said, calling attention to the uncomfortable silence that had strung out.

  “Sorry.” Juhg reached for a glass of wine. “Parched throat. Didn’t get much sleep last night.” He sipped, then resumed the reading, conscious that Craugh never turned around to face them, to offer a conjecture, or to acknowledge them in any way.

  My investigation has led me to believe that The Book of Time was lost here in this world, separated into four pieces, four distinct divisions of Time itself.

  I can’t help but wonder at that. Cockleburr’s book, though he didn’t know it at the time because—even though he traveled extensively—he didn’t travel the world over, was not complete. Methoss told him that—while he was still a human wizard—he and the group of—

  Here the Grandmagister broke off into a rather uncomplimentary description of Methoss and his companions. The vilification was quite uncommon for the Grandmagister.

  Juhg choked on the passage and couldn’t read it. Even if he couldn’t trust Craugh, he couldn’t hurt him either.

  —he and the group … had confronted Kharrion and discovered The Book of Time had been divided into four portions, locked into underground vaults among four cities.

  One city was Seadevil’s Roost, which was a southern sea empire of humankind.

  “I’ve never ’eard of such a place,” Raisho said. “An’ I’ve traveled all along the coastline.”

  “This would have been a very long time ago,” Jassamyn said.

  “Pre-Cataclysm,” Craugh said. “Actually, it was very near to this place.” Juhg continued with the narrative.

  I performed a massive amount of research on my own, the journal continued. I couldn’t justify utilizing any of the Librarians on this task. For all I knew, my quest would turn out to be a wild trilik chase after all, despite the details Cockleburr provided.

  Still, I persevered.

  I almost asked you to help me with this task, Juhg, but things between us just weren’t … right somehow. For the first time, I began to suspect that asking you to do something like this would be an imposition.

  Please accept my forgiveness for ever thinking this, but that is the only excuse I can offer. I would not willingly keep you from anything I did that I considered of merit.

  Pain shot through Juhg’s heart. His hands trembled, shaking the book and making his rapidly written transcription hard to read. You weren’t wrong, he thought silently.

  Both he and Craugh had much to bear from the Grandmagister’s openhearted ways.

  I was surprised to learn that Seadevil’s Roost, named
for those obnoxious flying fish that Jassamyn seems to favor so when we’re at sea, had actually existed at one time.

  I found a map and set to the task of locating the city. Unfortunately, the city no longer existed. Not as a city, anyway. But I located its ruins.

  From what Methoss told Cockleburr, placing the four pieces of The Book of Time in the underground vaults beneath the cities had detrimental effects on those cities. All of them experienced violent deaths.

  Seadevil’s Roost sank into the ocean after a tsunami ripped the sea floor to shreds for miles around it. Lord Kharrion’s later attacks destroyed

  Teldane’s Bounty and rendered the Shattered Coast.

  In the Smokesmith dwarven community of the Molten Rock Forge, where the Smokesmith dwarves became the most successful armorers of their time, an underground river speared into the heart of the active volcano they used as a natural forge. The magic they used—a seldom seen thing among dwarves—to bind the volcano to their bidding agitated the natural explosiveness of the underground river mixing with the molten lava to the degree that all of them perished when the mountaintop blew. Those once proud mountains tumbled into rubble and became the Smoking Marshes.

  By the Old Ones, Juhg, we were so close to one of the secrets back when you and I escaped the goblinkin mine all those years ago! ff we had but known!

  But we didn’t.

  And, as it turns out, it was a good thing we didn’t know.