by GM Gambrell
Eight
It took weeks of searching to finally find the entrance to the secret library. He spent more time in his duties as janitor than he did researching, pushing his broom and looking around just so he could explore and actually look for wherever the mysterious entrance was. Even a conversation with the tunnel’s resident rat didn’t add any insight. The eighteenth floor of the library, the furthest down from the surface, contained the oldest of the memory stones, but even the oldest only went back a few hundred years. Life then, he knew, had been similar to life now. It just didn’t change, and Duncan often wondered how a people who did not grow survived.
There was nothing obviously different about the eighteenth floor. It had the same standard spiral shelf configuration as the other floors, all terminating in the central studying area filled with couches, desks, and chairs. Just as with the above floors, a small arch stood at the center of the room, covered in vine plants. Frustrated, he stood staring at the arch for a long, long time, wondering what their purpose was. Most Magician architecture, from the early times, was purely functional. Why put in stairs when you could teleport from one floor to the next. Why install a window when you could simply look through the walls?
It didn’t make sense for the original builders to put a simple arch in the center of the room. But it hadn’t made any sense for there to be a kitchen, either. The kitchen, Dr. Felix had said, had been for those youngsters who hadn’t yet learned to conjure food, which told Duncan that, at least once, not everyone had the perfect magic they did now. He wondered if the arches might have served some other purpose to those ancient magicians in the new, freshly built school.
He waited one evening until all the students had retired for the evening and he had the eighteenth floor to himself. He then carefully began clearing away the vines that had, over the generations, climbed up and covered the arch. There were numbers lining the right-hand side of the arch on both sides—one through nineteen. He touched the number three, just out of curiosity, and the stone lit up around it, glowing a dull green. The area in the arch began to shimmer, and through it, he could see another floor. He stepped through the portal and found himself on the third floor, in the study area, on the opposite side of the arch there.
“So they couldn’t always teleport, either,” he said, confirming his theory that the original Magicians’ power wasn’t as sophisticated as it was now. They couldn’t always teleport, and the arches, much like the memory stones, were enchanted in a way that didn’t require one’s individual magic. They were simply used.
He turned back to the third floor arch and quickly cleared away the vegetation from the right-hand side. That arch didn’t have as many numbers and only went to the eighteenth floor. He touched eighteen and stepped through, returning to where he’d started. He then turned back to the arch and punched the number nineteen. The entire arch lit up and glowed dull blue.
“What do you seek?” a voice from nowhere asked him.
“I…seek knowledge,” he replied, not knowing how the protection enchantment worked. Falcon had said it simply kept out those who didn’t deserve to be there, and he didn’t know if he did or not.
“Enter.”
He stepped into the shimmering portal and was immediately struck by the smell of mildew and dust. He knew that no one had entered the secret section of the library in a long, long time. He wondered why Falcon hadn’t been a recent visitor, but it was a moot point. He was there now, and the thrill of seeing the thousands of books on simple wooden shelves overruled any other emotion.
“Hello, books.”
Like the upper stories, he couldn’t find any sort of rhyme or reason to the order of the books on the nineteenth floor, but unlike the upper stories, he could walk up and look at what each book was about. There were titles that made no sense to him, like A Study in Early Human Dialects or The French Language as Remembered by Tyrius C. Bloke. He didn’t know what the French language was or what early human dialects might be. One title, Human Machinery of the Last War, jumped out at him. He understood those words and picked the book up, sat down by the shelf where he’d pulled it from, and started reading.
The book was filled with two-dimensional pictures of vehicles followed by descriptions of each and a magical method for destroying them. There were Firebird Attack Fighters, air-to-air combat planes capable of small bombing runs. They were best defeated by short electrical bursts to short out their circuitry, whatever that meant. There were Tiger Tanks, ground attack vehicles that were best destroyed by manipulating the ground underneath them, collapsing them into great trenches and burying them alive. Duncan shivered. The terror those men felt in those tanks, buried alive, must have been a lot like being trapped in the Void. There were also pictures of noncombat vehicles, transport airplanes, cargo ships and trucks, and helicopters. He paused and smiled, seeing a picture of the helicopter like Jim’s, just in pristine condition. There were also personal transport units called cars, and he actually recognized those vehicles as parts of the city of New Dallas.
“Well,” he said aloud, “they used the scraps of the old world to build the new one. That makes sense.”
There were dozens of other books that he wanted to read, but the process was so much slower than watching a memory stone and he grudgingly admitted that some magic had its advantages. He picked up a book at random, instead, and began reading from The Log Of Combat Medics, 2133-2145 and opened the book to page 123.
From the Log of Justice Smith
234th Healing Corps
The Third Year of Magic
I don’t know why they want me to write this. I think its rubbish, but I’ll follow orders to the end. We all will now, won’t we? There isn’t anything left but our orders and each other.
I was a nobody before Jeremiah Fredrick raised us up. I was born and raised in Old London, and while I was growing up I always knew I didn’t quite fit in with the regular people. I was as different from them as night was from day and I went my own way. I became a midwife and nurse. I traveled mostly in the areas around London with the Gypsies and the Carnies, helping them deliver babies and treating their minor ailments when I could. It wasn’t a bad life, and I was happy, but I know what those folks they’re now calling human thought of us. You could see it in their eye when we passed, or when they brought their kids to our carnivals. Keep away from them dirty people, they’d say, and they meant us. Still, even with those dirty looks and whatnot, I didn’t hate the humans. I was a human. Until Jeremiah Fredrick set us free, we were the humans. We were all one people once upon a time, but we’ve forgotten that now that the war is over.
Don’t get me wrong. I know Jeremiah was right and we had to save them from themselves and save the only world we’ve got, but I just wish it didn’t have to be as bloody as it was. I saw a lot more of it than you blokes did, being on the front line and tending to the men like I did, and I can tell you it was pretty bad. Worse than pretty bad, really, but that ain’t what they asked me to write about.
They asked me to write about the siege of England. They said it didn’t have to be much, but enough so you in the future know what it looked like from my point of view. England, the place of my birth and raising, was one of the last of the human lands to fall, as you already know. They said it might have had something to do with simple geography, ‘cause it’s a big island. But I don’t think that’s it, especially since it was so close to our new homeland, New Atlantis. It seems to me like it should have been one of the first places to fall, but it was, of course, the home of Jeremiah Fredrick. He might have been saving it for last. Who knows?
I’ve never met our savior, but I feel a certain kinship with him. We were both English, after all, before we were Magicians.
The English held out throughout the war and didn’t send their ships and planes to the other big battles. It was like King William knew what was going to happen and did everything he could to protect his homeland. It was a sight to see…those damn RAF pilots tanglin’ with our
dragons in the sky. I have to give them credit. Those boys were the bravest of the brave. I don’t mean to slight our own boys, but can you imagine pointing your fighter jet at a flock of dragons? Much less fight them?
The siege of England lasted for six months and we brought to bear every conceivable magic against them that we could, and yet they held out. Their destroyers and submarines went toe to toe with our Krakens, their fighter pilots, like I said earlier, beat our dragons and wyvern to a pulp. Their soldiers beat back our knights, goblins, and Orks at every beach landing. They were beating us at every turn, and to read their newspapers it was like they were whippin’ the Nazis all over again.
Can you imagine that? Them comparing us to the Nazis? We were the liberators, not the oppressors, but I guess it depends on what side of the battle you were on to realize that.
You can read about all that fighting stuff from the soldiers. I’m sure some of Jeremiah’s generals are writing big, glorious volumes as I write this. I didn’t know what I was looking at anyway. I only knew about the wounded and the dead.
You see, back then, in the latter days of the war, which were really the early days of Magic, we didn’t yet know our full potential with the power Jeremiah gave us. They said if you had a sense of fighting, you developed fighting skills, or, like me, became a healer, ‘cause that’s what I’d always done. He told us each of us had our place and our magic was special and unique. So as soon as I had it, I knew I could heal. But everyone could heal, they just didn’t know it yet.
Maybe if they had, we wouldn’t have lost so many boys when we finally took England.
The wounds I saw were what you’d expect on any battlefield. There were gunshot wounds by the thousands, burns, and chemical exposure. I went in with the first waves up the Thames, into London itself. They shot at us from the rooftops and the windows, and every time they shot one of our boys, I was there to remove the bullet, seal him up, and get him back in the fight. The chemical weapons were the worse. Despite the magic, our bodies are still like the humans, and the gases they spread through the city, after King William knew it was over, affected us just like they did the humans. It took us a long time to figure out how to shield ourselves from it and, when we finally did, it was too late for a lot of the boys.
You see, I could dig a bullet out of one of the boy’s leg, no problem. That just took a thought. Sealing up the leg was but another thought. But how did you think away the damage those chemicals did to those boys? How do you think away the utter destruction that happened to every cell in the body? It was possible, later, but then, the magic was all still so new to us.
Justice Smith’s story went on, but Duncan closed the book quietly.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that, Justice,” he said, quietly. “I hope you found peace.”
He couldn’t read anymore, right then, and had to wipe the tears from his eyes. He stood, heading for the teleportation arch out of the room, and, for a second, didn’t care if he ever read anything more about the Last War.
