The Destruction of the Books Read online

  Raisho grinned again. “Not without me bustin’ a head or two, I won’t.”

  “It could be that I would be with you. Kelloch’s Harbor is not a safe place. This place is not a town built on trade. It’s a waterhole filled with cutthroats and scoundrels.” Juhg drummed his fingers on the leaning tabletop. Sometimes the young sailor chose to be very dense about inferred dialogue. Juhg felt uncomfortable with some direct conversations circumstances had forced him to have with his friend and fellow investor.

  “Oh.”

  “And I cannot run nearly as fast as you can.”

  “I would stand an’ fight at your side till the bitter end,” Raisho promised. “I wouldn’t leave ye there.”

  Juhg knew that Raisho meant what he said. Unfortunately, it would only mean the doom of us both. The dweller sighed, one of the acts that everyone accused dwellers of holding in common, a trait that all nondwellers lamented. Only dwellers, general opinion said, could issue such deeply piteous and heartfelt sighs.

  The young sailor was an accomplished swordsman and practiced his chosen craft, in addition to his sailing, every chance he got. Upon occasion when events had forced Raisho to use his martial skills in Windchaser’s defense against pirates or goblin ships, Juhg had complimented the young sailor on his bravery. Raisho had always said that Juhg was the bravest person he had ever known: a dweller who had left—by choice—the sequestered safety of Greydawn Moors, a Librarian who had chosen to voyage back out into the rough-and-tumble world he’d barely escaped from.

  The serving wench stood at Raisho’s side and glanced at him demurely. “And what would you be after having, milord?”

  “Milord!” Raisho laughed merrily and slapped his thigh.

  The serving wench reddened at the young sailor’s loud reaction. Others in the tavern turned to look, but found that no violence was in the offing and quickly grew bored enough to return to their cups and their conversations.

  Juhg felt sorry for the serving girl. Raisho meant nothing by his outburst, but she did not know him and did not know that.

  “Raisho,” Juhg said. “Please be mindful of her time. The tavern is full and she is very busy.” He didn’t want an angry seaman ready to fight them over the attentions of the serving wench.

  Juhg tried not to let the reaction bother him. Here on the mainland, away from the safety of Greydawn Moors, most humans didn’t respect dwellers. Most humans thought of dwellers, if they thought of them at all, primarily as a cheap labor source or vermin. The goblins often referred to dwellers simply as eaters, and talked of them as charitably as they would of a locust invasion.

  Dweller villages found outside the few cities and towns that dotted the coastlines fell hard to the goblin slavers. Once the goblins clapped every captured dweller into chains, the goblins burned the villages as though they were lice-infested nests. Even if a slave escaped, there was no home to return to.

  “I’ll have ale,” Raisho told the serving wench. “Quickly now, an’ plenty of it. I’ve got me a powerful thirst.” He glanced at Juhg. “What will ye have?”

  “Chulotzberry tea,” Juhg said. “Please.”

  “Of course, milords.” The serving wench ducked her head.

  “Thank you,” Juhg called after her. A human serving him still struck him as strange. At the Great Library, dwellers still handled the menial tasks. But many humans who came to the Vault of All Known Knowledge for answers to questions had treated him as an equal.

  In fact, he was even on speaking terms with the Grandmagister’s wizard friend Craugh. And Craugh, wizard of no little repute and an enigmatic history, claimed few as friends. His wizardly powers, town gossips said, sometimes increased the population of toads when someone irritated him past the point of tolerance.

  “So what brings ye here?” Raisho asked, indicating the tavern with an expansive wave. “If ye’d wanted to be safe, ye’d have stayed aboard Windchaser.”

  “I wanted to feel firm land beneath my feet again,” Juhg answered honestly.

  Raisho shook his head sorrowfully. “I told ye afore ye left that the sea would be no place for ye, Juhg. ’Tis a hard life upon the salt, an’ a lonely one at that, even in the best of circumstance. Ain’t fittin’ for a dweller because ye all are so much of family.”

  That was true of most dwellers, Juhg silently agreed. “I have no family.” He had intended the statement only as one of fact, bereft of emotion. Instead, his words sounded bleak and harsh, even to his ears. His loss never stayed far from his heart.

  Raisho stopped smiling and broke eye contact. “Ye’re a good friend to me, Juhg. Don’t ever feel like ye got no family, ’cause as long as I still breathe, ye’ll have all the family I can give.” He raised his eyes to Juhg with some embarrassment. Raisho wasn’t a man who easily spoke of tender feelings.

  “Thank you,” Juhg said. “I wish I had something to offer in return.”

  “Ye do. I’ve sailed a lot of the Blood-Soaked Sea. Seen dozens of ports like the hog’s wallow we’re in now. I’ve seldom had the friendship the likes of the one I now have with ye.” Raisho grinned and wiggled his brows. He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. “An’ I’ve never had me one what could make me a rich man with tradin’.”

  Juhg laughed in spite of the tension of the moment, in spite of the mistake he’d very nearly made with the journal keeping he hadn’t intended to be doing. He returned his attentions to his plate. Dwellers, after all, had earned their goblin nicknames.

  The serving wench returned with the young sailor’s ale and Juhg’s glass of chulotzberry tea. Raisho curled a silver coin, much too much for the drinks, into the young woman’s hand.

  “Thank ye,” he stated kindly, with a smile as generous as the tip. “I meant ye no harm. Honest I didn’t.”

  She nodded and smiled, and Juhg guessed that she knew the nature of the coin pressed into her hand. “Let me know if you need anything further, milords.” She backed away, then turned and fled.

  “So?” Raisho asked expectantly.

  “What?” Juhg asked, acting as though he didn’t know what his friend referred to.

  “Yer book. What was ye a-writin’ in it?”

  Juhg chewed the olive flatbread carefully as he surveyed the tavern. The Broken Tiller served mostly sailors and longshoremen who ferried the goods from the ships out in the harbor. Unfortunately, pirates mixed in with that clientele on a regular basis, though they never came into the harbor flying the black flag.

  The tavern looked as though the initial builders cobbled it together from shipwrecks that chanced upon the craggy shores or the reef farther out in the harbor. Probably beginning as a single structure enclosing a great room and fashioned from the stern of a large merchant ship, the tavern now stretched out with four similar rooms, all cramped and close-quartered. Narrow doorways, not quite square, joined the rooms.

  Similar architecture covered the broken hills that framed the port village, all of them at one time or another pieces of sailing ships or cobbled from crate timbers or masts. If he hadn’t known that humans and a few dwarves plying blacksmiths’ trade lived there, Juhg would have sworn the place was home to dwellers. Dwellers held fame as a people who made lives for themselves from the remnants of worldly goods left by others, though some insisted those goods were little more than trash and unwanted debris.

  “I was writing my thoughts,” Juhg answered obliquely, wishing that his friend would drop the matter.

  “What thoughts, then?” Raisho gestured toward the heaped plate.

  “Please,” Juhg said, though his first impulse was to claim the food as his own. He was back on the mainland now, not in Greydawn Moors, where no dweller went without food after a full day’s work. No dweller there claimed a stone for a pillow either. When he’d sailed aboard Windchaser from the Yondering Docks where the Blood-Soaked Sea lapped upon the shores of Greydawn Moors, Juhg had prepared himself to return to that hand-to-mouth existence. He was ashamed that such selfish thoughts of gluttony came back so
easily.

  “Yer thoughts,” Raisho reminded as he helped himself to a corn cake. He slathered the corn cake with creamed butter and golden orange firepear preserves.

  “Mine,” Juhg agreed. “How are the firepear preserves? I haven’t tried them.” He’d been afraid to because the strong smell had burned his nose.

  “Ye won’t like it. Too strong.” Raisho helped himself to another corn cake, the next to last, and covered it with firepear preserves.

  Unwilling to quietly watch his final corn cake be devoured in such a cavalier fashion by Raisho, who often exhibited a dwellerlike appetite by eating when there was no way he could possibly be hungry, Juhg claimed the remaining corn cake. He helped himself to preserves, scented the concoction again, and told himself that the firepears could not possibly be that hot. Biting into the cake, he found he had a mouthful of what felt like coals pumped to full heat by a blacksmith’s bellows. Or maybe he had a mouthful of stinging brinebees. Hurriedly, he grabbed the glass of tea and drank deeply, seeking the soothing and healing balm of the chulotzberry.

  “I warned ye,” Raisho said.

  Reluctantly, thinking that he might try cleaning the firepear preserves off to at least salvage the corn cake, Juhg realized the futility of the effort and shoved the morsel over to the young sailor.

  Raisho smiled broadly as he accepted the surrender. “Thank ye kindly.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Juhg croaked, then drank more tea. He focused on the remnants of his meal, getting most of them slightly ahead of Raisho’s questing fingers.

  “The book.”

  Juhg regarded his friend. He had known Raisho for three years before signing ship’s articles with Windchaser and Captain Attikus. Raisho usually didn’t possess the tenacity of thought he now so plainly exhibited.

  Keeping his voice pitched low, Juhg said, “I was making notes about this place.”

  “The port?”

  “Yes. Kelloch’s Harbor.”

  Raisho sorted through Juhg’s plate and found a sizable chunk of pricklemelon. He popped the green and red fruit into his mouth and relished the salty sweet rush of flavor.

  “I could order you a plate,” Juhg said. “We could pay from our profits.”

  Grinning, Raisho agreed. “We could. We could indeed. But I’m not that hungry.” He took a baked potato in his fingers and upended the tuber to pour the honey-glazed seaweed into his mouth. He chewed and sighed with content.

  Juhg marveled at the young sailor’s capacity. Even Taurak Bleiyz, fictional dweller hero—And wasn’t that a redundancy?—and champion whose own appetites were legendary, would have been shamed by Raisho’s ability to consume.

  “All this writin’ ye’re doin’ here an’ aboard Windchaser,” Raisho said, “makes me wonder if’n ye were truly ready to leave the Vault.”

  Glancing around quickly, Juhg made certain that no one had overheard the conversation. “Raisho, I beg you to watch your tongue. I swear, it fairly luffs in the breeze created by your breathing. No one here knows of that place, and it would be better to keep it that way.”

  Greydawn Moors existed on no known map. Old magic, ancient and powerful magic, had created the island where the Vault of All Known Knowledge had been hidden away since Lord Kharrion had begun gathering his goblin armies. Those magicks wielded by the human wizards had torn the island from the sea bottom. Dwarves, according to the histories, had shorn up the thick stone columns that held the island in place at the ocean’s bottom. Elven warders had made the risen island fertile and loosed the great aquatic monsters that roamed freely in the Blood-Soaked Sea beneath the pall of continual gray fog kept in place by an ancient enchantment.

  A sober expression fitted itself to Raisho’s face. “I know. I know.” He waved Juhg’s warning away. “All this secrecy, it’s just easy to ferget, ye know.”

  “No,” Juhg said distinctly, “it’s not.”

  “Aye. Perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it’s just me.”

  “And perhaps it’s the ale,” Juhg suggested.

  “I was just of a mind to celebrate, is all.” Raisho pushed his ale mug away, then folded his arms across his chest petulantly. “Wasn’t exactly me fault ye weren’t in the first tavern I went a-lookin’ fer ye in.”

  “No,” Juhg said agreeably. “I suppose it wasn’t. And I suppose there were a half-dozen such establishments between that one and this one.”

  “I don’t know,” Raisho agreed guiltily. “I didn’t count.”

  Juhg didn’t want his friend to feel too badly. Raisho’s mistake was less than if he’d drawn attention by writing in the journal. Juhg used his knife to nudge a flutterfish fillet toward the young sailor.

  Raisho took the fillet in his fingers, tilted his head back, and dropped the food into his mouth. He chewed contentedly. “I thought ye knew all about Kelloch’s Harbor from them—” He stopped himself before he said books.

  Before leaving Greydawn Moors, Juhg had prepared for his journey by choosing the ship he would secure passage on. From there, based on his knowledge of Captain Attikus’ normal trade routes, Juhg had assembled a book regarding conversations he’d had with sailors who had frequented the taverns along the Yondering Docks.

  “The knowledge that I had,” Juhg said, “was good enough to prepare a modest trade venture, but there is so much that was left out of my … sources.”

  “So ye’re figurin’ on remedyin’ that? With yer own efforts?”

  Juhg pondered that. He didn’t have an actual reason for all of his writing. He just couldn’t seem to help himself. Still, Raisho’s supposition gave him at least an excuse for his efforts. “It seemed the thing to do. I can always send the … my work … back with another ship. Or with Windchaser.”

  Shaking his head, Raisho asked, “Have ye given any thought to the possibility that ye weren’t through with yer work there? That maybe Grandmagister Lamplighter was right about yer callin’ an’ what ye was truly meant to be?”

  Quietly contemplating another bite of pricklemelon, Juhg said nothing.

  “I can see that ye have thought about all of that,” Raisho said a moment later. “Ye miss all them … Well, ye know what I’m talking about.”

  Juhg did indeed. Raisho’s deliberate nonuse of the word books resonated within him. The Vault of All Known Knowledge was the world’s repository of literature, of nonfiction and fiction. When Lord Kharrion had led the goblins across the world to pillage and loot, they had deliberately destroyed books. Vast libraries, some that had existed in fact and some that existed only in legend, were lost.

  Thousands of books remained within the Vault, though, and cataloguing them all had taken generations of dwellers in an attempt to put the collections to rights. Juhg missed the Great Library. All those years ago, the Builders had raised the structure so hurriedly that blueprints of the vast buildings and caverns did not exist. The wings and hallways and stairways meandered all across the mountaintop. The lower sections of the Library stood honeycombed from the Knucklebones Mountains up above the Ogre’s Fingers. Some dweller historians continued to maintain that the Builders had constructed part of the island from the body of a giant ogre Lord Kharrion had ensorcelled into his service.

  Those events had taken place during the dark times known as the Cataclysm. Even now, after all those centuries had passed, the books gathered in the Vault of All Known Knowledge remained zealously guarded by the dweller Librarians, as well as the elves and the dwarves who lived there.

  “I couldn’t stay there,” Juhg said.

  “Grandmagister Lamplighter made a home fer ye,” Raisho said. “As he made homes fer others over the years who he brought home from his travels. Ye could still be there. An’ if’n ye so chose, why, I’m sure the Grandmagister would welcome ye back with open arms.”

  Juhg knew that.

  “Way I heard it,” Raisho said in a softer voice, “ye were like to a son to him, ye were.”

  “I know,” Juhg said. “But my family may still be out there.” Then he c
orrected himself. “Here. They may still be here. I’ve got a mother and a father, two brothers and a sister that I know of.”

  “If’n the goblin slavers the Grandmagister freed ye from didn’t do fer ’em.”

  Juhg glanced at the young sailor.

  Raisho’s blue eyes held a stricken look. “Didn’t mean no harm nor foul, Juhg. Just tryin’ to put everythin’ in perspective fer ye because I care about ye. Which is why I put in a good word with Cap’n Attikus fer ye.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Embarrassment colored Raisho’s face. “Nothin’. I meant nothin’. Just me mouth betrayin’ me mind again.”

  “You meant something,” Juhg said with a little force. During their three-year friendship, he’d never put too much pressure on the ties that bound them. “What did you mean?”

  Raisho scowled. “Don’t ye be botherin’ the cap’n with it. Like as not, he won’t be overly fond of either of us if ye go off askin’ him about this. Better we should just keep it betwixt us.”

  “What word did you put in?”

  Shrugging, Raisho answered, “Weren’t much. Cap’n Attikus, he just wasn’t too happy about takin’ on a scribbler, is all.”

  A scribbler! Juhg couldn’t believe it. Captain Attikus was one of the few ship’s captains in all the world who knew Greydawn Moors laid across the forbidden expanse of the Blood-Soaked Sea. The captain knew why the island had to remain hidden. If the goblin ships discovered the existence of the Vault of All Known Knowledge, they would sail on Greydawn Moors and burn the island down to the waterline, showing no mercy to man or beast.

  Librarians at the Vault held great respect from those who knew of them. Unfortunately, not many knew of them.

  “A scribbler!” Juhg gasped in disbelief. Anger stirred within him. “The term is grossly offensive.” Accepting it meant accepting an insult to the time and effort his teachers had put into him as well. He couldn’t do that.

  Raising his hands meekly, Raisho said, “Now, now. Don’t go off an’ get yer dander all riled up.”