The Rover Read online

  “I suppose it had to be the annotated version by Vassely, the Mad Monk of Bethysar,” Grandmagister Frollo stated with regret.

  “Yes.” Wick’s shoulders slumped in dismay. The book had been a massive tome, all the book a single dweller could carry and still stealthily stumble up and down staircases without breaking his neck.

  The grandmagister stalked down the bookcase, eyeing all the volumes distastefully. “You know how I feel about Hralbomm’s Wing, Librarian Lamplighter.”

  “Yes, sir.” Everyone at the Vault of All Known Knowledge knew the grandmagister’s thinking on every room in the great library.

  “This wing is filled with frivolity, something that has no place in a proper history of the world. And that is what we have here in the Vault of All Known Knowledge. We are the last bastion of hope, the final torch that will hold back that dreadful beast, Ignorance, father of the corrupting twins, Superstition and Irrationality.”

  Solemnly, feeling as though he had an anchor about his neck, Wick followed his master. After the Cataclysm had decimated populations and ravaged the world of whole races, when the very idea of civilization had hovered on the brink of disaster, the Old Gods had engineered a plan that had caused the construction of the Vault of All Known Knowledge.

  Wick took pride in the fact that a dweller had been chosen to care for the First Book, the one the library designers had used to safeguard the island and start building. As those men had constructed the great stone edifice, others had searched out books lost in the world and brought them back. Now they had each and every one, and so it would be until a future grandmagister felt it safe to return them to the world. Until that time, dwellers would continue to serve the grandmagisters of the library.

  “Imagination, as I have profusely illustrated upon more than one occasion,” Grandmagister Frollo pontificated, “is simply a marriage of convenience between misinformation and an impatient passion to understand. A truly educated scholar knows, while an uneducated charlatan blends fact and fiction into a concoction gossip-mongers want to hear. A true student washes his hands, and his brain, of such things.”

  Wick trailed a hand over the book spines, struggling to keep from taking a tome from the shelf when he spied an interesting title. However, he did remember where they were located. He managed to snatch his hand way just before Grandmagister Frollo looked back at him to make sure he was paying attention.

  “Were it within my power,” the grandmagister declared, “I would rid the library of these particular books. They offer nothing educational, and only rob an impulsive librarian with an attention deficit of his already finite time in this place.”

  “Begging the grandmagister’s pardon,” Wick said, “but I wasn’t reading that book during the time allotted to my duties here at the library. I never neglect those.”

  “I know you do not.” Grandmagister Frollo stopped unexpectedly and turned to face the little dweller. The old man shook his head sadly. “I wasn’t talking about your duty periods, Librarian Lamplighter. A librarian lives by the time that he spends between the covers of a book. You spend more than most. However, I hate to see that time go unrecognized by you as a precious commodity and squandered on volumes such as these.” He swept a hand in irritation at the bookcases surrounding them.

  “Forgive me, grandmagister,” Wick apologized, “for I did not mean to anger you.”

  “You don’t make me angry,” the old man snapped. “In fact of the matter, you vex me, Librarian Lamplighter, you vex me like a good dose of chafing wartneedle pox. By the First Book, if most of my other librarians had the zeal and the passion, as well as the sheer grasp, you exhibit for the written word, the task of finally cataloguing all the volumes in this building would not seem so insurmountable.”

  Pride swelled within Wick. He’d labored hard at the library for years only to never progress past his current level. No one had ever been a Third Level Librarian for as long as he had. The grandmagister has noticed! Suddenly, the thought that Grandmagister Frollo had been searching for him seemed not so daunting. Perhaps his promotion, which Wick considered to be long overdue, was again up for review.

  “Yet,” the old man continued in a more strident, thundering tone, “you insist on cluttering that great pumpkin of a head of yours with the most trivial literature contained within these magnificent halls.” The grandmagister exhaled deeply and continued a little more calmly, but the effort showed. “I have tried to understand it, tried even to believe that you will some day grow past these debilitating pursuits, but there are days like today when my doubts overpower my dedicated attempts to believe those things.”

  Just as quickly as the feeling of pride had come to Wick, it went away even faster. The little dweller gazed down at his unpolished shoes and his guilt suddenly seemed too much to bear. His father was disappointed in him, and so was the grandmagister. “I humbly apologize again, Grandmagister. I will try to devote myself more to the readings you suggest.”

  “Very well, Librarian Lamplighter.” The grandmagister cleared his throat. “However, I didn’t seek you out to remonstrate you over your reading habits. Despite your diversions and incessant ramblings through this great library, I’ve found you to be more dependable than many.”

  Now this was looking up. The air returned to Wick’s lungs. “Thank you, Grandmagister.”

  “That was an observation,” Grandmagister Frollo advised, “not a compliment.”

  “Of course, Grandmagister.”

  “I have a task for you.”

  “Gladly, Grandmagister.”

  “I need you to go down to the Yondering Docks and deliver this,” Grandmagister Frollo pulled a thick package wrapped tightly in cheesecloth and twine from beneath his robes, “to the Customs House for shipping.”

  “Of course, Grandmagister. What is it?”

  Grandmagister Frollo blinked irritably. “Librarian Lamplighter, I have taken obvious care that this package is wrapped securely.” He popped one of the tight twine lines, making it thrum against the cheesecloth for a moment. “Were I to hire a town crier to go about announcing the package and what it contains, I think that would defeat the purpose of the wrapping.”

  “Of course, Grandmagister. I was only inquiring because I wanted to know how best to handle the package.”

  “With care, I would think, that would reflect somewhere between the concern one would show for an elven blown-glass figurine and a goblin hog’s-head cheese.”

  Bile rose at the back of Wick’s throat momentarily at the thought of a goblin hog’s-head cheese. It was made, of course, from real hogs’ heads. “I could take the package to the ship it’s going out on. I really don’t mind.”

  “Whether you mind is irrelevant,” the grandmagister said. “If I’d wanted you to take the package to the ship, I’d have asked. What I want you to do is to deliver it to the Customs House.”

  “Will someone pick it up there?”

  A frown turned the grandmagister’s face sour. “No, Librarian Lamplighter, I’m sending the package to the Customs House to rot.”

  Wick’s face flamed. He made himself be quiet.

  “Are we quite clear on your duties now?”

  “Yes, Grandmagister.”

  “Oh, and this letter as well.” The old man produced a letter. There was no address on the letter. The insignia of the grandmagister’s ring—an open book and quill—was pressed into the wax seal.

  Wick took the letter. “Yes, Grandmagister.” He looked at the package and the letter, and his curiosity gnawed at him from the back of his mind like spoor beetles, which were known to crawl for miles after only getting a fragrant hint of a fresh prize waiting to be claimed.

  “Off with you, Librarian Lamplighter,” the grandmagister ordered, shooing Wick with one ink-stained hand. “There are only so many daylight hours librarians are graced with, and many, many pages to turn.”

  “Of course, Grandmagister.” Wick bowed and backed from the room, carrying the heavy package in one hand
, the letter in the other. “You can count on me.”

  The old man glanced at him threateningly. “If I can’t, Librarian Lamplighter, I know where you sleep.”

  2

  Yondering Docks

  Treydawn Moors bustled with activity. Normally, the city was early to bed and early to rise, making the most of the natural light. But any time the cargo ships put into the harbor, the dwellers and dwarves alike hastened to get their goods and wares down to the docks to sell or trade them. The island was mostly self-sufficient, but there were still a number of foods and textiles that had to be traded for, as well as creature comforts and new seed stock for the various planting seasons for the grain fields and corn fields that lay just outside the city.

  Wick guided the cart through the main street that cut through the heart of the city. The cart’s wheels clacked across the seashells scattered across the street with severe snapping noises. Dwarven road builders dredged up fresh seashells from the north coastline once a month, hauled them by cart into the city, and patched road sections damaged by constant use.

  Turning onto Raysun Street, Wick glanced at the old wishing well on the corner where dweller graybeards sat on hardwood benches and spoke to each other of their problems, dreams, and memories. The little librarian remembered going there with his grandfather, sitting on the old man’s knee and listening to the stories they told that had been handed down to them from generations past. Grandpa Deigeh always had a pocketful of cheeryberry licorice in those days, and the cheeryberry flavor had always left Wick with a smile on his face.

  The dwarven houses and shops on either side of the street were most readily noticeable. Crafted with dwarven skill and a love for straight lines and permanency, the stone houses were slightly larger than dweller homes. Each house corner was perfectly squared off and each door frame and window was perfectly level. The chimneys were works of art. They used wood to accentuate the use of the carved stone blocks. The dwarves painted their homes in staid, solid colors taken from the hues of stone and woods they worked with. Their gardens were small and neatly organized, filled with small carvings of animals and people that moved and danced when the wind blew the small vanes that powered them.

  Dweller homes, on the other hand, tended to be constructed in a much more haphazard fashion. Where the dwarves took time to clear away old buildings and homes that had fallen in disrepair, the dwellers simply tore out the worst of the areas and shored up the rest, leaving sagging walls and off-center, patched roofs. Dwellers were used to living in spaces between anything that had spaces between, including other buildings, in alleys, and rock formation. There was safety in numbers. Chimneys didn’t go straight up from dwellers’ homes; they staggered up through roofs, twisting and rambling, a hodgepodge of stones thick with mortar.

  Dweller homes were painted in bright colors in outlandish combinations, and festooned with objects and ornamentation scavenged from everything that caught a dweller’s wandering, acquisitive eye and fancy. Most of what caught dwellers’ eyes glittered or gleamed or glistened. Shiny shapes dangled from under the sagging eaves and were hammered onto doors and walls. All of those reflective surfaces were polished mirror-bright.

  Usually two or more dweller homes were built together, leaning against one another for support. Sometimes as many as a dozen houses were clustered together, as long as every house could maintain its own entrance and exit. Sometimes those entrances and exits included stairways and crosswalks that extended over other houses. They reminded Wick of frog eggs to a degree, all of them touching each other, independent yet needing the support of the others.

  All in all, dweller housing tended to seriously irk the dwarven population. The dwarves took pains to see to it that their houses stayed well away from nearby dweller houses. If they didn’t, the dwellers had a tendency to build additions onto their houses, encroaching on dwarven territory.

  The little librarian eyed the sun dropping quietly in the western horizon and continued on to the docks.

  Wick stared in wonderment at all the tall-masted ships berthed in the harbor just beyond Yondering Docks. Even after reading so many books about ships and sailors and sailing, he’d had no comprehension of how big the vessels really were. He pulled the cart to a stop beside a sailcloth-maker’s shop and stared at the ships in total awe.

  Fog clung to the harbor, thick, gray cottony clouds of it scudding close to the bruised-purple water. Close in, he could see through the fog and the shapes of men and ships, but further out, the fog was impenetrable, leaving the rest of the world to the imagination.

  Some days, Wick had heard, the fog burned off and a man standing on the shore had a clear view of the Blood-Soaked Sea as it stretched north and east. The south side of the island rarely experienced the fogs that the harbor area was filled with most of the time. A few of the older dwellers liked to tell tales of the dark days after the Cataclysm and how the Builders had worked their sorcery, bringing in the clouds to hide the harbor from goblin and goblinkin eyes. The dwarves that lived in Greydawn Moors maintained that the weather was a natural occurrence, born of the land and sea.

  The dwarves liked to take their magicks in small doses. Humans had always wielded the great magick of legend, though only a few of them. Still, those few who possessed such power seemed to know no bounds. Elves knew forest magicks, spells and wards that helped with the guardianship of the lands they had sworn to protect. And dwarves, with their canny knowledge of metals, gems, and stone, swore they knew no magick at all, only the trades their fathers had taught them. Occasional dwellers and other races knew only small magicks that went over well in taverns but offered no real power.

  Wick wished he could have seen out into the Blood-Soaked Sea. He didn’t know when he would get down to the docks again.

  Seashells had been brought in from the oceans, cracked under the hammers of dwarves, then laid thickly over the mud that wound in between stone warehouses and businesses around the docks. As a result, the roads looked white and pearl gray with a few pinks thrown in. On those few clear days, shortly after a rain, Wick’s oldest brother Moryhr had described the roads as gleaming iridescence.

  Moryhr’s recounting of the roads on those days had always reminded Wick of the tales of the Ceffalk Elves. The Ceffalk Elves had disappeared even before the Cataclysm, but they reportedly built magick roads that extended deeply into the past and sometimes into twisted worlds that might have been. These days, the Ceffalk Elven roads were only tales, and no one knew if they had really ever existed.

  Nearly all of the buildings around the docks showed dwarven skills. A few ambitious dwellers still maintained a presence in the Yondering Docks, but the harbor area was generally known as a dangerous place. There were far easier and safer ways to live in Greydawn Moors, and dwellers as a rule preferred those ways instead of the adventurous ones.

  Out in the harbor, bells rang, echoing over the water and seeming to come from the fogs. Wick’s skin goosebumped as he heard them. When he was a child, his mother had told him stories of terrible monsters the dwarves had captured from the Blood-Soaked Sea and brought into the harbor to aid in its protection from the goblins. The monsters, his mother had told him, preferred the taste of goblin flesh, but had been wreathed in collars with great bells on them to warn friendly ships that the monsters had surfaced and could pose sailing hazards.

  The bells were actually on the small longboats that carried cargo in from ships out in the harbor that couldn’t reach a berth. The pilots clanged them continuously so other longboats and ships would look for them in the thick fog. The clangor of the bells mixed in with the shouted commands of captains and quartermasters to crew as well as conversations yelled between ships. The creak of the ships and the litany of pinging noises from the mast riggings added to the cacophony.

  The Customs House sat on a spit of land thirty feet above the rest of the docks. The construction was definitely dwarven. Huge stone blocks had been hauled up to the area and cunningly crafted into large, interlocki
ng puzzle pieces. The stones showed different striations, from wavy curves to ragged jags, and colors that ranged from blacks to blues to reds. No stone was colored or shaped like any other. Wick couldn’t even begin to guess how long the construction had taken. The building stood four stories tall, with elegant balconies and a steep roof that centered around a lighthouse that went up another forty feet.

  A well-traveled road covered in flagstones wound up a ridge that led to the Customs House doors. Two small stone bridges spanned wide ditches along the way. A handful of carts stood in the area before the building, though Wick noticed that a number of captains and quartermasters simply walked back and forth.

  The little librarian urged the mule forward again, heading for the Customs House. He knew he had to finish grandmagister’s assigned task and return to the Library quickly.

  The waiting room in the Customs House was ornate. Wick gazed in wonder at the paintings that decorated the walls. He recognized some of them as works that had been done before the Cataclysm. Elegant dwarven furniture provided seating in small groups around low tables or at half a dozen desks. Most of those areas were taken already.

  “So you’re the one,” the Customs House clerk announced when Wick finally reached him. The clerk was gray-haired and quite well advanced into his years. Ink gleamed wetly on his thumb and first two fingers, but Wick noted that none of the ink left smears on the papers he labored over.

  “I’m the one?” the little librarian repeated, not sure at all what the clerk was referring to.

  The clerk looked at the little librarian curiously, then frowned sternly. “Yes. A human has been here three times to pick up this package.”

  “I got here as quickly as I could,” Wick said. “It is a long trip from the Library.”

  “So it is,” the clerk replied, poking at the package experimentally with his quill. “The man waiting to pick this up will be quite relieved to see it.”