Authors: Mel Odom

Tags: #Fantasy, #S&S

Lord of the Libraries (27 page)

BOOK: Lord of the Libraries

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Magic that healed or changed things without destroying them was hard to work. Generally only very strong wizards could work such spells, and most of them didn’t because it took too much from them. Craugh had sworn Juhg to secrecy, not wanting him to tell anyone about the incident. He hadn’t wanted anyone to know that he handled “good” magic.

For a moment, Juhg felt guilty about being suspicious of Craugh’s intentions. The wizard had done a great deal for the Library and for the Grandmagister.

But he’s got a lot to atone for,
Juhg told himself in rebuttal.
Unleashing
The Book of Time
into this world. Fathering Lord Kharrion. All those untold people he put to death and the empires he overturned. Besides that, although he doesn’t destroy them so the spell is supposed to be inherently good because of that, turning someone into a toad is not a good thing.

“Hey!” Dusen squalled from the other room. “You’re floodin’ the buildin’! Hey! Can you hear me!”

Craugh gestured and a single green spark tore through the rooms, heading back toward the smuggler.

Dusen cried out in true alarm, sounding panicked. “Okay! Okay! I’ll shut up! Just make the spider go away again!”

Just when Juhg could see all the way to the bottom of the stairs, though water still rushed from the downstairs area, a terrific crunching sound came up from the bottom of the building. The floor listed underfoot, increasing the angle the building was already sitting at.

Craugh put out a hand and the water stopped coming up the stairs for a moment.

“Taking all the water out of there has affected the way the building’s sitting on the sea floor,” Jassamyn whispered. “It’s already not sitting flat, but the water changing places is affecting it.”

Gradually, the crunching sound stopped and the building seemed once more anchored in the mire of the sea.

Peering down into the hallway, Craugh said, “We’ve got to continue. I’ve not taken out enough water yet.”

Eventually, puddles followed the deluge. After a time, no more water came up the stairs.

“All right, apprentice,” Craugh said in a strained voice, “let’s see if we can find
The Book of Time
.”

Raisho took the lead, walking boldly down into the hallway with his cutlass in one hand and a lantern in the other. Cobner followed him, both hands on his battle-axe.

Juhg looked down at the water that was now up to his waist. He wasn’t happy. A lot of water had been moved, and if Craugh lost control of his spell, a lot of it would rush back down into the hallway. He followed Craugh, stepping through the water and past the invisible wall that held it back from the hallway.

He held the lantern high as he walked down the narrow curving stairs. Steep anyway, and wet now, the stairs were made even harder to negotiate because the building leaned in their direction. Juhg experienced a touch of vertigo as he went down because he was leaning so far forward.

They passed a number of sprung traps and bones of what were probably victims of those traps. Juhg had to step over cruel spears that jutted out of the walls in two places, duck through the legs of a skeleton that had its head pinned to the ceiling, and negotiate a section of the stairs that had gone flat as a result of a trick step that caused twenty steps to fold downward. There were also four open pits where more skeletons were wrapped around jagged spears of glass.

At the second floor, Raisho and Cobner split off to search the rooms.

Craugh looked back over his shoulder at Juhg. “Our destination is down farther still, isn’t it, Apprentice?”

“Yes,” Juhg replied.

And they were off, leaving Cobner and Raisho exploring. The dwarven warrior and the young sailor caught up with them before the others reached the second floor.

The bottom of the stairs let out into an immense circular room.

Craugh walked into the middle of it. His face was ashen and his hand holding a lantern shook a little.

“Are you all right?” Juhg asked.

“It is a lot of water, apprentice,” the wizard snapped. “Don’t waste what time we have. Find the hiding place Wick wrote of.”

Getting his bearings in the room, barely able to see the lines of the sundial marked on the floor, Juhg walked to the wall to the right. Skeletons littered the floor. Several of them wore different uniforms and carried weapons showing diverse craftsmanship. Juhg’s practiced eye told him they were of separate cultures and disparate times.

When it was first built, the room was probably an entertainment room for the Baron of Seadevil’s Roost and his most important guests. Remnants of broken furniture lay all around the room, mixing with the skeletons and shattered stonework. Maybe there had once been a fortune in fine goods, in gold-rimmed glasses or beaten copper mugs bearing the baron’s crest, but now there was only moldering garbage.

And, perhaps, a final secret still.

Another quaver ran through the building, causing everyone to glance up apprehensively.

“Apprentice,” Craugh said hoarsely.

Turning his attention to the wall, Juhg searched for the hidden door. Water droplets gathered on the stone surface and ran down through the grooves. A preternatural chill filled the room, so cold with him in wet clothes that his bones ached.

Holding his lantern up high, Juhg wiped his free hand across the wall until he found four circular patterns that looked like the rest of the design. Satisfied that he’d found what he was looking for and that the design matched the description in the Grandmagister’s book, he depressed the top upper left pattern, the bottom right, pressed down and turned the upper right counterclockwise, and pressed down and turned the lower left clockwise. Then he pressed at the block in the center, causing it to sink back three inches till it locked.

Rumbling echoed through the big, cold room.

Listening for the sound, Juhg turned to the center of the room. A circle four feet across unlocked in the room’s center, then it dropped down the height of a human man and revealed a recess in the stone.

Something glowed a deep sea-blue inside.

“I’ve got it,” Raisho said, dropping over the edge and starting for the object.

Walking closer, glad the young sailor had volunteered, Juhg watched with interest. The blue glow radiated from two gemstones floating inside the space. The gemstones possessed square bases that flared up to cube-shaped points that were flat on top. They looked like short mesas on broad bases.

No,
Juhg thought.
That can’t be right. That isn’t a book.

But he knew that it had to be because the pieces matched the description the Grandmagister had given in his journal. The Voldorvian elves wrote on handmade amber jewels they grew layer by layer and then laid spells upon so the book within could be read in the mind of the person who held the gems. They were some of the hardest books Juhg had ever had to read because they took such a high level of concentration. Most of the First Level Librarians at the Vault of All Known Knowledge hadn’t been able to read them. The Grandmagister had been able to read them as easily as he might read by trailing a finger along a line of script. Juhg had heard rumors that some wizards carried spell books written by the Voldorvian elves, although that craft had been lost back during the Cataclysm.

Tentatively, as if realizing that he had put himself directly into the path of danger, Raisho reached into the space with a knife. Without warning, he dropped to his knees as the knife fell from his hand.

“It burned me,” Raisho exclaimed.

Wanting to make certain his friend was all right, and to tend to his wounds if he wasn’t, Juhg dropped inside the recessed place as well. A quick examination of the young sailor’s hand showed no injury.

“Well,” Raisho said sheepishly, “it
felt
like it burned me.”

“The knife is iron,” Craugh said. “Some of the old magic wars with iron.”

Juhg remembered that then. Iron was a product wholly of the world, not of whatever place magic came from. That was why the magic swords in so many of the romances in Hralbomm’s Wing didn’t really exist. Iron and magic could seldom be bonded, and only then with simple spells and for not very long.

Well, if the gemstones reject iron,
Juhg thought
, that’s one argument for these being ancient pieces.

“If you’re just going to look at it,” Craugh growled, “let me down there.”

Hesitant, Raisho reached into the space for the two floating gemstones.
His hand seemed to graze them because they suddenly tumbled end over end. But when Raisho closed his hand, it came out empty and the two gemstones continued to float and spin inside the space.

“I could have sworn I had them,” the young sailor said. He tried again, but experienced the same results. Still, the gemstones spun differently, as if he’d made contact yet again.

Abruptly, the building shivered again. A sudden deluge sprayed down the stairwell and Juhg thought the wizard’s spell holding the water back had slipped. But after the initial splash, no more water came.

“We need to hurry,” Craugh said, sounding more strained than ever.

“The Grandmagister had the same problem retrieving the gemstones,” Juhg said. “He came here and saw these gemstones, but he couldn’t get hold of them.”

When he’d decoded that passage in the Grandmagister’s journal, Juhg hadn’t known how that could be possible. Now he’d seen Raisho struggle with the same problem several times.

“Let me,” Juhg asked, stepped around Raisho and reaching out to the gemstones. He felt them somehow slip through his fingers like cold mist up in the mountains. Repeating the action, he watched more closely and saw that he wasn’t missing the gemstones, his fingers were actually passing
through
them like they were apparitions instead of the real thing.

“What’s taking so long?” Craugh demanded.

“I can’t close my hand on them,” Juhg said. “I mean, I can close my hand on them, but they pass through my hand. I can feel them, feel how cold they are, but I can’t get a grip on them.”

“Maybe they’re an illusion,” Jassamyn offered. “There have been traps all along the way, thankfully much removed from this point in time, but who’s to say if the gemstones are really the part of
The Book of Time
that is supposed to be here? They could be part of a trap that was left here all those years ago.”

“No,” Juhg said. “This is it. It has to be. The Grandmagister would not be wrong about something like this.” He felt the chill of the gemstones pulse against his hand, like they were there one instant and gone the next. Concentrating on the pulses, he tried to time them, get a feel for when he could close his hand on the gems.

It’s like a tumbler lock,
he told himself
. You just have to feel your way through it. There. Almost. No, wait, wait. They have vibrations. Like music. To the
untrained and unknowing ear, music is just sound, but a mathematician recognizes the patterns and sequences and knows they have measure and form.

He felt for the measure and form, listening to the music of the gemstones. They grew more tangible in his hand, and the feeling of physical presence lasted longer and longer.

Unexpectedly, Craugh fell, obviously no longer able to hold onto his staff. Or hold the water back. In the next instant, Juhg heard the gurgling sea rushing pell-mell down the hallway.

And in that instant the contact he had with the spinning blue gemstones was at its strongest. There was an instant of jarring shocks and he went deaf. Then he was gone from the basement level of the Baron of Seadevil’s Roost.

“What Do You Know About the Nature of Time, Librarian?”

W
hen Juhg reopened his eyes, he was on a narrow trail that wound around a mountain that vanished in the clouds before him. He looked everywhere, up the huge stone mountain to his left, over the steep side of the drop-off to his right, then up the trail he was apparently following in the direction he was headed, and back along the way he must have come to get here.

Where are Craugh, Raisho, Cobner, and Jassamyn?
Juhg asked himself.
And why can’t I remember climbing this mountain?

Only a short distance from him in any direction that he looked, gray clouds obscured his vision. He couldn’t tell how far he’d come up the mountain or how much farther he had yet to go.

“Craugh?” he called. He remembered how the water had started pouring down through the hallway, knowing that the wizard had overextended himself. He raised his voice.
“Craugh!”

His voice was lost in the cloudy darkness. Not even an echo came back to him.

Think, Juhg. You can reason this out. You were trained to
use your mind at the vault of All Known Knowledge, by the best Grandmagister who ever lived.

He glanced down at his clothing, discovering that he was dressed in First Level Librarian robes. Where had his clothes gone? He would never wear the Librarian robes outside of the Vault of All Known Knowledge or Greydawn Moors. Reaching up to his head, he was surprised to discover that his hair was no longer wet. In fact, he was dry all over.

How much time had passed since Craugh had fallen? Then a cold suspicion stared to creep in at the edges of Juhg’s mind.

Am I dead? Is this what death is like?

“You’re not dead, Librarian Juhg.” The voice was quiet and pleasant.

Turning, Juhg discovered that there had been another traveler on the road after all, though he didn’t know how he could have missed the fellow earlier.
He must have stepped out of the clouds. That’s it. He just stepped out of the clouds while I had my back turned.
Unfortunately, he knew he hadn’t had his back turned long enough for the other traveler to have climbed the mountain, not even the short distance he could see.

The figure was tall as a human but looked more like a praying mantis. Standing on its back four legs, the creature held the other two arms curled up under its chest. The body was sleek, covered in a bright green carapace with mottled purple brushed in. The creature was so thin that it looked fragile, but the chitinous hide looked like armor. The head was a rounded triangle with a carved mouth and two bulging black eyes. The antenna wriggled constantly, slight movements that tested the air.

“Who are you?” Juhg asked, stepping back from the fantastic creature till he teetered at the edge of the cliff. There was nowhere else he could go.

“Your guide.”

“My guide?”

“Yes.”

“My guide to where?”

“Wherever it is you wish to go, Librarian Juhg.”

Juhg took heart in the fact that the thing hadn’t tried to eat him. “Where are my friends?”

“Back at the building.”

“I want to go back there.”

“You’re already there,” the creature said.

“Nonsense,” Juhg said, “as you can plainly see, I’m here. Wherever here is.”

“And you’re there.” The reply was stated calmly and reasonably.

Juhg blinked his eyes, realizing he was suddenly back in the basement room watching Craugh still falling and the water rushing down the hallway to fill the room where they were. The two blue gems hung frozen in the secret space before him, and for the first time he realized the chill of contact with them was maintaining. He closed his hand on the gems only to feel them fade through his fingers again. When he blinked his eyes again, he was once more standing on top of the mountain with the praying mantis.

“Here,” the creature said, “time is malleable and has no rules. Or rather, time here has every rule. You are here, and you are there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. That is why you are here now: so that you may understand in time.”

In time?
Juhg wondered how those two words were used. Was it meant that given time he would soon find some kind of understanding (though, personally, given present circumstance he very much doubted that)? Or did the creature mean that he was there to understand
in time
so that he could prevent some horrible occurrence (like the building basement flooding and drowning them all)?

He didn’t know.

“I need to go back with my friends,” Juhg said. “I can’t just leave them. They’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Yes. But there will be time for that. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Time?”

“Can you send me back?”

“When I am ready. And I won’t be ready until you are ready.”

“I am ready.” With the water rushing down the hallway, he had to be ready. He couldn’t leave his friends to die.

“You are not,” the praying mantis insisted.

“When will I be ready?”

“Once you understand some of what you came here to understand. You can’t understand it all at once because your mind will only stretch so
far. You’re—too much a part of organized time. You lack the vision and skill it would take to absorb everything I could give you now. If I tried, the burden would destroy your mind.”

“My friends will still be there when I get back?”

“No time is passing there now for you,” the creature said. “You’re standing outside of Time. You could watch time go by here if you wanted to, but I perceive that you wish to rejoin with your friends at the same moment that you left.”

“Yes.”

The creature shook its round head. “You may die.”

Juhg thought about that. Things certainly did look bad back when he’d … when he’d … whatever it was he’d done to stand back in that room. “I can’t leave them.”

“I could save you.”

“Can you save them?”

“Perhaps, but the effects of my intervention would cause ripples that could offer dire consequences at this juncture. It would be better to save them later.”

“How can you save them later if they’re dead?” Juhg felt frustration and anger building up. He didn’t understand what was taking place.

“Your perceptions of time impair you, Librarian. For now accept that such a task is not beyond my ken.”

Accept? Juhg couldn’t do that. He struggled with understanding what was going on with him now. “Is this real? Or am I hallucinating from some side effect of those two gems?”

“This is real.”

“You brought me here?”

“No.
The Book of Time
brought you here.”

“You mean the two blue gems?”

“Yes. That is the portion
of The Book of Time
that Lord Kharrion left in the keeping of the Baron of Seadevil’s Roost all those years ago.”

“I can’t get those two gems,” Juhg said. “They keep slipping through my fingers.”

“That’s because you lack proper understanding. That’s why you were brought here.”

“Why wasn’t Raisho brought? He touched the gems.”

“He didn’t see the resonance within the gems that you did. His mind
only grasped the physical aspect represented by
The Book of Time.
You reached for the possibilities. In that instant,
The Book of Time
chose you. You are the one that was chosen, the one that is chosen, and the one that will be chosen. Always.”

“Because I felt the pulsing of the gems?”

“Because your mind was open. As it was and is and will be.”

Unable to grasp the meaning of what the praying mantis was talking about, Juhg decided to concentrate on easier to digest facts. “Who are you?”

“Your guide, as I have told you.”

“Why do I need a guide?”

“Because, at this point, you don’t know how to guide yourself. There is much that you don’t know.”

Juhg was growing frustrated and scared. Maybe he was lying under an ocean of water—
at least a bay,
he argued—drowning, and the discussion he was having with the giant praying mantis was only a distraction to spare him from the pain of death.

“You are not dead, Librarian Juhg.”

“I know. You keep telling me that.”

“What do you know about the nature of Time, Librarian Juhg?” the creature asked.

“It marks the passage of the day into night, of the night into day, and divides the seasons of the year.”

The praying mantis thing frowned—which was a hard thing to do when there were so few facial features to work with, but Juhg clearly understood that it wasn’t pleased. “Those are the artifices that those who live in your world choose in an attempt to make sense of the passage of Time. Do you know what Time is?”

“No,” Juhg said, interested in spite of the dire circumstances he found himself in at both places where he was.

“Time is limitless, Librarian Juhg. Everyone works to hard to quantify it and pay special attention to the passage of it. Like Time is going somewhere.” The creature laughed, and it was a very odd sound. “Time is as limitless as space. Also like space, it has no beginning and no end. It has always been, and it will always be.”

“I knew that,” Juhg said. “Herrah Snez wrote in his discourse on Time, ‘Time can never be wasted nor saved. So approach each moment with an eye toward making it be the best moment you can.’”

“An excellent thought,” the creature said, “but, sadly, incorrect. In true Time, there are no moments. All divisions made of Time were wrought by those of limited perception.”

“Time passes,” Juhg said. “Something that happens … an … an action—” He waved his hand. “—has a place in time. It’s marked. It’s finite.”

“Is it?” The mantis smiled.

“Time passes,” a voice said to Juhg’s left.

He turned his head, wondering how yet another person had come upon the mountain without him knowing it, and he saw
himself
dressed in Librarian’s robes.

“Something that happens … an … an action—” His other self waved his hand. “—has a place in time. It’s marked. It’s finite.”

In disbelief, Juhg reached out to touch his other self. He felt the warmth of flesh and blood brush against his fingertips. Then his other self turned to face him, his face filled with surprise and a little fear.

A heartbeat later, someone touched Juhg’s face. He whipped his head around and stared into the face of yet another self.

“This doesn’t make sense,” the self to his left said. And that was only a heartbeat before he heard those same words coming from him. Even then, he realized that another self was suddenly to the right of the self to his right, and the reaction to being touched by the self beyond him was taking place.

Suddenly, the mountain trail seemed filled with Juhgs all in a row. They were all touching and being touched, all of them just as surprised as he had been.

“I don’t understand,” his left self said, and Juhg agreed with himself only a moment later.

The mantis waved. All of Juhg’s other selves vanished, leaving him standing on the trail facing the creature. Juhg touched his own chest, wanting to make certain that he was real. He felt his own heart beating frantically.

“Time simply is,” the mantis said. “Like space, time has no limits. No beginning, no end.”

“We don’t know that.”

“You have looked up into the sky at night and wondered what was out there,” the mantis said. “Do you think that all that emptiness can actually be contained? And once contained, what of the space outside it?”

Juhg had no answer. The question had fascinated him at times, but it was simply too large to properly address. He walked away for a time, trying
to assemble his thoughts. “There have been a number of scholars who have addressed that question. I’ve read several books in the Vault of All Known Knowledge.”

“Have you found any solace in their teachings?”

Juhg knew he had not. Everything he’d read had only led to further understanding that when it came to what lay outside the world, he didn’t know. Nor did anyone else.

“Some of those scholars have insisted that space is an organic thing,” the mantis said. “They say that space grows a little each day, like a plant in a forest, or a pool of water that swells with the rain. But a plant takes nutrients from other sources to put on new foliage, and the rain fills the pool. So where, then, does this new space come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“How far can it grow? Or is it like a plant or a pool, governed by its own nature or constrained by space?”

Juhg could only shake his head.

BOOK: Lord of the Libraries

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