The Destruction of the Books (2 page)

Although tall for a dweller, Juhg stood only a little more than half his friend’s size. His fair hair and skin that still held the cherry glow of a newfound tan contrasted sharply. Raisho looked every inch a sailing man, while Juhg looked something like a miniature version of a merchant in the hand-tailored clothes that he took such care in. Except that no merchant was ever a dweller in the northern climes of the mainland.

Nor did any dweller know how to write
. Fear trailed cat’s claws across Juhg’s shoulders. He swallowed hard.

Thankfully, no one in the loud tavern appeared to have noticed the young sailor’s comments. The Broken Tiller lived up to its name as a place where men who fought the sea for a living gathered to spend their time in lazy circles of talking, drinking, and eating. Small and crowded by a low ceiling, the tavern had an earthen floor covered by crushed oyster shells that staved off most of the mud when the torrential rains that often wracked the coast came stealing in the light of day or the loneliness of night.

“You might warn someone when you were about to pounce on them,” Juhg replied irritably.

Lowering his voice, Raisho said, “An’ ye might want to give a thought that maybe ye ain’t back on Greydawn Moors, or at the Vault, where dwellers read an’ write an’ such like it ain’t nothin’.”

Despite his embarrassment at being surprised, Juhg knew the young sailor was correct. Writing in the journal, even as compelling as the exercise had been and as active as his mind insisted on being, was a mistake. Juhg was a dweller, one of a race that had been enslaved by goblin slavers for centuries, even after the evil Lord Kharrion had been defeated by the combined remnants of armies made up of humans, elves, and dwarves.

The dwellers hadn’t fought in those battles against Lord Kharrion and his goblin hordes. Dweller natures prevented them from massing for battle, as the gods had intended. The Old Ones had shaped dwellers to be survivors, and one of the greatest survival skills was cowardice. Still, the lack of effort for the dwellers’ own freedom and lives had left rancorous feelings among the other peoples of the world.

“Were it not me,” Raisho said, “an’ were it a goblin what found ye a-scribblin’ in that book, why, ye’d be drawn an’ quartered an’ thrown out into that muddy street what lies outside them doors.”

“I know.” Juhg took the book from under his plate and pocketed it in his worn gray traveling cloak.

He rolled the quill he’d been using back into the waterproof oilskin that he carried them in, keeping all the quills straight and orderly as his training dictated. He wasn’t neat and orderly by nature; those skills had come from his training at the Great Library. Capping the inkwell he’d kept out of sight on the chair beside him, he put the small bottle into his pocket as well.

“Ye mind if I sit?” Raisho asked.

“I’m sorry. Please do.” Juhg gestured to the other side of the table.

Raisho didn’t find a chair immediately to hand. He glanced a little farther afield, then hooked a chair with a foot and yanked it over. He sat in the chair, taking care to shift the cutlass and long knife he wore at his hips. When he finished with his adjustments, both blades lay quick within reach.

“What are you doing here?” Juhg asked.

“Came to find ye.”

“Why?”

“Wanted to share me good fortune with the one what was somewhat responsible fer it.” Raisho rubbed his palms together. Calluses midwifed by long hours of handing ship’s rigging and scraping barnacles rasped against each other.

Juhg raised his eyebrows. “
Our
good fortune, you mean?”

“Aye.” Raisho nodded with good-natured reluctance. “Our good fortune, then.”

Unable to keep either impatience or hope from his voice, Juhg finally gave up any attempt at feigning disinterest. After all, the purchases at the last port intended for sale here were primarily his suggestion based on independent reading he’d undertaken. “You sold our goods well?”

A broad white smile split Raisho’s face. “Well enough, little bookworm. Well enough, indeed.” The young sailor jingled a modest purse. The silvery tinkle of the coins inside sounded promising.

In spite of himself, Juhg’s ears pricked and he began attempting to guess at their profits based on the clinks he heard. Much of those profits, he knew, depended on how well the Cheemantine blankets had brought in an unproven market.

“The blankets?” Juhg asked.

Raisho nodded. “Mighty cold up here, but people still have an eye fer fashion. As ye guessed.”

Juhg smiled. Buying the blankets had been a gamble, and he felt satisfaction that the investment had paid off. Cheemantine blankets served to fight the chill of long winter nights, but each was uniquely made with patterns that were—reportedly, at least—not duplicated by the blanket makers. Even among the poor, hardscrabble environment of Kelloch’s Harbor, Juhg had felt certain buyers would want individual things, items that others around them could not duplicate.

Raisho lifted a hand and drew the attention of a serving maid.

She was a young lass, dressed in a simple homespun gown, and quick to respond to the young sailor despite her tired eyes.

“Don’t go around advertising your newfound wealth,” Juhg cautioned. His innate dweller’s nature to run and hide in the face of physical adversity rose to the surface. “Otherwise you’ll lose that profit, and perhaps your very life, before you make it back to the ship.”

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.