Fairy Metal Thunder (Songs of Magic, Book 1)

by JL Bryan

  Chapter Seven

  Aoide called a band meeting. Since her apartment was stripped bare by the dwarves, she had everyone meet up at the Pretty Good Library of Sidhe City, which held what remained of the Great Library of Avalon, which had been destroyed by humans long ago.

  Aoide stepped inside the hollow oak tree that housed the Pretty Good Library, her bare feet slipping on the cold, brightly colored wood floor. The tree had been magically petrified to avoid any risk of fire.

  Shelves ringed the interior of the tree, stretching high out of sight overhead. The highest shelves held the oldest scrolls. Lower ones held the newer bound books. The bottom floor was full of the newfangled crystal balls that could each hold an entire library of books, plus pictures and music. Woven basket elevators ferried Folk up and down the hundred-story library on a system of ropes and pulleys. Librarians, mostly gnomes with long beards and pointy hats, worked quietly at their desks on each floor.

  Bridges and a spiral staircase connected the shelves. Angled mirrors carried shafts of sunlight down from openings high above, illuminating the tables and desks on each floor.

  Aoide found Rhodia and Neus at a petrified-wood table on the second floor. The pink-haired fairy and the shaggy faun, her band’s harpist and piper, looked unhappy.

  “Lucky morning to both of you!” Aoide said as she joined them.

  “Are we ready to start this meeting yet?” Rhodia asked. “I have to get to my new job. Selling caramel corn at the Circus. I’m going to get so fat.”

  “Skezg isn’t here yet,” Neus said. The faun scratched behind his goaty ear, then rubbed one of the two horns protruding from his forehead, a sign he was worried. He kept tapping the bottom of his foot, which was lined with hard goat-hoof, against the library floor.

  “Skezg never says anything anyway,” Rhodia said. “So those dwarves really stripped your bones, huh?”

  Aoide frowned. Back at home, all her furniture was gone, along with the paintings from her walls, her little dried-violet rugs, and the hand-painted dressing screen that had once been the door to her sleeping-room.

  “You haven’t had any collector problems?” Aoide asked Rhodia.

  “Oh, no, I have six roommates,” Rhodia said. “So my share of the bills is tiny.”

  “Is that a new tattoo?” Aoide pointed to the pink skull on Rhodia’s right shoulder.

  “Oh, yeah, but I didn’t pay for it,” Rhodia said. “My friend did it as a favor, to cheer me up. I’m just as broke as you guys.”

  “Are you sure you threw in all your savings when the Queensguard demanded it?” Neus asked.

  “Are you accusing me of holding something back?” Rhodia asked.

  “If you did, it would be really helpful now,” Aoide said. “Since they ripped us off.”

  “Do you have anything to spare?” Neus asked. “At this rate, I’m going to have to move back to my parents’ cave in the Blue Grass Mountains.”

  “You guys, I have nothing!” Rhodia said.

  Skezg shambled into the library, slumped on all fours. The ogre’s long, furry orange arms dragged the floor as he walked on his knuckles. Fairies gasped and stepped back, surprised to see an ogre in the library.

  Skezg bounded up the curving petrified-wood stairs and landed with a thud near their table. A wizened old librarian gnome across the floor raised a finger to his lips and shushed the ogre.

  “How are things going for you, Skezg?” Neus asked.

  “Bad,” the ogre said. “In ogre school, I was only good at two subjects: playing drums and breaking things. It’s hard to find steady work breaking things.”

  “It’s good luck Aoide has a solution to get us out of this jam,” Rhodia said.

  “I do?” Aoide asked.

  “I mean, that’s why you called a band meeting, right?” Rhodia asked. “Or are we just here to gripe?”

  “It’s not really a solution, just some things to think about,” Aoide said. “First, the bad news. I’ve heard from the Queensguard. That elf, Hoke, found our instruments but wasn’t able to bring them back. The four man-whelps used our instruments to defeat his unicorn. When she was in full dragon form, too.”

  “How is that possible?” Neus asked. “They’ve had no conservatory training, have they?”

  “They must be fumbling around,” Rhodia said.

  “If so, they’re very gifted fumblers,” Aoide said. “So they still have our instruments.”

  “Is the Queensguard returning our money?” Rhodia asked.

  “No, that’s the extra-bad news. They say they’re going to use it to fund their investigation. They’ll pay us back what’s left after that, if there’s anything.”

  Everyone groaned. Skezg punched himself in the head.

  “There will be nothing,” Neus said. “You know they’ll keep it all.”

  “I do,” Aoide said. “And I know they’re probably too scared to go grab the instruments themselves, when they’re in the hands of dragon slayers.”

  “So what are they going to do?” Rhodia asked.

  “They wouldn’t tell me,” Aoide said. “But that’s their excuse for keeping our money.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” Neus asked. “We get no instruments and no money? I hate the Queensguard.”

  “But we can’t do anything about them,” Aoide said. “There was something else that Hoke the Swamp Elf mentioned. He said unicorns were only the second best magic sniffers. He said the best were banshee wolves.”

  More groans from everyone else.

  “Where are we going to get a banshee wolf?” Rhodia asked.

  “Do they even exist anymore?” Neus asked.

  “So this is what rock bottom looks like,” Skezg mumbled.

  “Even if you could find one, you can’t hire one,” Rhodia said. “There aren’t any banshee wolf trainers. They’re wild monsters.”

  “People used to say the same about ogres,” Aoide said.

  “They still say it,” Skezg said.

  “But these are wolves.” Neus’s goaty ears pricked up. “I smell like food to them.”

  “This is your plan?” Rhodia asked. “Trap a banshee wolf and get it to work for us? I quit.” She stood up.

  “What ideas did you have?” Aoide asked her.

  “We could wait for the Queensguard to find our instruments,” Rhodia said.

  “I don’t like that idea, either,” Neus said. “If they ever do find them, they’ll probably make us pay a huge fine to get them back, or something like that. They’re greedy.”

  “But this banshee wolf idea is a dead end,” Skezg said.

  “Maybe,” Aoide said. “But that’s why I wanted to meet you here at the library. We should see what we can learn about banshee wolves. I bet they have something in the Monsters-to-Music section. Maybe there’s some way to get a wolf to help us.”

  “Sounds crazy to me,” Rhodia said.

  “But we’re desperate,” Neus said.

  “Very desperate,” Skezg agreed. He was biting his own toenails now, a sign that he was extremely worried. The chomping sound drew a disapproving glare from the old gnome librarian.

  “I’ll go ask,” Aoide said. She walked up to the old librarian, giving him a bright smile. “Hi! We’re looking for—”

  “Please keep your voice down!” he shouted, his voice echoing up and down the hundred-story library.

  “Sorry!” she whispered. “We’re looking for books about banshee wolves.”

  “Banshee wolves. Fiction, nonfiction, or other?”

  “Nonfiction, please,” Aoide whispered.

  The gnome waved his hand over a crystal ball, which sparkled and glowed. He looked bored as he peered into it.

  “Do you have your library card?”

  Aoide opened her cornflower purse and gave him the slice of quartz with the library logo on it. He waved this over the crystal ball.

  “You have an overdue book, still checked out,” he said. “Lime
ricks and Other Bad Jokes.”

  “I don’t remember that one. I must have been going through a bad-joke phase,” Aoide said. “Anyway, I’m sure it’s just under my bed or something. I’ll find it.”

  “It’s a hundred and fifty years overdue,” the librarian said.

  “Oh! I’ll look for it, I promise. But can you help with the banshee wolves?”

  The gnome sighed and walked toward a woven basket elevator mounted on ropes. “Right this way. If it were up to me, you couldn’t even enter the library if you have an overdue book out. But nobody listens to me.”

  Aoide motioned for the rest of the band to follow. She stepped into the basket with the gnome, and Rhodia and Neus followed. The basket floor creaked when Skezg's heavy weight dropped into it, and the librarian gave a worried look. He turned a hand crank inside the basket. It bounced once, but nothing happened.

  “This elevator hasn’t been working very well,” the gnome said. “Perhaps your friend is too heavy.”

  Then the basket rocketed upward through the tree, past dozens of floors. Aoide and the others shrieked and grabbed onto the rim of the basket.

  The basket slammed to a stop, bounced hard, and turned upside down. Everybody spilled out, screaming, clinging to the rim, their legs dangling dozens of stories above the petrified floor below.

  Then the basket righted itself and they spilled back inside, catching their breath as the basket swung from side to side.

  “Not working very well at all,” the gnome said. When the swaying slowed down, he stepped out onto a bridge. “This is our floor.”

  The four of them climbed out and followed him to a wall full of pigeonholes. He reached high and picked out one scroll, walked a few steps, stooped low, and picked out another. He gave these to Aoide.

  “These are too old to be checked out,” the gnome said. “You can read them at the table over there. When you are done, leave them on the table. Do not attempt to reshelve them, or you will put them in the wrong place. If you are not a master-grade librarian or higher, you could not possibly understand our system of gnomenclature.”

  “Leave the scrolls out, don’t put them away, don’t straighten up after ourselves,” Aoide said. “You got it.”

  The librarian gave them a long, disapproving look. Then he stepped into the basket, turned the crank, and plummeted out of sight at a terrifying speed.

  “Let’s see what we got,” Rhodia said.

  Aoide unrolled the first scroll across a nearby table. It was done in the style of the ancients: stories were told in a series of colorful, hand-drawn panels. White circles full of words were used to show things that the ancient people had said, and sometimes puffy cloud shapes showed what they were thinking. That was the way the ancients kept records.

  The band lined up along the unfurled scroll. Aoide looked at the first panels, which depicted humans with swords and spears pursuing a few silver-white wolves through a bright green forest.

  “This is a story about man-world, in the ancient times,” Aoide said, skimming the text. “In a place called Éire. It says humans hunted the banshee wolves for the magic in their hides and teeth, which they believed made men into powerful hunters and warriors. Many wolves were killed. The wolves went into the east, to beg a fairy king to protect them.” Aoide pointed to the pictures and the boxes of text.

  Rhodia looked at the next set of panels.

  “One of the she-wolves went to the court of the fairy king,” Rhodia summarized. “His name was Giollanaebhin Caomhánach, Tiarna of the Oirthearach Clans of Éire...too Gaelic, didn’t read.” She skipped ahead. “Okay. So basically this fairy king says, ‘You got it, wolves, you can hide in my realm, in the mountains of Wicklow. I’ll keep you safe from those hunters.’ Your turn, Neus.”

  “Then the hunters come, and it’s one of the human kings and his best warriors,” Neus said, following the bright panels. “So the fairy king can’t just run him off. Instead, he invites the human king inside for a big banquet, feast, music, dancing...And he tells the human king that he and his warriors have slain all the banshee wolves. He presents the king with a gift of fifty white banshee wolf pelts.”

  “But they were only rat pelts, enchanted to look like wolf skins,” Skezg read. “In the morning, the human king and his warriors awoke alone in a field. They took the pelts home with them. The fairy enchantment was so strong, months passed before the king could see that the gifts were only useless rat hides. But the humans did not hunt banshee wolves again, believing that none were left to hunt. And that’s the end of the story,” the ogre said.

  “So that was useless,” Rhodia said.

  “Maybe not,” Aoide said. “It says that banshee wolves are creatures you can talk to.”

  “It’s just an old children’s story,” Rhodia said. “In those fables, dogs talk, frogs talk, plants and rocks talk, everything talks. A banshee wolf is a wild animal.”

  “What’s the other scroll?” Neus asked.

  Aoide unrolled it on a second table.

  “It’s a volume of the Field Guide to the More Monstrous Wildlife of Faerie,” Aoide said.

  “Sounds like a total yawn,” Rhodia commented.

  “Here’s something we can use.” Neus pointed to a map. The shaded area indicated the known habitats of banshee wolves in Faerie. “That’s where we can find them. It’s way out west.”

  “Too far out west!” Rhodia said. “That’s the Hauntlands.”

  “They live on the border of the Hauntlands and the Big Friendly Prairie,” Neus said.

  “But that’s on the other side of the Hauntlands from us,” Aoide said.

  “I don’t want to go into the Hauntlands!” Skezg wailed. The big ogre hugged Rhodia in fear, and her nose wrinkled at his smell.

  “I’m with big orange guy,” Rhodia said, while she pulled away from him. “The plan is to go through the most haunted part of Faerie? And while we’re there, we look for these wolves, who are best known for being able to sneak up and eat you before you ever hear them? I am not jumping in on this.”

  “Look at that.” Aoide pointed to a dot on the map, a village called Caomhánach. It was on the edge of the Prairie, near the Hauntlands. “I wonder if clan Caomhánach is one of those rural clans now. A lot of those old noble families ended up out there, keeping themselves out of Queen Mab’s way.”

  “I wonder if they could help us,” Neus said.

  “You’ve both been drinking loopy-fruit juice,” Rhodia said. “How will we even get there? We don’t have money for a coach. And I’m not flying out there with just Aoide to protect me.”

  “All four of us would have to go,” Neus said. “On our own hooves.”

  “You mean walk?” Rhodia looked horrified. “Skezg, tell me you wouldn’t do this, right? I’m not the only one here who isn’t crazy, right?”

  “I’ll do whatever Aoide thinks we should do,” Skezg said.

  “Way to think for yourself,” Rhodia said.

  “I don’t see what else we can do,” Aoide said. “Unless we try to sneak over to man-world ourselves.”

  “Sh!” Rhodia said. She cast a few worried glances around the library, as if afraid they’d been overheard. “That breaks the Supreme Law.”

  “Has anyone ever been to man-world?” Aoide asked.

  The four of them looked at each other. Nobody had.

  “So, we need help,” Aoide said.

  “I hate this,” Rhodia said. “I really, really hate this.”

  “As much as you hate hawking caramel corn at the Circus?” Aoide asked.

  Rhodia sighed. “I guess I’d better go home and pack a bag.”