The Search For Magic tftwos-1

by Brian Murphy

  “Attached to the horns!” Stanach roared as the worm came nearer and the sound of the earth rumbling beneath it grew even louder. “See!”

  Jai saw, and he understood that this was how the handler in the basket directed the creature, even as other dwarves jogged along beside it, poking it with long sticks when it paused in its journey or lumbered off and threatened to eat its way through the wall. Stanach warned Jai to keep still, not for fear that the worm would harm him. The thing had no eyes and no interest in anything but eating its way to some dwarf-directed destination, but it would be easy to slip in the slime of the worm’s passing and fall beneath the beast.

  “Then,” he said, “we’d be sending to Thorbardin for sponges to sop up your remains.”

  The worm passed to the shouting of a parade of dwarves, hooting and poking to keep the worm in a more or less straight line. None of them looked to the side or even seemed to be aware they passed one of their fellows and an elf. It was worth the life of each of them to keep their eyes on the worm and keep the worm itself moving. It was a slow passing, like a mountain strolling by. Stanach stood a moment looking after it.

  Jai pushed away from the wall, getting a better grip on the stone in his hand. Somewhere along the way he’d find the Mianost entrance. It wouldn’t be an easy thing alone in the tunnel, trying to find his own way. Adrenaline shot through him in the instant he made his decision. In a brilliant moment of clarity he saw just where he would bring the stone down on Stanach’s skull-there, in the center.

  He cocked his arm and the dwarf turned, his own arm coming up with arrow swiftness. Stanach grasped his wrist so hard that Jai’s fingers went numb.

  “Now why,” the dwarf said, his words edged with ice, “why would you want to do that, elf?”

  Stanach’s grip tightened. Pain shot through Jai’s wrist to his elbow, to his shoulder.

  “Drop the stone,” the dwarf whispered, “or I’ll break your wrist.”

  The stone fell, but not by an act of will. Jai’s fingers had no feeling in them to hold. Stanach eased his grip, a little, but didn’t release Jai’s wrist. “Answer me. Why?”

  In the pulsing light and the shifting shadows, Jai took a long breath against the pain in his arm. “I’m not going to Thorbardin. I’m going back to Qualinost.”

  Stanach laughed, a hard, harsh bark. “You are, are you?” He looked pointedly at Jai’s knee. “And how do you reckon you’re going to get there?”

  Jai hated him in that moment. His blood burned with hate. “I’ll get there walking.”

  “By Winter Night, maybe.” The dwarfs eyes darkened. “You’re a fool to go back up there now. Your people are running these tunnels as fast as we can build them, as fast as we can bring them in. Soon there’ll be nothing for you to go back to. Nothing.”

  “You’re wrong! Up there is all there ever was of us. Every tale of who we are, every song, every story, all the history of us. It’s up there, and-”Jai stopped, shivering. “And if all that were lost, Stanach, here is one more tale that needs telling. The tale of the end. Someone needs to know how it ends, so they will know how to begin again.”

  Stanach let go his wrist. Jai looked at the flesh there, already bruising, then he looked away.

  “Please, let me go. What’s it to you, Stanach? Nothing, so just… let me go.”

  As swiftly as he’d turned before, that swiftly did Stanach turn again. His eyes took Jai’s and held them. “I feflte being here. I hate being out of Thorbardin. I was too long away in older days.” He glanced at his ruined right hand, then away. “I came home broken and saw the city and the kinship broken after that. I hate being out of Thorbardin.”

  “Why? If you leave the city, will it fall apart without you?”

  “No. No, if I leave the city, I fall apart without it.”

  He looked away. Jai saw nothing of his face, his blue-flecked dark eyes. He saw no sign of what the dwarf was thinking or feeling, only one small twitch of his thick shoulders.

  “All right,” Stanach said, his eyes still on some point south, some point in the direction of Thorbardin. “All right. It’s all falling apart, elf, but if you want to stand in the ruin, off you go.”

  You, he said. He bent and picked up something from the shadows: a broken stick one of the worm-handlers had discarded. With one swift stomp of his booted foot, he sheared off the splintered end. The stick he handed to Jai, with two words of advice. “Use it.”

  Then he walked away, back south toward Thorbardin. Jai smiled, following. Before Thorbardin, or even the crossway, they would come to the way out of the tunnel, the way through and up to Mianost. It was all right. He could manage the walk. He’d come this far.

  He was bleeding by the time he got there-cuts from falls, scraped hands, torn knees, his cheek ripped raw by a rock. He was bruised, and the muscles and bones of his knee screamed. He fell again, he didn’t think he could get up again, but Stanach said, not gently, “Come on, elf. You said you could do it. So do it.”

  “Shut up,” Jai snarled, and he wasn’t sure it was only sweat running down his cheeks. “Shut up and give me your hand.”

  Stanach did, gripping hard, laying bruises on top of bruises as he hauled Jai to his feet. Wordless, he put the stick back into Jai’s hand, and he pointed to the stone wall, the rocky ribcage of the tunnel. “There,” he said, but Jai saw nothing other than worm-chewed stone and moisture running down in rivulets made golden by the lantern light.

  Stanach touched the wall, just a gentle nudge, and the stone swung inward-a slab as long as an elf is tall, and as wide. It moved silently, smoothly, and there was no magic attached to it, just good dwarven engineering. When Stanach held the lantern close to the entrance, he illuminated rough stone stairs winding upward. He did not, however, illuminate anything that might remotely resemble guards or any kind of watch. “Not at this end,” Stanach said. “The guards are above, and they’re your folk. We delve; they ward.”

  They stood quiet a moment and then Stanach said, “That’s your last climb up. Just hang around looking suspicious and some elf or another will find you and fetch you home.”

  Jai drew breath to speak, then held it. Thin light slipped suddenly down the stairs, pale and silvery. A whiff of rain drifted in on a vagrant breeze. A woman’s voice wafted softly down from above, speaking in Elvish. The voice sounded familiar, distant whisper though it was. When it came closer, Jai knew it. Annalisse!

  Another party of refugees was coming through, but why was Annalisse with them? His heart sank. Had she fallen foul of the Dark Knights? Had the Marshal learned of her connection to the resistance?

  Annalisse’s footfalls came closer. Another followed her, this one’s tread heavier. A dwarf, Jai thought, and then he heard the chime of ring mail, the clank of armor.

  “I told you the Marshal would want to know about this,” Annalisse said coolly. “This is no cave. This is a way down into the earth.”

  The next voice Jai heard was human, and he knew the clanking armor was black, the wearer a man whose soul was owned by the green dragon. “Damn. That’s dwarf craft.”

  Whistling, something dark and swift flew past Jai’s face. Stanach’s throwing axe made a terrible sound as it bit deeply into the throat of the Knight. The man made no sound at all but for that of his body clanking down the stairs. Shoving Jai back, tumbling him to the stony floor, Stanach leaped for the corpse and kicked his axe free of the Knight’s neck.

  Shouts and cursing erupted in the stairwell as three more Knights ran down the steps.

  Jai got the stone wall behind his back, the cold damp rock biting into his flesh as he pressed close, levering himself to his feet. Stanach’s voice swore in the name of a god years gone away.

  “By Reorx! Close the door, elf!”

  Close it? Close him in with the Knights and the traitor? And what? Howl for help? Beneath him, the earth vibrated. No matter how loudly he shouted, no one would hear him above the thunder of worms eating through stone. Jai kicked the door op
en wider and got a good grip on his stick. The first Knight to come through got his feet tangled in the stick and, while he was struggling to rise, his skull shattered by a two-handed blow with a rock. Bone shards flew up from the broken skull, brains and blood seeped through. Jai’s stomach turned, his gorge rose.

  “Close the damned door!”

  A second Knight came through, staggering. Blood poured from his mouth and nose. He tripped over his fellow and Stanach’s axe stuck quivering in his neck above his mail shirt.

  Jai dropped his stick and planted his hands on the pile of corpses, ignoring the stench of blood and death. Balanced on one leg, he yanked the axe put of the Knight’s neck and hobbled for the doorway. From the shadow within the doorway, he trembled to see Stanach standing on lower ground, three steps below a burly Knight-undefendable ground-and the glinting tip of a keen edged sword was dipped to touch his neck. Above the Knight, Annalisse stood. Her face was cold as the white moon on an icy night.

  “Kill him,” she said.

  Icy fear washed through Jai. In his scribe’s hand was a weapon that would do Stanach no good. Neither could he charge up the stairs to the dwarfs rescue. He grinned suddenly, and he moved, flinging himself into three lurching steps, the stick in his hand. With a cry to distract the Knight, Jai hit Stanach hard behind the knees.

  Roaring curses, Stanach fell backwards. The Knight, just thrusting his sword, lost his balance and pitched headlong down the stairs. Annalisse cried out as Stanach staggered to his feet and took the axe Jai thrust into his hand. He finished the Knight in the space of a breath and turned toward Annalisse, arm cocked to throw the axe.

  “No!”Jai cried.

  For one furious instant, Stanach didn’t understand.

  Jai put a hand on his arm, holding his throw. “She’s betrayed the resistance, Stanach. We have to know if there are others.”

  His words hung between the dwarf and the Lady Librarian, the question unanswered.

  “Lady,” he said, and he hadn’t meant to speak gently, yet he did. “Why?”

  She closed her eyes, as one in pain. “I did it for the library.”

  “The library? I don’t understand.”

  Eyes shut, she drew a tight, pained breath. “I went to Medan and made a bargain. I told him I had something he wanted, if only he would promise to preserve the library. Through all that’s to come, he must keep it safe.”

  On the evening of his last night in Qualinost, she’d done that. For a fleeting moment, Jai saw in her icy expression what he’d seen then-that longing look, that sense of loss’s shadow as she looked around at her precious hoard of manuscripts and books, songs and fables and legends, all the golden history of the Qualinesti. She’d bargained her soul for the Library of Qualinost, and into the bargain thrown elven and dwarven lives.

  “You knew before I did that our family was leaving Qualinost.”

  “Yes. I didn’t know where you were going, but you told me that.”

  She’d set a Knight to linger around Mianost. When the refugees didn’t arrive, the Knight had no way to follow farther. Annalisse, however, didn’t give up so easily. She had more patience than Knights. She had, she believed, much more at stake.

  Tonight there were, she said, with the first dawning of shame in her voice, four Qualinesti warriors dead in the forest, not far from the entrance to the tunnel. “But we took a vow, Jai, you and I. There will always be a library. There will always be history’s hoard in Qualinost.”

  “We did, lady,” he said, the words like dust in his mouth. “But we took it to serve a truth, not a building.” Softly, he gave her back her own words, often spoken in the quiet precincts of her library. “We can’t forget who we were. It’s how we know who we are, and how we can guess who we will be. My lady, with your bargain, you risked making us cowards before all who would look back at us. You risked ending our history in shame.

  “It isn’t the collection that matters. It is the history that matters.”

  He turned his back on her. He didn’t look when Stanach asked if he should kill the traitor.

  “No,” he said. “Your folk and mine are going to want to deal with her.”

  The dwarf grunted and said he could save them all the time and trouble now, but he didn’t insist. He ordered Annalisse down the stairs. When she passed Jai, she paused. “It’s over Jai, or it soon will be. We can only try to live.”

  Jai said nothing, but didn’t look at her.

  Stanach gestured with his axe. Annalisse walked past, the hem of her sleeve brushing against Jai’s hand. It felt like ice, like winter coming

  Dwarves dragged away the corpses of the Knights, eight strong fellows come back with Stanach from the work detail. Sitting on the bottom step of his way home, Jai heard them talking and the scrape of mail on stone as the heavy bodies were hauled away. No one came to wash away the blood.

  “Stone will remember that forever,” Stanach said.

  Jai nodded. He had nothing to say-or nothing that would pass the grief thickening his throat. Annalisse, his mentor… she’d given up. In fear or despair she’d chosen betrayal and found a way to convince herself it was an option.

  Stanach, a grub-light in hand, took a seat on the step above. After a long moment of silence, he said, “They’re closing this entrance tonight. There’s a party of you Qualinesti above getting ready, and we’ll close it down here too. By morning no one will know it was here.”

  Jai nodded.

  “Are you sure you want to go? What about your mam and your da? Will y’not want to see ‘em one time?”

  Jai shook his head. “Send them word. Just tell them… tell them I have to do this.”

  Stanach’s voice softened, a little. “Jai.”

  Jai turned, startled to hear the dwarf speak his name. He’d been “elf all along, just that- someone to move through the tunnels and then forget.

  “Jai, it won’t be long before it all falls apart up there. The end is told. You heard it tonight People are giving up.”

  Breeze smelling like rain slipped down the stairs. A woman’s voice called softly, urging Jai to come up now, or stay. Qualinesti! Secret soldiers of a king who danced, it seemed, to a tune of his own calling, one his people didn’t truly understand. It wasn’t over yet, not while these strove.

  Jai rose, balancing with a hand on the dwarfs shoulder. “Walk up with me, will you?”

  Wordless, they went. It was a long way up, a hard road, all those dozen winding stairs. At the top, Jai turned. A pit of blackness yawned below. Stanach stood in a pool of yellow lantern light on the top step. His face was like stone, no muscle moving.

  “Stanach, the story isn’t all told yet, because I haven’t told it. I’m going back to do that. I’ll send the histories and stories out of Qualinost a little at a time. I’ll find a way to get them through to Thorbardin, and… and all the rest of the tale. How it ends.”

  Stanach looked down into the darkness and then back. “Just get them out. Put them in any hand coming into the tunnel. I’ll see them the rest of the way home. And when the last one… Well, don’t stay too long, eh? Come bring the last one to me yourself.”

  “Stanach, I don’t know if…”

  A small muscle twitched in Stanach’s cheek. He took a breath; it sounded ragged. “That’s right. You don’t know. But you do know this: I’ll be here, right here in the tunnel, trawling for lostlings.” He offered his hand, his left, and Jai took it in his own left, grasping it the way Qualinesti warriors did, the hard comrade’s clasp. “I’ll wait.”

  Jai nodded. He said no more about his chance of coming back. He turned, and he left, going out into the night and the end.

  The Lost Sea

  Linda P. Baker

  Effram saw the first splatters of rain hit the window only because the neighborhood children were throwing rocks at his windows again. And they were doing it standing inside his boat.

  Glass tinkled, soft as wind chimes, onto the floor in one of the second floor rooms he rarely use
d. Little feet thudded on the deck in imitation of a sailor’s jog as the children laughed and cheered, celebrating the particularly well aimed throw. The four children, their faces dirty and their hair wild and uncombed, were all from one family. The littlest one was being newly initiated in the fine art of harassing crazy Captain Effram.

  He stormed onto the back porch, reaching for the sling he kept hanging on a post for just such visits. The stones he kept beside it weren’t big or heavy enough to really hurt. They were just enough to give the little brats a smart pop for trespassing again. Just enough to leave a sting in exchange for the hurled insults that still had a sting of their own, even after twenty years.

  Effram stepped into the yard and drew back on the sling. The children gave him ample opportunity for a very good shot, but just as he was about to fire, a big raindrop plopped right into the middle of his forehead. He missed his shot. With a loud thunk, the stone bounced carelessly off the hull of the boat, and the children cackled with glee.

  With high pitched shouts of “Ahoy, mate!”

  “Where you gonna sail today, Captain-on the Sand Sea?” the children ran away, leaping directly from the deck of the boat onto what had long ago been the breakwater for the harbor, then down into the dry bed that had once been the Sea of Tarsis.

  Effram ignored them. Sniffing the air, he scanned the sky to the south of the city, following the wet scent of rain to the pewter sight of rain. Boiling, silver-gray clouds stretched away to the horizon. The sky was barely recognizable as the same sky under which he’d lived for almost thirty years. Gone was the interminable, unwavering, blazing new sun, painted over with the dull, slate gray of an approaching storm-a fat, ungainly storm with a belly full of water. He hadn’t seen a real storm, a wet storm, since he was a boy in Ankatavaka.