Wizard's Goal

by Alan J. Garner

  Blinking away his disorientation, Garrich soaked up his new environs. The Shieldrock Range remained close at hand, only now curving away southward on his right instead of the left. Maldoch had hopped them a mere forty leagues. They were at the mouth of a dry and dusty river valley cutting into a rocky plateau by means of an ancient canyon. Past torrents of water must have carved the channel through the pinkish-brown sandstone, but now the parched riverbed was nothing more than sand and loose stone eroded from the sheer cliff walls rearing up dizzyingly vertical on either side. It was the gateway into an arid, desolate place that challenged life and sapped the will to live: hardly an auspicious start to their journey into the sandy, waterless wilds that were the hallmark of the Great Desertland.

  "Rain has not fallen here in over five thousand years,” Maldoch said of the baked landscape.

  Garrich squinted up at the heavens, shocked to see a pale blue sky entirely devoid of clouds. Across the way, on the other side of the mountains leapfrogged moments ago, the overcast skies billowed sullenly. It was if an invisible barrier high in the atmosphere blockaded any rain clouds from drifting east. “It's hot,” he dryly observed.

  "It'll get hotter. Down in the interior the rocks get scorching enough to fry eggs on. We're lucky not to be traveling at the height of summer, boy. Then you'd not only sweat bucketfuls, you would actually melt"

  That divulgence bothered the Goblin, and he began stripping off his cloak.

  "Leave it on,” ordered the wizard, roughly pulling Garrich's cape back up over his shoulders. “Sunstroke can be a killer, even on the desert verge. Stay covered up."

  "But I'll overheat,” he protested.

  Maldoch scratched his hawkish nose. “I'll fix that,” he said, ferreting through his carryall. He fetched out a leather pouch and untied the knotted drawstring. Emptying a whitish powder into the palm of his hand, he blew the finely grained dust over the Goblin's cloak. The residue clung glaringly to the gray material, gradually seeping into the weave of the cloth and turning the robe a glossy black hue.

  "This'll reflect the heat and make the desert hotness bearable,” the spellcaster explained, repeating the process on his cloak.

  Inspecting his changed daywear, Garrich astutely remarked, “For a spellcaster, you fall back on common potions and powders quite often."

  "There's more than one way to skin a cat."

  Garrich grimaced. “Why would anyone want to skin a cat?"

  "It's a figure of speech."

  "Leave the maxim composing to Parny. He's infinitely better at it than you."

  The wizard made an unhappy face. It irritated him being second best to any. “We wait here until sundown and descend into the valley come dark,” he gruffly decided. “It's more comfortable moving about the desert in the cool of night."

  "We're walking in?"

  "Unless you intend sprouting wings and taking flight."

  "What about your poor feet?"

  "They haven't fallen off yet. I'm gambling they'll survive a trek across the sands."

  Hobbling a short way down the parched watercourse, Maldoch sought out an umbrella of shade offered by a slight overhang of the cliffs and plonked himself down to await nightfall. Garrich joined him, his mind ticking over.

  "This has to be the Dead River,” he postulated. “So you're probably taking us to the Troll capital twenty or so leagues from the southwest bend. It's the only settlement of note within easy walking distance."

  Impressed by the youth's vast improvement in geography, the delighted wizard hid his smile of approval beneath a covering hand and wisecracked, “Crikey, boy. You must've swallowed that atlas Parndolc loaned you."

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  Chapter Twenty Four

  The day was stiflingly hot. Sweltering beneath his blackened cloak, Garrich waited impatiently in the meager shade a doorway offered for Maldoch to emerge from the windowless building across the way.

  "Is everyone in Terrath taller than me?” he muttered, eyeing up the giant pedestrians moving lethargically up and down the sandy side street.

  Trolls were amazingly big. Males stood an average of nine feet, their 300-pound bulk grossly muscled. Even the slenderer, but no less muscular, females standing tall at six and seven feet towered over the shorter Goblin. Yet despite their intimidating tallness, the Sulanders—as they called themselves—were the proverbial gentle giants and extremely hospitable. Over the course of their weeklong stay in Rohal Ak Jubai, the principal city of the Trolls in the Great Desertland, Garrich and Maldoch were being treated well. Their host, a kindly elder by the name of C'marl who billeted them at a friend's house, was especially cordial.

  "Stop making goo-goo eyes at the girls and come along!” rebuked the wizard, hustling from the doorless arch on the opposite side of the thoroughfare.

  Garrich took off after the striding wizard and caught him up rounding a corner into the wide band of raked sand serving as one the chief roads. “I can't help it,” he said, defending his ogling. “It's not my fault I keep running into naked ladies of late."

  To underline the youth's point, a bevy of nubile, ebony skinned beauties sauntered past the outlanders, cleverly balancing on their hairless heads elongated clay water jars painted with geometric designs while they suggestively made their way back from the public well at the center of the city. Demurely gazing at the visiting Goblin, the bare-breasted maids giggled and provocatively swung their hips, scantily covered by the mini-skirts of sheer cotton worn by female Trolls of all ages. Garrich hardly noticed the waggling bums, too entranced by the many pairs of pert breasts jiggling and bouncing with a life of their own to notice anything below the waist. His head automatically turned to follow the teasing temptresses as they passed him by, encouraging a fresh outburst of girlish titter from the hussies flaunting their charms.

  Playing upon Garrich's distraction, Maldoch whispered to him, “Here comes a real stunner."

  Garrich's head spun around eagerly, and he jumped in fright when an aged crone came shuffling his way. The toothless old woman, displaying skin the texture of corrugated tree bark and saggy boobs like empty, flaccid waterskins, flashed him a gummy smile. He shuddered and pulled up his hood to ward off the unsolicited attention while scuttling by her.

  Trolls were hardly the loveliest creatures in the best of lights. Practically devoid of any body hair, their glossy black, pigmented skin acted as a perfect sun block against the burning desert rays. Splayed, sixteen-inch long clodhopper feet permitted easy access over dune slopes and gave rise to their informal generic name of Sandwalkers. Complimenting facial adaptations to desert life added to their matchless appearance. Tiny, jet-black eyes sat tucked beneath canopied brow ridges to cut down on the sun's blinding glare, under which was placed a broad nose with vertical nostril slits able to close against the wind-blown grit stirred up by the furious sandstorms that frequently scoured the Great Desertland. The ears were proportionately human-sized but topped by downward hanging large flaps of triangular skin that helped keep the head cool by dispelling excessive heat. A thin, lipless mouth to seal against moisture loss finished off the ensemble of physical attributes tailored explicitly to a predominantly desert lifestyle.

  "Did you get what you were after?” Garrich asked the hastening wizard.

  "They were out of stock,” grumped Maldoch.

  "Of what?"

  "Dried, four-legged sand snakes."

  Not desiring to know what use the spellcaster had in mind for those, Garrich said, “Where to now?” mindful that noon was a quarter hour away and all sensible folk holed up in a shady spot during the hottest part of the day.

  "Back to J'tard's house."

  "And the charming K'hanti,” groaned Garrich, taking two steps to Maldoch's one just to keep pace with the striding spellcaster. “How long are we going to hang around here for?"

  "Until J'tard returns from in-country with the Troll talisman,” Maldoch tartly informed him. “It's not so bad. Think of it as playing inside th
e biggest sandpit in the world."

  "Parny described it like that once."

  Maldoch groaned. “By the Maker's beard, him and I are starting to think alike."

  Troll cities were unlike their human and Dwarven counterparts. Water, not gold, was counted the most precious commodity in these parts, a fact reflected in their town planning.

  Rohal Ak Jubai, like her sister communities of Kha-Rell in the south and the northern conurbation of Kha-Sebaalch, was built around a life-sustaining artesian well. Long ago, ancient water divining Trolls hand-drilled favorable spots in the Great Desertland, tapping the scattered underground reservoirs of clear, cool liquid. Settlements predictably sprung up beside the manmade oases, gradually expanding from communes into towns and later to cities as populations swelled from the mounting number of drifters trading in their age-old nomadic ways for watered permanence.

  Tradition was not abandoned entirely, Trolls retaining strong communalism. They had to stick together to survive. Loners did not last long in the sun-baked high desert and over the centuries the Sandwalkers cultivated a spirit of intense cooperativeness to promote the mutual survival of the various tribes that carried over into city living. Whereas Men willingly chose to live fenced away from their neighbors, sadly isolated from contact with their fellows, Trolls embraced togetherness and visibly expressed this in their architecture. Walls were employed only to provide exterior facades for dwellings as a buffer against the incessant sun and sand. Internally, buildings were compartmentalized, when necessary, by shiftable woven blankets decorated with the intricate geometric patterns repeated by Troll artisans in every medium from ceramics to painting, and easily rearranged to alter the size and shape of rooms at will. Such partitioning was softer than plaster walls and harked back to their simpler, tent-dwelling nomad days.

  "We'll drop by and see V'drall on our way through,” decided Maldoch.

  Garrich positively beamed. While harboring no particular desire to visit with the crusty librarian, everyone in the city knew the Library of Histories to be the coolest place in town.

  From a bird's eye view the Troll capital formed a giant hexagon gravitating around the central hub of the city well, named Middle Watering funnily enough. Eight main arrow-straight roads emanated from the corners of the hexagonal layout to converge on the city center, inspiring the famous Troll adage All roads lead to water. Parndolc was not the only Terrathian with a penchant for composing maxims.

  The navigating wizard headed out of the mercantile zone away from the pottery and weaving workshops sharing space with curio stores and apothecary offices. The thriftier side of Maldoch appreciated desert merchandising. In a society where bartering was the norm and money seemed as foreign to Trolls as flooding, the spellcaster's padlocked purse had perfect opportunity to regrow its cobwebs.

  Turning right at the end of the broad thoroughfare, Garrich quickened his step as the blazing sun climbed higher into a cerulean sky made to shimmer by the desert heat haze. The side street they were hurrying down was one of an octad running parallel to the exterior walls and bisecting the bigger roads, providing a division between the granaries, storehouses, and public buildings of the inner core from the general housing areas of the outer city.

  Crossing the southeast roadway angling northwest from the sole gate into and out of Rohal Ak Jubai, Maldoch stopped abruptly in the middle of the road. An elderly municipal worker smoothing out the heavily tracked sand paused to lean on his costly wooden rake and watch the robed mage. Throwing back his hood, Maldoch cocked his white-maned head as if listening to a faraway noise. He continued on his way a moment later with a dissatisfied look souring his bearded mug.

  "What was that all about?” asked Garrich, hearing nothing untoward.

  "Thought I heard a horn,” muttered the frowning wizard, pulling his cowl back up.

  Another right turn beyond the public bathhouse and the flanking city meeting hall brought the pair to the sandy steps of the capacious Library of Histories, four stories high and assembled of the same adobe the rest of the city was constructed from: sun-dried bricks fabricated out of wind-blown clay. Inside, the midday furnace was cooled by freestanding oblong rock shelves arranged in orderly rows either side of the central aisle the wizard and Goblin ambled down, their booted footfalls echoing dully on the clay flagstones. Tallow candles recessed high in wall alcoves barely illuminated the vault, impressing upon Garrich its cave-like dimensions and qualities. Faint, metrical tapping disturbed what should have been the glutinous quiet that pervades all libraries.

  This was no ordinary repository of knowledge. Conventional books were weirdly absent here, replaced by tablets of stoic sandstone indented with, what looked at first glance, illegible symbols. Of the three races that expressed the Shared Tongue in written form, only Men and Dwarfs utilized the Runic Alphabet. The Trolls, eldest of the Fellow Races, physically recorded the spoken word in hieroglyphs, stylized pictures of figures and objects representing words and sounds that predated alphabetic characters. Pictograms surpassed even the Sandwalkers in agedness.

  Progressing along the cordoned walkway toward the rear of the library, the two visitors immersed themselves in the history of the ages. 1,400 years into the First Epoch, six centuries before human society crawled into infancy, an enterprising nameless Troll began recording significant Terrathian events for posterior on stone slabs. Rock weathered time far better than burnable parchment or rustable iron, mountains outliving people and civilizations. That fledgling practice enlarged in scope over the decades until finally the Library of Histories was erected to house the multiplying records and growing number of custodians tending the chronology of the known world.

  Maldoch could never shake the feeling of stepping back in time whenever he returned to this antiquated building. Each shelf of glyphs he passed chronicled the births of nations, the deaths of kings, the lives of the immortalized greats ... facts unprejudiced by color or creed. Past melded into present, catalogued by the sequential bookshelves starting with the earliest occurrences at the front by the arched entranceway and extending to the more recent episodes contained on the shelves further in. The library, already half full of crammed ledges brimming with the wisdom gleaned from the experiences only longevity offers, contained ample room to expand. History, like Time, marched to an uninterrupted beat.

  Garrich followed the wizard beyond the last shelves into the spacious backroom to discover the source of the background tapping. The Goblin's previous visit had him loitering for an hour or more by the front shelves while Maldoch conducted his private business unseen out back, but for some reason the preoccupied spellcaster did not object to his ward tagging along to observe this time.

  Rows of stonecutters seated on stone benches at stone tables were chipping pictographs on stone tablets using primitive chisels and hammers of, you guessed it, stone, industriously updating the annals of history. Behind the engravers, a second contingent of bookkeepers breathed colored life into the otherwise dull glyphs, painstakingly brushing pigments of red, yellow, white, blue, and green into the storytelling depictions with brushes made from unihorn belly hair.

  Visibly perplexed, Garrich had to ask the obvious. “They're so isolated here in the desert. How do they get news of the outside world?"

  "From me,” confessed Maldoch. “Call me the roving reporter for the Troll Times.” The wizard chuckled at his own in-joke, which Garrich failed to get. “In return for furnishing them with reports of goings-on in the rest of Terrath, one of the scribes gets the fulltime job of converting the library glyphs into runic text for me. The Trolls kindly store the translations for me here on a back shelf."

  Garrich noted that individual sitting apart from his colleagues at a small end table all to himself, assiduously copying the undecipherable pictographs from a stack of tablets on to a thin sheet of clay in runic scrawl. “Can't you read those picture-words either, Maldoch?"

  The wizard snorted indignantly. “Of course I can, boy. I just can't be fagged. Runes
are much simpler to peruse."

  A shortish, blocky Troll conferring with one of the librarians looked up and approached Maldoch, his white and green striped knee-length skirt of dyed unihorn wool disconcertingly feminine. Garrich could not help but observe that even a short Sandwalker was a head taller than the long-limbed spellcaster.

  "Tell me it's finished, V'drall,” demanded Maldoch, not bothering to greet the Keeper of the Library of Histories.

  'The ink's barely dried,’ growled the head librarian, his voice the timbre of thunder rumbling in the distance.

  "Then it's ready."

  V'drall glanced caustically at the mage and snapped his fingers. A scribe rose from his worktable, blowing gently on a sheet of stiff writing papyrus as he did so. Carefully rolling the page up and looping a cotton tie about the tube, he came over to place the scroll in the Keeper's waiting hand, and then went back to his engraving. When V'drall went to pass the cylinder to Maldoch, the wizard gestured that the boy be given it.

  Hesitantly accepting the gift, Garrich took the moment to study the Keeper. Like all adult Troll males, conical tusks curled upward from V'drall's bottom lip, the length of curvature a precise indication of maturity. Helpful, considering it was nigh on impossible for an outsider to determine a Troll's exact age. Judging by his finger-long tuskers, V'drall was at least a century old and therefore earned a seat on the advisory council. Another prominent physical feature of desert menfolk were their tattooed chests: indelible designs of rock formations, desert animals and the like denoting tribe, genealogy, even marital status. A week was not nearly long enough for Garrich to learn to identify the assorted tattoos, so V'drall's lineage and allegiances remained unknowable.

  "What's this?” he said of the scroll.

  "A replacement copy of the Shamanist Ode,” related Maldoch. “Try not to lose this one."

  'There's no chance of that,” the Goblin assured him. “I don't plan on flying again."