The Barrow

by Mark Smylie

  “Nothing unusual about that. If it’s one of the rare books rooms I’ll just enter you into the ledgers with the name of the Chancery Lord requesting the copy to be made and fetch you the key,” said Grim Liam, grabbing a brown leather ledger from beneath the desk, where it sat next to a rarely used black ledger.

  “Ah, that’s the unusual part,” said Harvald, and leaning forward he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial tone, and let his eyes fill with meaning. “I can’t tell you the name of the Chancery Lord.”

  “What?” said Liam, a puzzled expression on his face. “Well, that is un . . . oh!” Liam gave a start, as he unraveled the hint, and he also lowered his voice. “You mean; it’s for him.”

  “Yes!” said Harvald. “I mean, it’s just a bit of research, but still, it’s very exciting. Apparently he very much liked the work I did for him copying the transcripts of the trial of Lord Wilhem last year. I think I told you about that, didn’t I?”

  “Oh yes, a terrible business, that!” said Liam. “Well, then; I suppose it might be best if this one was off the ledgers completely, wouldn’t it?”

  “I was afraid to ask, old friend, but that would be most excellent indeed,” said Harvald.

  “Then let’s just put that particular ledger away,” said Liam, slipping the brown ledger back under the desk. “I can just enter you as having entered into the general Library, then. Would that work, do you think?”

  “Yes, I think that’d be fine,” Harvald said; after all, some students and guards had seen him enter the Library doors so it might stand out later if for some reason his name was not recorded anywhere. He watched as Liam wrote his name into the main ledger of the Library, and then could barely stand it as Liam stood and consulted a massive bound ledger, the Catalog of the Rare Books Collection, that was on a separate desk behind him. After a few minutes that seemed like hours to Harvald, Liam finally reached down, rummaged a bit in a drawer beneath the desk, and fished out a brass key.

  “Here we go,” said Grim Liam. “The key to the Blue Room in the Rare Books Wing, where you can find the Libra di historum Manonesian. The password is regismata.”

  “Most excellent, old friend,” said Harvald with a smile. “Most excellent!”

  As he walked through the halls and galleries of the Library, Harvald discovered he’d been sweating into his shirt during his interaction with Grim Liam, the fear building in him that someone would come along and interrupt before he’d had a chance to make good his entry. But now relief that he had cleared the first hurdle flushed the fear away, making it difficult for him to keep a measured pace as he made his way deep into the wings.

  He passed the scriptorium halls, where students and scribes diligently made their own copies of the books they were studying, or were employed in creating copies of some work at the request of a noble or member of the High King’s Court. Still the old-fashioned way, he thought as he remembered the many hateful hours he’d spent there doing the same. Printed books had finally appeared in Therapoli, imported from Palatia and Hemispia beginning a hundred years ago, and were now increasingly available, being produced even within the city itself. But the University did not own a printing press—though Harvald knew of eleven in operation in other parts of the University Quarter and over in the Foreign Quarter—and neither did the High King’s Court, a mark of the general conservatism of the city’s most powerful institutions. Instead, students and clerks spent many hours laboriously hand-creating copies of ancient texts and important documents, and therefore duplicating in some cases the errors and editorial decisions of some previous generation of copyists.

  During his time at the University, a great debate had raged about the appropriateness of the use of both printed editions of books and the use of Indices created to make their perusal easier, both of which were rejected as foreign concepts alien to the proper traditions of the University. Only the more cosmopolitan students of the Mottist College—named in honor of the Lord Mott, Vizier of Palatia and inventor of the first Indices—embraced the printed word with enthusiasm. Hard to believe that those debates had come to bloodshed, he mused. But now, only a few years later, the debate was muted if not largely over, the presence of printed books firmly established in the city and the University, and their ascent was almost certainly inevitable. Try standing in the way of the future, he thought, glancing at the rows of students diligently bent to their task, and it will sweep you aside.

  After the scriptorium halls, he passed through the four great halls of the main Library wing. Each hall held copies of the books of the four Ages of History, going back chronologically. So the first hall was filled to bursting with the books of the current Age, the Age of Iron and Fire, which began when Akkalion, the Emperor of Thessid-Gola, fell into what came to be called the Gray Dream; the second with the books of the Bronze Age, which began after the Catastrophe that ended the Worm Kings and the darkness of the Winter Century; the third with the books of the Age of Legend, which began after the sinking of Ürüne Düré and the end of the War in Heaven with the ascension of Islik to the throne of the King of Heaven; and then finally, the last hall filled with the books of the Golden Age, that most ancient time when gods and men walked Geniché’s earth together, stretching all the way back to the Age of Creation. Only one book had been created during the Age of Creation: the Great Book of Yhera, the Queen of Heaven, written with the blood and skin of the Great Dragon, and from which grew her Sacred Tree. And that book could only be found in the Otherworld, where the World Mountain and the Sacred Tree met Yhera’s palace in the Heavens. Only the greatest of magicians and heroes could ever hope to see that book, and get a chance to read it or, if they dared, inscribe their lives within it.

  The scholar-magicians of the Golan Great Schools had been the first to outline the concept of the Ages of History, and their schema had been widely adopted throughout the cultures of the Mera Argenta. The end of the Age of Iron and Fire was already widely predicted; indeed, mendicant proselytizers and holy men were an increasingly common sight in the public areas of the city, and even out on the roads and trails of the countryside. They’d passed half a dozen different apocalyptic preachers by the side of the road or in small village squares on their way to and from the Manon Mole, each of them proclaiming a different way in which this Age would end, and the next Age would begin. They’re going to need to build a new wing when this Age is over, he thought. Though maybe they could just kick out all those useless copyists and turn that room into the Hall of the New Age. But the idea that they were on the cusp of a great change in the world excited Harvald, particularly given his current self-appointed mission.

  In the first hall, the Hall of the Age of Iron and Fire, he stopped and perused the shelves until he found a copy of On the Language of the Mael Kings, by Gammond of Wael, luckily a fairly common book, if one not in particularly high demand. The further back he went in the building, the quieter it became and the fewer students and clerks he saw, until by the time he turned into the central corridor of the Rare Books Wing it was practically deserted. He passed only a single open door, to the Green Room, and saw a single student therein, busy at work copying some ancient text; he did not recognize the young man, but whoever it was must have been a favorite of some Magister, to be allowed to work alone and unsupervised.

  Harvald stopped in front of the Blue Room, and slid the key into the lock. “Regismata,” he whispered as he turned the key, and then breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the lock click open. The warding enchantment was a simple one but strong, bound into the lock of the door by Magister Clodarius, and he changed the passwords for each room in the Rare Books Wing each day.

  Harvald opened the door and slipped inside; against the customs and rules of the Library, he closed the door behind him. He walked quickly to one of the empty drafting desks that stood in the middle of the room. Selecting one he liked that faced the door, so that anyone that entered could not immediately see what was spread out upon the tilted surface of the desk, he set do
wn On the Language of the Mael Kings and took off his half-coat and opened his satchel. There was a single window in the room, high set against the wall and barred with rune-inscribed iron, and though the midday light streamed through it the room was still dark and gloomy, so he lit an oil lamp over the desk. Fire was, of course, the greatest danger and worry in the Library, but it was simply too expensive to use the enchanted potents of the ajuga flower to spark the heatless flames of magic, and so care and discipline in the handling of fire was drilled into every student and clerk. He quickly pulled out from his satchel blank sheets of parchment of varying sizes, an inkbottle and quills, and a water bottle to quench his thirst, and arranged them on the desktop and in its special-built holders.

  It took him almost a half hour to find the Libra di historum Manonesian, as there was no particular order to the books and scrolls that filled the room. The books were arranged on straight shelves, while the scrolls of papyrus and parchment were arranged in latticework cubbyholes. He had started in a hurry, and went through the room once without finding it, before he forced himself to breathe more steadily and start over, being more thorough the second time. He finally found it and with as much care as he could, hauled the large, three-century-old volume over to the desk. He slowly turned its pages until he found a nice page to set it open to, spotting the words regis wyvernnis on one side opposite an illumination of some horrible battle. Suitably grim, he thought, then slipped the key back into his coin purse and slung the satchel over his shoulder.

  He had selected the Libra and the Blue Room for two reasons. One was that he actually might need the book, as appended to the fables of the ancient Wyvern King and his barbarous descendants was a later history of the bandit knights of the Manon Mole and, most importantly, of the beginnings of the Nameless Cults there in the centuries after the Worm Kings, when worship of Nymarga the Devil and the Forbidden Gods took root amongst the most depraved of the hill peoples.

  The second was because the Blue Room was located right across from the stairwell that led to the top floor of the Wing, and the warded Black Rooms of the Library: the collection of the forbidden.

  He slipped two amulets out of his satchel, and then slipped them over his head. One was a small glass vial filled with a clear liquid, and hung from a gold chain. The other was a small copper square on a copper chain; inscribed into its surface was a circle of small runes from the Daedeki Grammata, the set of a dozen magical symbols created by the magician-god Daedekamani during the Golden Age and given to the men of the Gola. The small runes were a rune of making, a ward rune, a rune of becoming, a rune of cleansing, and a rune of light, making the amulet a fairly basic magician’s aid. He rubbed the copper amulet with his fingers and concentrated on the rune of making, picturing it in his mind as he closed his eyes, and began to recite words combining the Incantations of Seeing and Making: “Open my eyes and open my ears. Let me see the World. Let me see the North. Let me see the South. Let me see the East. Let me see the West. Close their eyes and close their ears. Make me invisible. Let me walk unseen amongst friend and foe. Let me walk unseen in the North. Let me walk unseen in the South. Let me walk unseen in the East. Let me walk unseen in the West.” And then he took a deep breath and walked out the door.

  He heard the locks slide back into place as he closed the door of the Blue Room behind him, and then he slipped as quietly as he could across the hall and into the spiral stairwell. One twist of the stairwell went down into the lowest levels of this wing of the Library, and he’d eagerly explored that with Stjepan and Gilgwyr back in the day, but he ignored it and headed up, listening in case there was anyone above him. Up to the Blue Room he was within his rights and could easily explain his presence; but now, moving up to the top floor, he started to sweat again even with the incantation, for he knew it wasn’t foolproof. He paused at the landing, listening for noise in the corridors beyond. Hearing nothing, he slid out onto the top floor.

  The windowless corridor was only dimly lit, the only light cast from a few haphazardly spaced oil lamps on sconces, but the incantation made the corridor shine a bit more brightly in Harvald’s eyes. Deep, dark doorways flanked him on both sides of the hall as he moved toward the Black Rooms, and he came to a halt outside the outer door. It was large, made of blackened oak and bound in elaborate bronze fretwork which was shaped in its center into a Daedeki Grammata ward rune like the one he had on his amulet: a six-pointed star set within a circle.

  Rituals had a way of leaving bits of energy and power behind in the places they were performed, so any place where men and women performed magical or sacred rituals on a regular basis could soon become a repository of latent power: temples and shrines, for example, or a wizard’s tower. Natural parts of the landscape could also hold reservoirs of power for those who knew how to tap them: glens and groves, lakes, waterfalls, caves, hilltops and mountains could all become sacred places thanks to the whims of nature or the veneration of men, animals, or spirits. The menhirs, the old fae stones, were a way for the fae and other peoples of the ancient world to identify and access such spots. And the same was true for places of death and ruin, such as battlefields, gallows, and graveyards, where the spirits of the dead had congregated and passed out of the world.

  The University itself was no different; not only was it a place where over its many centuries thousands of students had performed magic rites large and small, copied spells and rituals, and worshipped their gods with prayers or offerings, but it was also quite possibly built on top of an ancient maze and labyrinth which had been the scene of much death and suffering. And thanks to his incantation he could see an impressive enchantment worked upon the door, tapping into the magical and spiritual power of the building and the earth upon which it was built, and binding some of that power into the ward rune to prevent anyone from entering without the key. Unlike the keys to the Rare Books Rooms, which were held in the safekeeping of the librarians at the front desk, the keys to the Black Rooms were worn on a chain hung around the neck of Master Clodarius. Once upon a time other Magisters had been allowed to carry their own keys to the Black Rooms, but that had stopped after a recent scandal and now only Clodarius and Clodarius alone could open the door.

  Harvald stood before the door, inspecting it. The fretwork ward rune was affixed into the center of the door, just about chest height, and the keyhole was dead center to the rune. He slipped the key to the Blue Room out of his satchel, and holding both of his amulets in one hand, he began to slide the key into the keyhole. Keeping the rune of making in his mind again, he began to whisper into the keyhole, his voice almost seductive: “Make this the Key. Make this the Key to this Door. This is the Key. This is the Key to this Door. Open the Lock to this Door. Open this Door!” He could feel the enchantment resisting his incantation, could feel its strength pushing back at him; but he wasn’t trying to break the enchantment, just fool it. And against the tapped power bound into the enchantment, siphoned up from the bones of the ancient building, he’d brought a reservoir of his own: a vial of his sister’s last tears, collected years ago as she wept in her sleep, with all her grief and despair trapped within each drop of True Love.

  The lock never had a chance.

  Harvald took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly as he turned the key. It turned perfectly, and he could hear a metal mechanism clicking away on the other side of the door. The door swung open, and he stepped inside quickly, and closed it behind him.

  The space he was in was pitch black. He held onto his copper amulet, the rune of light in his mind, and whispered a quick Incantation of Making: “Illumina mundi!” The more ancient the language, the more powerful the incantation, but unlike Stjepan, who had an easy facility with many different tongues, Harvald had only memorized a handful of incantations in any language beyond the Middle Tongue. A cold blue light began to shine from his amulet, and as he began to make out his surroundings a figure loomed in front of him. He gave a start, his hackles rising, and then immediately felt foolish as he realized it
was just a statue made of marble. The statue depicted one of the Sharab Deceal, the winged harpy guardian spirits of the Underworld which were often set as watchers over the treasure troves of magicians, glaring with a drawn and upraised short sword at whoever entered the room. But if the statue had once served as the locus for a binding enchantment for an actual spirit once, Harvald could see no evidence that there was one present now, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

  Beyond the statue, he could see three doors; each identical to the door he had just passed through. The contents of each room were closely guarded secrets, and men had paid with their lives for trying to get a peek at the catalog ledgers for the Black Rooms kept in Master Clodarius’ chambers. Stjepan, Gilgwyr, and Harvald had spent a small portion of their free time at the University trying to figure out ways to get a glimpse into the catalogs to see what was there, and could never find a suitable plan worth risking everything for. But Harvald had different ways through the world now, years later, and different friends, and he had asked a very special friend in which room he could find a translated copy of De Malifir Magicis, the very rare and quite forbidden Book of Curse Magic of Ymaire, the enchantress daughter of Eldyr. And luckily that friend knew which room it was in, and so Harvald went directly to the door on his right.

  He repeated the steps that had gained him entry through the first warded door, and was rewarded with the opening of this second door. He stepped inside, and stifled a laugh of giddy awe.

  Harvald stood in a fabled place, where few eyes had ever been allowed. He wondered, for a moment, if he was the first trespasser this Black Room had ever seen in the four centuries since it was created; there were stories amongst the students of cunning thieves and dastardly wizards who had stolen into the Black Rooms to make off with powerful grimoires, and while Harvald suspected that most of them were probably just campus folk tales, some instinct told him that he was not the first sneak-thief to stand where he was standing. Still, for a moment he luxuriated in the achievement, taking in the bookcases made of bronze, the dark cabinets and occasional tables and chairs. The shelves, he could see, held not just books, but an assortment of odds and ends; there appeared to be a collection of ceremonial sacrificial knives, several rune-marked skulls, chalices, wooden boxes chased in gold and jewels and filled with lead tablets inscribed with curses, hands made of wax, riveted brass heads . . . a veritable treasure trove of occult paraphernalia. Harvald gaped, and he had to fight the urge to stuff his satchel full of as many things as he could grab. Oddly he found the words of his own advice running through his head. “Don’t get distracted by the obvious bright bauble,” he’d told young Erim. Sound thinking, he thought. Eyes on the prize, as Guilford might have said, the poor bastard. You’re here for a reason.