The Book Knights

by J. G. McKenney

  Some readers and scribes resisted, discovering their literacy offered protection against the debilitating effects of Fay’s technology. Risking their lives to keep reading, they hid books in basements and attics, behind walls and under floors. To root them out Fay created her Incendi police, armed platoons of black-clad troopers that raided, arrested, and “cleansed” in the Corporation’s name. Financial rewards and Network fame were offered to citizens who informed on others they suspected of keeping books. Neighbor turned on neighbor, friend betrayed friend, and families were torn apart. After forcing tortured confessions from them in the cold, dark depths of the castle dungeon, Incendi police executed readers and scribes by the thousands. Their books died along with them, burned in celebratory Lightings broadcast to the mesmerized masses.

  Fay was close to achieving the goal she had set so long ago, The History was nearing its final page, and soon the power of words would be hers. Every eventuality had been anticipated, every contingency accounted for. Save one…

  The Challenger has come.

  The golden sheen of Wyzera’s pen caught the light as Fay withdrew its tip from the ornate well. She held it above a piece of paper next to the open tome, preparing to write, drawing the power of the great book’s words into her consciousness where she could focus it on the question like a search light. But as she tried to draw a response from the page, something impeded her will, hiding the truth, denying the answer she sought. In a quarter century of using The Meditations to realize her goals, she never experienced such resistance.

  “Where is the Challenger?” she asked, her voice quivering, perspiration beading on her ivory skin. She held the question in her mind and lowered the pen to the paper as she read the first line of the passage before her, a short piece entitled The Maze.

  The words were perfect, each syllable flowing into the next with melodic precision, creating an image so clear, so precise, so beautiful that Fay had to catch her breath. The image and question mingled together in her consciousness, and she labored to bind them there, her hand tightening on the pen like a vise, the veins on her temples throbbing with the intense pressure created by the effort.

  The resistance was distant but strong, fighting to destroy her focus and deny an answer, but Morgan Fay would not relent. Her face reddened with exertion, and she leaned over the broad oak desk, unwilling to surrender. The lights in the wall sconces dimmed, and she was nearing her breaking point when an image crystallized in her mind. The tip of the pen’s blade sliced through the paper, digging into the desk’s polished surface, scarring its woody grain. Bleeding ink, it carved out the word DRAGONS just before Morgan Fay collapsed.

  Disheveled and confused, she was awakened by the gentle nudge of a hand on her shoulder.

  “Are you well?” Utter despair darkened Mordred’s face. His eyes darted back and forth from Fay to the pen to the paper’s ragged message.

  “Mordred,” Fay mumbled, straightening herself in the chair. She frowned at the Incendi captain’s fingers still touching her, and he pulled his arm away. With a dignified lift of her chin she returned the pen to its case and combed her fingers through her long black hair. “I’m fine.” She took a deep breath to center herself. “Any progress in your search for the Penderhagen girl?”

  Mordred swallowed. “No. If she’s still on the island, someone must be helping her. So far, her parents have given us nothing.” He lowered his head, expecting to be chastised for his failure.

  Fay did not look at him. Instead, she brushed away the sheet of paper, studying the word chiseled into the desktop. DRAGONS.

  “Oh, she’s still on the island,” said Fay. “And I think I know where she’s been hiding.”

  “Me?” asked Arti. “I…I don’t understand. Why would you be looking for me?”

  Gal nudged Arti below the table and nodded toward the motorhome’s narrow door. It was clear she thought the old man was crazy, and she wanted to leave. Now.

  “Don’t go,” pleaded Merl, noticing Gal’s signal. “Please. I’ll explain everything.” He stood and reached for the pot. “But it’s going to take a while; I’ll make more tea.”

  The story Merl recounted was as fantastic as any Arti had read in her family’s library. “Before the Corporation,” he began, “I was a member of the Order of Librarians, a group whose sworn duty was to protect the written word in all its forms. The Order believed the power of words kept evil at bay, that it was a gift belonging to everyone, a shield against the sword of oppression.

  “I was very young when my talents garnered the attention of senior members of the Order, those who wanted to ensure that the rarest and most valuable books would be found and protected. It was the Order’s wish that people have access to the knowledge contained in those works; they were to be shared with the world.” Merl smiled proudly. “I was as surprised as any when I was given the honor and responsibility to be the Master Librarian for the collection. There were many in the Order who thought I was too inexperienced for such an assignment. They were probably right.” Nostalgia warmed his face. “But I was full of energy, and my faculty for languages far surpassed any of the other candidates.

  “The library was here in Tintagel at the castle on the hill, in what is now the headquarters of Fay Industries.” Merl expected to surprise Arti with this information, but she only nodded. “You knew about the library. How?”

  “My parents went there on a school trip when they were little,” replied Arti. “They told me all about it. They said it was amazing.”

  Merl smiled again, remembering the many tours he had given to schoolchildren. “I must have met them. Isn’t that strange?” he muttered. “And they were right, the library was a very special place. But it was also too much for any one person to manage.

  “Thousands of books came to me each year, and the Order wanted the older texts to be translated, so they could be studied and enjoyed. It took so much of my time just maintaining the volume of works—collecting and cataloguing everything—that I had little time left for academic matters. I needed help, but finding someone fluent in ancient dialects was not easy. For many months, the Order searched near and far for a person qualified for the job—without success.

  “Then one bright autumn day, a young woman came to the castle. She was pretty with long black hair, and I noticed her reading a yet-to-be translated Old Ferencian manuscript. Dumbstruck, I asked her how she had learned such an obscure dialect. She told me that she had worked at a small library in her home town, a tiny hamlet in East Corben on the North Verinese border. They had two works in Old Ferencian, and she claimed she used them to teach herself the language!

  “I didn’t believe her, of course,” snorted Merl. “No one could learn Old Ferencian alone with only two works as reference. So, I tested her.” He shook his head. “I was shocked to discover that her skills rivaled my own.” He took another sip of tea. “By the way, if you haven’t figured it out yet, the young woman was Morgan Fay.”

  “The Witch on the Hill?” gasped Gal.

  Merl nodded. “The same, though she was much different then.” The old librarian stared into his cup. “We became very close, Morgan and me. We were a team. Together we made the library at Tintagel the greatest in the world.”

  “So what happened?” asked Arti. “What went wrong?”

  Merl caressed the thick book’s cover with his gloved hand, tracing the embossed gold and silver cup’s curving lines. “The Grail Tomes happened. The books came to us from a private collection in East Crent. The details of their provenance were a little fuzzy, but we didn’t ask questions; we were just happy they’d survived. It was a homecoming of sorts, since the Order had commissioned them when it first formed over two thousand years ago. They were the crown jewels of our collection, the most beautiful and important books ever written.” Merl looked down at the tome with reverence, remembering a time when it had stood on a marble pedestal in the library’s castle tower. “Even in this sorry state, it’s still a treasure.”

 
; “You said tomes. There’s more than one?”

  “Yes, Arti. This book has a twin, identical in every way, down to the smallest detail. When the tomes came to us, we couldn’t believe our good fortune. But they arrived with a warning, a very odd set of instructions. Morgan and I were told we could only read one particular page from the books, and only on two specific days of the year.” The old man saw the confusion on the girls’ faces. “Yes, I thought it was strange, too—some bizarre superstition handed down through the ages. But as I discovered later through my research, the Grail Tomes had a very strange story to tell.

  “They were written by a pair of mystic scribes who delved deeply into the magic of words. Yes, magic I say, for the books have a power that cannot be explained by logic or reason.” He delicately lifted the tome’s thick leather cover, revealing a title page decorated with intricately scripted letters, hand painted jewels of shimmering gold around deep rich hues of cobalt blue and dark forest green.

  “There are four chapters in all, beginning with The Meditations, forty-four passages whose imagery is so wonderfully rich they possess spell-like power. I have studied them for twenty-five years—very carefully, I should add—and only scratched the surface of their potency. They are very dangerous, and you must never look at them. Understood?” He stared at Arti and Gal until they nodded.

  At the first of three string bookmarks, about a quarter of the way down the scorched binding, Merl carefully wedged his gloved hand into the tome, turning to another brightly painted page featuring another title and an intricately decorated gold and silver cup, matching the one on the book’s cover.

  “The second chapter, The Verses, contains one hundred and twelve individual poems, works that ebb and flow with a grace and movement that is breathtaking. The Verses were used to train a select group of warriors charged with protecting the Grail Tomes. They were called the Knights of Maren, and they swore fealty to their king and the Order of Librarians.”

  Arti’s eyes widened. “We saw someone with a tattoo that looked just like that.” She pointed at the cup in the center of the page and looked at Gal for confirmation.

  Merl sounded doubtful. “A Knight of Maren? Here? Now?”

  “He fought in the Cauldron,” said Gal. “Kicked The Mountain’s ass.”

  Merl frowned. “‘The Mountain’?”

  “That was the name of the other fighter,” explained Arti. “He was real big.”

  “I see,” said Merl. “If there is a true Knight of Maren here on the island, we may have a worthy ally for our quest.”

  “Quest? What are you talkin’ about?” asked Gal.

  “Let me finish,” said Merl. “Where was I?”

  “The Verses,” said Arti.

  “Yes, yes, The Verses—I’ve explained that. The third chapter is The Test. That’s the part you read today, Arti. The book is my shield. The pen is my sword. The ink is my blood. It is the ancient oath of the Knights of Maren. I had no idea what message was hidden on the page, but by pulling the words from the tome, you have named yourself the ‘Challenger.’”

  “‘Challenger?’” Maybe Gal was right, thought Arti. Maybe the old man was crazy. “Challenger for what?”

  “The answer to that question is found in the final chapter.” Merl heaved the tome on its back, exposing several singed and missing pages. “As you can see, this tome has been damaged, some of it burned away. The same flames that did this nearly consumed me.” He paused as if what he was about to say was difficult.

  “Remember how I told you that Morgan Fay and I worked together in the library? She…”

  As the old man struggled to find the words, Arti looked at the partly burned book and Merl’s gloved hands, making the connection. “She started the fire.”

  “Whoa,” whispered Gal.

  “Yes,” said Merl. “Morgan was always curious, always wanting to learn—I loved that about her. But after a while she became obsessed with knowing what secrets the books held. I tried to make her realize the danger, to remind her of the vow she had made.”

  Only twice a year, on the equinox, when light and darkness are in balance, may we open the Grail Tomes. To read The History. To count the words.

  “She thought I was being overly cautious but promised to obey my wishes. Months later, I happened upon her reading The Meditations and knew that vows meant nothing to her. She denied everything, but I could see that the books had changed her. The Morgan I knew and loved had left me.” Tears welled in Merl’s blue eyes. “Then came the flames.

  “She took the other Grail Tome and set fire to the library. I arrived at the castle just in time to save this one.” Merl gently patted the book with his gloved hand. “Morgan thinks I’m dead, and that it died with me. That is to our advantage.” He sighed, “Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “The last chapter is called The History, but unlike the other three, it is still being written.”

  “Who’s writin’ it?” asked Gal. “You?”

  “No, Gal. Not me.”

  Merl spun the heavy tome on the round table and flipped a swath of empty, singed pages to one that had a few lines of elegant, swirling script at its top, words written in the same Old Ferencian found in the preceding chapters. “Look,” he said.

  The girls stared down at the page but didn’t notice anything. Finally, Gal’s patience ran out. “What? I don’t see nothin’. Just a bunch of words I can’t read.” Ignoring her, Merl studied the cup in his hands, waiting.

  “Hold on,” said Arti. “Something’s happening.” She leaned closer to the page. “A letter! It just appeared!” Gal, having also witnessed the phantom character materialize, stared wide-eyed at the page. “And there’s another,” announced Arti. “It’s making a word.” She shook her head in disbelief. “The History is…writing itself.”

  “Yes,” said Merl. “And the words are coming faster with every book threatened with destruction, bringing us ever closer to the day.”

  Arti searched the old man’s eyes. “What day?”

  “The day our destiny is written,” said Merl.

  “Our what?” asked Gal.

  “I think he means the future,” said Arti.

  “That’s precisely what I mean,” said Merl. He watched as another letter snaked into existence on the tome’s broad page. “The ancient scribes who created this book knew the power of words was humankind’s greatest gift, that it must be shared among everyone if the forces of evil were to be kept at bay. Fearing a day would come when its power would be stolen, they created The History.

  “Its purpose is to warn us when our connection to the power of words is being threatened. The faster the words appear on The History’s pages, the more of its power we’ve lost, and the closer we are to our doom.” The old librarian offered a weak smile. “Luckily, it also provides a way to restore the balance, to take the power of words back.”

  Merl nodded at the book, just as another word finished forming. “When they arrive at The History’s final page, the words will stop coming, the revelations will end.”

  Arti frowned. “But you said our destiny will be written.”

  “Yes, it will,” said Merl, “but it can only be crafted by a human hand, by a scribe capable of wielding one of the great pens.” Arti was even more confused, now.

  “Don’t you see?” continued Merl. “That’s been Morgan’s purpose all these years. She’s been robbing us of the power of words, banning and burning her way to the final page, knowing that when it’s all that remains, the future is hers to write. And when she does, she’ll have the means to find every scribe and reader in existence. No one anywhere will be safe.” Merl glared at Arti. “She’ll burn every book…and kill us all.”

  He set his cup down on the edge of the table and sighed. “When I realized what she was planning, I knew I had to stop her. I broke my vow to the Order and began to study the tome.” His face softened. “And to search for you. The world is a big place, and I’d almost given up. I had no way to know where t
he Challenger would be found. The words that appeared in The History had never offered any help. They were isolated, disconnected, their purpose and meaning incomprehensible.

  “Then, two months ago, something miraculous happened.” He reached out and turned a couple of the book’s huge pages. “Here it is,” he said, pointing at a line of curling script, reading it slowly. “From the flames to the Isle of Avalon, the Challenger has come. It was the clue telling me where to find you.” He smiled, reflecting on the day’s events. “Or where you would find me.”

  The old librarian gently closed the broad leaves, exposing the tome’s tattered binding and the stubs of other pages that had been burned away. “There would have been eight pages left before the final one.”

  “But they’re gone,” said Arti. “You won’t know when they’re full.”

  “That is the dilemma we face.” He took his seat again. “Whoso pulleth the words of this tome shall challenge for the write of History. Arti, you are the one who can deny Morgan Fay what she most desires. You’ve passed The Test.” He reached across the table and gently patted the burned and battered book. “But this Grail Tome is useless to us now. You cannot write on a final page that isn’t there.”

  Arti understood. “We need the other tome, the one Fay has. That’s our quest.”

  “We? Our?” Gal threw her head back and groaned, “Aw, crap!”

  CHAPTER 10

  Arti had to admit the whole thing sounded crazy. A quest to steal a magical book with the ability to dictate the future? From CEO Morgan Fay, the most powerful—and dangerous—person on the planet? A mission into the headquarters of the Incendi police, the Flames that had taken Arti’s parents and were still hunting her? No one in her right mind would risk it.

  But as dangerous as Merl’s plan was, it gave Arti hope. Hope that what he had said was true, that she might be able to alter the course of history—and save her parents in the process. It still wasn’t enough to conquer her doubt.