by John Bierce
Then he sprinted down the hall.
Within a few paces, he felt his outstretched arm smack into a couple of people, and after about ten paces, he crashed right into someone.
The attention ward in the hallway collapsed, unable to keep the students’ attention off of one another any longer.
There were about a dozen students in the hall, most looking quite confused. Only one of them had a letter from the room in their hand already that he could see. Hugh was guessing they were mostly journeymen, but there looked to be a few more apprentices than in Emmenson’s class.
The student who he’d crashed into pulled himself to his feet and glared at Hugh. “Indris’ claws, that hurt. Watch where you’re going, kid.”
“I couldn’t see you, so that wouldn’t have helped,” Hugh replied, still pleased with himself for figuring out the existence of the attention ward concealing the students from one another— even if he still couldn’t tell where it was placed. He did notice that the door to the classroom was still concealed from the outside, however.
The other student just glared at him and grumbled, until he noticed Hugh’s spellbook. His eyes widened.
“You’re the Stormward!” he blurted.
Hugh gave him a weird look, suddenly uncomfortable. “What?”
“It was you!” the student said. “You were the one that saved Theras Tel from the storm this summer! I was there! I mean, I didn’t see you while you were there, but I saw the battle and the storm and everything, and everyone kept talking about your spellbook carved from solid emerald!”
Hugh started backing up nervously. “It’s not emerald,” he muttered.
“What are you taking this class for?” the other student asked. “Shouldn’t you be teaching it or something?”
Most of the other students were looking at them now. Hugh was really starting to regret breaking the attention ward.
“I… I’ve got to go,” Hugh said. He pivoted and sprinted off.
Alustin had most certainly been correct about the need for physical training.
The other three had similarly unusual classes, for the most part. Sabae’s healing class was the only normal, apprentice-filled class any of them were taking. It was mostly focused on emergency response and battlefield medicine— healing affinities were incredibly useful, but quite limited without an extensive knowledge of anatomy and physiology, as well as many years of training.
Only enchanters and one or two other mage disciplines required as much training time as healers, and since Sabae was training primarily as a battle mage, she simply wouldn’t have time to become a full healer, so battlefield medicine was as far as she’d be going— though that was still a particularly intensive training program.
Her other class, the one-on-one seminar, Alustin had held himself. He wasn’t planning on leaving on one of his mysterious missions for a couple weeks yet, apparently. They weren’t doing anything new at the moment— just helping Sabae finish mastering wrapping her wind armor around her entire body. The most difficult part was, according to her, making sure that she could still breathe through it. Hugh didn’t see why that was a problem— the armor was made of air, after all— but apparently it was.
Talia seemed somewhat disinterested in talking about her classes. When asked, she just said they were going fine, then changed the subject. Hugh suspected that meant that her tutors weren’t making any progress with her dream affinity. Talia’s spellcasting limitations were a good bit more challenging to work around than Hugh or Sabae’s— while she was incredibly powerful in a few focused areas, she’d been almost entirely unable to progress outside of those areas.
And while Talia was quite happy with those areas— especially considering that they all let her fight more effectively— she was still quite sensitive about her limitations, so Hugh decided not to push her.
Her independent study, however, Talia was quite happy to chat about. It consisted entirely of her exploding various animal bones and recording the results. Hugh was fairly sure Talia could spend weeks setting fires and causing explosions without ever growing bored.
Godrick’s training with his father was apparently going great and was closely paralleling Sabae’s. He was mainly working on extending his stone armor across his body. He was more secretive about it than Sabae, though— Sabae’s techniques wouldn’t be useful to anyone other than her, while Godrick was using his father’s armor spells, which were a closely kept— and much sought after— secret.
CHAPTER FIVE
Intermediate Library Filing Skills
Sabae glared at Alustin, then punched another book out of the air.
“This is the most poorly named class of all time!” she yelled at him. Alustin just kept smiling and casually stepped out of the way of a swooping grimoire.
Sabae snarled, then detonated the wind armor around her legs, sending herself hurtling towards Talia, who was armed only with a net and was being mobbed by a flock of spellbooks. Talia could hardly use dreamfire without destroying the books, which would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise.
After Sabae dispersed the flock with a series of gust strikes, she took a moment to check on the others. Hugh had somehow ended up on one of the floating pathways in the center of the Grand Library, hunting down a particularly elusive bestiary. His weird crystal spellbook was badly savaging an innocuous-looking book. Godrick, meanwhile, was wrestling a tome that looked like it weighed more than Talia.
“What are we actually supposed to be learning here?” Sabae demanded of Alustin.
“Intermediate Library Filing Skills,” Alustin replied, sidestepping another attacking book, before casually snatching it out of the air. He strode over to the nearest shelf and shoved the book in an empty space without looking.
“I thought you were training us up as Librarian Errant candidates, not librarians!” Talia yelled, trying to disentangle a panicked spellbook from her hair.
Hugh screamed something incoherent in the distance, and Sabae looked over to see him dangling above the apparently bottomless abyss in the center of the library, holding onto the bestiary in one hand and his spellbook’s leather strap in the other. All three were sinking rapidly through the air. Sabae spun up her wind armor around her legs again, preparing to try and reach him, but the three started rising rapidly through the air. He’d probably just cast a levitation cantrip to reduce his weight.
“This really shouldn’t surprise you, but dealing with books is still a big part of being a Librarian Errant,” Alustin said. “While we might be Skyhold’s intelligence service, cover stories work better when they’re actually true. Just a moment, please.”
The spellform tattoo band on Alustin’s arm flared into visibility, and sheaves of paper flooded out of it. They hovered for a moment, and then Alustin sent them hurtling towards Hugh. They swiftly latched onto his legs, whereupon Alustin began pulling Hugh and the two books back towards the ledge.
“Help!” yelled Godrick, who was being dragged towards a gap in the railing by the massive book he’d been wrestling.
Sabae sighed and windjumped towards him.
Once the group had finished subduing the rogue flock of books and reshelving them— a task made much easier by the origami golems sent by the Index to help guide them to the right shelves— Alustin gathered them together at a reading area that jutted out over the abyss in the center of the Grand Library.
Of course, you’d have to be insane to drop your guard in here for a bit of reading time.
The Grand Library was impossibly large. It was roughly shaped like the inside of a hollow, square tower— if that tower were a mile across and at least four miles tall.
Sabae was confident that the mountain Skyhold was carved into wasn’t actually large enough to contain the Library, and Alustin and Hugh had confirmed that there was spatial trickery at work— something akin to Alustin’s tattoo, but on a much, much larger scale.
Books were shelved along balconies that wrapped around the wall, connected by sp
iral staircases, ramps, and ladders. The balconies looked small from a distance, but Sabae knew that some of them went back quite a distance. You could spend a lot of time exploring the Grand Library without seeing the massive empty space in the center.
In said abyss floated countless rows of hovering shelves, islands that contained reading nooks, bookbinding stations, and even a small forest with its own miniature sun on one. Glowcrystals were scattered liberally throughout the library, but it was so huge that the space still seemed dim and foreboding.
At the bottom of the abyss was a thick, faintly glowing blue mist. Sabae knew that it contained the Index, a massive magical construct created by and linked to Kanderon Crux. The sphinx’s lair, a massive hovering crystal dais, was located below even that, but Sabae had no idea if she was down there or not. Or, for that matter, how the massive sphinx got in and out of this place. While the Grand Library was massive, all the doors she’d seen to it were human sized.
While the flock of books had been irritating, they hadn’t been overly dangerous. If the four of them hadn’t been trying to avoid as much damage to the books as they could, they could have easily wiped them out.
The same, however, was hardly true of the rest of the library. It was, apparently, nearly as dangerous as the labyrinth at times, and quite a few librarians and visitors died in it every year. Alustin had forced them to memorize a list of recent victims as their punishment for sneaking in last year, and many of the entries had ranged from terrifying to nauseating.
“There’s a property of the Grand Library that few know about,” Alustin said, once they’d all settled down into armchairs in the reading area. “It’s extraordinarily hard to scry on anyone in here. This is one of the few spaces that it’s safe to discuss sensitive topics you have access to, other than my office, Hugh’s room to a certain extent, and the labyrinth. And since the whole point of inducting you into all of this intrigue this early is to keep you all out of the labyrinth, I’d advise staying out of there.”
“Just to an extent?” Hugh asked, looking slightly miffed. There wasn’t much Hugh would challenge a teacher on, but Sabae knew how proud he was of his ward work.
“Any common scrying attempt into your room would fail,” Alustin said, “but blocking a specialized affinity like my farseeing attunement or a few others would require massively overbuilt wards, which would draw entirely too much attention.”
“Like there’s not enough attention on us already?” Hugh muttered irritably.
Alustin pulled a thin book from his tattoo and tossed it underhand to Hugh, who barely managed to catch it before his spellbook grabbed it. Hugh shoved the spellbook off his lap, and it fluttered away irritably.
“That should provide you with a set of ward modifications that won’t prevent the more specialized scrying methods, but it will warn you if someone is attempting to do so,” Alustin said. “Just be careful to pay attention to them when talking in your room.”
Sabae tapped her fingers, staring vaguely off at one of the islands floating in the Library abyss. She could tolerate the attention a lot better than Hugh could— every member of the Kaen Das family had to deal with it to one degree or another in Ras Andis— but something about all the attention they were receiving had been bugging her quite a bit lately.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “How are we supposed to make worthwhile spies if literally everyone knows who we are? My grandmother was quite clear about the best spies being entirely boring and forgettable. You and the other Librarians Errant seem exactly the opposite, and you seem determined to keep throwing us in situations that will throw us into higher and higher profile.”
Well, Sabae hadn’t known any other Librarians Errant until this week, but she’d been doing her research since returning to Skyhold.
Alustin smiled at that. “That’s the trick, Sabae. The known Librarians Errant are supposed to be noisy and visible to people who are paying attention. They’re lodestones for attention.”
“Wait, the known Librarians Errant?” Sabae asked.
“There are a considerable number of our members who keep much, much lower profiles,” Alustin said. “On top of that, the overwhelming majority of the missions we’re sent on aren’t spywork at all, but are in fact entirely on the level. If anyone tries to interfere with all of our missions, it will cost them considerable political capital, and give Kanderon and the Council room to push back against them. And most of the actual espionage that high visibility Librarians Errant like myself engage in is either just making covert pickups from embedded agents or… more active missions that require a somewhat aggressive skillset.”
“Like assassinations?” Talia asked, leaning forward in her seat. She seemed a little too excited by that thought.
Alustin winced. “We try to avoid those as much as reasonably possible. A reputation as a legitimate order with a rumored tendency to dabble in espionage is one thing, but if we were to gain a reputation as assassins, we’d find ourselves welcome in far fewer places.”
“Ah still don’t understand why would anyone let yeh in their city anyhow, if they know yeh’re spies.” Godrick said.
“Well,” Alustin said. “Among other reasons, the true purpose of the Librarians Errant is hardly so well known as your father made it out to be. He’s always preferred to make knowledge seem less valuable than to have people realize how intelligent he is. As for those who do know or suspect, they’re not sure who among us are spies, and they’d rather have a known threat to watch than an unknown one. In addition, Skyhold doesn’t have any true enemies— it would be prohibitively costly for most nations and city-states on Ithos to attack, and we strenuously seek to maintain as much neutrality as we can.”
“Why do we even need a spy service if we’re trying to stay neutral?” Hugh asked. “Quit that!” This last comment was addressed to his spellbook, which was attacking a nearby grimoire.
“We still control a significant amount of territory and resources,” Alustin said. “We’re at the center of what is likely the densest region of aether on the whole continent. We’re above the largest labyrinth on the continent as well, and the goods that are won by the adventurers that survive delving its depths are worth more than the entirety of the exports of some major cities. We have literally thousands of trained mages, as well as Kanderon, one of the mightiest beings on the continent. She might avoid the public eye as much as possible, but everyone who is anyone knows who she is. We’ve got wealth, we’ve got power, and you can’t have those without there being trouble. Nobody is ever truly neutral.”
“What about Emblin?” Sabae asked. “They claim to be neutral, and I’ve never heard anything that might say otherwise.”
Hugh shot her an uncomfortable look— he really didn’t like talking about his homeland very much.
“Emblin can say they’re neutral all they want, because nobody dares attack them,” Alustin said.
Everyone looked taken aback at this. Alustin looked around at them and then sighed. “I would have at least expected Hugh to get this one. Emblin might be relatively poor and undeveloped, but it’s in a stable and severe mana desert. Its aether is only dense enough to maintain a very small amount of magic before being drained, and it refills very, very slowly. Given how reliant almost every military on the continent is on mages, this puts them at an almost crippling disadvantage inside Emblin. The only nation that could likely overcome that disadvantage easily would be the Havath Dominion, and they’re all the way across the continent from Emblin.”
“Not,” Alustin added, “that I have any doubt they’ve already developed plans for doing so some day.”
He shook his head as if clearing it and moved on. This was hardly the first time Sabae had seen Alustin react poorly to even his own mention of the Havath Dominion— there was clearly some sort of history there, but she didn’t know why he seemed to hate them.
Not that he was in any select company. Havath claimed to be the legitimate inheritors of the mantle of the Ithonian Empi
re, and they’d engaged in numerous wars of conquest and expansion over the past century, absorbing numerous city-states and smaller nations. Several times their expansions had only been beaten back by large coalitions of their neighbors.
Sabae recalled hearing something from her grandmother about their battle tactics being unusual, but couldn’t remember the details, or why that might make them better suited for attacking Emblin, of all places.
If Havath didn’t keep acting like they were doing their conquests a favor, the hatred so many had for them might not have been quite so intense.
Sabae realized she’d missed the last thing that Alustin had said, and turned her attention back to him. He had started to tell the others about lamplighters— operatives who tended to safehouses, prepared supply caches, and otherwise kept operations running on a logistical level.
There was something funny about this whole situation, something bothering her like a loose tooth that she couldn’t stop poking with her tongue. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out what, though.
She knew the whole “Skyhold is neutral” line was nonsense— Skyhold had spent most of its history claiming that it wasn’t actually a city-state, merely a school, and that it was neutral, but its actions throughout history completely put the lie to both. That wasn’t what was bothering Sabae, though.
Hugh and Talia might trust Alustin completely, but Sabae still had reservations. Or, rather, she trusted Alustin with her life, but she far from trusted him to be honest with them.
“Hugh, I don’t think your spellbook is attacking that other book,” Talia said, grinning.
“What do you mean, not attacking, it’s…” Hugh started, then turned red when he realized what Talia meant.
Sabae glanced over at the books, sighed, and turned her attention back to Alustin.
CHAPTER SIX
Gifts
That Fifthday, a sandship from Theras Tel arrived bearing gifts.