Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  Past the Manticore Gate lay a long, vault-ceilinged room in which Indexers toiled amongst thousands of scrolls and card-files. Unlike the Librarians, the Indexers preferred comfortable blue robes to armor, but they were all visibly armed with daggers and hatchets. Furthermore, in niches along the walls, Laszlo could see spears, truncheons, mail vests, and helmets readily accessible on racks.

  “I envy your precision, friend Laszlo.”

  The gravelly voice that spoke those words was familiar, and Laszlo turned to the left to find himself staring up into the gold-flecked eyes of a lizard about seven feet tall. The creature had a chest as broad as a doorway under shoulders to match, and his gleaming scales were the red of a desert sunset. He wore a sort of thin quilted armor over everything but his muscular legs and feet, which ended in sickle-shaped claws the size of Laszlo’s stilettos. The reptile’s cloak was specially tailored to part over his long, sinuous tail and hang with dignity.

  “Lev,” said Laszlo. “Hi! What precision?”

  “Your ability to sleep late and still arrive within a hair’s breadth of accruing penalties for your tardiness. Your laziness is…artistic.”

  “The administration rarely agrees.” Laszlo was deeply pleased to see Inappropriate Levity Bronzeclaw, “Lev” to everyone at the university. Lev’s people, dour and dutiful, gave their adolescents names based on perceived character flaws, so the wayward youths would supposedly dwell upon their correction until granted more honorable adult names. Lev was a mediocre sorcerer, very much of Laszlo’s stripe, but his natural weaponry was one hell of an asset when hungry weirdness might be trying to bite your head off.

  “Oh, I doubt they were sleeping.” Another new voice, female, smooth and lovely. It belonged to Yvette d’Courin, who’d been hidden from Laszlo’s view behind Lev, and could have remained hidden behind a creature half the lizard’s size. Yvette’s skin was darker than the armor she wore, a more petite version of Laszlo’s and Casimir’s gear, and her ribbon-threaded hair was as black as her aspirant’s cloak. “Not Laz and Caz. Boys of such a sensitive disposition, why, we all know they were probably tending to certain…extracurricular activities.” She made a strangely demure series of sucking sounds, and some gestures with her hands that were not demure at all.

  “Yvette, you gorgeous little menace to my academic rank,” said Casimir, “that is most assuredly not true. However, if it were, I reckon that would make Laszlo and myself the only humans present to have ever seen a grown man with his clothes off.”

  Laszlo felt a warm, unexpected sensation in the pit of his stomach, and it took him a moment of confusion to identify it. Great gods, was that relief? Hope, even? Yvette d’Courin was a gifted aspirant, Casimir’s match at the very least. Whatever might be waiting inside the Living Library, some bureaucratic stroke of luck had put him on a team with two natural magicians and a lizard that could kick a hole through a brick wall. All he had to do to earn a sixth year was stay out of their way and try to look busy!

  Yvette retaliated at Casimir with another series of gestures, some of which might have been the beginning of a minor spell, but she snapped to attention as Master Molnar loudly cleared his throat.

  “When you’re all ready, of course,” he drawled. “I do so hate to burden you with anything so tedious as the future of your thaumaturgical careers—”

  “Yes, Master Molnar. Sorry, Master Molnar,” said the students, now a perfectly harmonized quartet of apology.

  “This is the Manticore Index,” said Molnar, spreading his arms. “One of eleven such indices serving to catalog, however incompletely, the contents of the Living Library. Take a good look around. Unless you choose to join the ranks of the Librarians after surviving your nine years, you will never be allowed into this area again. Now, Aspirant Jazera, can you tell me how many cataloged items the Living Library is believed to contain?”

  “Uh,” said Laszlo, who’d wisely refreshed his limited knowledge of the library’s innards the previous night, “about 10 million, I think?”

  “You think?” said Molnar. “I’ll believe that when further evidence is presented, but you are nearly correct. At a minimum, this collection consists of some 10 million scrolls and bound volumes. The majority of which, Aspirant Bronzeclaw, are what?”

  “Grimoires,” hissed the lizard.

  “Correct. Grimoires, the personal references and notebooks of magicians from across all the known worlds, some more than four thousand years old. Some of them quite famous…or infamous. When the High University of Hazar was founded, a grimoire collection project was undertaken. An effort to create the greatest magical library in existence, to unearth literally every scrap of arcane knowledge that could be retrieved from the places where those scraps had been abandoned, forgotten, or deliberately hidden. It took centuries. It was largely successful.”

  Molnar turned and began moving down the central aisle between the tables and shelves where Indexers worked, politely ignoring him. No doubt they’d heard this same lecture many times already.

  “Largely successful,” Molnar continued, “at creating one hell of a mess! Aspirant d’Courin, what is a grimoire?”

  “Well,” she began, seemingly taken aback by the simplicity of the question. “As you said, a magician’s personal reference. Details of spells, and experiments—”

  “A catalog of a magician’s private obsessions,” said Molnar.

  “I suppose, sir.”

  “More private than any diary, every page stained with a sorcerer’s hidden character, his private demons, his wildest ambitions. Some magicians produce collections, others produce only a single book, but nearly all of them produce something before they die. Chances are the four of you will produce something, in your time. Some of you have certainly begun them by now.”

  Laszlo glanced around at the others, wondering. He had a few basic project journals, notes on the simple magics he’d been able to grasp. Nothing that could yet be accused of showing any ambition. But Casimir, or Yvette? Who could know?

  “Grimoires,” continued Molnar, “are firsthand witnesses to every triumph and every shame of their creators. They are left in laboratories, stored haphazardly next to untold powers, exposed to magical materials and energies for years. Their pages are saturated with arcane dust and residue, as well as deliberate sorceries. They are magical artifacts, uniquely infused with what can only be called the divine madness of individuals such as yourselves. They evolve, as many magical artifacts do, a faint quasi-intelligence. A distinct sort of low cunning that your run-of-the mill chair or rock or library book does not possess.

  “Individually, this characteristic is harmless. But when you take grimoires…powerful grimoires, from the hands and minds of powerful magicians, and you store them together by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the millions…”

  This last word was almost shouted, and Molnar’s arms were raised to the ceiling again, for dramatic effect. This speech had lost the dry tones of lecture and acquired the dark passion of theatrical oration. Whatever Master Molnar might have thought of the aspirants entrusted to his care, he was clearly a believer in his work.

  “You need thick walls,” he said, slowly, with a thin smile on his lips. “Thick walls, and rough Librarians to guard them. Millions of grimoires, locked away together. Each one is a mote of quasi-intelligence, a speck of possibility, a particle of magic. Bring them together in a teeming library, in the stacks, and you have…”

  “What?” said Laszlo, buying into the drama despite himself.

  “Not a mind,” said Molnar, meeting his eyes like a carnival fortune-teller making a sales pitch. “Not quite a mind, not a focused intelligence. But a jungle! A jungle that dreams, and those dreams are currents of deadly strangeness. A Living Library…within our power to contain, but well beyond our power to control.”

  Molnar stopped beside a low table, on which were four reinforced leather satchels, each containing a single large book. Pinned to each satchel was a small pile
of handwritten notes.

  “A collection of thaumaturgical knowledge so vast and so deep,” said Molnar, “is far, far too useful a thing to give up merely because it has become a magical disaster area perfectly capable of killing anyone who enters it unprepared!”

  Laszlo felt his sudden good cheer slinking away. All of this, in a much less explicit form, was common knowledge among the aspirants of the High University. The Living Library was a place of weirdness, of mild dangers, sure, but to hear Molnar speak of it…

  “You aspirants have reaped the benefit of the library for several years now.” Molnar smiled and brushed a speck of imaginary dust from the cuirass of his Librarian’s armor. “You have filed your requests for certain volumes, and waited the days or weeks required for the library staff to fetch them out. And, in the reading rooms, you have studied them in perfect comfort, because a grimoire safely removed from the Living Library is just another book.

  “The masters of the university, as one of their more commendable policies, have decreed that all aspirant magicians need to learn to appreciate the sacrifices of the library staff that make this singular resource available. Before you can proceed to the more advanced studies of your final years, you are required to enter the Living Library, just once, to assist us in the return of a volume to its rightful place in the collection. That is all. That is the extent of your fifth-year exam. On the table beside me you will see four books in protective satchels. Take one, and handle it with care. Until those satchels are empty, your careers at the High University are in the balance.”

  Lev passed the satchels out one by one. Laszlo received his and examined the little bundle of notes that came with it. Written in several different hands, they named the borrower of the grimoire as a third-year aspirant he didn’t know, and described the process of hunting the book down, with references to library sections, code phrases, and number sequences that Laszlo couldn’t understand.

  “The library is so complex,” said Molnar, “and has grown so strange in its ways that physical surveillance of the collection has been impractical for centuries. We rely on the index enchantments, powerful processes of our most orderly sorcery, to give us the information that the Indexers maintain here. From that information, we plan our expeditions, and map the best ways to go about fetching an item from the stacks, or returning one.”

  “Master Molnar, sir, forgive me,” said Casimir. “Is that a focus for the index enchantments over there?”

  Laszlo followed Casimir’s pointing hand, and in a deeper niche behind one of the little armories along the walls, he saw a recessed column of black glass, behind which soft pulses of blue light rose and fell.

  “Just so,” said Molnar. “Either you’ve made pleasing use of the introductory materials, or that was a good guess.”

  “It’s, ah, a sort of personal interest.” Casimir reached inside a belt pouch and took out a thick hunk of triangular crystal, like a prism with a milky-white center. “May I leave this next to the focus while we’re in the stacks? It’s just an impression device. It’ll give me a basic idea of how the index enchantments function. My family has a huge library, not magical, of course, but if I could create spells to organize it—”

  “Ambition wedded to sloth,” said Molnar. “Let no one say you don’t think like a true magician, Aspirant Vrana.”

  “I won’t even have to think about it while we’re inside, sir. It would just mind itself, and I could pick it up on the way out.” Casimir was laying it on, Laszlo saw, every ounce of obsequiousness he could conjure.

  But what was he talking about? Personal project? Family library? Caz had never breathed a word of any such thing to him. While they came from very different worlds, they’d always gotten along excellently as chambers-mates, and Laszlo had thought there were no real secrets between them. Where had this sprung from?

  “Of course, Vrana,” said Master Molnar. “We go to some trouble to maintain those enchantments, after all, and today is all about appreciating our work.”

  While Casimir hurried to emplace his little device near the glass column, Molnar beckoned the rest of them on toward another gate at the inner end of the Manticore Index. It was as tall and wide as the door they’d entered, but even more grimly functional—cold, dark metal inscribed with geometric patterns and runes of warding.

  “A gateway to the stacks,” said Molnar, “can only be opened by the personal keys of two Librarians. I’ll be one of your guides today, and the other…the other should have been here by—”

  “I’m here, Master Librarian.”

  In the popular imagination (which had, to this point, included Laszlo’s), female Librarians were lithe, comely warrior maidens out of some barbarian legend. The woman now hurrying toward them through the Manticore Index was short, barely taller than Yvette, and she was as sturdy as a concrete teapot, with broad hips and arms like a blacksmith’s. Her honey-colored hair was tied back in a short tail, and over her black Librarian’s armor she wore an unusual harness that carried a pair of swords crossed over her back. Her plump face was as heavily scarred as Molnar’s, and Laszlo had learned just enough in his hobby duels to see that she was no one he would ever want to annoy.

  “Aspirants,” said Molnar, “allow me to present Sword-Librarian Astriza Mezaros.”

  As she moved past him, Laszlo noticed two things. First, the curious harness held not just her swords but a large book, buckled securely over her lower back beneath her scabbards. Second, she had a large quantity of fresh blood soaking the gauntlet on her left hand.

  “Sorry to be late,” said Mezaros. “Came from the infirmary.”

  “Indeed,” said Molnar, “and are you—”

  “Oh, I’m fine. I’m not the one that got hit. It was that boy Selucas, from the morning group.”

  “Ahhhh. And will he recover?”

  “Given a few weeks.” Mezaros grinned as she ran her eyes across the four aspirants. “Earned his passing grade the hard way, that’s for sure.”

  “Well, I’ve given them the lecture,” said Molnar. “Let’s proceed.”

  “On it.” Mezaros reached down the front of her cuirass and drew out a key hanging on a chain. Molnar did the same, and each Librarian took up a position beside the inner door. The walls before them rippled, and small keyholes appeared where blank stone had been a moment before.

  “Opening,” yelled Master Molnar.

  “Opening,” chorused the Indexers. Each of them dropped whatever they were working on and turned to face the inner door. One blue-robed woman hurried to the hallway door, checked it, and shouted, “Manticore Gate secure!”

  “Opening,” repeated Molnar. “On three. One, two—”

  The two Librarians inserted their keys and turned them in unison. The inner door slid open, just as the outer one had, revealing an empty, metal-walled room lit by amber lanterns set in heavy iron cages.

  Mezaros was the first one into the metal-walled chamber, holding up a hand to keep the aspirants back. She glanced around quickly, surveying every inch of the walls, floors, and ceiling, and then she nodded.

  “In,” said Molnar, herding the aspirants forward. He snapped his fingers, and with a flash of light he conjured a walking staff, a tall object of polished dark wood. It had few ornaments, but it was shod at both ends with iron, and that iron looked well-dented to Laszlo’s eyes.

  Once the six of them were inside the metal-walled chamber, Molnar waved a hand over some innocuous portion of the wall, and the door behind them rumbled shut. Locking mechanisms engaged with an ominous series of echoing clicks.

  “Begging your pardon, Master Molnar,” said Lev, “not to seem irresolute, for I am firmly committed to any course of action that will prevent me from having to return to my clan’s ancestral trade of scale-grooming, but merely as a point of personal curiosity, exactly how much danger are we reckoned to be in?”

  “A good question,” said Molnar slyly. “We Librarians have been asking it daily for more than a thousand years. Astriza, wh
at can you tell the good aspirant?”

  “I guard aspirants about a dozen times each year,” said Mezaros. “The fastest trip I can remember was about two hours. The longest took a day and a half. You have the distinct disadvantage of not being trained Librarians, and the dubious advantage of sheer numbers. Most books are returned by experienced professionals operating in pairs.”

  “Librarian Mezaros,” said Lev, “I am fully prepared to spend a week here if required, but I was more concerned with the, ah, chance of ending the exam with a visit to the infirmary.”

  “Aspirant Inappropriate Levity Bronzeclaw,” said Mezaros, “in here, I prefer to be called Astriza. Do me that favor, and I won’t use your full name every time I need to tell you to duck.”

  “Ah, of course. Astriza.”

  “As for what’s going to happen, well, it might be nothing. It might be pretty brutal. I’ve never had anyone get killed under my watch, but it’s been a near thing. Look, I’ve spent months in the infirmary myself. Had my right leg broken twice, right arm twice, left arm once, nose more times than I can count.”

  “This is our routine,” said Molnar with grim pride. “I’ve been in a coma twice. Both of my legs have been broken. I was blind for four months—”

  “I was there for that,” said Astriza.

  “She carried me out on her shoulders.” Molnar was beaming. “Only her second year as a Librarian. Yes, this place has done its very best to kill the pair of us. But the books were returned to the shelves.”

  “Damn straight,” said Astriza. “Librarians always get the books back to the shelves. Always. And that’s what you browsers are here to learn by firsthand experience. If you listen to the Master Librarian and myself at all times, your chances of a happy return will be greatly improved. No other promises.”

  “Past the inner door,” said Molnar, “your ordinary perceptions of time and distance will be taxed. Don’t trust them. Follow our lead, and for the love of all gods everywhere, stay close.”

  Laszlo, who’d spent his years at the university comfortably surrounded by books of all sorts, now found himself staring down at his satchel-clad grimoire with a sense of real unease. He was knocked out of his reverie when Astriza set a hand on the satchel and gently pushed it down.