“The Wild Hearts? A scout? Thirty years?”
“Sure.”
Well now, how about that! The old-timer’s a genuine hero, a walking legend! But then what’s he doing in a place like this? Over their period of service the wild ones put together a fair-sized fortune, so they can relax and live out the rest of their lives in their own little houses with no worries or cares, and no need to slave away day and night, choking on old dust.
“You’re not lying?” Somehow it was hard to believe I was face-to-face with a genuine Wild Heart, even a retired one.
The old man snorted angrily and rolled up the sleeve of his greasy, moth-eaten, light green shirt to reveal a tattoo on his forearm. A small purple heart, the kind that lovers draw on walls, only this one had teeth.
The Wild Heart. And below it the title of his unit: BRIAR.
So the old-timer isn’t lying. No fool on earth would be stupid enough to tattoo himself with the symbol of the Wild Hearts, let alone the name of a reconnaissance unit. The Hearts would simply slice the rogue’s arm off, tattoo and all. And they wouldn’t bother about his age.
I whistled.
“Oho! And how many missions?”
“Forty-three,” the old man muttered modestly. “I got as far as the Needles of Ice with my detachment.”
I almost stumbled and fell. Forty-three missions beyond the Lonely Giant? That was impressive. This old-timer deserved a little respect.
“Was it tough?”
“You bet it was,” the old man replied, thawing a little. “We’re here.”
We left the dark, narrow little corridor behind us and entered an immense hall that seemed to go on forever. The vast numbers of tables and chairs for visitors were all empty, except for one, where a youth wearing the robes of the Order was sitting. He was leafing through a thick, dusty book, blowing his nose into a handkerchief every second. The snot-nosed juvenile took no notice of us.
An entire lifetime would be far too short to read everything that had accumulated in the library over the centuries. The huge shelves of black Zagraban oak soared way up high into the space under the domed ceiling, their tops hidden in darkness that not even the light streaming in through the tall lancet windows could dispel. There were thousands of books—hundreds of thousands—standing on the shelves, preserving the knowledge of thousands of generations of Siala on their yellowed pages.
There were narrow balconies winding around the walls of the library, so that visitors could climb all the way up to the ceiling to get the book they needed. There were books here that had been written by half-blind priests sitting beside a candle with its flame flickering in the wind: ancient tomes of the elves, who had created their manuscripts when the full moon shone and the black waters of the Iselina reflected the heavenly lamp of night as they flowed between the roots of gigantic trees. There were books here by the gnomes—written first on clay tablets, and later on thin sheets of metal, and finally printed on the printing press they invented, which was stored away somewhere safe in the Steel Mines. Scrolls written by human magicians; books created by the finest minds of Siala; books produced by nonentities and mediocrities. Learning of all kinds: history, culture, war, peace, magic, shamanism, life, and death. Legends of the gods, men, elves, heroes, stories of hundreds of animals and other creatures, of thousands of stars, and Sagot only knows what else. All the knowledge of the world was gathered together in this ancient library, which was based on the library at Ranneng, built almost nine hundred years earlier.
“Oho!” I exclaimed admiringly, throwing my head back to look up at the ceiling and trying to make out exactly where in the gloom the walls of learning came to an end.
I’d never been in any libraries before. Except for a few private ones, where I’d borrowed a couple of rare volumes from the owners for other, equally passionate lovers of literature.
“Oho’s about right!” the old man said as proudly as if he’d written everything in the place himself. “So what are you after, hooligan?”
“Are there any old plans of the city here?”
“There are a few, all right,” he mumbled.
“I need plans of the Stain. And plans of Hrad Spein—in fact, everything you have on the place.”
The old man whistled, pursed his lips, and snapped his fingers a couple of times as he gazed thoughtfully over my shoulder, then he fixed the gaze of his watery eyes directly on me. “So that’s the lay of the land, is it, my old mate? Why not ask for a map that shows the treasures of the dwarves or the gnomes while you’re at it? If you didn’t have that ring, I’d throw you out on your ear. I get all sorts in here asking about documents proscribed by the Order. No end to them these days. Pah! Right, let’s go . . .” The old man turned his back on me and started wandering through the shelves toward the mysterious inner depths of the library.
“No end to them?” I questioned him cautiously. “Who?”
“You, for instance. Why the hell can’t you all stay at home with the girls?”
“And who else?”
“There was one here yesterday,” the old-timer muttered angrily without turning round as he led me into a narrow little room with a wrought-metal door in the wall.
“He looked like you. Gray and tight-lipped he was, just like you. Came in the evening. And he stuck a ring under my nose, too. A bit different from yours, but it had just as much authority, you mark my words. Old man, he said, give me the plans of the Stain, he said. At least he hadn’t completely lost his senses, like you. He didn’t ask any questions about Hrad Spein. We’re here. Hang on, I’ll unlock the door.”
The old man began fiddling with a massive bundle of keys and swearing as he opened the squeaky old locks.
I was thinking hard. Who else has suddenly decided he needs maps of the forbidden district of the city? Has the king hired someone else to do the job as well as me? Doesn’t he trust me? Or are these people working for someone else? The Nameless One, for instance?
“What’s your name, pops?” I asked amiably, bending down to duck under the ceiling of a gray corridor that led deep under the ground, into darkness.
“Bolt,” the old-timer muttered, lighting the torch lying ready near at hand. “Crossbow Bolt, that’s my name. Mind you don’t break your legs, the steps are steep. All the forbidden books are kept in an underground depository. Let’s get what you want, then you can go back up to read it, otherwise I’ll freeze to death here.”
“I heard that the forbidden books couldn’t be taken out of the depository.”
“Hmm . . . I’d like to tell the Order where to stick their stupid rules. Those fat bloated wizards don’t understand a thing. If they’d ever fought ogres, like me, they’d soon drop all that stupid nonsense. Who needs this old junk? When you’ve read everything you want, I’ll bring them back. Careful, the step’s broken here.”
Hm. Bolt. I knew that in the Wild Hearts many soldiers were given nicknames to replace their real names. The nickname described the man, and men earned them for the specific quality of their service, actions, knowledge, or character. The Wild Hearts took pride in their new names.
Crossbow Bolt. So in former times the old man must have been a good shot.
We walked down into a dark hall that was small, but even so the torchlight was too feeble to illuminate it fully. The old man reached out one hand into the darkness, there was a loud click somewhere up above our heads, and the room was flooded with blinding sunlight. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut in sudden surprise.
“Aha, frightened, eh?” The old man giggled with delight. “Come on now, don’t be afraid. Come on, open those peepers.”
I slowly got used to the bright light. Like the large hall up above, this small one was crammed absolutely full of books and scrolls on metal shelves. And hanging from the high ceiling there was a blindingly bright round sphere, like a little sun.
“The dwarves invented it. Did you think they run around in the dark in those caves of theirs, smashing their foreheads against the walls?
Oho noo . . . They put up magic lamps like this. Magic! Our Order’s never even come close to anything like it. The charlatans! But the dwarves put one of these candles in here, and about ten of them in the basements of the royal palace. Of course, I’ve got no idea how much money they took for it. But it’s handy all right.”
I nodded.
“Right, then. Stay here, and don’t touch anything or stick your nose into anything. I’ll go and get what you want.” The old man gave me a menacing look to make sure I understood what he’d said.
As soon as he was gone, I instantly shed my harmless pose and started strolling about, looking at the titles of the old volumes. My eyes slid along until they suddenly came to rest on a small shelf of magic scrolls. The following words were written in immense, ornate letters on the wall beside the shelf: BATTLE SPELLS! RUNE MAGIC. THESE SCROLLS MAY ONLY BE USED BY ARCHMAGICIANS OF THE ORDER, WHEN PERMISSION HAS BEEN GRANTED BY THE COUNCIL!
I couldn’t understand why rune-magic battle spells would be lying there so openly, entirely unprotected. Any light-fingered rogue—like me, for instance—could easily make off with these rolled-up sheets of parchment.
Carelessness will destroy the world yet. Just you mark my words!
I glanced round quickly, grabbed one scroll, with a black ribbon, out of the dusty heap and stuck it inside my shirt. Then I moved away, to wait for the old man. I’d acted like a petty thief, but I thought to myself that no one else was going to need the scroll for a long time, and it might come in handy in Hrad Spein.
The trouble with scrolls is that you can only use them once. After you’ve chanted the formula and worked the spell, you can simply throw the useless parchment away. The magic destroys the words, erasing them from the scroll and from the reader’s memory. But at least you don’t have to be a magician to work magic that has been written down on paper. You only need to know how to read.
I heard Bolt coughing somewhere behind the shelves, and then he himself appeared, carrying two books in his hands. One was huge and thick, in a brown buffalo-skin binding with worn gold embossing, the other was small and so old that I thought it would crumble to dust under his fingers.
“An ogre almost grabbed me back there,” the old man muttered, handing me the books I wanted. “The brute was hiding under the shelves. I had to give it a couple of kicks to frighten it off. Well, why are you just standing there like a block of wood?”
“Is that all?” I asked Bolt in amazement as I looked at the two books. I’d been expecting more.
“That’s enough cheek from you. The big one is plans of Avendoom, drawn four hundred years ago, and the little one’s about Hrad Spein. Written quite recently, but it’s in a terrible state. The other books are in orcish. You don’t happen to savvy their spiel, do you. Right! Then quit your moaning.”
The old man turned out the dwarves’ sun, took the torch out of its bracket, and started climbing up the steps. We walked all the way back in silence. Then, still without speaking, the custodian locked the iron door and showed me to a table, only not in the large hall. It was in a little cubbyhole, surrounded by books. Then he walked off, muttering something to himself.
I began my research with what was simplest and easiest. Setting aside the little book, I pulled over the weighty tome composed of maps of the city bound together into a single volume.
The pages of fine parchment rustled quietly under my fingers as I turned them in search of the part of Avendoom that interested me. The maps in the book were astoundingly precise and detailed. It was obvious at first glance that this was the painstaking handiwork of dwarves. Only those large but meticulous hands could possibly have traced the lines so precisely and lovingly.
As the pages flashed past my eyes, so did the streets of Avendoom and the city’s history. I found what I was looking for quite quickly. The Forbidden Territory. Of course, drawn at a time when the magicians of the Order had not yet combined forces with the Rainbow Horn to transform five whole streets into a cursed spot that was walled off from the rest of the city.
Well then, getting into the Forbidden Territory would be fairly easy. Only what was waiting for me in there? Three roads left the Port City, running in parallel toward the Artisans’ City: the Street of the Sleepy Cat, the Street of Men, and Graveyard Street. The last of these ran into the old graveyard that was still in use at that time.
Running at right angles to the Street of the Sleepy Cat was the Street of the Magicians, which opened out into the square where the old Tower of the Order stood. On the other side of the square the Street of the Roofers began. As I had expected, all these streets occupied a substantial chunk of the city, a lot more than I had been counting on, in fact. It was going to be a tricky business. But if I wanted to find Grok’s grave, I would have to get into the old Tower of the Order somehow. I couldn’t understand how the two previous expeditions could have set out for Hrad Spein without knowing where to look for the Horn. What had they been counting on?
I tried to memorize all the roads, buildings, and side streets. Call me a fool, if you like, but I never copy plans down onto parchment. What do I have a head for?
Round about midday I leaned back in my chair, exhausted, then slammed the large volume shut and pushed it aside. I stretched and yawned. I would tackle the little book on Hrad Spein next. Hrad Spein, the very worst haunted house ever, filled with the shades of demons, orcs, ogres, and elves. Well, at least we would have an elf with us. What a curious, rare beauty she was, although not a conventional beauty by any means. Not that she was my type—what a match that would be! Ho-ho. Mysterious though, fascinating secrets there. She would bear watching.
My stomach was quite shamelessly reminding me that it was feeling rather hungry. Bolt went by, and I asked him if he could bring me something to eat or go and buy something. The only answer I got was a furious glance and a stern lecture that I should stuff my belly at an inn, not a depository of learning.
Deciding to try a different approach, I took out a silver coin and set it spinning on the table. Before the coin even came to a stop, Bolt grabbed it and disappeared into the walls of books and scrolls. A little while later he came back with a huge amount of food and four bottles of sour red wine: he’d been generous with my money and bought enough drink for an entire squadron.
We dined right there, on the table. In half a day not a single other person had come to visit the library building, and as I gnawed on a tough, unappetizing chicken leg, I realized how lonely and miserable the old man must feel here. Meanwhile, Bolt reserved most of his attention for the wine. After my snack, I told the custodian to go away and let me get on with my work, and he picked up the bottles and the remaining food and left.
I pulled over the little book, which bore a title in black letters: Hrad Spein. A nocturnal mystery, shrouded in death. A history with conjectures. The scholarly work of the magician Dalistus of the Snow, the Order of Avendoom.
Well, at least it would make interesting reading.
Ornate letters and engravings, maps, drawings of mysterious, inconceivable creatures. The terrible tale took a grip on me, plunging me into an age of ancient mysteries.
“Hrad Spein” is a ogric name. Translated into the language of men it means “Palaces of Bone.” But the dark elves say that the human tongue is incapable of expressing the universal horror that the ogres invested in those two words. No one knows who created Hrad Spein, and in which age, whose thought and strength it was that bit so deep into the bones of the earth, creating those immense caves and caverns that were later transformed into the architectural wonders of the northern world and, later still, into a world of darkness and horror.
The first to discover Hrad Spein were the ogres, before they withdrew into the Desolate Lands. There were no orcs yet then, not to mention human beings. The ogres spent a long time exploring Hrad Spein, a very long time. That was where they solved the mysteries of the Kronk-a-Mor. Nothing is known about the origin of the ogres, but they appeared in Siala a lot later than the time w
hen unknown builders first laid the foundations of the Palaces of Bone. They say that the potency of the ogres’ magic came from ageless catacombs, where they discovered the ancient writings of an unknown race that lived in Siala long before the ogres arrived.
Deep, deep under the ground the ogres came across gigantic halls and caves. They started using Hrad Spein as their graveyard, leaving their dead and placing terrible curses on the burial sites. Later, when the ogres moved away to the north, it was the bones of orcs and elves that found their final resting place in Hrad Spein. While constantly warring with each other above the ground, they also found time to create magnificent palaces below it, palaces of a beauty that stunned their contemporaries. And thousands of thousands were interred there, in the ancient burial grounds.
Exquisitely elegant ceilings, columns, frescoes, halls, statues, and corridors—that was Hrad Spein in those times. The orcs and the elves worked together. It was the only place where there was an effective truce between the feuding relatives. Neither side intruded on the lower levels of the ogres. Both races realized that nothing good could be expected from the ogres’ magic, and the upper layers of the palaces provided more than enough space for them.
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