THE LIBRARY OF CALAMAE

Three
 

Wasn’t that what he’d been doing since he and Cassella left the inn that morning? Except before, it had been her mission, with him as her guide. Now these forest warriors had made it their mission.

Warriors. By Mithra, they were common bandits, not soldiers. They’d still managed to sneak up on him and Cassella, communicating through some inscrutable combination of nonverbal signals and primordial instinct. In the Southern Ghestruland army, he’d met soldiers who’d fought the Schomites of the Southwestern Octosphere, side by side with the Spirelights. They’d sounded more like demons than men or beasts.

All he’d wanted was to serve out an unremarkable term of service, as the Ghestru Empire required of a young man of his humble birth, then go home to his childhood sweetheart and raise a family by the sea. Just his luck, he’d wound up on the front lines, where he saved the life of his lifelong best friend. His buddy got to go home early, minus a leg. Then his sweetheart had written him, tearfully telling him it was over between them. She’d tried to wait, but she’d found love with another man... his one-legged old buddy, no less. If he made it home alive, he’d sworn, he’d kill them both.

One thing Brecka had never seen himself as was a leader. He’d picked a fine time to start, the day his commander ordered the slaughter of a village of civilians. It turned out Brecka’s fellow infantrymen had loved him well enough to follow him in a mutiny, wherein they’d strung up and gutted the old genocidal prick. He’d expected the high command to make an example of him, with a big public execution and all that. Instead, he’d been quietly sold into slavery, to Abril Brendi, who’d later sold him to the fighting pits of lower tier Trescha. There, his skill with a blade had earned a lot of money for more assholes he’d never met.
‘Til today, the only Schomites he’d met had been those he’d faced in the fighting pits. Well, them and Krav, along with the starved, shivering refugee civilians he’d taken up with after escaping Trescha. Krav had come to Trescha as a refugee of the Schlogmire territories. After the city-state fell, he’d made himself leader of the little group of survivors, through sheer, brutish force of personality. He’d loved bragging about how he used to run with the fabled Bandit Chief Rorkaster. From what Brecka understood of the city-state’s political situation, Rorkaster had been the righthand man of General Severen Gris, the turncoat usurper from the ranks of the Spirelight International Police, who’d led a pack of his former Schomite enemies into the city-state. They’d captured the local Priest King, and Gris had promised a new age of unity between the Schomites and Spirelights, while his magic and soldiers held out the rest of the Spirelight Empire. The new local dictator hadn’t changed much for Brecka, or anyone else on the lower tiers from what he could tell, not ‘til the defences fell and some elite Spirelight unit swarmed in, intent on killing anyone who’d contaminated themselves through the blasphemous intermingling Gris had encouraged.

Thing was, from among the countryside’s dispossessed Schomite refugees who’d made it into the city-state, Rorkaster had reportedly sought out all his old bandit friends and recruited them into the local security... yet Krav had been left to rot as a neighbourhood bully, in the slums where Gris had dropped most of the refugees. Cassella had seen to Krav with one of those special bolt casters only Spirelight International Agents could use, because only Spirelight International Agents were genetically bred to have the proper bone structure in their hands to operate the devices properly. That meant she hadn’t lied about her parents. Yet she hadn’t dared draw her caster on Tia and Ketz’s bandits. Now, Tia and Ketz... those were some well-known Schomite bandit names. Brecka had imagined they’d be older.

The road narrowed and swerved sharply, leading downhill even as the crags rose steeper on either side. The mist thickened, and the air grew chilly, like these lands suddenly remembered what season it was. Brecka had last seen this road through the window of a gleaming, shell shaped carriage. Approaching on foot, it all looked different yet the same. It certainly felt longer. His legs stiffened as the sky reddened. Around the next bend, he spied the side road that had once taken the shell shaped carriage to the Library of Calamae.

He halted and lifted his hand. Soft shod feet whispered to a stop through the dirt. He glanced back. Tia and Ketz stalked along behind Cassella, their eyes alight with hatred for Spirelight and Ghestru alike, for centuries of theocratically sanctioned murder, rape, and broken treaties, telling him, You’d better not lead us astray, meatskin. Otherwise, you and your little glowstick friend are gonna get your heads shoved up each other’s asses, while we eat your guts while you’re still alive. He couldn’t see the rest of the Schomite warriors, but he felt their presence.

Brecka walked past the carriage road and parted the brush to reveal a narrow, rocky, winding ditch that led downhill.

‘Everyone,’ he hissed over his shoulder, ‘walk single file behind me. As we go downhill, the mist will grow thicker, ‘til you won’t see anything clearly but the ditch in front of you. Keep your eyes forward. If you look around at the mist, it’ll show you things that’ll make you want to jump out of the ditch and fight it. Don’t do that. You’ll just die. Or it’ll twist you around and confuse you, while you fight whatever pops up in front of you. You won’t be fighting what you think you’re fighting. More likely, you’ll be killing each other. That’s how the gods who haunt this place will mess with your heads.’

They descended downhill through the ditch, the forest warriors falling in behind Brecka and Cassella. All around them, the mist roiled up ever thicker. Dead branches leaned in on either side, like blackened, skeletal fingers prodding and pricking, like the Spirah gods had long ago sucked this patch of land dry.

It smelled sweet, Brecka noticed, not like the piney, sappy flora of this strange continent, more like the balmy, pungent canopies of his homeland, the salty sea air wafting in on rising flames set by him and his old platoon. Through it, there echoed the clashing song of Ghestruland steel on Ghestruland steel. Off to the right, he heard his childhood buddy cry out to him, begging for help.

Brecka almost sprang out of the ditch, to his old friend’s aid. I should go kill you myself, he thought, yeah, cut your betraying head right off. Or better yet, still save your life, but chop your dick and balls off along with your leg. Let’s see you go home and steal my girl then.

A hand tapped his shoulder. ‘Brecka,’ Cassella whispered, ‘this is bad.’

‘That’s the first thing we’ve agreed on since you made your crazy proposition.’

‘Look, even if we pull this off, these Schomites won’t let us go. They’ll kill us both once they have what they want.’

‘That’s crossed my mind. So what do you suggest we—’

‘Hey,’ said Tia, somewhere behind them. ‘Keep walkin’. No funny stuff, or—’

Far behind, a Schomite warrior shouted, ‘To hell with you, Ma! Fine, you don’t wanna believe me about Uncle Breni? Let me bring you his head, hear what he has to say then!’ The warrior dashed up out of the ditch.

Brecka spun and stared back uphill. ‘Hold the line,’ he shouted to the others.

The upstart vanished into the mists, his blade flailing left and right, hewing through dead branches. A knife licked out of the gloom and a warrior careened backwards, a sheet of blood spraying out into the fog before misting down over his companions. From within the trench, a panicked blade thrust upward, skewering the former comrade. The other warriors bustled against each other like spooked cattle in a gorge. It sounded like at least two more of them were fighting each other.

Tia broke from formation. For a moment, Brecka was sure the mist’s illusions had claimed her, too. Instead, she slammed her way back up the trench, knocking her own warriors aside, ‘til she reached two of them locked in a deadly grapple. She drew her blade and hacked them both to pieces with a few wild chops, as though slaying some random roadside predator.

‘Everyone, keep movin’!’ she shouted, as cooling spatter rippled down her body.

Finally, the trees parted before the gardens and courtyards of the Library of Calamae. An egg-shaped dome of glistening opal rose above the centre of the wide, tall structure. Brecka looked around, still dazed as the misty illusions faded from his brain. Of the Schomite warriors who’d followed him downhill, less than half remained. A braided maze of swerving paths ran through a garden of twitching, scarlet flowers, leading to a small, sunken doorway at the side of the building. To either side of the door, there stood two guardsmen, dressed much like Cassella, though plainer, as befit a lower rank. They looked bored at first, then stared in confusion, out across the garden, at the party who’d just emerged from the woods. It was like they’d been posted there for so long, dutifully awaiting action that never came, so the sight of an actual threat must seem even more surreal than this infernal place where they’d been stationed.

‘Hey,’ shouted one, reaching for his blade. ‘State your business, or—’

His head lashed back as a whistling bolt flew right into his mouth and punched through the back of his skull. As he dropped, his companion sprang sideways for cover, his mouth opening to shout the alarm. Another of Cassella’s bolts arced through the air and landed in his neck with a meaty thunk. His quivering fingers rose to the bristly end, pulling weakly at it before he fell over gurgling. Cassella holstered her bolt caster. Tia, Ketz, and the other Schomites all stared at her in bewilderment, much like Brecka had when he’d first seen her use it last night.

‘Alright,’ said Tia, starting forward, ‘let’s—’

Brecka caught her shoulder. She spun, snarling like something feral. He held his ground. ‘You need to follow me through here. Trust me, you don’t wanna set a foot wrong in this garden.’

He started down the first cobblestone pathway, then turned right, walked a semicircle, back towards the first path, then he took a sharp left. As he neared the other end, he looked back to make sure the others were following him accordingly. So far, so good. Finally, a mere two feet of short hedges stood between everyone and the sunken stone doorway where the two corpses lay. It looked like they were about to emerge, then he turned and led them further back through the garden.

‘To hell with this,’ snarled a man in the rear. ‘Look, it’s right there!’

He sprang over the hedges, his boots kicking up leaves and petals. Thorny vines slithered up around his legs and pulled him down into the flora. He writhed and screamed for only a moment before the vines enveloped his whole body. The scarlet blossoms stood up taller, bloomed wider and brighter. They quivered and sighed out a trilling, ghostly hum. The man’s companions drew their blades to hack him free.

‘Leave him,’ Brecka shouted. ‘He’s dead already. You try to hack your way through that, we’re all dead.’

The warriors stared in shocked sorrow. Tia shot them a haunted nod, so they moved along behind Brecka. He led them further back through the maze, then around a few more twists and turns before they all finally stepped out at the other end.

Other than Brecka, Cassella, Tia and Ketz, only five warriors remained. They gathered around, their limber bodies and battle-hardened faces as unreadable as ever. With a start, Brecka realised that at least two of them looked even younger than the twins. Were these Schomites the sort to wage their wars with child soldiers? No, he realised, it was his and Cassella’s people who’d forced the young ones of these forests to grow up so fast.

Brecka met Tia’s eyes. ‘Get your warriors in order,’ he said through his teeth. ‘Once we step through this door, we can’t have any more breaks in rank. If anyone here doesn’t do exactly what I say, ‘til we get where we’re going, we’re all dead.’

‘You heard the man, boys and girls,’ said Tia. ‘Lead the way, meatskin.’

He shook his head. ‘Not this time. Ketz. You go first.’

‘Excuse me?’ said Tia, her fingers twitching towards her blade.

‘Ketz, you know more about this glowstick spirit science than anyone else here, right?’

Tia nudged Cassella roughly. ‘Shouldn’t that be a job for, y’know, the glowstick?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ said Cassella. ‘I haven’t been trained for a place like this.’

Tia glared. ‘Ain’t that funny, considerin’ this all started as your idea.’

Cassella shivered, staring hauntedly at the looming structure. ‘Now that I’m here, I wish I’d stayed home.’

‘Sounds like you ain’t such a mastermind like you thought you was. You’d still better—’

‘Will you all shut up?’ said Ketz. ‘I’ll do it, okay?’

‘Ketz,’ Tia pleaded, with softer vulnerability than Brecka could have imagined from her. ‘Seriously, you don’t have to—’

‘Don’t I?’ he said. ‘It’s a little late to turn back now. Brecka, what do I need to do?’

‘Step through this door. Walk in front. I’ll be right behind you. You’re trained in navigating spiritually charged spaces like this, right?’

‘Yeah.’ Ketz nodded nervously. He looked at Tia. ‘You said it yourself, sis. To hell with lettin’ the Spirelights have our forest. This Ghestru man’s got us this far, and... well, this Spirelight lady’s got things she wants to learn here, and so do I. Hey, Cassella, what was it you said you wanted to find in there?’

‘The Scrolls of Delane.’

He nodded. ‘I’ve heard of those. Let’s make our own deal. We take this place, and all those archives are free to search, I’ll help you find what you want, about gettin’ the kiss of the gods scrubbed off your head, if you promise to stick around for a while and help me translate some old scrolls in there that I’ve dreamed of gettin’ the chance to take a crack at.’

Tia slapped her forehead. ‘Oh, forfucksake!’

‘Done,’ said Cassella.

Tia peered murderously at Brecka and Cassella. Her remaining Schomite warriors gathered behind her, awaiting her signal. Her brother caught her eyes and nodded. She sighed, nodded back, and stood down.
Brecka opened the door and held it for Ketz. A darkened hallway loomed before them. Ketz walked through silently, followed by Brecka, then Cassella and Tia, then the others. The narrow passageway ran steadily downward, with ghostly, greenish lights flickering faintly through a distant, egg-shaped opening ahead. They reached it and filed out onto a glistening floor of black marble. Above, to either side, there stretched a stack of three mezzanines, swooping outward at strange angles. Towering shelves lined each level, stuffed full of ancient scrolls and books, illuminated by glass encased oil lamps that hung from the stone columns. Ketz drifted forward as though in a trance, gazing around wistfully, like a kid in a fancy sweetshop.

At least someone here’s having a good time. Brecka still caught the kid by the shoulder and said, ‘Hey. Don’t get distracted.’

Ketz glanced back, his eyes stony. ‘I’m still here. Don’t worry. We’re close.’ His gaze flickered past Brecka, past his sister, to Cassella.

When Brecka looked back and forth, he caught some strange, silent exchange, between the young Schomite bandit and the renegade Spirelight woman, like the two shared some understanding, of hidden fascinations no one else here would ever comprehend. Brecka met Tia’s eyes and saw that she was just as unsettled as him. Hey, at least they agreed about something.

High above, the day’s fading light spilled in through the smoky glass dome they’d seen outside. Up along the mezzanines, monks and librarians drifted back and forth, clad in black robes and sashes of silver and gold. Some of them sat at oaken rolltop desks, translating and transcribing one roll of parchment to another. Amongst them marched a few guards, clad in uniforms like the ones outside, oblivious to Brecka and the invaders he’d led here. They’d stay oblivious ‘til it was too late, right up to the moment when Ketz found the altar and pulled the lynchpin, so long as the party stayed in single file, didn’t stray beyond the central path.
Brecka remembered being here before, as a slave, wishing a pack of savages would descend on this place, kill his master and everyone complacent with the bastard. Now he was about to make that happen, and he beheld the dreaming innocence of everyone here.

Kill every last one of those glowsticks, Tia had said. Did every last one of these glowsticks here deserve that? Probably not.

West of the Great River, Cassella claimed, a lowborn Ghestru immigrant might make a new life for himself.

Was Brecka about to break his word, deny himself that chance, for the sake of this place’s custodians, innocent or otherwise? No, he decided, he wasn’t.

Ketz led the pack up a sloping ramp, to a towering archway that led up into the grand, octagonal chamber, at the centre beneath the egg-shaped dome, through which the murky red sky shone down. The pack stepped into the sacred space, where a floor of pure angel lapis inclined inward like a whirlpool. At the centre, there rose the glimmering altar upon the oval-shaped dais. From the centre of the altar, a crystalline, treelike sculpture swooped and jutted upward like an orgy of dancing snakes, tapering off at the top in a corkscrew tail that touched the centre of the smoky dome. Out of the coils bulged thousands of frozen, screaming faces, like they’d all been the last who’d made the mistake of venturing this far. Somehow the shape defied all notions of balance and physics, like it shouldn’t be able to stand up. The base of the structure bubbled blackly over the altar like a sagging gut. Near the bottom, there jutted the hilt of a jewel speckled dagger.
Ketz started towards the structure.

‘Ketz,’ Brecka started.

Ketz glanced back. ‘What? This is what you all wanted me to come here and do, right?’ He climbed the dais and yanked the dagger from the altar.

The building shrieked. The sloping floor shook and cracked. Brecka strutted and braced himself. In his shaky peripheral vision, his companions lurched left and right, crashing into each other and rolling across the floor. Beyond the chamber, unearthly shrieks erupted throughout the Library of Calamae.

‘Ketz, what the fuck did you just do?’ Tia growled through rattling teeth.

Ketz stood before the altar, staring dumbly at the dagger in his hand, the only one in the room who hadn’t been bodily shaken by the cosmic disruption he’d just unleashed.

‘Everyone brace yourselves,’ Brecka shouted. ‘It’ll be over in a minute. Then the real fighting starts.’

The room went dim as it rumbled to a stop. Beyond the archway, the rest of the building echoed with howls of agony and confusion. In a daze, Brecka rose and lurched towards the archway. Beyond, on all levels, the Library of Calamae lay in shambles, the shelves fallen against each other, the railings shattered, raining fluttering debris down across the black marble. Here and there lay the monks, some crushed beneath fallen shelves or fallen to their deaths from on high, others squirming and gibbering, their minds shattered in the explosion of otherworldly energy.

Brecka sure hoped Cassella’s Scrolls of Delane hadn’t been too damaged by the cataclysm. He guessed she and Ketz would have to figure that out later, because already the stairways rattled with the stomping boots of guards who hadn’t been killed or incapacitated. He’d really hoped Ketz’s disruption would take out more of them. Instead, he now saw that the place was full of more of them than he’d realised were here in the first place. Down the fractured stairs and around every corner they came through the gloom, in a storm of glimmering Spirelight blades, converging on the chamber.

Some of them spilled forward or flipped backwards through the air, as Cassella’s bolts flew from her caster. Once her brace of bolts ran empty, she dropped the caster, drew her rapier in one hand, her dagger in the other, and stood ready at Brecka’s side. Two of the Schomites stepped forward, their slings spinning, before loosing their jagged wooden stars. One Spirelight fell with a split skull, another with a star embedded in his breastbone.

At Brecka’s other side, Tia howled, ‘Everyone get ready for some killin’!’

She sprang ahead of everyone else, alone before the approaching onslaught. She wants to die, thought
Brecka. As the hulking, better armoured shapes swarmed around her lithe little form, he was sure he was about to see her get sliced to pieces. Then her curved blade flicked up and cleaved the first man’s jaw from his face. He staggered away, his body washed in red, while his fingers looked for the lower half of his face that wasn’t there anymore. Tia leapt over a swish of blades as though hopping a fence, then ducked and swooped. A man’s femoral arteries hissed open in a spurting rain that washed across the marble floor. She stabbed up, skewering another man beneath the chin. Her blade caught on his jawbone. As she wrestled it free, two more guards descended upon her from either side. One of them almost got her, but by now, her companions had barrelled from the chamber, shrieking in bloodthirsty delight, hewing her attackers to pieces.

For a moment, Brecka froze before the unfolding carnage. He was no stranger to wanton butchery, yet these woodland Schomite warriors embodied it like nothing he’d ever beheld. Ketz leapt in next to his sister, so the pair fought sometimes side to side, sometimes back-to-back, in a unit all their own like a two beast army, in such a blinding blur of slaughter that he could barely tell them apart. More like demons than men or beasts, indeed!

Cassella had already joined the fray, lunging and voiding and spinning with serpentine fluidity. She might have been raised by Schomites, yet it was the elite finesse and prowess of the Spirelight International Police, passed down from her mother, that Brecka witnessed now, her rapier and dagger in constant motion, the longer blade always doing one thing while the shorter one did something else, stabbing, blocking, and slashing with blinding precision.

Two other Schomites went down, the ones who were even younger than the twins, cleft in half by the blades of the better armoured Spirelights. Some of those Spirelight guards still made it through and came straight at Brecka. He drew the rapier Cassella had given him, just in time to block the swoop of an enemy’s heavier sword. He retreated, stabbing and hacking. His edge crashed on a guard’s shoulder. It made a deep, red dent that mostly just pissed the guy off more. That’s right, this blade wasn’t meant for chopping like the cut-and-thrust single hander he’d wielded in the army or the antique broadswords with which he’d excelled in the fighting pits. It was made for finesse, like Cassella’s blades. He hadn’t been trained with such weapons, but it was time to adapt or die. He retreated, blocking a swooping barrage of utility blades, sliced and gouged in maddened desperation. A Spirelight’s blade sang past his side. He lunged in, caught the attacker in a grapple, broke the man’s arm and stabbed him in the face.

Someone else stabbed him in the side. You never got used to being stabbed, no matter how tough you were, no matter what the tale leaf legends told. An ice water jolt blasted out from the wound, through his body. He fought off the paralysis and stabbed his attacker right back, forcing the man to the ground. He twisted him onto his back and gouged over and over, as though ravaging a lover, ‘til the body went limp and bled out beneath him. He rose to meet the next one, parried and stabbed. He kept parrying and stabbing, even as everything became a blur. The harder he fought, the worse he bled. His knees quivered, threatening to buckle.

His fingers went numb, and he heard his sword clatter on the floor in front of him. He nearly collapsed, then someone caught hold of his arms on either side.

‘Easy there, meatskin.’ That sounded like Tia. ‘If anyone’s earned a rest today, it’s you.’

They lowered him onto his back. He blinked and saw Cassella leaning over him.

‘Did we win?’ he sighed.

‘Yeah, meatskin, we won,’ said Tia. ‘And for the record, no, we ain’t gonna kill you or your glowstick friend. Yeah. I heard you say that. Out here in the Nagga Mountains, when our word’s given, it’s good. You fought well.’

Brecka’s blurring eyes rolled around. ‘Great. Looks like I’m just as killed, though, either way, right?’

‘Sure looks that way,’ said Tia. ‘Sorry, mister.’

Cassella leaned in over him. ‘No, Brecka. Stay with me! I promised to get you across the Great River, and that’s what I’m gonna—’

‘Ah, shut up.’ He brushed her hands away. ‘To be honest, it never much appealed to me in the first place. Is Ketz still alive?’

‘I’m here, man,’ said Ketz.

‘Fulfil your promise to this lady.’

‘What, you mean about the Scrolls of Delane? Yeah, we already found those.’

‘Thank you, Brecka,’ said Cassella tearfully. ‘I couldn’t have got here without you.’

She no doubt meant it well, but from where he lay, he realised, in his final moments, she might as well have said it to any of those guards they’d killed while getting in here. Brecka sure hoped Tia, Ketz, and most of all, Cassella all got what they wanted out of this place. For his own part, he settled back, closed his eyes, and let himself drift away. Tia was right, he’d earned a rest. He sure hoped those infernal Spirelight gods really had been banished from this place. If he had a soul, it would soon be headed elsewhere, and he’d hate to get tangled up here with those bastards.
 
THE END