The Destruction of the Books (55 page)
Caught off-balance, Juhg flailed for the table. The table, like the benches around it, was secured to the floor by trunnels. The wooden nails made certain the furniture would not move. He fell across the table hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs.
Critter narrowly avoided being flattened. He ran awkwardly across the table on his mismatched legs, flapping his wings and cursing the whole way. His fork pegleg slipped out from under him suddenly and he fell in a rolling tangle of feathers. Crimson and yellow down puffed out around him. He flared his wings at the last second and took to the air.
The ship lurched back the other way as she was hammered once more. Critter banged into the wall and went down with an undignified plop. He cursed terribly and got himself up once more. He rubbed a wing on his head and his good eye squinted in pain.
“What’s going on?” Juhg demanded as he righted himself. The ship wasn’t striking something. He knew that now.
Something
was striking the pirate ship.
“Ye’ll find out, dweller.” The rhowdor flapped for the doorway. “Just ye hurry topside. There’s things to be done, an’ scribblin’ in them books ain’t gonna much help keep ol’
Peggie
afloat.”
The ship lurched again, twisting violently as she fought the water, the wind, and whatever was hitting her. Critter sailed into a wall, struck his head on a lantern, and cursed in a manner that would have made even the most callous dwarven pirate aboard the ship blush.
With the rucksack hanging over his shoulder, Juhg made his way through the hallway to the ladder leading up to the deck. Dwarven pirates ran through the waist, already carrying out Captain Hallekk’s orders.
Has it come to this, then?
Juhg wondered.
Have we come all this way only to be sunk in unfriendly waters by the mainland?
He tried to put the bitter and depressing thoughts out of his mind. But he couldn’t. He knew that back in Greydawn Moors people died every day while defending their island home and the remnant of the Great Library from the goblinkin ships that remained lurking in the Blood-Soaked Sea.
And all he’d done was make three copies of a book no one might see. If he hadn’t been trapped aboard
One-Eyed Peggie
and hadn’t felt so responsible for the Grandmagister’s current situation, he wouldn’t have stayed. The feeling of futility filling him was one of the reasons he’d tried to leave the Vault of All Known Knowledge and his life as a First Level Librarian. Only the book he’d found with Ertonomous Dron had pulled him back to the island.
All those lives wasted,
Juhg thought bitterly, thinking of the sailors aboard
Windchaser
who had died to acquire that book,
only to deliver a trap into the Library
.
It was too much to live with during the time he worked on the books. All while they helplessly pursued the goblinkin ship that had taken the Grandmagister captive during the battle for Greydawn Moors. So far, the three goblinkin ships had remained together, too strong for the dwarven pirates to take, but neither did the goblin captains know that they were followed by the mystic eyeball that gave
One-Eyed Peggie
her name. The monster’s eyeball, taken by Peggie herself (who had been one-legged), had the power of watching over every sailor who crewed aboardship.
“Are we holed?” Juhg asked one of the passing pirates who hurried toward the hold that led to the cargo area with an armful of tools.
“She’s cracked,” the pirate admitted. He was scarred and thick, a sailing man who’d seen more than his share of rough seas and ill luck. “We’re takin’ on water, but we’ll get her shipshape again soon enough. Long as that beastie don’t find a way to smash us to pieces first.”
“What beast?” Juhg asked. The Blood-Soaked Sea was filled with all manner of creatures.
The pirate waved him off, then dropped down the hold.
Feeling the impulse to go see for himself how bad the damage was, then reconsidering because he didn’t know enough to help and because he really didn’t want to know how bad things were if they were bad, Juhg pulled himself up the simple wooden ladder.
Rain splashed his face before he reached the deck. The world was dark gray overhead and dull gray all around him. Dwarven pirates ran along
One-Eyed Peggie
’s deck wearing hooded rain slickers and carrying harpoons.
When had it started raining? Juhg didn’t know. He’d been committed to writing down everything he could remember about Imarish, the city where the Grandmagister had left something, he’d said, for Juhg to find.
Craugh the wizard had insisted that be done so others could perhaps find the something the Grandmagister had left there for him in case he got killed along the way. The statement, especially while on a sea full of monsters frenzied by blood, hadn’t offered Juhg any comfort. But Craugh, as always, was a rocky shoal of pragmatism.
“All hands keep a sharp lookout!” Critter crowed from the mid ’yards. “Stick ’im in the eye if ye gets the chance! That thrice-blasted beast won’t like that none, I’ll warrant!”
Juhg gazed toward the stern bridge, thinking he would see Hallekk or Craugh there. Instead, only the helmsman stood at the great wheel. A dozen dwarven pirates flanked him, all of them peering down into the swirling gray-green water that surrounded them.
Thick fog pressed upon them, flitting in layers across
One-Eyed Peggie
’s rain-slick deck. Juhg could scarcely see either end of the ship. Lanterns were lit fore and aft so that she might be seen by other ships. However, getting seen was one of the last things anyone aboard the pirate ship wished for. They were in dangerous waters. Goblinkin in their stolen vessels and true human pirates sailed these seas, always searching for the valuable trade shipments the south mainland made with the north.
“Dreezil,” a familiar voice barked, “do ye see anythin’? Anythin’ at all?”
“No, Cap’n Hallekk. I see water boilin’, but no hide nor hair of no creature.” Dreezil stood watch in the crow’s nest high above the deck. He was lost in the thick fog, and Juhg didn’t think the young dwarf could even see the deck from where he was.
Another blow struck
One-Eyed Peggie,
rolling her over to starboard. Again, the impact came from below the waterline. Juhg thought about the crew down in the hold working to repair the cracked timber. How fast were they taking on water? He remembered the three times he’d tramped through rising water to help seal a puncture in the cargo hold of a ship. None of those experiences had been pleasant. Twice the ship had gone down despite their best efforts, and Juhg had never gone down once himself.
“Well,” Cap’n Hallekk bawled in frustration, “it ain’t gone away, now has it? It’s still knockin’ us about like we was a child’s toy. There’s a monster down there, an’ I want it found.”
Holding on to the railing, getting more soaked by the minute, Juhg made his way forward. The ship rolled slowly from side to side as she recovered her balance.
On the forward deck, Hallekk stood braced and ready with a harpoon in one massive hand. The dwarven captain was nearly as broad as he was tall, carrying massive shoulders and standing a few inches taller than most dwarves, though still shorter than most humans or elves. His fierce beard trailed down to his belly, woven with bits of yellowed ivory carved into the shapes of fish and other sea creatures. Gold hoops hung from his ears. Scars marked his face and arms, testifying to the long and violent years he had put in as a Blood-Soaked Sea pirate. The pirates’ reputations were often earned with a weapon and bravery.
When the Builders had first caused the island to be raised from the sea floor so they could hide the Great Library there, they’d also set up lines of defense to prevent its eventual discovery. The first and most fearsome had been the monsters they’d loosed in the waters, and the second had been the volunteers who had taken up lives and battles under the skull and crossbones. Mainland ships stayed away from the heart of the Blood-Soaked Sea.
Pirates were plentiful after the Cataclysm. During Lord Kharrion’s time, goblinkin had captured ships and harried rescue efforts transporting books from the mainland. But those efforts had been few because the Unity Army had known leaving the mainland to the goblin forces would have meant Darkness had prevailed. In the end, they’d managed to stand and bring the Goblin Lord down.
Mostly, the volunteers from Greydawn Moors had been humans. Their natures, short-lived and determined ever to be wanderers and conquerors, suited the humans for the sea and the promise of combat. It helped that not a few of them gained substantial wealth from their efforts.
Still, a few dwarves and elves had taken to ship occasionally. Generally they tended more toward joining ships for a time. Dwarves liked to go a-roving for gems and chances to work metal in different smithies, and brought back news of the mainland. Elven warders brought back new stock—plants and animals—to keep the island’s plant life and wildlife healthy and hardy. None of them talked about the island or the Great Library while they were about. All of them had families there who would be forfeit the first time they let slip the secret they protected. Strangers were seldom welcome at Greydawn Moors because strangers didn’t have much investment in the city or the people who lived there.
But there had been exceptions. Juhg had been born on the mainland, had never known about the Great Library until Grandmagister Lamplighter had freed him from slavery at a goblinkin gem mine.
One-Eyed Peggie
was unique, the only ship in all of the Blood-Soaked Sea under a dwarven captain. Captain Hallekk had taken over the ship after Captain Farok had died in the Grandmagister’s arms during their escape from the undersea port of Callidell after tracking down and stealing the fabled Gem of Umatura. Callidell had been located in the dead heart of a volcano. The carved facets of the Gem of Umatura, once identified and translated, had unlocked a dead language in books long forgotten that had set the Grandmagister off on another whirlwind quest through the history and dangers of the mainland.
Lurching with the motion of the rolling ship, feeling the dreaded heaviness to her now that told she was taking on water, Juhg went up the stairs to the forward deck. The task was made even harder because
One-Eyed Peggie
bucked and twisted instead of cleanly cutting through the sea. He gazed around, struggling to make sense of the sky and the sea since they insisted on being very nearly the same color.
“There!” a pirate shouted, pointing to port.
Juhg turned at once, staring out at the gray-green sea. At first he saw nothing, then his keen vision tracked the underwater movement despite the rain pinpricking his eyes and peppering the rolling mountains of the ocean.
An undulating mass of deep purple and red scales moved beneath the sea. The mass was gone, disappearing under the ocean surface, almost as quickly as he’d spied it.
“What was it?” Hallekk demanded.
“A monster,” someone replied.
“What kind of monster?”
“Big.”
Hallekk growled a curse as he prowled the prow. “Big? I knowed it was big. From the way it was a-smashin’ up
Peggie,
why I didn’t need to see it to know it was big. What I need to know is how we’re a-gonna deal with it.”
“We can throw meat in the water. Maybe the beastie will chase the meat to the bottom an’ leave us alone.”
Juhg stood at the back of the bridge, leaving Hallekk plenty of room to pace. The big dwarf kept the harpoon at the ready.
“Meat won’t help,” a calm voice said. “That’s a bearded hoar-worm. You can throw every morsel of meat aboard this ship into the water and that creature won’t go break away from us. It feeds on live prey, and it lives to hunt.”
Moving forward to peer around the triangular jib sails straining in the strong winds, Juhg spotted Craugh the wizard on the other side of the bridge.
TOR BOOKS BY MEL ODOM
The Rover
The Destruction of the Books
Hunters of the Dark Sea
“Just as aged Bilbo Baggins gives way to a new hero, Frodo, at the start of
The Lord of the Rings
, so does elderly Edgewick “Wick” Lamplighter, now a Grandmagister at Great Library, leave center stage to a youthful progeny, the pint-sized Juhg, in this Tolkienesque sequel, set nearly a century later, to Odom’s
The Rover
(2001). In the tradition of Fritz Leiber’s immortal
Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser
, Juhg and his burly human friend, Raisho, set out on a series of fantastic adventures … The narrative moves along at a snappy pace, with much good humor, zest and color,… the magic lies in the details, where books and wizards, both good and evil, glimmer.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The battles are ferocious … As before, plenty of humor tempers the wild action.”
—
Booklist
“Odom’s bouncy, funny, cliff-hanger adventure is perfect for the Potter crowd, with enough puns, wry asides, and satirical send-ups to amuse Tolkien fans.”
—Kirkus Reviews
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE BOOKS
Copyright © 2004 by Mel Odom
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 0-765-34649-4
EAN 978-0765-34649-0
First edition: July 2004
First mass market edition: June 2005
eISBN 9781466845961
First eBook edition: April 2013