by Rab Foster
in Issue 127, August 2022
Jaydar Skenthorpe gawped at the tabletop. Though the men swigging furtively at the tavern’s other tables were unlikely to see it in the smoky candlelight, he couldn’t believe what his companion had placed in front of him.
A book.
Hoarsely, he demanded, “You want me to transport this? With the Brethren controlling the city, you know the penalty for being caught in possession of such a thing is imprisonment? Death, even, if it’s the wrong type of book!”
The small man opposite took a pouch out of his satchel and set it beside the book. Jaydar heard coins jingle. “I’m willing to pay handsomely.”
The sound of the coins rallied Jaydar’s courage. “Where do you want me to take it?”
“To a library.”
He blurted, “There are still libraries in the city?” The small man’s expression became pained and Jaydar lowered his voice. “You’re telling me libraries still exist here, under the Brethren’s noses?”
“Of course,” his companion whispered back. “If there are still books, and still people wanting to read them, there are still libraries. Obviously, operating secretly.” Then he glanced over Jaydar’s shoulder, grimaced, and snatched the book and pouch back onto his lap, under the table’s rim.
The burly figure of the tavern-keeper loomed over them. Momentarily, his eyes seemed to gleam with suspicion. But then he announced, “If you’re new to the city, gentlemen, you should know that the Brethren have decreed all taverns must close one candle-length after sunset. Their sect who enforces such matters, the Night Brethren, will be on patrol soon to make sure. Those had better be your last cups of wine.”
Jaydar had been in the city long enough to be aware of the Brethren’s crusade against everything they regarded as wicked. “I’m surprised,” he said, “they allow taverns to open at all.”
“They have bigger matters to deal with just now,” explained the tavern-keeper. “Getting rid of the old, lax priests who used to run the temples. Closing down the academies. Outlawing books and reading… Besides, they don’t need to stamp us out. We’ll be gone soon enough. They’ve razed the liquor merchants’ district – destroyed the city’s wineries, breweries, distilleries. That wine you’re supping is almost the last in my cellar. After it, there’ll be nothing more to drink.”
“You don’t sound so upset about this.”
The tavern-keeper shrugged resignedly. “The Brethren are ruthless and cruel. Thanks to them, I’ll have to find a new line of business. But this city needed them to seize control. It was not a good city beforehand. There were rumours of terrible things happening. Dark rituals, blasphemies, perversions, evil-doing… All directed by the Demon Vadargarn.”
After the tavern-keeper had left them, Jaydar looked at his companion. “The Demon Vadargarn?”
The small man sighed. “We readers of books have always been a minority in this city. Whereas the majority have always been illiterate, stupid and superstitious. Gullible enough to believe ghoulish tales told by their grandmothers about demons and demon-worshippers and the like. Gullible enough too to welcome the arrival of those intellect-hating, life-denying despots the Brethren.” He lifted up the book and pouch again and slid them over the table to Jaydar. “Listen carefully. I’ll tell you how to find this library.”
“What’s stopping you going to it yourself?”
“Because it’s hidden in the area the tavern-keeper mentioned – the former liquor merchants’ district. The Brethren have left the district in ruins and it’s become a hiding-place for the city’s criminals, whom the Brethren take a dim view of too. You see what a puny weakling I am. How long would I last, trying to traverse a place like that? So, here are the directions…”
By the time Jaydar had memorised those directions they were the tavern’s last customers. Its candles had burnt low, the fire in its hearth had become a pile of embers. Jaydar secured the book and pouch under the breast of his jerkin. Then they got up and went looking for the tavern-keeper. A long serving table, now loaded with dirty plates and cups, had been placed in front of a doorway leading to the kitchen and cellar. The door behind it was closed.
“Tavern-keeper,” the small man called at the door. “Your payment for this evening!”
The door didn’t open and no voice replied. Jaydar went behind the table, tested the door’s handle and found it was locked. He glanced at the room’s other door, which led outside, and saw it was shut too…
A key scraped in the second door’s lock and it burst back, revealing a quartet of black-clad figures wielding cudgels and bearing lanterns. Masks with long, pointed proboscises covered their faces, which made them look like big-beaked crows. The Night Brethren, Jaydar had heard, believed evil was a pestilence. While conducting their duties, they kept the insides of their masks’ proboscises packed with sacred herbs so that they wouldn’t breathe in and be infected by any evil they encountered.
Behind these four Night Brethren was the tavern-keeper. “That’s them!” he cried. “The pair with the book!”
Jaydar seized an end of the table, heeled it upwards and showered the Night Brethren with plates, cups, scraps of food and dregs of wine. When the table crashed against them too, the nearest man blundered over it. As he fell, the trajectory of his head met the trajectory of Jaydar’s boot.
Then Jaydar snatched a tray off the floor and ran to the hearth, chased by the three enforcers who were still on their feet. Using the tray like a shovel-blade, he scooped up some embers and flung them across the room behind him. One pursuer tried to dodge the fiery bombardment, collided with another table, and tumbled over the top of it. A second man rushed at him, sparks suddenly glowing amid his hair and in the folds of his clothes. Jaydar smashed the tray into his face and he toppled back, his mask’s proboscis bent sideways.
By now Jaydar had ripped out his main blade and he hurtled towards the entrance door, slashing it in front of him. The only Night Brethren who hadn’t fallen sprang out of his path. However, the tavern-keeper remained in the doorway, paralysed. Jaydar slammed a boot into his crotch and bowled him back onto the flagstones of the alley outside, then bounded out across the top of him.
He ran towards where the alley joined a main street, only to halt as he discovered another group of Night Brethren filling the alley’s mouth. They rushed towards him. Then behind him a voice piped, “This way!” Jaydar turned in time to see the small man duck into a second, narrower alley that sprouted from the side of this one.
He followed. The side-alley was barely wide enough to accommodate his shoulders. After a few yards, they reached a flight of steps. While the small man struggled up them, Jaydar glanced back and saw their pursuers surge into the side-alley. Suddenly its confines echoed with their shouts, its wall fluttered with light from their lanterns. With their long-beaked masks, they resembled a flock of carrion birds swooping down on two pieces of meat.
Jaydar started ascending the steps too. Already, his companion was panting for breath and slowing. Since there wasn’t enough space to get past him, Jaydar thumped his palms against his back and propelled him on. “Faster!” he yelled. Meanwhile, he heard boots begin to clatter up the steps behind him.
Sobbing with exertion, the small man scrambled past the uppermost step and emerged onto a higher-level alley. Jaydar cleared that top step too… And promptly he seized the small man by the back of his breeches and collar. He lifted him, spun around and flung him back down the steps.
Like a missile, the small man struck the pursuing mob of Night Brethren and sent them crashing downwards.
“You should’ve given me the money,” Jaydar hissed, “after I delivered the book.”
He resumed running.
The following night, in the liquor merchants’ district, Jaydar ran again.
Pursuing him this time was a pack of wild dogs. In one fist he gripped his main blade, which glistened in the moonlight with canine blood.
He sprinted along a street lined with burnt-out buildings. Because the sky was clear and the four moons were radiant tonight, he was able to see and avoid the copious rubble lying on the ground. Then the street twisted. Jaydar swerved around the corner and encountered something the moonlight failed to illuminate – a rope stretched across the street at ankle-level. He sprawled over it and the main blade flew from his hand. Simultaneously, he heard a creak, felt a gust of displaced air as something swung past him, then heard another sound, a deafening clang.
Jaydar sat up. An iron gate had been suspended overhead, one end hinged on a horizontal pole, its other end held up on a prop. The prop had been knocked away and the thing had swung down and blocked off the street behind him. Enraged, unable to advance and tear him apart, the dogs bayed on the gate’s far side.
He realised a man was crouching behind him. A dagger-blade caressed his throat. “Good doggies,” said a voice. “Helpful as always, chasing our prey right into our hands.”
A second man approached the gate and jeered, “Stupid, hairy bastards! We’ve snatched your grub away again!” He started dancing a mocking jig and the dogs became even more frenzied.
Prey? Grub? Did these vagabonds, Jaydar wondered, intend just to rob him or to eat him as well?
Sitting on the ground, he silently manoeuvred a hand to his right boot. He kept a second blade, a slim one, concealed behind a long, thin flap down the boot’s side. He removed the blade and made some calculations about the man’s position behind him. Then he thrust it upwards. The blade penetrated under the man’s jaw, traversed his mouth and buried itself within his skull. Jaydar’s other hand grabbed backwards, caught the corpse before it keeled over and held it in the crouching pose it’d occupied at the moment of death. Then he waited for the second man to come back from the gate.
When he returned, Jaydar bent forward and lugged the corpse over the top of him. It thumped into the second man’s legs and knocked him back against the ground. Immediately, Jaydar scrambled onto him and the slim blade struck again, downwards, through an eye, into another skull.
Jaydar cared for dogs as little as he cared for people. Nonetheless, something made him drag the two corpses to the gate and bundle them over it, into the middle of the slavering pack.
He continued following the small man’s directions until the dogs were no longer audible behind him. He arrived at a building topped by a huge chimney. The Brethren hadn’t succeeded in burning this building down because it was fireproof. It’d been designed to contain internal fires, whose heat had dried out things used in the brewing and distilling of alcohol – grains, hop-leaves, berries.
Though Jaydar had the small man’s coins, he assumed the Brethren would pay money too to know the location of a secret library. But first, he wanted to see this library for himself. The more information he had about it beforehand, the more payment he might manage to haggle out of the Brethren.
He lit a candle with a flint, fire-striker and scrap of char-cloth, then ventured into the building. He passed along corridors and descended staircases. Under his boots crackled fragments of things the Brethren had managed to break or burn. He came to the giant, metal door of a furnace. Using the main blade’s handle, he beat against it a code the small man had taught him.
A hatch opened in the middle of the giant door and the head and shoulders of an elderly woman protruded. “Yes?” she rasped.
“I’ve come about your library.”
The old woman chuckled. “There’s no library here.”
“I believe there is. I’ve been told about it.”
“There isn’t. Come and see for yourself.” The head and shoulders retreated.
Jaydar clambered through the hatchway. The furnace’s interior formed an immense space behind the door. It was lit by several lanterns, but all that was visible were its walls, black with soot, and its floor, ankle-deep in cinders. Oddly, this soot and cinders hadn’t besmirched the robes the old woman was wearing.
“As I said. No library.”
Jaydar produced the book. “That’s a pity. I’d wanted to return this.”
The old woman reached forward. “Let me see that.”
After she’d leafed through the book – whose pages were inscribed with some language unknown to Jaydar – the old woman repeated, “There’s no library here…” Her eyes rolled upwards. “Though there might be a library there.”
She bent over and raised a lever-handle out of the cinders. As it cranked up, metal wheels began to grind in the chimney above them. The old woman explained, “My followers and I have adapted the building’s mechanism – the one that originally suspended masses of hops, fruits, grain at different heights over the furnace.”
Then objects descended from the chimney’s darkness. These were tall, narrow sets of shelves that were crammed full of books. The shelves and books dangled at the ends of chains and they all stopped descending when their bases were about a foot above the cinder-buried floor.
The last item to come down wasn’t a bookcase but a table, with chains attached to its corners. On this rested more books, damaged ones, as well as sheets of paper, pots of gum, scalpels, needles, thread, thimbles and piles of folded fabric. “I repair them too,” said the old woman. “With those hooligans the Brethren trying to destroy books, the skill of repairing them is more important than ever.”
She focused again on the small man’s book. “Ah, yes… I lent this one to Hurbar Skeel. A trivial little fellow, if I remember rightly. No surprise that he borrowed this. A trivial book, full of trivial spells and incantations. For acquiring wealth and ladies’ affections and the like. Not things that matter.” She fixed her gaze on Jaydar. “If, for instance, he’d acquired the power to see into other people’s souls… Well, if he’d seen into your soul, probably he wouldn’t be in the predicament he’s in now.”
Jaydar backed away. The old woman’s eyes suddenly blazed with amber light. And, somehow, she was growing. She shot up in height and expanded in width. Also, she wasn’t clad in robes any longer. Now she seemed covered in…
The raspy voice hadn’t changed. “Still, little Hurbar was cunning. He knew there’d be trouble when this book was finally returned. That’s why he hired you to deliver it. He sent you as his proxy.”
Jaydar lunged at the massive figure that reared before him, slashing and stabbing at it with both the main blade and the slim one. But they encountered a wall of bronze scales and left no mark. Then the figure lunged back at him. The ends of its ten talons were as sharp as the scalpels on the book-repairing table.
Later, the old woman – for she’d returned to human form – worked at the table, binding a book with a panel of newly-acquired material whose colour was an epidermal hue of pink.
“Yes,” she mused, “there’s nothing the Demon Vadargarn hates more than an overdue book.”
© August 2022, Rab Foster
Rab Foster was brought up on a hill farm in the Borders region of Scotland, but he now works as an educational consultant. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Legend, Schlock! Webzine, Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3. and previously in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.