Warsinger - Chapter Seventeen

My head was ringing as I wandered through Vulkan Keep to the library. My chat with Ignas had power-leveled my Leadership skill, added a point each to Intelligence and Wisdom, and left me thinking about my fight with Suri in a whole different light. It had made me realize something important - namely that I'd treated her like a huge fat jerk. 

I stepped into the warm, dry chamber and was immediately overwhelmed. Vulkan Keep's library was more like a book vault built into the mountain. Shelf after shelf after shelf receded into the subterranean depths, well-lit with rows of clear, heatless mage lights. There was a large sign out front: "No pipes, matches, sparks, witchcraft or loitering."

A surprisingly young man with a long ponytail of startling red hair sat at the desk beside the sign, his narrow lips pursed as he quickly and dexterously copied the contents of a brittle scroll, carefully stretched under a glass pane, into a brand-new leather-bound book. He glanced up at me as I sidled over to the desk, eyes sharp and hawkish.

"Can I help you?" He didn't sound Vlachian - he had the same crisp, Britishy accent as Rutha, though less pronounced.

"Uhh..." Up close, I noticed his teeth. They were sharper than normal human teeth, twin rows of small glassy fangs. Both of his ears were scarred. He was Lysian, like Rutha, but his ears had been docked and rounded to look more human. "Yeah. Actually, I'm looking for a stack of books on about-“ I checked my list. “Twelve different subjects. And statesmanship. And military strategy."

"So fourteen subjects, then?" He arched a slender eyebrow.

I shifted from foot to foot, breathing in the smell of old paper. "Yeah." 

He waited expectantly.

"Uhh... let's start with Dakhari history," I said. "Sachara. The Demon Queen."

"Hmm." He set his quill down, covered his ink pots, and looked off into space for a moment. "We don't have any books about Sachara, specifically, but we do have books on Dakhari history. What else? I can remember more than one thing."

I bought up the quest menu again. “The Drachan War, the Drachan – species – and the Rostori?”

The Archivist's brows climbed higher with each additional entry, until I thought they were about to climb off his face. But at the end of it all, he concentrated for a moment and then rose smoothly to his feet.

"Follow me," he said. "And bring a cart."

The carts were big rattling iron things, cumbersome and hard to turn around corners. I trotted after the librarian like a puppy, stopping when he stopped, and maybe privately jealous at how confidently he skimmed the titles, pulled a book now and then, and skimmed two or three pages within seconds before replacing them or adding them to the growing pile in front of me.

"Some of what you need is in the locked section," he said briskly. "We can't take the cart in there. The shelves are too narrow."

"Are we going to be able to find everything?

"Not everything. No library has everything," the Archivist said, heading briskly down the corridor. “But we have some very ancient records on the Drachan in Vulkan Keep. No one other than I and the Chief Archivist have sat down and read them since they were copied, I suspect. Not really a common subject to enquire about, these days.”

"They’re about to become real common." I had to dig my feet in to turn around the shelves as he darted behind the corner.

It was only when we reached the locked section that I understood why it was called that. The books here were huge, bound in leather and wood and belted shut. Each book was also literally chained and locked to the shelves. Every tome had an iron loop, and a heavy-duty chain was passed through each of them and padlocked at either end of the bookcase. Every volume looked like it weighed a ton - some of them were fifteen inches tall and three inches thick.

"It smells amazing back here," I remarked, watching the librarian haul out a book the size of his chest and waddle back out to the cart. "Is that incense?"

"Dragon's blood ink," he replied. "Not actual dragon's blood, mind you. It is an ink made from the sap of an exotic tree found only on Meewhome. It preserves extraordinarily well on this dolphin-skin vellum they use.”

“The Meewfolk wrote these?” I pulled one from the shelf and opened it up, curious. There was a solid wall of neat red text, pages and pages written in a looping, pretty script I couldn't read. It almost looked like Vlachian, but it wasn't. It was much fancier. “I never imagined them to be like… scholarly types.”

"The Meewfolk bought both literacy and the worship of the Nine to Vlachia," the Archivist replied. "They've been here, on Artana, for longer than any other intelligent species, dragons included. At the time of the Drachan Wars, they were the most sophisticated empire in the world."

I gaped. “Are these books that old? What are they about?”

The man shook his head. “This shelf here is Meewfolk history, about the only books with any account of the Drachan by that name. And they are not originals. These are copies of copies of copies… books translated into Aesari, then Dakhari, re-translated into Old Period Mau, and then Modern Mau. Some of these are in the language of the cat folk, but we have a few we’ve translated to contemporary Vlachian. In truth, I’d recommend that you take that Old Period Mau book you’re holding and have it directly translated by a Meewish scholar who has studied the language of the period. The Master of the Archives here a human, and is only passingly fluent.”

I looked down at the book creaking in my hands. “How old is this one, then?”

“Only about five hundred years,” he replied breezily. “The original it was copied from was probably eight hundred years old.”

Like everyone who’d grown up in the 2040s, paper books were a historical curiosity greater even than keyboards and wired hard drives. Intellectually, I knew information could physically endure for more than a couple of years outside of the internet, and that volumes like this had been the way we’d passed down knowledge for most of human history. But it was one thing to know that and another to be holding something that, in real life, would have been kept in a museum under glass. And displayed on the internet, where people would take virtual tours of it.

“Do any of these have like… a timeline of Meewfolk history?” I asked, looking up at him.

"Yes. The book I just picked out for you does." He bustled back. "Might I ask why a Tuun would want or need to know about the Drachan and the Meewfolk and suchlike? Your people are famously insular.”

I shrugged. "Just curious, I guess."

He scoffed. “Pull the other one.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Well… short version is that I just became the Voivode of Myszno, but I don’t know that much about the world. So I’m trying to learn.”

He turned an interesting shade of pale silver-gray. "My apologies, Your Grace."

"Hector's fine," I said. "The 'Your Grace' stuff doesn't feel right."

"It is highly improper to address a lord by his given name."

"Dragozin, then. Does that work?"

"How about we settle on 'Voivode'?" He flashed me a nervous toothy smile. "My apologies for insulting you. I didn't even notice the King's Mark."

"No worries. What's your name?"

"Kythias of Taltos, Junior Archivist." He bowed from the neck. "We have one more volume to collect. And by the way, these locked tomes cannot be removed from the library."

"Can I take a copy?" I asked. "I can put them in my Inventory and rip... I mean, copy the text from them."

"By all means. But please spare the ripping." Kythias shimmied past me and went to get the last book.

As it turned out, I had to rip copies of almost of them - because the combined weight of all the books I needed for the Save the World quest came out to about two hundred pounds of paper and leather. I had a maximum inventory limit of a hundred and fifty, most of which was already taken up by shit I really needed to sort through, stash, throw away or sell. I only took two books in physical form with me. One was A History of Dakhdir, Her Nations and Empires, and the other was the best book on military strategy Kythias had to offer me, simply titled War and Rulership. It was a relatively small book, maybe about a hundred pages long. It had been written by Lawislaw the Burned, Ignas's great-great-great-great grandfather. I knew from other hints the game had dropped that he was the Vlachian king who had conquered Myszno and the Sathbar Plains and added the territories to his country. 

"You'll be reading for quite a while with these, so it's just as well you're Starborn," the librarian said cheerfully. "It must be useful, being able to just take copies like that. If we have to duplicate a book, we mortals must copy them by hand. I admit I'm a little jealous."

"I'm jealous you can read," I replied. "Thanks, man. Keep it real."

It was a long walk back to the hangar. Everyone had gone home for the night, and it was dark enough that Karalti's body almost blended into the shadows of the cavern. One oil lamp had been left on for her, the golden light glinting off the scales of her neck and jaw. She snoozed on, oblivious as I took the lamp and crawled under her wing, which still covered my bedroll like a marquee. 

Ignas had given me a lot to think about myself and my new responsibilities in Myszno, Baldr and Suri. He was right, about all of it. Intentions didn't count for shit. Actions, and the consequences of those actions, were what mattered. Actions like prioritizing Dakhari history so that I could show my girlfriend that I cared about her quests and what was important to her.

I took a deep breath, settled in, and pulled out the book on Dakhari history. It was a big, thick volume on a dry academic subject, full of words I didn't know and wouldn't be able to understand. It weighed half a ton, sitting there in my hands.

"Willpower." I heaved a sigh, cracked the pages, and began to read.