The Search For Magic

The End

Be careful, Jai,” said the librarian, Annalisse Elmgrace.

Jai Windwild bent low over the worktable to see the parchment sheets better. Three were stuck together. He suspected they were held fast by the beginnings of mildew.

With great difficulty he bent to one knee so his eye was level with the table, but he held his position only for a moment. Gripping the edge of the table and gritting his teeth, he quickly levered himself up again. His shattered left kneecap had long since healed, or at least the bones had grown together again, though they had never knitted well. Sometimes, Jai felt the bones grinding against each other, the pain like lightning shooting through him. It had been his bad luck to break his kneecap in the dark years after the gods had left and taken magic with them. There had been no one to heal him, mage or cleric or sorcerer.

“Be careful, Jai,” Annalisse murmured.

He said, “Yes, madam,” but didn’t look around. The librarian cared only about her books, scrolls, and manuscripts. Fond though she might be of him, her best apprentice, her true love was for the Library of Quali-nost. This Jai knew, and he didn’t resent it.

“Ah, excellent,” she said, as he slipped one page from atop another. “These pages are among our most precious treasures.”

Jai waited, hiding a smile, for he knew what she’d say next. He’d heard those words a hundred times.

“We can’t forget who we were, Jai. It’s how we know who we are, and how we can guess who we will be.”

He said, “Yes, madam,” as he had a hundred times. Hearing her dictum over and again did not lessen his belief in the truth of it.

Head bent, Jai returned to his work, for another thing the librarian liked to say was this: “Results. I care about results, and the only result that matters to me, or should ever matter to you, is that we preserve our Library in the best order.”

They did that, the Lady and all her scribes and cat-alogers and recorders and preservationists. Their devotion was to the Library of Qualinost, heart and soul, and each had sworn the quiet vow required upon entering the service of the Lady Librarian: There will always be a Library; there will always be History’s Hoard in Qualinost.

There would always be, Jai thought, his fingers teasing the edges of the parchments, looking for a way between. Yet the collection was not growing. Few new books came to the library these days. Annalisse and her staff tended what books they had in their collection. They repaired old manuscripts, brightened faded illuminations, deepened the ink of an ancient script, tried to maintain the various rooms at the proper temperature and level of humidity to keep safe manuscripts that were penned as long ago as the Age of Dreams. In the days before the Dragon Purge that had been easier to do. Then there had been elven mages to weave spells to keep the climate of the great Library of Qualinost at perfect balance.

No matter the difficulty, this was the dearest work of Jai’s heart, this careful preservation of a race’s history in the face of war and a dragon’s oppression. Most especially because of those things. Some elves stood against the dragon’s overlord-some with their bodies armed in secret or, as Jai’s own parents, standing as small links in a slender chain of shadowy resistance. Jai served in his own way, safeguarding the records of ancient elven heritage, the history to stand forever as a light against the darkness. In these days after gods, in these dragon days when House Cleric did not send its sons and daughters to temples but to libraries, Jai did holy work.

Beneath his hand now lay the Histories of Kings, the tales of all the rulers of the Qualinesti elves since fabled Kith Kanan himself had separated their race and led the people out of Silvanesti and into the forest. The thin page felt like silk. So did the breeze slipping in through the high window. Out that window the towers of Qualinost rose golden-lovely structures round which a great span of bridgework ran. Upon the bridge used to walk proud elven warriors who kept the kingdom and its gleaming capital safe.

But those were older times. Jai had been but an infant in his mother’s arms, and the king had been Solostaran. In these days of the dragon Beryl, all the Qualinesti had for leadership was Gilthas, the misbred son of the old king’s daughter, Princess Laurana, and her half-elven husband, but he was little more than a puppet on the Dark Knights’ strings. A marshal ran the kingdom now, a human named Medan, and no one doubted it was he who pulled the strings that made the weakling king dance.

At the Marshal’s order, the Qualinesti warriors had been disbanded. The young king did not make any significant protest. Troubled with ill health, when he roused, it was to dance the nights away with pretty women and then lull himself to sleep with his own- by all accounts turgid-poetry. While Gilthas danced, Medan’s black-armored Knights patrolled the silvery span round the elven city and sat in their squat, ugly barracks drinking, gambling, and making certain no elf doubted the ruthlessness of the green dragon’s minions.

The conflicted dragon balanced between her hatred of elves and her love of the tribute Medan squeezed out of them.

Jai’s hand shook, and his breath caught ragged in his throat. Very carefully, he slipped one thin sheet of parchment from atop the other, like brushing a shadow from a shadow.

Behind him, Annalisse said, “Don’t work too late, Jai.”

“I won’t,” he said, but they both knew he’d been long at his work and would be longer still.

She laughed. “Well, at least take time for your supper, will you?”

He said he would try, and the librarian said nothing more to discourage him from returning to his work. Those sheets needed separating before more damage occurred, and Jai Windwild had the patience for the work.

In the purpling twilight, Jai lurched down the garden path and home to his supper. He owned no crutch or cane. He owned only a slanting gait. It was his, and if he did not run on sun-dappled forest paths anymore, he’d taught himself not to regret that too much. He went each day to better places, into the lands of legend and the proud realms of elven history. There, he would have been happy to spend all his days.

The first golden fireflies danced ahead of him into the darker shadows beneath the arbor at the front of his parents’ little house. The heady scent of wisteria filled the twilight. Thick bunches of the amethyst flowers brushed Jai’s shoulders as he passed. He caught the door latch, balancing a little against the jamb, and the door opened under his hand.

Face white as the lone pale moon, his father gestured him inside.

“Father, what-?”

Emeth Windwild shook his head and closed the door behind his son. “Come in,” he said. “We must talk.”

Jai saw his mother beyond his father’s shoulder. She sat still as stone in a cushioned nook near the window that overlooked the little stream beside the house. Marise Windwild loved no place in her home better than this. She did not look out though. Her eyes darted from her husband to Jai, then to Emeth again.

Someone has died, Jai thought. The house had that kind of stillness, the breath-held quiet when sorry news has come. He thought of his father’s uncle who lived down in Mianost, a man so old it had been a wonder for the last ten years that he’d wakened each morning. When he turned to his father again, words of sympathy on his lips, he saw Emeth’s hand trembling. That trembling quieted every word Jai would have spoken. He had never seen fear in his father. Not during the terrible Chaos War, when all the world seemed to run mad, nor afterward when the dragon came. Not even when his son had shattered his knee, nor when he watched Jai struggle to walk again as healers warned he would not win that battle.

“What’s happened?” he asked. Marise Windwild drew a breath, as though her son’s question freed her. She shuddered, and her eyes welled. “Your father… he has been…”

She choked, tears spilled down her cheeks as Emeth finished her sentence. “We have to go, Jai. We have to leave the city. A message to one of the agents of the resistance went astray.”

Jai’s heart slammed hard against his ribs. “Father…” he said, whispering as though agents of Marshal Medan crouched in the shadows. “Father, something that implicates you?”

Emeth shook his head. “I don’t know. A spy was found in Medan’s household, and right after, someone disappeared-someone along the chain I work with.” Cold understanding chilled Jai’s blood. His father was like a number of others who aided the resistance: only a small link in a chain. He would, now and then, hand a note to a tailor, information disguised as an order for clothing. He’d speak a word to one of the bakers in the household of a woman known for her shy and retiring ways, something that only seemed to be about bread or the price of wheat. Intercepted, these seemingly innocent messages and others like them would appear to be nothing more than the daily business of an ordinary man. But in the right ears, they were more. No man or woman passing a word understood the whole of the message, but all the words together became news when they reached their destination. Somewhere, perhaps in a dark and deep forest glen, the leader of the resistance, that fierce warrior known as the Lioness, would see to it that a plan of the Marshal’s would turn suddenly sour. Black-breasted Knights would die with elven arrows in their necks, and the elven warriors would vanish.

Simple men and women made this work, risking their lives and the lives of their families every day in the cause. Now a link in the secret chain had been broken and the delicate trust betrayed to the enemy.

“The damage has been done, Jai,” his mother said. “One by one, those who had to do with this matter will leave the city. You, your father, and I will go at dawn, for we have a plausible excuse for leaving and will arouse no suspicion.”

They would go to Mianost, the three of them. They would leave before first light, making sure that messages were left behind to say that Emeth’s uncle was failing fast, that the family wanted to gather one last time to be with their venerable relative. Passes would be secured to take them safely out of the city and past the checkpoints manned by the Dark Knights. In an occupied city, not every elf was trustworthy, not everyone a partisan. The whole of the plan to escape was not revealed to everyone who had part in it. Each knew only what he must.

“This much your mother and I know,” Emeth said, “for the rest, we will do what we’re told when we arrive in Mianost. We are confident that once we reach Mianost there will be a way to true safety.”

Stunned, Jai spoke without thinking. “Leave…” He shook his head. “I just got to the last page of the histories of the kings-”

“Damn the kings!” Emeth cried. “Jai, listen to me. We have no choice. If we don’t leave tomorrow, we must take our chances here. I forbid that.” His hard expression softened. He was not unaware of his son’s love for his work. Indeed, he had fostered it. “I’m sorry, son. Events give us no choice. We must leave. I know very little, but if I were ever made to tell even that, others would be found out.”

Jai heard that as though hearing his father’s death sentence, for there was a place in Qualinost not so old as the lovely houses and homes of the elves. It dated only to the time of the dragon’s conquest-a crouching, ugly building of sandstone, hard planes, and biting comers. Narrow windows, like suspicious eyes, glared round the square structure. Ironbound doors opened only at the order of one of Marshal Medan’s soldiers. There the Knights were barracked, and below that place was an unlit hole of a room. In that chamber, no man or woman had ever survived the torturer’s attentions with all secrets intact. The telling was the fee paid for death at last.

Quietly, steadily, Jai said, “You don’t have to stay, father, but I don’t have to leave.”

Marise rose, turning her back on the window. “You do, Jai.”

“But I don’t know anything! I don’t know who you talk to, when or where or what you say. You’ve always made sure of that, so there’s no need for me to flee. I couldn’t tell anyone anything if I wanted to. Go to Mianost and leave me behind-”

“No,” said Emeth, and now his face wasn’t so pale. His hands didn’t tremble. “No, Jai. If Medan ever came to suspect us, he would take you to torture.”

The Knights would break him bone by bone in that terrible place beneath the barracks. Jai’s blood went cold. “But I would never- Father, you know I would never-”

Emeth held up a hand, a gesture Jai knew well. “No more, Jai. You would never tell, but you would be killed for your silence. That won’t happen. You will come with us. No more will be said.”

Jai took in a long, difficult breath. In his mind he heard the words of the Lady Librarian, spoken only today: We can’t forget who we were, Jai. It’s how we know who we are, and how we can guess who we will be. How could he abandon the holy work? Breathing again, he understood he could not, and he knew it would gain him nothing to continue to press his case with his parents.

“Jai,” Marise said. “Son, go back to the Library.”

He shook his head, not understanding.

“Have your supper and then go back. You always do at this time. It would seem strange to anyone who might be watching if you didn’t tonight.”

Jai looked to his father, who nodded slowly. “Yes, but be back before the moon is highest. Say nothing to anyone about our plans.”

Jai did as he was bidden, and when he left his parents’ home, his were the usual lurching steps, his hitching gait well-known to his neighbors and to any minion of the Marshal who might be watching.

Jai sat in silence among the histories of the kings. He had no plan for staying behind. He had not even the smallest thought or idea to turn into a plan. He had only his work, and this he did, trusting that some idea would spring to mind. So sunk in concentration was he that the sound of a footfall startled him. His heart jumped, and he looked up to see Annalisse standing in the doorway.

“Here you are,” she said, entering the room. “I’m not surprised.” She slipped a finger around the edge of the first page of The History of Kith Kanan. “You are the best of my students and the most faithful of my apprentices. Any of the others would have left this work for tomorrow.” She fell silent a long moment, her silence like shadows creeping. “And yet, I don’t know how many tomorrows there are.”

Jai looked up. “Lady?”

“Don’t you hear it, Jai?” She looked at the manuscripts and books, at the sturdy tables and high stools. She turned, looking out the door, and Jai knew she saw what he did: gracefully spiraling staircases leading down into winding corridors, reading rooms, the silent nooks where once scholars came to study, and the vast, high arched chamber in the middle of all, where the most prized pieces of the library’s collection were displayed. There, in older days, elven kings had entertained poets and philosophers.

“Jai,” she said, “This place has been a temple, in its time as sacred as any raised to gods. Treaties were signed here, laws enshrined here. All that we are is contained in the towers of this place. In the march of Medan’s Knights I hear an ending coming.”

The scent of ancient ink and venerable parchment filled the room. Jai looked around at the folios, the books, the tightly rolled scrolls all here for repair. Sometimes in quiet hours, when there were only these for company, Jai thought he heard the scratch of ancient quills, the voices of elves many long years dead as they spoke the words of an age-old ballad or tale. And yes, he could feel an end coming.

“Do you think the dragon will fall upon us, lady? Do you think…?”

Annalisse shook her head. “Who can know? But I feel… something. Like the future knocking on the door of the present. I have spent so much time among the histories and the long tales that I often think I can see the pattern of how things work out. You feel it, too, don’t you Jai?”

He admitted that he did. An end was coming. To a kingdom, to a long and many-leafed branch of a shining history…

Annalisse’s eyes went soft and sad. “I feel something else, a closer ending. Are you leaving, Jai?”

Shock ran like lightning along Jai’s nerves.

Annalisse shrugged, a melancholy smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Well, I see how you look around tonight, how your fingers linger on everything-table, pen, page. You look like a man who has another road to take.”

Fear made him shiver even as he scrambled to think of something to say. In the end, he reached for a portion of the truth, hoping his voice didn’t shake.

“Madam, I’m sorry. I would have told you in time. My father has had word that his uncle who lives in Mianost is calling the family to gather.”

A cloud chased across her brow, then vanished. “Ah, that’s a shame, but it has been a long time coming, hasn’t it?”

Jai nodded. “It has.”

“Well”-she sighed-”I’m going to miss you. How long will you be gone?”

Jai said he wasn’t certain. “There is the gathering of the family, and then…”

And then they must wait for his father’s ancient uncle to die. After that, the funeral rites, a period of mourning, and the settling of the will. All this, his pause asked Annalisse to understand, and she nodded gravely as though she did.

“When do you leave?”

For the barest moment, Jai hesitated, feeling he’d said too much already, not knowing how he could have said less.

“I’m not sure,” he lied. “Mother said something about making an early start. Father said he had some small matters to tend to.”

His lie sat like truth. He knew it because Annalisse’s grave expression never changed. With his next breath, however, Jai spoke sudden words unplanned, and these were not lies.

“And,” he said, glancing causally away as if this were a minor detail, “I don’t know that I’ll stay in Mianost as long as my parents will. After my uncle’s death, that is. The business of his will and the disposition of his home… well, that’s best handled by my father. I might well come back here.”

He said this, and it was all he could do not to smile. He’d found his plan. He had, for he’d said aloud that he would return, and if he did not… why, that would look suspicious indeed.

Briskly Annalisse clapped her hands, as one does who doesn’t like to dwell on sadness anymore. “Well! Let’s make use of you while you’re still here. There’s no reason we can’t at least begin to catalog the repair needed on the first page of the Histories tonight.”

Jai agreed there was no reason, and they spoke of his departing no more.

When he returned home, Jai let his parents know he’d been obliged to say something to Annalisse about their leaving Qualinost, and he told them what other thing he’d said. About Annalisse, they seemed to understand that he’d had no choice. They agreed that he’d handled the matter well. About his decision to return to Qualinost after sufficient time had passed, his parents were not pleased. His father looked like a man being blackmailed. His mother quietly wept. Neither could change what he’d done.

The Windwild family left Qualinost as planned. The night’s darkness was just going to gray, the sky yet possessed a few stars, and the moon had only an hour before sinking into the west. Like people who had nothing to hide, the Windwilds left the city riding-Marise upon a pretty roan mare, Emeth on a tall black gelding, and Jai astride a docile little gray that followed his mother’s mare peacefully. At Manse’s suggestion, they made the most of their pretense, taking care to greet those few who saw them and to say they were going to Mianost prepared to mourn a kinsman. At the black-breasted guards who walked the four spans of the silver bridge that girded Qualinost they did not look.

One of those who stopped them on their way was Annalisse, the Lady Librarian. Outside her home, which was not far from her beloved library, she looked up from a bench in the garden at the sound of bridles ringing. She went out from the garden and took Emeth’s hand in hers, speaking quietly of her wish that his uncle pass peacefully from the world. “But not,” she said, “until he experiences the joy of seeing all his kin come to gather around him, the old and the young. Travel in peace, Emeth, and keep well.”

“You, too, old friend,” Emeth replied quietly. “And we will meet again.”

Her sapphire eyes luminous in the fragile light, the smallest of smiles tugging at the corners of her mouth, Annalisse agreed that they would.

Hearing her say so, seeing her smile, Jai suspected what he had not before: the Lady Librarian was part of the resistance.

“Mother,” he whispered, his voice a little tinged with surprise.

“Hush,” Marise murmured, and that one soft word was all the confirmation Jail needed.

The small shady path at the head of a winding forest trail was known best to the folk of Mianost who liked to slip away from parents or spouses to keep a lover’s tryst. There, in the late afternoon, Jai and his parents met a tall, lithe woman with flashing eyes so palely blue as to look like diamonds. She wore her golden hair in a thick braid. Her clothing was of gray and green and butternut, so that, seeing her move, one had the impression of sun-dapple and shade and fern. Jai’s heart rose to see her, for she was lovely like a wild thing, quick and canny and dangerous.

She stepped toward Emeth, and though he was surprised by her sudden appearance, he greeted her courteously. Jai noticed that she did not offer her name, and his father did not offer theirs.

“Greetings, traveler,” she said to Emeth.

“Warrior, I greet you,” Emeth replied.

Warrior!

“Father…”Jai said, suddenly uneasy.

Emeth hushed him with a gesture. To the newcomer, he said, “I hadn’t expected to see you so soon.”

“Nor I you. There’s no going on to Mianost, Emeth. A Dark Knight has been seen farther up the trail.”

Jai’s heart lurched. Like his parents, he darted frightened glances into the forest shadows.

“It’s all right,” said the woman. She put a calming hand on the neck of Emeth’s horse, which had begun dancing uneasily, scenting his rider’s fear. “I don’t know if he’s looking for you, Emeth, but we can’t take the chance he is, or even that he’s alone.”

Emeth nodded, as though he understood something his wife and son did not. Marise voiced the very question in Jai’s mind. “How will we get past the Knight?”

The lady warrior hooked her finger through a golden chain hung round her neck. From her blouse she lifted something bright green. Jai had the swift impression of a talisman of flashing emerald, the stone shaped like a leaf half furled. She dropped the talisman so that it hung outside her blouse, the stone sitting at the V of her rough gray shirt, the place where her breasts rose.

“Magic,” she said. “If we’re lucky.”

“Father?” Jai said again, but he didn’t give voice to his doubts. The newcomer looked up at him, right into his eyes. She raised a brow and smiled, and Jai found himself not looking into her eyes but at the emerald nestled on the woman’s breasts.

The wind changed, shifting so that it was at the woman’s back. Jai caught her scent and could think of nothing else. His mind filled with images of the forest, of oaks and elms and trees less tame than those in the orchards of Qualinost. Clinging to her hair and skin and clothing was the perfume that comes from beyond the bridges of Qualinost, from outside the city and deep in the forest where the glens are shrouded in shadow and the streams run nameless into rivers long secret.

“Let me assist you,” she said to Jai, holding the gray horse still and reaching a hand to him.

Words of protest rose in Jai’s heart at the thought of this tall, lovely woman handing him down from the horse as if he were a child. He said nothing, however, for he found himself foot to ground before he remembered moving. Indeed, his parents stood each on one side of him, his mother’s face a little paler than it had been, his father’s settling into lines of peace. Jai’s heart kicked hard against his ribs. He gasped for breath. Once, twice, and then the woman put a hand on his shoulder.

“Easy,” she whispered. “It’s like a dream.” She came very close, and his eye fell on the emerald again. She laughed, a low, soft chuckle. “Just like a dream.”

And it was, the kind of dream where people did not move but suddenly found themselves in other places with no understanding of how they got there.

Jai drew breath to speak, but she warned him to silence. With that warning he realized she hadn’t really spoken to him at all, not with lips and tongue. She spoke into his mind.

The magic is unstable, she said, keep still and trust. Concentrate on being still.

Trust! That trembled in him just as his heart did, and he wondered if that quaking heart would be enough to cause the magic to collapse or worse, to change into something the woman couldn’t control. Again, she laughed. Her voice sounded like jays in the trees, raucous and challenging. Suddenly, it had nothing to do with jays at all, but became the voice of a storm. Wind and rain and driven leaves whirled along the ground.

Jai cried out-or tried to. He had no breath, no words, and no sight. The last sense to fail was his hearing, and the last thing he heard was his mother’s voice, frail and thin in the storm-wind of magic, crying, “Jai! Emeth! Hold on to-!”

“Hey,” said a voice, low and very deep.

Jai groaned, and then he shut his mouth. He simply lay still, in pain. He must have fallen hard. His chest hurt as if all the air had been blasted out of his lungs and only recently returned. His head hurt. Worse, pain screamed through his knee. The joint felt as if it were on fire. The ruined muscles that once supported him twitched feebly.

“Hey.” A finger poked him, once and then again. “Hey! Can you hear me?”

Jai opened his eyes to see a dwarf crouching near, a glowing lantern on the ground beside his knee.

A dwarf. How?

The lantern light flickered and moved, but not like a candle’s flame. It pulsed. The dwarf leaned closer, his bearded face so near Jai could see the blue flecks in the irises of his dark eyes. “I said can you hear me?”

Jai closed his eyes again. “I’m not deaf.”

The dwarf grunted. “That’s good.” He kept silent for a heart’s beat, then, “Your ears work. How about the rest of you?

Jai’s belly clenched, but he refused to groan as he moved his leg. Pain lanced through the knee, shooting up his leg to his hip, yet in that pain he found a measure of comfort. Even all these years later, he remembered what broken bones felt like, he remembered how ripped muscle screamed and burned. His breath eased through clenched teeth. He had broken or torn nothing.

He opened his eyes again. “I’m all right.”

“If you say so.” The dwarf shrugged, sitting back on his heels, deeper into the shadows beyond the lantern light. In his muscular left hand he gripped the haft of a throwing axe. “I’m Stanach Hammerfell. You’re Jai Windwild, I take it.”

Jai frowned. “How did you know…?”

Relaxing his grip on the axe, Stanach nodded toward Jai’s knee. “I’ve been told to keep an eye out for you- a lame elf named Jai.”

For a long silent moment, the dwarf looked at the ruin of Jai’s knee, the poorly knitted bones, the swelling of new bruises. He gave Jai a sidelong glance as to say, Well, that’d be you, wouldn’t it?

But aloud, he only said, “You might like to know your mam and your da are all right.”

“My what?”

Stanach looked at him as if he’d had a few wits jogged loose by the fall. “Your mother and father,” he said with exaggerated care. A sly smile tugged at his lips. “You were concentrating on something when the lady did her magic, eh? That pretty emerald in its pretty nest. Not concentrating on keeping still and trusting, which is what you were supposed to do. Damn magic. I hate it when they have to use it. It’s always me got to go searching miles of tunnel for the ones who fall out of it too soon or too late.”

“Where am I?”

“Underground.” Stanach sat back again, and this time Jai noticed that his strange eyes changed, as a dwarfs will when the light recedes. The irises opened wide, all black now, no blue flecks to be seen. “Underground, and nearer to Qualinost than Thorbardin.”

Thorbardin?

At Jai’s puzzled expression, the dwarf nodded. “Thorbardin, which is where you’re headed. Didn’t they tell you that?”

Flatly, Jai said, “No one tells anyone all of anything about escape plans.”

“All right, then, I’ll tell you. I suppose you or your parents did something to catch the eye of the dragon’s underlings, yes?” Jai let his silence be the answer. “Thought so. Well, you’re near the route you elves take when you’re leaving Qualinost in the dark of night.

Dwarves have been delving a tunnel between Thorbardin and Qualinost — ”

“Delving? Why?”

Stanach shrugged. “Kings don’t tell me why they do things. The elf-king and our thane put their heads together one day and said, ‘Delve!’ and off we went, digging a road between Qualinesti and Thorbardin.”

Plainly disbelieving, Jai said he doubted Gilthas would look up from his poetry long enough to make such a plan.

“Really? Well, likely you know him better than I do.”

Jai, who knew the king not at all, said no more.

“This place is a work-tunnel. We stashed gear and tools here when we were digging out this part of the main tunnel. The work began at Thorbardin, and once the job is done, there’ll be a dark-road that starts about five miles from Qualinost and ends right at Thorbardin’s cellar door. Till then there are ways into the finished part. Magic’s one of them, and hunting you lostlings who fall out of the spell the gods know where gives me a way to pass my days. But the easier way is through one of the secret entrances.” Stanach looked up, no sign of humor in his blue-flecked dark eyes. “Why did the lady warrior not lead your party to the Mianost entrance?”

Bitterly, Jai told him what had happened, and how it ruined his plans.

“Your plans? Promising as you say you are, there’s got to be more scribes than you in Qualinost. I suppose they can find someone else to patch up the parchments now that you’re gone.”

“It’s not about patching, it’s about keeping.” Jai put his palms flat to the stony floor and pushed himself up to sit. “I have to get back to Qualinost.”

Stanach’s left hand dropped to the haft of his axe. He looked right into Jai’s eyes. “No. You’re here now-”

“You don’t have to take me. You don’t have to do anything but point me in the right direction. I’ll get there myself.”

“No, you won’t. Even if you could manage it, I can’t let you. No one roams the tunnels alone. You’re coming with me, and you’re going to Thorbardin.”

The hair prickled on the back of Jai’s neck. A cold bleakness lay behind the dwarfs eyes, like the far stretch of a winter plain.

“And besides, what’s to keep, back there in your Qualinost? A few books and papers, some old songs…? For how long? Might be your homeland is still in one piece tonight. Maybe it will be tomorrow, but the end is coming, and no one’s thinking it’ll be a long time happening.”

In his low deep voice, Stanach Hammerfell said much the same thing Annalisse had. The echo chilled Jai to the heart. Was there nothing, then, but ending? Was there nothing but the road away from the golden kingdom and all the long years of elven glory?

There had to be more!

A sound, like far-off thunder, rumbled in the stone beneath him, vibrating through his spine and painfully in his knee. Jai looked around, seeing the strange pulsing lantern-light shining on a high ceiling of stone, roughly hewn, and piles of rocks shoved up against the glistening walls.

“What’s that noise?”

“Worms.” Stanach said.

“Worms? How could worms-?”

Stanach waved the question away. “Better showing than telling.” He peered closely at Jai, then stood and offered his hand. “You reckon you can get up and walk?”

Jai grasped Stanach’s hand. The dwarf had a surprising strength. He stepped back and pulled Jai right up to his feet. He bore Jai’s weight while he found his balance and didn’t seem to feel it at all. When Jai was steady again, Stanach handed him the lantern. Jai almost dropped it. The light moved like it was alive-and then he saw something living did reside in the little lantern cage.

“Grubs,” Stanach said. “Well, larvae. Hold steady. You drop it, you’ll likely kill it.”

Jai held the lantern at arm’s length, watching the fat, eyeless larva pulse, its glowing body casting as much light as an oil lamp would.

Stanach picked up his axe and slid the haft into his belt. He settled the broad belt round his waist, checking to see that all was there: knife, fat leather water-bottle, and a coil of rope. When he took the lantern back, Jai had a good look at him. He was a dwarf in his middle age, not more than two hundred years, likely a decade or so less. He stood as high as Jai’s chest. His beard was black, his hair silvering at the temples and long enough to fall over the collar of his shirt. Thick in the neck, thick in the shoulders, he looked like one who knew his way around a hammer and anvil.

“You’re a forgeman,” Jai said.

“Used to be.”

Even as he said so, Jai realized that Stanach had done everything with his left hand, holding the axe, lifting the lantern, hauling Jai himself to his feet. His right hand hung at his side, the fingers twisted and withered. The dwarf stood braced, as though waiting for the inevitable, for Jai to mumble an apology for noticing. When Jai said nothing, he relaxed.

“All right, elf,” he said, “we have some traveling to do, and it’s going to be a hard old walk. You up to it?”

“Walking to where?”

“We’ll catch up with the work detail. That’s a good two miles out. They can send a runner back along the tunnel to Thorbardin and let your mam-” He cocked his head, and offered a lean smile-”your mother and father, know all’s well with you.”

“Thorbardin. How far are we from there?”

“Farther than I like to be. We’re standing about halfway between there and Qualinost. There’s a crossway up ahead. Once we get there it’s north to Qualinost, or as near to Qualinost as we get till we hit stone. From there, it’s clear south to Thorbardin. You came in-or tried to come in-about a mile north of where we are now, near Mianost. We’ll pass it on the way, but you won’t see much. We hide those ways in and out pretty well.

“Come on, now. We’ll make the camp, and then you can rest.”

Bleak dwarf, rough as stone. His strange eyes seemed to see only winterscapes, only lifelessness and ending. But there are endings, and there are beginnings, Jai thought. Out from winter, spring. He didn’t know where he’d find his beginning, that spring again. With all the world seeming to want to end around him, he couldn’t imagine. He did know, though, that he would not find it in Thorbardin. His heart told him that.

No, he decided. He wasn’t going to Thorbardin. He was going back to Qualinost, and the first thing he could do about that was get rid of the dwarf.

It was, as Stanach had said, a hard old walk through the tunnel. Once they turned south the going became rougher, rising and falling in ways a man able to stride out and not worry about his footing wouldn’t notice. Jai felt every rise and dip, every rock on the underground road. He had a sense of walls rising high, curving to a rough ceiling, but he didn’t look around much. He couldn’t take his eyes from the ground. Stanach kept the light near, for the farther they went the rougher the road became.

“They haven’t made the second pass yet. It’s going to be hard going. Hold on to me if you want, elf.”

Jai didn’t, and didn’t even thank him for the offer. He concentrated on the way ahead, lurching along unassisted. He was looking for something, an opportunity.

They went that way for a time. Jai looked at the walls when they stopped to rest. Stanach called them the ribs of the runnel, and he said the ceiling was the spine, the floor the belly. Like we’ve been swallowed by some horrible beast, Jai thought. At these ribs, spine, and belly he looked, trying to find some sign of the Mianost entrance. He saw nothing but stone. All the while the earth vibrated beneath them, the rumbling growing stronger the farther they went. The vibrations rattled Jai’s knee, sending fiery lightning lances shooting through the joint.

“That can’t be worms,” he said, his words coming through gritted teeth as he leaned up against a damp wall, again forced to rest.

“If you say so.”

Lanterns hung at intervals on the walls, settled snugly in iron brackets. By their glowing light Jai saw the tunnel here was strewn with debris, boulders half as high as Jai stood, many looking like they’d been flung to the ground by some giant hand and shattered.

To balance, he put his hand on one of the piles. His fingers closed round a stone the size of his fist. His belly clenched suddenly. That might be one way to get rid of the dwarf.

“Larvae?” Jai said, speaking of the lanterns, getting a good grip on the stone.

“Lots. We’re almost there.” Stanach untied the leather water bottle from his belt and held it out. Jai let go the stone and took what he offered. “It’s not water. Go easy.”

Jai would have known what the bottle held the moment he unstopped the mouth. The pungent odor of dwarf spirits stung his nose. He took a sip, the liquor burning past his lips and down his throat, finally sitting like fire in his belly. Standing there, the spirits afire inside him, he imagined he felt pain ease. He took a step, his knee wobbled beneath him, but for the moment it didn’t hurt.

“Just the lying spirits,” Stanach said. In the light and the shadow, he looked like he knew those lies and maybe had believed them for a while. He took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and returned the leather bottle to his belt. “Rest. It isn’t far to the work camp now-just beyond the bend. There’ll probably be a healer there to slap some poultice or something on your knee. It won’t help the pain, but if anything’s inflamed, it might help that.”

Again, Jai felt the stone beneath his hand. Again, he closed his fingers around the roughness of it. “You don’t sound like you have a lot of faith in healers.”

Stanach grunted. “Magic was better, but gods come and gods go, and this latest going of theirs isn’t the first. I had the bad luck to get my fingers broken the time before, during the War of the Lance, while the crowd of them was shuffling around on the doorstep, trying to decide whether to stop by again. Friends tried to help…” Again, he shrugged. “Healer-craft is good for cuts and boils and colds, but you probably notice it doesn’t do much for the big things.”

The ground beneath their feet shook again. Stanach braced with his feet planted wide. Jai caught his balance against the wall. From behind came voices, several shouting in Dwarvish. A great rumbling filled the tunnel, sounding like thunder. With gestures and words Jai couldn’t hear, Stanach made him understand that he should get right up against the wall.

“Second pass!” he shouted, his words sounding small and distant. He pointed back the way they had come, and Jai’s blood ran cold. He gripped the stone now.

Something huge lumbered through the tunnel from the direction he and Stanach had just come, something nearly six feet thick through the middle, and so long Jai couldn’t see the end of it. It came hungry, eating all the stone and rubble in its path, chewing boulders with the same placidity as a cow chewing grass in her green pasture.

“Worm!” Stanach shouted.

His heart pounding, Jai thought the last thing you could name that creature was worm. And yet it did look like an out-sized worm, its hide glistening with slime in the light of lanterns, advancing as worms do, slithering in a gigantic sort of way. It had horns, and atop its back a basket sat, maybe where the neck was if, indeed, it had a neck. In that basket a dwarf stood, thick leather reins in his hands.

“Attached to the horns!” Stanach roared as the worm came nearer and the sound of the earth rumbling beneath it grew even louder. “See!”

Jai saw, and he understood that this was how the handler in the basket directed the creature, even as other dwarves jogged along beside it, poking it with long sticks when it paused in its journey or lumbered off and threatened to eat its way through the wall. Stanach warned Jai to keep still, not for fear that the worm would harm him. The thing had no eyes and no interest in anything but eating its way to some dwarf-directed destination, but it would be easy to slip in the slime of the worm’s passing and fall beneath the beast.

“Then,” he said, “we’d be sending to Thorbardin for sponges to sop up your remains.”

The worm passed to the shouting of a parade of dwarves, hooting and poking to keep the worm in a more or less straight line. None of them looked to the side or even seemed to be aware they passed one of their fellows and an elf. It was worth the life of each of them to keep their eyes on the worm and keep the worm itself moving. It was a slow passing, like a mountain strolling by. Stanach stood a moment looking after it.

Jai pushed away from the wall, getting a better grip on the stone in his hand. Somewhere along the way he’d find the Mianost entrance. It wouldn’t be an easy thing alone in the tunnel, trying to find his own way. Adrenaline shot through him in the instant he made his decision. In a brilliant moment of clarity he saw just where he would bring the stone down on Stanach’s skull-there, in the center.

He cocked his arm and the dwarf turned, his own arm coming up with arrow swiftness. Stanach grasped his wrist so hard that Jai’s fingers went numb.

“Now why,” the dwarf said, his words edged with ice, “why would you want to do that, elf?”

Stanach’s grip tightened. Pain shot through Jai’s wrist to his elbow, to his shoulder.

“Drop the stone,” the dwarf whispered, “or I’ll break your wrist.”

The stone fell, but not by an act of will. Jai’s fingers had no feeling in them to hold. Stanach eased his grip, a little, but didn’t release Jai’s wrist. “Answer me. Why?”

In the pulsing light and the shifting shadows, Jai took a long breath against the pain in his arm. “I’m not going to Thorbardin. I’m going back to Qualinost.”

Stanach laughed, a hard, harsh bark. “You are, are you?” He looked pointedly at Jai’s knee. “And how do you reckon you’re going to get there?”

Jai hated him in that moment. His blood burned with hate. “I’ll get there walking.”

“By Winter Night, maybe.” The dwarfs eyes darkened. “You’re a fool to go back up there now. Your people are running these tunnels as fast as we can build them, as fast as we can bring them in. Soon there’ll be nothing for you to go back to. Nothing.”

“You’re wrong! Up there is all there ever was of us. Every tale of who we are, every song, every story, all the history of us. It’s up there, and-”Jai stopped, shivering. “And if all that were lost, Stanach, here is one more tale that needs telling. The tale of the end. Someone needs to know how it ends, so they will know how to begin again.”

Stanach let go his wrist. Jai looked at the flesh there, already bruising, then he looked away.

“Please, let me go. What’s it to you, Stanach? Nothing, so just… let me go.”

As swiftly as he’d turned before, that swiftly did Stanach turn again. His eyes took Jai’s and held them. “I feflte being here. I hate being out of Thorbardin. I was too long away in older days.” He glanced at his ruined right hand, then away. “I came home broken and saw the city and the kinship broken after that. I hate being out of Thorbardin.”

“Why? If you leave the city, will it fall apart without you?”

“No. No, if I leave the city, I fall apart without it.”

He looked away. Jai saw nothing of his face, his blue-flecked dark eyes. He saw no sign of what the dwarf was thinking or feeling, only one small twitch of his thick shoulders.

“All right,” Stanach said, his eyes still on some point south, some point in the direction of Thorbardin. “All right. It’s all falling apart, elf, but if you want to stand in the ruin, off you go.”

You, he said. He bent and picked up something from the shadows: a broken stick one of the worm-handlers had discarded. With one swift stomp of his booted foot, he sheared off the splintered end. The stick he handed to Jai, with two words of advice. “Use it.”

Then he walked away, back south toward Thorbardin. Jai smiled, following. Before Thorbardin, or even the crossway, they would come to the way out of the tunnel, the way through and up to Mianost. It was all right. He could manage the walk. He’d come this far.

He was bleeding by the time he got there-cuts from falls, scraped hands, torn knees, his cheek ripped raw by a rock. He was bruised, and the muscles and bones of his knee screamed. He fell again, he didn’t think he could get up again, but Stanach said, not gently, “Come on, elf. You said you could do it. So do it.”

“Shut up,” Jai snarled, and he wasn’t sure it was only sweat running down his cheeks. “Shut up and give me your hand.”

Stanach did, gripping hard, laying bruises on top of bruises as he hauled Jai to his feet. Wordless, he put the stick back into Jai’s hand, and he pointed to the stone wall, the rocky ribcage of the tunnel. “There,” he said, but Jai saw nothing other than worm-chewed stone and moisture running down in rivulets made golden by the lantern light.

Stanach touched the wall, just a gentle nudge, and the stone swung inward-a slab as long as an elf is tall, and as wide. It moved silently, smoothly, and there was no magic attached to it, just good dwarven engineering. When Stanach held the lantern close to the entrance, he illuminated rough stone stairs winding upward. He did not, however, illuminate anything that might remotely resemble guards or any kind of watch. “Not at this end,” Stanach said. “The guards are above, and they’re your folk. We delve; they ward.”

They stood quiet a moment and then Stanach said, “That’s your last climb up. Just hang around looking suspicious and some elf or another will find you and fetch you home.”

Jai drew breath to speak, then held it. Thin light slipped suddenly down the stairs, pale and silvery. A whiff of rain drifted in on a vagrant breeze. A woman’s voice wafted softly down from above, speaking in Elvish. The voice sounded familiar, distant whisper though it was. When it came closer, Jai knew it. Annalisse!

Another party of refugees was coming through, but why was Annalisse with them? His heart sank. Had she fallen foul of the Dark Knights? Had the Marshal learned of her connection to the resistance?

Annalisse’s footfalls came closer. Another followed her, this one’s tread heavier. A dwarf, Jai thought, and then he heard the chime of ring mail, the clank of armor.

“I told you the Marshal would want to know about this,” Annalisse said coolly. “This is no cave. This is a way down into the earth.”

The next voice Jai heard was human, and he knew the clanking armor was black, the wearer a man whose soul was owned by the green dragon. “Damn. That’s dwarf craft.”

Whistling, something dark and swift flew past Jai’s face. Stanach’s throwing axe made a terrible sound as it bit deeply into the throat of the Knight. The man made no sound at all but for that of his body clanking down the stairs. Shoving Jai back, tumbling him to the stony floor, Stanach leaped for the corpse and kicked his axe free of the Knight’s neck.

Shouts and cursing erupted in the stairwell as three more Knights ran down the steps.

Jai got the stone wall behind his back, the cold damp rock biting into his flesh as he pressed close, levering himself to his feet. Stanach’s voice swore in the name of a god years gone away.

“By Reorx! Close the door, elf!”

Close it? Close him in with the Knights and the traitor? And what? Howl for help? Beneath him, the earth vibrated. No matter how loudly he shouted, no one would hear him above the thunder of worms eating through stone. Jai kicked the door open wider and got a good grip on his stick. The first Knight to come through got his feet tangled in the stick and, while he was struggling to rise, his skull shattered by a two-handed blow with a rock. Bone shards flew up from the broken skull, brains and blood seeped through. Jai’s stomach turned, his gorge rose.

“Close the damned door!”

A second Knight came through, staggering. Blood poured from his mouth and nose. He tripped over his fellow and Stanach’s axe stuck quivering in his neck above his mail shirt.

Jai dropped his stick and planted his hands on the pile of corpses, ignoring the stench of blood and death. Balanced on one leg, he yanked the axe put of the Knight’s neck and hobbled for the doorway. From the shadow within the doorway, he trembled to see Stanach standing on lower ground, three steps below a burly Knight-undefendable ground-and the glinting tip of a keen edged sword was dipped to touch his neck. Above the Knight, Annalisse stood. Her face was cold as the white moon on an icy night.

“Kill him,” she said.

Icy fear washed through Jai. In his scribe’s hand was a weapon that would do Stanach no good. Neither could he charge up the stairs to the dwarfs rescue. He grinned suddenly, and he moved, flinging himself into three lurching steps, the stick in his hand. With a cry to distract the Knight, Jai hit Stanach hard behind the knees.

Roaring curses, Stanach fell backwards. The Knight, just thrusting his sword, lost his balance and pitched headlong down the stairs. Annalisse cried out as Stanach staggered to his feet and took the axe Jai thrust into his hand. He finished the Knight in the space of a breath and turned toward Annalisse, arm cocked to throw the axe.

“No!”Jai cried.

For one furious instant, Stanach didn’t understand.

Jai put a hand on his arm, holding his throw. “She’s betrayed the resistance, Stanach. We have to know if there are others.”

His words hung between the dwarf and the Lady Librarian, the question unanswered.

“Lady,” he said, and he hadn’t meant to speak gently, yet he did. “Why?”

She closed her eyes, as one in pain. “I did it for the library.”

“The library? I don’t understand.”

Eyes shut, she drew a tight, pained breath. “I went to Medan and made a bargain. I told him I had something he wanted, if only he would promise to preserve the library. Through all that’s to come, he must keep it safe.”

On the evening of his last night in Qualinost, she’d done that. For a fleeting moment, Jai saw in her icy expression what he’d seen then-that longing look, that sense of loss’s shadow as she looked around at her precious hoard of manuscripts and books, songs and fables and legends, all the golden history of the Qualinesti. She’d bargained her soul for the Library of Qualinost, and into the bargain thrown elven and dwarven lives.

“You knew before I did that our family was leaving Qualinost.”

“Yes. I didn’t know where you were going, but you told me that.”

She’d set a Knight to linger around Mianost. When the refugees didn’t arrive, the Knight had no way to follow farther. Annalisse, however, didn’t give up so easily. She had more patience than Knights. She had, she believed, much more at stake.

Tonight there were, she said, with the first dawning of shame in her voice, four Qualinesti warriors dead in the forest, not far from the entrance to the tunnel. “But we took a vow, Jai, you and I. There will always be a library. There will always be history’s hoard in Qualinost.”

“We did, lady,” he said, the words like dust in his mouth. “But we took it to serve a truth, not a building.” Softly, he gave her back her own words, often spoken in the quiet precincts of her library. “We can’t forget who we were. It’s how we know who we are, and how we can guess who we will be. My lady, with your bargain, you risked making us cowards before all who would look back at us. You risked ending our history in shame.

“It isn’t the collection that matters. It is the history that matters.”

He turned his back on her. He didn’t look when Stanach asked if he should kill the traitor.

“No,” he said. “Your folk and mine are going to want to deal with her.”

The dwarf grunted and said he could save them all the time and trouble now, but he didn’t insist. He ordered Annalisse down the stairs. When she passed Jai, she paused. “It’s over Jai, or it soon will be. We can only try to live.”

Jai said nothing, but didn’t look at her.

Stanach gestured with his axe. Annalisse walked past, the hem of her sleeve brushing against Jai’s hand. It felt like ice, like winter coming

Dwarves dragged away the corpses of the Knights, eight strong fellows come back with Stanach from the work detail. Sitting on the bottom step of his way home, Jai heard them talking and the scrape of mail on stone as the heavy bodies were hauled away. No one came to wash away the blood.

“Stone will remember that forever,” Stanach said.

Jai nodded. He had nothing to say-or nothing that would pass the grief thickening his throat. Annalisse, his mentor… she’d given up. In fear or despair she’d chosen betrayal and found a way to convince herself it was an option.

Stanach, a grub-light in hand, took a seat on the step above. After a long moment of silence, he said, “They’re closing this entrance tonight. There’s a party of you Qualinesti above getting ready, and we’ll close it down here too. By morning no one will know it was here.”

Jai nodded.

“Are you sure you want to go? What about your mam and your da? Will y’not want to see ‘em one time?”

Jai shook his head. “Send them word. Just tell them… tell them I have to do this.”

Stanach’s voice softened, a little. “Jai.”

Jai turned, startled to hear the dwarf speak his name. He’d been “elf all along, just that- someone to move through the tunnels and then forget.

“Jai, it won’t be long before it all falls apart up there. The end is told. You heard it tonight People are giving up.”

Breeze smelling like rain slipped down the stairs. A woman’s voice called softly, urging Jai to come up now, or stay. Qualinesti! Secret soldiers of a king who danced, it seemed, to a tune of his own calling, one his people didn’t truly understand. It wasn’t over yet, not while these strove.

Jai rose, balancing with a hand on the dwarfs shoulder. “Walk up with me, will you?”

Wordless, they went. It was a long way up, a hard road, all those dozen winding stairs. At the top, Jai turned. A pit of blackness yawned below. Stanach stood in a pool of yellow lantern light on the top step. His face was like stone, no muscle moving.

“Stanach, the story isn’t all told yet, because I haven’t told it. I’m going back to do that. I’ll send the histories and stories out of Qualinost a little at a time. I’ll find a way to get them through to Thorbardin, and… and all the rest of the tale. How it ends.”

Stanach looked down into the darkness and then back. “Just get them out. Put them in any hand coming into the tunnel. I’ll see them the rest of the way home. And when the last one… Well, don’t stay too long, eh? Come bring the last one to me yourself.”

“Stanach, I don’t know if…”

A small muscle twitched in Stanach’s cheek. He took a breath; it sounded ragged. “That’s right. You don’t know. But you do know this: I’ll be here, right here in the tunnel, trawling for lostlings.” He offered his hand, his left, and Jai took it in his own left, grasping it the way Qualinesti warriors did, the hard comrade’s clasp. “I’ll wait.”

Jai nodded. He said no more about his chance of coming back. He turned, and he left, going out into the night and the end.