Jonathan Strahan - Swords & Dark Magic - The New Sword and Sorcery

Tense moments passed. The papers continued to snap and twirl above them, and the winds still wailed madly, but after a short while the worst of the page-storm seemed to be spent. Glass and metal fragments rained around them like discarded toys, and the whole screaming mess fluttered on down the aisle, leaving a slowly falling haze of upflung dust in its wake. Coughing and sneezing, Laszlo and his companions stumbled shakily to their feet, while the noise and chaos of the indoor cyclone faded into the distant mist and darkness.

“My thanks, humans,” said Lev hoarsely. “My clan’s ancestral trade of scale-grooming is beginning to acquire a certain tint of nostalgia in my thoughts.”

“Don’t mention it,” coughed Laszlo. “What the hell was that?”

“Believe it or not, that was a book,” said Astriza.

“A forcibly unbound grimoire,” said Molnar, dusting off his armor. “The creatures and forces in here occasionally destroy books by accident. And sometimes, when a truly ancient grimoire bound with particularly powerful spells is torn apart, it doesn’t want to stop being a book. It becomes a focus for the library’s unconscious anger. A book without spine or covers is like an unquiet spirit without mortal form. Whatever’s left of it holds itself together out of sheer resentment, roaming without purpose, lashing out at whatever crosses its path.”

“Like my face,” said Laszlo, suddenly aware of hot, stinging pains across his cheeks and forehead. “Ow, gods.”

“Paper cuts,” said Casimir, grinning. “Won’t be impressing any beautiful women with those scars, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I’m impressed,” muttered Yvette, pressing her fingertips gingerly against her own face. “You just let those things whirl around as they please, Master Molnar?”

“They never attack other books. And they uproot or destroy a number of the library’s smaller vermin. You might compare them to forest fires in the outside world—ugly, but perhaps ultimately beneficial to the cycle of existence.”

“Pity about the lamps, though,” said Yvette.

“Ah. Yes,” said Molnar. He tapped the head of his staff, and a ball of flickering red light sprang from it, fainter than that of the lost lamps but adequate to dispel the gloom. “Aspirants, use the empty book satchel. Pick up all the lantern fragments you can see. The library has a sufficient quantity of disorder that we need not import any.”

While the aspirants tended their cuts and scoured the vicinity for lantern parts, Astriza glanced around, consulted some sort of amulet chained around her wrist, and whistled appreciatively. “Hey, here’s a stroke of luck.” She moved over to a bookcase nestled against the outer library wall, slid Lev’s grimoire into an empty spot, and backed away cautiously. “Two down. You four are halfway to your sixth year.”

“Aspirant Vrana,” said Molnar, “I believe we’ll find a home for your book not a stone’s throw along the outer wall, at sixty-one Manticore Northwest. And then we’ll have just one more delivery before we can speed the four of you on your way, back to the carefree world of making requests from the comfort of the reading rooms.”

“No need to hurry on my account,” said Casimir, stretching lazily. His cloak and armor were back in near perfect order. “I’m having a lovely time. And I’m sure the best is yet to come.”

It was a bit more than a stone’s throw, thought Laszlo, unless you discarded the human arm as a reference and went in for something like a trebuchet. Along the aisle they moved, past section after section of books that were, as Master Molnar had promised, completely unharmed by the passage of the unbound grimoire. The mist crept back in around them, and the two Librarians fussed and muttered over their guidance spells as they walked. Eventually, they arrived at what Molnar claimed was sixty-one Manticore Northwest, a cluster of shelves under a particularly heavy overhanging stone balcony.

“Ta-daaaaaa,” cried Astriza as she backed away from the shelf once she had successfully replaced Casimir’s book. “You see, children, some returns are boring. And in here, boring is beautiful.”

“Help me!” cried a faint voice from somewhere off to Laszlo’s right, in the dark forest of bookcases leading away to the unseen heart of the library.

“Not to mention damned rare.” Astriza moved out into the aisle with Molnar, scanning the shelves and shadows surrounding the party. “Who’s out there?”

“Help me!” The voice was soft and hoarse. There was no telling whether or not it came from the throat of a thinking creature.

“Someone from another book-return team?” asked Yvette.

“I’d know,” said Molnar. “More likely it’s a trick. We’ll investigate, but very, very cautiously.”

As though it were a response to the Master Librarian’s words, a book came sailing out of the darkened stacks. The two Librarians ducked, and, after bouncing off the floor once, the book wound up at Yvette’s feet. She nudged it with the tip of a boot and then, satisfied that it was genuine, picked it up and examined the cover.

“What is it?” said Molnar.

“ Annotated Commentaries on the Mysteries of the Worm, ” said Yvette. “I don’t know if that means anything special—”

“An-no-tated,” hissed a voice from the darkness. There was a strange snort of satisfaction. “New!”

“Commentaries,” hissed another. “New, new!”

“Hells!” Molnar turned to the aspirants and lowered his voice to a whisper. “A trick, after all! Vocabuvores again. Keep your voices down, use simple words. We’ve just given them food. Could be a group as large as the last one.”

“Mysteries,” groaned one of the creatures. “New!” A series of wet snapping and bubbling noises followed. Laszlo shuddered, remembering the rapid growth of the thing that had tried to jump him earlier, and his sword was in his hand in an instant.

“New words,” chanted a chorus of voices that deepened even as they spoke. “New words, new words!” It sounded like at least a dozen of the things were out there, and beneath their voices was the crackling and bubbling, as though cauldrons of fat were on the boil…many cauldrons.

“All you, give new words.” A deeper, harsher voice than the others, more commanding. “All you, except BOY. Boy that KILL with spell! Him we kill! Others give new words!”

“Him we kill,” chanted the chorus. “Others give new words!”

“No way,” whispered Astriza. “No gods-damned way!”

“It’s the same band of vocabuvores,” whispered Molnar. “They’ve actually followed us. Merciful gods, they’re learning to overcome their instincts. We’ve got to destroy them!”

“We sure as hell can’t let them pass this behavior on to others,” whispered Astriza, nodding grimly. “Just as Master Molnar said, clamp your mouths shut. Let your swords and spells do the talking. If—”

Whatever she was about to say, Laszlo never found out. Growling, panting, gibbering, screeching, the vocabuvores surged out of the darkness, over bookcases and out of aisles, into the wan circle of red light cast by Molnar’s staff. Nor were they the small-framed creatures of the previous attack—most had grown to the size of wolves. Their bodies had elongated, their limbs had knotted with thick strands of ropy muscle, and their claws had become slaughterhouse implements. Some had acquired plates of chitinous armor, while others had sacks of flab hanging off them like pendulous tumors. They came by the dozens, in an arc that closed on Laszlo and his companions like a set of jaws.

The first to strike on either side was Casimir, who uttered a syllable so harsh that Laszlo reeled just to hear it. His ears rang, and a bitter metallic taste filled his mouth. It was a death-weaving, true dread sorcery, the sort of thing that Laszlo had never imagined himself even daring to study, and the closest of the vocabuvores paid for its enthusiasm by receiving the full brunt of the spell. Its skin literally peeled itself from the bones and muscles beneath, a ragged wet leathery flower tearing open and blowing away. And, an instant later, the muscles followed, then the bones and the glistening internal organs; the creature exploded layer by layer. But there were many more behind it, and as the fight began in earnest, Laszlo found himself praying silently that words of command, which were so much babble to non-magicians, couldn’t nourish the creatures.