Jeff Grubb: The Last Guardian

“The Magus does not need an assistant,” muttered Khadgar, clearing a space at the end of one table and pulling out a chair. “He needs a housekeeper.” He shot a glance at the doorway to make sure that the castellan was well and truly gone.

Khadgar sat down and the chair rocked severely. He stood up again, and saw that the uneven legs had shifted off a thick tome with a metallic cover. The front cover was ornate, and the page edges clad in silver.

Khadgar opened the text, and as he did so he felt something shift within the book, like a slider moving down a metal rod or a drop of mercury moving through a glass pipe. Something metallic unwound within the spine of the tome.

The book began to tick.

Quickly Khadgar closed the cover, and the book silenced itself with a sharp whirr and a snap, its mechanism resetting. The young man delicately set the volume back on the table.

That was when he noticed the scorch marks on the chair he was using, and the floor beneath it.

“I can see why you go through so many assistants,” said Khadgar, slowly wandering through the room.

The situation did not improve. Books were hanging open over the arms of chairs and metal railings. The correspondence grew deeper as he moved farther into the room. Something had made a nest in one corner of the bookshelf, and as Khadgar pulled it from the shelf, a small shrew’s skull toppled out, crumbling when it struck the floor. The upper level was little more than storage, books not even reaching the shelves, just piled in higher stacks, foothills leading to mountains leading to unattainable peaks.

And there was one bare spot, but this one looked like someone had started a fire in a desperate attempt to reduce the amount of paper present. Khadgar examined the area and shook his head—something else burned here as well, for there were bits of fabric, probably from a scholar’s robe.

Khadgar shook his head and went back to where he had left his scribe’s tools. He spilled out a thin wooden pen with a handful of metal nibs, a stone for sharpening and shaping the nibs, a knife with a flexible blade for scraping parchment, a block of octopus ink, a small dish in which to melt the ink, a collection of thin, flat keys, a magnifying lens, and what looked at first glance like a metallic cricket.

He picked up the cricket, turned it on its back, and using a specially-fashioned pen nib, wound it up. A gift from Guzbah upon Khadgar completing his first training as a scribe, it had proved invaluable in the youth’s perambulations among the halls of the Kirin Tor. Within was contained a simple but effective spell that warned when a trap was in the offing.

As soon as he had wound it one revolution, the metallic cricket let out a high-pitched squeal. Khadgar, surprised, almost dropped the detecting insect. Then he realized that the device was merely warning about the intensity of the potential danger.

Khadgar looked at the piled volumes around him, and muttered a low curse. He retreated to the doorway, and finished winding the cricket. Then he brought the first book he had picked up, the ticking one, over to the doorway.

The cricket warbled slightly. Khadgar set the trapped book to one side of the doorway. He picked up another volume and brought it over. The cricket was silent.

Khadgar held his breath, hoped that the cricket was enchanted to handle all forms of traps, magical and otherwise, and opened the book. It was a treatise written in a soft feminine hand on the politics of the elves from three hundred years back.

Khadgar set the handwritten volume to the other side of the doorway, and went back for another book.

“I know you,” said Medivh, the next morning, over sausage and porridge.

“Khadgar, sir,” said the youth.

“The new assistant,” said the older mage. “Of course. Forgive, but the memory is not everything it once was. Too much going on, I’m afraid.”

“Anything you need aid with, sir?” asked Khadgar.

The elder man seemed to think about it for a moment, then said, “The library, Young Trust. How are things in the library?”

“Good,” said Khadgar. “Very good. I’m busy sorting the books and papers.”

“Ah, by subject? Author?” asked the master mage.

Fatal and non-fatal, thought Khadgar. “I’m thinking by subject. Many are anonymous.”

“Hmmmfph,” said Medivh. “Never trust anything that a man will not set his reputation and name upon. Carry on, then. Tell me, what is opinion of the Kirin Tor mages about King Llane? Do they ever mention him?”

The work proceeded with glacial slowness, but Medivh did not seem to be aware of the time involved. Indeed, he seemed to start each morning with being mildly and pleasantly surprised that Khadgar was still with them, and after a short summary of the progress the conversation would switch into a new direction.

“Speaking of libraries,” he would say. “What is the Kirin Tor’s librarian, Korrigan, up to?”

“How do people in Lordaeron feel about elves? Have any ever been seen there, in living memory?”

“Are there any legends of bull-headed men in the halls of the Violet Citadel?”

And one morning, about week into Khadgar’s stay, Medivh was not present at all.

“Gone,” said Moroes simply when asked.

“Gone where?” asked Khadgar.

The old castellan shrugged, and Khadgar could almost hear the bones clatter within his form. “He’s not one to say.”

“What’s he doing?” pressed Khadgar.

“Not one to say.”

“When will he be back?”

“Not one to say.”

“He would leave me alone in his tower?” asked Khadgar. “Unsupervised, with all his mystic texts?”

“Could come stand guard over you,” volunteered Moroes. “If that’s what you want.”

Khadgar shook his head, but said, “Moroes?”

“Ayep, young sir?”

“These visions…” started the younger man.

“Blinders?” suggested the servant.

Khadgar shook his head again. “Do they show the future or the past?”

“Both, when I’ve noticed, but I usually don’t,” said Moroes. “Notice, that is.”

“And the ones of the future, do they come true?” said the young man.

Moroes let out what Khadgar could only assume was a deep sigh, a bone-rattling exhalation. “In my experience, yes, young sir. In one vision Cook saw me break a piece of crystal, so she hid them away. Months passed, and finally the Master asked for that piece of crystal. She removed it from its hiding place, and within two minutes I had broken it. Completely unintentionally.” He sighed again. “She got her rose quartz lenses the next day. Will there be anything else?”

Khadgar said no, but was troubled as he climbed the staircase to the library level. He had gone as far as he had dared so far in his organization, and Medivh’s sudden disappearance left him high and dry, without further direction.

The young would-be apprentice entered the library. On one side of the room were those volumes (and remains of volumes) that the cricket had determined were “safe,” while the other half of the room was filled with the (generally more complete) volumes that were noted as being trapped.

The great tables were covered with loose pages and unopened correspondence, laid out in two semiregular heaps. The shelves were entirely bare, the chains hanging empty of their prisoners.

Khadgar could sort through the papers, but better to restock the shelves with the books. But most of the volumes were untitled, or if titled, their covers so barely worn, scuffed, and torn as to be illegible. The only way to determine contents would be to open the books.

Which would set off the trapped ones. Khadgar looked at the scorched mark on the floor and shook his head.