"Castle Eld 1 - Stacked" by Ashley R. Wynn

Stacked

            Walking between rows of reading chairs, Brishka eyed the stack of books on her desk.  She had been away for a few moments; the privy was nowhere near the library.  No books in the stack seemed to have been returned damaged.  Occasionally some wretch returning a book that had been damaged would wait until she left her desk to walk across the castle to the privy.  Damaging books incurred a fine, depending on the damage.  Books were rare and expensive.  Only nobles were allowed to remove any from the library, or occasionally a visiting professor from the King’s School of Higher Education.  Nobles were the only folk who could afford to replace damaged books, and visiting professors revered books in such a way that Brishka, the head librarian, did.  They saw them as the dangerous things of magic that they were.

            In the deepest, oldest vaults of the castle, the ones with the openings into spectacular caverns, there were truly magical books.  They were tomes brought home by the Lords of the castle and their families since there had first been a castle stronghold on Eld Mountain.   Spell books of the classical sense that a wizard, witch, or other such occult figure would carry around were kept there.  Life-journals, enchanted cookbooks, and even a ship’s log or two were kept in these vaults.  They were never spoken of, and only a select few people knew their existence.  This esoteric group had passkeys or other means to get through the Trinite Doors.  Occasionally there was a time when the Lord of Eld Castle knew nothing of this cache of books.  This was one of those times.

            The thought of the spell-cache had been niggling Brishka for weeks.  She sank into her comfortable desk chair and plucked the top book from the stack.  She thought she knew, by glancing at the spines, who had left them.

            “Probably in a hurry packing for the hunt.  Good thing he brought them all back instead of losing them in the woods,” Brishka murmured to herself. 

She spoke quietly, even when she was serving fines for damaged or stolen books.  Trespassers knew when they had crossed the librarian’s boundaries, though she did not have to raise her voice.  These folk were usually surprised by the soft-spoken woman’s ability of intimidation.  Brishka had an excellent record at replacing missing books; she even had managed to get a few from nobles her predecessors could not get to pay their fines.

            A scrap of paper fluttered from the small green volume on fungi.  She picked the paper up and read the words inked onto it.  It was a poem, she thought.  She read the words again.  The piece of paper was a corner torn from a larger piece. 

            “Perhaps he was using it as a bookmark.”  No one was in the library with Brishka, but she often spoke out loud anyway.  She held the green book closed, with its spine resting on her desk.  She let go with both hands, and the new-looking book fell open to the first page of a chapter detailing the myriad uses gnomes have for fungi.  “Odd.  There isn’t a gnome warren in leagues of here.” 

            She set the book aside on a pushcart and checked the rest in the stack.  She lingered over the very bottom book.  A Treatise on the Great Hunt had been written and wonderfully illustrated by Elwood Merria, one of the sons of Lord Bemit Merria, the man who had built the long-ago stronghold castle on Eld Mountain.  Though Brishka found the man’s text to be rather overdone and boring, the pictures he had inked onto the vellum pages were worth poring over for hours.  The color and detail of each sketch pulled one into the man’s images.  Most were forest scenes depicting the heroes of the legendary Great Hunt of the White Bull astride beautiful horses.  Tiny forest creatures frolicked in the undergrowth, and tiny eyes peeped from shadows under rocks.  Individual leaves and grasses were picked out with care in green, yellow, and brown inks. 

            After looking through the book once more, Brishka added it to the cart.  It belonged in the reference section, and was not supposed to have left the library.  She put away the books, traversing all nine rooms of the library. 

            “He must have accidentally put it in his book bag,” Brishka murmured to herself.  “Or he could have looked at it while I was in the privy and just left it for me to put up properly.  It is a long walk to the reference cases, and he would be in a hurry if he is going on the hunt.”

            The next dawn, the current Lord Westin Merria and a large party of hunters would set out for the first big hunt of the harvest season.  Most of the nobles would be leaving their wives at the castle or their own outlying country estates.  The court had only returned from the summer castle a lunar ago, and castle life had been slowly getting back to normal.  After the hunt things around Eld Castle tended to settle into winter.  The Breaking holiday with all of its food, festivity, and gifts would be the highlight of the calm season.  The hunts were the last chances any of the hunters would have before being trapped in the castle for the winter.  The steep winding roads down into the forests at the bottom of Mount Eld became impassable once the ice set in.

            After shelving all the other books that had been in circulation that afternoon, Brishka returned to her huge carved desk to straighten it.  She carefully put away a book whose stitching she was mending.  Her inkpot was tightly capped and tucked inside a drawer along with a couple of letters she had received from professors at the King’s School.  Under the clutter of her desk, Brishka noticed the triangular scrap of paper where Jemson Merria, the Lord’s third eldest son, had scribbled a poem.  After reading it again she dropped it into her desk drawer and made sure the spare key was there.  Satisfied that everything was in its place, Brishka set out to lock the main doors and find herself some supper.

*     *     *

            By the time the librarian had finished her supper, Jemson stood before the first of the Trinite Doors.  Catching his breath, he folded the parchment map and slipped it back into his inner jacket pocket.  Pulling an amulet on a leather thong off over his head, he murmured a prayer to Juana, the goddess of archery, mystery, and truth finding.  The youngest son of Lord Merria of the Castle Eld felt the prayer to be proper, though he did not usually feel himself to be a spiritual person.  The moon and arrow device on the amulet lent weight to the issue; it was one of the symbols of the goddess, even if it was a bit more unusual than the ones at the temple.  It was made of a delicate silvery metal with intricate knot work around a small disc.  Engraved upon the coin-sized disc was a bow-like sliver of the moon, nearly bisected horizontally by a star-tipped arrow.  The knot work was a great hooded serpent, twisting and knotting itself as it swallowed its own feathered tail. 

            The standards of the goddess Juana the Serpent Slayer in the temples depicted the goddess, arrow notched in her bow, standing with one boot planted upon a dying, arrow-feathered serpent named Qu’oaxxl.  Words written in the ancient language of the Merria ancestors proclaimed from banners, “I shall hunt and destroy those that shadow the truth with lies.  My arrows shall find my enemies’ hearts in darkness.”  The fabled Great Hunt for the White Bull took place in her honor and with the blessings of her priestesses.  The first of the Trinite Doors stood before Jemson, baring the same symbols as the amulet, instead of those found in the temple.  It buzzed with magic and gave off an ominous sense of death and danger.

 Jemson’s great-grandmother had given him the amulet when he was a small child spending the long days in her lap, listening to stories of the Great Hunt.  Thyriks, then an old woman, had been but a small girl, when her great-grandmother had given her the amulet.  She in turn passed it on to her great-grandson along with the stories of her great-grandmother Gunnvor’s first hand account of the Great Hunt. 

            After his great-grandmother Thyriks had passed into the spirit world, Jemson, still a young boy, had asked other family members to tell him the story.  None told the story the way Granda Thyriks had.  No one else had ever mentioned Granda Gunnvor’s part in the story, nor how the White Bull had been found slain by the poisons of a great serpent.  Stories told by the other members of her family always ended with Bemit Merria killing the Bull with one of his arrows made from star stone.  None of their stories ever mentioned the horrible scars that Bemit had borne until he finally went to the spirits, scars caused by the terrible poisons of the serpent.  Even the book he had borrowed from the reference section, the one with all the amazing pictures that Elwood Merria had done had left out parts of the story his Granda Thyriks told.  Not one to question his elders aloud, Jemson had kept his thoughts to himself and never disputed their traditional versions of the tale of the Great Hunt.  Granda Thyriks had only told him, after all.  She had not shared the stories with his older brothers.

            Jemson took a deep breath, banishing the turmoil of his thoughts.  He held what he believed to be a talisman of the goddess Juana before him, dangling from his sweaty fist.  Sucking in a deep breath, he took a step toward the door.  The magical buzz intensified as Jemson took another tentative step.  Before his knuckles touched the shining marble surface of the door, he hesitated.  The stutter in his step did not stop the amulet from swinging forward; inertia carried it forward until it the small metal disk clinked against the pale marble.  The intensifying buzz suddenly stopped.  Counterweights ratcheted and clanked as the thick marble slab, the first Trinite Door, slid into the wall.  Taking his torch from a bracket, Jemson exhaled and stepped into the newly opened passageway.  Two more to go.

            Holding the torch up revealed a narrow but high-ceilinged stairway descending before him.  With his free hand, Jemson fumbled the folded map from his inner pocket.  He shook it open and held it in the sputtering light of the torch.  From more than three years of research, the youngest of the Lord of Eld’s sons believed that the next door would open onto the Path of the Serpent.  He had made this map with painstaking care from hints and clues he had found in books in the library and books and relics in the family museum. 

The museum was in the highest towers of the castle.  They were cold, drafty in the winter, blisteringly hot in the summer, and no one other than Randall the hawker would live in the tower rooms.  However, they made fine storage for all the old furniture, books, wardrobes, chests, and other clutter the family and household servants had accumulated over the years.  Of course if you found a wardrobe you wanted for your room downstairs, getting it moved down the staircases was a bit of a bother.

            Starting down the winding stairs, he put the map a0way and made sure the flask of antidote was still inside his jacket pocket.  He hoped he had translated the passage from the Icthian herbalist’s journals properly.  Otherwise, the performance before supper that he gave of a sick and heartbroken young man had been for nothing.  He had pretended to be suffering from one of his horrible headaches all afternoon.  Normally, when one of Jemson’s mysterious headaches came on, he ended up in bed for a couple of days at least.  He had pretended to make a fight of it and then snuck into the library after telling his family that he would be in bed.  After wishing them luck, Jemson had asked that they not disturb him and told them to leave for the hunt without him.  He would have a servant get him something to eat when he felt well enough to keep food down.

            The marble slab ground shut above and behind him.  Jemson hoped he would not need to make a fast exit.

*     *     *