Hit the Books 15/06 Sorrel Darkfire

Sitting in the welcoming alcove in the Runaway Library listening to Chonk reel off the services the library might offer them, Sorrel shifted uneasily in her chair. Sparks in Shade, Kavel, Derthaad, Kelne and Tayz were fine comrades. She knew this from experience.

As they’d observed the blue and white mosaic walls of the library gleaming in the sun outside Port Ffirst, she had been so caught up in the beauty of columns, the elaborate geometric shapes, the golden tiles, the ornate carvings, the cool entrance hall that she’d ambled happily into this mysterious readerie with not much else in her head but eating pussy and kicking ass.

She noticed the queues of people there, she gathered, to have their unhappy memories cleansed. She preferred to nurse hers so that they made her stronger. But each to their own. Even then she felt things were going well.

Chonk was as she remembered – half chest, half dangerous carnivore, all heart – and although he clearly had mummy issues he was prepared to offer them a killing automaton locked in extermination mode if they could only extract a jammed punch card and replace it with a less genocidal one. He had books on Gith as well, he explained, and possibly weapons too. And a kraken, although that had just wandered in one day so he couldn’t speak for its loyalties. At which point she saw the problem rushing towards her.

“So,” Sorrel leaned forward. “What you’re saying is – one room with valuable information and some librarians whose only request is silence..” Chonk nodded. “Another room stuff to gills with useful items that’s entirely unguarded…” Chonk beamed acknowledgement. “And a locked room in a tower with a wild killer machine that can destroy worlds and has just one tiny weakness that no-one has managed to correct in millennia?” Chonk stopped smiling and nodded again.

Sorrel turned to the rest of the party. “The books or the weapons?” she asked.

“The killing machine,” they all cried. ‘To the tower!”

“Wait!” Sorrel cried. “Honestly, I don’t mean to be that asshole, but I’ve been in Kantas a year or so and I know what your plan is – you’re all going to bundle in and attack it all at once, right?”

They looked at each other baffled. “Well… of course…” Tayz spoke as if to a child. “This is the way.”

The air briefly swirled and waved and melted into a flashback and Sorrel was catapulted back decades to her House training…





Halfway through her fourth year, when just over half her intake group were dead or mained, Sorrel had been summoned again by Callimar Daevion'lyrn in the Endless Basement beneath the Final Door.

The ageless drow welcomed her to his chambers with brief nod. He collected rare, thin porcelain, and turned a delicate cup over and over in his blue-white fingers while the occasional scream rose and died slowly from behind an obsidian door.

“Darkfire,” his voice was soft. “Our last meeting has stayed with me. I have decided to appoint myself your tutor. I will meet you in the gardens tomorrow for our first essay assignment. Now leave me. I have something important to do…”

The obsidian door opened behind him. She turned as fast as dignity allowed and was on the stairs before the death cry reached her ears.

---

At the appointed time Callimar was sitting in the palace gardens watching the butterflies with an expression of mild annoyance as if he found something offensive about their unjustified beauty and casual disregard for the sorrow of the world.

He made most students nervous. His spies were legion and, when spies were not well placed, he relied on scrying and foresight to ensure he always knew as clearly as possible what was going to happen so that he could ensure that it that it didn’t - or at least happened to someone else.

Sorrel approached him carefully and was stunned when a large steel club swung into the side of her head. This was a literal rather than a metaphorical stunning. She couldn’t move, could speak only falteringly and she felt certain that any test of her strength or dexterity would fail.

“What was the point of that?” Callimar plucked a butterfly from the air and examined it closely.

“Whu..?’

“Why would you ever gallop up like a thundering jabberslythe?”

“Dible node…” her lips were numb but she could taste blood at the back of her throat.

“I suppose I’m partly to blame,” he sighed and turned to face her, his left palm open, watching the butterfly intently as it moved its wings experimentally. “It’s difficult to win a game when you don’t know the rules.”

As the butterfly began to rise, his right palm smashed down on it so suddenly that Sorrel would have jumped if she had any control over her muscles.

“See what I mean? Now then. Let us discuss stealth. What is the ideal reaction the perfect con?”

Sorrel shook her head dumbly.

“Nothing. Once the mark has taken the convincer, you’ve put him on the send and taken off the touch then the true artist cools him out, so he never quite knows if anything has actually happened. It’s the same with assassination – natural causes is the perfect murder. When I have finished with you, Darkfire, you will either be dead or able to deliver a death that no-one, not even the corpse himself, notices.”

Sorrel staggered to her feet and held onto a low stone wall. “Why ‘him’?”

Callimar held the butterflies wings up to the sun and watched the rays pierce the patterns. “For some reason the mark is always male. Don’t ask me why. It’s just the way things are. But I will show you how to relieve the mark of everything including their mortal soul and leave not a trace – not even a wound on your surprisingly undamaged skin.”



She swirled back to the library and said… “could we try something slightly different this time?”

As the door opened, a vast collection of limbs, gears, scythes, grinders and blazing furnaces of every known energy turns to face them, towering over them like four cargo ships fused together and armed with a handful of burning battleaxes.

The thing opened what might have been a mouth or could simply have been a tunnel to Hell wherein lurked balls of lightning bouncing and turning like playful storm elementals looking for a fight.

“Intruders detected,” the words came from somewhere deep inside the grinding gears. “Initiate destruction.”

Sorrel deployed the mental chaff taught by Callimar – the blend of slipping between molecules and moving with such care that few things could see you. Those that could – and she suspected this was armed with truesight – could be diverted by the final ability… the merging into the furniture that made you look just as if you belonged and presented no threat to anything or anyone.

She had made it just over half-way across the room when the others moved.

Kavel charged forward, Kelne summoned spirit guardians, Derthaad called on the dragons of his ancient soul and the mechanised death beast moved forward so fast Sorrel couldn’t even see the blur. It crushed almost all of them, knocking them prone, ramming them back and letting bolts of lightning sear Kelne then bounce off to scour the rest with Sorrel somehow miraculously unscathed.

So far the plan was sort of working. She was at least behind the thing now and could see the slot the punch card had jammed in.

As Sparks conjured magicks on Kavel, stretching the goliath’s mighty limbs out still further, she plucked a tension wrench, two half-diamond picks and a snap gun from the oiled canvas case in her backpack and set to work as carefully as possible. After a few seconds, she felt something click deep in the machine and she sensed the card was freed from whatever impediment had locked it in place.

At which point, without turning its head, the beast swatted her away so that she flew through the air to land next to Kavel. “Hammer and ghost brother,” she winced. “I think you can pull it out now.”

Kavel strode over, ducked a swinging metallic hook and yanked the punch card out with one swift movement.

The animated death trap ground to a halt, its eyes dimming and a soft ticking sound emanating from its core as metals contracted as they cooled.

The goliath rammed the replacement card into the slot, the eyes opened and the thing shuddered back to life, surveyed the room then bolted for the door.

The party limped to their feet, bandaging and healing where possible, just as Chonk wandered in.

“It just left through the door,” the mimic exclaimed with some surprise, taking the damaged card from Kavel. “Now look here… it was only operating at 1/10th of its destructive power. Fancy.”

Sorrel surveyed her damaged comrades and thought – perhaps this will encourage a more cautious approach…?

Kantas is as Kantas does

But as they tiptoed across the library in search of a book on Gith and Tayz decided to banish one of the beholder librarians she wasn’t hugely surprised.

Everyone had agreed - we're just gonna just get the book and leave.

As soon as the doors opened Tayz said, I’m going to kill something.

The battle with the remaining beholder was fraught with flesh wounds until Kelne erased its memory.

“I hope you’re all grateful,” Tayz nodded. “We would have had to fight two otherwise.”

"THEY WEREN'T ENEMIES TO BEGIN WITH, DAMMIT!” Derthaad cried.

“So ungrateful,” Tayz sighed.

Book in hand they stopped into the archive as the bells began to wring, warning that the libraries departure was imminent.

Such riches there were – albeit painfully extracted – that as the party staggered though the door Sorrel felt faintly guilty.

“We appear to have cleaned you out,” she apologised to Chonk.

“We like it here,” Chonk reassured her. “We can’t fight but we should probably help. And honestly, most of that stuff was mothers. It's sad when a son has to speak the words that condemn his own mother. But I couldn't do anything else. Off you go. I'll just sit here and be quiet. You’re probably watching me. Well, I hope you can see what kind of a person I am. I'm not even going to swat that fly. I hope you are watching... you'll say, "Why, Chonk wouldn't even harm a fly..."