The Sentinels

  “Oh,” she said, looking down at me with wide eyes, “this is going to be bad.”

  I pushed back on the bookcase, and though I was nowhere near tall enough or strong enough, I guess I gave it just enough to set it back straight. Joen took a deep breath, then gasped when the bookcase started to gently lean in the other direction. No way could I pull it back.

  “Wait! I exclaimed. I had an idea.

  “Wait?” Joan asked, surprisingly calm, like the eye of a hurricane. “Are you kidding me?”

  I ran as quickly as I could to the other side of the bookcase and jumped up into the first shelf. That slowed its descent just a bit and made it possible for me to clamber up a couple more until I was about as high off the floor as Joen. We couldn’t see each other, but I could hear her sigh in relief.

  “Whatever you just did,” she called, “it worked.”

  I quickly explained to her that we should carefully climb up the bookcase at the same speed so it stayed balanced. Joen caught on quickly enough and we used some of that discipline we picked up at the Tower of Twilight to carefully ascend the precarious bookcase.

  “Here we are,” Joen said. “Now what?”

  “Well,” I started, “now I can …”

  But the books we wanted were on the other side.

  “I can’t see them,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Joen answered, “and too bad I’m a total drooling village idiot who can’t read or anything.”

  That made me cringe and I apologized as she gathered up as much as she could carry and still climb. Then together we managed to get back down to the floor without being crushed. We met up again on the other side of the bookcase and I took a couple of the books from Joen.

  “We can start with these, and … um … Do you feel that?” I said.

  The floor rumbled. Joen looked around, surprised, then retreated a few steps. The librarian rounded the corner, pushing a great rolling ladder.

  “Here we are,” she said. “Now, the first scroll on the left up there is an …” She spotted the books we were holding, looked up at the shelf, back down at us, then back up at the shelf.

  “Thank you,” Joen said, sheepish. I just kind of smiled.

  “… index,” the librarian went on. “It will tell you what the rest are. You can’t take anything from the library. Check in with me on your way out, and please do not climb the bookshelves.” She walked away before I could respond.

  “Thank you!” I shouted after her, but the sound seemed muted and I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me. I moved to the ladder. It was huge and bulky, but it rolled easily.

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’ll come in handy.”

  “Come on,” Joen said. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we can leave.”

  “I could spend a decade in here,” I said, looking up from a scroll and gazing around the cavernous library.

  “Oi, reading stories and the like, right? Sounds thrilling,” Joen said.

  “Yeah, it does,” I started, turning to face her. But her posture—and her tone, I then realized—did not fit with her words.

  Joen’s arms were wrapped tightly around her body and her head was down, her yellow hair—long once more, as she’d not cut it in the past year—draped over her face. Her eyes darted around, barely visible under the shield of her hair, but obviously uncomfortable, nervous even.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  She looked up at me. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just … can we be done quick here, please? This place makes me feel … odd, you know?”

  “I thought you liked books,” I said, curious. “You seemed to like Malchor’s books, anyway.”

  “It ain’t the books,” she said. “It’s the place. It’s just too … closed. I want to see the sky, eh? Feel the wind. And here it’s like, there is no sky and there never will be.” She shuddered and dropped her head again to an open book on the table in front of her.

  “The sky is just above us,” I said. “Just past the ceiling.”

  “Oi, I know,” she snapped. “I ain’t stupid.”

  We’d found a free table and piled as many of the books and scrolls on it as we could, then just started reading. The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop, and we both spoke in hushed tones.

  “It’s all in Elvish,” Joen said, frustrated. “This one too,” she added, indicating scroll after scroll. “And this one, and that one … all of these.”

  “Give them to me,” I said. “I used to read some Elvish a while back.”

  “Oi, what do they say, then?”

  “I said I used to read it. I haven’t had a chance to in years.”

  Joen growled and slammed closed the tome she was trying to read. “If Malchor knew we were coming here next, why didn’t he teach us to read in Elvish?” she asked.

  “He was too busy teaching us discipline,” I answered.

  “By locking us in a room with a bunch of books on discipline, eh? Why couldn’t one of those books have been in Elvish?”

  I looked to the shelves around us. They were filled to bursting with tomes and scrolls and books of various sorts. “Maybe,” I said, thinking aloud, “there’s a lexicon somewhere around here.”

  “A whatsicon?” Joen asked.

  “A lexicon. A book written in two languages, to translate from one to the other.”

  “Oi, that’d be useful. Maybe that librarian woman has one.”

  “Shhh!”

  That sound startled us both. It was the librarian, staring down at us as though we were unclean things that just wiggled our way out from under a rock. I grimaced, but Joen hid a smile.

  The woman handed me a little silk pouch. I only glanced away from her for a second and she was gone.

  “That’s just creepy, ain’t it?” Joen whispered. “The way she does that?”

  The soft silk pouch felt heavy in my hands. I could feel a single object inside, round and curved. Without hesitation, I opened the drawstring and pulled out the object: a large glass lens.

  I peered through the lens, looking at Joen, expecting her to be distorted. But she looked perfectly normal. However, I felt like something was amiss, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  I pulled the lens away from my eye. My view didn’t change.

  “Great,” she said, “now we can see the words we can’t read more close up.”

  I brought the lens back to my eye then withdrew it again. After several more attempts, I finally figured out what I was seeing.

  Without the lens, the words on the spine of the tome on the shelf behind Joen was written in Dwarvish. When I brought the lens back to my eye, the words were written, very clearly, in Common.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I found our lexicon.” I took the big book from Joen and started to read. “It works on Elvish too.”

  “Well hurray,” Joen quipped. She stood up and stretched. “Nature calls.”

  I waved her off and she went to find a bathroom. I had barely begun to start reading when she tapped me on the shoulder. Still reading, I said, “That was fast.”

  She leaned down so her lips were very close to my ear and whispered, “Someone’s here.”

  I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and she whispered, “He’s writing, but not reading.”

  Right away, I realized someone was listening to us and writing down everything we said. We were doing research for him too, whoever he was.

  The study table had a collection of quills, a communal inkwell, and a small stack of parchment sheets. I took one and wrote: What does he look like?

  Joen took the quill from me and wrote: Cloke, hud up. Her penmanship was as bad as her spelling.

  I took the quill back. Like last night?

  I looked at her and she nodded.

  Act normal, I wrote with my left hand and loosened the cutlass from its sheath with my right. But no reading aloud.

  She nodded and went a different way to find a bathroom while I tried to read and keep one eye on the lookout. It was
n’t easy.

  After a bit, she came back and whispered in my ear, “He’s gone.”

  “We should still be quiet,” I whispered back, looking around.

  She sat across from me, took a quill, and wrote: Wut exakly r we lucking four heer?

  “Nice spelling,” I whispered and she made a gesture that the sailors used to use.

  I took the quill from her hand and wrote: If I can find a book called How to Destroy the Stone of Tymora, that would be great, but failing that, anything that will at least point us in the direction of the Stone of Beshaba. We know we need both to destroy one.

  She read that and nodded. We both went back to reading.

  To save time, we’d pulled down all the documents from the section the librarian had pointed out—there weren’t many, maybe half a dozen tomes and two scroll cases, plus the index. A cursory glance at the tomes suggested there would be little information there. Two of the six were regional histories written by the famed traveler Volo. One concerned the history of the High Moor, and was in fact an Elvish translation of a tome my mentor, Perrault, had carried, and had once made me read—or more likely, this was the original tome, and Perrault’s was the translation. Another work of Volo detailed the Great Desert, Anauroch. What these had to do with the stones, I couldn’t quite fathom. I wondered at first if they’d perhaps been mixed into the collection by accident, but their titles appeared on the index alongside the remaining documents.

  The other four tomes detailed histories and mythologies relating to Tymora and Beshaba. Whether they contained any relevant information, we couldn’t tell just at a glance. One tome did reference the stones themselves, but the passage in question was a story about the heroic deeds of a past stone bearer and said nothing about how to destroy them, or how to find them, or the identity of the Sentinels, or anything I found particularly useful or interesting.

  While Joen made her way slowly through a book of funerary rites, I opened one of the scroll cases, which had huge scorch marks on it as though it had once been set on fire. It wasn’t easy to open, and was even harder to get the partially burned scroll out of, but eventually I sat back to read it. Because it was written in some type of Elvish script, I traced the magical lens over the parchment, watching in amazement as the Common-tongue translation appeared behind the curved glass.

  “Oi, this’s some sort of map,” Joen said.

  I shushed her and looked up to see her holding a piece of parchment that had been tucked into the pages of the funeral book. She placed the map in the middle of the table so we could both see it. It showed some desert—probably Anauroch—but its labels were not in Common.

  She reached over and snatched the lens from my hand.

  “Hey!” I exclaimed, and my own voice sounded deafening in my ears.

  Joen took great pleasure in shushing me. She gazed through the lens at the map.

  “The lens isn’t working right,” she whispered. “This isn’t in Common.”

  I slid closer to look, and sure enough, as she held the lens over the tags, the words still appeared to be in another language.

  “We should ask the librarian about it,” she whispered.

  I held up a hand to stop her and pointed to a symbol on the map that looked like half a letter.

  “Oi, yeah, I see it. Could be an o? Maybe a g?”

  I shrugged and reached out for the lens.

  “I don’t see how it’s gonna matter who holds the lens,” she whispered, but gave it to me anyway.

  I turned away from her, putting the lens back on my own parchment.

  “Hey, give that back!” she shouted angrily, then clapped her hands over her mouth. Trying not to laugh, she grabbed at my shoulder, hoping to turn me back around. When that failed, she tried reaching over me to grab the lens. I just kept reading and trying not to laugh myself.

  “Hey now, this one is interesting,” I whispered, then motioned her over to look through the lens with me. The scroll was all about the Stone of Beshaba, how it was created, the first soul given to it, the Sentinel—I almost dropped the lens, I was so surprised.

  Joen gasped and we both read: And the Sentinel was an Elf of exceeding Grace. And the Sentinel was called …

  But it was burned on that edge. We couldn’t read it.

  Joen pointed to a partial letter and whispered in my ear, “Could be an a.”

  I could only shrug and read on.

  It said the Sentinels are connected to their stones and to each other. They always know where the other is and where the stone is, and the soul the stone has chosen. That must be how those cultists had found us.

  “Great,” Joen whispered.

  Though it had been a while since we’d seen the hooded man or anyone else, I took up the quill and wrote: If this scroll case has information on the Stone of Beshaba, maybe the other has information on the Stone of Tymora.

  She took the quill and wrote back: And that’d have the name of Timora’s Centenal.

  And that Sentinel can find the other Sentinel, I answered in writing. And then we’ll have both Sentinels, and one can lead us to the other stone!

  We looked at each other, then, lunged for the unopened scroll case as one. Joen got there first.

  “Careful,” I whispered.

  “I know! Relax, eh?” she answered, plucking the silver stone cap from the scroll. With shaking hands she withdrew the parchment from inside. She stared at it a moment, then her face dropped into a half frown, half scowl.

  I tried to make it clear from my facial expression that I was waiting to hear what it had to say. She turned it around to show me and mouthed, “The scroll is missing. There’s just another map.”

  “No,” I whispered, holding up the first map. “It’s the same. Look.” When we looked at them side by side it was obvious that they were identical, but the lettering was different.

  I thought for a bit then took the parchment from Joen’s hand. I stacked the two maps, holding them toward a lamp. The parchments were thin, nearly translucent in the light, and I could clearly see the markings of one map through the other. I aligned them, and sure enough, the gaps in the text of one perfectly fit with the other.

  “The lens,” I whispered, turning to Joen. But of course, she was a step ahead of me. As I turned, I nearly smashed my face into her rising arm.

  “Watch it, eh?” she muttered as she shoved me aside and grabbed the stacked maps, bringing the lens up in front of them.

  It was Anauroch after all.

  “But what’s this?” Joen whispered, gesturing at the other word.

  There were only two labels on the whole map—the other markings appeared to be short poems scattered around the edges. But Anauroch, the Great Desert, was clearly marked, and along its western edge was a small symbol the lens translated as “Twinspire.”

  I shook my head and shrugged. Neither of us wanted to say the word aloud lest our “friend,” was still skulking about.

  She looked at me, her dour mood of the past few hours gone, the twinkle back in her eye. “Hold these,” she said, practically shoving the maps and the lens into my hand. I tried very hard not to crumple the parchment scrolls as I caught them, but I was fairly sure there was now a crease or two that hadn’t been there before.

  I watched in amazement as Joen became a veritable whirlwind of energy. She bounded over to the books, collecting them into one armload, and very nearly ran up the ladder. She piled the books into their compartment haphazardly then leaped back down to the floor. She swept the last parchment up, rolled it quickly and placed it in a scroll case. She put it in the correct case, I noted, but I figured that was more luck than intent. I separated out the maps, moving to hand her the correct fragment. But she ignored me, climbing the ladder again, and placing the scroll case and the index scroll among the tomes.

  Down the ladder she came again, grabbing the remaining empty scroll case. She held it out to me expectantly. When I hesitated, she tried to grab the maps. Realizing what she meant to do, I rolled up
the parchment sheets, figuring I’d be a lot gentler than she was being. I slipped the maps into the case.

  “Wrong case,” I said.

  “Oi, I don’t care,” Joen said, popping the cap on the case. “Come on!”

  She took off at a near sprint, rounding the corners in the maze of books with such speed I feared she’d careen into the shelves and cause a serious disaster. But she’d always been graceful, and the year of training at the Tower of Twilight had only enhanced that, and despite her speed she moved in perfect balance. I followed. The boots I’d procured from Sali Dalib so more than a year ago in Memnon magically allowed me to move so quickly it was easy to match her speed.

  On the journey through the library, Joen kept her head down, and I figured she wasn’t paying much attention to our route. But, as it turns out, I was wrong. She never hesitated at a turn, but moved with purpose and direction, and only a few moments later we were bursting through a door into the antechamber of the library.

  The librarian wasn’t surprised in the least as we came through the door. She didn’t even lift her head as she asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “There’s a scroll missing from your collection,” Joen said.

  That got the librarian’s attention. “Missing?”

  “Missing. Not present. It ain’t where it’s supposed to be, you know?”

  The librarian looked shocked. “All the documents in this library are magically marked,” she said. “They can’t be removed, or I’d know about it!”

  But Joen had already pulled me past her. It was then that I realized Joen wasn’t carrying the scroll case anymore.

  “Oi,” Joen said as we rushed to the door, “if you say so!”

  “But …,” the librarian sputtered, “you wait now.”

  Joen, still running, let go of me to push the doors open with both hands, and we were out in the bright spring sunshine. Sunshine? I thought. How long had we been in there?

  I followed her down the steps at a run while a loud clamor of gongs and bells sounded behind us.

  “Do you still have that scroll case?” I asked Joen as we ran out into the street.