I expect the dark secret passage to be long and bring us outside of the city, but it’s short, and we come out in a cellar that smells like root vegetables. At least we’re away from the library. I push the passage door open. Like the door at the other end, it’s disguised as a shelf, this one covered with pickling jars, some full, some empty.
Immediately I can hear shouts and crashing and running feet above, similar to the chaos we just left behind in the library.
Not far enough, I think, swallowing the dry lump in my throat.
There’s a heavy impact, and the cellar door to the surface rumbles and shakes dirt onto the stairs.
I have no intention of going near the cellar door. I stay in the doorway of the passage we came through. Mieklo hugs my ankle, peering around it. He’s shaking, so I pick him up and hold him close.
I dare not speak any words of comfort. I dare not make a sound.
Thumping approaches, great thudding steps, and they stop nearby.
I pull the passage door toward me, closing it, cringing at the soft click that’s too loud. There’s one small hole at eye level, and I dare to peek out of it between two jars filled with green liquid and floating herbs.
The cellar doors swing upward. I hold my breath, my limbs going rigid. Only Mieklo’s whiskers move in the dark passage, his nose testing the air. He can’t see through the hole. Instead, he watches me, listening with his whole body.
A booted foot thumps onto the top stair. It’s armored in black, serrated metal. Armored legs follow, and I can see a large axe dangling loosely from an armored hand. It’s huge, taking up the stairway before I can see its whole body. A helm with metal blades surrounding two glowing red eyes ducks into the cellar, and the armored behemoth has to crouch to fit. Two long horns scrape the ceiling, dislodging dirt and stones to ping down onto its head.
Mieklo makes a tiny disturbed squeak, and absently petting him does nothing to calm either of us.
I refuse to breathe. My lungs burn, begging for air, but I know it would be too loud.
I feel like it’s looking straight at me, through the pickling shelf, through the hidden door, through the tiny hole I peer through. Its red eyes stare forward, but then they flicker away to roam left to right.
It can’t see me, I chant silently, hoping the more I think it, the more true it will become.
It fully enters the cellar, ducked down to fit, approaching the door I peer through. As I watch, it takes a jar of pickled vegetables in its armored hand and studies it. Its red eyes return to the shelf, and I draw back, barely daring to look through the hole from farther away.
It makes a curious noise, a low growling hum, and takes another step toward the shelf.
Shadows blur past above the cellar door, followed by fearful noises, and the armored creature’s attention is drawn up. It hefts its axe, dropping the pickling jar to smash on the floor, and climbs back up the cellar stairs. It disappears without closing the doors.
I let myself breathe, long rattling breaths.
Mieklo is still trembling.
“It’s gone,” I whisper, watching the open portal to the chaos of the city above. “But we’re not safe yet. We need to stay here.”
I stand there, peering out the secret hole and through the open cellar doors until my legs grow wobbly with fatigue.
As I’m watching, there’s an encounter at the top of the stairs. A woman with a child she carries in her arms runs into view, away from something. The woman skids to a stop as the armored creature from before steps into view. She positions her body between it and the child.
It drinks in her terror as she begins to cry, begging.
“Please, let my child go. Let her be safe.”
“Safe? No safe.” The armored creature’s voice echoes within the helmet, deep and gravelly. When it begins to laugh, the sound is like the black serrated steel of its armor rubbing together. “All chaos. All burn.”
My skin prickles with a sudden chill at its words, but I can’t look away.
The armored creature swings his axe, removing the sobbing mother’s head in a spray of blood. The child begins to wail.
I nearly choke on a sob of my own, and I slide down the rough hewn wall, hugging Mieklo close. I fold my legs up to my chest, and Mieklo curls up on my knees, watching me.
The child becomes silent.
I cry until I exhaust myself, falling into a fitful sleep.
I awake with a start. I’m groggy, my brain in a fog until I realize where I am. Then it all comes back in a rush. I jump up, flailing my hands along the wall to guide me in the dark.
Mieklo runs away and turns back to chitter up at me.
“Sorry.” I cringe at the volume of my voice.
I realize the passage is silent. I put my eye to the hole in the secret door. The cellar stairs are lit gray with diffused pre-dawn light. The cellar is silent, and so is the street above.
I don’t trust it. I stand there squinting into the hole for a dozen more breaths. I don’t see or hear anything. Not even the songbirds greeting the coming sun. Just silence.
I open the secret door behind the pickling shelf. The whole cellar smells strongly of vinegar. I avoid the glass shards, my feet only covered with soft slippers.
Mieklo scampers past me. “Come back,” I hiss, but he ignores me. He’s up the cellar stairs before I’m out the door. I approach slower. I squint at the dim light that’s brighter than the dark passageway I’ve been in for hours.
The street above is empty, but it’s puddled with drying blood. I think of the mother and her child, glad they’re not still on the road. Acid roils in my empty stomach.
A clatter makes me duck back into the stairway. I peer over the edge.
A group of people, dirty and disheveled, stumble past in a close-knit clump.
“I wonder where they’re going?” I ask.
Mieklo urges me out of the cellar. His excitement is obvious. I’m happy to see other people instead of monsters too, but I hold tight to my caution.
Unsure of what else to do, I retrieve Mieklo and deposit him on my shoulder. I follow the crowd. There’s safety in numbers.
The streets are strewn with rubble from the buildings surrounding us. Some are completely destroyed, right down to their foundations. Some of the rubble is too large to step over, and I have to walk around it. The fires have mostly gone out, but the air smells like smoke and iron.
I look back over my shoulder to try and see the library. I know right where it should be, high in the city’s skyline, but I don’t see it.
Mieklo makes a sad squeak, and I pet him absently.
The crowd grows as we follow, people coming out of the buildings that still stand. We’re heading toward the center of the city.
The town square opens up wider than usual, with several decapitated buildings ringing it, but it is packed shoulder to shoulder with people. Somehow the town hall still stands, and a single man stands on the stairs, waving his arms and yelling to be heard over the din of chatter and wailing.
I can’t hear what he says.
No one appears to be listening anyway.
I see a man in a light gray robes and with dark hair graying at the temples kneel before an injured young boy. He says a prayer, and his hands glow white. The long cut on the boy’s leg mends before my eyes.
A woman holds her two children close, like a mother hen, covering them with a torn blanket draped down from her shoulders. Only their smudged faces peek out from under it.
Another man in robes the color of spilled wine, waves his hands and creates a plain yellow cake from thin air. He places it into the reaching hands of a young child, and casts another spell. A second cake appears and disappears. There are endless more hands beseeching him.
A girl hovers over her father. He lays on the ground, his face and clothes covered in blood. He still lives, moaning in pain, gripping his distraught daughter’s sleeve.
How many families were torn asunder this day? How many new orphans were made?
I still can’t hear the man on the steps of the town hall. I press through the crowd, trying to get closer. He’s only one voice among many, but I need answers. Does the library still stand? Did any of the librarians or scribes make it out alive? What happens now?
The crowd resists me, and I push through. Then it’s gone. I stumble forward into the void and strike something, like a wall but white and hairy. It knocks me down. It winds me.
The hairy wall turns, and I stare up into the face of a creature I’ve never seen before, not in all my books. Its face is flatter than a horse’s, and long ears flutter around its face in its distress. It rears up and shows a mouthful of flat teeth. It won’t eat me, but it might crush me with its trunk-line legs.
I skitter backwards as Mieklo fights to stay perched on my shoulder.
“Gnuf! Easy!” A husky female voice shouts. A woman with shoulders wider than my arm span steps around the hairy creature, pulling on its reins. She guides it around and settles it. Then she sees me on the ground.
“Oh? Are you who surprised Gnuf?” she asks me.
I don’t know how to answer. He surprised me too.
”Come on then. Let’s get you up off the ground, eh?” The woman’s rough voice is smoothed by her kind words. She offers me her large hand, but I hesitate. “Don’t worry about Gnuf, he won’t hurt you. He’s big, but he’s a softy.”
I take her offered hand, and Mieklo chitters near my ear as I rise. He clings to the collar of my shirt.
“There you go,” the woman says. She still seems huge now that I’m standing. She has a sword, longer than I am tall, strapped across her back. “You all right?”
I nod, my eyes still wide and watching her.
“Well, let’s have Rent take a look at you, eh?” Her huge hand covers my shoulder.
Mieklo continues to chitter anxiously from my opposite shoulder.
“Rent!” the tall woman shouts into the crowd. “Where’d that priest get off to?” she asks no one in particular.
The man in the gray robes with the graying temples appears from the crowd. “Jilli? What’s going on?”
“Check out this girl,” the tall woman answers. “Gnuf knocked her down, and she still seems a little shaken.”
I start to stutter in protest as Rent approaches. “I’m fine,” I manage.
“We’ll check just to be sure,” Rent says. He looks me over. “No blood, no torn clothes. You must have found a good hiding spot.”
I stiffen, split about whether to explain myself.
“Is your family close by?” Rent asks me.
I shake my head. “I-I work as an apprentice scribe at the library.”
Rent’s face falls. “Ahh, the library. A shame what happened there.”
My stomach does a somersault. “What happened to the library?”
“We came into the city from the west gate. The erebus razed it to the ground,” Jilli says. “I’m so sorry. You’re lucky you got out of there in one piece.”
Mieklo exhales a squeaky whine.
I feel a deep sadness wash over me, a sadness additional to my own. I look at the xichu with a confusion I can’t ponder farther as Rent continues to speak.
“You said you don’t have family here. Do you have a way to get back to them?”
I stammer for a moment. Can I? No, they’re far from Northend. Even with enough food, I’d never make it on my own. “No, the library is my home.”
“Not anymore.” A new voice joins us. The elementalist who had been conjuring food appears at Rent’s elbow. “There’s nothing left there. Thousands and thousands of manuscripts lost. It’s a bloody shame.” Despite his words, a hint of amusement plays on his face, like he’s looking for humor in the situation. How could someone possibly find humor in what’s happened here? “But the mayor is announcing some means to assist the city’s widows and orphans. I’m sure they can help you.”
I feel lost in the sea of displaced people.
“Here, have a cake. It will help you feel better.” The elementalist offers one to me.
I take it. I stare at it, unable to figure out what to do with it. I certainly can’t bring myself to put it in my roiling stomach.
“What’s your name, kid?” Hax asks.
“Lola-Grace Eleanor Milicent Feniquill.”
“Oh, all that?” Hax strokes his well-manicured beard. “Can I just call you Lo?”
“I’d rather you not,” I say. “My name’s Lola-Grace.”
“Right.” Hax continues on. “Do you have a back up plan if the library thing doesn’t work out?”
I’m already annoyed with Hax. I want to yell at him. I want to cry. I want to hide in a cellar that smells like dirt and vinegar, because even hiding from demons was better than having my life questioned and my future laid bare. What would I do?
I look at Mieklo on my shoulder. I remember the bard I named him for. “I’d like to be a traveling bard,” I admit.
“That’s something. A bard, eh?”
I nod. “Except…” My face flushes. “Except I don’t have an instrument, I can’t carry a note, and I’m not any good at poetry.”
“That does create a problem.”
“There’s another library in Phiur,” Rent interjects with a shrug.
Mieklo responds to that. The library had been his home as well. He’s never been away from it.
“I don’t know where that is,” I admit, “but I should get Mieklo there. He belongs amongst the books.”
“A xichu? Hmm.” The elementalist scratches his beard. “I thought the librarians ran them all off years ago? I haven’t seen one in ages. I kind of thought they’d gone extinct. Dirty little parchment-munching vermin.”
”Hax, that’s not appropriate,” Rent says, and I can see a familial resemblance between the two of them now that they’re standing side by side.
Mieklo makes a harsh noise and starts yelling in his squeaky voice, his tail twitching where it’s wrapped around my neck.
“He’s not a vermin. Mieklo never eats manuscripts. He only eats scraps I give him.” I stop, realizing the xichu hasn’t eaten anything since before we fled the library. I dig through my pockets and only find two small pieces of parchment remaining. He seems to realize they’re the last, and he only takes one. He stays on my shoulder but turns away to eat it.
“Don’t they feed off emotions too?” Hax asks, making a face at the xichu.
“Only positive emotions, like the emotions we feel when we’re reading or listening to a story,” I correct defensively. “All of this distress is going to make him sick.” I gesture around us.
“Phiur is a long way from here,” Rent says. “You’ll never get there on your own.”
All of my bluster deflates.
Rent makes a thoughtful noise, tapping his lip with one finger.
“Oh, no,” Hax says to Rent’s unspoken words. “I know that look.”
“She should come with us,” Rent says.
“There it is,” Hax replies with a frown.
“Absolutely not,” Jilli answers. “We can’t be responsible for a young girl who doesn’t know how to defend herself. The road will be fraught with danger. No, Rent, no.” Then she says it once more, punctuating her words with a sharp gesture. “No.”
“Who else is there to take her?” Rent asks. “And there’s nothing for her here. The mayor can’t possibly help all of these people.”
“No,” Jilli says, simple and firm.
“We’re going in that direction, Jilli.”
“No.” More firmly.
“I’ll be responsible for her,” Rent continues.
Jilli falters. She exhales. “Fine, Rent. She’s your responsibility, but don’t think that exempts you from any other duties. Gods, Blaize is going to love this,” she says, her hands dropping to her sides.
~ * ~
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