The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [123]
The next aisle over must be blocked, too-much of the room above it had fallen long ago, collapsing down onto those library shelves in a large and untidy fall of stone. Stone ceiling tiles hung down, bulged and discolored, like some sort of gigantic, petrified infection. The arc of shelf leading in that direction was dark with the ashes of a long-ago fire that had been small but fierce. Hawkril and Craer exchanged glances, and the procurer led the way up their new aisle, two rows closer to the center.
Here there were still tomes on the shelves. Embra made a little eager sound and tried to push past the procurer-but the blade of his slim sword barred her way, and even as she pressed against it, hissing her frustration at him, she saw that the books were in truth books no more, but a quivering flood of fleshy brown and black mushrooms, their spores drifting around them in a lazy, ale-hued cloud.
The Lady of Jewels made another small sound, this one of disgust and dejection. A moment later, she almost jumped out of her skin when Hawkril's large and heavy hand descended without warning on her shoulder.
"If it's books you want," his deep growl said almost lovingly into her ear, "look into yon shafts of light-up high off the floor here, mind."
Embra moved to where she could see past a tangle of cobwebs, and looked… and saw. Inside each of the six glowing columns of enchanted air, hanging high out of reach of normal-size folk standing on the floor, floated an open book of massive size. "Oh," she gasped, and started forward without thinking.
Hawkril's gripping hand and Craer's raised sword reached her at about the same time-which was also when something swooped in the central darkness, there came a flash, and a figure in robes tumbled out of the high gloom, plunged past the books in their lighted shafts, and struck the floor with an ominous thud and cracking sound.
The Silvertree sorceress swallowed in the firm grasp of the Blackgult men. Together they saw another mage come into view, darting through the air like a gigantic, wingless wasp. He peered down at one book, hanging in the light, and reached for it.
His grasping hand seemed to pass right through it. Even as he frowned down at it in astonishment, crossbows snapped from three places among the shelves on the far side of the dome. Quarrels sped, a transfixed body jerked with a grunt, flung up its arms wildly, and slumped down, sinking swiftly out of sight
"By the Three," Embra murmured, shaking herself as if emerging from an unpleasant dream. Another of the glowing caterpillar-things slunk slowly into view along shelves to their right; shelves that were empty of all but heaps of pulp dripping with mold. It had fleshy horns on its head, which curled and uncurled in constant, almost lazy motion as it undulated along. When it saw them, it reared up, as if to survey them, and then suddenly turned and slid from view, its body passing along the shelf in an impossibly long procession of palely glowing segments. The Lady of Jewels stared at those sagging heaps of discolored pulp. "What's written, I wond-"
There was a thump on their right, very close by, and a swift, light metallic grating or scraping. The Four barely had time to stiffen before two plate-armored figures, as tall and as broad of shoulder as Hawkril, burst around the end of a shelf. Their faces were hidden in full war helms, but their intentions were clear enough. They thrust forward the long and heavy swords in their hands as they came, jabbing the air viciously and charging swiftly enough that the air they were lancing could not help but soon contain one or more of the Band of Four.
Hawkril hesitated not an instant but shouldered through his fellows to meet