The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [167]
In elven form, wearing his green tunic and buckskin leggings, Evandar travelled to Linalantava. With a pair of heavy leatherbound books under his arms, he walked along a misty trail that seemed to lead nowhere. All at once he stepped off, glided down, and found himself standing among twisted, stunted pines.
A cool wind played over a barren landscape. It seemed that the very sunlight changed, turning pale while he picked his way through huge grey boulders along the crest of a hill. Below him a cliff dropped down to a long parched valley gashed by a dry riverbed; far across rose high mountains, black and forbidding, peaked with snow. A wind blew steadily, whining through the coarse grass. The stunted slant of the few trees made it clear that the wind rarely stopped.
When he turned round, he saw directly behind him more of the deformed trees, scattered round a spread of low wooden buildings, long oblongs roofed with split shingles. They were covered with carvings, every inch of the walls, every window frame and door lintel, of animals, birds, flowers, words in the elvish syllabary, all stained in subtle colors, mostly blues and reds, to pick out the designs. From round behind the complex he could hear a faint whinny of horses, and a snatch of song drifted with the swirling dust.
Evandar made his way among the huddled longhouses, some hardly better than huts, that sheltered what was left of one of the finest university systems the world has ever known, then or now. The dry air of these parched mountains protected the books that the People had brought with them into exile, the last pitiful remains of the grand libraries of Rinbaladelan and the copies that generations of scribes had made since. It was the curator of these books that he’d come to see, and he found him in the scriptorium, a long narrow building with windows all round.
Meranaldar jumped up to greet him with a low bow. Although his name meant “demon slayer,” Meranaldar was a thin man, stooped and hollow-eyed from his long years spent tending the sacred books. His hair was as pale as Evandar’s own, but his eyes were a more normal purple color.
“My humble greetings!” Meranaldar said. “A visit from one of the Guardians is an honor worth treasuring.”
“My thanks to you, then.” Evandar held out the books. “I’ve brought these back to you.”
Meranaldar took them and laid them down on the wooden table. His long fingers, gnarled from years of holding a pen, trembled as he turned a few pages.
“Does Jill have no further need of these, then?”
It took Evandar a few moments to realize what he meant.
“I’m sorry,” Evandar said. “But yes, she’s dead.”
Meranaldar’s eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away on the sleeve of his tunic.
“Well, she had the shaking fever very badly when she left us,” Meranaldar said. “May her gods treat her well in their Otherlands, as she called them.”
Evandar considered telling him how Jill had truly died, then decided against it. Grief was grief no matter what caused the mourning, and he had no desire to tell long complex stories about dweomer and the Guardians.
“I knew she’d want you to have them back,” Evandar said instead. “My friend, I’ve come with a favor to ask you. You’ve got a map of the city of Rinbaladelan, if I remember rightly. I should like a copy of it.”
Meranaldar stared at him for a long moment.
“Er, you do have the map, don’t you?” Evandar said.
“Of course! I’m just surprised. It seems such an odd thing to ask for.”
“Ah, well, I suppose it does. I have this scheme in mind, you see, but it’s not yet ripe enough for the talking about.”
“Very well. Far be it for me to argue with a Guardian.” Meranaldar paused, drumming his fingertips on the table while he thought. “The best copy isn’t here. It’s down in the city. I’ll have to find someone to take my place, then journey there.”
There had been a time when Evandar would have accepted all this effort as merely the tribute due to a Guardian, but recently he’d learned what effort meant to those who lived in the world of Time and Death.
“How may I repay