The Last Guardian (5 page)

These men had fought, Khadgar realized, both hard and recently. Only one man in three was without some form of rude bandage, bloodstained badges of war sticking out from beneath dirty armor and damaged helms. Their weapons were notched as well, and spattered with dried crimson. He had fallen into a battlefield.

Khadgar examined their position. They were atop a small hillock, a mere fold in the undulating plains that seemed to surround them. What vegetation existed had been chopped down and formed into crude battlements, now guarded by grim-faced men. This was no safe redoubt, no castle or fort. They had

chosen this spot to fight only because there was no other available to them.

The soldiers parted as their apparent leader, a great, white-bearded man with broad shoulders, pushed his way through. His armor was a battered as any, but consisted of a breastplate bolted over a crimson set of scholar’s robes, of the type that would not have been out of place in the halls of the Kirin Tor. The hem, sleeves, and vest of these crimson robes were inscribed with
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runes of power—some of which

Khadgar recognized, but others which seemed alien to him. The leader’s snowy beard reached almost to his waist, obscuring the armor beneath, and he wore a red skullcap with a single golden gem on the brow. He held a gem-tipped staff in one hand, and a dark red sword in the other.

The leader was bellowing at the soldiers, in a voice that sounded to Khadgar like the raging sea itself.

The warriors seemed to know what he was saying, though, for they formed themselves up neatly along the barricades, others filling gaps along the line.

The snow-bearded commander brushed past Khadgar, and despite himself the youth stumbled back, out of the way. The commander should not have noticed him, no more than any of the blood-spattered warriors had.

Yet the commander did. His voice dropped for a moment, he stammered, his foot landed badly on the uneven soil of the rocky hilltop and he almost stumbled. Yet instead he turned and regarded Khadgar.

Yes, he looked at Khadgar, and it was clear to the would-be apprentice that the ancient mage-warrior saw him and saw him clearly. The commander’s eyes looked deeply into Khadgar’s own, and for a moment Khadgar felt as he had under Medivh’s own withering glare earlier. Yet, if anything, this was more intense. Khadgar looked into the eyes of the commander.

And what he saw there made him gasp. Despite himself, he turned away, breaking the locked gaze with the mage-warrior.

When Khadgar looked up again, the commander was nodding at him. It was a brief, almost dismissive nod, and the old man’s mouth was a tight frown. Then the snow-bearded leader was off again, bellowing at the warriors, entreating them to defend themselves.

Khadgar wanted to go after him, to chase him down and find out how he could see him when others did not, and what he could tell him, but there was a cry around him, a muddy cry of tired men called into duty one last time. Swords and spears were raised to a sky the shade of curdled blood, and arms pointed toward the nearby ridges, where flooding had stripped out patterns of purple against the rust-colored soil.

Khadgar looked where the men were pointing, and a wave of green and black topped the nearest ridge.

Khadgar thought it was some river, or an arcane and colorful mudflow, but he realized that the wave was an advancing army. Black was the color of their armor, and green was the color of their flesh.

They were nightmare creatures, mockeries of human form. Their jade-fleshed faces were dominated by heavy underslung jaws lined with fanged teeth, their noses flat and snuffling like a dog’s, and their eyes small, bloody, and filled with hate. Their ebon weapons and ornate armor shone in the eternally dying sun of this world, and as they topped the rise they let out a bellow that rocked the ground beneath them.

The soldiers around him let out a cry of their own, and as the green creatures closed the distance between the hill they let out volley after volley of red-fletched arrows. The front line of the monstrous creatures stumbled and fell, and were immediately trampled by those who came behind. Another volley

and another rank of the inhuman monsters toppled, yet their failing was subsumed by the advancing tide of the mass that followed.

To Khadgar’s right there were flashes as lightning danced along the surface of the earth, and the monstrosities screamed as the flesh was boiled from their bones. Khadgar thought of the warrior-mage commander, but also realized that these bolts only thinned the charging hordes by the merest fraction.

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And then the green-fleshed monstrosities were on top of them, the wave of ebon and jade smashing against the rude palisade. The felled timbers were no more than twigs in the path of this storm, and

Khadgar could feel the line buckle. One of the soldiers nearest him toppled, impaled by a great dark spear. In the warrior’s place there was a nightmare of green flesh and black armor, howling as it swept down upon him.

Despite himself, Khadgar backed two steps, then turned to run.

And almost slammed into Moroes, who was standing in the archway.

“You,” wheezed Moroes calmly, “were late. Might have gotten lost.”

Khadgar wheeled again in place, and saw that behind him was not a world of crimson skies and green monstrosities, but an abandoned sitting room, its fireplace empty and its chairs covered with drop cloths.

The air smelled of dust only recently disturbed.

“I was…” gasped Khadgar. “I saw…I was…”

“Misplaced?” suggested Moroes.

Khadgar gulped, looked about, then nodded mutely.

“Late supper is ready,” groaned Moroes. “Don’t get misplaced, again, now.”

And the dark-clad servant turned and glided quietly out of the room.

Khadgar took one last look at the dead-end passage he had stumbled into. There were no mystic archways or magical doorways. The vision (if vision it was) had ended with a suddenness only to be equaled by its beginning.

There were no soldiers. No creatures with green flesh. No army about to collapse. There was only a memory that scared Khadgar to his core. It was real. It had felt real. It had felt true.

It was not the monsters or the bloodshed that had frightened him. It was the mage-warrior, the snow-haired commander that seemed to be able to see him. That seemed to have looked into the heart of him, and found him wanting.

And worst of all, the white-bearded figure in armor and robes had Khadgar’s eyes. The face was aged, the hair snow-white, the manner powerful, yet the commander had the same eyes that Khadgar had seen in the untarnished mirror just moments (lifetimes?) before.

Khadgar left the sitting room, and wondered if it would not be too late to get a set of blinders.

Three

Settling In

We’ll start you off slow,” said the elder wizard from across the table. “Take stock of the library.

Figure out how you are going to organize it.”

Khadgar nodded over the porridge and sausages. The bulk of the breakfast conversation was about

Dalaran in general. What was popular in Dalaran and what were the fashions in Lordaeron. What they were arguing about in the halls of the Kirin Tor. Khadgar mentioned that the current philosophical question when he left was whether when you created a flame by magic, you called it into being or summoned it from some parallel existence.

Medivh huffed over his breakfast. “Fools. They wouldn’t know an alternate dimension if it came up and bit them on the….So what do you think?”

“I think…” And Khadgar, suddenly realizing he was once again on the spot. “I think that it may be something else entirely.”

“Excellent,” said Medivh, smiling. “When given a choice between two, choose the third. Of course you meant to say that when you create fire, all you are doing is concentrating the inherent nature of fire contained in the surrounding area into one location, calling it into being?”

“Oh yes,” said Khadgar, then adding, “had I thought about it. For a while. Like a few years.”

“Good,” said Medivh, dabbing at his beard with a napkin. “You’ve a quick mind and an honest
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appraisal of yourself. Let’s see how you do with the library. Moroes will show you the way.”

The library occupied two levels, and was situated about a third of the way up the tower itself.

The staircase along this part of the tower hugged the outside edge of the citadel, leaving a large chamber two floors high. A wrought iron platform created an upper gallery on the second level.

The room’s narrow windows were covered with interwoven rods of iron, reducing what natural light the room had to little more than that of a hooded torch. On the great oak tables of the first level, crystalline globes covered with a thick patina of dust glowed with a blue-gray luster.

The room itself was a disaster area. Books were scattered opened to random pages, scrolls were unspooled over chairs, and a thin layer of dusty foolscap covered everything like the leaves on the forest floor. The more ancient tomes, still chained to the bookshelves, had been unshelved, and hung from their links like prisoners in some dungeon cell.

Khadgar surveyed the damage and let out a deep sigh. “Start me off slow,” he said.

“I could have your gear packed in a hour,” said Moroes from the hallway. The servant would not enter the library proper.

Khadgar picked up a piece of parchment at his feet. One side was a demand from the Kirin Tor for the master mage to respond to their most recent missive. The other side was marked with a dark crimson smear that Khadgar assumed at first was blood but realized was nothing more than the melted wax seal.

“No,” said Khadgar, patting his small pouch of scribe tools. “It’s just more of a challenge than I first anticipated.”

“Heard that before,” said Moroes.

Khadgar turned to ask about his comment, but the servant was already gone from the doorway.

With the care of a burglar, Khadgar picked his way through the debris. It was as if a battle had erupted in the library. Spines were broken, covers were half-torn, pages were folded over upon themselves, signatures had been pulled from the bindings entirely. And this was for those books that were still mostly whole. More portfolios had been pulled from their covers, and the dust on the tables covered a layer of papers and correspondences. Some of these were open, but some were noticeably still unread, their knowledge contained beneath their wax seals.

“The Magus does not need an assistant,” muttered Khadgar, clearing a space at the end of one table and pulling out a chair. “He needs a housekeeper.” He shot a glance at the doorway to make sure that the castellan was well and truly gone.

Khadgar sat down and the chair rocked severely. He stood up again, and saw that the uneven legs had shifted off a thick tome with a metallic cover. The front cover was ornate, and the page edges clad in silver.

Khadgar opened the text, and as he did so he felt something shift within the book, like a slider moving down a metal rod or a drop of mercury moving through a glass pipe. Something metallic unwound within the spine of the tome.

The book began to tick.

Quickly Khadgar closed the cover, and the book silenced itself with a sharp whirr and a snap, its mechanism resetting. The young man delicately set the volume back on the table.

That was when he noticed the scorch marks on the chair he was using, and the floor beneath it.

“I can see why you go through so many assistants,” said Khadgar, slowly wandering through the room.

The situation did not improve. Books were hanging open over the arms of chairs and metal railings. The correspondence grew deeper as he moved farther into the room. Something had made a nest in one corner of the bookshelf, and as Khadgar pulled it from the shelf, a small shrew’s skull toppled out, crumbling when it struck the floor. The upper level was little more than storage, books not even reaching the shelves, just piled in higher stacks, foothills leading to mountains leading to unattainable peaks.

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And there was one bare spot, but this one looked like someone had started a fire in a desperate attempt to reduce the amount of paper present. Khadgar examined the area and shook his head—something else burned here as well, for there were bits of fabric, probably from a scholar’s robe.

Khadgar shook his head and went back to where he had left his scribe’s tools. He spilled out a thin wooden pen with a handful of metal nibs, a stone for sharpening and shaping the nibs, a knife with a flexible blade for scraping parchment, a block of octopus ink, a small dish in which to melt the ink, a collection of thin, flat keys, a magnifying lens, and what looked at first glance like a metallic cricket.

He picked up the cricket, turned it on its back, and using a specially-fashioned pen nib, wound it up. A

gift from Guzbah upon Khadgar completing his first training as a scribe, it had proved invaluable in the youth’s perambulations among the halls of the Kirin Tor. Within was contained a simple but effective spell that warned when a trap was in the offing.

As soon as he had wound it one revolution, the metallic cricket let out a high-pitched squeal.

Khadgar, surprised, almost dropped the detecting insect. Then he realized that the device was merely warning about the intensity of the potential danger.

Khadgar looked at the piled volumes around him, and muttered a low curse. He retreated to the doorway, and finished winding the cricket. Then he brought the first book he had picked up, the ticking one, over to the doorway.

The cricket warbled slightly. Khadgar set the trapped book to one side of the doorway. He picked up another volume and brought it over. The cricket was silent.

Khadgar held his breath, hoped that the cricket was enchanted to handle all forms of traps, magical and otherwise, and opened the book. It was a treatise written in a soft feminine hand on the politics of the elves from three hundred years back.

Khadgar set the handwritten volume to the other side of the doorway, and went back for another book.

“I know you,” said Medivh, the next morning, over sausage and porridge.