Two Renegade Realms (Realm Walkers Book 2) (6 page)
“No. I know about the Lymen warriors.”
Various light materials exquisitely sewn into elaborate clothing quivered over her eager frame. Sparkly pieces flashed an array of colors. She didn’t wait for the men to respond. “I’ve been reading the stories.”
Cantor wondered if he’d left all sense and logic in the sleeping alcove. He certainly was not surrounded by pillars of rationality. His companions had lost touch with the importance of this mission. Fishing tourneys and bedtime tales? “Stories?”
Dukmee stepped closer to Bixby and put a hand on her shoulder. “Histories.” He gestured to the wall lined with bookcases. “Diaries, journals, reports, letters. A thousand different accounts of the Lymen.”
Bridger spun around to face Bixby. His tail knocked over a small wooden orrery. “And you can tell us all about them?”
“Absolutely. I have excellent retention.”
“What do they like to eat?”
“Cattle and corn.”
“Weaknesses?”
“Our sun hurts their eyes.”
“Weapon of choice?”
“Anything pointy. Swords, arrows, knives, and spears.”
Bridger grinned at Cantor. “This is great.”
Cantor agreed, but his mind was already looking ahead. “We’ll have to organize the information first, plan our strategy accordingly, and then secure one more thing before we can even hope to slow them down.”
“What?” asked Bixby. “What else do we need?”
“An army.”
Determined to get numerous projects done before they left, the realm walkers took up different chores. Later in the afternoon, Bixby sat inside a cupboard she had emptied of its store of scrolls. One of the scrolls had caught her eye.
Colors.
Most of the materials she had investigated were black on white or faded brown on darkening yellow. She’d found the latter hard to read.
When she glimpsed a design of yellow, green, and purple, she snatched the scroll out of the tidy pile. With new enthusiasm, she sat on the only uncluttered spot available, the cabinet she had just emptied.
The musty smell tickled her nose. She dug out a lace handkerchief saturated with a light lemon freshening gel and waved it around her head. Tucking it away with a smile, she concentrated on her find. She pulled one end of the neat bow, untying the ribbon. The parchment crackled as she cautiously unrolled the scroll.
Pictures!
Whimsical pictures. The artist conveyed his delight over the subjects depicted on the page, drawing with a light touch of outlining and muted colors giving substance. Bixby wondered
if originally these colors had been bold. Now the yellow was murky, the green subdued, and the purple almost black.
As she unrolled the scroll, the pictures became brighter. She bit her lip in anticipation as she ventured on. The last section had only the line drawings, which petered out to nothing. A great deal of room was left, but no more entries.
She frowned.
She didn’t have a clear idea of what the maker of this scroll wanted to portray. In order to grasp that concept, she needed to be more systematic in her study. Carefully rerolling the last of the parchment, she began again, this time applying years of studying technique to follow the sequence in more depth.
The depiction of a pod from some plant repeated throughout the manuscript, though only once did the artist actually picture this pod in the branches of a bush. As Bixby explored the scenes, she realized the graceful, willowy limbs and foliage surrounding the pods were actually creatures, more animal than plant. They seemed to crawl in and out of the pods, which begged the question: Were the people tiny or the pods humongous?
Scribbles beside the images began to make sense to her puzzling mind.
Words, but not in a language she recognized and not in a script she had ever seen before. She secured the scroll with its original ribbon and scrambled out of her cubbyhole. Dukmee must see this.
She found him packing up maps on the far side of the library. Dukmee used ornate map weights to spread the scroll from one end of a long table to the other, planting the palm-sized metal statues at regular intervals along the half-blank length of parchment.
The scholar tapped his chin as he slowly perused the document, then grabbed a long-legged metal animal by its middle and shifted it in order to expose an image quite near the edge.
Bridger walked close behind him, peering from his great height over the mage’s shoulder.
Cantor stood on the other side of the table, which meant he looked at the whole piece upside down. He pointed to a square of random-looking black marks. “What’s this language?”
“The old tongue,” Dukmee said.
Cantor’s thoughts wisped through Bixby’s mind.
“What does he mean?”
Bixby allowed her cheer to brighten her eyes and face, even in this solemn occasion.
“I believe the next history round we would have taken in training would have covered the theory of the nine planes and only one language. And of course, the old tongue.”
“Ahma and Odem never mentioned these theories.”
“Not theories, plural, but theory, singular.”
Dukmee bent over the scroll, taking a closer look at some of the writing. Bixby held her breath, waiting for some pronouncement. Dukmee straightened and moved on.
She sighed.
“Why just one theory?” asked Cantor.
“It shouldn’t be called a theory, should it?”
Exasperation nipped at Cantor’s words.
“
No comment. Not enough information.”
Bixby giggled.
“Sorry.”
“It is fortunate,”
said Dukmee to both of their minds,
“
that my coworkers are so considerate. They’d not hinder my thinking by chatting superfluously while I weigh the evidence of this startling discovery.”
Bridger’s voice pushed into the cluttered conversation.
“Not using a hedge, are they?”
Bixby covered her mouth. A ridiculous gesture since the words hadn’t been spoken. A bubble of laughter tried to surface. She tamped it down. Her eyes caught Cantor’s. His twinkled. The bubble rose again and escaped.
The laugh burst from her lips, followed by Bridger’s slow chuckle, then Cantor’s rumbling laughter.
Dukmee’s eyebrows rose almost to his hairline. He grinned. “Let’s have tea and biscuits, and I’ll tell you what I think.”
The busyness of preparing a snack gave them time to put aside their humor. With hot tea in their mugs, the three turned eager eyes to the mage.
With his free hand, Dukmee indicated the new find displayed on the table. “These are pictures of the devices used to travel from one plane to another. The pods are part of a plant, of course, and therefore prone to lose integrity quickly.” He pointed to a picture of a pile of vegetation. On closer inspection, Bixby realized it was not a garbage heap, but old rotting pods.
Dukmee continued. “I tend to think they can make one trip, to and back. They seem to carry only one occupant. So far, I see more problems in using them than advantages.”
Cantor ran his finger along the rim of his mug. “Unless you have no portals and no realm walkers.”
“Exactly so, Cantor. I doubt they would be useful for our forces, but I can see the guild using them for illegal transport. The evidence of their crime could be buried in a mulch pile.”
Jesha jumped into Bridger’s lap, eyeing the cheese in his sandwich. Bridger squinted as he thought. Offhandedly, he offered his cat a pinched-off treat while he pondered the new information. “Shall we need an army to repulse the Lymen?”
“I believe so.” Dukmee pointed to mid-scroll. “See one of the last pictures — the one that looks like scribble and dots?”
They all directed their attention to where Dukmee pointed.
“That,” said the mage in a tone of a grandiose announcement, “is a field. In the field are plants. On the plants are pods.”
Realization poured through Bixby’s mind and flooded her system with a surge of energy. “Those are pods, thousands of pods.”
Bridger shook his head slowly. “Enough pods to deliver an army.”
Cantor grimaced. “We need an army.”
B
ridger used both arms to gesture at the table laden with books, scrolls, and loose sheets of parchment. “Shouldn’t we ask somebody for permission to take all this from the library?”
Cantor shrugged, amused by his constant’s desire to follow rules, even when no rules were evident. “Who shall we ask?”
He glanced up from the scrolls he was tying together as the female member of their mission waltzed into the room.
With her garments flowing around her, Bixby came to the work table, carrying several hampers. “Bridger, I’m just glad Dukmee didn’t ask us to stuff orreries into these bags.”
Cantor straightened and used two fisted hands to rub the small of his back. None of the work tables were the right height for his long torso. He watched Bixby’s graceful hands pluck up the smaller tomes and place them in the bag. Bridger’s movements resembled those of a shovel digging and tossing garden
dirt around. Cantor strode to his side, hoping that with his help they might store the materials with less damage to their frail pages.
While he piled books into small stacks for Bridger to shift into the hamper, he stole glances at Bixby, with her clothes fluttering to the slightest movement and her face in a constant shine of pleasure. She didn’t look like someone who would stick to an assignment as dry as plowing through hundreds of old works of literature.
He smiled at her. “Bixby, you constantly surprise me. You’ve done an admirable job of reading and recording Lymen facts in your journal.”
She tossed a frown at him. “I thought you were smart enough to figure out that I’m more than a pretty face. I’m disappointed to find out you didn’t think I could study. After all, Cantor, I had my first tutor when I was three.”
He laughed and saw her relax. He stretched out his arms and turned in a complete circle. “I know, Bix, but look at this.”
Shaking his head, Cantor surveyed the multiple bookcases around the room. He studied the disheveled shelves, noting the empty spaces and the stacks of tomes on various tabletops. “No wonder they called this the Lymen Library. How many books do you suppose are here?”
Bridger answered. “Five hundred sixty-seven.”
Bixby’s head came up, and she stared at the dragon. “You counted them?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I couldn’t sleep the first night we were here.”
Cantor grunted. “I’m surprised you didn’t put back the ones that Dukmee and Bixby had out.”
“Dukmee threatened to lock me in a bottle if I messed
up his piles. I didn’t know which were his and which were Bixby’s.”
Despite the annoyance Cantor sometimes felt at the mage’s high-handed decrees, he could not deny the man’s good judgment. Especially this last decree to pack up most of the library and take it with them. “Dukmee’s right, I know. By taking the unread volumes with us, we can continue to read and learn as much as we can before the enemy lands. There just hasn’t been enough time for Bixby to read and summarize all the information.”
Bixby kept up her pace of securing the material into hampers. “I think part of his reasoning is that it’s better for us to have these than our enemies. What an advantage over the council to know more about our visitors than they do!”
Bixby pushed between the dragon and Cantor as she tidied more bound documents away in another hamper. Apparently, they weren’t working fast enough for her.
She thrust her chin toward the tallest bookcase. “I never did get that entire high shelf read. The smaller books came down easily, but I couldn’t budge that big, thick monster. It’s stuck to the ledge. I couldn’t get situated to apply enough leverage.” Her head swung back and forth as she looked at her companions. “Maybe one of you could get that last book down.”
Cantor left off straightening parchments. Rubbing his palms on his tunic, he approached the ladder leading to the top shelf of a bookcase that almost reached the ceiling. It was twice his height.
“Bridger, come hold the ladder steady,” he called as he put his foot on the first rung.
The dragon trotted across the room and grasped the wooden slats with his massive clawed hands. “Got it.”