Below the Library

“It’s time to see how high this conspiracy goes,” I said, waving Dean Windsworth’s letter to Mordane Swiftgale.

“Wait, Plume, don’t just force it!” Crispin squeaked.

We were both bent over the Dean’s message to Mordane when Olive returned from saying goodbye to her friend. I’d had enough of waiting for her. We could get some answers right now by reading this letter.

Ignoring Crispin, as I had done so many times before, I cracked the red wax seal and unrolled the parchment. The seal flashed white as it broke and a shiver ran through the feathers on the back of my neck. The parchment grew hot in my hands and I dropped it instinctively as fire raced through the ink and the whole sheet ignited. Within seconds there was only ash left on the floor.

“Nice one, Plume,” congratulated Olive. “I guess we won’t be delivering that letter.”

---

“He must have gone through here,” said Olive confidently. “Look at how hastily the scratches were covered up.”

We all looked at the patch of wall Olive was describing and agreed. The stone was smooth, unnaturally so. Just like the wall outside Figory Figgins’ room.

“But how do we get in,” Olive wondered, less confidently.

“Perhaps,” I said, “we should try violence?”

It had been too long. I took a quick breath and released all control of the rage that had slumbered deep within me through the past week. My heart beat faster and the world around me blurred into the background as I focused on the enemy in front of me: this wall.

I screeched wildly and swung my axe hard against the stone.

The shock ran along the axe, up my arms, and wobbled through my feathers all the way to my feet. The wall was unyielding, and all I got for my efforts was a tiny sliver of stone chippings dusting the ground. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I settled into a sturdier stance and smashed the axe against the wall again and again. No surrender.

Crispin walked up to the wall and felt it carefully with one paw. He wisely stayed outside my reach. After a moment he bowed his head forward and leaned it against the cool stone. He murmured to himself, “One with the stone, one with the stone.”

Olive, more of a thinker than us two do-ers, watched us unconcerned with a kind of baffled detachment. She began looking around for a switch or a lever disguised as some kind of suspicious book, but without any luck.

After a few minutes I felt my rage waning and I collapsed backwards onto the floor and inspected my axe.

“It’s no good, Crispin,” I grumbled. “It’s not going to budge.”

But then the strangest thing happened.

Rather than moving the wall, Crispin made a low groaning sound and his head moved slowly and steadily through the surface of the rock. In time his arms and body melted into the wall too, until at last we saw the bizarre sight of Crispin’s hind paws vanishing.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve never seen that before.”

“Crispin,” Olive called, knocking on the wall where he had disappeared. “Are you okay back there?”

There was a clunk and then a mechanical scraping sound as the wall slid gratingly to the side, sloughing of bits of the smoothed plaster surface as it went. On the other side, Crispin stood with one hand on a lever, framed against floating motes of magical light in the darkness behind him.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “And why didn’t it work for me?”

Crispin shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve just got to use your head.”

---

We snuck, sneaked, and clanked as quietly as possible down the eerie mote-filled corridor. There were old wooden doors all alongside us but they concealed nothing more sinister than disused cleaning cupboards and empty storerooms.

The most promising room was a little further down the passage, just before a sharp turn to the right. It was lit by candlelight and we peered round the open door-frame before daring to go inside.

It looked like a study. The back wall was lined with bookshelves and on the wall to the right there was a door to a built-in cupboard. In the center of the room there was an armchair and side table, situated in just the right light for comfortable reading.

“Race you,” I dared Crispin.

We both bounded forward toward the chair but I was faster. I landed on the cushioned seat with an aggressive bounce and elbowed Crispin out of the way. He knocked into the side table and sent an empty drinking glass teetering over the edge. With his uncanny reactions he shot out his hind legs and caught the glass with his feet.

“Arcane texts, certainly magical, but no languages that I recognize,” mused Olive as she checked through the bookshelves trying her best to ignore us. Her path took her to the cupboard door.

“I wonder what’s in here?” Olive grasped the handle and turned it.

She swung the door open to reveal a tall Strig roosting in the cupboard. The pince-nez and feather colourings were unmistakable. This was Mordane Swiftgale.

“Shhh!” Olive shushed, pointing at the sleeping librarian.

We stared at Mordane, regretting our boisterous antics when we raced into the room, but he showed no signs of waking. In fact, when we looked closer we weren’t even sure if he was sleeping at all.

Mordane Swiftgale was surrounded by a swirling translucent haze of grey energy that we had never seen before. The magical field seemed to be holding him still and unbreathing in the cupboard.

“Crispin,” I whispered warily, holding my axe at the ready. “Get rid of this magic.”

Crispin gulped and nodded. He closed his eyes briefly and the energy around Mordane glowed briefly before thickening into a kind of soup and slopping down to the ground in viscous blobs.

When there was still no movement from Mordane, Olive darted forward and took a sample of the goo which, of course, inspired Crispin to do exactly the same thing for himself.

“He was imprisoned,” I whispered, half to myself and half to the others. “No-one would voluntarily shut themselves in a cupboard and cover themselves in goo. So who have we been dealing with in the library: an imposter?”

“Look,” Olive pointed to a silver pendant hanging on a hook inside the cupboard. I reached up and unhooked it for her. “Shiny!”

“Mordane was wearing that before,” said Crispin absentmindedly as finished scooping grey goo into a sample tube.

“Let’s wake him,” I said resolutely. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

We had to give up in the end, though not for lack of trying. We tied Mordane up, just in case, and sat him in the armchair. I shook him bodily but no change. Crispin slapped him with a pancake. No change.

“I’m out of ideas,” said Crispin.

“We should do something so we know if he wakes up,” said Olive. “There must be some spell I’ve read that would warn us…”

Crispin took the empty drinking glass from the side table and, with remarkable dexterity, flipped the glass up into the air so it landed balanced on Mordane’s head.

“There,” he said. “The librarian wakes up, dislodges the glass, it falls onto the floor and smashes. We’d hear that quite easily down here.”

Who could argue with that?

---

We continued down the corridor towards the end of the passageway. As we approached the final door, my fine-tuned senses picked up the smell of death and decay. There was the muffled sounds of claws clattering against the stone floor.

Maybe this was where the servitors ended up.

Crispin and Olive sneaked ahead to listen at the doorway while I hung back, wary of making too much noise and giving them away. They inspected it carefully to see whether it could be opened by pushing or pulling. After more time than I would have expected, they came to a conclusion.

Olive motioned the plan back to me: get ready!

In one sudden movement, Crispin opened the doorway back on himself and Olive pressed herself flat against the wall on the other side of the door. The bright light of the room ahead shone into the corridor and revealed me standing heroic and alone.

“Mordane Swiftgale,” I addressed the room threateningly. “Or so you led us to believe.”

The room was wide and much longer than the previous study. Inside were chalkboards covered with incomprehensible formulae, runes, and diagrams. Servitor skeletons stood alert throughout the room, paused in the midst of the menial tasks they were carrying out.

At the far end of the room there was a large wooden desk, behind which sat a cloaked Corvum.

“Not quite,” said the Corvum in a croaking voice. “Odwald Ebonheart would be more accurate.”

He did not look up at the heroic profile I cut in the doorway. He simply continued studying the papers on his desk.

“In case you didn’t notice, you’re interrupting my research,” Odwald said after a moment of silence.

“What research requires you to imprison and impersonate a professor of the Avium?” I asked.

“None of your business!” Odwald squawked.

“Why have you been tearing pages out of books in the library?” I persisted. I wasn’t sure that this was Odwald, but I thought he might give himself away.

Odwald slammed his hands down on the desk. “We don’t have time for this!”

I didn’t hear him speak an order or make any motions, but suddenly the servitors dropped what they were carrying and turned to face me. I wasn’t going to take any chances with those sharp claws, so I drew my axe and let loose my rage once more.

I crushed the first servitor I could reach and then turned my axe on a second. Olive burst in through the doorway and strummed a crackling wave of sound through the air, knocking three more backwards against the bookshelves. Crispin spun the door back on itself and popped it off its hinges, storming into the room and destroying another servitor with a pointed finger and the sound of a ringing bell that permeated the room.

Odwald grabbed his staff from behind the desk and sent a missile of white light streaking over to hit me. The servitors seemed emboldened by this and got a few good hits in too, but they were no match for us.

“You need some help, Plume?” asked Olive. She had now drawn her rapier and was dancing through the melee, dodging claws and inflicting wounds.

“No,” I growled as I fended off another attack. “Now it’s personal!”

I crushed one final servitor with the flat of my axe, scattering the once-again lifeless bones across the stone floor. Olive and Crispin had dispatched the remaining skeletons in short order. We found ourselves alone in the room.

“Odwald?” I shouted. “Did anyone see where he went?”

Crispin, in his haste to follow the Corvum’s tracks, tripped over an uneven floor tile and fell flat on his face.

“Over here,” said Olive who had reached the desk. “It’s the missing pages from the library books. And some kind of journal?”

“Let’s have them,” I said, opening the Bag of Holding and tucking them safely inside.

“Down here,” said Crispin, heaving himself up off the floor. “There’s a draft coming from the ground ahead. It must be a trapdoor.”

“Odwald must have fled down there during the scuffle,” I said grimly. “He’ll be defenceless now we’ve taken out his servitors. Let’s go.”

I lifted the trapdoor open and one by one we descended the narrow staircase into the true depths of the library.

---

Odwald had made no attempt to hide his tracks. We could hear him rushing around inside his “laboratory”, as the sign outside the door proclaimed. He was preparing for his final stand. I gripped my axe roughly. We wouldn’t let him get away with whatever it was he thought he could get away with.

“Are you ready?” I asked the others. Olive nodded but Crispin held up his hand.

“One moment,” Crispin said and then touched my chest. His hand glowed with a warm golden light that I had seen once before. “Ardea’s blessing go with you.”

With that, I kicked open the door. But before we could rush Odwald, something brought us up short.

It was a gigantic mass of bones. Much larger, much tougher than the servitors we had fought before. It towered above all of us, monstrous and awful.

“What is it?” I managed to splutter before it raised its claws and crashed across the laboratory floor towards us.

I swung my axe twice but I couldn’t find a weak spot. The creature hounded us back into the doorway where I did my best to hold off its attacks.

“A little help here,” I shouted.

Crispin summoned his spiritual weapon and Olive ducked under my legs to squeeze her way into the room and attack the creature from the other side. But, as soon as she did, more servitors jumped over the laboratory benches to surround her.

“You don’t understand what you’re doing,” croaked Odwald from across the room. “Just leave! Get out of my way or my cobblefright will force you out!”

The cobblefright was just too much for us. Olive and I took a beating on the front lines and, even with Crispin healing our wounds, we were beginning to be overwhelmed. It reached out and grabbed us with its claws and squeezed, crushing us in its grip.

Olive managed to fire off one last thunderwave before she lost consciousness.

“Not Olive!” I cried, hitting the cobblefright with everything I had. But I shouldn’t have forgotten about Odwald.

“Fear me,” said the Corvum with a sinister hiss. His eyes glowed green and I saw fear strike unbidden into Olive and Crispin’s hearts. Their eyes widened and from behind me I heard Crispin’s footsteps flee back down the corridor towards the stairs.

But something inside protected me from giving up. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I continued my assault, axe blows ringing against the toughened bones of the cobblefright.

“Strong, aren’t you,” said Odwald. “Not for long.”

He waved his staff in my direction and I felt my muscles slacken and each blow become more and more feeble. I could barely push back against the cobblefright’s grip and I could feel its talons closing, pressing, suffocating.

Until a sudden change surprised me. I fell to the ground, gasping for breath. The cobblefright had dropped both me and Olive and had turned to face Odwald.

He barely noticed until it was on top of him. The creature raised both claws to strike against its creator. Only then did Odwald react.

“No! What are you doing?” he screamed as the blows landed, knocking him bodily to the side. He clung on to his staff.

I checked on Olive and took advantage of the moment of respite to stabilise her.

“It’s not too late to talk this out, Odwald,” I shouted, hoping that the loss of control of his creation would make Odwald more amenable to diplomacy.

“Talk this out? You attacked me!”

“We can defeat the cobblefright together,” I tried again.

“It’s defending me!” Odwald persisted even as he dodged backwards to avoid another onslaught of violence from his own creation.

I leapt back into the fray. Uncooperative or not, we couldn’t let the cobblefright kill Odwald until we got some more answers from him. I was pleased to hear Crispin scurrying back down the corridor towards us.

“I’m sorry, Olive,” said Crispin, healing our comrade with a word from the doorway as he made it breathlessly back into the room.

“Riiiii!” Olive screeched, shattering the remaining servitors that were picking on her and throwing herself back into combat.

Together we pushed the cobblefright across the room, avoiding its claws and landing blows wherever we found an opening. At last, Crispin called down a bolt of pure light and the bindings that held together the cobblefright’s form started to disintegrate. It collapsed, creaking and crumbling into pieces that rattled and spread across the floor.

“What have you done?” cried Odwald. “What have you done to my cobblefright?”

Before we could act, Odwald raised his staff again and vanished from our sight.

“Where are you, Odwald?”

“He’s disappeared,” I yelled. “Find him!”

Olive tried her best. A quick spell and a scan across the room and we saw him, or at least his outline. He was moving fast along the back of the laboratory and before we knew it he slipped through the door and disappeared into the passages beyond.