The Armageddon Library

 The entrance hall was marble-floored and the white marble, flecked with red and gold inclusions, glistened as though freshly polished.  Tall stone pillars — not marble as that would have been decadent — held the ceiling aloft in two rows of four pillars each.  Their sides were fluted and their tops were carved to make it seem as though grapes and vines were growing there.  At the far end of the hall were mahogany double doors with brass handles, and along the walls of the hall were paintings; most were landscapes but there were two portraits that flanked the far double doors.

Heather, who had been leading the way until that point, slowed down and then took several steps to the side, stepping out of the colonnaded avenue down the centre of the hall and stopping in front of one of the landscapes.  The painting was rendered in an ochre palette, all earthy browns, deep reds, and a hint here and there of orange.  A single splash of yellow was used to indicate the breaking of sunlight through clouds and illuminating a wide building that looked like a palace of some kind; two storeys high and made of a dark, expensive looking stone.  Part of it was ruined and the walls were shattered and riven; lumps of stone littered the foot of the wall and rooms were partially visible.  A grandfather clock, seemingly untouched by the devastation around it, was located high up in the partial ruin with the time just visible.

“Heather?”  Jacob had reached the double doors and was resting his hand on a handle.

“In a minute,” she said, not turning to look at him.  He looked at the back of her head, admiring her long black hair that fell straight down to her waist, and then at the door.  His fingers tightened on the handle as he made his decision, but the handle refused to turn and the doors refused to move.

“I think these doors need both of us,” he said, tugging on the handle.  The doors were solidly made and didn’t even tremble.  He noticed that the handle was cold beneath his hand and seemed to be chilling his skin instead of being warmed by it.  Puzzled, he pulled his hand away and shook the slowly-growing numbness from it.

“I recognise this,” said Heather, still not turning away from the painting.

“Somewhere you’ve been?”  Jacob stopped shaking his hand and examined the handles on the doors carefully, now not touching them.  One, the one he’d been holding, had a grey layer of condensation covering it but the other was clear. He touched a finger to it, tentatively, and it felt warm to the touch.

“Somewhere I’ll be,” said Heather.  “It’s from a vision.”

“One of those that Yaga gave you?”  Jacob couldn’t keep from sounding faintly skeptical.  Grandmother Yaga was, in his view, a fraud: a con-artist who read tarot cards, cast horoscopes and dabbled in numerology and preyed on the weak-willed and simple-minded.

“She didn’t give me any visions,” said Heather, turning away from the painting at last.  “She gave me a drink that helped me see them more clearly.  I had the visions anyway, every time I tried to sleep.  She helped me see them, and that made them go away so I can sleep properly.”

Jacob opened his mouth and then hesitated.  The dark circles caused by weeks of sleeplessness were still visible on Heather’s face and he’d been kept awake some nights himself listening to her toss and turn and try to sigh as gently and quietly as possible.

“Right,” he said awkwardly.  “Ok, I guess that’s how it worked then.”

“It is,” said Heather.  She took a step forward and then frowned.  Instead of joining Jacob at the door she crossed the hallway to the other side and stared at the painting there.

“This one too!  I will be here in the future.  How strange is that!”

“Well,” said Jacob, trying to rein in his skepticism.  “I guess these are places you want to visit anyway, so maybe it’s not that surprising you were dreaming about them.”

“Visions aren’t dreams, Jacob.  They come on like dreams, but they are glimpses of the future.  It’s still you, just looking through your own eyes at a different time.”

“Seems a bit pointless,” said Jacob.  “What good is seeing it if you can’t do anything about it?”

Heather’s finger brushed lightly over the surface of the painting, feeling the brush strokes permanently imprinted in the oil paint.  It was rough, a little like snakeskin.  “If you remember it,” she said, “you can do something about when the time comes because you can plan what you’re going to do.  It’s like you get an extra chance, time to think about it before it happens.”

“You sound like you’ve done just that.”

“I have,” said Heather.  “Here.”

Jacob decided that standing by the double doors wasn’t encouraging Heather to join him so he walked over to the painting to join her.  His presence normally caused her to back away slightly, so perhaps he could herd her to the double doors like a sheepdog.  To his surprise though, she remained standing where she was and let him get almost close enough to put his arms around her.  He looked at the painting, more to have to something to do than out of curiosity, and almost turned away again.  Then he focused and took in the picture.

“That’s us,” he said, staring.  “Here.  In this room.”

“Yes,” said Heather.  “I had a vision of this room and that painting, only in the vision I came to help you with the door instead of stopping and looking at the art.”

“And?”

“And in my vision we were both killed by what lies beyond the door.”

Jacob was silent for several seconds and then he shivered, a full body shake that made him turn pale and look wild-eyed.  That faded quickly, but the paleness remained.

“What does lie on the other side then?” he asked.  “I thought we were looking for a library.”

“That’s what’s on the other side,” she said as though not realising how annoying that sentence was.  “And there was something else; a snake of ice that lay coiled around the room and guarded the books and breathed out the very cold of Fimbulwinter.  It exhaled, and we died in a freezing gale that torn the heat from our skin and our souls from our flesh.”

Jacob took a step back from her and, when he realised that he’d taken a step towards the door took another step, further away from both of them.

“It’s gone now,” she said.  “It was always leaving, we just were too fast and startled it.”

“I don’t much like snakes,” said Jacob.  His voice was faint and the paleness wasn’t fading.  “That sounds like a nasty way to die.”

“It’s not how I die,” said Heather.  “At least, not today.  I have seen myself in other visions and other places; I surely won’t die until after then.”

“Must be nice to know,” muttered Jacob. “Anyone can have these visions, can they?”

Heather’s sudden smile startled him and she laid a finger briefly on his lips.  When she withdrew it he licked them.

“Seers see their own deaths,” she said.  “It’s depressing, seriously.  I’ve seen myself die eight times now, and each time I’ve had to figure out how to avoid it.  Sooner or later I’m going to get it wrong, and then the vision of my death is the true one.”

“I can handle that,” said Jacob, but it didn’t sound convincing.  “Can we go in the Library now or are there spiders in there?  Or lions and tigers?”

Heather nodded.  “We can go in.  You can open the doors yourself now, there’s no snake on the other side holding them shut.”

“Good to know,” murmured Jacob.  He returned to the doors trying not to tremble as he reached out for the handles.  This time they stayed warm in his grip.  “I hope the Armageddon Library is worth the trip.”

“So do I,” said Heather.

Rules and points

 The spaceship’s drives hummed as the power increased.  Sat in the command-chair on the bridge, Captain Rascal bounced gently up and down — he had the gravity on the bridge kept at a quarter of one-G especially for this — waiting for the moment that Yemoi, the navigation officer, would announce that they were ready to enter hyperspace.  His eyes glittered with excitement and his fingers, slightly short and stubby for a baseline human, gripped the arms of the command-chair as though to stop him from bouncing away from it.  Which, given that Captain Rascal was short and light and built like a jockey, was entirely possible in the reduced gravity of the bridge.

The bridge doors opened on the left side and Rascal looked casually over to see who was arriving.

“Vizile!  Get over here you old reprobate!”

Vizile, the First Officer, forced a smile onto his long, thin face.  His skin was ruddy, a consequence of being born on one of the four Fire Worlds, and his hair was jet black and he looked, to Rascal at least, like a picture of a demon from old mythologies.

“Captain,” said Vizile in a level tone that completely belied his actual mood.  “I think we should consider—“

“Engines at full power,” said Yemoi, speaking over him.  Vizile raised a red hand as though to try and stop her speaking, but she continued, “Entry into hyperspace is now possible.”

“Don’t do that yet!” yelled Vizile.  Rascal grinned at him.

“Mark!” he yelled, equally as loudly, and Yemoi pressed some buttons on the desk in front of her.  Vizile’s face spasmed as he tried to both grimace and stop himself grimacing at the same time.  It looked like the effort hurt.

“What’s the matter, Viz?” asked Rascal.  The transition into hyperspace was smooth; from the perspective of the bridge the only thing that changed was that the viewing screen greyed out.  Whatever was out there now was impossible to see as hyperspace contained no photons.  Energy exchange was mediated through some other means that was still being intensively studied.

“I think we might have left someone behind,” said Vizile.  His voice was tightly controlled and he was trying hard not to sound angry but he sounded like someone had stepped heavily on his foot and he was trying not to scream.  “I have been unable to find Merance.”

“We did leave her behind,” said Rascal.  Now that they had entered hyperspace and there was nothing to anticipate he had slowed his bounce and was sitting almost normally in the command-chair.  “Her shuttle didn’t reach us before we departed.”

Vizile rubbed a hand over his face.  His skin paled with the the pressure, only gradually reddening again as he hand was lifted.  “She was en route?” he asked.

“Maybe?  I dunno,” said Rascal.  “Is there a test for that?”

“I mean,” said Vizile, “she was travelling to us when we left?”

“Oh,” said Rascal. “Why didn’t you say so then?  Yes, she would have been about three minutes away.  But she was late, and you have to have rules, don’t you, Viz?”

Vizile drew a long breath.  He had, as he acutely remembered, sat down with the captain a few days ago to discuss having rules and obeying them, particularly with regard to using the ship’s instruments (such as the Butcher) in ways that potentially (or definitely, in the case of the Butcher) harmed the planetary life around them.  It had not been an easy, or pleasant, conversation, and he had been walking figuratively on eggshells ever since waiting to see if Rascal was plotting revenge.

“I think, Sir,” he said after a pause, “that we did discuss that rules can be treated as guidelines at certain points, and that making a point and breaking a rule can both be problematic.”

“Did we?”  Rascal grinned again and despite himself Vizile smiled back.  The Captain’s mood was oddly infectious.

“Yes, Sir,” he said.  He rarely called Rascal ‘Sir’ and was hoping that the man would notice this sooner or later.  “Yes, and I think you were making a point there, that didn’t need to be made.  Weren’t you?”

Rascal’s smile never faded or faltered.  “Not for you, old bean,” he said.  “For Merance.  She needed to learn not to be late, right?”

“I… I… suppose so,” said Vizile who wanted to sit down somewhere quietly and work this out without Rascal derailing his train of thought.  “I… I mean, we can always go back for her.”

“No need!”

Vizile’s train of thought derailed thoroughly and catastrophically.  He blinked several times, trying and failing to guess what Rascal might mean.  Finally he gave in.

“What do you mean?” he asked, his tone full of trepidation.

“She was close enough to get pulled into hyperspace with us,” said Rascal.  He started bouncing again, which Vizile considered a bad sign.  “She’s sort of following us.  She should pop out at the other end when we do.  Give or take a half-million kilometres.”

“Wha— that— how—“  Vizile struggled to find any words and he took a couple of steps backwards while his brain short-circuited in every direction there was.  Yemoi looked up from the navigation console, which was doing little at this point except showing the expected time to departure from hyperspace, and addressed the captain.

“The shuttle’s too small, Sir,” she said, and it irked Vizile just a little than the ‘Sir’ was sincere.  “It’s not got the stability to withstand hyperspace travel.  It’ll probably disintegrate when it emerges.”

“Let’s hope Merance gets into a space-suit before that happens then!” said Rascal cheerfully.

Free and fair elections

 Asquith, known as the Iron Scourge throughout many of the lands of Appoloron, walked into the throne room of Concord Keep.  There were two guards on duty outside the door, and two inside the door.  As he looked at the interior guards one of them squeaked and fainted.  The other, who had turned as pale as wood-ash, trembled like a leaf in a strong breeze.

“Pick him up,” said Asquith, trying for patience.   It seemed like the guards in the keep didn’t know how to do anything without being told.

“Sir!” said the guard quickly, saluting.  He hit his helmet so smartly that it fell off his head and bounced twice before resting up again his unconscious partner.  “Sorry sir!”

Asquith sighed, not bothering to hide his disgust with the guards, and stalked over to the other side of the room.  There were tapestries hanging on this wall in blue and red; on the entry side they were green and purple.  Merrilla, a sorceress who’d been adventuring with him for nearly fifteen years, was holding a corner of one of them and talking about it with Menelouse.  Menelouse was arguably more of a merchant than an adventurer though he could be handy with a dagger when no-one was looking at him.  He was also tonsured to try and hide the fact that he was balding from the middle outwards, had a straggly greying beard and a paunch that suggested he preferred ale to combat.

“What’s wrong with the guards?” asked Asquith, adding “this morning,” as an afterthought.  “I think one of them just fainted when I came in.”

“We did kill a whole bunch of their colleagues,” said Menelouse.  “Well, I say we, but I mean you.”

“And?” Asquith was genuinely puzzled.  In order to kill the previous King, Erich III, they’d had to storm the castle and collateral death was a natural side effect of this.

“And so they’re all worried that you’re going to do the same thing to them,” said Menelouse.  “Or maybe ask Merrilla to turn them all into toads or ferrets.”

”Capybaras,” said Merrilla.  “Toads are icky and ferrets run off and get into things.  You lose count of them, and the next thing you know is that you’ve dispelled all the magic in a room and there’s a dead guard squashed into a box or hamper.”

Menelouse raised an eyebrow and Merrilla shrugged.  “It’s happened before,” she said.

“I haven’t killed anyone in days,” said Asquith.  He felt a little aggrieved that the guards trusted him so little.  “What makes them think I’m going to start now?”

“Well,” said Menelouse, “they don’t know you, do they?  They just know that you turned up, killed a bunch of people, killed the King, and haven’t left yet.  They’re going to be a bit worried about you deciding you’re bored, killing everyone else, and leaving.”

“I could just leave,” said Asquith, but Menelouse was shaking his head.  “I could!”

“But you wouldn’t leave anyone alive who might think that you’d done something illegal, would you?” said Menelouse.  “I mean, leaving is one thing, but leaving with someone putting a bounty on your head is another, isn’t it?”

“They wouldn’t dare!”

“The guards don’t know that.”

Asquith stared at Menelouse for a few seconds then turned away.  He walked to the throne and looked at it carefully.

“Don’t,” said Merrilla, raising her voice a little.  At the door the conscious guard looked up, then looked hurriedly back down at the floor.  “We agreed.  Free and fair elections for a new ruler.  If you sit on it, you’re acting like you’re in charge.”

Asquith grunted and sat on the topmost of the three steps that lead up to the throne.  “Last thing I’d want,” he said.  “That just sets you up as a target for the next regicide to come along, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t pay all that well either,” said Menelouse.  “I mean, sure, there are taxes to be gathered but there’s a lot of work goes into that, and there are a lot of expenses for a country.  I mean, here, for example, you’ve got recruitment costs to rebuild the army as a priority, and the weather’s been poor for years, so it’s not like there’s a lot of food around.  Now, if you—“

“Shut up!”

Menelouse looked sulky.  “Just saying,” he muttered, but stayed quiet after that momentary rebellion.

Merrilla let the tapestry fall from her hand and walked over to sit next to Asquith.  She was wearing a satin off-white gown that draped over her and caught the draughts of air so the she seemed a little like a swan sitting on the currents of a river.

“The elections should be over,” she said.  “We’ll get the results in soon, and then we can go.”  She looked over the throne room; stone walls and floor like all the rooms of the keep, and solid, aged-looking floorboards of a brown wood so dirty you couldn’t tell what tree it had come from.  Apart from the guards, the throne, and the tapestries the room was bare: it was used for audiences with visitors and handing down judgements and didn’t need much furniture, but its emptiness seemed to echo the way Asquith looked: as though waiting for something.  “I was thinking we might go back to—“

“No,” said Asquith.  “I’ve heard tell that there’s a small border war to the east; I think we’ll go there and kill a few more people.  Relax a little.”  There was a squeak from the guard at the door but he managed to stay conscious.

“But—“

“No,” said Asquith.  “This has all been rather more stressful than I anticipated.  I need something mindless to do.  Something that will take my mind off all these other things.”

“Menelouse will—“

“No.”

Merrilla fell silent though her face wrinkled and smoothed as thoughts ran through her mind and she tried to find a way to broach them with Asquith and then decided not to bother.  Seconds turned into minutes, then into a half-hour.  Only then was the silence broken by the creak of the door opening.

“What do you want?” snapped Asquith without looking up.  Merrilla and Menelouse however watched curiously as the Lord Chamberlain entered.  He was a surprisingly young man dressed in a brocade robe of brown and green and carrying a black staff that was the official symbol of his office.

“A word or two, my Lord,” he said, sounding deferential.  Something in his tone appeared to soothe Asquith, who looked up and rearranged his scowl into something approximating a smile.

“Make it quick,” he said.  “Wait, the election results?”

“Indeed, my Lord,” said the Chamberlain.  He smiled, and Merrilla was struck by how cold the smile was, and how genuine.  It was the smile of a man who knows he’s delivering bad news and is actually quite pleased by it.

“The results of the free and fair elections have been tallied.  And recounted, and then checked a third time.  There can be no mistake in the outcome.”

Merrilla found herself rising to her feet.  She looked over: Menelouse was on the balls of his feet and looked as nervous as she felt.

“Who?  You’re being awkward; it is Count Vrech?”  Asquith had had to be stopped from cutting the Count’s throat when the Count had denounced them as regicides.

“No, my Lord,” said the Chamberlain.  “The Count, however, has been informed of the outcome and wishes it to be known that he is leaving the country as we speak.”

“Good,” said Asquith.  “Which way?  I think I might just follow him.”

“Ah,” said the Chamberlain, and Merrilla felt a cold hand stroke her soul.  “No, my Lord, you will not.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!”

The Chamberlain’s smile became icy indeed and Merrilla sank back down to sit on the stairs.  Suddenly she knew what he was about to say.

“You have been elected King, my Lord,” said the Chamberlain.  “Though an elected King is perhaps an oxymoron, so we should call you President, or Leader, or something similar.  You will be busy learning statecraft I think.”

Asquith just stared and the Chamberlain waited a moment, then carefully, artistically, shrugged.  “Free and fair elections, my Lord,” he said.  “You are clearly someone who can defend themselves, and know all about sieges and warfare.  You are probably what we need to lead us to a new golden age, and if not, you can probably lead a war that will make us all rich.  The people appreciate that.”

“I don’t know how to run a country,” said Asquith in a small voice of horror.

“Who does, my Lord?  We all just make it up as we go along.”