Broken Rule | Chapter 29

This post is chapter twenty-nine of my not-previously-published epic fantasy novel Broken Rule, which I'm serializing here on Steemit.

The story so far:
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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Learned Marek rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was getting a headache behind his eyes again. Since the day they had opened the library he had been studying magic, stopping only to sleep and eat, and only when his men reminded him it was necessary. From the beginning he had been drawn to one book more than any other, Principles of Flame. He closed it now, marking his place with a thick red ribbon. He stared at his right hand for a moment, trying to position his fingers precisely. After a moment he used his left hand to help get them exactly right, the fingertips forming the points of an ancient rune. Holding his right hand rigid, he waved it in front of him, sharply from left to right, and then in a gentle arc back to its original position. The flames of the oil lamps that were scattered around the library extinguished.

The headaches were troubling. Marek had never before been prevented from reading words like this. He wondered if there was some force opposing him, something keeping him from acting on the Most Holy's will. Marek stood. If he was unable to read any longer today, there must be some other way he could attend to the will of the Most Holy. He went to the door of the library. The excavation had continued while he had studied, expanding all around the building, which now sat completely uncovered at the bottom of a large pit. He took the stairs that had been cut into the wall of the pit up to the surface.

When the engineers had finished their digging around the library, Marek had set them to the task of establishing defenses. The library was dangerous and irreplaceable, it wouldn't do to have it fall into the wrong hands. Reuben had begun erecting a circular stone wall, with the library pit at the center, made entirely of stone plundered from the other underground ruins they had discovered. Whenever they started running low on stone blocks they simply sunk a new pit and hauled up some more. With the location of the library fixed, it was easier and easier to plumb the depths and find other buildings that had been buried along with it.

Marek went to the kitchen that had been set up in the camp and found the stew to be especially watery today.

“We're running low on vittles, Learned,” observed Petro. “Pretty soon they'll have to stop calling it stew and start calling it soup.”

“I suppose that we weren't properly provisioned for an expedition this long.”

“It's the sitting in one place that's buggered us up. When you're moving along there's always stuff to find. Trapper's great at that. But everything near here is picked clean, and in these mountains the pickings were slim to start with.”

“You seem to be the expert. What do we do about it?”

“Well, I ain't saying I'm no expert, I just done this once or twice before. But I figured me and some of the boys could head out to Gorton and buy us a mess of supplies. Of course, that plan needs a bit of coin, and the quartermaster ain't so keen on it.”

“Shall I explain to him what the Blessed Book says about our obligations to the hungry?”

“I expect that will fix him right up,” Petro said, slapping Marek on the shoulder.

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Marek spoke to the quartermaster and found the right words to get him to part with this coin. He saw Petro off and then walked through the camp talking to the men. Many of them were nervous and awkward around him, as they had been when he had first taken command. He must have been spending more time hidden away with the books than he had realized. His headache cleared up, but his desire to study was as strong as ever. Maintaining a positive relationship with the men was important, but studying magic was more important, so he returned to the library. He was about to sit down to his book again when a different fancy struck him. He walked over to one of the shelves. Most of them had been restocked by now, although whether the books were in the order that the librarians had intended was a mystery. At least they weren't in heaps on the floor. He held his hand out to the books, trailing his fingertips along the spines as he walked, until something made him stop. He pulled the volume from the shelf, a huge tome bound in red leather. The Chaos of Fire in Service of an Ordered Mind. Had he learned all he could from the earlier text? Had he seen this title from the corner of his eye? Had the words of the other book guided him here, without his even realizing it? Marek stopped questioning the way the Most Holy guided him and carried the tome back to his table.

He pushed his old book aside and opened the new one. With what he had learned from his earlier studies, he began to fly through it. He absorbed pages at a glance and flipped to the next. With the Most Holy pushing him so hard, there must be some great insight to be learned, some great message for him hidden here. Turning page after page, he was going faster than ever, until a particular diagram caught his eye.

He stopped, carefully positioned his fingers, and waved at the oil lamp on the table. With a strange roar followed by a dreadful pop the lamp exploded, spreading fire all over the table. And the books. And Marek. He screamed and fell backwards out of his chair, writhing on the ground for a moment in pain. Why had this happened? How could it have happened? Was he not always pursuing the will of the Most Holy? Always, always he pushed forward, always eager to learn the Most Holy's will. But he had forgotten the Most Holy's will, hadn't he? He had tried to move past it, to find the next step, when the Most Holy's will was for him to be here, in this library. To learn the content of the books, not just to hunt for another step along the path. The Most Holy was testing him. Testing his resolve, testing to see whether he had the patience to learn the magic he was meant to learn or whether he would destroy himself by racing ahead of the Most Holy's will.

The fire burned, and the pain was agonizing. But Marek knew how to end it, if he quieted his frenzied animal instincts and concentrated on the words he had been learning. He stood, the flames still rising from his clothes, and looked at his right hand. He positioned his fingers properly and with a wave of his hand the flames went out.

Still, Marek's animal instincts cried out to him. The pain! The burns! But they didn't matter. Only the words mattered. He looked at the book and saw that the flames had only singed it slightly. It must be protected somehow, warded against the flames that it taught its readers to bring forth. Marek ran his reddened, blistered fingers across the cover, tracing the title and breathing a sigh of relief. Nothing important had been damaged. He turned the new book back to the first page and began to read in earnest. The Most Holy wanted him to read each word, to master each spell, and he would. There would be no shortcuts on the path the Most Holy had laid out for him.