Chapter 43: To The Library

A new day dawns. Every morning I wake up, take a deep breath, and my lungs exult at the cleanness of it. I take a dip in the river, careful to keep my cast dry, and my skin shivers at its coolness. Then I go for a jog around camp, and my feet complain at every impact upon rock through my boots.

Some things about civilisation I do not miss in the slightest. The pollution, the politics, the endless plodding drudgery of education, work and life as a whole. So many advancements that were supposed to save time, allow us to spend more time on recreation, and yet it felt like there was less time than ever. Or perhaps that was how it always felt, and my memories deceive me into thinking that things used to be better.

Other things I wonder how it is I took them for granted. A warm bed. A shelter that doesn’t leak when it rains. Access to a variety of ingredients, and instructions on how to cook them. Information. Fabrication. Wonder. Toilet paper.

To say that this world is better than Earth would be to deny the advancements of humanity over the millennia. To say that Earth is better than this world would be to deny everything that Earth sacrificed for those same advancements, everything that it left behind.

There are many things better about this world. And many things better about Earth. As it is with almost every comparison under the sun. The only real thing that determines which is better is your perspective.

But I digress. The sun is shining, the clouds drift by, and we’re not getting attacked by a horde of monsters. The day is wasted on such thoughts.

I do some simple stretches to cool down from the jog and inform the others of the orcs nearby and what Heather has told me about them. Best to keep everyone in the know, just in case. If they haven’t come near us since we got here, I doubt that’ll change anytime soon, but you never know.

The day goes by without anything unusual happening, and we sit around the fire in the evening at dinner, talking about this and that; nothing of importance. Finishing the last bite of meat, Jakin sets his bowl on the ground and drops his spoon inside it. “So, these orcs yeh’ve been talking about…” He rolls his hefty shoulders. “Seems to me that we need to make contact. If they ain’t hostile, great. If they are, we need to know. How do we go about it?”

“We’ll need to head over, try and make a positive first impression. Fortunately, Heather knows where they are, so we won’t be blindly exploring for once.” I smile wryly.

“Aye, that’ll be a welcome change.” Boaz nods with a small smile.

Heather opens her mouth as if to say something, but pauses and closes it again. I raise an eyebrow questioningly, and she shakes her head slightly, so I shrug and let it be.

“Maybe we could hunt something, give it to them as a gift. Back where I came from, they used to say, ‘the way to a man’s heart is his stomach.’ It might not be much, but it could give us a good foothold to start good relations.” I muse.

“I think…” Xiltroth says slowly, “If we hunt something powerful and give it to them, that could also send the message that we’re strong, and they shouldn’t mess with us.”

“But wouldn’t that be a bit aggressive?” Jakin scratches at his bearded chin. “Being all, ‘hello, look at this monster we just killed!’”

“That’s a good point, but I think it’s a good idea, so long as we don’t go over the top or shove it in their faces.” I shrug. “We’ll have to choose what we hunt somewhat carefully. Don’t want to seem as if we’re trying to intimidate them.”

Jakin grunts, shaking his head. “These mind games are all going a bit over my head. Strong or weak, intimidation or gift, whatever. We work that bit out when we get to it. So, we go over there, hunt something, give it to them and hopefully don’t end up hacking each other to pieces. Am I missing anything?”

“That’s about it.” I nod with slight amusement. “But another thing I’ve been wondering is whether I should go with you or not.”

Jakin’s mouth opens immediately, but I raise a hand to stop him. “Just hear me out first. It’s best if we do this as soon as possible, leave nothing to chance. But I’m injured. We may not know much about them, but if the old stories are anything to go by, they probably value strength highly, not unlike the beastman. Me, like this, not the best first impression. Besides, if things get hairy, I’m not able to move about as well as usual. I’d be a hindrance if we had to escape.”

“Like hell you would.” Snorts Jakin. “Sure, you’re slower, can’t do a much physically for a while. But yeh’re trying to tell me you couldn’t just create a barrier of fire to stop anyone else from following us, if it came to it? ‘Course you could. Besides, if you’re not there, who’s gonna do the talking? None of us are good at negotiation, at talking and working things out.”

“Neither am I, to be fair.” I shrug.

“A fair sight better than us, at least.” Jakin shrugs. “Look, yeh’ve got to come. Ain’t safe for us to split up, not for something like this, not here.”

I nod slowly. “You make a fair point. It’s dangerous for me to be alone, especially as I am now. Alright then, we all go. Do our best to make some new friends or, at worst, prevent earning some new enemies.”

“That’s more like it.” Jakin nods approvingly.

Boaz shakes his head at it all, smiling. “Not much of an adventure without our daring leader, now is it?”

“Daring leader?” I laugh. “Jakin just had to talk me into going on this one.”

“Daring enough to charge into a cave of soldiers with only questionable information saying we wouldn’t be stuck full of bolts the moment we walked in.” Xiltroth chuckles. “Boaz is right. We do this all together, or we may as well not at all.”

“I’d drink to that,” Jakin nods, before his smile sours slightly, “but we’re out again.”

“I wouldn’t.” Xiltroth says candidly, shrugging. “Can’t stand the taste. Much too bitter.”

“The more for us.” Boaz laughs.

I smile wryly. “You’d think that it would be difficult to fuel a drinking habit out here in the wilderness, but you two seem to manage well enough.”

“Aye, but we can only carry so much back from the town, and it takes a while to get there.” Jakin sighs. “Even drinking sparingly it’s always out before long.”

“Good news, then.” I reply. “We’re going back to town soon, probably tomorrow.”

“Eh? Thought we were heading to the orcs?” Jakin remarks.

“We are.” I proceed to explain. “I want to know as much as we can before we head in there. The gnome’s records of the orcs are hundreds of years out of date, but they could give us an idea into the orcs’ culture and how they think. A whole city of orcs isn’t something we could fight if something goes wrong. So, we have to make sure that nothing does.”

Plus… There are a few other things I want to check on.

When we approach the town the next day, it feels a bit different to usual. Quieter. It isn’t until we’re actually part-way to the town center that I realise what it is.

There are no explosions coming from Ren’s house. No colourful smoke, no acrid smell. I guess he really has given up on that for good.

“Well, anyone that feels up for some reading, feel free to help out. We’ll meet up at Ren’s at dusk, discuss what we’ve learned.” I say, pulling open the door to one of the largest buildings in town: the library.

“Not for me, sorry.” Jakin shakes his head apologetically. “The war on words is one I’ve never won a battle in.”

Boaz nods. “Not much better, myself.”

“Well, I’m in.” Xiltroth shrugs.

“I, uh…” Heather stammers nervously.

“The doors, right.” I nod in understanding. “Well, see you later.”

We enter the building and are greeted by Len.

“Aaron, Xil. I hope your arms is doing well?” The diminutive man asks warmly.

I nod. “As well as you could hope for a broken limb. We’re here today to try and find out more about the orcs. Apparently, they aren’t that far from where our camp is.”

“How terrible!” Len gasps. “They haven’t raided you, have they?”

“No, we haven’t actually seen them yet.” I shake my head, causing Len to let out a breath of relief. “But Heather – you’ve met Heather, right? The centaur that joined our group recently – says that she’s been there before and it’s less of a tribe and more of a city. What’s more, that they aren’t hostile.”

“And you’re inclined to believe her?” Len asks sceptically.

“She hasn’t given me any reason to distrust her as of yet.” I confirm. “But I wanted to find out more about the orcs and their culture before we actually go there and witness it in person.”

“I see…” Len scratches his hairless chin in thought. “Well, come on through and we’ll see if we can’t find something of use.”

Len leads us through a door in the rear of the entrance room, and we emerge into a vast library. It’s comparable in size to libraries on modern earth, but this one is several degrees more impressive, by virtue of a single fact: every single book and text here, every page, was written and bound by hand. The amount of effort and time expended over the centuries to accumulate this volume of knowledge exceeds that of the modern world by magnitudes.

“I wouldn’t get your hopes too high on being able to understand the culture of orcs in detail.” Len prefaces as we walk past the groaning shelves. “I doubt there were any scholars in the past that managed to get a firsthand look at an orc tribe, unless it was one that had been vacated or destroyed. Most of the accounts here will be of conflicts between the orcs and other kingdoms – including us, actually.”

“You?” I say in surprise. “But to my understanding, your people have never had much of an effective military. How could you have repelled the orcs?”

“We had an alliance with the beastmen of Binod. They would leave a force here to defend us, and we would give them exclusive trade benefits.” Len shrugs. “We aren’t a strong people, but there are benefits we enjoyed as the greatest alchemists of the time.”

“Wouldn’t that mean that they were trapped here when the valley was cut off from the outside world? I haven’t heard of anything like that.” I remark in confusion.

“True. True!” Len barks. “They must not have been here when we were cut off. But why? I’m terribly sorry, but I want to look into this. Everything is ordered by date, you’ll have to look some three hundred years back.”

“No problem, we should be fine searching by ourselves.” I reply, nodding as he turns towards one of the bookcases.

There are several others in the library, browsing the shelves or reading at one of the tables that dot the area in the centre. A couple of them observe us for a few moments before going back to their books, our presence evidently not of enough interest to distract them for long.

I nod towards the closest empty table. “We’ll bring anything we find there, try and get a clearer picture. I’m guessing this’ll take a while.”

Xiltroth nods, and we split up slightly, scanning through the titles to try and find something relevant.

Within about half an hour we determine one of the things we should be looking for: a series of books titled ‘guard report’, followed by a particular year. Each of them detail anything that happened relating to the town’s security and the guard’s activity that year, major or minor.

It is still a lot to go through, however, skimming through hundreds of pages listing comings and goings, monster attacks, crimes and everything in between. But no orc invasions.

We go through over twenty years of the books without seeing anything, and we almost start looking for other similar books, to see if maybe larger scale conflicts were omitted from the guard report and listed elsewhere. But, finally, in the guard report for three hundred and twenty four years ago, Xiltroth spots a brief mention: ‘On this date, there was an orcish raid. Casualties number eight in allied Binod’s forces, and three in our own. None fatal. Orc numbers notably lower than the last raid, at an estimated eighty. Allied Binod forces severely outclassed the enemy forces in quantity, equipment and individual skill. Enemy forces fled after short conflict.’

Something, finally. It was no scientific document or social study, but it was at least evidence that there was something here to find.

The next mention we find is another three years back, then two, two, one, seemingly becoming more and more common an occurrence as we go back through the records until it seems like it happens almost every other month, several of the raids being recorded in a single volume of the guard report.

Violent, indeed.

As early as four hundred years ago, there are records of them barely managing to repel an orc raid with extensive losses, or even failing and having food, drink and tools pillaged and carted away by the orcs.

“So let’s see, what do we have on them?” I ask, a little bleary from several hours of reading in the dim light. Stuff like this was what ruined my eyesight in the first place.

“Not much.” Xiltroth shakes his head softly with both annoyance and tiredness. “Most of what we have is from the guard reports, and that doesn’t exactly tell us much about them except that they did a lot of killing and pillaging.”

Rubbing at my neck, I look down again at the numerous books set out on the table. “Looks that way. But maybe we can get something if we look at it another way. Let’s look at these again with the assumption that the orcs today aren’t like this. Something has to have caused that. Look for any changes.”

“The obvious change is that their attacks grew sparser in the more recent years.” Xiltroth offers.

“There is that.” I agree. “Could be relevant. What caused that?”

Xiltroth shrugs, and so we both look down again and start reading everything again. It isn’t obvious at first, since there’s quite a few years delay between the actual cause and the decline in raid, but we eventually figure it out.

It’s the Binod allies they had. At first, in the earlier years, it was just the gnomes on their own – physically and magically weak as they are, they were easy targets for the powerful and numerous orcs. It was rare that they managed to repel a raid, and it usually ended with the orcs taking off with various resources. But after they made an alliance with Binod, that changed. The first few raids were shaky, a fair few casualties on either side. But once Binod had a clearer picture of the amount of warriors they needed, they sent more reinforcements.

For the first time, the orcs were frequently and consistently taking heavy losses, and rarely managing to loot supplies. Their raids petered off because they became too risky.

“So, they stopped raiding the gnomes, unable to overcome their new allies. Where do they go then?” I muse. “Seems like they raided for food, weapons and anything else they needed. They had to have started attacking somewhere else once the easy target hardened up.”

“Not Xin.” Xiltroth replies. “I never heard of any orc raid happening, save for some children’s stories. I doubt orcs have been seen around Xin for a long time.”

“The closest kingdom to them is Binod… But they wouldn’t have gone there, either.” I shake my head.

“They would just be in an even worse situation than in the first place, facing the main might of Binod’s military.” Xiltroth nods. “Where else is there?”

“None that I know of.” I shrug. “Maybe we need to find ourselves some old maps.”

It doesn’t take long for us to find one from around the same time as the orc raids were diminishing, around three hundred and forty years ago. A short note before the map states that it was originally penned by Xin explorers, and the authenticity of all but the most obscure regions had been confirmed. Nodding to myself in satisfaction, I turn to the map itself. Seeing the title, I let out an involuntary snort.

‘A compleat map of the civilised world’. Complete my foot, this doesn’t even map an entire continent. Chances are that there are others just as, if not more, civilised than this. But it will do for our purposes. The five kingdoms, of course, are dead centre, emblazoned with their respective crests and sporting borders that were likely completely different to modern times – again, not that it matters.

Idly tracing an estimate of the route we took from the western border of the dwarven kingdom, Morrock, to that small pond, to the south side of the river. My finger drifts past where our camp is, across the river and to the north-east, to an area marked in shades of red. ‘Orc tribes’, says the label. My gaze drifts further north-east, where a mountain range is depicted. A single, large skull symbol is drawn over them with no further explanation or description, and the area beyond the mountains is blank.

To the east of the orc camps, bordering both Xin and the mountains, gentle, shallow peaks and waves illustrate the ‘great northern desert’. Great, huh… Well, I suppose they have no other desert as reference to compare it to. Can’t fault them for that. More accurately, it spans an area perhaps two thirds as large as Xin, spanning north to the mountains and east to the sea. Nowhere close to the big old desert smack bang in the middle of Australia. Then again, if we’re to compare deserts, Antarctica outclasses them all, doesn’t it?

To the north and slightly to the west of the orc camps, and east of the gnome towns in the mountains there, is labelled the mystical forest. The mountains themselves, the ones the gnome’s hidden valley is in, has a complex network of passes through it, and not an awful lot is explored past them. To the west is unlabelled plains, forests and hills. Nothing of note.

“As far as I can tell, there’s literally nobody else for them to have raided.” I note.

Xiltroth nods. “Same here. But they’re still around, so they must have found an alternate source of food and supplies.”

“They were forced into a corner. Supplies running low, they had to try anything they could. Maybe one of the tribes tried to imitate what they’d seen on raids, farming and domesticating animals, hunting…” I hypothesise. “Managed to keep afloat. Maybe the other orc tribes noticed and tried attacking them, but failed? Or maybe they recognised that conflict would cause them all to fall, and banded together… Either way, one large ruling tribe is created. Self-sufficient, for the first time in history.”

“Not needing to raid outsiders anymore, they would become more peaceful… Right?” Xiltroth muses questioningly.

“Ideally, that’s what happened.” I shrug. “Realistically? They could also be biding their time and building up their military. Impossible to say exactly what happened without more information. Rarely is there an actual need for a war, on either side. More often than not, it’s greed. Land, money, resources, manpower. They just create an excuse that sounds good so the soldiers will die for them willingly. But anyway, even though it’s all just conjecture, just knowing that their raids decreased over time makes me think that they are what Heather remembers them as: an at least somewhat peaceful civilisation.”

Xiltroth nods thoughtfully. “Should we continue looking for more information?” He asks.

I glance out the window; the light is starting to dim. “As much as I’d like to, it’s already starting to get late and I still need to visit the doctor. Ideally, we’ll set off again early in the morning, see if we can find the orc city before the end of tomorrow.”

Xiltroth nods, and we start replacing all the books back where we found them. “I kind of enjoyed this.” He says quietly. “It’s been a long time since I could just sit down in peace and read, even if it was for something like this.”

“Yeah.” I sigh. “Most of the times we’ve come here we’ve been focused on something else. Might be good if we started coming here more often, or for longer, so we can do things like this. There’s a lot that can be learned from places like these. Centuries of accumulated knowledge… Impossible to know what you might find. Hidden within these pages could be forgotten histories, ancient techniques, the teachings of masters long gone, waiting to see the light of day again.”

“Glad to hear you are of the same opinion as myself.” Len says smilingly, approaching. “I noticed you starting to leave. Did you manage to find what you were looking for?”

“We think so.” I reply. “And it’s probable that our two questions aren’t unrelated. The historical alliance with Binod was primarily due to the orc raids as far as I could tell, but once Binod soldiers came here, the orcs were getting beaten back every time they attacked. Evidently, they didn’t like the idea of fighting losing battles, as the raids decreased over the years, eventually until there were none at all. I’d guess at that point the Binod soldiers returned to their homeland, not being needed to defend any longer. Not too long after… Well, you know the rest.”

“The tunnel collapsed and contact ceased, yes.” Len nods. “It sounds plausible, but forgive me for wanting to confirm it for myself.”

“Of course.” I shrug. “It’s always better to confirm from multiple sources to decrease the chances of false or inaccurate information.”

“That it is.” He nods deeply, smiling. “Well, I hope that it all fares well with the orcs. I would be quite interested in hearing all about it, presuming you aren’t completely wrong about them and – well, best not to jinx it.”

“No problem. Either way we’ll let you know.” I nod in affirmation. “But we best be leaving now. Thanks for letting us use the library.”

Len shakes his head. “Don’t mention it. You and your friends saved our town, this much doesn’t even count as a favour in comparison.”

“I suppose not.” I scratch my head awkwardly. “But I think what Dex did was more impressive. Not even a warrior, and he ran through the mountains and plains, avoiding monsters where he could while trying to find us.”

“Yes, the energetic little tyke saved us all, bless the poor boy.” He sighs. “I do hope he’ll be able to recover from it all, eventually.”

Nodding in agreement, I start turning to leave. “I’ll check in on him when I get the doctor to look at my arm again. See you again another day.”

“Best of luck!” He calls after us as we head out the door.