Warsinger by James Baldwin (most important books of all time txt) 📕

“Not everything. No library has everything,” the Archivist said, heading briskly down the corridor. “But we have some very ancient records on the Drachan in Vulkan Keep. No one other than I and the Chief Archivist have sat down and read them since they were copied, I suspect. Not really a common subject to enquire about, these days.”

“They’re about to become real common.” I had to dig my feet in to turn around the shelves as he darted behind the corner.

It was only when we reached the locked section that I understood the name. The books here were huge, bound in leather and wood and belted shut. Every one of them were also literally chained and locked to the shelves. Each tome had an iron loop, and a heavy-duty chain was passed through each of them and padlocked at either end of the bookcase. They looked like they weighed a ton - some of them were fifteen inches tall and three inches thick.

“It smells amazing back here,” I remarked, watching the librarian haul out a book the size of his chest and waddle back out to the cart. “Is that incense?”

“Dragon's blood ink,”he replied. “Not actual dragon's blood, mind you. It is an ink made from the sap of an exotic tree found only on Meewhome. It preserves extraordinarily well on this dolphin-skin vellum they use.”

“Meewfolk wrote these?” I pulled one from the shelf and opened it up, curious. There was a solid wall of neat red text, pages and pages written in a looping, pretty script I couldn't read. It almost looked like Vlachian, but it wasn't. It was much fancier. “I never imagined them to be like… scholarly types.”

“The Meewfolk brought both literacy and mathematics to Vlachia, if not all of Artana,” the Archivist replied. “They've been here, on Artana, for longer than any other intelligent species, dragons included. At the time of the Drachan Wars, they were the most sophisticated empire in the world.”

I gaped. “Are these books that old? What are they about?”

The man shook his head. “This shelf here is Meewfolk history, about the only books with any account of the Drachan by that name. And they are not originals. These are copies of copies of copies… books translated into Aesari, then Dakhari, re-translated into Old Period Mau, and then Modern Prr’aaow. Some of these are in the language of the cat folk, but we have a few we’ve translated to contemporary Vlachian. In truth, I’d recommend that you take that Old Period Mau book you’re holding and have it directly translated by a Meewish scholar who has studied the language of the period. The Master of the Archives here is human, and is only passingly fluent.”

I looked down at the book creaking in my hands. “How old is this one, then?”

“Only about five hundred years,” he replied breezily. “The original it was copied from was probably eight hundred years old.”

Like everyone who’d grown up in the 2040s, hand-scripted books were a historical curiosity greater even than keyboards and wired hard drives. Intellectually, I knew information could physically endure for more than a couple of years outside of the internet, and that volumes like this had been the way we’d passed down knowledge for most of human history. But it was one thing to know that and another to be holding something that, in real life, would have been kept in a museum under glass. And displayed on the internet, where people would take virtual tours of it.

“Do any of these have like… a timeline of Meewfolk history?” I asked, looking up at him.

“Yes. The book I just picked out for you does.” He bustled back. “Might I ask why a Tuun would want or need to know about the Drachan and the Meewfolk and suchlike? Your people are famously insular.”

I shrugged. “Just curious, I guess.”

He scoffed. “Pull the other one.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Well… short version is that I just became the Voivode of Myszno, but I don’t know that much about the world. I’m trying to learn.”

He turned an interesting shade of pale silver-gray. “My apologies, Your Grace.”

“Hector's fine,” I said. “The 'Your Grace' stuff drives me nuts.”

“It is highly improper to address a lord by his given name.”

“Dragozin, then. Does that work?”

“How about we settle on 'Voivode'?” He flashed me a nervous toothy smile. “My apologies for insulting you. I didn't even notice the King's Mark.”

“No worries. What's your name?”

“Kythias of Taltos, Junior Archivist.” He bowed from the neck. “We have one more volume to collect. And by the way, these locked tomes cannot be removed from the library.”

“Can I take a copy?” I asked. “I can put them in my Inventory and rip... I mean, copy the text from them.”

“By all means. But please spare the ripping.” Kythias shimmied past me and went to get the last book.

As it turned out, I had to rip copies of almost all of them - because the combined weight of the books I needed to start Know Thy Enemy came out to about two hundred pounds of vellum and leather. I had a maximum Inventory limit of a hundred and fifty, most of which was already taken up by shit I really needed to sort through, stash, throw away, or sell. I only took two books in physical form with me. One was A History of Dakhdir, Her Nations and Empires, and the other was the best book on military strategy Kythias had to offer me, simply titled War and Rulership. It was a relatively small book, maybe about a hundred pages long. It had been written by Lawislaw the Burned, Ignas's great-great-great-great grandfather. I knew from other hints the game had dropped that he was the Vlachian king who had conquered Myszno and the Sathbar Plains and added the territories to his country.

“You'll be reading for quite a while with these, so it's just as well you're Starborn,” the librarian said cheerfully. “It must be useful, being able to just