The Destruction of the Books Read Free Page A

Juhg answered honestly.
    Raisho shook his head sorrowfully. “I told ye afore ye left that the sea would be no place for ye, Juhg. ’Tis a hard life upon the salt, an’ a lonely one at that, even in the best of circumstance. Ain’t fittin’ for a dweller because ye all are so much of family.”
    That was true of most dwellers, Juhg silently agreed. “I have no family.” He had intended the statement only as one of fact, bereft of emotion. Instead, his words sounded bleak and harsh, even to his ears. His loss never stayed far from his heart.
    Raisho stopped smiling and broke eye contact. “Ye’re a good friend to me, Juhg. Don’t ever feel like ye got no family, ’cause as long as I still breathe, ye’ll have all the family I can give.” He raised his eyes to Juhg with some embarrassment. Raisho wasn’t a man who easily spoke of tender feelings.
    “Thank you,” Juhg said. “I wish I had something to offer in return.”
    “Ye do. I’ve sailed a lot of the Blood-Soaked Sea. Seen dozens of ports like the hog’s wallow we’re in now. I’ve seldom had the friendship the likes of the one I now have with ye.” Raisho grinned and wiggled his brows. He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. “An’ I’ve never had me one what could make me a rich man with tradin’.”
    Juhg laughed in spite of the tension of the moment, in spite of the mistake he’d very nearly made with the journal keeping he hadn’t intended to be doing. He returned his attentions to his plate. Dwellers, after all, had earned their goblin nicknames.
    The serving wench returned with the young sailor’s ale and Juhg’s glass of chulotzberry tea. Raisho curled a silver coin, much too much for the drinks, into the young woman’s hand.
    “Thank ye,” he stated kindly, with a smile as generous as the tip. “I meant ye no harm. Honest I didn’t.”
    She nodded and smiled, and Juhg guessed that she knew the nature of the coin pressed into her hand. “Let me know if you need anything further, milords.” She backed away, then turned and fled.
    “So?” Raisho asked expectantly.
    “What?” Juhg asked, acting as though he didn’t know what his friend referred to.
    “Yer book. What was ye a-writin’ in it?”
    Juhg chewed the olive flatbread carefully as he surveyed the tavern. The Broken Tiller served mostly sailors and longshoremen who ferried the goods from the ships out in the harbor. Unfortunately, pirates mixed in with that clientele on a regular basis, though they never came into the harbor flying the black flag.
    The tavern looked as though the initial builders cobbled it together from shipwrecks that chanced upon the craggy shores or the reef farther out in the harbor. Probably beginning as a single structure enclosing a great room and fashioned from the stern of a large merchant ship, the tavern now stretched out with four similar rooms, all cramped and close-quartered. Narrow doorways, not quite square, joined the rooms.
    Similar architecture covered the broken hills that framed the port village, all of them at one time or another pieces of sailing ships or cobbled from crate timbers or masts. If he hadn’t known that humans and a few dwarves plying blacksmiths’ trade lived there, Juhg would have sworn the place was home to dwellers. Dwellers held fame as a people who made lives for themselves from the remnants of worldly goods left by others, though some insisted those goods were little more than trash and unwanted debris.
    “I was writing my thoughts,” Juhg answered obliquely, wishing that his friend would drop the matter.
    “What thoughts, then?” Raisho gestured toward the heaped plate.
    “Please,” Juhg said, though his first impulse was to claim the food as his own. He was back on the mainland now, not in Greydawn Moors, where no dweller went without food after a full day’s work. No dweller there claimed a stone for a pillow either. When he’d sailed aboard Windchaser from the Yondering Docks where the