Following the shogun’s entourage, before long Roskvir had returned to the forecourt of the great library once more.

  Where he’d abandoned so many wounded marines, earlier that morning.

  After leaving the princess in the guest quarters aboard the Tanngnjostr, he’d crossed paths with the survivors as they’d limped back to the Albion beachhead, not an hour before he and the shogun had departed back again into the city that evening. Of the sixty he and Thjali left behind, fifteen had returned alive. They’d reported withstanding a haphazard counterattack from the city’s defenders, just he'd predicted, before their advancing frontline finally linked up with their encircled position, enabling their evacuation.

  It was the same forecourt where he’d first seen that girl, whose unsettling, level regard for some reason he could not forget.

  Marble tiles were stained with dried blood. The masonry would’ve been a sight to behold, reflecting the sunset’s warmth across its speckled ivory gleam. It still was, where blood had not crusted overtop. The whole building was at once strange and beautiful, an obvious masterwork of that alien culture. Such details were overlooked in the energy of battle.

  After ordering his retinue to remain outside, the shogun nevertheless gestured for Roskvir to accompany him through the ornate main entrance.

  A body was slumped over the front desk. As the shogun surveyed the foyer, Roskvir lifted the corpse’s head by a fistful of its matted hair, finding a single, clean cut from ear to ear.

  “Hmm. She’d said she’d left the library untouched,” remarked the shogun. “I suppose this is what that means, to her. A pity. If that one was still alive, it would’ve made this next part so much easier.”

  The shogun continued on, further within. For minutes, they passed successive hallway crossroads of the labyrinthine complex. But before long they’d reached a wide and high-ceilinged room, a voluminous atrium, perhaps at the heart of the great structure.

  “We would cover more ground separately, kapit?nleutnant. Why don’t you take the southern wings, and I’ll look around the northern ones?”

  “Sir—”

  “My safety is not threatened, here, I assure you of that,” said the shogun gently, as if reassuring a nervous schoolchild.

  “…And what specifically should I be looking for?”

  The shogun only smiled.

  “For anything I’d want to know about. Go on, now.”

  But Roskvir couldn’t help but cast one last curious glance back, before departing.

  Rather than venturing into the library's northern wings, the shogun sat on the floor of the vast and empty space. With legs folded in the style of the lotus, his hands rested open-palmed on his knees.

  Roskvir closed the door behind him quietly, and sighed. The shogun did not yet seem anywhere near as unpleasant a superior as Thjali. But at least he’d understood her.

  Something caught his eye on the floor of the hallway leading yet deeper into the library. More dried blood, left in a long trail down its length. In fact, two or three distinct dribbled lines, rather than just one. No doubt left by the pale and bleeding thralls shambling after Thjali that morning.

  Following the trails, a few dozen paces down the hall Roskvir found the two halves of a deadbolt mechanism, sliced into clean halves as if for the instruction of some locksmith’s apprentice.

  Beyond the open double doors remained evidence of a vicious struggle, more puddles of dark crimson caking on to the polished tile. Some crude symbol was etched into the floor. Roskvir first thought it was a pictogram of teeth, or thorns, before realizing it represented a crown.

  He couldn’t help but wonder what had transpired there exactly, earlier that morning, even if the broad strokes were obvious. It was clear that even the strongest native soldiers and sjaelsvabeners were outmatched by Albion training and experience. Seeing the remnants of that struggle, though, Roskvir had to admit that some of the natives of that land at least fought bravely.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The hallway went deeper still, he saw. And the shogun had not already signalled for his return. He ventured on.

  It terminated at last in a cul-de-sac. There, on a desk nestled within the nook, a leatherbound volume lay open to a middle page, beside a ceramic vessel filled with milky brown liquid that gave off a smell like a sweet pastry.

  The open pages of the tome depicted a scene like a fairytale. Characters congregated with old-fashioned swords and suits of armor, like the regalia of Albion warriors of the feudal age. But others were fantastical monsters. Tall, humanoid insects, as if man-sized praying mantises.

  None besides Thjali, her three thralls, and the strange child had emerged from the library after his marines seized the hill, he knew.

  The girl had been reading that very book before they’d arrived.

  * * *

  Roskvir found the shogun still on the floor of the atrium just as he’d left him, sitting in a beam of the setting sun that warmed his serene meditation. He showed no reaction to Roskvir’s return, only breathing deep and steady, basking in the fading sunset amber that filtered through the library’s crystal-faceted windows.

  Without warning, the great man’s brow creased. He came to his feet in a single fluid and silent motion, as if featherlight despite the apparent heft of his musculature. In a ready stance on the balls of his feet, he drew back with one arm, two fingers aimed at the floor.

  Then, in an instant, the sunset’s orange filling the room was overcome by the total, imperial violet of his sjaelbrand.

  Deep and royal fire vanquished the sun’s light, in a swift coup growing from nothing to coat each wall and window, uniform and stark.

  A broad ring of purple flame flared into being above his head. A vertical ingot gem of color held in its center, brighter than the rest.

  And Roskvir felt the presence of the shogun. An outpouring of calm and controlled strength, nevertheless legible at once as a power of terrible immensity. The presence dominated all aspects of his perception, and he dug in psychic heels to remain steady against its tide, as the force surpassed his memory of even Thjali’s might.

  The shogun’s sinewed right arm, still drawn back with fingers still poised, glowed with the same violet fire.

  Then the blow fell.

  But he pulled the strike with perfect, deliberate precision, taming it just at the point of collision against the atrium’s centerpoint. And Roskvir knew at once it would’ve otherwise shattered the stone floor like glass.

  A vibrating quake rippled up through his boots, nevertheless. Echoes of his blow’s force shaking the vast halls of the great library.

  Then the violet fire vanished. Thinning embers of sunset seemed slow to relight the atrium in its place, as if wary to return.

  “Follow me, kapit?nleutnant.”

  * * *

  Behind a bookshelf in a hidden corner of one far hall’s most distant reach, they came upon a locked iron door. Another flash of violet took the metal bulk off its hinges with ease, sending it crashing back into the passageway it once protected. The shogun stepped over the crumpled metal plate without hesitation, ducking his head to begin down the dark, cramped stairway.

  Wooden bookshelves still lined the walls once the stairway bottomed-out. In the meager light, Roskvir caught the occasional twinkle of gauffered gold bindings, as the tomes seemed to become older and rare. They even passed items that weren’t books at all, but scrolls, unbound collections of loose parchments, or the occasional stone tablet.

  No lamplight burned where the shogun halted, facing a flat stone wall. But the great man felt at the smooth stone, before his fingers somehow found impossible purchase. He flexed, pushing.

  Some mechanical contraption in the floor and ceiling actuated. Clicking, then grinding rumbled, as a thick block of the wall receded. True pitch darkness led away down that yet-deeper oubilette.

  “Remain here, kapit?nleutnant,” said the shogun.

  Then he slipped within, disappearing into the darkness, leaving Roskvir alone at the threshold.

  He returned after many silent minutes. In each hand he carried a thick volume bound in simple tan leather, neither bearing any title.

  “Kapit?nleutnant… your sjaelsvaben… it truly burns, hot like flame, not just sjaelbrand, yes? I understand this quality is much to credit for your impressive reputation.”

  “Yes, your excellency. It burns.”

  “In that case, kapit?nleutnant… I shall leave the library, now. After I depart, it is my desire that you turn to ash each and every page of written word within its premises.”

  Roskvir blinked in disbelief. The shogun’s expression betrayed nothing.

  “If there are works that will not burn, in some manner otherwise destroy them. But all is to be erased which this library stores. Do you understand, kapit?nleutnant?”

  "After the war, twelve Unit 731 members were tried by the Soviet Union in the 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials and sentenced to prison. However, many key figures, including Ishii, were granted immunity by the United States in exchange for their research data. The Truman administration concealed the unit's crimes and paid stipends to former personnel."

  Wikipedia

  “A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”

  Baltasar Gracian