Chapter 9
I’d like you to realize two things at this point.
First, I want you to know that when I uttered the words “Oh, is that all? I was worried I might find something strange in here,” I wasn’t being sarcastic in the least. Actually, I as being quite serious. (Nearly as serious, even, as the moment when I would plead for my life while tied to an altar of outdated encyclopedias.)
You see, after all I’d seen that day, I was growing desensitized to strangeness. The realization that the world contained three new continents still had me in shock. Compared to that revelation, a room full of dinosaurs just couldn’t compete.
“Why, hello, good chap!” cried a small green Peteridactyl. “You don’t look like a Librarian sort.”
Talking rocks might have gotten a reaction out of me. A talking slice of cheese definitely would have. Talking dinosaurs… meh.
The second thing I want you to realize is this: You were warned beforehand about the talking dinosaurs. (Kindly see page 67.) So no whining.
I stepped into the room. It was some sort of storage chamber and was filled with battered cages. Many of those cages contained… well, dinosaurs. At least, that’s what they looked like to me.
Of course, they were quite different from the dinosaurs I’d learned about in school. For one thing, they weren’t very big. (The largest one, an orange Tyrannosaurus Rex, was maybe five or six feet tall. The smallest looked to be only about three feet tall.) The vests, trousers , and British accents were unexpected as well.
“I say,” said a Triceratops. “Do you think he’s a mute? Does anybody by chance know sign language?”
“Which sign language do you mean?” asked the Pteridactle. “American primitive, New Elshamian, or Librarian standard?”
“My hands aren’t articulated enough for sign language,” noted the Tyrannosaurus Rex. “That’s always been rather a bother for deaf members of my subspecies.
“He can’t be mute!” another said. “Didn’t he say something when he opened the door?”
Bastille poked her head into the room. “Dinosaurs,” she said, noticing the cages. “Useless. Let’s move on.”
“I say!” said the Triceratops. “Charles, did you hear that?”
“I did indeed!” replied the Pterydactle. “Quite rude, if I do say so myself.”
I frowned. “Wait. Dinosaurs are British?
“Of course not,” Bastille said, stepping into the room with a sigh. “They’re Melerandian.”
“But they’re speaking English with a British accent,” I said.
“No,” Bastille said, rolling her eyes. “They’re speaking Meleran – just like we are. Where do you think the British and the Americans got the language from?”
“Uh… from Great Britain?”
Sing chuckled, stepping into the room and quietly shutting the door. “You think a little island like that spawned a language used by most of the world?”
I frowned again. “I say,” said Charles the Pterrodactlye. “Do you suppose you could let us free? It’s terribly uncomfortable in here.”
“No,” Bastille said curtly. “We have to keep a low profile. If you escaped, you could give us away.” Then, under her breath, she muttered, “Come on. We don’t want to get involved.”
“Why not?” I asked. “Maybe they could help us.”
Bastille shook her head. “Dinosaurs are never useful.”
“She certainly is a rude one, isn’t she?” asked the Triceratops.
“Tell me about it,” I replied, ignoring the dark look Bastille shot me. “Why are you dinosaurs here anyway?”
“Oh, we’re to be executed, I’m afraid,” Charles said.
The other dinosaurs nodded.
“What did you do?” I asked. “Eat somebody important?”
Charles gasped. “No, no. That’s a Librarian myth, good sir. We don’t eat people. Not only would that be barbaric of us, but I’m sure you would taste terrible! Why all we did was come to your continent for a visit!”
“Stupid creatures,” Bastille said, leaning against the door. “Why would you visit the Hushlands? You know that the Librarians have built you up as mythological monsters.”
“Actually,” Sing noted, “I believe the Librarians claim that dinosaurs are extinct.”
“Yes, yes,” Charles said. “Quite true. That’s why they’re going to execute us! Something about enlarging our bones, then putting them inside of rock formations, so that they can be dug out by human archaeologists.”
“Terribly undignified!” the T. Rex said.
“Why did you even come here?” Sing asked. “The Hushlands aren’t the type of place one comes on vacation.”
The dinosaurs exchanged ashamed glances.
“We… wanted to write a paper,” Charles admitted. “About life in the Hushlands.”
“Oh, for the love of…” I said. “Is everybody from your continent a professor?”
“We’re not professors,” the T. Rex huffed.
“We’re field researchers,” Charles said. “Completely different.”
“We wanted to study primitives in their own environment,” the Triceratops said. Then he squinted, looking up at Sing. “I say, don’t I recognize you?”
Sing smiled modestly. “Sing Smedry.”
“Why, it is you!” the Triceratops said. “I absolutely loved your paper on Hushlander bartering techniques. Do they really trade little books in exchange for goods?”
“They call the books ‘dollar bills,’” Sing said. They’re each only one page long – and yes, they do use them as currency. What else would you expect from a society constructed by Librarians?”
“Can we go?” Bastille asked, looking tersely at me.
“What about freeing us?” the Triceratops asked. “It would be terribly kind of you. We’ll be quiet. We know how to sneak.”
“We’re quite good at blending in,” Charles agreed.
“Oh?” Bastille asked, raising an eyebrow. “And how long did you last on this continent before being captured?”
“Uh…” Charles began.
“Well,” the T. Rex said. “We did get spotted rather quickly.”
“Shouldn’t have landed on such a popular beach,” the Triceratops agreed.
“We pretended to be dead fish that washed up with the tide,” Charles said. “That didn’t work very well.”
“I kept sneezing,” said the T. Rex. “Blasted seaweed always makes me sneeze.”
I glanced at Bastille, then back at the dinosaurs. “We’ll come back for you,” I told them. “She’s right – we can’t risk exposing ourselves right now.”
“Ah, very well, then,” said Charles the Pterradactyl. “We’ll just sit here.”
“In our cages,” said the T. Rex.
“Contemplating our impending doom,” said the Triceratops.
The reader may wonder why one of the dinosaurs was consistently referred to by his first name, while the others were not. There is a very simple and understandable reason for this.
Have you ever tried to spell Pterodactyl?
We slipped out of the dinosaur room. “Talking dinosaurs,” I mumbled.
Bastille nodded. “I can only think of one group more annoying.”
“Talking rocks,” she said. “Where do we go next?”
“Next door.” I pointed down the hallway.
“Any auras?” Bastille asked.
“No,” I replied.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean the sands won’t be in there,” Bastille said. “It would take some time for the sands to charge the area with a glow. I think we should check them.”
I nodded. “Sounds good.”
“Let me open this one,” Bastille said. “If there is something dangerous in there, it would be better if you didn’t just stumble in and stare at it with a dumb look.”
I flushed as Bastille waved Sing and me back. Then she crept up to the door, placing her ear against the wood.
I turned to Sing. “So… do you really have talking rocks in your world?”
“Oh, yes,” he said with a nod.
“That must be odd,” I said contemplatively. “Talking rocks…”
“They’re really not all that exciting,” Sing said.
I looked at him quizzically.
“Can you honestly imagine anything interesting that a rock might have to say?” Sing asked.
Bastille shot an annoyed look back at us, and we quieted. Finally, she shook her head. “Can’t hear anything,” she whispered, moving to push open the door.
“Wait,” I said, an idea occurring to me. I pulled out the yellow-tinted Tracker’s Lenses and slipped them on. After focusing, I could see Bastille’s footprints on the stone – they glowed a faint red. Other than that, the hallway was empty of footprints, except for mine and Sing’s.
“Nobody’s gone in the room recently,” I said. “Should be safe.”
Bastille cocked her head, a strange expression on her face. As if she were surprised to see me do something useful. Then she quietly cracked the door open, peeking through the slit. After a moment she pushed it open the rest of the way, waving Sing and me forward.
Instead of dinosaur cages, this room held bookshelves. They weren’t the towering, closely packed bookshelves of the first floor, however. These were built into the walls and made the room look like a comfortable den. There were three desks in the room, all unoccupied, though all of them had books open on top of them.
Bastille shut the door behind us. I glanced around the small den – it was well furnished and, despite the books, didn’t feel cluttered. This is more like it, I thought. This is the kind of place I might stash something important.
“Quickly,” Bastille said. “See what you can find.”
Sing immediately walked to one of the desks. Bastille began poking around, peeking behind paintings, probably looking for a hidden safe. I stood for a moment, then walked over to the bookshelves.
“Smedry,” Bastille hissed from across the room.
I glanced over at her.
She tapped her dark sunglasses. Only then did I realize that I was still wearing the Tracker’s Lenses. I quickly swapped them for me Oculator’s Lenses, then stepped back, trying to get a good view of the room.
Nothing glowed distinctly. The books, however… the text on the spines seemed to wiggle slightly. I frowned, walking over to a shelf and pulling off one of the volumes. The text had stopped wiggling, but I couldn’t read it anyway.
It was just like the book in Grandpa Smedry’s glass safe. The pages were filled with scribbles, like a child had taken a fountain pen to a sheet of paper and attacked it in a bout of infantile artistic wrath. There was no specific direction, or reason, to the lines.
“These books,” I said. “Grandpa Smedry has one like them in the gas station.”
“The Forgotten Language,” Sing said from the other side of the room. “It doesn’t look like the Librarians are having any luck deciphering it either. Look.”
Bastille and I walked over to the place where Sing was sitting. There, set out on the table, were pages and pages of scratches and scribbles. Beside them were different combinations of English letters, obviously written by someone trying to make sense of the scribbles.
“What would happen if they did translate it?” I asked.
Sing snorted. “I wish them good luck. Scholars have been trying to do that for centuries.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Because,” Sing said. “Isn’t it obvious? There are important things hidden in those Forgotten Languages texts. If that weren’t the case, the language wouldn’t have been forgotten.”
I frowned. Something about that didn’t make sense. “It seems the opposite to me,” I said. “If the language were all that important, then we wouldn’t have forgotten it, would we?”
Both of them looked at me as if I were crazy.
“Alcatraz,” Sing said. “The Forgotten Language wasn’t just accidentally forgotten. We were made to forget it. The entire world somehow lost the ability to read it some three thousand years back. Nobody knows how it happened, but the Incarna – the people who wrote all of these texts – decided that the world wasn’t worthy of their knowledge. We forgot all of it, as well as the method of reading their language.”
“Don’t they teach you anything in those schools of yours?” Bastille said, not for the first time.
I gave her a flat look. “Librarian schools? What do you expect?”
She shrugged, glancing away.
Sing glanced at me. “It’s taken us three thousand years to get back even a fraction of the knowledge we had before the Incarna stole it from us. But, there are still lots of things we’ve never discovered. And nobody has been able to crack the code of the Forgotten Language despite three thousand years of work.”
The room fell silent. Finally, Bastille glanced at me. “Well?”
“Well what?” I asked.
She glanced at me over the top of her sunglasses, giving me a suffering look. “The Sands of Rashid. Are they in here?”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t see anything glowing.”
“Good enough. You would be able to see them glowing even if they were encased in Rebuilder’s Glass.”
“I did notice something odd, though,” I said, glancing back at the bookshelves. “The scribbles on the spines of those books started to wiggle the first time I looked at them.”
Bastille nodded. “That’s just an attention aura – the glasses were trying to get you to notice the text.”
“The glasses wanted me to notice something?” I asked.
“Well,” Bastille said. “More like your subconscious wanted you to notice something. The glasses aren’t alive, the just help you focus. I’d guess that because you’ve seen the Forgotten Language before, your subconscious recognized it on those spines. So, the glasses gave you an attention aura to make you notice.”
“Interesting,” Sing said.
I nodded slowly – then, curiously, Bastille’s entire shape fuzzed just slightly. Another attention aura? If so, what as it I was supposed to notice about her?
How do you know so much about Oculator auras, Bastille? I thought, realizing what was bothering me. There was more to this girl than she liked to let people see.
Some things just weren’t making sense to me. Why was Bastille chosen to protect Grandpa Smedry? Certainly, she seemed like a force to be reckoned with – but she was still just a kid. And for her to know so much about Oculating, when Sing – a professor, and a Smedry to boot – didn’t seem to know much…
Well, it was odd.
You may think those above paragraphs are some kind of foreshadowing. You’re right. Of course those thoughts weren’t foreshadowing when they occurred to me. I couldn’t know that they’d be important.
I tend to have a lot of ridiculous thoughts. I’m having some right now. Most of these certainly aren’t important. And so, I usually only mention the ones that matter. For instance, I could have told you that many of the lanterns in the library looked like types of fruits and vegetables. But that has no real relevance to the plot, so I left it out. Likewise, I could have included the scene where I noticed the roots of Bastille’s hair and wondered why she dyed it silver, rather than letting it grow its natural red. But since that part isn’t relevant to the –
Oh. Wait. Actually, that is relevant. Never mind.
“Ready to go, then?” Bastille asked.
“I’m taking these,” Sing said. He unzipped his duffel bag, tossed aside a spare uzi, then stuffed in the translator’s notes. “Quentin would kill me if I left them behind.”
“Here,” I said, tossing a Forgotten Language book into the bag. “Might as well take one of these for him too.”
“Good idea,” Sing said, zipping up his duffel.
“There just one thing I don’t get,” I said.
“One thing?” Bastille asked with a snort.
“Why do the Librarians work so hard to keep everything quiet?” I asked. “Why go to all that trouble? What’s the point?”
“Do you have to have a point if you’re an evil sect of Librarians?” Bastille asked with annoyance.
I fell silent.
“They do have a point, Bastille,” Sing said. “Everyone has a reason to do what they do. The Librarians, they were founded by a man named Biblioden. Most people just call him The Scrivener. He taught that the world is too strange a place – that it needs to be ordered, organized, and controlled. One of Biblioden’s teachings is the Fire Metaphor. He pointed out that if you let fire burn free, it destroys everything around it. If you contain it, however, it can be very useful. Well, the Librarians think that other things – Oculatory powers, technology, Smedry Talents – need to be contained too. Controlled.”
“Controlled by those who supposedly know better,” Bastille said. “Librarians.”
“So,” I said, “all of this cover-up…”
“It’s to create the world The Scrivener envisioned,” Sing said. “To create a place where information is carefully controlled by a few select people, and where power is in the hands of his followers. A world where nothing strange or abnormal exists. Where magic is derided, and everything can be blissfully ordinary.”
And that’s what we fight, I thought, coming to understand for the first time. That’s what this is all about.
Sing threw his duffel over his shoulder, adjusting his glasses as Bastille went back to the door, cracking it open to make certain nobody was in the hallway. As she did, I noticed the discarded uzi, lying ignored on the floor. Trying to look nonchalant, I wandered over to it, absently reaching down and picking it up.
This is, I would like to note, precisely the same thing any thirteen-year-old boy would do in that situation. A boy who wouldn’t do such a thing probably hasn’t been reading enough books about killer Librarians.
Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t like most thirteen-year-old boys. I was special. And, in this case, my specialness manifested itself by making the gun break the moment I touched it. The weapon made a noise almost like a sigh, then busted into a hundred different pieces. Bullets rolled away like marbles, leaving me sullenly holding a piece of the gun’s grip.
“Oh,” Sing said. “I meant to leave that there, Alcatraz.”
“Yes, well,” I said, dropping scrap of metal. “I thought I should… uh, take care of the gun, just in case. We wouldn’t want anyone to find such a primitive weapon and hurt themselves by accident.”
“Ah, good idea,” Sing said. Bastille held open the door, then we all moved into the hallway.
“Next door,” Bastille said.
I nodded, switching glasses. As soon as the Tracker’s Lenses were on, I noticed something: bright black footprints, burning on the ground.
They were still fresh – I could see the trail disappearing as I watched. And there was a certain… power to the footprints. I instantly knew to whom they belonged.
The footprints passed through the hallway, beside a yellowish-black set, disappearing into the distance. They burned, foreboding and dark, like gasoline dropped to the floor and lit with black fire.
As Bastille crept toward the next door in the hallway, I made a decision. “Forget the room,” I said, growing tense. “Follow me!”