Chapter 5
At this point, perhaps you Hushlanders are beginning to doubt the truth of this narrative. You have seen several odd and inexplicable things happen. (Though, just as a warning, the story so far has actually been quite tame. Just wait until we get to the part with the talking dinosaurs.) Some readers might even think that I’m just making this story up. You might think that everything in this book is dreamy silliness.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
This book is serious. Terribly serious. Your skepticism results from a lifetime of training in the Librarians’ school system, where you were taught all kinds of lies. Indeed, you’d probably never even heard of the Smedrys, despite the fact that they are the most famous family of Oculators in the entire world. In most parts of the Free Kingdoms, being a Smedry is considered equivalent to being nobility.
(If you wish to perform a fun test, next time you are in history class, ask your teacher about the Smedrys. If your teacher is a Librarian spy, he or she will get red-faced and give you a detention. If, on the other hand, your teacher is innocent, he or she will simply be confused, then likely give you a detention.)
Remember, despite the fact that this book is being sold as a “fantasy” novel, you must take all of the things it says extremely seriously, as they are quite important, are in no way silly, and always make sense.
Rutabaga.
“That is a knight?” I asked, pointed at the silver-haired girl.
“Unfortunately,” Grandpa Smedry said.
“But she’s a girl!” I said.
“Yes,” Grandpa Smedry said. “and a very dangerous one, I might add. She was sent to protect me.”
“Sent?” I said. “Who sent her, then?” And is she supposed to protect from Librarians, or from yourself?
Bastille stalked right up to Grandpa Smedry, placed her hands on her hips, and glared at him. “I’d stab you with something if I didn’t know that you’d arrive too late to get hurt.”
“Bastille, my dear,” Grandpa Smedry said. “How pleasant. Of course I didn’t mean to leave you behind. You see, I was running late, and I needed to go – “
Bastille held up a hand to silence Grandpa, then glared at me. “Who is he?”
“My grandson,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Alcatraz.”
“Another Smedry?” she asked. “I have to try to protect four of you now?”
“Bastille, dear,” Grandpa Smedry said. “No need to get upset. He won’t be much trouble. Will you Alcatraz?”
“Uh… no,” I said. That was, of course, an absolute lie. But would you have said anything different?
Bastille narrowed her eyes. “Somehow I doubt that. What are you planning, old man?”
“Nothing to worry about,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Just a little infiltration.”
“Of?” Bastille asked.
“The downtown library,” Grandpa Smedry said, then smiled innocently.
“What?” Bastille said. “Honestly, can’t I even leave you alone for half a day? Shattering Glass! What would make you want to infiltrate that place?”
“They have the Sands of Rashid,” Grandpa Smedry said.
“So? We’ve got plenty of sand.”
“These sands are very important,” Grandpa Smedry said. “It’s an Oculator sort of thing.”
Bastille’s expression darkened a bit at that comment. She threw her hands into the air. “Whatever,” she said. “I assume we’re late.”
“Very,” Grandpa Smedry said.
“Fine.” She stabbed a finger at me; I barely suppressed a tense jump. “You, get in my car. You can fill me in on the mission. We’ll meet you there, old man.”
“Lovely,” Grandpa Smedry said, looking relieved.
“I – “ I began.
“Must I remind you, Alcatraz,” Grandpa Smedry said, “that you shouldn’t swear? Now, we’re late! Get moving!”
I paused. “Swear?” I said. However, my confusion gave Grandpa Smedry a perfect chance to escape, and I caught sight of the man’s eyes twinkling as he jumped into his car, Quentin and Sing joining him.
“For an old man who arrives late to everything,” I noted, “he certainly is spry.”
“Come on, Smedry!” Bastille growled, climbing back into her sleek car.
I sighed, then rounded the vehicle and pulled open the passenger side door. I tossed the handle to the side as it broke off, then climbed in. Bastille rapped her knuckles on the dashboard, and the car started. Then she reached for the gear shift, throwing it into reverse.
“Uh, doesn’t the car drive itself?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” Bastille said. “It can do both – it’s a hybrid. We’re trying to get closer to things that look like real Hushlander vehicles.”
With that, the car burst into motion.
Now, I had been very frightened on several different occasions in my life. The most frightening of these involved an elevator and a mime. Perhaps the second most frightening involved a caseworker and a gun.
Bastille’s driving, however, quickly threatened to become number three.
“Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of bodyguard?” I asked, furiously working to find a seat belt. There didn’t appear to be one.
“Yeah,” Bastille said. “So?”
“So, shouldn’t you avoid killing me in a car wreck?”
Bastille frowned, spinning the wheel and taking a corner at a ridiculous speed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I sighed, settling into my seat, telling myself that the car probably had some sort of mystical device to protect its occupants. (I was wrong, of course. Both Oculator powers and silimatic technology have to do with glass, and I seriously doubt that an air bag made of – or filled with – glass would be all that effective. Amusing, perhaps, but not effective.)
“Hey,” I said. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen,” Bastille replied.
“Should you be driving, then?” I asked.
“I don’t see why not.”
“You’re too young,” I said.
“Says who?”
“Says the law.”
I could see Bastille narrow her eyes, and her hands gripped the wheel even tighter. “Maybe Librarian law,” she muttered.
This, I thought, is probably not a topic to pursue further. “So,” I said, trying something different. “What is your Talent?”
Bastille gritted her teeth, glaring out through the windshield.
“Well?” I asked.
“You don’t have to rub it in, Smedry.”
Great. “You… don’t have a Talent, then?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I’m a Crystin.”
“A what?” I asked.
Bastille turned – an action that made me rather uncomfortable, as I thought she should have kept watching the road – and gave me the kind of look that implied that I had just said something very, very stupid. (And, indeed, I had said something very stupid. Fortunately, I made up for it by doing something rather clever – as you will see shortly.)
Bastille turned her eyes back on the road just in time to avoid running over a man dressed like a large slice of pizza. “So you’re really him, then? The one old Smedry keeps talking about?”
This intrigued me. “He’s mentioned me to you?”
Bastille nodded. “Twice a year or so we have to come back to this area and see where you’ve moved. Old Smedry always manages to lose me before he actually gets to your house – he claims I’ll stand out or something. Tell me, did you really knock down one of your foster parents’ houses?”
I shifted uncomfortably. “That rumor is exaggerated,” I said. “It was just a storage shed.”
Bastille nodded, eyes narrowing, as if for some reason she had a grudge against sheds to go along with her apparent psychopathic dislike of Librarians.
“So…” I said slowly. “How does a thirteen-year-old girl become a knight anyway?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bastille asked, taking a screeching corner.
And here’s where I proved my cleverness: I remained silent.
Bastille seemed to relax a bit. “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good with people. They annoy me. That’s probably why I ended up in a job that lets me beat them up.”
Is that supposed to be comforting? I wondered.
“Plus,” she said, “you’re a Smedry – and Smedrys are trouble. They’re reckless, and they don’t like to think about the consequences of their actions. That means trouble for me. See, my job is to keep you alive. It’s like… sometimes you Smedrys try to get yourselves killed just so I’ll get in trouble.”
“I’ll try my best to avoid something like that,” I said honestly. Thought her comment did spark a thought in my head. Now that I had begun to accept the things happening around me, I was actually beginning to think of Grandpa Smedry as – well – my grandfather. And that meant… My parents, I thought. They might actually be involved in this. They might actually have sent me that bag of sands.
They would have been Smedrys too, of course. So, were they some of the ones that “got themselves killed,” as Bastille so nicely put it? Or, like all these other relatives I was suddenly learning I had, were my parents still around somewhere?
That was a depressing thought. A lot of us foster children don’t like to consider ourselves orphans. It’s an outdated term, in my opinion. It brings to mind images of scrawny, dirty-faced thieves living on the street and getting meals from good-hearted nuns. I wasn’t an orphan – I had lots of parents. I just never stayed with any of them all that long.
I’d rarely bothered to consider my real parents, since Ms. Fletcher had never been willing to answer questions about them. Somehow, I found the prospect of their survival to be even more depressing that the thought of them being dead.
Why did you burn down your foster parents’ kitchen, lad? Grandpa Smedry had asked. I quickly turned away from that line of thinking, focusing again on Bastille.
She was shaking her head, still muttering about the Smedrys who get themselves into trouble. “Your grandfather,” she said, “he’s the worst. Normal people avoid Inner Libraria. The Librarians have enough minions in our own kingdoms to be plenty threatening. But Leavenworth Smedry? Fighting them isn’t nearly dangerous enough for him. He has to live as a spy inside of the shattering Hushlands themselves! And of course, he drags me with him.
“Now he wants in infiltrate a library. And not just any library but the regional headquarters – the biggest library in three states.” She paused, glancing at me. “You think I have good reason to be annoyed?”
“Definitely,” I said, again proving my cleverness.
“That’s what I thought,” Bastille said. Then she slammed on the brakes.
I smashed against the dash, nearly losing my glasses. I groaned, sitting back. “What?” I asked, holding my head.
“What what?” Bastille said, pushing open the door. “We’re here.”
“Oh.” I opened my door, dropping the inside handle to the street as it came off in my hand. (This kind of thing becomes second nature to you after you break off your first hundred or so door handles.)
Bastille had parked on the side of the street, directly across from the downtown library – a wide, single-story building set on a street corner. The area around us was familiar to me. The downtown wasn’t extremely huge – not like that of a city like Chicago or L.A. – but it did have a smattering of large office buildings and hotels. These towered behind us; we were only a few blocks away from the city center.
Bastille rapped the hood of her car. “Go find a place to park,” she told it. It immediately started up, then backed away.
I raised an eyebrow. “Handy, that,” I noted. Like Grandpa Smedry’s car, this one had no visible gas cap. I wonder what powers it.
The answer to that, of course, was sand. Silimatic sand, to be precise – sometimes called steamsand. But I really don’t have room to go into that now – even if its discovery was what eventually led to the break between silimatic technology and regular Hushlander technology. And that was kind of the foundation for the Librarians breaking off of the Free Kingdoms and creating the Hushlands.
Kind of.
“Old Smedry won’t be here for a few more minutes,” Bastille said, standing with her handbag over her shoulder. “He’ll be late. How does the library look?”
“Umm… like a library?” I said.
“Funny, Smedry,” she said flatly. “Very funny.”
Now, I generally know when I’m being funny. At this moment, I did not believe that I was. I looked over at the building, trying to decide what Bastille had meant.
And, as I stared at it, something seemed to… change about the library. It wasn’t anything I could distinctly put my finger on; it just grew darker somehow. More threatening. The windows appeared to curl slightly, like horns, and the stonework shadows took on a menacing cast.
“It looks… dangerous,” I said.
“Well, of course,” Bastille said. “It’s a library.”
“Right,” I said. “What else should I look for, then?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m no Oculator.”
I squinted. As I watched, the library seemed to… stretch. “It’s not just one story,” I said with surprise. “It looks like three.”
“We knew that already,” Bastille said. “Try for less permanent auras.”
What does that mean? I wondered, studying the building. It now looked far larger, far more grand, to my eyes. “The top two floors look… thinner than the bottom floor. Like they’re squeezing in slightly.”
“Hmm,” Bastille said. “That’s probably a population aura – it means the library isn’t very full today. Most of the Librarians must be out on missions. That’s good for us. Any dark windows?”
“One,” I said, noticing it for the first time. “It’s jet-black, like it’s tinted.”
“Shattering Glass,” Bastille muttered.
“What?” I asked.
“Dark Oculator,” Bastille said. “What floor?”
“Third,” I said. “North corner.”
“We’ll want to stay away from there, then.”
I frowned. “I’m guessing a Dark Oculator is something dangerous, right?”
“They’re like super Librarians,” Bastille said.
“Not all Librarians are Oculators?”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Of course not,” she said. “Very few people are Oculators. Smedrys on the main line and… a few others. Regardless, Dark Oculators are very, very dangerous.”
Well, then, I said. “If I had something valuable – like the Sands of Rashid – then I’d keep them with him. So, that’s probably the first place we should go.”
Bastille looked at me, eyes narrowing. “Just like a Smedry. If you die, I’m never going to get promoted!”
“How comforting,” I said, then nodded at the library. “I’m seeing something else about the building. I think… some of the windows are glowing just a bit.”
“Which ones?”
“All of them, actually,” I said, cocking my head. “Even the black one. It’s… a little strange.”
“There’s a lot of Oculatory power in there. Strong Lenses, powerful sands, that sort of thing. They’re making the glass charge with power by association.”
I reached up, sliding the glasses down on my nose. I still couldn’t quite tell if I was seeing actual images, or if the light was just playing tricks on me. The changes were so subtle – even the stretching – that they didn’t even seem like changes at all. More like impressions.
I pushed the glasses back up, then glanced at Bastille. “You certainly seem to know a lot about this – especially for someone who says she’s no Oculator.”
Bastille folded her arms, looking away.
“So how do you know all of this?” I asked. “About the Dark Oculator and the library seeming empty?”
“Anyone would know those auras,” she snapped. “They’re simple, really. Honestly, Smedry. Even someone raised by Librarians should know that.”
“I wasn’t raised by Librarians,” I said. “I was raised by regular people – good people.”
“Oh?” Bastille said. “Then why did you work so hard to destroy their houses?”
“Look, aren’t knights supposed to be a little less… annoying?”
Bastille stood upright, sniffing angrily. Then she swung her purse straight at my head. I started but remained where I was. The handbag’s strap will break, I thought. It won’t be able to hit me.
And so, of course, it smashed right into my face. It was surprisingly heavy, as if Bastille had packed a brick or two inside, just in case she had to whack the odd Smedry in the head. I stepped backward – half from the impact, half from surprise – and stumbled, falling to the ground. My head banged against the streetlamp, and I immediately heard a crack up above.
The lamp’s bulb shattered on the ground beside me.
Oh, sure, I thought, rubbing my head. That breaks.
Bastille sniffed with satisfaction, as she looked down at me, but I caught a glimmer of surprise in her eyes – as if she too hadn’t expected to be able to hit me.
“Stop making so much noise,” she said. “People will notice.” Behind her, Grandpa Smedry’s little black car finally puttered up the street, coming to a stop beside us. I could see Sing smushed into the backseat, obscuring the entire back window.
Grandpa Smedry climbed perkily out of the car as I stood rubbing my jaw. “what happened?” he asked, glancing at the broken light, then at me, then at Bastille.
“Nothing,” I said.
Grandpa Smedry smiled, eyes twinkling, as if he knew exactly what had happened. “Well,” he said, “should we be off, then?”
I nodded, straightening my glasses. “Let’s go break in to the library.”
And once again, I considered just how strange my life had become during the last two hours.
Rutabaga.