“How… how do I manage that?” I asked.
“It takes time to practice, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Time we don’t have! But, well, it probably won’t come to that. Just… try to stay away from any rooms that shine black, okay?”
I nodded again.
“Well, then!” Grandpa Smedry said to the whole group. “The Librarians will have to spend ages cleaning up that mess in the lobby. Hopefully, they won’t even notice the door until we’re gone. One hour! Quickly, now. We’re late!”
With that, Grandpa Smedry spun to the left and began walking down the empty white hallway. Quentin waved good-bye. “Rutabaga, fire over the inheritance!” he said, then rushed after the elderly Oculator.
Sing and Bastille turned to me. It… looks like I’m in charge, I thought with surprise.
This was a strange realization. Yes, yes, I know – Grandpa Smedry had already said that I would have to lead my group. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself in this situation. The truth is, however, that I was never the sort of person that people put in charge. Those kinds of duties generally go to the types of boys and girls who deliver apples, answer questions, and smile a lot. Leadership duties do not generally go to boys whose desks collapse, who are often accused of playing pranks by removing the doorknobs of school bathrooms, and who once unwittingly made a friend’s pants fall down while he was writing on the chalkboard.
I never did manage to get that stunt to work again.
“Um, I guess we go this way,” I said, pointing down the hallway.
“You think?” Bastille asked flatly, handing Sing his gym bag of guns. She pulled a pair of sunglasses – Warrior’s Lenses, as the others called them – out of her jacket packet and slipped them on. Then she took off, walking down the hallway, handbag flipped around her shoulder.
If I ordered her to go back and follow Grandpa instead, I wonder if she’d go… I decided that she probably wouldn’t.
“Say, Alcatraz,” Sing said as we followed Bastille. “What do you suppose this little wrap on my ankle means?”
I frowned, glancing down. “The bandage?”
“Oh,” Sing said. “Is that what it is? First aid, it is called, correct?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why else would someone wrap your ankle like that?”
Sing glanced down, obviously trying to inspect the ankle bandage while still walking. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, “I thought maybe it was some preliminary courtship ritual…” He trailed off, looking toward me hopefully.
“No,” I said. “Not a chance.”
“That’s sad,” Sing said. “She was pretty.”
“Is that the sort of thing you should be thinking about?” I asked. “I mean, you’re an anthropologist – you study cultures. Are you allowed to interfere with the ‘natives’ you meet?”
“What?” Sing said. “Of course we can! Why, we’re here to interfere! We’re trying to overthrow Librarian domination of the Hushlands, after all.”
“Why not just let people live their lives, and live yours?”
Sing looked taken aback. “Alcatraz, the Hushlanders are enslaved! They’re being kept in ignorance, living only with the most primitive technologies! Besides, we need to do something to fight. Back at the Conclave of Kings, some people are starting to talk about surrendering to the Librarians completely!” He shook his head. “I’m glad for people like your grandfather, people willing to take the fight into Librarian lands. It shows that we won’t just sit back and slowly have our kingdoms taken from us.”
Up ahead, Bastille glared back at us. “Would you two like to chat a little more?” she snapped. “Perhaps sing a little tune? If there are any Librarians up ahead, we wouldn’t want them to miss out on hearing us coming.”
Sing looked at his feet sheepishly, and we fell silent – though a part of me wanted to yell something like, “What did you say, Bastille?” as loudly as I could. You see, that is the sad, sorry, terrible thing about sarcasm.
It’s really funny.
But I just walked quietly, thinking about what Sing had said – particularly the part about the Librarians only letting Hushlanders have the most “primitive” of technologies. It seemed ridiculous to me that the Free Kingdomers considered things like guns and automobiles to be “primitive.” They weren’t primitive, they were… well, they were what I knew. Growing up in America, I’d come to assume that everything I had – and did – was the newest, best, and most advanced in the world.
It was very unsettling to be confronted by people who weren’t impressed by how advanced my culture was. I wanted to huff and think that whatever they had must not be all that good either. Except the problem was that I’d seen that they had self-driving cars, glasses that could track a person’s footprints, and armored knights. All were, in one way or another, superior to what I’d know. (Admit it, knights are just cool.)
I was coming to realize something very difficult. I was slowly accepting that the way I did things – the way my people did things – might not actually be the best way.
In other words, I was feeling humility.
I sincerely hope that you never have to feel this emotion. Like asparagus and fish, it’s not really as good for you as everyone says it is. Selfishness, arrogance, and callousness got me much further than humility ever did.
Have I mentioned that I’m not really a very good person?
Our small group reached the end of the unmarked hallway, Bastille still in the lead. She paused, holding up a hand, peeking around the corner. Then she continued onward, her platform sandals making a slight noise as she stepped onto a carpeted floor. Sing and I followed. The room beyond was filled with books.
Really filled.
Perhaps you’ve never experienced the full, suffocating majesty of a true library. You Hushlanders have probably visited your local libraries – you’ve perused the parts that normal people are allowed to see. These places tend to have row upon row of neat bookshelves, arranged nicely. They are presented attractively for the same reason that kittens are cute – so that they can draw you in, then pounce on you for the kill.
Seriously. Stay away from kittens.
Public libraries exist to entice. The Librarians want everyone to read their books – whether those books are deep and poignant works about dead puppies or nonfiction books about made-up topics, like the Pilgrims, penicillin, and France. In fact, the only book they don’t want you to read is the one you’re holding right now.
Those aren’t real libraries, however. Real libraries take little concern for enticement. You who have visited the basements stacks of a university library’s philosophy section know what I’m talking about. In such places, the shelves get squeezed closer and closer together, and they reach higher and higher. Piles of books appear randomly at the junctions and in corners waiting to be shelved, like the fourth-generation descendants of a copy of Summa Theologica and an edition of Little Women.
Dust settles on the books like a gray perversion of rain forest moss, giving the air a certain moldy, unwelcome scent faintly reminiscent of a baledragon’s lair. At each corner, you expect to turn and see the withered, skeletal remains of some poor researcher who got lost in the stacks and never found his way out.
And even those kinds of libraries are by pale apprentices to the enormous cavern of books that I entered that day. We walked quietly, passing shelves packed so tightly together that only an anorexic racing jockey could have squeezed between them. The bookshelves were easily fifteen feet high, and enormous plaques on the ends proclaimed, in very small letters, the titles each one contained. Long wooden poles with pincerlike hooks leaned against some shelves, and I got the impression that they were used for reaching between the shelves to pull out books.
No, I thought, it would take a ridiculous amount of practice to learn to do something like that. I must be wrong.
You may have guessed that I wasn’t actually wrong. You see, Librarian apprentices have plenty of time to practice things that are ridiculous. They really only have three duties: First, to learn the incredibly and needlessly complicated filing system used to catalog books in the back library stacks. Second, to practice with the book-hooks. Third, to plot ways to torture an innocent populace.
That third one is the most fun. Kind of like gym class for the murderously insane.
Sing, Bastille, and I crept along the rows, careful to keep an eye out for Librarian apprentices. This was undoubtedly the most dangerous thing I’d ever done in my short life. Fortunately, we were able to get to the eastern edge of the room without incident.
“We should move along the wall,” Bastille said quietly, “so Alcatraz can look down each row of books. That way, he might see powerful sources of Oculation.”
Sing nodded. “But we should move quickly. We need to find the sands and get out fast, before the Librarians realize they’ve been infiltrated.”
They looked at me expectantly. “Uh, that sounds good,” I finally said.
“You’ve got this leadership thing down, Smedry,” Bastille said flatly. “Very inspiring. Come on, then. Let’s keep moving.”
“Bastille and Sing began to walk along the wall. I however, didn’t follow. I had just noticed something hanging on the wall above us: a very large painting that appeared to be an ornate, detailed map of the world.
And it looked nothing like the one I was used to.
Chapter 8
At this point, you’re probably expecting to read something like, “I suddenly realized that everything I thought I had known was untrue.”
Though I’ll likely use that exact phrase, I should warn you that it is actually misleading. Everything I knew was not untrue. In fact, many of the things I’d learned about the world were quite true.
For instance, I knew that the sun came up every day. That was not untrue. (Though, admittedly, that sun shone on a geography I didn’t understand.) I knew that my homeland was named the United States of America. That was not untrue. (Though the U.S.A. was not actually run by senators, presidents, and judges – but instead by a cult of evil Librarians.) I knew that sharks were annoying. This also was not untrue. (There’s actually nothing witty to add here. Sharks are annoying. Particularly the carnivorous kind.)
You have been warned.
I stared up at the enormous wall map and suddenly realized something. Everything I thought I’d known about the world was untrue. “This can’t be real…” I whispered stepping back.
I’m afraid it is, Alcatraz,” Sing said, laying a hand on my shoulder. “That’s the world – the entire world, both the Hushlands and the Free Kingdoms. This is the thing that the Librarians don’t want you to know about.”
I stared. “But it’s so… big.”
And indeed it was. The Americas were there, represented accurately. The other continents – Asia, Australia, Africa, and the rest – were there as well. They were collectively labeled INNER LIBRARIA on the map, but I recognized them easily enough. The difference, then, was the new continents. There were three of them, pressed into the oceans between the familiar continents. Two of the new continents were smaller, perhaps the size of Australia. One, however, was very large. It sat directly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, right between America and Japan.