“Oh,” I said. “Um, sorry.” Still frowning to myself, I stepped into the room.
It was a large chamber. Far larger, I decided than could have possibly fit in the store. I could now see a rug set with thronelike chairs arranged to face the hearth in a homey manner (if your home is a medieval castle…). To my left, there was a long, broad table, also set with chairs.
“Sing!” Grandpa Smedry yelled, his voice echoing down a hallway to the right. “Sing!”
If he breaks into song, I think I might have to strangle myself… I thought, cringing.
“Lord Smedry?” a voice called from down the hallway, and a huge figure rushed into sight.
If you’ve never seen a large Mokian man in sunglasses, a tunic, and tights before –
Okay. I’m going to assume that you’ve never seen a large Mokian man in sunglasses, a tunic, and tights. I certainly hadn’t.
The man – apparently named Sing – was a good six and a half feet tall, and had dark hair and dark skin. He looked like he could be from Hawaii, or maybe Samoa or Tonga. He had the mass and girth of a linebacker and would have fit right in on the football field. Or, at least, he would have fit right in if he’d been wearing a football uniform, rather than a tunic – a type of garment that I still think looks silly. Bastille has pictures of me wearing one. If you ask her, she’ll probably show them to you gleefully.
Of course, if you do that, I’ll probably have to hunt you down and kill you. Or dress you in a tunic and take pictures of you. I’m still not sure which is worse.
“Sing,” Grandpa Smedry said. “We need to do a full library infiltration. Now.”
“A library infiltration?” Sing said excitedly.
“Yes, yes,” Grandpa Smedry said hurriedly. “Go get your cousin, and both of you get into your disguises. I need to gather my Lenses.”
Sing rushed back the way he had come. Grandpa Smedry walked over to the wall on the other side of the hearth. Not sure what else to do, I followed, watching as Grandpa Smedry knelt beside what appeared to be a large box made entirely of black glass. Grandpa Smedry put his hand on it, closed his eyes, and the front of the box suddenly shattered.
I jumped back, but Grandpa Smedry ignored the broken shards of black glass. He reached into the chest and pulled out a tray wrapped in red velvet. He set this on top of the box, unwrapping the cloth and revealing a small book and about a dozen pairs of spectacles, each with a slightly different tint of glass.
Grandpa Smedry pulled open the front of his tuxedo jacket, then began to slip the spectacles into little pouches sewn into the lining of the garment. They hung like the watches on the inside of an illegal street peddler’s coat.
“Something very strange is going on, isn’t it?” I finally asked.
“Yes, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said, still arranging the spectacles.
“We’re really going to go sneak into a library?”
Grandpa Smedry nodded.
“Only, it’s not really a library. But someplace more dangerous.”
“Oh, it’s really a library,” Grandpa Smedry said. “What you haven’t realized before is that all libraries are far more dangerous that you’ve always assumed.”
“And we’re going to break into this one,” I repeated. “A place filled with people who want to kill me.”
“Most likely,” Grandpa Smedry said. “But what else can we do? We either infiltrate, or we let them make those sands into Lenses.”
This isn’t a joke, I began to realize. This man isn’t actually crazy. Or, at least, the craziness includes much more than just him. I stood there for a moment, feeling overwhelmed, thinking about what I had seen.
“Well, all right, then,” I finally said.
Now, you Hushlanders may think that I took all of these strange experiences quite well. After all, it isn’t every day that you get threatened with a gun, then discover a medieval dining room hiding inside the beverage cooler at a local gas station. However, maybe if you’d grown up with the magical ability to break almost anything you touched, then you would have been just as quick to accept unusual circumstances.
“Here, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said, standing and picking up the final pair of spectacles. They were reddish tinted, like the pair Grandpa Smedry was currently wearing. “These are yours. I’ve been saving them for you.”
I paused. “I don’t need glasses.”
“You’re an Oculator, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said. “You’ll always need glasses.”
“Can’t I wear sunglasses, like Sing?”
Grandpa Smedry chuckled. “You don’t need Warrior’s Lenses, lad. You can access abilities far more potent. Here, take these. They’re Oculator’s Lenses.”
“What are Oculators?” I asked.
“We are, my boy. Put them on.”
I frowned, but took the glasses. I put them on, then glanced around. “Nothing looks different,” I said, feeling disappointed. “The room doesn’t even look… redder.”
Of course not,” Grandpa Smedry said. “The tints come from the sands they’re made of and help us keep the Lenses straight. They’re not intended to make things look different.”
“I just… thought the glasses would do something.”
“They do,” Grandpa Smedry said. “They show you things that you need to see. It’s just subtle, lad. Wear them for a while – let your eyes get used to them.”
“All right….” I glanced over as Grandpa Smedry knelt to put the tray back inside the broken box. “What’s that book?”
Grandpa Smedry looked up “Hmmm? This?” He picked up the small book, handing it to me. I opened to the first page. It was filled with scribbles, as if made by a child.
“The Forgotten Language,” Grandpa Smedry said. “We’ve been trying to decipher it for centuries – your father worked on that book for a while, before you were born. He thought its secrets might lead him to the Sands of Rashid.”
“This isn’t a language,” I said. “It’s just a bunch of scribbles.”
“Well, any language you don’t understand would just look like scribbles, lad!”
I flipped through the pages of the book. It was filled with completely random circles, zigzags, loop-dee-loops, and the like. There were no patterns. Some of the pages only had a couple marks on them; others were so black with ink that they looked like a child’s rendition of a tornado.
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. A language has to make patterns! There’s nothing like that in here.”
“That’s the big secret, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said, taking back the book. “Why do you think nobody, despite centuries of trying, has managed to break the code? The Incarna people – the ones who wrote in this language – held vast secrets. Unfortunately, nobody can read their records, and the Incarna disappeared many centuries ago.”
I wrinkled my brow at the strange comments. Grandpa Smedry stood up, stepping away from the glass box. And, suddenly, the shattered front of the box melted and reformed its glassy surface.
I stepped back in shock. Then I reached up, suspiciously pulling off my glasses. Yet the box still sat pristine, as if it hadn’t been broken in the first place.
“Restore Glass,” Grandpa Smedry said, nodding toward the box. “Only an Oculator can break it. Once he moves too far away, however, it will re-form into its previous shape. Makes for wonderful safes. It’s even stronger than Builder’s Glass, if used right.”
I slipped my Lenses back on.
“Tell me, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said, laying a hand on my shoulder, “why did you burn down your foster parents’ kitchen?”
I started. That wasn’t the question I’d been expecting. “How did you know about that?”
“Why, I’m an Oculator, of course.”
I just frowned.
“So why?” he asked. “Why burn it down?”
“It was an accident,” I replied.
“Was it?”
I looked away. Of course it was an accident, I thought, feeling a bit of shame. Why would I do something like that on purpose?
Grandpa Smedry was studying me. “You have a Talent for breaking things,” he said. “Or so you have said. Yet lighting fire to a set of drapes and ruining a kitchen with smoke doesn’t seem like a use of that Talent. Particularly if you let the fire burn for a while before putting it out. That’s not breaking. That seems more like destroying.”
“I don’t destroy,” I said quietly.
“Why, then?” Grandpa Smedry said.
I shrugged. What was he implying? Did he think I liked messing things up all the time? Did he think I liked being forced to move every few months? It seemed that every time I came to love someone, they decided that my Talent was just too much to handle.
I felt a stab of loneliness but shoved it down.
“Ah,” Grandpa Smedry said. “You won’t answer, I see. But I can still wonder, can’t I? Why would a boy do such damage to the homes of such kind people? It seems like a perversion of his Talent. Yes, indeed…”
I said nothing. Grandpa Smedry just smiled at me, then straightened his bow tie and checked his wristwatch. “Garbled Greens! We’re late. Sing! Quentin!”
“We’re ready, Uncle!” a voice called from down the hallway.
“Ah, good,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Come, my boy. Let me introduce you to your cousins!”
Chapter 4
Hushlanders, I’d like to take this opportunity to commend you for reading this book. I realize the difficulty you must have gone through to obtain it – after all, no Librarian is likely to recommend it, considering the secrets it exposes about their kind.
Actually, my experience has been that people generally don’t recommend this kind of book at all. It is far too interesting. Perhaps you have had other kinds of books recommended to you. Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, or teachers, then told that these books are the type you “have to read.” Those books are invariably described as “important” – which, in my experience, pretty much means that they’re boring. (Words like meaningful and thoughtful are other good clues.)
If there is a boy in these kinds of books, he will not go on an adventure to fight against Librarians, paper monsters, and one-eyed Dark Oculators. In fact, the lad will not go on an adventure or fight against anything at all. Instead, his dog will die. Or, in some cases, his mother will die. If it’s a really meaningful book, both his dog and his mother will die. (Apparently, most writers have something against dogs and mothers.)
Neither my mother nor my dog dies in this book. I’m rather tired of those types of stories. In my opinion, such fantastical, unrealistic books – books in which boys live on mountains, families work on farms, or anyone has anything to do with the Great Depression – have a tendency to rot the brain. To combat such silliness, I’ve written the volume you now hold – a solid, true account. Hopefully, it will help anchor you in reality.