“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.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“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 slid 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 my 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 seem 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 Language 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, turning 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 Restoring 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.”