‘Are you all right, Your Majesty?’ Aluki asked again, timid.
‘We will win this battle,’ I said. I felt a strange sense of determination shoving away my feelings of shame and loss. ‘And we will get the antidote. We no longer have an option in this regard.’ I turned to regard the soldiers. ‘We will find a way to get Bastille out, and then wake her up. I am not going to fail her.’
Solemnly, the soldiers nodded. Oddly, in that moment, I finally felt like a Smedry, maybe even a king, for the first time.
‘The city is protected for the time being,’ I said. ‘Though we still have to worry about the tunnels. I want people back to their posts watching the city for Librarian incursions. We’re going to last. We’re going to win. I vow it.’
‘Your Majesty,’ Aluki said, nodding upward. ‘They knocked a hole in the dome. They’ll find a way to exploit that.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We’ll deal with that when it happens. Have someone watch to see what the Librarians do next. Ask my advisers if they can think of any way to patch that hole.’
‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ Aluki said. ‘Er . . . what will you be doing?’
I took a deep breath. ‘It’s time to confront my mother.’
NCC-1701
In the year 1288, if you were to pass by an old acquaintance on the way to Ye Olde Chain Mail Shoppe and call him ‘nice,’ you’d actually be calling him an idiot.
If it were the year 1322 instead – and you were on your way to the bookshop to pick up the new wacky comedy by a guy named Dante – when you called someone ‘nice’ you would be saying that they were timid.
In 1380, if you called someone ‘nice,’ you’d be saying they were fussy.
In 1405, you’d be calling them dainty.
In 1500, you’d be calling them careful.
By the 1700s – when you were off to do some crowd surfing at the new Mozart concert – you’d be using the word nice to mean ‘agreeable.’
Sometimes, it’s difficult to understand how much change there is all around us. Even language changes, and the same word can mean different things depending on how, where, and when it was said. The word awful used to mean ‘deserving of awe’ – full of awe. The same as awesome. Once, the word brave meant ‘cowardly.’ The word girl meant a child of either gender.
(So next time you’re with a mixed group of friends, you should call them ‘girls’ instead of ‘guys.’ Assuming you’re not too brave, nice, nice, nice, or nice.)
People change too. In fact, they’re always changing. We like to pretend that the people we know stay the same, but they change moment by moment as they come to new conclusions, experience new things, think new thoughts. Perhaps, as Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same river twice . . . but I think a more powerful metaphor would have been this: You can never meet the same person twice.
The Mokians hadn’t actually put my mother in the university with the other prisoners. I’d told them to put her in a place that was very secure, and they didn’t have a prison. (It may surprise you to learn this. Mokia is exactly the sort of place the Librarians don’t want you to believe in. A paradise where people are learned, where arguments don’t turn into fistfights, but instead debates over warm tea and grapes.)
No, the Mokians didn’t have a prison. But they did have a zoo.
It was actually more of a research farm, a place where exotic animals could be kept and studied in the name of science. My mother, Shasta Smedry, was confined in a large cage with thick bars that looked like it had once been used to house a tiger or other large cat. It had a little pool for water, a tree to climb in, and several large rock formations.
Unfortunately, the Mokians had removed the tiger before locking my mother in. That was probably for the tiger’s safety.
I walked up to the cage, two Mokian guards at my side. Shasta sat inside on a small rock, legs crossed primly, wearing her Librarian business suit with the ankle-length gray skirt and high-necked white blouse. She had on horn-rimmed glasses. They weren’t magical, according to my Oculator’s Lenses. I checked just to be certain.
‘Mother,’ I said flatly, stepping up to the cage.
‘Son,’ she replied.
I should note that this felt very, very odd. I’d once confronted my mother in a situation almost exactly like this, during my very first Library infiltration. Except then, my mother had been the one outside the bars, and I had been the one behind them.
I didn’t feel any safer having it this way.
‘I need to know the formula for the antidote,’ I told her. ‘The one that will overcome the effects of the Librarian coma-guns.’
‘It’s a pity, then,’ she said, ‘that I don’t have it.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Hmm . . . If only there were a way for you to tell if I were speaking lies or not.’
I blushed, then dug out my Truthfinder’s Lens. I looked through it.
She spoke directly at me. ‘I don’t know the antidote.’
The words puffed from her mouth like white clouds. She was telling the truth. I felt a sinking feeling.
‘I’m not from the Order of the Shattered Lens,’ my mother continued. ‘They wouldn’t entrust one such as me with something that important – they wouldn’t let any foot soldier know it. That secret will be very carefully guarded, as will the secret of the antidote to the Mokian stun-spears.’
I looked at my guards. Aluki nodded. ‘Very few know our formula, Your Majesty. One was the queen, and the other is the—’
‘Don’t say it,’ I said, eyeing my mother.
She just rolled her eyes. ‘You think I care about this little dispute, Alcatraz? I haven’t the faintest interest in the outcome of this siege.’
It was the truth.
I gritted my teeth in annoyance. ‘Then why did you sneak in?’
She just smiled at me. An insufferable, knowing smile. She’d been the one to suggest I get out my Truthfinder’s Lens. She wasn’t going to be tricked into saying anything condemning. At least, not unless I shocked her or distracted her.
‘I know what you and Father are doing,’ I said. ‘The Sands of Rashid, the book you both wanted from Nalhalla.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘I know that you’re seeking the secret of Smedry Talents,’ I said. ‘You married my father to get access to a Talent, to study them, and perhaps to get close to the whole family. It was always about the Talents. And now you are looking to discover the way that the Incarna people got their Talents in the first place.’
She studied me. Something I’d said actually seemed to make her hesitate, look at me in a new way. ‘You’ve changed, Alcatraz.’
‘Yeah, I put a new pair on this morning.’
She rolled her eyes again, then stood up. ‘Put away that Lens, leave your guards behind, and let’s have a chat.’
‘What? Why would I do that!’
‘Because you should obey your mother.’
‘My mother is a ruthless, malevolent, egocentric Librarian bent on controlling the world!’
‘We all have our faults,’ she said, strolling away from me, following the line of bars to the right. ‘Do as I request, or I’ll remain silent. The choice is yours.’
I ground my teeth, but there didn’t seem to be any other choice. Reluctantly, I put the Truthfinder’s Lens away and waved the guards to remain behind as I hurried after Shasta. I wouldn’t be able to tell if she was lying or not, at least not for certain. But hopefully I could still learn something from her. Why had she joined the group infiltrating Tuki Tuki? Perhaps she knew something, some way to save us.
As I moved to join her, an alarm rang through the city – one of the scouts we’d posted had seen a tunnel opening. Hopefully, the soldiers would be able to deal with it. I walked up to where Shasta stood, far enough from Aluki and the other guard to be out of earshot. I suspected that she wanted me away from the other two so she could manipulate me into letting her go free.
That wasn’t going to happen. I hadn’t forgotten how she’d given Himalaya up to be executed, nor how she’d sold me – her own son – to Blackburn, the one-eyed Dark Oculator. Or how she killed Asmodean. (Okay, so she didn’t really do that last one, but I wouldn’t put it past her.)
‘What is it you think you know about the Smedry Talents?’ she said to me, arms folded. Her smirk was gone; she looked serious now, perhaps somewhat ominous. The effect was spoiled by the giant tiger chew toy in the grass beside her.
‘Kaz and I talked it through,’ I said. ‘The Incarna wanted to turn people into Lenses.’
She sniffed. ‘A crude way of putting it. They discovered the source of magical Lenses. Every person’s soul has a power to it, an energy. Lenses don’t actually have any inherent energy; what they do is focus the energy of the Oculator, distort it, change it into something useful. Like a prism refracting light.’
She looked at me. ‘The eyes are the key,’ she said. ‘Poets have called them windows to the soul. Well, windows go both directions – someone can look into your eyes and see your soul, but when you look at someone, the energy of your soul shines forth. If there are Lenses in front of that energy, it distorts into something else. In some cases, it changes what is going in to your eyes, letting you see things you couldn’t normally. In other cases, it changes what comes out, creating bursts of fire or wind.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘I’ve had Lenses that worked even after I took them off.’
‘Your soul was still feeding them,’ she said. ‘For some kinds of glass, looking through them is important. For others, being near your soul alone is enough, and merely touching them can activate them.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘You will see,’ she said cryptically.
I didn’t trust her. I don’t think anyone with half a brain would trust Shasta Smedry.
‘So what of the Incarna?’ I asked.
‘They wanted to harness this energy of the soul,’ she said. ‘Every person’s soul vibrates with a distinctive tone, just like pure crystal will create a tone if rubbed the right way. The Incarna felt they could change the soul’s vibration to manifest its energy. Men would not “become Lenses,” as you put it. Instead, they’d be able to use the power of their soul vibrations.’
The power of their soul vibrations? That sounds like a seventies disco song, doesn’t it? I really need to start a band or something to play all of these hits.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But something went wrong, didn’t it? The Talents were flawed. Instead of getting the powers the Incarna anticipated, they ended up with a bunch of people who could barely control their abilities.’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking at me, thoughtful. ‘You’ve considered this a great deal.’
I felt a surge of rebellious pride. My mother – known as Ms. Fletcher during my childhood – had very rarely given me anything resembling a compliment.