‘You want the Talents for yourself,’ I said, forcing myself to keep focused. ‘You want to use them to give the Librarian armies extra abilities.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Don’t try to claim otherwise,’ I said. ‘You want to keep the Talents for yourself; my father wants to give them to everyone. That’s what you and he argued about, isn’t it? When you discovered the way to collect the Sands of Rashid, you disagreed on how the Talents were to be used.’
‘You could say that,’ she said.
‘My father wanted to bless people with them; you wanted to keep them for the Librarians.’
‘Yes,’ she said frankly.
I froze, blinking. I hadn’t expected her to actually answer me on that. ‘Oh. Er. Well. Hmm.’ Maybe I should have paid more attention to the ‘ruthless, malevolent, egocentric Librarian bent on controlling the world’ part of her description.
‘Now that we’re past the obvious part,’ Shasta said dryly, ‘shall we continue with our conversation about the Incarna?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘So what went wrong? Why are the Talents so hard to control?’
‘We don’t actually know,’ she said. ‘The sources – the few I’ve had read to me with the Translator’s Lenses – are contradictory. It seems that some thing became tied up in the Talents, some source of energy or power that the Incarna were using to change their soul vibrations. It tainted the Talents, made them work in a way that was more destructive and more unpredictable.’
The Dark Talent . . . I thought, again remembering those haunting words I’d read in the tomb of Alcatraz the First.
‘You asked why I tell you this,’ Shasta said, studying me looking through the bars. ‘Well, you have proven very . . . persistent in interfering with my activities. Your presence here in Tuki Tuki means I cannot afford to discount you any longer. It is time for an alliance.’
I blinked in shock. ‘Excuse me?’
‘An alliance. Between you and me, to serve the greater good.’
‘And by serving the greater good, you mean serving yourself.’
She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out yet. I thought you were clever.’
‘Pretend I’m stoopiderifous instead,’ I said.
‘What happened to the Incarna?’
‘They fell,’ I said. ‘The culture was destroyed.’
‘By what?’
‘We don’t know. It must have been something incredible, something sweeping, something . . .’
And I got it. Finally. I should have seen it much earlier; you probably did. Well, you’re smarter than I am.
I suspected something might be wrong during my father’s speech in Nalhalla, when he announced that he wanted to give everyone a Talent. But I hadn’t realized the full scope of it, the full danger of it.
‘Something destroyed the Incarna,’ I found myself saying. ‘Something so fearsome that my ancestor Alcatraz the First broke his own language to keep anyone from repeating it . . .’
‘It was this,’ Shasta said softly, intensely. ‘The secret of the Talents. Think of what it would be like. Every person with a Talent? The Smedry clan alone has a terrible reputation for destruction, accidents, and insanity. Philosophers have guessed that the Talents – the wild nature of them, the unpredictability of your lives when you are young – is what makes you all so reckless.’
‘And if everyone had them . . .’ I said. ‘It would be chaos. Everyone would be getting lost, multiplying bears, breaking things. . . .’
‘It destroyed the Incarna,’ Shasta said. ‘Attica refused to believe my warnings. He insists that the information must be given to all, that it’s a “Librarian” ideal to withhold it from the world. But sometimes, complete freedom of information isn’t a good thing. What if every person on the planet had the ability, resources, and knowledge to make a nuclear weapon? Would that be a good thing? Sometimes, secrets are important.’
I wasn’t sure I agreed with that . . . but she made a compelling argument. I looked at her, and realized that she sounded – for once in her life – completely honest. She had her arms folded, and seemed distraught.
I suspected that she still loved my father. The Truthfinder’s Lens had given me a hint of that months before. But she worked hard to stop him, to steal the Translator’s Lenses, to keep the Sands of Rashid from him. Even going so far as to use her own son as a decoy and trap to catch those Sands.
Hesitantly, I pulled out the Truthfinder’s Lens. She wasn’t looking at me, she was staring off. ‘This information is too dangerous,’ she said, and the words were true – at least, she believed they were.
‘If I could stop anyone from getting the knowledge, I would,’ she continued. She seemed to have forgotten for the moment that I was even there. ‘The book we found in Nalhalla? I burned it. Gone forever. But that’s not going to stop Attica. He’ll find a way unless I stop him somehow. Biblioden was right. This must be contained. For the good of everyone. For the good of my son. For the good of Attica himself . . .’
My Lens showed that it was all truth. I lowered it, and in a moment of terrible realization, I understood something. My mother wasn’t the bad guy in all of this.
My father was.
Was it possible that the Librarians might actually be right?
4815162342
Standing there in that abandoned zoo, I had a moment of understanding. A terrible one that was both awesome and awful, regardless of the definitions you use.
It was much like the moment I’d had when I first saw the map of the world, hanging in that library in my hometown. It had shown continents I didn’t expect to see. Confronting it had forced my mind to expand, to reach, to stretch and grab hold of space it hadn’t known about previously.
After spending so much time with Grandpa Smedry and the others, I had understandably come to see things as they did. The Smedry way was to be bold almost to the point of irresponsibility. We were an untamed bunch, meddling in important events, taking huge risks. We did a lot of good, but that was because we were carefully channeled by the Knights of Crystallia and our own sense of honor.
But what if everyone acted like that? My mother’s analogy was a good one. If every person was given a bomb big enough to destroy a city, most would probably be responsible with it. But it took only one mistake to ruin everything.
Were the Librarians right to want to contain some information?
I thought they might have been. But, of course, they were wrong about a lot of other things. They controlled too much, and they sought to enforce their way by conquering people. They lied, they distorted, and they suppressed.
But it was still possible for them to be right on occasion, when members of my family were wrong. And it was very possible that my mother – arrogant, conniving, and dismissive as she was – was doing something noble, while my father was being reckless.
If he got what he wanted, it could destroy the world.
Standing there, thinking about it, everything changed. Or perhaps I changed, and the world stayed the same. Or maybe we both changed.
Sometimes, I wished that darn river of Heraclitus’s would just stay still. So long as it wasn’t moving, it was easy to figure it out, get a perspective on it.
But that’s not how life is. And sometimes, the people who used to be your enemies become your allies instead.
‘I see that you understand,’ Shasta said.
‘I do.’
‘Then do we have a truce?’ she asked. ‘You and I will work together to stop him?’
‘I have to think about it first.’
‘Don’t take too long,’ she said, glancing upward. ‘Tuki Tuki is doomed. We’ll need to get to the catacombs and do our business there quickly, then escape before the city falls.’
‘I’m not abandoning Tuki Tuki!’ I snapped.
‘There’s no use fighting now,’ she said, pointing upward. ‘Not with that hole in the dome. The Order of the Shattered Lens has ro-bats. They’ll be flying through there to drop on the city in moments.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Ro-bats. Are those, by chance, giant robotic bats?’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s the most stoopiderific thing I’ve ever heard of.’
‘Oh, and what would you call them?’
‘Woe-bots, of course,’ I said. ‘Since they bring woe and destruction. Duh.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Either way, I’m not going to leave. The Mokians are depending on me. They need me.’
‘Alcatraz,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘We are working for the preservation of humankind itself. Compared to that, one city is unimportant. Do you think it was easy for me to treat you like I did, all those years? It was because I knew that something more important was at stake!’
‘Right,’ I said, walking away. ‘You should win an award for your downright wonderful mothering instincts, Shasta.’
‘Alcatraz!’
I walked away. Too many things didn’t make sense; I had to sort through them. As I walked, Aydee Ecks and Aluki ran up to me, she with her backpack full of bears on her shoulder, him holding his flaming spear.
‘Your Majesty,’ Aluki said urgently. ‘Lady Aydee just brought us word. The scouts have spotted something outside the city. We’re in trouble.’
‘Giant robotic bats?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘Hundreds, Alcatraz!’ Aydee said. ‘I started to do the math but Aluki stopped me. . . .’
‘Probably for the best,’ I said.
‘They must have been waiting until the dome broke open to surprise us,’ Aluki said. ‘Your Majesty, they’ll be able to drop thousands of troops through that hole! We have no kind of air force. We’ll be destroyed in minutes!’
‘I . . .’
Aluki and Aydee looked at me, eyes urgent. Needful.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I whispered, hand to my head.
‘You have to know what to do,’ Aluki said. ‘You’re king!’
‘That doesn’t mean I have all of the answers!’ I said. My mother’s revelation had shocked me, unhinged me.
Change. A man can be confident one moment – and then, with one discovery, be shocked to the point that he’s completely uncertain. If my mother was working for what was right, and my father was the one trying to destroy the world . . .
I’d saved him. If everything went wrong, it would be my fault. What else had I been horribly wrong about?
But could I trust what my mother had said?
She’s right, I thought, with a growing feeling of horror. The words she’d said when I watched her with the Truthfinder’s Lens . . . the things my father had said . . . what I’d read . . . my own feelings and experiences with the Dark Talent. All of these things mixed and churned together in me, blended like some nefarious smoothie from a gym counter in Hades.
The Dark Talent, my Talent, wanted everyone to be like the Smedrys. Somehow, I knew that Alcatraz the First had contained it within our family, limiting its damage and power. He was the reason why if someone became a Smedry, they got a Talent – but once one became too distant from the family line, children stopped being born with Talents. You only got to be a Smedry if you were cousins to the main line that ran from my grandfather to my father, to me.