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 het 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.
"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 c
ompelling 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?
CHAPTER 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.