“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.”