“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 me 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 look 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 Languages 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, glancing 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 Rebuilder’s 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.”
Bastille nodded. “That’s just an attention aura – the glasses were trying to get you to notice the text.”
“The glasses wanted me to notice something?” I asked.
“Well,” Bastille said. “More like your subconscious wanted you to notice something. The glasses aren’t alive, the just help you focus. I’d guess that because you’ve seen the Forgotten Language before, your subconscious recognized it on those spines. So, the glasses gave you an attention aura to make you notice.”
“Interesting,” Sing said.
I nodded slowly – then, curiously, Bastille’s entire shape fuzzed just slightly. Another attention aura? If so, what as it I was supposed to notice about her?