‘Ah, nice,’ Sing said, walking forward. ‘Last time, I had to spend an hour appeasing their security requirements.’
Bastille followed. She obviously hadn’t recovered completely, even if she was a little more animated. We entered the stairwell, and for a brief moment I was reminded of the Library of Alexandria, with its wraithlike Librarians and endless rows of dusty tomes and scrolls. It had been beneath the ground too.
The similarity soon ended. Not only was the Royal Archives not a library, but the stairwell didn’t end in a strange teleporting darkness. Instead, it stretched on for a distance, dusty and dry. When we finally reached the bottom, we found the two Knights of Crystallia standing guard at another set of doors. They saluted, apparently recognizing Sing and me.
‘How long will you need access, my lord?’ one of the knights asked.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Um, I’m not really sure.’
‘Check back with us in an hour, if you don’t mind,’ said the other knight – a stout woman with blond hair.
‘All right,’ I said.
With that, the two knights pushed open the doors, letting me, Sing, and Bastille into the archives. ‘Wow,’ I said. That just didn’t seem to cover it. ‘Wow,’ I repeated, this time with emphasis.
You’re probably expecting a grand description here. Something impressive to depict the majestic collection of tomes that made up the archives.
That’s because you misinterpreted my ‘wow.’ You see, like all alphabetically late palindromic exclamations, ‘wow’ can be interpreted a lot of different ways. It’s what we call ‘versatile,’ which is just another way of saying that it’s a dumb thing to say.
After all, ‘wow’ could mean ‘That’s great!’ Or it could mean ‘That’s disturbing.’ It could also mean ‘Oh, hey, look, a dinosaur is about to eat me!’ Or it could even mean ‘I just won the lottery, though I don’t know what I’ll do with all that money, seeing as how I’m in the stomach of a dinosaur.’
(As a side note to this side note: As we found in book one, it is true that most dinosaurs are fine folk and not at all man-eaters. However, there are some notable exceptions, such as the Quesadilla and the infamous Brontësister.)
In my case, ‘wow’ didn’t mean any of these things. It meant something closer to: ‘This place is a total mess!’
‘This place is a total mess!’ I exclaimed.
‘No need to repeat yourself,’ Bastille grumbled. (Bastille speaks fluent woweeze.)
Books were heaped like piles of scrap in an old, rundown junk-yard. There were mountains of them, discarded, abused, and in total disarray. The cavern seemed to extend forever, and the piles of books formed mounds and hills, like sand dunes made from pages and letters and words.
I glanced back at the knights guarding the doorway. ‘Is there some kind of organization to all of this?’ I asked hopefully.
The knight paled in the face. ‘Organization? Like . . . a cataloging system?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You know, so that we can find stuff easily?’
‘That’s what Librarians do!’ the blond knight said.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Just great. Thanks anyway.’ I sighed, stepping away from the door, which the knights closed behind me. I grabbed a lamp off the wall. ‘Well, let’s go investigate,’ I said to the others. ‘See if we can find anything suspicious.’
We wandered the room, and I tried not to let my annoyance get the better of me. The Librarians had done some horrible things to the Free Kingdoms; it made sense that the Nalhallans would have an irrational fear of Librarian ways. However, I found it amazing that a people who loved learning so much could treat books in such a horrible manner. From the way the tomes were strewn, it seemed to me that their method of ‘archiving’ books was to toss them into the storage chamber and forget about them.
The piles grew larger and more mountainous near the back of the chamber, as if they’d been systematically pushed there by some infernal, literacy-hating bulldozer. I stopped, hands on my hips. I had expected a museum, or at least a den filled with bookshelves. Instead, I’d gotten a teenage boy’s bedroom.
‘How could they tell if anything was missing?’ I asked.
‘They can’t,’ Sing said. ‘They figure if nobody can get in to steal books, then they don’t have to keep them counted or organized.’
‘That’s stupid,’ I said, holding up my light. The chamber was longer than it was wide, so I could see the walls on either side of me. The place wasn’t infinite, like the Library of Alexandria had seemed. It was essentially just one very big room filled with thousands and thousands of books.
I walked back down the pathway between the mounds. How could you tell if anything was suspicious about a place you’d never visited before? I was about to give up when I heard it. A sound.
‘I don’t know, Alcatraz,’ Sing was saying. ‘Maybe we—’
I held up a hand, quieting him. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’