They had seen what my request would demand of them, even if I hadn’t. Suddenly, I felt very stoopiderlifluous.
‘I should cancel the plan,’ I said suddenly. ‘We can think of something else.’
‘Something that doesn’t risk the lives of your soldiers?’ Kaz said. ‘Kid, we’re at war.’
‘I just . . .’ I didn’t want to be the one responsible for them going into danger. But there was nothing to be done about it. I sighed, sitting down.
Kaz joined me. ‘So now . . .’ he said.
‘Now we wait, I guess.’ I glanced upward nervously. The rocks continued to fall; the glass’s cracks glowed faintly, making the dark night sky look like it was alight with lightning. Fifteen minutes. If the Librarians didn’t burrow in during the next fifteen minutes, the dome would shatter and the Librarian armies would rush in. Most of the Mokians – the ones I didn’t have watching for tunnels – were already gathered on the wall, anticipating the attack.
I blinked, realizing for the first time how tired I was. It was well after eleven at this point, and the excitement of everything had kept me going. Now I just had to wait. In many ways, that seemed like the worst thing imaginable. Waiting, thinking, worrying.
Isn’t it odd, how waiting can be both boring and nervewracking at the same time? Must have something to do with quantum physics.
A question occurred to me, something I’d been wondering for a while. Kaz seemed the perfect person to ask. I shook off some of my tiredness. ‘Kaz,’ I said, ‘has any of the research you’ve done indicated that the Talents might be . . . alive?’
‘What?’ Kaz said, surprised.
I wasn’t sure how to explain. Back in Nalhalla – when we’d been in the Royal Archives (not a library) – my Talent had done some odd things. At one point, it had seemed to reach out of me. Like it was alive. It had stopped my cousin Folsom from accidentally using his own Talent against me.
‘I’m not sure what I mean,’ I said lamely.
‘We’ve done a lot of research on Talents,’ Kaz said, drawing his little circle diagram in the dirt, the one that divided up different Talents into types and power ranges. ‘But we don’t really know much.’
‘The Smedry line is the royal line of Incarna,’ I said. ‘An ancient race of people who mysteriously vanished.’
‘They didn’t vanish,’ Kaz said. ‘They destroyed themselves, somehow, until only our line remained. We lost the ability to read their language.’
‘The Forgotten Language,’ I said. ‘We didn’t forget it. Alcatraz the First broke it. The entire language. So that people couldn’t read it. Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kaz said. ‘The Incarna were the first to get Talents.’
‘They brought them down into themselves, somehow,’ I said, thinking back to the words of Alcatraz the First, which I’d discovered in his tomb in the Library of Alexandria. ‘It was like . . . Kaz, I think what they were trying to do was create people who could mimic the power of Oculatory Lenses. Only without having to use the Lenses.’
Kaz frowned. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘My tongue moving while breath moves out of my lungs and through my throat, vibrating my vocal cords and—’
‘I meant,’ Kaz said. ‘Why do you think that the Talents are like Lenses?’
‘Oh. Right. Well, a lot of the Talents do similar things to Lenses. Like Australia’s Talent and Disguiser’s Lenses. I did some reading on it while I was in Nalhalla. There are a lot of similiarities. Shatterer’s Lenses can break other glass if you look at it; that’s kind of like my Talent. And then there are Traveler’s Lenses, which can push a person from one point to another and ignore obstructions in between. That’s kind of like what you do. I wonder if there are Lenses that work like Grandpa’s power, slowing things or making them late.’
‘There are,’ Kaz said thoughtfully. ‘Educator’s Lenses. When you put them on, it slows time.’
‘That’s an odd name.’
‘Not really. Have you ever known anything that can slow down time like a boring class at school?’
‘Good point,’ I said.
All in all, there were thousands of different kinds of glass that had been identified. A lot of them – like the Traveler’s Lenses – were impractical to use. They were either too dangerous, took too much energy to work, or were so rare that complete Lenses of them were nearly impossible to forge.
‘Some glass is called technology,’ I said, ‘but that’s just because it can be powered by brightsand. But all glass can be powered by Oculators. I’ve done it before.’
‘I know,’ Kaz said. ‘The boots. You said you were able to give them an extra jolt of power.’
‘I did it again,’ I said. ‘With Transporter’s Glass in Nalhalla.’