The Seeker (51 page)

He looked up excitedly. “This is the entrance according to my maps, but the lock is strange. It seems to be locked from the inside. Do you think you can open it? It will be complicated.” He described the mechanism, which was indeed complex. I wondered why such a lock would be wanted to protect books when they had been so plentiful in the Beforetime.

I looked around, not liking the way the dark seemed to crouch just outside the wavering circle of torchlight. Pavo had marked out the squarish shape of a door. There was a great deal of earth layered over it, but he assured me it would make no difference. I let my mind feel out the lock until I understood how it worked. It was as much a seal as anything, more secure than any door I’d encountered—all the more so because the mechanism had malfunctioned, jamming so that it could not be opened from either side.

After a long moment, I had it. There was a distinct
whirring sound, and the door swung inward. The mounded earth near our feet seemed to drop, sliding away into the revealed space, showering dirt onto the metal steps that ran down from the opening. I had expected the air to smell bad, but it was odorless, dry, and cool.

I knelt and peered in, instinctively raising my hands in defense, certain something was about to leap out at me.

“I’ll go first,” Pavo said impassively.

“Wait for me,” I said.

Climbing back to the top of the rubble, I told Reuvan to stay with Avra. Kella and Jik came to help, carrying their own torches.

“Warn us if there is any danger,” I sent to Avra.

We descended into the dark with as much joy as if it were our own grave. Except for Pavo—he went first, fearless. I came next, and behind me, Kella and Jik holding hands. As soon as my head was below ground level, I realized the ground was slightly tainted—enough to prevent me from staying in contact with Avra.

The steps took us down to a long, dark corridor.

I was struck by the smooth sameness of all the surfaces. There was no hint of the owner’s personality, no feeling that human beings had ever been there. Now that we were inside, my attack of nerves had faded, and I found myself curious about the library. Why would a library be built like a secret fortress?

“What is this place?” Jik whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Kella whispered. They stared at one another, then exploded in a fit of nervous giggles.

“It was more than just a library,” Pavo said in a normal voice. “The Oldtimers eventually used machines to store their knowledge, and books became less important, even
old-fashioned. Luckily for us they never fell completely from favor. This place was an historical storehouse. Among other things.”

I did not like his tone, but before I could ask what he meant, we rounded a bend in the corridor.

Pavo stopped dead ahead of us with a hiss of indrawn breath. I looked over his shoulder and gagged. Kella screamed, and Jik looked close to fainting.

Before us, leaning against the side of the hall, were a number of human skeletons. One was small, the size of a young child. Almost certainly the skeletons of Beforetimers.

“They’re dead. They can’t hurt you,” Pavo said, but he sounded shaken, too.

“What … what happened to them?” Kella whispered.

Pavo sighed. “There was evidence that this storehouse … was meant to store more than just books. The Oldtimers actually wrote about the possibility of the Great White, which they called ‘First Strike.’ This place was supposed to be a possible shelter, because it could be completely sealed off. They must have survived the holocaust only to be trapped here. And there was no one alive on the outside to help them escape.”

“They … they were trapped?” Kella said, aghast.

Pavo patted her arm, and we passed single file and ashen-faced.

There were no other unpleasant surprises, although we walked down the corridors leading to the main storage area with as much trepidation as if skeletons might wait around every turn. Eventually, we came to a series of solid and immovable doors. Pavo explained the locking mechanism. I rested my hands on the cool metal and went to work on the locks. Each time a door opened, there was a hiss.

Opening the last door, we found ourselves in a gigantic storage room filled with endless rows of books on shelves, reaching high above our heads and running away into the shadows.

For a long time, we simply stood there and stared. Even Pavo, who must have anticipated such a find, was struck dumb by the scale of the storehouse. Surely all the knowledge of all the ages of man before the holocaust must be contained in the thousands of books we saw before us.

Then Pavo stepped forward and laid his hand reverently on one of the books. “Just think of it,” he said in a voice that trembled with excitement. “We are the first in hundreds of years to come here. The first since the Oldtimers.” He gathered himself visibly.

“The books are old and frail. Only the dry air has preserved them. Handle them lightly and as little as you can. Look for books on Oldtime machines like the Zebkrahn and books on healing. Also any showing maps of the old world. The Beforetimers were very orderly. If you find one map book, you will have found all such books,” he said. “We will each take a different section. Bring anything worth looking at to me, but mark your place so you don’t forget where it came from.”

I padded to the far end of the vault, amazed at the scale of it. Despite the orderly arrangement of the books, the sheer volume made it hard to find what we wanted. And though I understood the words, many of the books made no sense to me, being filled with references to things I did not understand. Some of those I
could
piece together offered up bizarre notions and ideas.

One book claimed there had once been midget races of various kinds—squat, wizened men with huge axes and tiny
people with wings. Another book talked of a land where there were men and women taller than skyscrapers. Kella came hurrying down to show me a book she had found showing drawings of people with fish tails instead of legs.

I began to feel bewildered. If there had been so many different kinds of races, what had happened to them all?

Jik gave a shout. He had found a book showing wonderfully clear pictures of a Beforetime city. Pavo stopped his sorting to explain that the remarkably lifelike pictures had not been drawn by artists but were actual images of reality, somehow preserved by a process designed by the Oldtimers.

Jik’s book seemed to be composed entirely of such images showing a number of Beforetime cities in all their glory. Here were the dark towers we had seen in the city under the mountain but lit by bright lamps, thousands of them. “Cities of light,” Kella whispered, awed. It was hard to reconcile the dark, decaying city under Tor, or the rubble above us, with the sheer beauty of those images.

Jik was the first to find a map, though whether it was real I couldn’t say. It’s fringes showed beasts unlike any I’d seen, lizard-like and menacing. “Here be dragons,” it read.

“And that was before the mutations of the Great White,” mused Pavo.

Soon after, I came across a section containing books on machines. They meant nothing to me, but Pavo went through them carefully, rejecting this, keeping that.

He waved away the books of half-fish people, saying the creatures must have been of a race that had become extinct before humans came. However fascinating, we did not have room for such things, he said.

There were hundreds of books on very trivial subjects—books that told how to dress your hair or make a garment,
books on how to set flowers in a jar, and even a book showing how to fold paper into the shapes of animals. It struck me that the wondrous Oldtimers had possessed a silly, trivial side.

There were books on every conceivable subject. Books on machines that carried men and women over land, over sea, and even up to the stars. The more I read, the more I understood that the old world really had passed away forever. So much had changed; so much knowledge lost that could never be regained. The teknoguilders’ fascination with the past suddenly struck me anew as pointless. The future was what really mattered. And perhaps the past was better lost, if it had led the Beforetimers to the Great White.

“It is such a waste,” Pavo lamented, wrapping books in waxed cloth to be carried by Jik to the foot of the stairs. “Now that we have broken the seal, the books will decay quickly. You must tell Garth to send another expedition soon, before they are lost to us.” I felt a chill at Pavo’s calm acceptance that he would not be there to do the telling.

I was about to turn into another aisle when my gaze fell upon a particular title.

Powers of the Mind
.

I stared at the book as if it had eyes and might stare back. Breathing fast, I took it down. I let it fall open where it wanted, then struggled to read the tiny script.

I felt hot and faint, for what could it mean but that the Oldtimers had speculated about Talents? I trembled at the revolutionary idea that the powers we had always imagined to be caused by the Great White might have existed before the holocaust—that they were not mutations but some natural development of the mind.

I flicked a few more pages and read.

My eyes flew down the page. Flicking back and forth feverishly, I found the book mentioned many of the abilities I knew to be real and even some I had not encountered.

My head ached with the tremendous feeling of having made a discovery that might well change our future. If the Council saw such a book, they would have to admit Misfits were not mutations. But the Council called such books evil and burned them.

And the discovery might only make things worse for us; if our kind was the future and not some freakish sideline, what were ordinary people but a dying breed?

I shivered and read on more soberly.

I shivered again, knowing in my deepest heart that the truths contained in the book would not make us more accepted.

“Elspeth?” Jik asked. I started, instinctively closing the book. “Are you all right?” he asked curiously.

I nodded. “What is it?”

“It’s Reuvan. I was taking books to the stairs, and I heard him call out,” Jik said.

I bit my lip, slipping the book into my pocket and cursing the unyielding tainted earth that would not let me reach Avra mentally. Then I told myself to be glad the taint was not lethally strong, as in the Blacklands. I left Pavo to his books and returned to the stairs, climbing up to poke my head aboveground. It was nearly dawn, and pink light showed faintly in the east. I sent a query to Avra.

“He has gone,” the mare sent perplexedly. “I could not find your mind. The funaga ran away.”

“Why did he leave?” I asked.

“I saw nothing. There was nothing,” she sent.

Bewildered, I lifted my torch and climbed out, wondering what could have frightened Reuvan badly enough that he would desert us.

I opened my mouth to call down the steps, but the words died in my throat.

Fear had seized me.

My heart pounded and the night was suddenly ice-cold as I watched the air before me shimmer and smoke in a way that could not be natural. The smoke coalesced into a spectral face so grotesque and malevolent that only some Herder hell could have spawned it. Almost reptilian, it watched me from the end of the alley, a shadowed creature of roiling smoke and razor-sharp teeth.

Terror flooded my mind; the lantern slid from my nerveless fingers. I screamed then, barely registering the footsteps coming up the metal steps behind me. I heard Kella cry out before I saw her, falling at my feet in a dead faint. That shook me enough to break my trance. I dashed the books from Pavo’s arms and half dragged him and Jik out of the doorway. They stared at the specter in astonished wonder.

“Ghosts …” Pavo moaned.

I grasped his shoulders and shook him to make him help me lift Kella, all the while keeping an eye on the creature. It did not advance but opened its mouth menacingly. Then there was a savage growling, but not from the monster—it came from the far side of the mound of rubble and was followed by a high-pitched scream.

Then, just as abruptly as it had appeared, the smoky demon vanished.

“What just happened?” Pavo asked.

Jik looked at me, his face transformed. “That growling. It was Darga!”

I thought fear had deranged him, but there was barking nearby, and this time I recognized it. I sent out a probe and immediately encountered Darga.

“There you are,” he sent imperturbably. “Come to me.”

Startled, I told the others to wait inside and picked my way over the rubble, tracing his probe to what remained of a
building fronting the alley. It was little more than four walls, and in one corner a growling Darga held a thin, ragged figure at bay.

I was beside him before I realized it was a girl cowed against the wall, her skin as black as if she had rolled in the mud. To my bewilderment, she hissed and bared her teeth at the sight of me.