Authors: Isobelle Carmody
'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 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 tainted slightly - enough to prevent me penetrating it to reach 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.
We believe it was a storage place,' 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 favour. 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.
They're dead. They can't hurt you,' Pavo said, but he sounded shaken too.
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.
'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. There were lots of places listed as possible shelters. This place was supposed to be one of them, because it could be completely air sealed. But I guess they locked themselves in, forgetting they wouldn't be able to get out. Or maybe they hoped someone would be alive to let them out.'
'They . . . they were hiding?' Kella said, aghast.
Pavo patted her on the 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 with as much trepidation as if skeletons might wait round every turn. Eventually we came to another series of solid and immovable doors. Pavo showed me the locking mechanism. I rested my hands on the cool metal and worked the lock. 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 so well. Handle them lightly and as little as you can. Look for books on Oldtime machines like the Zebkrahn. Also books showing maps of the old world. The Oldtimers were very orderly. If you find one map book, you will have found all such books. Also books on healing,' he said.
'We will take a different section each,' he decided. 'I'll start here; Kella, you start to the left; Jik to the right, and Elspeth down the other end. Bring anything worth looking at up and lay another book on the ground so you don't forget where it came from.'
I padded to the far end of the vault, amazed at how quickly my fears had gone. I was not easily frightened but there was something about the ancient city that worked on a person's mind. That was probably the real truth behind Brydda and Reuvan's ghosts.
Despite the arrangement of the books, the sheer volume made it hard to find what he wanted. 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 the books 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 men and women 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 men and women 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. One picture showed a square tower soaring high above the others around it, but instead of glass the building appeared to be made of mirrors, each window reflecting the marvellous Oldtime city. Even Pavo admired the sheer beauty of the skyscrapers. It was hard to reconcile the dark, decaying city under Tor, or the rubble above us, with those images.
Jik was the first to find a map, and 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 these derived from a race which had become extinct before men came. These were fascinating, but we did not have room for such things, he said.
He also decided not to use his valuable space for books about the Oldtime. 'The Beforetimers are as extinct as the fish people. We are the future,' Pavo said with such unconscious arrogance that I was reminded of something Brydda had said when asked what his allies would make of our abilities.
'I think they might accept for a time, while they helped us to win our war. But in the end, they would come to resent you, and be jealous of your abilities . . .'
Ranging through the shelves, I began to feel dizzy.
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 to make the shapes of animals and flowers. It struck me that the wondrous Oldtimers had possessed a silly trivial side.
There were books on every conceivable - and inconceivable - subject. Books on machines that carried men and women over land, over sea, over water and, even, as Jik had once said, up to the stars. So many books and the more I read, the more I understood that the old world really had passed away for ever. So much had changed and 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, not the past. 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 a title seemed to jump out at me.
Powers of the Mind.
I stared at it 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.
. . . Every mind possesses innate abilities beyond the five known senses. For most people, these abilities remain hidden and untapped. Sometimes, they are used imperfectly or accidentally, and called hunches, insight, or inspired guesses. Even those who have demonstrated these mental abilities or extra-sensory perceptions, are barely touching the edge of the true potential. It would take some immense catalyst to break through the mind's barriers and allow men and women to use and develop that hidden portion of their minds . . .
I felt hot and faint, for what could it mean that the Oldtimers had speculated about Misfit abilities? I shivered at the revolutionary idea that the powers we had always imagined to be mutations caused by the Great White, might have existed before the Holocaust; that they were not mutations, but some natural development of the mind. And as to a catalyst, what was the Great White but a catalyst to end all catalysts?
Excited, I flicked a few more pages and read.
. . . For time eternal, some men and women have exhibited flashes of future knowledge, and been called fey. But who is to say they are not simply the forerunners of some evolutionary movement, destined to be scapegoats and ridiculed, tormented and even killed for their strangeness, until the rest of the human race catches up ...
My hands were trembling so violently, I could barely read. I bit my lip and read those words again: '. . .
destined
to be scapegoats and ridiculed, tormented and even killed, until the rest of the human race catches up
. . .'
My eyes flew down the page. Flicking back and forwards feverishly, I found the book mentioned many of the abilities shown by Misfits, and even some I had not encountered, but they made no mention at all of others such as coercing or empathizing.
My head ached with the tremendous feeling of having made a discovery that might well change our future. If the Council were to see such a book, they would have to admit Misfits were not mutations. But the Council called such books evil and Burned them.
I thought again of Brydda, saying people would come to resent our additional abilities, be jealous of them, uneasy about the advantage they gave us over ordinary unTalented people. And worse, if we and our kind were the future and not some freakish sideline, what were ordinary people but a dying breed?
I shivered and read on more soberly.
. . . The Reichler Clinic has conducted a progressive and serious examination of mental powers, and has produced infallible proofs that telepathy and precognitive powers are the future for mankind. Reichler's experiments have taken mind powers out of the realms of fantasy and set them firmly in the probable future.
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 violently, then closed the book with shaking fingers.
'Are you all right?' he asked curiously.
I nodded, slipping the book into my pocket. 'What is it?'
'It's Reuvan. Pavo thinks he heard him call out,' Jik said.
I bit my lip, cursing the unyielding tainted earth that would not let me reach Avra mentally. Returning to the stairs where Pavo waited, I said, 'I'll go up and see what's happening.' Climbing up the steps, I poked my head above ground. It was nearly dawn and pink light showed faintly in the east. There was no one in sight but I sent a query to Avra.
'He has gone,' Avra sent perplexedly. 'I could not find your mind. The funaga ran away.'
'What did he see? What frightened him?' I asked.
'I saw nothing. There was nothing,' Avra sent.
Bewildered, I lifted my torch and climbed out, wondering what could have frightened Reuvan badly enough to have made him desert us.
I opened my mouth to call down the steps, but the words died in my throat. Terror flooded into my mind and the lantern slid from nerveless fingers.
Fear.
My heart pounded and the night was suddenly ice-cold. The air in front of my eyes shimmered and smoked. I came dreamily close to fainting as the smoke coalesced into a face so grotesque and malevolent that some Herder hell must have spawned it.
The spectral face smiled and changed into a creature with smoke spiralling from distended nostrils and an elongated face filled with rows of razor-sharp teeth. The mouth opened.
I felt the hair on my neck and arms stand up.
I screamed then, the footsteps gonging on the metal steps behind me sounding distant. I heard Kella cry out before she fell at my feet in a dead faint. That shook me enough to break my trance and I called Jik and Pavo. I dashed the books from Pavo's arms and half dragged him out. He stared at the smoky creature in astonished wonder.
'Ghosts ...' Jik moaned.
I slapped him hard and made him help me lift Kella. We had to get out of the city. That was the only object in my mind.
Suddenly, I heard a savage growling from somewhere near. Abruptly and unexpectedly the smoky demon vanished and, with it, my terror.
Then I heard a high-pitched scream.
What is it?' Pavo asked.
Jik started forward, his face transformed. That growling. It was Darga!'
I thought fear had deranged him, but there was more barking, and this time I recognized Darga. But where had he come from? And who had screamed? And where had the demon ghost gone? Something very odd was happening. 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 and picked my way over the rubble, tracing his probe onto the second storey of a building fronting on the alley. Peering through a window, the fluttering torch light lit up a dangerously holed floor. In one corner, a growling Darga held a thin, ragged figure at bay.