Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (29 page)

Here, in the most advanced off-site storage facility serving the historical entertainment sector anywhere west of the Mississippi, you don’t find the artifacts. The artifacts find you.

The iPad blinks at me, now showing a blue dot labeled
ZULU-2591
near the center of the floor. Okay, that’s helpful. It must be a transponder tag. Or a magic spell.

There’s a thick yellow line painted on the floor in front of me. I edge one toe across, and the shelves nearby all swerve and recoil. That’s good. They know I’m here.

So then I push slowly into the maelstrom. Some shelves don’t slow down, but bend their trajectories to coast just behind or just ahead of me. I walk evenly, taking slow, deliberate steps. As they migrate around me, the shelves make a parade of wonders. There are huge urns glazed in blue and gold, strapped down and packed with foam; wide glass cylinders full of brown formaldehyde, tentacles inside dimly visible and undulating; slabs of crystal poking out of rough black rock glowing green in the darkness. One shelf holds a single oil painting, six feet tall: a portrait of a scowling merchant prince with a skinny mustache. His eyes seem to follow me as the painting curves out of sight.

I wonder if Mat’s miniature city—well, now Mat and Ashley’s—will end up on shelves like these one day. Will they strap it in sideways? Or will they carefully dismantle it and store all the buildings separately, each one wrapped in gauze? Will the shelves drift apart and go their separate ways? Will Matropolis spread out through the facility like so much stardust? So many people dream of getting something into a museum … is this what they have in mind?

The outer perimeter of the facility is like a highway; this must be where all the popular artifacts hang out. But as I follow the iPad and make my way toward the center of the floor, things slow down. Here, there are racks of wicker masks, tea sets packed in foam peanuts, thick metal panels crusted with dry barnacles. Here, there’s an airplane propeller and a three-piece suit. Here, things are weirder.

It’s not all shelves, either. There are rolling vaults—huge metal boxes set up on tank treads. Some of them crawl slowly forward; some sit in place. All of them have complicated locks and glinting black cameras perched on top. One has a bright biohazard warning splashed across the front; I make a wide path around it.

Suddenly there’s a hydraulic snap and one of the vaults heaves to life. It jerks forward, orange lamps flashing. I jump out of the way, and it trundles through the spot where I just stood. The shelves all move and make room as the vault begins its journey, slowly, toward the wide doors.

It occurs to me that if I’m flattened here, no one will find me for a while.

There’s a flicker of motion. The part of my brain that is devoted to the detection of other human beings (and especially muggers, murderers, and enemy ninjas) lights up like one of the orange lamps. There’s a person coming through the darkness. Hamster-mode: engage. Somebody’s running right at me, coming fast, and he looks like Corvina. I whirl to face him, put my hands up in front of me, and yell: “Ah!”

It’s that painting again—the mustachioed merchant prince. It’s come back around for another look. Is it following me? No—of course not. My heart is racing. Calm down, Fluff McFly.

*   *   *

In the very center of the facility, nothing moves. It’s hard to see in here; the shelves have shut off their lamps, maybe to save battery power or maybe just out of despair. It’s quiet—the eye of the storm. Bars of light from the busy perimeter poke through and briefly illuminate dented brown boxes, stacks of newsprint, slabs of stone. I check the iPad and find the blinking blue dot. I think it’s close, so I start checking the shelves.

They all have a thick layer of dust. Shelf by shelf, I wipe them off and check the labels. In tall black digits on shiny yellow, they read:
BRAVO-3877
.
GAMMA-6173
. I keep checking, using my phone as a flashlight.
TANGO-5179
.
ULTRA-4549
. Then:
ZULU-2591
.

I’m expecting a heavy case, some finely wrought ark for Gerritszoon’s great creation. Instead, it’s a cardboard box with the flaps folded in. Inside, each punch is wrapped in its own plastic bag with a rubber band to hold it tight. They look like old car parts.

But then I lift one out—it’s the
X
, and it’s heavy—and a bright wash of triumph floods through me. I can’t believe I’m holding this in my hand. I can’t believe I found them. I feel like Telemach Half-Blood with the Golden Horn of Griffo. I feel like the hero.

Nobody’s looking. I hoist the
X
high in the air like a mythic sword. I imagine lightning streaking down through the ceiling. I imagine the Wyrm Queen’s dark legion falling silent. I make a quiet energy-overload noise:
pshowww!

Then I wrap both arms around the box, heave it up off the shelf, and wobble back out into the storm.

THE DRAGON-SONG CHRONICLES, VOLUME III

B
ACK IN CHERYL’S OFFICE
, I fill out my paperwork and wait patiently while she updates the Accession Table. The terminal on her desk is just like the one at Cal Knit: blue plastic, thick glass, built-in handset. Next to it, she has a page-a-day calendar with pictures of cats dressed up as famous figures. Today’s is a fuzzy white Julius Caesar.

I wonder if Cheryl realizes how historically significant the contents of this cardboard box are.

“Oh, honey,” she says, waving her hand, “everything in there is a treasure to somebody.” She leans in close to the terminal, double-checking her work.

Huh. Right. What else is slumbering in the eye of the storm, waiting for the right person to come along and pick it up?

“You want to set that down, hon?” Cheryl asks, tipping her chin at the box between my arms. “Looks heavy.”

I shake my head. No, I do not want to set it down. I’m afraid it might vanish. It still seems impossible that I’m holding the punches. Five hundred years ago, a man named Griffo Gerritszoon carved these shapes—these ones exactly. Centuries passed, and millions, maybe billions, of people saw the impressions they made, although most didn’t realize it. Now I’m cradling them like a newborn. A really heavy newborn.

Cheryl taps a key and the printer next to her terminal starts to purr. “Almost done, hon.”

For objects of deep aesthetic value, the punches don’t look like much. They’re just skinny sticks of dark alloy, raw and scratched, and only at the very ends do they become beautiful, the glyphs emerging from the metal like mountaintops in the fog.

I suddenly think to ask, “Who owns these?”

“Oh, nobody does,” Cheryl says. “Not anymore. If somebody owned ’em you’d be talkin’ to them, not me!”

“So … what are they doing here?”

“Gosh, we’re like an orphanage for a lot of things,” she says. “Let’s see here.” She tilts her glasses and scratches at her mouse’s scroll wheel. “The Flint Museum of Modern Industry sent ’em over, but of course they went under in ’88. Real cute place. Real nice curator, Dick Saunders.”

“And he just left everything here?”

“Well, he came and picked up some old cars and took ’em away on a flatbed truck, but the rest, he just signed it over to the Con-U collection.”

Maybe Con-U should put on an exhibit of its own: Anonymous Artifacts of the Ages.

“We try to auction things off,” Cheryl says, “but some of it…” She shrugs. “Like I said, everything’s a treasure to somebody. But a lot of times, you can’t find that somebody.”

That’s depressing. If these little objects, so significant to the history of printing and typography and human communication, were lost in a giant storage unit … what chance do any of us have?

“Okay, Mis-ter Jannon,” Cheryl says with mock formality, “you’re all set.” She tucks the printout into the box and pats me on the arm. “That’s a three-month loan, and you can extend it to a year. Ready to change out of that long underwear?”

*   *   *

I drive back to San Francisco with the punches in the passenger seat of Neel’s hybrid. They fill the interior with a dense annealed odor that makes my nose itch. I wonder if I should wash them in boiling water or something. I wonder if the smell is going to stick to the seats.

It’s a long drive home. For a while I watch the Toyota’s energy-management control panel and try to beat my fuel efficiency from before. But that gets boring fast, so I plug in the Walkman and start up the audiobook version of
The Dragon-Song Chronicles: Volume III
, read by Clark Moffat himself.

I roll my shoulders back, grip the wheel at ten and two, and settle into the strangeness. I’m flanked by brothers of the Unbroken Spine, separated by centuries: Moffat on the stereo, Gerritszoon in the passenger seat. The Nevada desert is blank for miles, and high in the Wyrm Queen’s tower, things are getting super-weird.

Keep in mind that this series starts with a singing dragon lost at sea, calling out to dolphins and whales for help. It gets rescued by a passing ship that also happens to be carrying a scholarly dwarf. The dwarf befriends the dragon and nurses it back to health, then saves its life when the ship’s captain comes in the night to cut the dragon’s throat and get the gold in its gullet, and that’s just the first five pages—so, you know, for this story to get even weirder is a not-insignificant development.

But, of course, now I know the reason: the third and final volume of
The Dragon-Song Chronicles
served double duty as Moffat’s
codex vitae
.

All of the action in this installment takes place in the Wyrm Queen’s tower, which turns out to be almost a world unto itself. The tower reaches up to the stars, and each floor has its own set of rules, its own puzzles to solve. The first two volumes have adventures and battles and, of course, betrayals. This one is all puzzles, puzzles, puzzles.

It begins with the friendly ghost who appears to release Fernwen the dwarf and Telemach Half-Blood from the Wyrm Queen’s dungeon and start them on their ascent. Moffat describes the ghost through the Toyota’s speakers:

It was tall, made of pale blue light, a creature with long arms and long legs and the shadow of a smile, and above it all, eyes that shone bluer still than its body.

Wait a second.

“What do you seek in this place?” the shade asked plainly.

I fumble to rewind the tape. First I overshoot the mark, so I have to fast-forward, then I miss it again, so I have to rewind, and then the Toyota shakes as it crosses the rumble strips. I pull the steering wheel and point the car straight down the highway and finally press play:

… eyes that shone bluer still than its body. “What do you seek in this place?” the shade asked plainly.

Again:

… bluer still than its body. “What do you seek in this place?”

It is unmistakable: Moffat is doing Penumbra’s voice there. This part of the book isn’t new; I remember the friendly blue ghost in the dungeon from my first reading. But, of course, back then I had no way of knowing Moffat might encode an eccentric San Francisco bookseller into his fantasy epic. And likewise, when I walked through the front door of the 24-Hour Bookstore, I had no way of knowing I’d met Mr. Penumbra a few times already.

Ajax Penumbra is the blue-eyed shade in the dungeon of the Wyrm Queen’s tower. I am absolutely sure of it. And to hear Moffat’s voice, the rough affection in it, as he finishes the scene …

Fernwen’s small hands burned on the ladder. The iron was ice-cold, and it seemed each rung bit him, tried its evil best to send him plummeting back into the dark depths of the dungeon. Telemach was high above, already pulling himself through the portal. Fernwen glanced down below. The shade was there, standing just inside the secret door. It grinned, a pulse of light through spectral blue, and waved its long arms and called out:

“Climb, my boy! Climb!”

And so he did.

… incredible. Penumbra has already earned a touch of immortality. Does he know?

*   *   *

I accelerate back up to cruising speed, shaking my head and smiling to myself. The story is accelerating, too. Now Moffat’s gravelly voice carries the heroes from floor to floor, solving riddles and recruiting allies along the way—a thief, a wolf, a talking chair. Now, for the first time, I get it: the floors are a metaphor for the code-breaking techniques of the Unbroken Spine. Moffat is using the tower to tell the story of his own path through the fellowship.

This is all so obvious when you know what to listen for.

At the very end, after a long weird slog of a story, the heroes arrive at the tower’s summit, the spot from which the Wyrm Queen looks out across the world and plots domination. She is there, waiting for them, and she has her dark legion with her. Their black robes seem more significant now.

While Telemach Half-Blood leads his band of allies into the final battle, Fernwen the scholarly dwarf makes an important discovery. In the cataclysmic commotion, he sneaks over to the Wyrm Queen’s magic telescope and peeks through. From this vantage point, impossibly high up, he can see something amazing. The mountains that divide the Western Continent form letters. They are, Fernwen realizes, a message, and not just any message, but the message promised long ago by Aldrag the Wyrm-Father himself, and when Fernwen speaks the words aloud, he—

Holy shit.

*   *   *

When I finally cross the bridge back into San Francisco, Clark Moffat’s voice in the closing chapters has a new warble; I think the cassette might be stretched out from my rewinding and replaying, rewinding and replaying, again and again. My brain feels a little stretched out, too. It’s carrying a new theory that started as a seed but is now growing fast, all based on what I’ve just heard.

Moffat: You were brilliant. You saw something that no one else in the whole history of the Unbroken Spine ever saw. You raced through the ranks, you became one of the bound, maybe just to get access to the Reading Room—and then you bound up their secrets in a book of your own. You hid them in plain sight.