The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [150]
“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