The Myst Reader (18 page)

“The Art can be a dangerous thing, Atrus. That is why the D’ni took great precautions to protect these books and ensure they were not misused.”

“Misused?”

But Gehn had already moved away, searching again. He was crouched down, studying the edge of one of the pedestals in the second row.

“Atrus. Come over here.”

Atrus frowned, but did as he was told, stepping up beside his father.

“I want you to search all of these pedestals for a catch or switch of some kind.”

“Father?”

Gehn pointed to the door at the far end of the chamber. “We need to go inside. Somewhere here there is a switch or lever that will let us in.”

Atrus set to work, examining the pedestals, one after another, until, with a little cry of excitement, he found a tiny brass hemisphere set into the back of one of the great stone lecterns.

He pressed it. At once the door on the far side of the room slid open.

“Good,” Gehn said, straightening, then making his way across.

“Is this it?” Atrus said, standing in the doorway, staring with disappointment into what seemed like an unfurnished corridor from which no doors led out.

“No,” Gehn said, turning to look back into the main gallery. “The Book Room is below. I hoped the trapdoor would be open, but it looks like we shall have to force our way in.”

As his father stepped out again, Atrus moved past him, noticing for the first time the big square slab of stone that hung like a painting against the left-hand wall.

Standing before it, Atrus frowned. From its smooth surface protruded a number of geometric symbols—stars and semicircles, triangles and squares, and several others—arranged in what appeared to be a haphazard fashion.

Atrus squinted at it, trying to make out what it was he had noticed. There was a pattern. No … not a pattern, a progression. Each symbol had a mathematical value, and if you took those values …

A map. It was a map!

Gehn came back into the room, carrying one of the fallen pedestals, his muscles straining as he kept the massive piece of marble balanced against his chest and shoulder.

“Out of the way!” he gasped, then, lifting the huge stone with both hands, heaved it right through the middle of the slab, embedding it in the wall.

“But father …”

“Mind back, boy,” Gehn said, ignoring him, grasping the pedestal once again, and beginning to extricate it from the wall, heaving at it and rocking it back and forth until it came free.

But I could have solved the puzzle
, Atrus said silently, as his father threw the pedestal aside, revealing, behind the slab, a matrix of metal pullies and wires.

He watched as his father pulled and pushed at the wires, trying to work the mechanism that activated the trapdoor. For a moment there was nothing, and then there was a resounding click as something slotted into place.

“Stand over by the door, Atrus,” Gehn said, gesturing to him with one hand, the other buried deep inside the workings of the mechanism.

Atrus did as he was told, then watched as his father made a small little movement of his shoulder.

There was the hiss of hydraulics and then a low grating sound. A moment later a two-by-three rectangle of the floor beside them began to sink into the earth with a loud hissing noise, revealing a stairway.

Atrus followed his father down, into a large, well-lit space, filled with long workbenches piled high with all manner of clutter. Shelves crowded the walls. Eight cloaked skeletons sat in their chairs, slumped forward over their work. Another—their supervisor?—lay where he had fallen against the far wall.

“What
is
this place?” Atrus asked, sniffing the musty air, noting that the seated skeletons were chained to their desks.

“This is the main Book Room,” Gehn answered. But there was no sign of any books in that chamber. The shelves were crowded with all manner of things—boxes and bottles, papers and files, tools for writing and carving—but no books. Of
books
, at least of the kind that Gehn seemed to want, there was no sign. There were only those upstairs, and it was clear that Gehn did not want
them.

Atrus stared at his father, confused. But Gehn was looking about purposefully, searching the nearest shelves as if he might unearth real treasures here.

“What should I look for?” he asked, after a moment.

Gehn turned, staring at him, as if he had forgotten he was there, then gestured to a door at the back of the room, behind the stairway they’d come down.

“Have a look in there, Atrus. There should be a narrow passageway with four or five rooms off it. One of them will be the bookstore. If it is locked, call me. But it should be open. They would not have had time to lock it.”

No
, Atrus thought, beginning to understand how quickly catastrophe had fallen upon D’ni. At night, so his father had said, while most decent folk were in their beds.

Gehn turned away, rummaging among the shelves, stopping to take out a strange-looking glass vial and shake it, then throwing it aside.

Atrus watched him a moment longer then went through, finding it exactly as Gehn had described. The passageway was eight paces long. Two doors led off to the left, two to the right; one lay directly ahead. He tried that first, noting the D’ni “Book” symbol cut into the center of the elaborate carved pattern on its polished wooden surface.

The door swung back silently on its hinges at his touch. Inside was the tiniest of rooms—almost a cupboard it was so small—with broad shelves on all three sides, reaching up into the ceiling space well above his head.

Most of those were empty, but on one of the higher shelves there were seven, no eight, of the big, leather-bound books.

Atrus reached up and pulled one down, a red-covered book, surprised by how heavy it was, as if it were made of something more than paper. Then, kneeling, he placed it on the floor in front of him and opened it.

Nothing! The pages were blank. Disappointed, he closed the book and slipped it back into its place, then took another, this time with a pale green leather cover. That, too, proved blank. One by one he took the books down, certain that he would find at least one that had something written in it, but they were all, as far as he could see, the same.

Defeated, he placed one of the books beneath his arm and went outside, walking back down the passageway despondently.

Gehn had cleared a space on one of the workbenches and was bent over what looked like a wooden tray filled with a dozen or so large amber-colored inkpots. After a moment, he straightened, holding up one of the big, five-sided crystals to examine it, its rich amber color reflected in Gehn’s pallid face. Then, noticing Atrus standing there, he looked across.

“Well? Did you find any?”

“It’s no good,” Atrus said, steeling himself against his father’s anger. “There’s nothing in them.”

Putting the inkpot back in the case, Gehn came and took the book from Atrus. “Here, let me see that.”

He opened it and flicked through a number of pages, then looked up again. “This is fine. This is just what I was looking for. Are there others?”

Atrus went to shake his head, then nodded, utterly confused now. “But I thought … I thought you wanted ones with Ages in them. These … these are just books.”

Gehn laughed. “No, Atrus. These are not just books, these are
Kortee’nea.
Blank books, waiting to be written.”

Written
… Atrus stared at his father.

Gehn unslung his knapsack and slid the book inside it, then looked to Atrus again. “How many books are there in the store?”

“Eight.”

“Good. Then bring them back in here. There is ink here,” he said, gesturing toward the case of amber-colored pots, “and pens, too, so we have everything we need. Come then. Quick now, boy. We can be home by supper!”

“A
TRUS?”

Atrus looked up from his desk to where Gehn stood on the far side of the library.

“Yes, father?” he said, setting his pen aside, careful not to drip any ink across the copy paper.

“Come with me.”

Atrus stood uncertainly, then, skirting the dais at the center of the room, joined his father at the foot of the steps.

Two weeks had passed since the expedition into the city, and Atrus had begun to think that his father had forgotten his promise, but Gehn was smiling now.

“Are you ready, Atrus?”

“Ready, father?”

“To begin your work. It is time you learned how to Write.”

He followed Gehn up into a large, yet strangely claustrophobic room. At first he didn’t understand why, then he realized that it had been cut directly from the surrounding rock, which was why, perhaps, the ceiling was so low—a cave within a cave.

Books crowded the undecorated stone walls and were heaped up on the floor on all sides, while in the center of the room was a large desk, lit by a curiously shaped lamp—the only source of illumination in that dim and musty place. Facing that massive desk was another smaller one that had been cleared.

Gehn led him across, standing Atrus to one side while he sat in his chair and, reaching into one of the drawers, drew out a shallow metal tray on which was a large quill pen and a number of the amber-colored ink pots they had found on their first book hunt.

Setting the tray to one side, Gehn leaned across and pulled one of the big, leather-bound books toward him—its brown cover flecked with white—opening it to the first page.

It was blank.

He looked up at Atrus, his pale eyes fixing his son. “You have spent six weeks now, learning how to copy a number of basic D’ni words and have discovered just how complex and beautiful a script it is. But those characters also
mean
something, Atrus. Something much more than you’ve previously understood. And not just in this world. They were developed over tens of thousands of years for a specific task—that of describing Ages … of
creating
other worlds. They are not like the words you and I speak casually, nor can they be used so in the books. Writing—D’ni Writing—is not merely an Art, it is a science. The science of precise description.”

He turned, looking to the blank page. “When we begin, there is nothing. It is …
uncreated
. But as soon as the first word is written—just as soon as that first character is completed, the last stroke set down upon the page—then a link is set up to that newly created world, a bridge established.”

Atrus frowned. “But where does it lead, this bridge?”

“Anywhere,” Gehn answered, glancing at him as he removed the lid of the amber-colored crystal ink pot. “The D’ni called it Terokh Jeruth, the great tree of possibility.”

Atrus laughed. “It sounds like magic!”

“And so it is. But you and I are D’ni, and so I shall share a secret with you. We are not ordinary men, Atrus, we are
gods!
”

“Gods?” Atrus stared back at his father, bewildered.

“Yes,” Gehn went on fervently, his eyes lit with a passion Atrus had never seen in him before. “Common men but dream and wake. We, however, can live our dreams. Within limits—limits that the finest D’ni minds took great care to define over the millennia—we can create whatever we can visualize. We use words to conjure worlds.”

Atrus’s mouth had fallen open.

“Why, I could show you worlds so rich, so vivid in their detail, that they would make you want to burst with admiration for their makers. Worlds of such splendor and magnificence that they make this marvelous world of ours seem ordinary!”

Gehn laughed, then held the ink pot up for Atrus to see. Within the thick, yellow, glasslike walls of the container, was a fine black liquid.

“What do you see, Atrus?”

Atrus looked up, meeting his father’s eyes, momentarily startled by that echo of Anna’s customary words.

“Ink?”

“Yes … but not just any ink. It has special powers that ordinary ink does not possess. So, too, with the pages of the book. They are made of a special paper, the formula for which was kept secret by the Guild.”

“And the pen?” Atrus asked, pointing to it. “Is that special, too?”

Gehn smiled. “No. The pen is but a pen. However, if anyone else tried to do what we are about to do—anyone, that is, without D’ni blood—then they would fail. It would be impossible.”

Turning to face the page, Gehn set the ink pot down, then, dipping the metallic tip of the quill into it, lifted the pen above the page and began to write.

Slowly a D’ni character—the word “island,” Atrus noted—began to form, its intense blackness
burned
almost into the pure white surface by the pen.

Gehn wrote another dozen characters onto the page, then lifted the pen and looked to Atrus.

“Is it done?” Atrus asked, surprised that there had not been more. He had expected fireworks or the heavens to open. “Have you made a new Age?”

Gehn laughed. “It exists, yes … but as yet it is very crude. It takes a great deal of work to create an Age. There are special formulas you have to follow, precise laws to obey. As I said, it is not simply an Art, it is a science—the science of precise description.”

He gestured toward the open book. “As yet, I have merely sketched out the most basic elements of my new world. Ahead lies an immense amount of hard work. Every aspect of the Age must be described, each new element fitted in. But that is not all.”

Reaching across, Gehn took another, much smaller book from a pile at the side and held it out to Atrus. “Once the Age is complete, one must always—
always
—make a Linking Book.”

Atrus took the small book and opened it, noting at once how few pages were in it. All of them were blank.

“Yes,” Gehn continued. “Whenever you travel to a newly written Age you must always carry a Linking Book with you. If you did not, you would be trapped there, without any way of traveling back.”

Atrus looked back at his father, wide-eyed. “But what’s actually in one of these Linking Books?”

Gehn took the book back. “Each Linking Book refers to one of the larger descriptive books—to one specific book. You might say that it contains the essence of the larger book—certain phrases and words that fuses it to that book and no other. But that is not all. For a Linking Book to work, it must also include an accurate description of the place one wishes to link to on that particular Age, which is recorded by writing a special D’ni symbol, a Garo-hertee. Yes, and a Linking Book must be written in the Age and location it is meant to link to. And so a Linking Book is, in a sense, a working substitute for a descriptive book.”