The Myst Reader (17 page)

Atrus crouched, balancing the lantern on his knee, while he fitted the fire-marble, then, as it began to glow, he straightened up. Turning, he saw his father light his own lantern, then look to him.

In that fierce blue glow Gehn’s eyes seemed huge and unnatural. Looking into them, Atrus realized how much a stranger his father remained, even after all these weeks. He still knew so little about him.

“I shall go ahead,” Gehn said, unaware, it seemed, of his son’s close scrutiny. “But keep up with me, Atrus. These tunnels are like a maze. If you fall behind and lose sight of me, you are likely never to find your way out.”

Atrus nodded nervously, then, as his father squeezed past him and began to make his way down the sloping curve of the tunnel, hurried to keep up.

Behind Atrus there was the grating of the stone as the wall slid back into place. A dull, resounding thud echoed up the tunnel after him.

Passages led off to either side, some leading up, others down into the earth, but Gehn kept striding straight ahead. It was a good ten minutes before he stopped and, turning, making sure Atrus was still with him, pointed up a narrow flight of steps.

“It’s a long climb,” he said, “but quicker than trying to get there by the lanes.”

Up and up the steps went, twisting first to the right and then back to the left, as if following some natural fault in the rock. Briefly it opened out into a narrow chamber with a balcony overhead and stone benches cut into the rock, then it went on again, climbing more steeply.

“Not far now,” Gehn said finally, as the steps ended and they came out into a relatively flat piece of tunnel.

“Who made these paths?” Atrus asked, noting the words and patterns carved into this final stretch of wall.

“That,” Gehn answered, “is a mystery. For when people have been in a location as long as the D’ni have been here, then many things are done the reasons for which are either unknown or lost in the haze of time. That said, I should imagine there have been tunnels here since the very beginning. Some scholars—the great Jevasi among them—claim that the wall of the cavern is so riddled with them, that were any more to be cut then the whole great edifice would cave in upon itself!”

Atrus narrowed his eyes, imagining it.

Just ahead there was a glimpse of orange light. It grew, until he could see the tunnel’s exit outlined up ahead.

They came out into a narrow, unfurnished room. Above them the ceiling gaped. One could look straight up at the roof of the great cavern. This, Atrus knew, was the D’ni style. Only a very few of their buildings—official residences, like the Steward’s House—had roofs, the rest were open to the air. After all, what need was there for roofing when the rain never fell and there was never any variation in the temperature? At most a typical D’ni dwelling would have a thick awning of some kind stretched over its topmost story, and some of the two- and three-story buildings didn’t even bother with that, their occupants sleeping and bathing in the lower floors.

The room led out onto a small balcony. To the right a set of steps led down into a narrow lane. Atrus went to the rail, looking down the empty thoroughfare, fascinated by the jumble of gray stone buildings that met his gaze, the labyrinth of walkways and stairways and covered paths.

They went on, their heels clicking on the worn stone. The narrow lane curved to the left, climbing slowly between high walls that, in places, were cracked and fallen. Behind those walls lay a number of imposing-looking mansions, surprisingly few of which had collapsed, leading Atrus to think that they had been built to survive such shocks.

It was a strange and fascinating place to be, and as he walked, a familiar voice sounded in his head, asking the question it always asked.

Atrus? What do you see?

He hesitated, then:

I see faded paint on the walls. I see boards at windows and piles of rubbish, untended thirty years. I see … disrepair and dereliction. Signs of shared habitation. Abandoned sedans and ragged washing hung on threadbare lines.

Good. And what do you make of it?

He looked about him once more, then answered Anna in his head:

The mansions are old and grand, from a time when this was, perhaps, a respectable, even fashionable place to live, yet in more recent times this must have been a poor district: a place of considerable squalor, even before the great quake did its worst.

Good. Then why has your father come here? What could he possibly want in a place like this?

Books, he answered silently, yet it hardly seemed a good enough reason. Why should his father want more books?

A
T THE END OF A BROAD, ONCE TREE-LINED
avenue bordered by massive houses, stood the D’ni gatehouse. It was a huge, squat, square thing with twin turrets and a pair of massive studded doors that were closed against them. On the great slab of a lintel above the doors, two D’ni words had been cut deep into the ancient stone. Looking up at it, Atrus translated it in his head.

District of J’Taeri.

Stepping up to the left-hand door, Gehn braced himself, then leaned against it, straining against it, but despite his efforts it did not move even the tiniest amount. Gehn turned, looking about him, then walked across, venturing into the garden of one of the nearby houses, to emerge a moment later with a heavy-looking piece of metal, clearly the ornamental spout of a fountain.

Standing before the doors again, Gehn lifted the thick rod of metal high then swung it against the wood, aiming for the lock. There was a cracking sound and splinters flew, but the door held firm. Grunting loudly, Gehn raised the spout time and again, smashing it against the door, the wood splintering more and more each time. Finally, on the seventh or eighth blow, the lock fell away.

Gehn threw the spout down, then, leaning against the door, he heaved, his whole body straining, his neck muscles taut. Slowly but surely the massive door eased back.

They went through, into J’Taeri.

The buildings here were smaller but much better maintained than in the district they had left, yet both had that same feeling of immense age, of ancient histories piled up layer upon layer like geological strata. In places, where it had not been replaced, the stone floor of the lanes was so worn by the passage of millions of feet over the millennia that it dipped markedly in the center, its appearance fluid, like wax that had melted and re-formed, that likeness reinforced by the dark red of the stone.

Coming to a massive crossroads—a place where covered walkways crisscrossed overhead, and tunnels dipped darkly into the earth—Gehn stopped and took the small tanned leather notebook from his pocket, studying it closely.

Atrus had often noticed Gehn consulting the book, which seemed to contain information on all manner of things, yet strangely he had never seen him write in it.

Maybe he does it at night, when I’m not there
, Atrus thought, thinking of his own journal.
Or maybe he doesn’t need to. Maybe he’s already mapped out where everything is in this city.

To be honest, he was in awe of his father’s knowledge of the capital. Gehn seemed to know every street, every important building in D’ni. And even when he didn’t, he was sure to have it in his book.

Closing the notebook, Gehn pointed up the avenue to his left.

“We need to go this way. The main square is ten minutes’ walk from here.”

Atrus waited as Gehn tucked the book away, then set off again, silently following his father, staring about him as he walked.

The houses in J’Taeri were richly furnished; not only that, but there were huge pentagonal stone shields on many of the houses, decorated with symbols identical to those on Gehn’s tunic, the night he’d come to the cleft to claim Atrus.

Curious, Atrus had asked Gehn what they were and had discovered that they were Guild badges, and that those who lived in the houses that displayed them were senior Guild members.

J’Taeri, it transpired, had been a Guild district, and thus something of an anomaly in that the families who had once stayed there were not from the locality, but were drafted in to oversee Guild activities in the lower districts.

The houses were very different in J’Taeri; more elaborate in their design. Some of them reminded Atrus of the forms he had glimpsed in the caverns traveling to D’ni—seeming to mimic the form of dripstone and flowstone, narrow towers pushing up from their walls like great stalagmites, while large draperies of lacelike stone decorated their front arches. Others, much more prevalent, were constructed to resemble great slabs of rock, three or four stories resting one atop another like layers of smoothed slate, no sign of any doors or windows evident to the casual eye.

Two of the bigger houses stood out, not just because of their imposing design but also because they were made of the jet back, red-streaked stone he had noticed was used mainly in the uppermost levels of the city, and again he asked Gehn what, if anything, this signified.

“Those were the houses of important men,” Gehn had answered distractedly. “Only the very rich could afford to build with such materials.”

The avenue opened out onto a massive square enclosed by high stone walls, on the far side of which was a building that resembled the Steward’s House. Six broad white marble steps led up into the shadowed portico. Remarkably, its facade had survived the quake almost intact.

On the top step Atrus turned, looking out across the labyrinth of walls and rooftops toward the harbor far below, the great arch dominating the skyline, its top almost level with them. Then, turning back, he stepped up into the shadows of the Common Library.

Inside, beyond a row of five cracked pillars, was a small entrance hall, its floor covered in a mosaic. A dark, jagged crack ran through the center of it, but the picture was still clear. It showed a man standing beside a lectern, on which lay an open book, exactly like the books which stood on the pedestals in his father’s library back on K’veer. The man’s hand hovered just above the image on the page.

On the far side of the hall were two doorways, one to the left, one on the right. Cut into the plinth over the left-hand door was the D’ni symbol for “Enter,” while on the plinth to the right the same symbol had a circle about it, from which jutted seven short, wedge-shaped rays, like a star. From Anna’s lessons he recognized it as the D’ni negative. That sign read “Do Not Enter.”

He went to the left-hand door. It opened onto a long, caged passageway with ornately latticed sides of interwoven bronze and iron that went directly down the middle of a much bigger sloping corridor, the cracked walls of which were covered in carvings of open fields and blazing suns, and of men and women standing in those fields wearing strange glasses—
his
glasses, Atrus realized with a start of surprise!—as they looked up into those limitless, unfamiliar heavens.

At the end of the caged walk was a barrier. Gehn vaulted it effortlessly and walked on, into a big, high-ceilinged gallery, on the far side of which was a massive stone screen. Behind that could be seen three tall, black-painted doors.

Atrus clambered over the barrier, then went across, joining his father.

“Over there, through those doors, is the Book Room,” Gehn said. “From there the common people of D’ni would have the opportunity of traveling to an Age.”

He looked to Atrus, clearly proud of his race’s achievements.

“Did
everybody
use these places?”

Gehn shook his head. “No. That is why they are called the Common Libraries. These places were for the common, workingmen and -women of D’ni. The great families had their own books, their own Ages. They were rigidly administered by the Guilds, just as these Ages were, yet they were exclusive. Only those permitted by the families could enter them.”

Atrus frowned. “And the harvest worlds?”

“Those were Guild worlds. The books they used were specialized books, much less restrictive than the ordinary books. They had to be to take the great loads that were regularly brought back from those Ages.”

Gehn gestured toward the doors. “Anyway, let us go inside.”

Following his father, Atrus went around the screen and through the central doorway, into a big, long chamber filled with pedestals, divided in two by a central walkway, the whole thing mounted on a huge, white marble dais. Barely half the pedestals now stood, and the great dais itself was riven with cracks. There was no ceiling to the chamber, but overlooking it was a railed balcony, parts of which had fallen away. Even so, looking up at it, Atrus could imagine the cloaked Guild members standing there like gods, calmly supervising the comings and goings down below.

Atrus stepped up beside his father. On the nearest pedestal lay an open book, its thick leather cover secured to the lectern by a heavy gold chain.

“Here they are,” Atrus said.

Gehn looked to him. “No. Those are of no use to us.”

Atrus frowned, not understanding, but Gehn had crouched and was examining the top of one of the elaborately decorated pedestals, his fingers feeling beneath the beveled edge. With a huff of disappointment he straightened up, moving quickly on to the next, examining that, again with the same response.

While he was doing so, Atrus stepped up to the pedestal and looked down at the image on the right-hand page.

He frowned. It was dark, only the vaguest outline visible. Then he understood. There was thick layer of dust over the “window,” suspended there just a fraction above the page.

He went to touch it, to brush it aside, but Gehn, who had seen what he was about to do, grabbed his hand and pulled it away, gripping it tightly and shaking it as he spoke.

“You must
never
do that, Atrus!
Never!
You understand? For all you knew, that Age might be dead, destroyed by some calamity. You would be drawn into an airless void.”

“I’m sorry,” Atrus said, his voice very small.

Gehn sighed, then released his hand.