But she had promised Shaa.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tarfon wanted to know. “What did Max do? Is anyone trying to get him out? Why aren’t you -”
“Dr. Shaa said he would handle things,” Leen stated, which of course was not quite what he had said but which would hopefully close out this argument. “Can we get on with this?” It would be nice to realize more from this session than the already-clear fact that Max certainly did get around.
“Well,” Tarfon said reluctantly, “if that last one was the language Max tried and got results with, I don’t know that there’s much point in continuing to try other ones. I’m pretty well tapped out on spoken tongues, anyway. How about this -is there anything like a keyboard around? You know, ancient rectangular device that sits on a table, with letters that you press to spell out words?”
Leen’s mouth dropped. Why hadn’t she thought of that? “Wait here,” she told Tarfon, trotting up the stairs. Now where had she last seen that thing? It hadn’t been very long... in fact, now that she thought about it, she had found the device buried in its crate of junk and had cleaned it of the grime of ages years before, after her accession, when she had still had the thought of tidying up the place and putting things in some proper order, but then had stumbled across it again still on its same shelf with her same identifying tag only a few weeks ago. Had stumbled across it, and had played around with it, too... and then it had been less than a week later that Robin had wandered down one particular aisle and brought the hidden room to light. In this time of revealed synchronicity, was there any reason not to presume there might be a connection?
She hoped she hadn’t just left the thing lying around someplace for anyone to pick up.
But no, here it was, a platinum-colored plastic box the length of her forearm, inset with fifty or sixty cunningly fashioned fingertip-sized blocks bearing black letter-legends. Leen hefted it carefully and headed back to the secret room.
“So this is what they look like,” Tarfon murmured, holding the thing gingerly at half-arm’s length. “You read about something you think can’t possibly exist, and then there it is.” Now she was studying the back, then the ends. “There’s no cable. How do we plug it in?”
“Why not just try it?” suggested Leen. “The machine in the wall spoke; perhaps this keyboard will talk to it for us.” Tarfon looked around for a surface to place the keyboard on, then shrugged, sank to the floor cross-legged, and rested it on her knees facing the wall of the oracle. “These letters on the keys are from the same script system as that language you said Max used. It was very common; I’m surprised you don’t have anything on it here.”
“I’m sure we do,” said Leen. “The question is finding it, and finding the time to find it.” Actually, Leen did know the script system, she just wasn’t fluent in the language. “What are you waiting for?”
“... Nothing but nerves, I guess. Let’s see ...” Tarfon hunted across the board, then tapped a key. “Hey, look at that.”
Deep in the wall behind the murky window, the letter she had typed had appeared, a brightly glowing green. As she continued to type, the new letters sprung into life next to the first, spilling their way off to the side. “What are you telling it?”
“If this is a computer, supposedly they required very specific rituals,” said Tarfon. “Plus identification codes, passwords - see, look, now it’s asking who we are.” Another line of characters had appeared beneath the one she had created. “Who do we tell it we are?”
Who would have? - “Try Byron.”
“Byron?” The name didn’t seem to mean anything to her. “Okay, I think this would be how it’s spelled ... “ Tap tap tap, tap, tap.
“Now what?”
“It wants our password.”
“Does that mean it recognizes the name?”
Tarfon furrowed her brow. “It could be waiting until it has both the name and the password before analyzing them together, to keep from giving us any hints... You know, based on how you describe it behaving before, if we give it incorrect information now it’s possible it would lock us out again.”
“Can we go back and start over?”
“Let’s see... okay, who are we this time?”
“Um... Imperial Archivist? Can’t we just be a browser? A visitor?”
Taptaptaptaptap. “Hmm. ‘Guest access not’, uh, ‘authorized.’” Tarfon shrugged. “Let’s try Imperial Archivist. What do we have to lose?”
Leen, who had a pretty good idea of what they might stand to lose if the thing turned out to be as deadly as the other Archival snares, said nothing. She did, however, hold her breath.
Tarfon looked up. “It wants to see your sigil. Uh, do you have a sigil?”
Her predecessors had used to flaunt one, in the old days. Now it was just part of the accumulated lore. Where might her grandfather have stashed the thing? “Hang on again,” Leen said. “I’ll be right back.”
A nasty thought occurred to her as she scurried off toward her desk. What if Max had stolen that, too? He’d admitted to the theft of his amulet, the one that gave him some resistance to acts of gods, but what if he hadn’t exactly been telling her quite the whole truth? Had she ever seen the sigil of office during her own tenure?
Then Leen had reached her work area. She’d pretty much cleaned out the big desk. She’d never cared much for the credenza, though... but hadn’t her grandfather used that as a dumping ground for all kinds of junk? She yanked open a drawer, took a deep breath, and began to dig.
Where did all this stuff come from? There must be trash here back to Creeley. If - wait. She pulled free a small mahogany box inlaid with ivory and popped the catch. Inside lay a signet ring inscribed with fine tight runes. Not just runes - the intertwined first characters from a score of major classical alphabets. Leen clutched it in her hand - it was too large for any single finger - and ran back toward the secret room.
“Is it still waiting?” she called ahead of her, down the steps.
“It’s more patient that I am,” Tarfon told her. “Did you find it?”
“Here,” said Leen, sliding to a stop at the bottom of the staircase. “What do I do with it?”
“Hold it up to the screen, I suppose. Here - wait. I guess it’s already seen it.”
“Why?”
“Look what it’s saying - ‘Librarian access authorized.’”
CHAPTER 9
“We’re on the way to see the Protector of Nature, right?”
Gash actually stumbled as he glanced over at me. “Why do you think that?”
While Gash had been working on his ex-wife Jill, trying to convince her in the tradition of professional skullduggery to look past the multilevel vendetta they had been pursuing against each other since their breakup and see her way to a current modus vivendi, I had been thinking hard about the larger state of the game board. Protector of Nature had offered to make me head of her cabal if Max was removed from the scene, but of course she’d thought I was really Gash. Or had she? “With the way things are going,” I said with conscious disingenuity, “if you don’t take Protector of Nature up fast on that deal everything’ll be off. I know you were interested, not that I’m entirely sure why. You’ve never shown me any sign you wanted to run anything openly. Behind the scenes, that’s where you like to hang out, right? If anything, it’d only make you a target for Arznaak.” On the other hand, it might make Gash someone the Scapula could cut a deal with.
“The bunch of you have the Scapula seriously overrated,” Gash said, resuming his stride away from Jill’s temple down the Boulevard of Gods to wherever else he was leading me, but not addressing the real issue on the table. “When a mortal Transcends, they are quite fragile until they comprehend all the workings of their new state. Not only the powers of the office, the web of relationships into which they must fit. These things cannot be appreciated in a mere few hours. Even if the Scapula is a prodigy, there would be nothing to fear for several days, and even then nothing more than would be the case with another existing god.”