Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones

I clomped along, making my way toward a solitary figure standing near the chest of the bird. Enormous glass wings beat on either side of me, and I passed thick glass bird legs that were curled up and tucked back. Wind howled and slammed against me. The bird—called the Hawkwind—wasn’t quite as majestic as our previous vehicle, a glass dragon called Dragonaut. Still, it had a nice group of compartments inside where one could travel in luxury.

My grandfather, of course, couldn’t be bothered with something as normal as waiting inside a vehicle. No, he had to cling to the bottom and stare out over the ocean. I fought against the wind as I approached him—and then, suddenly, the wind vanished. I froze in shock, one of my boots locking into place on the bird’s glass underside.

Grandpa Smedry jumped, turning. “Rotating Rothfusses!” he exclaimed. “You surprised me, lad!”

“Sorry,” I said, walking forward, my boots making a clinking sound each time I unlocked one, took a step, then locked back onto the glass. As always, my grandfather wore a sharp black tuxedo—he thought it made him blend in better in the Hushlands. He was bald except for a tuft of white hair that ran around the back of his head, and he sported an impressively bushy white mustache.

“What happened to the wind?” I asked.

“Hum? Oh, that.” My grandfather reached up, tapping the green-specked spectacles he wore. They were Oculatory Lenses, a type of magical glasses that—when activated by an Oculator like Grandpa Smedry or myself—could do some very interesting things. (Those things don’t, unfortunately, include forcing lazy readers to go and reread the first couple of books, thereby removing the need for me to explain all of this stuff over and over again.)

“Windstormer’s Lenses?” I asked. “I didn’t know you could use them like this.” I’d had a pair of Windstormer’s Lenses, and I’d used them to shoot out jets of wind.

“It takes quite a bit of practice, my boy,” Grandpa Smedry said in his boisterous way. “I’m creating a bubble of wind that is shooting out from me in exactly the opposite direction of the wind that’s pushing against me, thereby negating it all.”

“But … shouldn’t that blow me backward as well?”

“What? No, of course not! What makes you think that it would?”

“Uh … physics?” I said. (Which you might agree is a rather strange thing to be mentioning while hanging upside down through the use of magical glass boots.)

Grandpa Smedry laughed. “Excellent joke, lad. Excellent.” He clasped me on the shoulder. Free Kingdomers like my grandfather tend to be very amused by Librarian concepts like physics, which they find to be utter nonsense. I think that the Free Kingdomers don’t give the Librarians enough credit. Physics isn’t nonsense—it’s just incomplete.

Free Kingdomer magic and technology have their own kind of logic. Take the glass bird. It was driven by something called a silimatic engine, which used different types of sands and glass to propel it. Smedry Talents and Oculator powers were called “magic” in the Free Kingdoms, since only special people could use them. Something that could be used by anyone—such as the silimatic engine or the boots on my feet—was called technology.

The longer I spent with people from the Free Kingdoms, the less I bought that distinction. “Grandfather,” I said, “did I ever tell you that I managed to power a pair of Grappler’s Glass boots just by touching them?”

“Hum?” Grandpa Smedry said. “What’s that?”

“I gave a pair of these boots an extra boost of power,” I said. “Just by touching them … as if I could act like some kind of battery or energy source.”

My grandfather was silent.

“What if that’s what we do with the Lenses?” I said, tapping the spectacles on my face. “What if being an Oculator isn’t as limited as we think it is? What if we can affect all kinds of glass?”

“You sound like your father, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said. “He has a theory relating to exactly what you’re talking about.”

My father. I glanced upward. Then, eventually, I turned back to Grandpa Smedry. He wore his pair of Windstormer’s Lenses, keeping the wind at bay.

“Windstormer’s Lenses,” I said. “I … broke the other pair you gave me.”

“Ha!” Grandpa Smedry said. “That’s not surprising at all, lad. Your Talent is quite powerful.”

My Talent—my Smedry Talent—was the magical ability to break things. Every Smedry has a Talent, even those who are only Smedrys by marriage. My grandfather’s Talent was the ability to arrive late to appointments.

The Talents were both blessings and curses. My grandfather’s Talent, for instance, was quite useful when he arrived late to things like bullets or tax day. But he’d also arrived too late to stop the Librarians from stealing my inheritance.

Grandpa Smedry fell uncharacteristically silent as he stared out over the ocean, which seemed to hang above us. West. Toward Nalhalla, my homeland, though I’d never once set foot upon its soil.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.