That’s depressing. If these little objects, so significant to the history of printing and typography and human communication, were lost in a giant storage unit … what chance do any of us have?
“Okay, Mis-ter Jannon,” Cheryl says with mock formality, “you’re all set.” She tucks the printout into the box and pats me on the arm. “That’s a three-month loan, and you can extend it to a year. Ready to change out of that long underwear?”
I drive back to San Francisco with the punches in the passenger seat of Neel’s hybrid. They fill the interior with a dense annealed odor that makes my nose itch. I wonder if I should wash them in boiling water or something. I wonder if the smell is going to stick to the seats.
It’s a long drive home. For a while I watch the Toyota’s energy-management control panel and try to beat my fuel efficiency from before. But that gets boring fast, so I plug in the Walkman and start up the audiobook version of The Dragon-Song Chronicles: Volume III, read by Clark Moffat himself.
I roll my shoulders back, grip the wheel at ten and two, and settle into the strangeness. I’m flanked by brothers of the Unbroken Spine, separated by centuries: Moffat on the stereo, Gerritszoon in the passenger seat. The Nevada desert is blank for miles, and high in the Wyrm Queen’s tower, things are getting super-weird.
Keep in mind that this series starts with a singing dragon lost at sea, calling out to dolphins and whales for help. It gets rescued by a passing ship that also happens to be carrying a scholarly dwarf. The dwarf befriends the dragon and nurses it back to health, then saves its life when the ship’s captain comes in the night to cut the dragon’s throat and get the gold in its gullet, and that’s just the first five pages—so, you know, for this story to get even weirder is a not-insignificant development.
But, of course, now I know the reason: the third and final volume of The Dragon-Song Chronicles served double duty as Moffat’s codex vitae.
All of the action in this installment takes place in the Wyrm Queen’s tower, which turns out to be almost a world unto itself. The tower reaches up to the stars, and each floor has its own set of rules, its own puzzles to solve. The first two volumes have adventures and battles and, of course, betrayals. This one is all puzzles, puzzles, puzzles.
It begins with the friendly ghost who appears to release Fernwen the dwarf and Telemach Half-Blood from the Wyrm Queen’s dungeon and start them on their ascent. Moffat describes the ghost through the Toyota’s speakers:
It was tall, made of pale blue light, a creature with long arms and long legs and the shadow of a smile, and above it all, eyes that shone bluer still than its body.
Wait a second.
“What do you seek in this place?” the shade asked plainly.
I fumble to rewind the tape. First I overshoot the mark, so I have to fast-forward, then I miss it again, so I have to rewind, and then the Toyota shakes as it crosses the rumble strips. I pull the steering wheel and point the car straight down the highway and finally press play:
… eyes that shone bluer still than its body. “What do you seek in this place?” the shade asked plainly.
Again:
… bluer still than its body. “What do you seek in this place?”
It is unmistakable: Moffat is doing Penumbra’s voice there. This part of the book isn’t new; I remember the friendly blue ghost in the dungeon from my first reading. But, of course, back then I had no way of knowing Moffat might encode an eccentric San Francisco bookseller into his fantasy epic. And likewise, when I walked through the front door of the 24-Hour Bookstore, I had no way of knowing I’d met Mr. Penumbra a few times already.
Ajax Penumbra is the blue-eyed shade in the dungeon of the Wyrm Queen’s tower. I am absolutely sure of it. And to hear Moffat’s voice, the rough affection in it, as he finishes the scene …
Fernwen’s small hands burned on the ladder. The iron was ice-cold, and it seemed each rung bit him, tried its evil best to send him plummeting back into the dark depths of the dungeon. Telemach was high above, already pulling himself through the portal. Fernwen glanced down below. The shade was there, standing just inside the secret door. It grinned, a pulse of light through spectral blue, and waved its long arms and called out:
“Climb, my boy! Climb!”
And so he did.
… incredible. Penumbra has already earned a touch of immortality. Does he know?
I accelerate back up to cruising speed, shaking my head and smiling to myself. The story is accelerating, too. Now Moffat’s gravelly voice carries the heroes from floor to floor, solving riddles and recruiting allies along the way—a thief, a wolf, a talking chair. Now, for the first time, I get it: the floors are a metaphor for the code-breaking techniques of the Unbroken Spine. Moffat is using the tower to tell the story of his own path through the fellowship.
This is all so obvious when you know what to listen for.
At the very end, after a long weird slog of a story, the heroes arrive at the tower’s summit, the spot from which the Wyrm Queen looks out across the world and plots domination. She is there, waiting for them, and she has her dark legion with her. Their black robes seem more significant now.
While Telemach Half-Blood leads his band of allies into the final battle, Fernwen the scholarly dwarf makes an important discovery. In the cataclysmic commotion, he sneaks over to the Wyrm Queen’s magic telescope and peeks through. From this vantage point, impossibly high up, he can see something amazing. The mountains that divide the Western Continent form letters. They are, Fernwen realizes, a message, and not just any message, but the message promised long ago by Aldrag the Wyrm-Father himself, and when Fernwen speaks the words aloud, he—
Holy shit.
When I finally cross the bridge back into San Francisco, Clark Moffat’s voice in the closing chapters has a new warble; I think the cassette might be stretched out from my rewinding and replaying, rewinding and replaying, again and again. My brain feels a little stretched out, too. It’s carrying a new theory that started as a seed but is now growing fast, all based on what I’ve just heard.
Moffat: You were brilliant. You saw something that no one else in the whole history of the Unbroken Spine ever saw. You raced through the ranks, you became one of the bound, maybe just to get access to the Reading Room—and then you bound up their secrets in a book of your own. You hid them in plain sight.
It took me hearing them to get it.
It’s late, past midnight. I double-park Neel’s car in front of the apartment and bang the wide button that sets the hazard lights blinking. I jump out, heave the cardboard box from the passenger seat, and dash up the steps. My key scratches the lock—I can’t find it in the darkness, and my hands are full, and I’m vibrating.
“Mat!” I run to the stairs and call up to his room: “Mat! Do you have a microscope?”
There’s a murmuring, a faint voice—Ashley’s—and Mat appears at the top of the stairs, wearing just his boxer shorts, which are printed with a full-color reproduction of a Salvador Dalí painting. He’s waving a giant magnifying glass. It’s huge and he looks like a cartoon detective. “Here, here,” he says softly, scampering down to hand it off. “Best I can do. Welcome back, Jannon. Don’t drop it.” Then he hops back up the stairs and shuts his door with a quiet click.
I take the Gerritszoon originals into the kitchen and turn all the lights on. I feel crazy, but in a good way. Carefully, I lift one of the punches out of the box—the X again. I pull it out of its plastic bag, wipe it down with a towel, and hold it under the glare of the stove’s fluorescent light. Then I steady Mat’s magnifying glass and peer through.
The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father.
THE PILGRIM
IT IS ONE WEEK LATER, and I have got the goods, in more ways than one. I emailed Edgar Deckle and told him he had better come out to California if he wants his punches. I told him he had better come out to Pygmalion on Thursday night.
I invited everyone: my friends, the fellowship, all the pe
ople who helped along the way. Oliver Grone convinced his manager to let me use the back of the store, where they have A/V gear set up for book readings and poetry slams. Ashley baked vegan oat cookies, four plates of them. Mat set up the chairs.
Now Tabitha Trudeau sits in the front row. I introduce her to Neel Shah (her new benefactor) and he immediately proposes a Cal Knit exhibit that will have, as its focus, the way boobs look in sweaters.
“It’s very distinct,” he says. “The sexiest of all apparel. It’s true. We ran a focus group.” Tabitha frowns and knits her brows together. Neel goes on: “The exhibit could have classic movie scenes looping, and we could track down the actual sweaters they wore and hang them up …”
Rosemary Lapin sits in the second row, and next to her are Tyndall, Fedorov, Imbert, Muriel, and more—most of the same crowd that came out to Google on a bright morning not so long ago. Fedorov has his arms crossed and his face set in a skeptical mask, as if to say, I’ve been through this once before, but that’s okay. I’m not going to disappoint him.
There are two unbound brothers from Japan, too—a pair of young mop-haired men in skinny indigo jeans. They heard a rumor through the grapevine of the Unbroken Spine and decided it would be worth their while to find a last-minute flight to San Francisco. (They were correct.) Igor is sitting with them, chatting comfortably in Japanese.
There’s a laptop set up in the front row so Cheryl from Con-U can watch. She’s beaming in via video chat, her frizzy black hair taking up the whole screen. I invited Grumble to join in, too, but he’s on a plane tonight—headed for Hong Kong, he says.
Darkness blooms through the bookstore’s front door: Edgar Deckle has arrived, and he’s brought an entourage of New York black-robes with him. They aren’t actually wearing their robes, not here, but their attire still marks them as strange outsiders: suits, ties, a charcoal skirt. They come streaming through the door, a dozen of them—and then, there’s Corvina. His suit is gray and gleaming. He’s still an imposing dude, but here he seems diminished. Without all the pageantry and the backdrop of bedrock, he’s just an old— His dark eyes flash up and find me. Okay, maybe not that diminished.
Pygmalion’s customers turn to watch, eyebrows raised, as the black-robes march through the store. Deckle is wearing a light smile. Corvina is all sharp gravity.
“If you truly have the Gerritszoon punches,” he says flatly, “we will take them.”
I steel my spine and tilt my chin up a little. We’re not in the Reading Room anymore. “I do have them,” I say, “but that’s just the beginning. Have a seat.” Oh, boy. “Please.”
He flicks his eyes across the chattering crowd and frowns, but then he waves his black-robes into place. They all find seats in the last row, a dark bracket at the back of the assembly. Behind them, Corvina stands.
I grab hold of Deckle’s elbow as he passes. “Is he coming?”
“I told him,” he says, nodding. “But he already knew. Word travels fast in the Unbroken Spine.”
Kat is here, sitting up front, way off to the side, talking quietly with Mat and Ashley. She’s wearing her houndstooth blazer again. There’s a green scarf around her neck, and she’s cut her hair since the last time I saw her; now it stops just below her ears.
We are no longer dating. There has been no formal declaration, but it’s an objective truth, like the atomic weight of carbon or the share price of GOOG. That didn’t stop me from pestering her and extracting a promise to attend. She, of all people, has to see this.
People are shifting in their seats and the vegan oat cookies are almost gone, but I have to wait. Lapin leans forward and asks me, “Are you going to New York? To work at the library, perhaps?”
“Um, no, definitely not,” I say flatly. “Not interested.”
She frowns and clasps her hands together. “I’m supposed to go, but I don’t think I want to.” She looks up at me. She looks lost. “I miss the store. And I miss—”
Ajax Penumbra.
He slips in through Pygmalion’s front door like a wandering ghost, fully buttoned into his dark peacoat, the collar turned up over the thin gray scarf around his neck. He searches the room, and when he sees the crowd in the back, full of the fellowship—black-robes and all—his eyes widen.
I sprint over to him. “Mr. Penumbra! You came!”
He’s half-turned away, and he puts a bony hand up around his neck. He won’t look at me. His blue eyes are glued to the floor. “My boy, I am sorry,” he says softly. “I should not have vanished so—ah. It was simply …” He lets out a whispering sigh. “I was embarrassed.”
“Mr. Penumbra, please. Don’t worry about it.”
“I was so sure it would work,” he says, “but it did not. And there you were, and your friends, and all my students. I feel like such an old fool.”
Poor Penumbra. I’m imagining him holed up somewhere, grappling with the guilt of having cheered the fellowship forward to failure on Google’s green lawns. Weighing his own faith and wondering what could possibly come next. He’d placed a big bet—his biggest ever—and lost. But he didn’t place that bet alone.
“Come on, Mr. Penumbra.” I step back toward my setup and wave him along. “Come sit down. We’re all fools—all except for one of us. Come and see.”
Everything is ready. There’s a presentation waiting to start on my laptop. I realize that the big reveal really ought to happen in a smoky parlor, with the sleuth holding his nervous audience spellbound using only his voice and his powers of deduction. Me, I prefer bookstores, and I prefer slides.
So I power up the projector and take my position, the blank light burning my eyes. I clasp my hands behind my back, square my shoulders, and squint out into the assembled crowd. Then I click the remote and begin:
SLIDE 1
If you were going to make a message last, how would you do it? Would you carve it into stone? Etch it into gold?
Would you make your message so potent that people couldn’t resist passing it on? Would you build a religion around it, maybe get people’s souls involved? Would you, perhaps, establish a secret society?
Or would you do what Gerritszoon did?
SLIDE 2
Griffo Gerritszoon was born the son of a barley grower in northern Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century. The elder Gerritszoon was not rich, but thanks to his good reputation and well-established piety, he was able to snag his son an apprenticeship with the local goldsmith. This was a great gig back in the fifteenth century; as long as he didn’t screw it up, the younger Gerritszoon was basically set for life.
He screwed it up.
He was a religious kid, and the goldsmith’s trade turned him off. He spent all day melting old baubles down to make new ones—and he knew his own work was going to suffer the same fate. Everything he believed told him: This is not important. There is no gold in the city of God.
So he did what he was told, and he learned the craft—he was really good at it, too—but when he turned sixteen, he said so long and left the goldsmith behind. He left Germany altogether, in fact. He went on a pilgrimage.
SLIDE 3
I know this because Aldus Manutius knew it, and he wrote it down. He wrote it down in his codex vitae—which I have decoded.
(There are gasps from the audience. Corvina is still standing at the back and his face is tight, his mouth a deep grimace, his dark mustache pulled down around it. Other faces are blank, waiting. I glance over at Kat. She’s wearing a serious look, as if she’s worried that something might have short-circuited in my brain.)
Let me get this out of the way: There’s no secret formula in this book. There’s no magic incantation. If there truly is a secret to immortality, it’s not here.
(Corvina makes his choice. He spins and stalks up the aisle past HISTORY and SELF-HELP toward the front door. He passes Penumbra, who’s standing off to one side, leaning on a short shelf for support. He watches Corvina pass, then turns back toward me, cups his hands around his mouth, and calls out, ??
?Keep going, my boy!”)
SLIDE 4
Really, Manutius’s codex vitae is just what it claims to be: it’s a book about his life. As a work of history, it’s a treasure. But it’s the part about Gerritszoon that I want to focus on.
I used Google to translate this from Latin, so bear with me if I get some of the details wrong.
Young Gerritszoon wandered through the Holy Land, doing metalwork to make a bit of money here and there. Manutius says he was meeting up with mystics—Kabbalists, Gnostics, and Sufis alike—and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He was also hearing rumors, through the goldsmiths’ grapevine, of some pretty interesting stuff happening up in Venice.
This is a map of Gerritszoon’s journey, as well as I can reconstruct it. He meandered around the Mediterranean—down through Constantinople, into Jerusalem, across to Egypt, back up through Greece, over to Italy.
Venice is where he met Aldus Manutius.
SLIDE 5
It was at Manutius’s printing house that Gerritszoon found his place in the world. Printing called on all of his skills as a metal-smith, but it bent them to new purposes. Printing wasn’t baubles and bracelets—it was words and ideas. Also, this was basically the internet of its day; it was exciting.
And just like the internet today, printing in the fifteenth century was all problems, all the time: How do you store the ink? How do you mix the metal? How do you mold the type? The answers changed every six months. In every great city of Europe, there were a dozen printing houses all trying to figure it out first. In Venice, the greatest of those printing houses belonged to Aldus Manutius, and that’s where Gerritszoon went to work.
Manutius recognized his talent immediately. He also says he recognized his spirit; he saw that Gerritszoon was a searcher, too. So he hired him, and they worked together for years. They became best friends. There was no one Manutius trusted more than Gerritszoon, and no one Gerritszoon respected more than Manutius.