Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

BACK IN CHERYL’S OFFICE, I fill out my paperwork and wait patiently while she updates the Accession Table. The terminal on her desk is just like the one at Cal Knit: blue plastic, thick glass, built-in handset. Next to it, she has a page-a-day calendar with pictures of cats dressed up as famous figures. Today’s is a fuzzy white Julius Caesar.

I wonder if Cheryl realizes how historically significant the contents of this cardboard box are.

“Oh, honey,” she says, waving her hand, “everything in there is a treasure to somebody.” She leans in close to the terminal, double-checking her work.

Huh. Right. What else is slumbering in the eye of the storm, waiting for the right person to come along and pick it up?

“You want to set that down, hon?” Cheryl asks, tipping her chin at the box between my arms. “Looks heavy.”

I shake my head. No, I do not want to set it down. I’m afraid it might vanish. It still seems impossible that I’m holding the punches. Five hundred years ago, a man named Griffo Gerritszoon carved these shapes—these ones exactly. Centuries passed, and millions, maybe billions, of people saw the impressions they made, although most didn’t realize it. Now I’m cradling them like a newborn. A really heavy newborn.

Cheryl taps a key and the printer next to her terminal starts to purr. “Almost done, hon.”

For objects of deep aesthetic value, the punches don’t look like much. They’re just skinny sticks of dark alloy, raw and scratched, and only at the very ends do they become beautiful, the glyphs emerging from the metal like mountaintops in the fog.

I suddenly think to ask, “Who owns these?”

“Oh, nobody does,” Cheryl says. “Not anymore. If somebody owned ’em you’d be talkin’ to them, not me!”

“So … what are they doing here?”

“Gosh, we’re like an orphanage for a lot of things,” she says. “Let’s see here.” She tilts her glasses and scratches at her mouse’s scroll wheel. “The Flint Museum of Modern Industry sent ’em over, but of course they went under in ’88. Real cute place. Real nice curator, Dick Saunders.”

“And he just left everything here?”

“Well, he came and picked up some old cars and took ’em away on a flatbed truck, but the rest, he just signed it over to the Con-U collection.”

Maybe Con-U should put on an exhibit of its own: Anonymous Artifacts of the Ages.

“We try to auction things off,” Cheryl says, “but some of it…” She shrugs. “Like I said, everything’s a treasure to somebody. But a lot of times, you can’t find that somebody.”

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.