The Scrivener's Bones (Alcatraz, #2)

by Brandon Sanderson

You think you know me. You’ve listened to the storytellers. You’ve talked with your friends about my exploits. You’ve read history books and heard the criers tell of my heroic deeds. The trouble is, the only people who are bigger liars than myself are the people who like to talk about me.

Oh, by the way. Did I mention that while waiting in that airport I was probably in the most danger I’d ever faced in my entire life?

I ate another stale potato chip.

For some reason, the more powerful a pair of Oculatory Lenses is, the less cool they tend to look. I’m developing a theory about it—the Law of Disproportionate Lameness.)

Leavenworth Smedry, after all, is a Smedry. (The last name’s a dead giveaway.)

Yes. You read that right. Evil Librarians control the world. They keep everyone in ignorance, teaching them falsehoods in place of history, geography, and politics. It’s kind of a joke to them. Why else do you think the Librarians named themselves what they did? Librarians. LIE-brarians.

Dangerous, but unseen. (Kind of like those troublemakers who read fantasy novels.)

I feel obligated to break the action here to warn you that I frequently break the action to mention trivial things. It’s one of my bad habits that, along with wearing mismatched socks, tends to make people rather annoyed at me. It’s not my fault, though, honestly. I blame society. (For the socks, I mean. That breaking-the-action thing is totally my own fault.)

It was as if the Talent and I had joint custody over my life; I got it on every other weekend and some holidays.

It seemed that no matter what I did, I ended up in even more danger than I’d been in before. One might have said that I constantly went “out of the frying pan and into the fire,” which is a common Hushlands saying.

Personally, I say, “Out of the frying pan and into the deadly pit filled with sharks who are wielding chainsaws with killer kittens stapled to them.”

A hero wasn’t the type of person who turned a laser of pure energy upon the backs of a bunch of soldiers, particularly when that bunch included innocent security guards.

You probably remember how I’m going to end up; I mentioned it in the first book. I’ll eventually be tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, with cultists from the Librarian Order of the Shattered Lens preparing to spill my Oculator’s blood in an unholy ceremony.

I’d like to congratulate you on finding this book. I’m glad you’re reading a serious work about real-world politics, rather than wasting your time on something silly such as a fantasy book about a fictional character like Napoleon.

Now, I do have to admit something. I find it very disturbing that you readers have decided to begin with the second book in the series. That’s a very bad habit to have—worse, even, than wearing mismatched socks. In fact, on the bad-habit scale, it ranks somewhere between chewing with your mouth open and making quacking noises when your friends are trying to study. (Try that one sometime—it’s really fun.) It’s because of people like you that we authors have to clog our second books with all kinds of explanations. We have to, essentially, invent the wheel again—or at least renew our patent.

But, where Bastille is concerned, that was actually a nice reception. She didn’t throw anything at me, hit me with anything, or even swear at me. Rather heartwarming.

Bastille gave me one of her barely tolerant looks. I keep telling her she should trademark those. She could sell photos of herself making the face so that people could use them to scare children, turn milk into curds, or frighten terrorists into surrendering.

“And if they’re facts, then why are they so complicated? Shouldn’t explanations about the natural world be simple? Why is there all of that needless math and complexity?”

At that very moment, there were thousands of people doing very important things all across the world—everything from getting married to jumping out windows—and I wasn’t a part of any of it. The truth is, even the most important people get left out of most things that happen in the world.

Not all Librarians are evil cultists. Some Librarians are instead vengeful undead who want to suck out your soul.

In layman’s terms, this law states that some things simply have to happen. If there’s a red button on a console with the words don’t push taped above it, someone will push it. If there’s a gun hanging conspicuously above Chekhov’s fireplace, someone is going to end up shooting it (probably at Nietzsche).

Don’t even get me started on the economic value of belly button lint.

I never got used to that feeling. It’s kind of like getting punched in the face by your own mortality. And mortality has a wicked right hook.

To this day, I haven’t been able to tell if Kaz genuinely has a death wish, or if he only likes to act that way. Either way, he’s a loon. But then, he’s a Smedry. That’s virtually a synonym for “insane, foolhardy lunatic.”

(He produced well over eight hundred thousand words’ worth of writing. The Honorable Council of Fantasy Writers Whose Books Are Way Too Long—good old THCoFWWBAWTL—is considering making him an honorary member.)

Is it the same ship? I think it isn’t. That ship is gone, buried, rotted. The copy everyone then called the ship of Theseus was really just a … copy. It might have looked the same, but looks can be deceiving.

“Blasted thing,” he said through gritted teeth, “why do you tall people have to fly up so high?”

“Sure. I’ll kick you anytime you want.”

Actually, you may find this annoying. It would have been a better story if someone had died here. An early fatality can really make a book seem much more tense, as it lets people realize how dangerous things can be.

You have to remember, however, that this is not fiction, but a real-life account. I can’t help it if all of my friends were too selfish to do the narratively proper thing and get themselves killed off to hike up the tension of my memoirs.

I’ve spoken to them at length about this. If it makes you feel better, Bastille dies by the end of this book. Oh, you didn’t want to hear that? I’m sorry. You’ll simply have to forget that I wrote it. There are several convenient ways to do that. I hear hitting yourself on the head with a blunt object can be very effective. You should try using one of Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy...

Adults are not idiots.

(I’m not sure what authors have against adults, but everyone seems to hate them to an extent usually reserved for dogs and mothers. Why else make them out to be such idiots? “Ah look, the dark lord of evil has come to attack the castle! Annnnd there’s my lunch break. Have fun saving the world on your own, kids!”)

Give them enough time, and they’ll turn any kid into one of them.

“The List is a time-tested and scientifically researched collection of facts that prove that short people are better off than tall ones.”

Reason number forty-seven: Tall people’s heads are in a thinner atmosphere than those of short people, so the tall people get less oxygen.

Reason number twenty-eight: Short people can find things easier and follow trails better because they’re closer to the ground.

I am a fish. No, really. I am. I have fins, a tail, scales. I swim about, doing fishy things. This isn’t a metaphor or a joke, but a real and honest fact. I am a fish.

“Like reading a book that will cost you your soul?”

(That last bit about the names—that is foreshadowing. So don’t say I never give you anything.)

I’d learned just the right buttons to push, the right things to break to make them hate me. Now, those same skills were coming in handy helping people feel good, rather than making them hate me.

Becoming a leader is, in a way, like falling off a cliff. It feels like a lot of fun at first. Then it stops being fun. Really, really fast.

Let’s talk about something called misdirection. In the last chapter, I told a big lie, then made you focus on it so much that you ignored the smaller lie. I said I was a fish. Then I mentioned my black shoes in passing, so you didn’t pay attention to them. People use this strategy all the time. They drive fancy cars to distract others from their having a small house. They wear bright clothing to distract from their being—unfortunately—rather bland people. They talk really loudly to distract you from their having nothing to say.

However, it’s quite different when your female cousin goes to sleep, then wakes up looking like an old man with a bushy mustache. Then it’s okay to make fun of her. That happens to be one of the very few exclusions covered by the Law of Things That Are So Funny You Can’t Be Blamed for Laughing at Them, No Matter What. (Other exceptions include getting bitten by a giant penguin, falling off a giant cheese sculpture carved to look like a nose, and getting named after a prison by your parents. I have a petition in the courts to revoke that third one.)

“Reason number one hundred twenty-seven. Short people have smaller bodies, but regular-sized hearts. That gives us a larger ratio of heart to flesh—making us far more compassionate than big people.”

It’s all about choices—and choices are never very much fun. If someone gives you a candy bar, you’re excited. But if someone offers you two different candy bars and tells you that you can only have one, what then? Whichever one you take, you’ll feel that you missed out on the other one. And I like candy bars. What about when you have to choose between two terrible things? Did I wait, or lead my group down into danger? That was like having to choose to eat either a tarantula or a bunch of tacks. Neither option is very appealing—both make you sick to your stomach, and both are tough to choke down without catsup. Personally, I like it much better when someone else does the decision making. That way you have legitimate grounds to whine and complain. I tend to find both whining and complaining quite interesting and amusing, though sometimes—unfortunately—it’s hard to choose which one of the two I want to do. Sigh. Life can be so tough sometimes.

I’ll take one chocolate bar and a handful of tacks, please. Anyone got any catsup?

(For those of you reading the electronic version, please lock your device rotation and adjust your font size up or down until the spacing in the first paragraph of this chapter looks correct on your screen. This is a vital part of the reading experience. I swear.)

There’s so much more to be learned here. It’s not only people’s first impressions that are often wrong. Many of the ideas we have thought and believed for a long time are, in fact, dead wrong. For instance, I believed for years that Librarians were my friends. Some people believe that asparagus tastes good. Others don’t buy this book because they think it won’t be interesting. Wrong, wrong, and so wrong. In my experience, I’ve found it best not to judge what I think I’m seeing until I’ve had enough time to study and learn. Something that appears to make no sense may actually be brilliant. (Like my art in paragraph one.)

Curators, it might be noted, give off a freezing chill. Because of this, they never need ice for their drinks. Unfortunately, since they’re undead spirits, they can’t really drink soda. It’s one of the great ironies of our world.