by Pearl North
The body was hidden by layer upon layer of ornate clothing, parts of it rotted away to reveal here a swath of gingham petticoat beneath a brocade topcoat, there a fur stole over an embroidered linen tunic. Overall, it gave the impression of having been added on to for centuries, not so much a human figure as an accretion of history.
Po took a deep breath and relaxed. Frightening as the figure was, it could do them no harm. It was dead. That much was obvious.
The rose—they were here to find the rose, and the sooner they did, the sooner they could leave. He opened The Book of the Night so that the light fell on the figure, and peered closely to discern from the myriad details of her costume something that might be the rose.
They searched her from head to toe and front to back, but found nothing. “If the rose is on her person, then it is beneath her clothing,” said Ayma.
Po stared at her. He wanted to tell her not to look at him like it was up to him to do something. “Perhaps we should search the rest of the room,” he suggested.
Ayma, clearly not eager to resort to the sacrilege of removing the clothing from a dead body, nodded. She went to the harpsichord. It was very like ones he’d seen in the palace.
Po examined the desk. It was the same design as the harpsichord. A blotter and a dried-out bottle of ink sat on top of it beneath a thick layer of dust. Po ran a finger through the dust to reveal an ornate inlay of gold and mother of pearl.
The desk had five drawers, a shallow one in the middle and two deeper ones on each side. The side drawers were empty but the middle one rattled as he opened it. Inside, amid dust bunnies and cobwebs, were the remnants of a cloth sack, now rotted away around its contents—a handful of small metal objects. Each was composed of three metal rods that were perpendicular to one another, just like the sticks Hilloa had used in her demonstration about dimensions, except that some of these had tiny beads at their ends. Po had heard of these. They were an Old Earth toy called jacks. Amid them sat a small pile of pink-colored dust. That would be the remains of the rubber ball that had been used in the arcane game. But there was nothing that remotely approached a description of Endymion’s rose or the Lion’s Bloom.
“Nothing here,” said Ayma, lowering the cover of the cabinet in the back that housed the harpsichord’s strings. It would be a perfect hiding place. But she shook her head.
Po spent some time examining the carvings on the stairway. Any one of those flowers might be the bloom in disguise, affixed to the carving. He pried at a few, but with no results. He wandered back into the room again. Ayma was on her hands and knees, checking the corners and the edges of the floor.
Po knelt on the floor, too, running his fingers along the seam between the floor and the baseboard, when he heard that faint, rustling sound again. Was it mice? No—not mice. The sound grew words. “My pen. I dropped my pen.” The voice, dry and faint, was nevertheless perfectly intelligible.
Po’s heart was in his mouth. He stood up and turned around. The corpse had not moved. It still sat in the chair, but its eyes were open. Dark, fathomless, they gleamed in the dim light of the room. The lips, dyed deep red, twitched. Was it a smile? They parted. The teeth were black.
“Yammon,” the thing whispered, and the smile grew.
Po stumbled backward, all the way until his back hit the wall. He struggled for breath. Ayma stood a few feet away, equally petrified. How was this possible? How could she still be alive after all this time? And what would she do to them now that they’d invaded her inner sanctum?
Ayma reached for him and pulled him toward the stairs. He understood now, the dread he’d felt on entering this place. It had felt wrong because it was. They should not be here. They ran up the steps to the little door.
Dry, dusty laughter issued from the corner of the room where the last Ancient sat. On this side, the door had no handle. And it had swung shut. Po scrabbled at the door, tried to pry it open with his fingernails, but it was no use.
“No!” Ayma cried. Tears streamed down her face and she, too, scratched and pried and pounded on the door. It was latched shut and there was no opening it.
She was panicking like a male. Again Po wished he were with someone who would know what to do. But they were both equally terrified and at a loss.
“We have to find the rose,” he said.
She clutched his arm. “What if she already has it?”
Po was surprised when the answer came to his lips. “She must not, or she would not be down here all alone.”
“Then that means the rose is not here, either, and we’re trapped here for no reason forever, and…” Ayma stopped herself.
“Maybe she is too old to get out of her chair. Maybe the rose is here, but she cannot reach it.”
“But we can.”
Po nodded. It was the slimmest of hopes and everything they held dear, not least of all their lives, depended on it. But at least it was something. He had another idea. “Maybe she knows where it is.”
“Probably,” said Ayma. And then she caught her breath. She lowered her voice to the barest of whispers. “We can pretend we are going to fetch it for her, and get her to tell us where it is.”
Po swallowed. He didn’t like the idea of deceiving an Ancient. But Ayma was right. It was a good plan. “Do you want…? That is, I can go and speak to her.”
She studied him. Clearly she was tempted to let him take on the physical risk. But then she shook her head. “We’ll both go.”
21
The Last Ancient
They held hands. Po felt like the Barley King walking to the scythe, but he felt something else, too; something strange and new. Ayma didn’t expect him to defer to her. She didn’t want his flattery. It was almost as if she didn’t see him as a male at all, though of course, she did. But it meant something different to her than it did to him, and in the space between her expectations and his he discovered what it meant to simply be Po.
He squeezed her hand and she looked at him. Just as he was wondering if she felt the same way, she said, “We’re just two people.”
Two very frightened people, possibly walking to their deaths. His eyes scanned the floor, hoping against hope to find the bloom before reaching the last Ancient and attempting to trick her.
As they came and stood before her, she smiled again. Those red lips parted and he saw that her teeth were not so much black as they were covered in all kinds of wires and beads. “Belrea and Yammon. Look at you. I never thought I’d see you again.”
Po glanced at Ayma and she shook her head. She knew no more than he did what Endymion was talking about. Perhaps Iscarion was right—perhaps she was mad, or senile, or both. The question of how she was even still alive haunted the back of his mind, but there was no time for that now. Ayma looked at him, waited for him to do something. Po cleared his throat. “Mistress Endymion.” He bowed, and Ayma gave a curtsey. “We are Ayma and Po, and we are here in search of the Lion’s Bloom.”
Her eyes glittered as she watched them. “The Lion’s Bloom, my rose, you mean. How cute. Next you’ll be asking me how to make Eggs. You’re Yammon and Belrea, and if you’re not, you will be. You are here to do my pleasure. Now hand me my pen!” She pointed at the floor a few feet from where she sat. A shadow, cast by her form, lay across the dusty carpet. Po knelt there and saw a darker shape.
He reached out and picked it up. It was a rod about the length of his forearm, with an oval bulb at one end, and it was made of the same coppery substance that entwined Eggs.
It was not as heavy as it seemed it should be. Ayma came to his side and they examined it closely. Po noted the striations in the long neck and the scalloped flourishes around the oval at the end.
“My pen…,” said Endymion, her hand, with its long, clawlike fingernails outstretched toward the object. “Yammon, give me my pen. It is not for puppets.”
It did look rather like a long, elaborate pen. He looked at her. This was an Ancient. Her very existence was a miracle. Po stepped closer, holding the pen
out to her.
“What are you doing?” said Ayma. “That’s the rose!”
In an instant striations resolved into leaves and oval flourishes into petals. Po stepped back, but even as he did, Endymion’s hand telescoped out of her sleeve on the end of a metal armature. He was so distracted by the apparatus emerging from the ragged cuff of her gown that he didn’t even react until she’d already grasped the stem of the rose with her hand.
Ayma grabbed the rose as well. They pulled, but the last Ancient’s grip was terrifyingly strong. She let out a high-pitched, keening wail and screamed, “Give it to me!”
“We musn’t!” said Ayma, panting with effort. “Remember what we saw upstairs, on the stage? The blood? They used the rose to do that.”
Po pulled with both hands and all his might.
There was a crack, and Po and Ayma fell on their backs clutching the pen. Endymion’s hand was still attached to it. It looked like a weather-beaten glove stuck on the end of a long metal rod. The sleeve of Endymion’s gown now hung empty and loose. Her other hand shook and a grinding, whining noise could be heard, but the appendage stayed where it was.
Shaking, Ayma yanked the pen from Endymion’s disembodied hand and threw the appendage across the room. “Yammon’s tonsils,” she swore under her breath.
Endymion emitted a creaking sound and an orange droplet appeared at the corner of one eye and rolled down her crenellated cheek. “Look what you’ve done, you wicked meat puppets. I can’t repair myself anymore. But I could, if you would just give me my pen. It’s not meant for you. You don’t even know what it is.”
Po had to resist the impulse to do exactly what the oldest woman in existence told him to do. He let go of the thing, and let Ayma hold it.
“It’s the rose,” she said.
“Wrong!” shouted Endymion. “Yammon, you don’t love Belrea. You love me. Kill her. Give me my pen back.”
Po didn’t look at Endymion. He kept his eyes on Ayma. “Ancient one, forgive me. I cannot give it back to you. My people are starving, and it’s my fault. I let the queen of Ilysies trick me and she ruined our crop. Now our only hope is to make the Plain of Ayor green again. This object—it can make the land green again, so we may live. I cannot give it to you. I must take it, and return to my people before they all die.”
“That’s not your story, Yammon.”
“My name is Po, Ancient one.”
“You look like him. He was my favorite, you know.”
Her favorite what, Po wondered, but instead he said, “Everyone thinks you are dead, Ancient one.”
“Theselaides told them so, did he?”
“Yes. In The Book of the Night he wrote that you died. It’s been many centuries since then.”
“That long?” She said it as if she’d overslept and missed breakfast, not as if she’d somehow survived for generations with no food or water. “I slept. I dreamed of my friends, back when they were still my friends.”
“Your friends? The other Ancients?” asked Po.
Ayma plucked at his sleeve. “Please,” she said. “Let’s just go. We have the rose now.”
She was right. “Use it, Ayma. Use it to make the Plain of Ayor green. Use it to open the door so we can leave.”
“Okay. What do I do?”
“What?”
“How does it work?”
Endymion laughed. “You don’t even know what it is, or how to use it. Yammon…Po.”
Po turned. His mouth was dry and his heart beat very hard, high in his chest.
“I’ll show you. I’ll show you how to use the pen. Give it to me and I’ll show you.”
A voice in the back of his head warned him against soothing promises from women of power. Ayma, still clutching the pen, backed away from them both.
“You would like to go back to your friends, wouldn’t you?” Endymion said.
Slowly, fearing a trap, he nodded.
She sighed. “Me too. Look at me. This isn’t being alive, is it? You can’t leave me like this. Just…give me the pen so I can fix myself, so I can join my friends. I’ll give it to you when I’m done.”
“She’s lying,” said Ayma. “She’ll use it to torture us, Po. Just like she and her friends did in the old days.”
Po thought of something. “I am an adept of kinesiology,” he said. Would his abilities work on an Ancient? She wasn’t a creature of flesh and blood—at least, not entirely. Could he heal her? “Maybe I can help you.”
“Ah, kinesiology. Yes. I wonder what would happen if you tried to use it on me?”
Po knelt at her feet. The hem of her robe was edged in gray paper with thousands and thousands of tiny words on it. Newspaper? Was that newspaper? “May I try?”
She stared at him. “If you can release me from this prison, you may keep the pen with my blessing, though you’d be better off without it. I’ll even show you how Eggs are made.”
Po placed his hands on the outsides of what he hoped were her knees. They felt hard, sharp, and cold. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe with her. Did she even breathe? Po felt nothing beneath his hands, not a glimmer of energy, not a spark of life. Still, he persisted.
Kinesiology was based upon attuning oneself to the life energy of another being, and whatever Endymion was, she was most certainly alive.
When integration came it came all at once, and it was unlike anything Po had ever experienced before. It completely and utterly consumed all of his awareness. There was nothing but this feeling. He couldn’t put words to it. It wasn’t a burning feeling or a freezing feeling. It wasn’t the sting of an insect or the sharp agony of a cut. It wasn’t the dull throb of a bruise or the bright pain of a headache. If anything, it was all of these at once and more. It was as if sensations were being forced upon him which were, in some way, too large for him. It was overwhelming more than anything else.
All the thoughts he’d ever had in his entire life rushed to the forefront of his awareness at once. He felt caught in a stampede. His own thoughts crushed him and all he could do was writhe in the all-consuming grip of whatever it was that was happening to him.
Po must have lost consciousness. When he came to awareness once more, he was still deep in the kinesthetic trance, in a space unlike any he’d ever experienced. It was the reddish black color he saw when his eyes were closed, and somehow it seemed more empty than the blackness of space.
This was not like any kinesthetic trance he’d ever experienced. “I’m not interfacing with your energy field,” he said.
“Not yet. I’m using your kinesthetic sense to give you a vision,” she said. “To show you this place.”
“Where are we?”
“This is where universes are born. Look, listen.”
There was a flash of light in the distance and a deafening explosion. Then the light mellowed and a sound could be heard. Po had heard this sound before. It was the Song.
Endymion reached out with all the hands of all her selves of all the times she’d been, and she wrapped them around that light, a glowing amber light. She held it and wound it with cords from her hair, cords of will and desire. It was a universe just beginning to form, and she stopped it. “You want to know how Eggs are made?” she said, holding a glowing amber ovoid. “This is how.”
“You made the Eggs?”
“Not me. But Pierce’s grandmother was one of the original seven who discovered the key to transcendence. He was always very proud of that.”
“Pierce?”
“One of my friends. An Ancient, you would call him.” She laughed. “And now, it’s time for you to do something for me.”
Everything shifted and Po found himself lying on his side. All around him stretched a vast desert of sand. He sat up, wiping the encrusted grains from the side of his face. The grains stuck to his hand. Looking at them, he realized they were not grains of sand at all—they were whirling capsules of light. Eggs—each one a universe captured in the moment of formation.
In the distance stood a la
rge sphere of gleaming metal. That, his sense informed him, was the center of Endymion’s awareness. He walked toward it, and as he did something strange happened. The closer he got, the smaller it became. At last he knelt and picked it up. The sphere fit in the palm of his hand.
He examined the sphere more closely. What had appeared to be flawless from a distance was in fact pitted with numerous tiny cracks. He tried to seal those cracks. Since usually the surroundings he encountered while in a trance provided the stuff with which to help the diseased or wounded body heal, he lifted a handful of universes in his palm and tried using them to fill the cracks in the sphere. But the universes simply turned black and fell away.
The ball wobbled, as if it resented his attempt at healing it. And then Po’s fingers lengthened, narrowed, and multiplied. They became fuzzy. His hands transformed into wings and detached from the rest of him and became a bird. It gave a caw and flapped away with the wounded orb in its beak.
Po shattered into a thousand a thousand pieces, fragments of himself. He found himself sitting on the floor of Endymion’s tomb, staring at her empty chair.
Both of his hands were still attached to the ends of his arms as they should be. For a moment he just sat there, grateful to be back in his own mind with his whole body. He was exhausted.
“Where did she go?” Ayma stood over him, staring between him and the empty chair.
“I don’t know.” Ayma helped him stand and he leaned against her for a moment. “I’ll tell you…,” he began, but trailed off because it all seemed too big for words. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
They went back up the stairs to the locked door. Ayma held the pen out to him. “Do you think maybe it’s just a pen?” she said. “You write with it, and what you write comes true?”
“Maybe,” he said. He really didn’t want to be the one to try it and find out. But Ayma couldn’t write. She handed the pen to him and he examined the thing. It did look a bit like a large, elaborate pen. Po examined the end that looked like the nib, if it were a pen. It was just a solid point. There was no opening for ink to come out.