by Pearl North
That Ymin retained her position here meant that she must have made some sort of deal with Thela. For information, most likely. He had to be careful. Giving her nothing could be almost as dangerous as revealing his plan. “I met a woman at the Libyrinth,” he said. Hilloa’s memory stabbed him. He had not permitted himself to think of her, until now.
Ymin breathed in. “I see. Don’t worry, I won’t mention it.”
Po looked at her. “I love Queen Thela,” he said.
She nodded. “Of course you do.”
* * *
The door to his chamber opened and Po put his book down. Thela entered. “How are you feeling?”
“Much better, thank you.”
Thela sank onto the couch next to the reflecting pond. “I’m glad to hear it. I’ve been all day with harbormother Parnan and my feet are killing me.”
Po got up and knelt at her feet. “Let me rub them for you.”
She smiled at him. “I didn’t want to ask, since you’re still recovering from your ordeal, but…”
“I’m fine, really.”
She wiggled her toes. “In that case…” It was no effort to keep his self-satisfaction out of his smile as he took her feet in his hands. In many ways, what Thela had written about him helped him to deceive her. He was incapable of giving himself away with a frown or a cross word. Outwardly, his every action was designed to please her, and it required no effort on his part at all. Po breathed with her and closed his eyes.
“Oh.” Her feet jerked in his grip. “You’re going to use kinesiology? Is that—should you do that?”
He looked up at her. “I’m strong enough, and it will feel even better if I do. Just from touching you right now, I can feel how tense you are.”
She bit her lower lip. “Well, all right, then.”
He closed his eyes and breathed with her again. Instantly he dropped into trance. It shocked him, how easy it had become, and at the same time, it was hard to believe he’d once feared he’d never be able to do it.
Now he beheld Thela’s inner world as if he were a hawk hovering high above Ilysies. He dived down to her heart center and found the tool that represented the pen still tucked away in its niche within the ruined temple. That was good.
Hoping to keep her focus on pleasant things, he turned to her naval center and planted seeds for a berry bush that would yield sweet fruit.
It took an enormous amount of energy to manipulate a person in this way, and by the time he was done, he was dizzy with exhaustion. But he couldn’t let her see that. He didn’t need Ymin Ykobos examining him anymore, and he needed Thela to feel free to accept kinesiology from him at any time.
Po took a deep breath and willed himself not to sway.
“Ah, that was lovely. Thank you, Po.” Thela stood and held her hand out to him. He stood before taking it, lest she feel him tremble. He thanked the Mother he was able to get to his feet without stumbling.
Thela drew him close and kissed him. She guided him toward the bed.
* * *
“So when you were in Endymion’s Tomb, and she asked for her pen, what did you do?” asked Thela, as they dozed in each other’s arms.
He hesitated out of sheer embarrassment. “I handed it to her. Or I would have, except Ayma stopped me.”
Thela shook her head. “Wait, you had it?”
“It was on the floor. We’d missed it before because it was in shadow.”
“If it was right there, then why didn’t Endymion get it herself?”
“Yeah. I know,” said Po. “I don’t think she could move. She was in a chair, and … well, her body wasn’t really her body and I don’t think her legs were working.”
“Her body wasn’t really her body?”
Po tried not to answer. It was hard to tell what information might be dangerous for her to have. Probably all of it. But Thela was waiting and it was impossible not to tell her. “When her arm came off, it was metal underneath her clothes. And later, when I treated her, I saw the true seat of her consciousness. The body, the clothes, her face, all of that was just like, I don’t know, a puppet or something. Decoration. Like how you wrap up a gift with elaborate bows but the important part is what’s inside.”
“You treated her?”
He hadn’t meant to mention that. “Yes.”
Her eyes widened. “Really. Po, that’s amazing. What … happened?”
“It’s hard to explain. First, she showed me how Eggs were made.”
Thela sat up. “Po, you should have told me that immediately. How could you keep something like that from me?” Anger and uncertainty sharpened her tone.
The question was not really directed at him. She was not asking why he would withhold such information, but rather how he’d been capable of it when he was only supposed to do what made her happy. The last thing he needed was for her to question the effectiveness of her control over him. “Only because it doesn’t matter. The method is impossible for any mortal being to attempt.”
She narrowed her eyes. “How can you be certain?”
He told her about being outside of time with Endymion, and how she took a universe that was just being born and stopped it from expanding, and made it into an Egg.
“Oh.” Her voice was soft, her eyes full of wonder. “That is what they are? Universes? Oh, my.”
“The Ancients are far beyond us, Your Majesty. They are not— I don’t believe they are beings of flesh and blood. I don’t know what they are.”
She nodded. It struck him that she did not question his deductions. She had more regard for his intelligence than he would have expected. “What happened next?”
“This is the strangest part of all. When I started treating her, the vision I had was of a desert, but the grains of sand were Eggs, and in the distance was a great metal sphere. Only the closer I came to it, the smaller it became, until I held it in my hand. Adept Ykobos taught me that in kinesthetic trance we can perceive things that are not apparent, either to the ordinary senses, or to reason. Thela, I knew that within that sphere was the real Endymion.”
“Inside it?”
“Yes. Only, the sphere was cracked. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. I tried to mend it but I couldn’t. And then, my hands sprouted feathers, and became a bird. They left my body and flew away with the sphere, and when I came out of the trance, Endymion was gone.”
In the silence, Po clearly heard the waves beating against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff outside. Thela stared at him, though he wondered if she really saw him at all. At length, she blinked and seemed to come back to herself. “That is the strangest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He nodded.
“Did she … what happened to her?”
“I don’t know. She said she wanted me to free her. I’m not sure what that means. She wanted to join her friends.”
“The other Ancients?”
He nodded.
“They’re all dead.”
Po suddenly realized that one interpretation of this story was that he had killed a woman. Would Thela kill him and have herself branded?
“Or so we thought,” Thela said. “The Ayorites call the Ancients the People Who Walk Sideways in Time.”
He didn’t mention that he knew that.
“Maybe death to them isn’t really death,” Thela went on. “If she was stuck in that chair, then maybe she was stuck in other ways, too, and you simply helped her move to a higher dimension. In any case, you did as she wished. What is most remarkable is that you were able to interface with her at all. This goes far beyond anything that has been accomplished with kinesiology in the past. I wonder what Ymin would say, if she knew of it.”
4
A New Voice
It had been a week since the return of the Chorus of the Word and people were starting to resume their regular routines. Haly sat on a stool at the console in the Great Hall, searching through books for anything regarding devices that could alter reality.
Hilloa marched up to Haly w
ith a stack of books in her arms. “We need to do something about Po and the pen,” she said.
She was right, but Haly didn’t have the first idea what to do about it. She listened to Hilloa’s books. She’d noticed that often the books told her things that pertained to the current situation.
“The study of the origins of words may be regarded as a sort of archeology of our thought process,” said Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
“Exhausted from old age, Moses’ last act was to write down on a scroll all the important events that had happened to the Hebrew people,” added The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.
No help there. “What do you think we should do?”
Hilloa stared at her. “I don’t know! I thought you would…”
Haly nodded. “Let’s break the situation down. This all-powerful device exists; of that there is no doubt. Apart from one momentary catastrophe, we have not been affected by it. We could be affected by it at any time. No one really knows where the pen is now, or what happened to Po or where he is now. We don’t know that Thela has the pen. She’s ruthless in accomplishing her aims. If she really had the pen, do you think there is anything Po could do to prevent her from using it?”
“His kinesiology—”
“Is a healing power, not mind control.”
“But he—”
“Isn’t it more likely that something else happened to the pen? That Thela does not have it at all?”
“We searched the temple from top to bottom. We never found the pen, or Po.”
“So we don’t know anything. Which makes choosing a course of action rather difficult.”
“So you’re going to ignore it.”
“We don’t even know what ‘it’ is,” said Haly. “And we have plenty of other problems that we have at least some idea of how to deal with, and not a lot of time for dealing with those, so…”
“So you’re just going to ignore the most intractable one.”
“Welcome to my life. Where do you think any of us would be now if I let fear force me into rash actions?”
Hilloa leaned back, her expression shifting from anger to surprise. “Oh. So…” She lowered her voice. “You do have a plan, then.”
Song and Silence. “I can’t discuss this right now, Hilloa. Please, the best thing for you to do is keep researching. The more we know, the better equipped we’ll be to deal with whatever comes next.”
Hilloa nodded, as if she was in on some secret now, and headed for the Alcove of the Fly. Haly watched her go with a sigh, and returned to her own studies.
* * *
Two days later Haly walked into her office to find Jan, Hilloa, and Baris waiting for her.
“We want to go rescue Po,” Baris said before Haly even had a chance to ask them what was on their minds.
She raised her eyebrows and put a pot of water on the glow warmer to buy time. “We don’t even know where he is,” she said at length.
“I think we do,” said Hilloa. “We’ve been talking it over and we realized a few things.
Haly sat down and regarded them. “Go on.”
“Well,” said Hilloa. “When we searched the temple for Po, we found that one tower was different from all the others. The rest all had a room at the top, but this one tower didn’t. Or rather, there was no door to enter by. Just a blank wall.”
“There’s a room there,” said Baris. “It belonged to Censor Orrin before. But now, the door is just gone.”
“And it’s not bricked in,” said Hilloa.
“You’d be able to tell that,” said Baris.
Jan nodded. “We think Queen Thela, or maybe Mab, used the pen to make the door go away.”
“Do you think they’re still in there?” asked Haly.
The three of them looked at one another. “We think Thela was there, and she used the pen to spirit Po, Mab, and herself back to Ilysies.”
Haly nodded. “Selene said much the same thing. But why are you all so certain she’d go back to Ilysies? If she does have the pen, she can do anything.”
“Po did kinesiology on Endymion,” said Jan. “An Ancient.”
“Ayma told us about it later,” said Hilloa. “The point is, Po’s kinesiology is…”
“Wildly powerful,” finished Baris.
“The Lit King kept having him heal Siblea so he could torture him more. It was hard on both of them. Bad. But Po…” Hilloa trailed off.
Jan said, “He just kept going. We thought he’d collapse at some point. We were worried it might kill him. He was in rough shape, but…”
Hilloa shook her head. “When we were taken out of the cell, at the end, he still walked under his own power. He had the strength to kill the Lit King.”
“So…” Haly waited.
“We think the reason Queen Thela hasn’t taken over everyone and everything with the pen is because Po’s preventing her with his kinesiology,” said Hilloa.
The rest all nodded in agreement.
Haly took a deep breath. It was an interesting theory. It would explain why, if Thela did have the pen, she hadn’t used it. But was it possible to do that with kinesiology, however powerful the adept might be? Besides, there were other considerations. “If you’re right, then how do you plan to rescue him without disrupting what he’s doing and putting him, and the rest of us, in even greater danger?”
Hilloa nodded. “I thought that myself, but we also don’t know how long he can keep doing that. And if he’s caught…”
“I understand your concern,” said Haly. “But going to Ilysies at this time is reckless. We have no idea what is really going on. You’re likely to do more harm than good. I know this is hard for you to understand but, sometimes, you just have to wait and see.”
“You sent Po with the chorus to keep him safe,” said Hilloa.
Haly swallowed against the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. “Yes. I know.”
“The other day when we talked, I thought you had a plan but you’ve done nothing. How can you abandon him?”
Haly closed her eyes. Hilloa was only a couple of years younger than she was. How could she make Haly feel so old? “I’m not. I simply have the experience to know that acting rashly can cause more harm than good. Sometimes, caring means waiting until you find the right course of action.”
“What if Thela is using the pen on Po right now? The citadel people have all kinds of stories of the things the Ancients did to their slaves with it. We can’t just sit here and do nothing!” said Hilloa.
“Yeah. Po could be in a lot of trouble right now,” said Jan. “Bad.”
They all stared at Haly as if she had sprouted a second head. “You sent him with the chorus to keep him safe!” said Hilloa.
Haly couldn’t look at them. She stared at her cooling tea. “I know. And I don’t take this lightly. You know, after I was taken captive by the Singers, Clauda and Selene were in much the same situation as we are in now.” She wished she could have Clauda talk to them about this, but Clauda was missing, too. Tales. “Clauda wanted to turn right around and go after them, but if they had, they’d have been taken captive as well. Selene wanted to get help, and they did, and though nothing went the way anyone planned, it did all work out, eventually.” She had to believe this was for the best. “We are not forgetting or abandoning Po. We are doing the best for him by being smart about this.”
They all nodded silently, but she had the distinct impression that her words were written in evaporating ink.
They’d only been gone a few moments when someone knocked on the door. With a sigh, Haly stood and answered it.
It was Burke. “Today is Palla’s interment,” she said.
Palla, Haly’s old crèche mistress. She had died in the first Redemption, when the population of the Libyrinth had fought the Singers with rifles and fire irons. Many had died. Haly missed Palla the most.
Libyrinth children were raised communally, but most of them had parents here. Haly’s parents had died when she was a very tiny baby, an
d Palla was the only mother she’d ever known. At the mention of her name, images flared to life in Haly’s mind, some of her best and worst memories. Palla smiling indulgently at her as she proudly scrawled her first words upon the crèche floor in palm-glow. Palla reading to her from Charlotte’s Web. Palla hugging her in congratulations when she received her first assignment as a clerk. And Palla dead on the floor of the Great Hall, her mouth full of blood and her empty eyes staring.
Burke held her gaze, nodding understanding. “No one is going to argue if you act as next of kin. And not just because you’re the Redeemer.”
Haly was about to agree when someone said, “They all thought I’d lost it…” The voice was so soft she could barely make out the words, but she definitely heard them. “What?” she asked, turning, but no one was there.
“Haly?” said Burke, giving her a concerned frown.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” said Burke.
“That’s odd,” said Haly. “If I didn’t know better I’d swear I just heard a book voice.”
“But they don’t come to you anymore unless you concentrate on them.”
“I know.”
It started as a whispering, but when she focused on it, words emerged. “I’d always been taken with Bohm’s concept of explicate and implicate orders.”
Haly looked about the room, realizing for the first time that she had no idea how she could tell which voice came from which book. It was just a part of her overall ability.
And just as she’d always been able to pinpoint a book voice in the past, now she knew the words she heard came from no book in this room. “This is very strange. It’s a book, I’m positive, but normally the nearest books are the loudest. How is this one breaking through the Song of all the others, seemingly from a distance?”
“It must be a very special book,” said Burke.
Haly nodded. “I’ve noticed that the particular bits the books recite to me don’t seem random.”