The City of Lies (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 3)

by Robert J. Crane

  “And what an excellent job you’re doing,” I murmured.

  “What was that, Meer?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Hmm.” Emmanuel turned up his nose at me, then strolled to Carson’s side. “So what is it you’re looking for, big guy?”

  “The library,” said Carson. He showed Emmanuel the photo.

  “Gotcha. I know the place.”

  “I’ve got a map.”

  “No worries, big man. Let Manny take the lead. You girls coming?”

  I pursed my lips at his receding back.

  Heidi did the same alongside me. “We don’t have to, right?”

  “I think we kind of have to.”

  “Maybe we can snatch Carson’s ring and open a gate under his feet to get rid of him.”

  “Do you think it would work like that? I figure it’s more Carson doing the weirdness than Borrick’s ring acting up.”

  Heidi shrugged. “Get Yankee Doodle to do it, then.”

  “Please,” I scoffed. “You think he’s in any hurry to lose Emmanuel?” I pointed; Carson was trotting behind Emmanuel, barely keeping pace despite the effort. His manbag bounced at his side, up and down like a yo-yo. “We’ve got more chance of finding Ostiagard’s treasure.” I shook my head. “Bloody Carson. Bet you anything he’d join the Emmanuel Brand fan club. And get a t-shirt. ‘I’m with Manny!’” I faked a retch (though it was very nearly a real one). “I hope Bub beats him up when he gets back.”

  “Very unlikely,” said Heidi sadly. “The orc likes him. Thinks his accent is funny.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe it is.”

  Emmanuel turned around. Raising an arm, he waved and called, “You two coming or not?”

  I grimaced but began to begrudgingly follow. Still: “Say the word, Heidi,” I murmured. “I’ll give him another hole for the sun to shine out of with Decidian’s Spear, I swear I will.”

  “No, you won’t. You’re too nice for that.”

  “Try me …”

  I intended on keeping half a football field away from Emmanuel and his hanger-on; close enough that we wouldn’t get lost en route to Pharo’s library, but with ample distance between us that we might snipe and moan about Emmanuel and his stupid big head, and Carson for inflating it.

  “‘Can I kiss you, Manny?’” I muttered in a very poor imitation of Carson’s accent—which was what exactly? American, yeah, but where in the hell was it he’d come from? Didn’t remember right now, didn’t particularly care—it was a stupid accent, with stupid sounds, and it dropped the ‘u’s out of words for stupid reasons. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “‘Can I call you that? Manny? Geez, I’d love to kiss you.’”

  “You’re letting this bother you too much,” Heidi told me.

  “Am I? Am I really?”

  “Well …”

  “No, but am I, though?” A note of desperation lingered in my voice. “Please tell me it’s natural to be as bothered by this as I am.”

  Heidi’s lips tightened.

  “Please?”

  She sighed. “Your brother is a bit of a pillock,” she began—

  “A lot.”

  “—but can you blame Carson for being starstruck?”

  “Yes! Yes, I can!” I was shrill, high-pitched enough to draw the attention of another pack of the diminutive rabbit people rushing by. Their squabbling conversation silenced until they were past. When it resumed, it was lower than before.

  “Go easier on him,” Heidi said. “It’s Carson we’re talking about. He loves that bloody orc, for crying out loud.” Her eyebrows drew together. “Pretty sure he thinks he’s a dog.”

  “Dogs can’t read,” I said. Carson had been very particular about leaving a note for Bub before leaving, explaining where we were going and why. The ‘why’ was simple, I’d have thought: Following a lead (which should really have been, Following a dead end). Somehow Carson had dragged it out to a full page, though.

  “Bet you anything Bub doesn’t read it,” I muttered to Heidi when Carson was out of earshot.

  “Of course he will. Carson wrote it.”

  “I’m not convinced he can read, though. His handwriting.”

  Pharo unfolded before us—and although I tried to keep my distance from Emmanuel and the groupie, my brother kept shooting backward glances behind him to keep track of our progress. They gradually slowed down… and before long, though I tried to drag my feet, we couldn’t keep back any longer. Back within earshot, Heidi and I had no choice but to listen to Emmanuel’s endless prattle.

  That endless prattle was, it turned out, a tour of Pharo’s great landmarks.

  “… spire over there—you see that? Just to the west.”

  Carson craned. “I think so. That’s the Monument to the Wayfarers, isn’t it?”

  “That it is,” said Emmanuel.

  “Monument to the Wayfarers,” Carson repeated. “It’s kind of wonky.”

  It was, I saw as I begrudgingly followed Manny’s pointed finger. Like the leaning tower of Pisa, the tip—the only part visible from here—canted awkwardly, looking as if it could fall over any moment.

  “They built that for the brave souls who unlocked the power of the talismans in the first place,” Emmanuel explained. “It’s to thank them—and to honor those who were lost.”

  “Were people lost?”

  “Oh, of course! Countless people whose names history has forgotten. Many of them found their way into voids, many more opened gates to places they couldn’t have survived: the bottom of an ocean; swamps; worlds buffeted by wind and hail and lightning. So many never came back, leaving behind partners who would forever wonder how the tapestry of their lost love’s life had ended. Parents lost children; children lost parents; all lost brothers. Sisters.” He looked over his shoulder to me at that, an approximation of love and sympathy on his face. “I feel fortunate every day that I was born at this time, rather than millennia ago, when the Wayfarers were paving the way ahead for the rest of us.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  Heidi elbowed me.

  Emmanuel ignored me, the hint of a smile ghosting his lips.

  He went on to Carson, “There were other worlds too, ones we’ve only ever heard about—places the most unfortunate Wayfarers found.”

  “What sorts of places?” Carson breathed. He was so utterly taken in.

  Do not kick him in the back of the knee, I told myself.

  But seriously, do it. Or Heidi. Get her to. She so would.

  “Fractured worlds,” Emmanuel said ominously. “Dark places where the gateways went wrong. Whole planets were blended in the blink of an eye, their surfaces ripped up and rearranged into a hellish nightmarescape.”

  I frowned. “‘Nightmarescape’?” That was so not a word.

  “What happened to the people who lived in those worlds?” Carson asked.

  “Terrible things,” Emmanuel said. “Things I would not wish on my greatest enemies.” Shaking his head sadly, he said, “Only a small handful of Wayfarers ever came back from those places. All had lost their minds.”

  “How do you even get to a place like that?”

  “You wouldn’t want to. And you’d never know you were until you got there. Looking glasses were designed to obscure fractured worlds.”

  “Looking glasses?”

  “Like Meer’s compass. Objects that allow you to see what awaits on the other side. In those, fractured worlds show up as mist—the void. And you’d be wise to never step into a void, my man.”

  “Mira says nothing exists there.”

  “My sister is right,” said Emmanuel—and just for the sake of never agreeing with a word that came out of his mouth, I had to bite back the urge to say, “No, I’m not.”

  Carson began, “But some of those voids …?”

  Emmanuel rested a hand on Carson’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t recommend trying to find one of those places. Not worth the risk. Even if it did mean going down in history.”

  Carson didn’t speak for qu
ite some time. And I reveled in that, because it also meant Emmanuel didn’t speak.

  Still, much as I hated to admit to doing anything because of my brother, I couldn’t help but mull over the Wayfarers’ history. Much of it I knew already, gleaned from scouring books in my parents’ study, then forays though the tomes in my hideout. Very interesting; very interesting indeed.

  Again, though, I was not about to admit to that. Not having heard Manny recounting it.

  We were passed by one of the firetruck-ish vehicles. It hummed along on tracks embedded in the road, belching fumes behind it. The air seemed suddenly thick, and there was an acrid tang that seemed to stick to my tongue.

  “Sort out your carbon!” Heidi belted at it as it receded. “You’d never be allowed into London in that!”

  “I think that would draw a great many eyes in London, don’t you?” said Emmanuel.

  I mimicked him with a particularly unattractive set of facial expressions, rolling my eyes.

  We finally arrived at the library. It was an odd building, to say the least. It rose into jagged peaks, zigzagging up and down, bending back and forth with no rhyme or reason, the dull metal barely gleamed in the sunlight. In a way, it reminded me of a crown. Just, you know … a crown that was really bent out of shape. And had been left in a coal mine for about two hundred years.

  A cluster of the rabbit people loitered on the steps leading to an overlarge entrance framed by crooked, misshapen windows.

  “Those aren’t Pharo’s citizens, are they?” Carson whispered to Emmanuel. “The journals didn’t say anything about them being rabbits, but …”

  “No,” said Emmanuel. “They’re here from the Uneden.”

  “Uneden …?”

  “Rabbit planet. They’re harmless. A little jittery, maybe. And they talk a lot.” He mounted the steps. “Come on. They won’t bite.”

  “Hope not,” Heidi muttered. “I missed my myxomatosis jab.”

  “Do they have vaccines for that?” Carson asked.

  “It’s a rabbit disease. What do you think?”

  He looked blank—then remembered Emmanuel was waiting, and so took the steps two at a time to catch up.

  Heidi shook her head. “I take it back about him having one brain cell. Fairly sure he doesn’t have any.”

  “That or being in the company of a Seeker god has killed whatever was rattling around in there.”

  Seeker god. Humph.

  We followed, taking less of a wide berth around the rabbit people than Carson had, and stepped inside.

  For a black building, made of metal, I’d have expected it to swallow heat and just trap it there. But the engineers must’ve done something fancy with the layering to disperse heat, because as we stepped in, the warm air became instantly cooler.

  The library was broken into segments. A reception area stood nearby, helmed by one of the few humans we’d seen so far today. She looked up, and—scratch that. Human-like. Her eyes were much too close together, and the nose was distinctly catlike. Also she had blue hair? Although I’d seen that in London, to be fair. But this didn’t look like a dye job. That, or it was really fresh, like today fresh, because the color extended right down to her roots.

  Unlike the madcap building style this planet’s people had opted for, the shelves were straight. They had to be, I supposed; too angled and the aisles would quickly fill with fallen books. The floorplan seemed to have followed the not-straight rule though, because from here I could see aisles set at odd diagonals to each other, and more still squeezing, cutting the space between them to a single-file bottleneck before widening out again.

  Like a library back home, signs hung from the ceiling. And they were in English, too!

  Wait. No, they weren’t, I realized as I peered closer. This world’s people had adopted some of my language. But apparently it was mostly confined to letters, or parts of words: a sign I had initially read as Reference at a glance actually said, Refe/ɺ/nce.

  Emmanuel stuck his hands on his hands. “The Archive,” he said, and breathed in deep, the way I’d expected someone to on a hike—you know, top of the trail, time to take in and enjoy nature. Not here, where there was literally no smell I could detect.

  “Hey, Sinita,” he said to the blue-haired woman on reception. “Pleasure to see you again.”

  She tittered and said something back I didn’t understand.

  Emmanuel pointed a finger gun at her and winked.

  “This place is Pharo’s Library of Alexandria,” Carson said to me and Heidi.

  “Uh huh,” she said flatly.

  “Well. Except for the fact that this place didn’t get burned down.”

  “You know your stuff,” said Emmanuel.

  Carson grinned. Then, turning back to the shelves laid out before us, he said, “This should be really easy. Boring, even.”

  “Absolutely,” said Heidi. “’Til the Order of Apdau show up on our tails again.”

  “Order of Apdau?” Emmanuel sounded surprised. “What beef do they have with you?”

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “Huh.” A pause, just in case we changed our minds; we didn’t. Nor did Carson share—maybe because he was scouring the signs and trying to figure out where we needed to go, but hopefully because he had a sense of honor to me and Heidi. Plus she’d already told him off for talking about the ring.

  “Well,” Emmanuel went on after it was clear none of us were budging, “you’re more than safe here. Apdau agents are well known here. They can’t operate freely. Not like London, where they can filter in and out largely undetected.”

  I exchanged a look with Heidi. Sure, ‘largely undetected.’ That was the Order of Apdau down to a tee.

  “Well, let’s go for boring then, shall we?” I said, nudging Carson into motion. “And we’ll cross our fingers that the Order are willing to follow the rules of polite society.”

  Carson got moving. Then hesitated. He glanced back to Emmanuel.

  “You know what you’re looking for, my man. Lead on.”

  Carson nodded, confidence boosted by my brother’s mere word, and resumed. Emmanuel waved a hand for Heidi and I to follow immediately behind; I stayed put, so with a casual shrug Emmanuel fell in after Carson, and we took the rear as far behind as we could feasibly manage.

  “You do know where you’re going, right?” Heidi called to Carson after he navigated us into a lopsided square.

  “Just finding it,” he replied.

  “Easy on the fella,” said Emmanuel. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  Didn’t seem much like it to me.

  After skirting yet another group of rabbit people—they were really out in force today—Heidi said, loud enough for Carson to hear, “Shouldn’t someone have found this amazing secret by now? If it’s just sitting in the library of Pharo—”

  “The Archive,” Emmanuel corrected.

  “—is it entirely unreasonable to think that someone else has looked? Someone with half a brain? It’s not exactly uncommon knowledge that Pharo’s people invaded and conquered Ostiagard. And there have been a loooot of people come searching for this treasure.”

  Carson paused at a junction. He frowned, seeming to glance up and down the crossroads.

  “It’s not the secret,” he said distractedly. “It’s the next clue—”

  Heidi cut him off. “And so do you mind telling me how this isn’t like your run-of-the-mill Seeker quest? We’re jumping through a lot of hoops here, Yates.” All of a sudden she was back to the old Heidi again, snippy and short-tempered.

  “This quest doesn’t have any keys,” said Carson, and he set off again. “Presumably, anyway.”

  “No keys at all,” Heidi griped. “About eighteen thousand books to scope out, but keys? Nada. Not a one.”

  “Give the man his due,” said Emmanuel. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you, big guy?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Real convincing.” Heidi folded her arms. “What exactly
is it you’re trying to find here, Yates?”

  “A journal,” said Carson, pausing for a moment to squint up a very tight aisle that forked off from the end of this one at a diagonal. “This name keeps popping up in my research. I want to check out the guy’s writings.”

  “And you’ll find them here?” said Heidi.

  “This is the Archive we’re talking about,” Emmanuel told her. “If it’s anywhere, it’s here.”

  “Didn’t ask you.”

  “Just saying.” A backward grin, crooked and toothy and white, and I was tempted to wrench the thickest book I could from the nearest shelf to wing it at his stupid smarmy face.

  “Whose name are you following?” I asked.

  “Guye Mordame,” Carson answered.

  “Sounds familiar,” I said, trying to remember where I’d heard it before.

  “I’ve mentioned him before.”

  Oh. Well, didn’t I feel special.

  “He should be familiar,” said Emmanuel. “Everyone knows of Guye Mordame. He’s one of the leading Seekers of the treasure of Ostiagard.”

  Heidi and I stared at the back of his head.

  He glanced back, looking suddenly abashed. “What? Everyone looks into Ostiagard’s treasure when they get started.”

  Heidi barked a laugh that drew the ire of a reptilian, many-legged thing seated in a very squat metal chair in an open reading space we were passing through.

  “Hah! Just as lame as the rest of us, aren’t you, Mr. Famous?”

  Emmanuel rolled his shoulders. “It’s important to know our history; how do you expect to move forward without knowing where you’ve been?” But when he turned back to resume following Carson, his mouth was downturned. He hadn’t sounded quite so self-satisfied there either, delivering another of his philosophical little sayings that he definitely believed and didn’t just spew at every opportunity to be looked up to as wise (on top of all those other glorious accomplishments of his).

  Carson, at the front of the line, had paused to peer at his phone. “The last journal said that this journal I’m looking for now is here in the Archive. It’s just a matter of where, exactly.”