"It would be premature to say. Could it not be an attempt by one clique within your court to turn you against another faction?"
"I am familiar with those games," he said. "They always make it plain whose heads I am to lop. This counsels me to shun all who might reach me."
"Thus it must come from someone removed," I said.
"So it would seem. Yet how can someone who is not part of my inner circle make free with my bedchamber?"
"Indeed. If the Archon's head cannot rest easy, who's can?" I struck a formal posture and said, "I am gratified by your confidence. I am also happy to take the case." I then paused and delicately cleared my throat.
"Yes?" Filidor said.
"At this point I usually discuss my fee."
The floating head showed a receptive mien. "Discuss away."
I cleared my throat once more and said, "I have found it best to negotiate a flat payment for most assignments, inclusive of expenses, rather than an hourly or per diem rate. Half is payable in advance and half upon completion. The arrangement avoids any dissatisfaction that may arise if, as often occurs, I resolve the case in a much shorter time than the client expected."
"What sort of flat fee did you have in mind?" Filidor said.
I mentioned a figure. He acquiesced without quibble, saying he would draw up a fiduciary draft as soon as he returned to the palace. "However," he said, "payment of the second half is of course contingent on successful completion of the assignment."
"Indeed," I concurred. "Since if I am not successful, it is quite likely that neither of us will have any further use for money."
#
I had my integrator interrupt its feeding and picking at itself long enough to summon an air car from a service that I occasionally used. The volante arrived promptly and we went up to the roof to board it unobserved, Filidor once again fully obscured by his elision suit.
It was growing late now and the clouds that had brought the evening's rain had dutifully disappeared. The newly cleaned sky glittered with countless orbitals passing overhead in every direction, while above them hung the long splash of stars known as The Spray, home to the Ten Thousand Worlds where lived the overwhelming proportion of mankind. Below us, as if in imitation of the sky, blazed the lumens of Olkney, that impossibly ancient city that had stood on this spot, bearing a dozen different names and boasting any number of plausible reasons for its existence, since far back in humanity's dawn-time. I had always preferred to view Olkney like this, from a good height; the closer one got to street level the more the hustle and thrust of the citizenry overwhelmed any hope of serenity.
The Archon must enjoy the most tranquil perspective of all, I thought, imperturbably poised in his palace high above both the majesty and the squalor to be found below, and insulated equally from both by whole phalanxes of officialdom and factotumry. I did not test the accuracy of my surmise by expressing it to Filidor as we transited the night sky, however; Olkney's air cars had ears, and were notorious for titillating passengers with snippets of what they had overheard and retained.
Before we boarded, the Archon had instructed me where to direct the vehicle and so we did not land at any of the levels reserved for official use. Instead, we set down on a broad terrace, halfway up the tiered immensity of the Archonate Palace, in a part of the grounds open to the public. I recognized the place as being near to the entrance of the Terfel Connaissarium. He had gathered together curiosities, oddities and singularities from every corner of The Spray and even from uncouth and uncharted worlds far out in the Back of Beyond. These he had brought together in a vast, multi-floored building he had caused to be erected, its upper stories supported by arches set upon arches and its roots sunk far down into the living rock of the Devenish Range that overhung Olkney.
The place was half ruined now. Most of Terfel's heterogeneous collection lay tucked away in subterranean storerooms. Occasionally, though, curators picked over the myriad items and assembled exhibitions of oddly juxtaposed objects: suits made of human skins fashioned by the untamed autochtones of Bizmant's World next to eye-snaring mesmer wheels used by adherents of the Refusalist cult on Hulle; fragile windslips from a light-gravity moon of Ondine next to massive soulstones dug up from antique tombs in Rusk before it finally sank beneath the waves.
At the moment, according to a placard out front, the Connaissarium was offering a display of semisentient musical instruments tuned to several conflicting harmonic scales. Visitors were encouraged to pluck a string or strike a key on any of the virtuoso apparatuses, which would cause the others to chime in competitively. Each would be driven by its nature to seek to dominate in a solo performance, resulting in amazingly discordant cacophonies from which the listener was invited to draw philosophical lessons. Also, there was a remarkable display of objects that primitive humanity had allegedly thrust through various parts of their bodies -- some of them extremely sensitive -- for decorative effect. I shuddered slightly at the thought: self-mutilation, though everyone's right, had always taken me aback.
The public part of the Great Connaissarium was open at all hours, Olkney being a city that could never sleep. I entered a portal beneath crumbling stonework, holding the door open and no doubt appearing to any observer as momentarily indecisive, to allow the invisible Archon to pass within. I paused in the foyer, glancing about like a bored patron deciding which gallery to enter first. A voice in my ear whispered, "The archway adorned by the nygrave's skull."
I ambled in the indicated direction. Beyond the archway was a spacious chamber full of what seemed to be misshapen pots and random lengths of rope. A notice explained the purpose of the display but I did not stop to peruse it, being urged by my invisible client to proceed across the marquetted floor (each small slab of wood cut from a different species of tree on Old Earth or one of the Ten Thousand Worlds), and through a smaller doorway. Here I found an anteroom with beams of light descending from the ceiling to fall upon a selection of small devices, each displayed atop its own waist-high pillar, whose functions and provenances I would never know.
I felt Filidor's unseen hand take my elbow and guide me on a weaving course through the columns to a shallow alcove on the far side of the room. Here hung a narrow tapestry of coarsely woven weave depicting some ancient autocrat committing unspeakable acts upon a figure kneeling before him. I was aware of my unseen guide brushing past me. Then the cloth was twitched aside and I saw a cluster of five indentations in the rear wall, patterned to fit the fingers and opposed thumb of a spread hand. A moment later, with a discreet crunch of stone passing over stone, the wall slid back. "In," said Filidor's voice.
I did as bid and stepped into a stone-lined corridor that angled gently down. The entrance closed behind us. I paused to await further instruction, though there was but one direction in which to go. I saw the young Archon's head appear, then his shoulders and eventually the rest of him as he peeled off the elision suit. He wadded up the shimmering pliofilm and placed it in a wallet he wore at the belt of his nondescript suit, then said, "Come."
"We are secure from observation, then?"
"I disabled all the percepts here in my boyhood," he said over his shoulder as he set off down the slope. "I tended to avoid my studies, and spent my time finding interesting ways about the palace. It's riddled with passages and secret stairways, some of them connecting to wings and chambers sealed off for tens of thousands of years."
I followed him as he spoke, my feet churning up puffs of dust. We walked in silence thereafter, and I turned my thoughts to what I knew of Filidor's history. Since boyhood he had had a reputation as a wastrel and nincompoop, spending his days -- or more accurately his nights -- carousing with a coterie of aristocratic ne'er-do-wells. His exploits were frequently written up in the froth-filled gossip columns of the Olkney Implicator. Then he had curiously disappeared from the life of riot and rompery for a while, only to re-emerge as the Archon Dezendah's apprentice and acknowledged heir. He continued to live the life of a spoiled ninny until
a second brief lacuna intervened, contemporaneous with rumors of an aristocratic plot to usurp the throne. Then all at once Filidor returned to public view as a full-weight man of authority. His uncle Dezendah retired, the nephew married and took the insignia of office, and ever since Filidor had scarcely caused the great mass of citizens to afford him a second thought, if indeed they had ever sent a first one his way. In other words, he was a perfectly acceptable Archon.
"Down here," he said as we came to the end of the corridor and found a wide circular hole in the stone floor, mostly filled by a spiral staircase of dark metal. It shook alarmingly as I set foot to it, but the young man was lightly tripping down into the darkness below. I followed, descending more steps than I could have comfortably counted until I surmised that we must be many levels deep into the heart of the mountains. Our way was lit only by the dim light of small lumens set above occasional archways that we passed on the way down. These were not closely spaced, but my eyes grew accustomed to the murk.
We came at last to the bottom of the stairs. An archway led into a desolate corridor but Filidor ignored the exit. He went to a spot about head high on the wall, where it appeared that the long-dead stone cutters who had dug the stairwell had left a slight convexity. He cupped his hand over the bulge and pushed, and a portion of the wall grudgingly receded. We stepped through the opening into blackness. I heard the Archon rustling about nearby and assumed he was looking for a light source.
"There is an odd odor here," said the voice inside my head.
"I thought you had gone back to sleep," I answered him.
"I think it is the odor of magic," he said.
"I smell nothing but must and stale air."
"Your senses are not attuned."
"They are the same senses you employ. We have but one nose between us."
"Perception takes place within the brain," he said, "where the raw stimuli are transmuted into electro-chemical impulses. I do not believe we use the same neuronic net to appreciate our surroundings."
He was probably right, I knew. He must inhabit a different cluster of neurons and synapses from those that were truly "mine" -- otherwise there could be no separation of identities.
Filidor now brought light from a portable lumen. I saw that we were standing in a narrow space between two sets of shelves that rose until they were lost to sight in the darkness. Ahead of us more topless shelves stretched into the gloom, all of them laden with boxes and trays of varying depths, each marked with a sequence of letters and numerals that bespoke a cataloging system. Many Archons, it seemed, had been indefatigable collectors of oddments, none of which had ever, in all the scores of millennia that preceded the penultimate age, been thrown away.
Holding the portable lumen aloft, Filidor set off. I followed. We went silently among the shelves, turning left at the second cross aisle then right after several more rows. We came at last to a section that looked exactly like every other we had passed, but here the Archon stopped and directed my attention to a shelf a little higher than my head. He pointed to a box whose end bore a sequence of symbols that meant nothing to me. "Please take it down," he said.
I did so. It was a lidless tray as long as my forearm and perhaps half that in width. Inside, nestled on soft quilted material, were a half dozen small figurines from some period I doubt any but the most dedicated pedant could identify. They were engaged in carnal acts of considerable ingenuity, some of which would tax the anatomy almost as much as they did the imagination.
"Remarkable," I said. "I wonder that anyone familiar with such exercises would retain the energy needed for carving."
"Note the symbols on the end of the tray," my client said.
"Yes?"
"Now compare them to this page from the catalog."
I had brought the page with me. I now studied it. "They are not the same," I said.
"Exactly. The objects in this tray should be in that one," he said, indicating a container of similar shape and size on the shelf directly beneath the one from which I had taken the first tray. I pulled the new one toward me, enough to peek within and see six more figurines much like the others.
"And you can see," Filidor said, "that this line of the catalog says that there should be twelve items in that tray."
"Could some long dead curator not have made an error?" I said.
"No. According to the records, this section was inventoried not many years ago. It should not have been touched since."
My inner companion was nudging me, an indescribable sensation when it occurs within one's own mind. "The odor is strongest here," he said.
"Hush," I told him. "You are obsessed."
To Filidor I said, "Very well, an object is missing from the collection, and some attempt has been made to disguise its removal. The logical assumption would be that some official has taken a fancy to the thing and it now graces an occasional table in his apartments. Except. . ."
"Except," said Filidor, "for the manner in which we became aware of its disappearance."
"The page from the catalog," I said. I was distracted at that moment by discovering that I had bent low toward the tray that I still held and was delicately sniffing at it. I did not want to engage before the eyes of the Archon in an internal wrestling match with my other self, and allowed my co-habitant to indulge himself. "It reeks," he said.
"Do not take charge of our body without consultation," I said inwardly, regaining control. When I was upright again I said to the Archon, "According to the catalog page, what should be in the tray?"
*"I have never seen it," said Filidor. "The catalog describes it as a mouth and chin of a male figure, life-sized, of a strong but unclassifiable material, apparently fractured from a larger work. Associated with the term, 'Majestrum,' from the Seventeenth Aeon."
"Hmm," I said. I am confident that I maintained an outward composure, but inwardly, at the moment the Archon had pronounced the word Majestrum, I had experienced a sharp frisson as if a strong electrical charge had shot through my body. After a moment, I realized that the effect on me was but a muted echo of what had struck my inner companion. When I felt for him, I received the same sense of absence that I experienced when he slept. It seemed he had lost whatever constituted consciousness.
I was both gratified and concerned. It was worrisome that a mere word -- or name, if that was what the three syllables conveyed -- could have had such an effect. I remembered what I had learned from my brief passage through the other dimension from which my erstwhile "demonic" visitor had come, of how I discovered that in his realm there was no difference between things and the symbols used to define them -- that to name an object or entity was to cause it to appear, that the map was literally the territory. If magic was to recover its prominence in our universe -- and I had reluctantly come to accept that inevitably it must -- then there would be words and names of power that could not be uttered without dire consequences. On the other hand, a word whose mere utterance could render my alter ego senseless was bound to have a certain appeal to the original tenant and unwilling sharer of the mind of Henghis Hapthorn.
I felt him stir and recover. "What happened?" he said.
"I believe you fainted."
"It was that word. I told you, this affair reeks of magic."
I assured him that I believed he was right. "The question is, where do we go from here?" It was only when the Archon replied in the affirmative that I realized I had spoken aloud.
"For the answer to that question," he said, "I have turned to you. What will you do?"
I began to say that it would be premature to say but he sent me a warning look, reminding me that Archons were not easily fobbed off by platitudes. Instead, I said, "Allow me a moment's thought."
Before the unsettling reorganization of my psyche, at this point I would have "applied insight," as I had always referred to the mental practice of carrying a problem down the back passageways of my mind to leave it at the door of my intuition. After a certain span of time, which could extend from
mere moments to a day or more, a suggestion -- usually a good one -- would appear in my mind. Now, however, my intuitive faculty had become a fully realized persona, and the inward journey consisted of my saying, within my mind, "What do you think?"
"It would be premature to say," was his answer, in a tone I found mocking.
"You are offended? Why?"
"Only because I have been trying to bring the obvious to your attention, without being able to penetrate your obtuse refusal to see -- or smell -- what is unmistakable to the nose."
"Not to my nose," I said.
"You do not smell the stench of that thing?"
"I smell nothing but age and uncirculated air."
"Truly?"
"I am not accustomed to lie to myself."
He seemed mollified for a moment, but then he came back to an air of grievance. "You did not inquire as to what happened to me when the Archon said. . . that word."
"I thought it best to postpone the discussion until we have dealt with the concerns of the ruler of the human-inhabited world. Who happens to be standing here wondering what we are accomplishing and, quite possibly, beginning to regret letting us in on his little predicament."
I wondered to myself -- that is, to my other self, what an anxious Archon might do with someone who was both privy to the existence of a usurper's conspiracy and demonstrating no particular ability to combat it. My alter ego took the hint. "There is not only an odor from the box," he said, "but a trail that hangs in the air."
"Could you follow it?"
"I believe so."
"Then do so."
"This way," I said to Filidor and gave my sharer control of our body.
I heard my voice say, "Please bring the lumen," and we set off. It was a curious feeling to be a passenger in one's own body, rather than the operator.
"Where are we going?" Filidor said.
"There was a faint odor in the box," my alter ego said over our shoulder, "and a scent trail that leads in this direction."
"Remarkable," said the Archon. "I detect nothing."
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