by Andrew Smith
“Do you think you could keep it down?” Delilah irritably demanded
“Oh, pardon me,” said Mme. Rumella insincerely.
“Hiya, Mme. Rumella!” said a small alto voice.
Suddenly, a small winged creature fluttered up in front of her face. Mme. Rumella squinted. “Wyyla-fair is that you?”
“Mm-hmm!” Wyyla responded in the positive
“I can hardly see you when you’re that size. Why don’t you grow up?”
“Alright!” Wyyla said brightly. The winged creature the size of a pygmy butterfly set herself on the floor and expanded until she was many times larger. Even so, she was only about two feet tall. She might have been mistaken for a small child, except that she was rather full figured. Gossamer wings colored like the ghost of silver sprouted from her back.
“Wyyla-fair, so nice to see you! It’s been too long!” Mme. Rumella exclaimed as she bent over to kiss Wyyla on the cheek. She then looked back at the Crusader and explained, “Wyyla is a sprite. They live in parts of the primeval forests that surround the city.”
Wyyla nodded in support. The squat creature wore a miniature wrap covered with representations of blooming red poppies, with a slit up one leg. Her hair was brown, twisted and piled up atop her head. Her lips were naturally a glistening rose color. “I’m sorry I haven’t come to visit, but I haven’t been into the city in ages! I’m just coming to check up on the ol’ destiny. But I promise to drop by soon.”
“Lovely. I’ll be at the shop. Unless I’m out with this one,” Mme. Rumella replied, indicating the Crusader with a tilt of her head
“Wyyla,” came the stern voice of Mr. Markab’s secretary, “Mr. Markab will see you now.”
“Gotta flutter!” Wyyla called as she returned to her smallest state and flew into the next room
Wyyla’s appointment came and went, followed by Voz, and finally Delilah Runestone, who looked less shaky, but not in a good way. The secretary’s voice called, “Mme. Rumella and guest.”
Mme. Rumella led the Crusader through the anteroom which the secretary lorded over, into Mr. Markab’s own office.
“Ah, there you are,” Mr. Markab greeted them with a wide smile. Wearing one of what must be an uncountable number of pinstripe suits, he stood as Mme. Rumella entered the room. He extended his hand, and Mme. Rumella took it. After a proper shake, firm but never crushing, they sat. One chair strained under the weight of the Crusader, but held.
Mr. Markab’s desk had pens and a blotter and a constantly burning lamp. Other than a few star charts on the wood-paneled walls, it could have been any accountant’s office. “Now, you are a Crusader, I am told.” The Crusader’s helmet nodded with a small squeak. “And for what again are you looking?”
“The Standard of Uruk. Do you know of its location?”
“Afraid not, but let us see whether you are destined to find it, and perhaps we can deduce something from that, eh? Now please, relax.” The Crusader made no visible motion. Mr. Markab glanced at Mme. Rumella who shrugged apologetically. Mr. Markab narrowed his eyes at the Crusader in concentration.
After a few moments, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I cannot read him.”
“Why not, Mr. Markab?”
“He is... Alive, in a way, but he is a sorcerous being, Mme. Rumella. He has only the destiny his creators made for him. If they were here, perhaps, but they are not.”
“How terrible. I’m sorry to have dragged you on a wild goose chase, you poor thing,” she said apologetically. Mme. Rumella frowned and asked, “Can you read Wyyla?”
“Yes, Mme. Wyyla is a sorcerous being, but a natural one, not one created, as our friend here.”
“Ah. Well, thank you very much anyway, Mr. Markab. We’ll be taking our leave now.”
“Yes, yes of course, Mme. I apologize again.”
“No trouble Mr. Markab, no trouble,” said Mme. Rumella with a smile that never quite made it.
Sun & Moon
Vijay always delivered to his best customers in person. He walked down the dirt road that contained his farmhouse and turned left on to the rounding cobblestoned street of the tea shop. He had a large canister of his famous chai blend tucked under each arm. He stopped. On the corner was a gray section of wall. It must have been from the sometime in or around the eighteenth century, so people said, or it would not have been in this part of town. In truth, no one knew just where, or when, it came from. Covering the wall from end to end were pictures of a smiling Spanish man with a well-groomed moustache. The caption enthusiastically proclaimed: Miguel Suerte, what the City needs!
“That,” said Tina Virtue, who had come up behind Vijay, “is far from the truth. Believe me.”
Of course he did. “I cannot imagine what he is thinking,” said Vijay truthfully, staring at the smiling poster. The red-and-orange striped background behind the grayscale portrait, like a Japanese-style drawing of the rising sun, offended him on some level he could not quite grasp.
“Why does the sun rise behind this man’s head?”
Tina Virtue remained silent.
“And why is he running for this office? Didn’t they take the last mayor, soak him in whale’s oil, hang him by the neck and then light him on fire?”
“Not the last one, no,” said Tina. By unspoken agreement, the pair turned and covered the remaining distance to the tea shop. Tina held the door for the encumbered Vijay, who thanked her.
Mme. Rumella, between customers at the moment, spotted them at once. She stopped fixing her graying curls behind her head and bustled over to help Vijay with the tea. “Lovely, Vijay, perfectly lovely!” She set the canisters in their places. “Can I get you anything?”
“You could prepare me a cup of this,” he said, patting one of the canisters.
“Of course, Vijay, free of charge. The usual Tina?”
Tina nodded. The proprietress set about fixing drinks. Suddenly, Leila Lanstrom flung open the door and shouted “Aha! Ah-freakin’-ha!”
“Good morning,” Mme. Rumella called. “Did you find something at the museum, pet?”
“No, but I’ve been thinking all night about this.” She continued over Mme. Rumella’s weary counsel that she get some sleep, “I did. And I think that maybe I’ve got a good place to look for the thing.”
“Really,” said Mme. Rumella, intrigued. She handed Tina and Vijay their drinks and rested her elbows on the counter, ready to listen.
“Okay, what about this,” said Leila excited her: “has the Crusader looked anywhere, or his just about harassing people on street corners like now?”
“Again?” Mme. Rumella sighed
Leila shrugged.
“I did ask him, and he said he looked a few places.”
“Do you know where?” Leila pressed
“Out by the Jericho Wall and that stretch of the River, where it’s the Euphrates.”
“Exactly his problem!” Leila exclaimed. “He’s been looking in all the wrong places. If the Standard disappeared from its resting place, and it’s an artifact from Mesopotamia, the logical places to check are places nearby. But in the geography of here, everything is completely scattered. So, the most likely place for it to turn up is somewhere with no possible association: Old World artifact, New World hiding place! It’s completely stuipid!” Leila concluded and threw her hands up in a gesture of triumph
“Of course!” Mme. Rumella exclaimed. “I’m so proud of you, pet. You really are getting the hang of this place!”
Leila blushed slightly. “Oh stop. I’ve even got the perfect place to look: The Street of the Dead!”
Mme Rumella beamed. It was a brilliant suggestion. A lot of things found their way to the ample hiding space afforded by the buildings that lined the avenue.
“Did someone say ‘Street of the Dead’?” came a Scottish voice from the doorway. Mary had just entered and was looking about enquiringly.
“Yes, dear, we’re going artifact hunting,” Mme. Rumella explained.
“Oh. Can I
get a tea first?”
“Of course. What’ll you have?”
Mme. Rumella quickly drew Mary’s water and set her tea steeping. Then she left the shop to run in her absence, with a quick apology to her customers. She was famous for it, and most of her regulars knew how to use all the shop’s equipment by now. When Mme. Rumella got taken by a whim, she would rush out the door at once to investigate.
Mary set off for downtown again, slipping down the alleyway next to the British Museum. Mme. Rumella and Leila Lanstrom went down the block, collected the Crusader, and made for parts of town farther out. “I do hope this outing will make up for yesterday,” Mme. Rumella mused
Almost immediately, they crossed a bridge over the River. As the city was all cities, the River was all rivers. It wound its way through the city, looping in and bisecting itself, and finally disappearing into the forests. The section they crossed was the Seine, about the time when the Eifel Tower was built
They crossed rings of time like the cross-section of a tree trunk, from the nineteen hundreds, back and back until they came to the Street of the Dead. A wide, sprawling avenue located in Teotihuacan in the Mexican highlands, the Street acted as the central area of the great city. The avenue, minus the sunken plaza called Ciudadela, appeared in the Woven City sometime after two hundred A.D., not long after its construction, in what archaeologists call the Miccaotli Phase of the ancient civilization. The avenue was just under two kilometers long, here in the city.
Generally, every building appears with the arched doorway into the normal world, the Portico. Along the entire street of the dead, there was only the one, set into the Pyramid of the Moon. There was great speculation as to the cause of this amongst the Woven City’s archaeological population. The general consensus was that since Teotihuacan’s city planning was, apparently, so stringent, the avenue was considered one building for Portico purposes. The underlying questions as to who decided these things and how they managed them were ignored.
Mme. Rumella, Leila Lanstrom, and the Crusader entered the street from the central side. There were only a handful of other people on the avenue today. Few people came to the Street of the Dead anymore. No-one used the Portico for fear of enraging real world archaeologists. The Porticoes transported their users to the normal world’s present regardless of when the building came to the city, or whether it was yet extant in the normal world.
“I think we should start at the Sun and work our way back,” Leila suggested.
“Whatever you say, pet.”
The trio walked past the Pyramid of the Moon, and then the further kilometer to the Pyramid of the Sun. “Can your joints handle it?” Mme. Rumella asked of the Crusader, who sometimes squeaked on inclines, as she surveyed the four stepped platforms leading to the building’s summit. The Crusader responded by setting off up the stairs. “I see,” Mme. Rumella muttered.
“This is absolutely amazing!” Leila cooed as she surveyed the temple that topped the pyramid. “You know, in the normal world, this temple was destroyed, and when the pyramid was reconstructed they kinda screwed it up.” She ran a hand over a slightly weathered carving of a masked man in profile, a definite no-no in her line of work, but buildings in the Woven City did not appear subject to the passing of time, so she forgave herself. “Shall we?” Leila asked rhetorically as she stepped down into the pyramid’s interior.
The passages within the pyramid, requiring years of excavation in the normal world, were perfectly preserved here. They worked their way into the core of the structure, searching shadowed areas and testing for false walls. Finding nothing. Mme. Rumella conjured a hovering globe of fire to light their way. Finally, they found themselves in the caves below. The Crusader could go no further. Mme. Rumella promised they would be very thorough in their search before leaving him.
She and Leila pressed forward down the tunnel. “Do you remember,” Mme. Rumella asked, “when the Globe of Carnaeo ended up down here?”
Leila shook her head. “I don’t think so. When was it?”
“Come to think of it, it happened three years ago. That was well before you arrived. Sorry, pet.”
“No problem. What happened?”
“Well, a Phoenician trading vessel went down in a stormy patch of the Woven Sea, some years before that. It was carrying the Globe of Carnaeo, one of the lost artifacts of the ancient Ireland. All hands were lost. Tragic,” she said. “I knew the captain’s widow. Lovely woman. She’s never quite been the same.”
Leila made a sympathetic hum and waited for her to continue.
“Well, someone was jogging the steps, and decided, capriciously, to come down into the tunnels, or so it’s told. He walked down here for a little while, and was about to go back, when he noticed a light. He walked toward it,” she said as the cave opened up into a trio of chambers before the. “Right there,” she pointed to the central one, “it was. Sitting, well, hovering, like it tends to do. There must have been years’ worth of dust on the top. He took it, and this became the hotspot for people searching for lost objects, until what happened to him...” Mme. Rumella trailed off, frowning at the memory
“Um... What did happen to him?” Leila asked, not convinced she wanted to hear the answer
“You see, the artifact’s owners live here, in a stretch of primeval forest beyond the Sticks, and he, er,” Mme. Rumella paused, trying to put the poor man’s stupidity in a better light. “He tried to sell it back to them. They were rather upset with him for the presumption and, er... No-one quite knows, but some people call that day the Day of the Screaming.”
“Oh no...”
“You could hear it all over the city, for hours and hours. It was days before we figured out what had happened. Since then people have decided it’s generally not worth the risk of upsetting someone.”
“So that’s why the place is so abandoned.”
Mme. Rumella nodded
“Too bad. It would be way cooler to live in ancient apartment on the street of the dead than my crappy one from the land of who-gives-a-crap.”
“Language, pet.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
They pressed forward and searched each of the chambers, but all were empty. They returned up the passage many times more quickly than on their way down, Mme. Rumella unnerved by her own story. They collected the Crusader and returned to the top of the Pyramid. Mme. Rumella spurred the Crusader on to the right, towards the Pyramid of the Moon. Leila suggested the two of them stay back to check the platforms lining part of the street.
Leila tested gingerly for concealed doorways and the like, as Mme. Rumella examined the platforms with a sharp eye.
“Do you think we ought to be helping him?” Leila asked, the apprehension obvious in her voice.
Mme. Rumella sighed. “Leila, pet,” she said indulgently, “you were born in the normal world, and it is a dangerous place, always has been. There you can avoid a lot of the danger if you’re careful, but never all of it. Here, the danger has a habit of going after those who avoid it. It’s practically clockwork. It really is best to embrace it, because in the end you have very little choice in the matter.”
Leila grumbled something unintelligible. “Don’t think I don’t know your reputation,” she said. “You’re just saying that to get me to do crazy things with you more often.”
Mme. Rumella shrugged. “Think what you like, pet,” she said and strolled off towards the Pyramid of the Moon. The sun climbed into the sky: local apparent noon in central Mexico. The pyramid rose before them, smaller than its solar counterpart, but no less important in the scheme of things.
There were more than half a dozen substructures within the pyramid, and any number of important burial sites. The trio entered the Pyramid of the Moon and searched for what seemed like ages
Leila stopped constantly to brush the dust out of her hair. She had never been to Teotihuacan herself, but had studied it in several courses. “I think this one is ‘burial two’,” she said as they approached a gravesite. “Bu
t I could be wrong. The New World was never really my thing.” Around the skeleton of the man in the tomb were the bones of sacrificial animals and offerings of obsidian and other stone. “It was uncovered in-”
Suddenly, the skeleton leapt to life and shouted ‘boo’ really loudly and Leila broke off screaming
“Calm down, pet!” Mme. Rumella ordered. She removed her traveling hat and slapped the skeleton across the arm bone.
‘Hey!”
“Do shut up, Jerry!” Mme. Rumella shouted as the protesting skeleton. Leila was still screaming. “And do calm down, pet!”
Leila stopped screaming in order to point at the skeleton and say ‘but’ repeatedly without and any subsequent clauses.
“Jerry, apologize to the lady!”
The skeleton rubbed sheepishly at the back of his top vertebrae. “Er, sorry,” he said
“How many times have I told you not to jump up and shout at people. It’s not nice!”
“Well, to be fair, only the one time,” Jerry replied.
“Jerry!”
“Sorry! I won’t do it again, Mme. Rumella, I promise.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Jerry, the lady with her mouth hanging open is Dr. Leila Lanstrom of the British Museum.”
“Wow,” said Jerry, impressed. The British Museum was one of only two archaeological organizations in the city.
“And that gentleman is a Crusader.”
“And I’m Mother Mary of the Sisters of Who Gives a Crap.”
“Jerry, mind your language!”
“They must live in my building,” said Leila
“Sorry. But if he’s searching for anything here, he’s out of luck. I’m not giving away any more of our stuff. It belongs here.”
“Of course I understand your sentiment, Jerry, but he’s not looking for an object from Teo, we just thought it might have ended up here.”
“Oh. Alright then.”
“And I see you’ve been doing your reading.”
“Yeah,” said the skeleton, in a proud tone of voice. “Once I read those primers you gave me, English was a cinch! And I finished ‘The Birth of the Anglican Church’,” he said, producing the rather dusty volume and handing it to the lady. “And I’m halfway through ‘An Honest History of Catholicism’. I haven’t gotten to ‘The Sunset of Queen Victoria’ yet, sorry.”