by Andrew Smith
Leila told herself that if she got bored, she could always go on a long vacation. She knew she was lying of course. Everywhere in this world of gods and sorcery and walking suits of armor was dangerous as all get out, and she would be there with her fountain pen, trying to sound out some basic incantation, and a giant half-woman, half-eagle would take her head in its talons and rip it clean off.
Mme. Rumella assured her that the Eagle Maidens were good people, but they were all at least six feet tall, and heavily muscled, and had those big, sharp talons. And a penchant for wearing bronze helms, which Leila didn’t understand. There were an awful lot of things that Leila couldn’t figure here. The normal world she basically had down, or so she considered. That’s why she spent all her time digging in the past. The mystery. At least she would never run out of that here, Leila assured herself. Especially being friends with Mme. Rumella, who was the kind of person mysteries came to. Leila was positive that’s why the Crusader was on the streets outside the tea shop. He was inevitably drawn to Mme. Rumella’s freaky intrigue-and-danger vibe.
“Speaking of which,” Leila muttered aloud, and stood. It was after eight: most everyone would have gone home by now, and she was no longer comfortable being in the building on her own. She took her Focus and clutched it tight, hoping she would make it across the street. The abduction of the Mulhoy linguist had made her acutely aware of how much she couldn’t defend herself in this place. The feeling was only made worse by the dazzling slowness of the Peelers, the only thing that passed for a police force here. She would feel much better in Mme. Rumella’s. The fact that the woman lived alone above her tea shop and was never robbed, burglarized, or booted out spoke volumes.
Exiting the museum, she found the cobblestone street abandoned. She paused for a moment at the doors before breaking into a dead run. She flung open the door and skirted inside. Benny was sitting with his feet up on the coffee table, reading the paper. Mme. Rumella was cleaning off the espresso machine. “Oh pet,” she said, “I’m so glad you remembered which way the door opens this time.”
“There was no-one out there, I was just kinda, y’know...”
“I understand pet. Would you like to stay here tonight?”
“Sure. Thanks,” she added.
“Tea?”
“Why not,” Leila shrugged. “May I have a chai?”
“Anything you like, pet.”
Leila sat down at the bar, and, in an effort to make conversation, told Mme. Rumella about the Crook of Osiris.
“How very odd,” said Mme. Rumella.
“I know. Gods creating other gods. They’re like meta-gods.”
“Gods are strange creatures with strange habits, pet, but I think we people can give them a run for their money any day,” Mme. Rumella commented
Leila laughed.
“Don’t laugh, Leila. You’re the one who said I should try to use more modern expressions.”
“I’m sorry,” said Leila and smothered further laughter with a sip of her drink. “Have you heard anything from that detective lady?”
“Mary’s told me nothing. I don’t know what they may have told her. I just hope they find him soon and get him away from whoever has him.”
“I’ve never seen you so nervous.”
“I know you understand, in theory, what we’ll be facing here if someone manages to use that thing, but you’ve never seen it happen.”
“And you have?” Leila asked, knowing the answer
Mme. Rumella nodded. “As you know, most history here in the city before the time of Rome is fairly unreliable.”
“Sure, that’s why it’s all in the Hall of Apocrypha.”
“Precisely. There are people still alive who remember a while into the pre-Roman era, but many of their stories are suspect. Though that’s beside the point. In the ancient near east, writing was mainly economic. When it caught on in Egypt, they began to use it for histories and that sort of thing.”
As Mme. Rumella paused to take a breath, Leila jumped in. “I do know all this,” she said
“Of course pet, what am I thinking? I apologize. Now, as far as I know, there were two incidents of written sorceries in the time of the Egyptians. During Roman times here, no-one never tried it. I’m not sure whether that was because they had learned their lesson, or because they looked on sorcery the same way they looked on the law.”
“As a matter of tradition, you mean? They never wrote down their laws, not successfully anyway, so they never wrote down their magic?”
“Right.”
Leila cringed. “Why do I have the feeling I know where this is headed?”
“After the fall of the Roman Empire, things were in a bit of collapse here as well. There were any number of refugees from all over their territories, all vying for power and influence. And, as in the normal world, most of the books were spirited away into monasteries.”
“Wait, what about the Alexandria Library? That was here then, or it should have been.”
“Oh my, what a mess. It was in dispute for nearly a thousand years. It all started at the very beginning of the sixth, and didn’t end till 1433.”
“Wow.”
“Indeed. The original leadership eventually retook its position, but in the mean time, they gave as many of their volumes as possible to monasteries around town. And someone got the idea to scribe some of the ancient sorceries before they were lost from memory. It was at the Monastery of St. Jerome, where-”
“Where’s that?” Leila interrupted.
“It doesn’t exist anymore. The plot of land on which it sat was absorbed into a terrible void, and the rest of the city healed over it.”
“Oh god...”
“No, just men. Stupid ones,” Mme. Rumella added. “I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. It was described to me by witnesses as a sickening red-black, and there was nothing else to be seen or heard, save the endless scream of a single tortured voice.”
Leila tried to block out the horrible picture in her head. It didn’t go very well. “Thanks for the nightmare. I needed a new one. Does anyone know what kind of spell it was that they were writing down?”
Mme. Rumella shook her head. “I can only hope that it’s one no-one will ever see again.”
Leila nodded in agreement.
“Then,” Mme. Rumella continued, “about seventy years later, there was another incident. Someone thought, very wrongly in the event, that surely if he only transcribed minor spells, a book of basics like you requested when you first came here, it wouldn’t have such dire consequences.”
“I almost hate to ask,” said Leila
“Liar,” Mme. Rumella smiled. “You’ve heard of the House of Folly?” When Leila shook her head, Mme. Rumella continued: “It was, before, a Tibetan palace. The man, I can’t recall his name, made half a dozen copies of his volume, and thought it would be best to keep them apart.”
“Sounds sensible.”
“You would think, yes. However, there was a matter of geometry.”
“What?”
“Geometry, pet. It was a... Some geometrical shape, I don’t recall.”
“A polyhedron,” Leila supplied.
“If you say so. Anyway, just like a crystal, or whatever Focus, it amplified the power of the spells. The rooms where each of the books were kept were transformed. The... planes? The planes of the shapes turned into solid minerals.”
“They were probably all diagonals too, huh?”
Mme. Rumella nodded. “They cut straight through walls and ceilings. They’re still there in fact. Since then, no-one has been fool enough to try again. And I’m very afraid of this Standard business. Ancient sorceries tend to be the most powerful.”
“Yeah, why is that?”
“They’ve earned it,” Mme. Rumella replied
* * * *
It was early the following afternoon when Mme. Rumella took Leila to see the House of Folly in person. Leila recognized the building, though Tibet was not her specialty. It was the Potala
Palace. The hill on which it was perched rose above the surrounding city. The red and white palaces rose above them, comprised of what appeared to be dozens of rectangular substructures.
“Where to first?” Leila asked as they ascended the long staircase to the entrance.
“The basement,” Mme. Rumella told her
“So we’re going to have to go up then down then back up again?”
“That’s right.”
Leila groaned as another pair of curiosity-seekers passed them going the opposite direction. One of them shot her a look
“So people actually come here to look? Other than us, I mean.”
“Oh my, yes. People still haven’t forgotten this. In fact, I take most new arrivals here eventually, in case they get ideas.”
“Why haven’t you ever taken me here?” Leila asked
“Oh pet,” Mme. Rumella laughed. “Even if you got ideas, you couldn’t magic your way out of a cupboard.”
Leila shrugged. It wasn’t untrue, she supposed. “So what about all the stuff inside? Is there any government stuff going on? What about the religious school?”
“Nobody works here anymore, pet. The transformations make people too nervous.”
“I’m surprised someone hasn’t set up here to charge admission.”
“Someone did once,” Mme. Rumella replied, pointing Leila up to the right as the stair continued
“What happened to him? Or her?”
“I kicked him in the shins,” said Mme. Rumella matter-of-factly
“For charging admission?”
“No, because he got fresh,” said Mme. Rumella, and smoothed her apron.
They entered the building. “This is huge,” Leila remarked. “I for one am duly impressed.”
Mme. Rumella grabbed her by the sleeve and led her to the descending stair. It took longer than Leila had expected for them to come to the room transformed by the lowest point of the polyhedron.
“And here I thought green rooms were weird,” Leila said. After a moment of gaping, she remarked, “And I really sincerely doubt that the original ceilings were thirty feet tall.”
“I would have to say not,” said Mme. Rumella, surveying the room.
The room was roughly twelve foot to a side, with high ceilings. The walls were a dark red clay. Leila touched one. “What’s with the red mudbrick walls? It looks nothing like the rest of the building.”
Mme. Rumella sighed. “Pet, it’s the effect of the magic, just like the ceilings.”
“Are those the planes?”
Mme. Rumella nodded. Appearing to come from the ceiling, but in fact rising from their intersection, the tips of four triangular planes hovered in the middle of the room, fifteen feet up. One plane showed much more surface than its opposite; the shape was tilted at an angle to the building. The point of intersection was aimed at one corner instead of straight downwards.
“Wow. You said minerals, not precious minerals,” Leila said as she wandered beneath the planes like a strange, inverted pyramid. One face was glassy obsidian. Leila saw herself and Mme. Rumella reflected from the black surface. One face was amethyst, another ruby, and the fourth... “Dear sweet mother of Jesus, is that platinum? That sheet must be worth millions!”
“In the normal world. Platinum is shockingly un-sorcerous. It has almost no value here.”
Leila swore
“Language, pet!”
“Sorry,” said Leila automatically
“Let’s move on. I want to show you the rest of the rooms. This one is the least transformed. Unless I miss my guess,” Mme. Rumella went on as they exited, “the effect started here at the bottom, moved along the planes of the, er-”
“Polyhedron.”
“Right, that, then hit the next four books, which were in a square shape, I believe...”
Leila took a moment to realize she was supposed to comment. “Oh, yeah, they would have to be.”
“Even though they were placed on different levels of the building.”
“Ah.” Leila pictured the shape in her mind, and tilted it. “That explains it.”
“And then continued up to the top.”
“So which copy of the book are we visiting next?”
Mme. Rumella showed a bit of a pained face as she replied. “Almost all of them,” she said.
They climbed upward through the palace. A much older palace was contained within the foundations of the white palace, though it had been seriously damaged by the transformation. Mme. Rumella took Leila to one of the chapels. “There are many chapels and halls in the white palace, “ Mme. Rumella explained. “The sorcerer put one book each in four of them.”
The door was large, and oaken, and possessed an arched top and big brass hinges. “Is that the original door?” Leila asked skeptically. “It doesn’t seem right.”
“You’ll see,” said Mme. Rumella. She pushed the door open. Bright daylight spilled into the hallway. She gripped Leila’s arm tightly and pulled her through.
The floors, walls, and ceilings all dropped away into nothing. Leila and Mme. Rumella stood on a patch of sky. Leila looked at the open air and let out a scream.
“Calm down, pet!” Mme. Rumella ordered, keeping her vice-grip on Leila’s arm.
“Okay, that was wierd.” Leila tried to breathe normally and looked around. They were standing in an endless blue sky. There was no ground below that she could see. There were patches of fluffy, reassuring clouds, and then, in the center of the space, Leila saw the source of the light.
“The sun?”
“Or something remarkably like it.”
The fiery orb was not much higher than Leila, maybe six feet in diameter. Taking a calmer look around she saw that the planes, that were minerals below, represented here by thin white lines. In the distance, there were three orbs like miniature planets spinning slowly in place. The ones straight ahead and to the left were higher than that to the right. Leila let out a musing ‘hmm’ and looked above her. Sure enough, there was the fourth planet. The surface was red and covered with craters and mountains and one excessively large trench.
“Mars? How cute is that.”
Mme. Rumella shook her head sadly, smiling as she did it. “Let’s away, pet.”
“Oh, okay. This place is great though! Can you walk out any further?”
“Basic self-preservation suggests that we ought not to try.”
“Okay,” Leila said again, and allowed Mme. Rumella to lead her back to the hallway.
They ascended to the red palace, which was much smaller and sat atop the white. Leila and Mme. Rumella continued up towards the very top, though it was a bit tricky in the middle when a plane of solid silver pierced the stair.
A sudden spiral stairway in the middle of the top floor exited onto the roof, and they followed it there. A dusky purple sky full of stars greeted them, though in reality it was only the afternoon. A white marble floor extended out in all directions, to seemingly no end. The plane of silver, the shortest one here, intersected three other triangular planes, of jade, amber, and, the largest of diamond. There were stone statues all around. Leila looked behind her, expecting and seeing more endless marble. There was also a statue of Athena, and, further on, an Olmec chieftain. Between Mme. Rumella and Leila and the planes was a statue of a man in robes, one foot on the ground, the other up as though running, hands outstretched. More statues appeared in the distance. Rising straight up from the intersection of the planes was a pillar, of sorts. The monolithic structure grew thinner towards the top, and was inscribed with hieroglyphics.
“That looks an awful lot like the Cleopatra’s Needle. “
“It is.”
“Whatever. We’ve got the real one, or the real version from this world, back at the museum. Next to the coffee room. People kept drawing graffiti on the River embankment,” Leila explained
“Some things can be in more than two places at once,” Mme. Rumella observed
Leila narrowed her eyes accusingly at the Needle. “I b
et,” she said to Mme. Rumella, “that you’re just waiting for me to ask a flood of questions and point out everything that I think is wrong with that, but I’m not going to do it.”
Mme. Rumella walked forward with a proud smile on her face. Leila followed. They stopped in a few paces to inspect the statue of the running man.
“Here he is,” Mme. Rumella said.
“Er, here who is?”
“The sorcerer who caused this mess, obviously.”
“Oh yes,” said Leila, more than a touch sarcastically, “obviously.”
“Once you’ve lived here long enough, you begin to figure out how things work. Besides, look at him. He’s running straight for the book, or rather where it was. My guess is that he saw the transformation moving up the building, and tried to reach the pinnacle here before it could be completed.”
“Aw, he almost made it.”
“Truth be told, I’m rather glad that he didn’t.”
“What an awful thing to say,” said Leila, taken aback
“Think about it, pet. The sorcery was moving along the lines created by the books. Not to mention that the books were transformed by their own work. If he had removed the last book, what might have happened? Not only would the last book have survived, but the magic here wouldn’t have been capped by the Needle. It could have continued on. It could have transformed the city. It could have risen up and turned the sky to stone, almost anything.”
“I suppose. It’s still kinda harsh, though.”
“If you say so,” said Mme. Rumella in the tone specific to people saying the phrase ‘if you say so’.
Leila was at that moment struck by a thought, and didn’t realize Mme. Rumella’s comment might be considered offensive. “You said these were books of basic spells.”
“I did at that.”
“Basic sorcery did all this?” Leila asked, as though somewhere between her ears and her brain, things stopped making sense.
“I doubt it would have done this much if it hadn’t been for the geometry,” Mme. Rumella admitted.