by Andrew Smith
“I still don’t understand why the math affects magic.”
“Oh, no, pet. It’s not the math. Math doesn’t really exist. It’s the relationship. Everything affects everything, including the orientation of everything as compared to everything else. Describing it mathematically is a matter of choice.”
“You’re getting a bit mystic for me,” said Leila skeptically
“Say what you will,” said Mme. Rumella, turning to leave, “but it’s true. You saw the books downstairs, transformed into planets?”
“Yeah...” Leila said, not following.
“Well,” said Mme. Rumella as they skirted the silver plane on the way down, “I may not have kept up on my math, but I have learned a thing or two about astronomy.”
“You could start making sense any time now.”
“It’s a metaphor, pet, wait till it’s finished. Now, take Venus for example. Now, I’ve never been to our Venus, but in the solar system of the normal world, it’s basically Earth’s twin, isn’t it? A bit smaller.”
“And closer to the sun.”
“Exactly!” Mme. Rumella enthused. “At Earth’s distance from the sun, Venus could be perfectly viable as a home for life. Instead, the oceans boiled off, and created more cloud cover, trapping more heat, boiling off more water, it’s... What’s the phrase I’m thinking of?”
“Positive feedback.”
“Something like that. And the normal Venus is a barren, sulfurous hell, because of its relationship to the sun.”
“That, as they say where I come from, is kinda sketch.”
“Pet,” Mme. Rumella began to sound exasperated, “what I mean is that it’s a simple matter of distance that made two very similar places so different. It’s orientation, it’s the relation of one thing to another. Wait! I’ve got another example. Say you have some magnet, right?”
“Alright,” Leila said, silently impressed that Mme. Rumella appeared to have picked up this much modern science. Of course she had been around much longer than modern science, so Leila supposed she was bound to have learned something
“You take that magnet and a another magnet, and you place them on opposite side of a room. What happens?”
“Probably nothing, unless they’re super strong.”
“Ah, but they aren’t. These are strictly low level magnets that we’re speaking of here. Now, take them and place them, say, six inches apart.”
Leila thought she knew where this was going
“At first they will probably stay relatively still, but they’ll be pulling on each other. And then, they’ll get going, and,” she clapped her hands for effect, “collide. But only because they happened to be placed in a position where they had the right relationship to one another.”
Leila nodded thoughtfully. It sort of made sense. But only sort of. Either way, she didn’t want to argue. Mme. Rumella was almost certainly right. She had been in this world many times longer than Leila. They exited the place known as the House of Folly and walked back center. The River came upon them in its winding course. Most sections of the River were unknowns, unless there was a bridge or some architecture that could be identified. There was a berth ahead of them.
“You know, I’ve never been on one of those things,” said Leila, indicating the gondola docked there.
“You haven’t? We ought to go then,” said Mme. Rumella. The River here was several feet below street level. Mme. Rumella hopped gingerly down to the old wooden jetty and stepped into the gondola, settling down onto the bench-like seat.
“Do you know who put these things here?” Leila asked as she began to row. The general outwise flow of the River reversed itself in a localized eddy below their gondola, helping them in their course
“Some mad Venetian, no doubt,” Mme. Rumella responded, unconcerned.
The color of the water changed slightly, but the back-flow continued. Their breath steamed on the air. It was much colder in this area. Soon enough, though, they were in a new place, and it was warmer, even if it was raining. Mme. Rumella, always prepared, removed an umbrella from her purse and stood so that she and Leila could share.
“Mme. Rumella,” Leila began as the rain ceased, “I’m really worried now.”
“As well you should be, pet, as well you should be.”
* * * *
“Why haven’t you gotten it yet?” Lionel hissed at the linguist
Clement Jones removed his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes, which did nothing to help the dark circles already underneath. “Because this really isn’t my specialty. I can’t tell which are glyphs and which are just pictures. I’m pretty sure this whole scene at the bottom is just there to look pretty.”
“I thought you were supposed to be good at your job,” Lionel fumed. He fussed nervously with his cape and began to pace around the small room
“I am good at my job, but this is not my job. I can read and speak Latin and every language even remotely related to Latin. This is not that. It’s not even anything that looks like letters to me. Some people can make sense out of hieroglyphics and pictograms, but I am not one of them.”
“Really?” Lionel said, in a tone at once disbelieving, angry, and fearful.
“Really. Listen, maybe, and this is a big maybe, if I were at the institute, so I could use all the resources there, I might be able to figure it out. Otherwise, I’ve got no chance.”
Lionel paused before answering. “I’ll think about it.” He swished his cape and exited
* * * *
The Egyptian sun sank in a cloudy blaze on the horizon. Voz lay on her blanket and noted how there were slightly too many stars in the sky for where the sun was on the horizon. It confirmed her suspicion that the sun was not, in fact, in the same place that she was. One of the stranger effects of the city was that it was impossible to see the sun rise or set in the same patch of the world in which you were at the time. However, the setting sun was visible in whatever distant place existed at the limit of your vision. Voz’s vision was roughly the same as the average human, but a creature with better vision would likely not be able to see the sun Voz was seeing at all.
The stars littered the sky, and Voz stared up at them, breathing in the cooling desert air. Voz couldn’t say what the attraction to the desert was. Her parents were both from islands, one in the Mediterranean, not particularly desert. The other was from Ireland. Definitely not desert.
She loved looking at stars she knew weren’t in the same place anymore, but that she could have done in any of the ancient parts of the city. Voz stared up and let millions of thoughts, like stars and sand, drift through her mind.
And then she heard the footsteps. “Ruin,” she called the name Mme. Rumella had supplied her, “if that’s you again, I am so very not letting you live this time.”
The footsteps continued. She listened. It wasn’t Ruin. This person was shorter, or at least had a much shorter stride. And they were lighter on their feet. Voz stood casually, brushing off a few stray grains of sand. She turned to face the approaching person. He was short, with auburn hair and a healthy growth of stubble. He fixed her with a calm blue eye. Voz attempted to return the look, though her hair constantly covered one eye.
“Who are you, and what possessed you to carry a gun?” Voz asked
“Hello, Voz. My name is Hunter.”
“What about the gun?”
“It’s more useful than it looks.”
“Great, but I don’t think it’s possible for it to be less useful than it looks.”
“I have a proposal for you.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Voz growled. “Tell me,” she demanded, “why I shouldn’t scream at you until your teeth come loose and every ounce of blood in your body decides to make a run for it?”
“I knew your mother.”
Voz halted. “Which one?”
“The Irish one,” Hunter grinned.
“How did you meet her?”
“Tried to kill her.”
“And lived?” Voz’
s face lit up. “Hunter Blue!” She stepped forward and shook his hand. “I’m so glad to finally meet you! Mom always spoke very fondly you, you know.”
“She’s crazy.”
“Yeah,” said Voz affectionately. “So how did you find me? Look who I’m asking! Sorry. What did you want to talk about?”
“I may need your help with something.”
“Hey, anything for a friend of the family,” said Voz.
“What do you know about the mayoral election?” Hunter asked.
Advice
The muted sun filtered in through the cracks in the barn’s walls. Motes of dust traced the movements of the air. Mary awoke suddenly and uncurled from her position on the chaise lounge. She kept promising herself that she would make it to her bed, but it hadn’t happened once since she acquired the chair.
She folded her blanket and threw it over the sofa. She went back and unfolded it so it covered more of what Benny called ‘the old lemon-and-lobster’: Mme. Rumella had yet to cover it as she had promised.
Mary reached down and picked her journal up off the floor where it had fallen overnight. She glanced ruefully at the seal once more before leaping downstairs for a shower. She still had little faith in the ladder.
She dried off, dressed and left for the day. Scotland outside her barn was damp. Billows of fog drifted around her as she trekked through the heather. It always looked greener in the fog. Much nicer than France, thought Mary to herself.
On a whim, she spun around, not even close to losing her balance as her heel sunk into the heather. The barn was receding into a bank of fog. The city had never felt more like home.
Time to put on my concerned face, Mary thought as she continued on. My personal preference is for the real egomaniacs. They’re always so much easier to spot. And subsequently pummel.
Then again, hadn’t they spotted three different dark ones? Was it possible that they were all working together, Delilah, Damon, and Lionel? The general practice was one at a time. It was almost like professional courtesy, Mary considered. And then again, there were periodic conspiracies. Are we due for one?
And if it is, what are they working on? She found herself wondering about the election as she past a ‘Suerte for Mayor’ banner hovering above a jetty on the River. Speaking of due, is this man just suicidal, or does he have an agenda working as well? He wasn’t dead yet. That fact alone lent Suerte a fair piece of credit in Mary’s book.
And then there was the Standard of Uruk. That sounded like Lionel, but Mme. Rumella didn’t believe it was him. Though the proprietress’s reasons were less than conclusive, she was the one with the knack for mystery.
Mary pulled out her Focus and ran it through her morning exercises as she pondered: single baton, double batons, torch, spear, shield, and claymore. She flicked the unnaturally light claymore over her wrist and returned it to single baton form.
Mary pictured her path, and headed northwest. North never felt like north to Mary, since it was an arbitrary position. Some people referred to it as twelve o’clock. That annoyed her. Either way, she would go up to the Fourth Quarter and then spiral inward towards Fernando Tarrega’s. That should put her there well after lunch time.
* * * *
Tina Virtue fretted over what she was about to do. She did not normally make house calls, to say nothing of un-requested ones. Normally, a client came to her, she performed her services, and that was the end of it. But Tina Virtue could tell that there was too much at stake here not to get involved. It was night, but she paraded down the street almost conspicuously.
The large house loomed ahead of her. To the normal eye, it looked dilapidated, hardly worth the time and effort it would take to refurbish and make it livable. But Tina Virtue saw the truth of the matter. The house was, despite its advanced age, in splendid condition. There was a light burning in one window, though anyone else would have seen darkness. Tina slunk up to the side of the house. Even as she knocked on the door, she could feel the illusion of the house enveloping her. To the casual observer, Tina had just disappeared.
There came a clicking of heels, quick, but not so fast as to tempt fate into toppling the walker down the stairs. The door swung open and Delilah Runestone appeared, Focus in hand. “What are you doing here?” Delilah demanded, eyes flashing.
“I am here to speak with you. Let me in.”
Delilah hesitated a moment, but then gestured for Tina to follow her inside. The burning light was upstairs, but Delilah led her down a ground-floor hallway to a sitting room. With a wave of her wand, the room sprang to life. The fireplace crackled, along with shining candles on every available surface. Tina blinked until her eyes accepted that the light wasn’t going away any time soon. Out the window, Tina could see a black wrought-iron table and chairs in the rear garden.
“Do you want a drink or something?”
“No, thank you,” Tina replied, setting herself down in an overstuffed armchair.
Delilah looked Tina over. Tina’s hair was slightly darker, and her eyes were green rather than painfully black, but other than that, they looked quite similar. She could almost be my sister, thought Delilah, but she said, “How did you find my house?”
“I know many things,” Tina replied.
Delilah wanted to slap her, but could think of smarter things to do. “Tell me what you want and get out,” she finally said.
“It’s my personal belief,” Tina began, “that you should go to Mme. Rumella’s and tell her what you are really doing.”
Delilah looked exasperated. “If you know so much, why don’t you tell them, hmm?”
“I do not reveal information learned in confidence from my clients,” said Tina resolutely. Delilah’s countenance became distinctly embarrassed. “I do suggest that you reveal yourself so that others may help you.”
“They’re already doing what I want them to do,” Delilah rejoined. “Besides... I can’t tell them.”
“You can,” Tina said slowly. “You choose not to.”
Delilah’s eyes flashed. She opened her mouth to argue, but knew that with Tina Virtue, it was futile to do so. “Fine,” she said in a low voice. “But I have my reasons. And I don’t have to take your advice.”
“Many decide not to,” said Tina easily. “They’re usually wrong.”
“I’m going to ask you to leave now,” said Delilah. She was struggling to remain calm. It was a common problem when talking to Tina Virtue, who had the infuriating tendency to tell people what they were doing wrong. The worst part, of course, was that you couldn’t pretend she was lying.
Tina rose gracefully and gave Delilah a cryptic, knowing look as she turned to leave. Delilah followed her silently down the hallway, where she readjusted her silk scarf and stepped outside. Tina knew it was difficult for people to accept the truth, and frankly though it was a wonder that she hadn’t been severely beaten more times in her life for telling the raw truth to the wrong person. However, Tina could take care of herself, and people knew that.
Tina allowed herself a small sigh. If Delilah had gone to Mme. Rumella, things would have worked out better. She was reasonably sure of that, and for Tina Virtue, reasonably sure was nearly always right. Even if she could never say so aloud. Someday, she thought, if she had the energy, she would put together a grand conspiracy, with only a gentle, truthful nudge here and there, just to prove that she could. She was reasonably sure that it would work, but then no-one knows everything.
* * * *
Mary knocked on Fernando’s door. He didn’t answer. Mary kicked in the door. She dodged the impenetrable cloud of incense as it rushed to attack her. Inside, she found the sitting room empty. Down the hall, the bathroom and bedroom both appeared empty. She stepped through into the kitchen and was greeted by the smell of a bubbling pot of soup. Fernando, dressed as ever like a peacock, sat at his small table with a bowl of soup and a crust of bread. He gave Mary a dirty look, even as he raised his spoon to his lips.
“How are you not finished with
lunch: it’s after three o’clock!” Mary said in an accusatory manner.
“I was busy. I’m just taking a break. If you don’t stop kicking in my door, I’m going to get the super up here to add extra safeguards to it.”
“And if you’re preternaturally lucky, they’ll hold up for several seconds. I have some questions for you.”
Fernando paused and gave her a look, and in that moment Mary knew she had made a grave error.
She braced herself for incoming sarcasm.
“Oh,” Fernando started, “questions for the oracle, is it? What a shocker. How am I ever going to recover from the shock of someone coming to me with questions? Thank God I don’t have a bad heart, otherwise I could be dead already.”
“Fernando,” she sighed, “what can you tell me?”
Fernando shrugged. “About the same as last time.”
“I think I know who the entity with the mission I should help with is.”
“Your big shiny friend, I’ve seen him.”
“You can see him now? Why couldn’t you see him before?”
“I mean I’ve seen him. When I was out buying vegetables for my soup,” he gestured at the bowl with his spoon.
“Oh.”
“I tried to read him, but I couldn’t,” Fernando remarked, taking another spoonful of soup.
“Right, because he’s a sorcerous being.”
“Right,” said Fernando, a little suspiciously.
“What about Suerte?” Mary asked.
“He’s going to be mayor,” said Fernando.
“You’re joking!”
“No, not joking,” he replied through soup. Swallowing, he continued, “I don’t know how he’s going to do it, but it’s pretty much set in stone at this point. Otherwise, I still can’t read anything about him.”
“Then how can you tell he’s going to be mayor?”
“Because,” Fernando explained as though she were being slow, “it’s not his fate, it’s everyone’s.”
Mary left, feeling more than a little unsettled. It was only four o’clock, but she decided she could use a drink. Remembering the last time she saw Fernando, Mary opted again for the Nightlight. It was past five there after all.