Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia) Read online

Reynard was grinning as he skirted the ragged edge of the midday market crowd. Everything was going exactly as planned.

  Using blueprints stolen from a dead inventor’s lab, he had spent the morning convincing a hastily convened assembly of merchants and minor members of Drell’s government that he was a brilliant if absent-minded engineer interested in making his designs reality and thereby providing the city-state with a massive mobile flame-thrower that would help protect them from the countless threats abroad in this wild world. To construct a prototype, he told them, he required not only funding—to the tune of several thousand gold pieces—but also access to the extremely rare, extremely valuable, and extremely flammable Phlogiston-22 stored in sealed subterranean vaults on the outskirts of the city.

  His performance as the scatterbrained genius had been so good he nearly fooled himself. He had mixed up everyone’s names, stammered out faux pas both endearing and embarrassing, and unleashed strings of incoherent tech-speak that glazed all eyes. And in the end he had won them over. They hadn’t said so, of course; bureaucracy dictated a series of further discussions and negotiations, the next one to be held tomorrow morning at the Merchant’s Guild. But their delighted smiles as they rose and thanked him for his time told him all he needed to know.

  If everything went as planned, he would soon wind up with not only enough gold to snap a mule’s back, but several canisters of Phlogiston-22, which he could then auction off to the highest bidder.

  Life was good.

  An explosion of laughter drew his attention to a large crowd off to his left. They were watching what was now called a Punching Judy show, a common marketplace entertainment in which a pair of leering puppets, a he and a she, shrieked and squawked and battered each other with blunt instruments.

  He watched the silly puppets for a second, then swept a bored glance over the audience. Then he froze in his tracks.

  At the far edge of the crowd stood a woman whose face was maddeningly familiar. She had light-brown skin, black hair that had been cropped to a fine down—a style currently popular among both men and women—and a red-and-green linen kirtle. Slung over her shoulder was a gray hemp bag weighed down with something heavy and angular.

  Reynard stood there staring at her for well over a minute, trying to recall where he had seen her before, while market-goers streamed past him and the early spring breeze, which retained just the faintest trace of winter’s chill, gently tousled his hair and tugged at his clothes. He was fairly sure she wasn’t one of his sexual conquests, though admittedly the list was so long not even he with his near-photographic memory could remember every single one. If indeed she wasn’t, it was a major oversight he ought to rectify. But he didn’t want to approach her until he had identified her, for she might be a former mark, and right now he couldn’t risk stirring up any unnecessary trouble, what with his Phlogiston scheme nearing fruition.

  Then she smiled at the puppets’ violent antics, and the sight of her perfectly white, even teeth—a sight rarer than comely whores in these diseased and brutal days—unlocked the right memory.

  It was the girl from New Portland, the one who had saved his life.

  Nine hundred years ago.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  As he crossed the crowd toward her, his eyes never once wavering from her face, barely aware of the toes he tromped and the shoulders he bumped and the murmured imprecations he received, he tried to remember her name. It was something odd. A regular noun with pleasant and comforting connotations. Beginning with an S.

  Serenity? Solidarity? No, not quite, but something like that. Her redheaded friend had had a similar name…

  Grace! That was the friend’s name. Grace. Grace and…

  Security? Stillness?

  Crap.

  Oh, well. No big deal. He knew all kinds of ways to get people to reveal their names to him without their realizing he didn’t already know.

  He was still a good fifteen feet from her when the audience burst into applause. Glancing stageward, he saw that the show was over, and the puppeteer had stepped out of his booth to take a bow. The puppets were still on his hands like a pair of grotesque mittens, and as he bowed he held up his arms and made the puppets bow, too.

  When he turned back to the girl, she was striding away toward Spear Street, shrugging her bag into a more comfortable position as she went.

  If he could just remember her name he could shout it out and make her stop. But the name (Sympathy? Satisfaction?) wouldn’t come, so he hurried after her, hoping to catch up.

  It wasn’t going to be easy, he soon saw. She walked fast and maneuvered through the ever-shifting mass of people with practiced ease, an ease he simply couldn’t rival, not with him having to split his attention between navigating the crowd and keeping track of her at the same time. It took all his effort just to match her pace.

  She exited the market and headed down Spear Street, a major thoroughfare lined with inns and taverns and shops and stables. Horses clopped along on every side. Wagons creaked and rattled. Blacksmiths’ anvils rang. A thousand conversations merged into a single ceaseless drone. The air stank of shit and straw and wood smoke.

  Six blocks down, with the neighborhood slowly growing seedier, she (Sweetness? Safety?) slowed to a near stop at the intersection of Spear Street and Cobbler’s Lane. Grinning, he hurried to close the remaining fifty feet between them. But then he saw the reason for her slowing down, saw what her attention was riveted on: one of Drell’s armored guards, standing tall and stiff with self-importance as he questioned an old man outside a stonemason’s a few doors past the intersection. Reynard also noted how her arm clamped the hemp bag against her side as if to hide it. Reynard himself slowed, intrigued by this unexpected development, and waited to see what the girl would do next.

  Keeping her wary eyes on the guard, she veered left onto Cobbler’s Lane, a quiet, sparsely traveled side street lined with artisans’ shops that sold specialty items—dolls, scrolls, baskets, and the like. The traffic here was very light, and he had no problem keeping track of her. He would have had no problem catching up to her, either, but the incident with the guard had piqued his curiosity, and he wanted to find out what she was up to before he revealed himself. Knowledge, after all, was power.

  As they made their way down Cobbler’s Lane he stayed a good thirty feet behind her and made sure to keep his eyes off her at all times, fixing them instead on the trio of children who happened to be racing past her, or on the window of a fletcher’s in which her reflection just happened to be visible. This, he quickly found, had been a wise decision, for a few times she half turned as if to examine the goods in a window she was passing, while no doubt in reality stealing a quick glimpse behind her to ensure the guard wasn’t on her tail.

  After a block and a half she turned down a narrow alley that connected Cobbler’s Lane with Twittenbrake Road. Reynard paused just short of the alley’s mouth and waited a few seconds, listening for any sound from the alley. He heard nothing. After a count of five, he strolled casually into the alley just in time to see her reach the opposite end and turn left.

  He trotted down the alley, splashing through puddles of unidentifiable muck and sending rats and roaches scuttling for cover. When he reached the far end, he stopped and peered around the corner in the direction she had gone.

  Twittenbrake was much busier than Cobbler’s Lane, with constant traffic into and out of and between the numerous taverns the street was infamous for, and for a few worrying moments he couldn’t find her amid the steady flux of bodies that moved about with varying degrees of coordination.

  But then he caught a quick glimpse of a figure with a black-fuzzed head and a red-and-green dress darting into another alley a hundred feet down on the opposite side of the street. He raced across Twittenbrake, swerving around startled drunks and bounding over a mangy yellow dog that was lapping up a puddle of vomit.

  When he reached the alley mouth and peered down it, he again caught only a fleeting
glimpse of the girl (Succor? Support?) as she turned down a side alley. Not good. This was one of those areas where the alleys branched and twisted to form networks so mazy you could get lost even with a map. If he didn’t catch her now, he might lose her completely.

  He rushed down the alley. The instant he rounded the corner into the side alley, a pair of huge meaty fists grasped the front of his shirt and slammed him against the side alley’s brick wall. The back of his head thwocked against the wall hard enough to make him see stars.

  “The hell you think you’re doin’?” growled a sneering, blond-stubbled face only inches from his. A thick scar as white and shiny as candle wax ran down the man’s right cheek. His breath stank of sardines and tooth decay.

  Reynard opened his mouth to respond, then paused, having spotted the girl over the man’s massive right shoulder. She stood ten feet away, watching blankly, her hemp bag and its mysterious contents held tightly to her chest. He met her eyes, hoping she would recognize him and call out for the blond man to stop, but her face remained blank.

  The man shook Reynard hard enough for Reynard’s head to smack the wall a second time.

  “Well?” the man snarled. “Answer me!”

  “I…I…” He inclined his head toward the girl. “I know her.”

  The man’s blond unibrow descended in a dubious frown.

  “Zat true?” he called back over his shoulder.

  The girl studied Reynard’s face. She shook her head.

  “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “‘S what I thought.” The man grinned at Reynard, revealing teeth in worse shape than his face. It was the grin of a man who knows he’ll soon be doing what he loves best. “Now you tell me what the hell you’s really up to.”

  Reynard looked at the girl again, desperately trying to remember her name. It was his only hope. What the hell was her damn name? Sanity? Solace?

  “Solace!”

  The man’s grin collapsed, and he emitted a surprised grunt. Solace blinked at Reynard in startlement. Then she frowned and shook her head slightly.

  “Have we met?” she said.

  Now that the immediate threat of violence was gone (or at least forestalled), he thought of more things he could say to try to jog her memory, things he probably would have thought of already if his head hadn’t been getting smacked against a wall.

  “Fall of New Portland,” he said to Solace.

  She looked blank again, and for a second he was afraid that she had forgotten the whole event, or that this wasn’t really her after all, only someone coincidentally similar, or, perhaps more likely, a descendant, recipient of similar genes and a name handed down through generations like a family heirloom.

  Then her eyes went wide.

  “Oh!”

  She regarded him with fascination for a moment, then said, “Yeah, now I remember you. But your name…I don’t quite…”

  “Reynard,” he said.

  “Of course! That’s right. Reynard.” She looked him up and down while a marveling smile spread across her face. “Wow. This is certainly a surprise.” To the blond man she said, “You can let him go, George.”

  George squinted balefully at Reynard, silently telling him not to try anything funny or something bad and painful and quite possibly fatal would happen. The hands released Reynard’s shirt. Reynard slumped against the wall, gently rubbing the growing bump on the back of his head.

  George stepped away as Solace stepped forward.

  “Are you hurt bad?” she asked Reynard.

  “Nah. Worst damage is to my pride. Well, unless I’m too concussed to realize it.”

  She smiled, relieved by his good humor. Then she looked at him more seriously. “Why were you following me like that?”

  “Honestly? I couldn’t recall your name until just a second ago. And you walk so fast, I couldn’t catch up. I didn’t want to just shout, ‘Hey, you girl there!’“

  Solace laughed. “I guess I do walk kind of fast.”

  “And, you know, people like us, we don’t really want to attract too much attention to ourselves, you know?” This was something of an understatement. The centuries since the Cataclysm had been an age of chaos, full of wars and invasions and betrayals. For safety’s sake, people stuck close to those most like themselves and shunned or killed anyone too different. Under such circumstances, you quickly learned to keep your differences to yourself.

  “After all,” Reynard concluded, flicking his eyes toward George, who stood scowling a few feet away, his arms folded across his chest, “you never know who might be listening.”

  She understood. “He knows. It’s okay.”

  “Ah.”

  “I know what?” growled George.

  “That I’m an Elder,” she said in a low voice. She gestured at Reynard. “He’s one, too.”

  At this, George’s whole demeanor changed. His face went slack with shock, his mouth dropping open so far you could have parked a cart inside. His arms fell from his chest and hung limply at his sides.

  “Uh…whuh…heck, I didn’t realize…” George flashed Reynard an obsequious smile and ducked his head in a little bow. “Sorry if I hurt you or anything, but, you know, you was followin’ Ms. Solace, and—”

  “Oh, I understand,” Reynard said. “It’s fine. Any decent man would’ve done the same.”

  “Thank you, Mr., um…”

  “Reynard’s fine.”

  “Reynard. Right.”

  “Um, if you don’t mind my asking, what’s an Elder?” Reynard asked Solace. “I think I understand from the context, but…”

  “It means someone who was alive before the Cataclysm and is still around today,” she explained.

  “Never heard the term before.”

  “It’s kind of newish. I heard it for the first time about fifty years ago in Cennomac, but it seems to be spreading fast.”

  George shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat. “Uh, if guys’re gonna talk about stuff like that, maybe you oughta get off the street. Plus, there’s, uh…you know. The thing.” He glanced meaningfully at Solace’s bag.

  “What thing?” Reynard asked.

  “Um…” Solace looked at George, then back at Reynard, then out the side alley’s mouth to the main alley beyond. “Let’s get inside first.”

  They headed a short distance down the side alley to a door Reynard hadn’t noticed before, mainly because it was painted the same color as the bricks around it. There were no signs on or around it, no windows, no indications of what was inside.

  George took out a heavy iron key ring, picked out a key, and unlocked the door. Pushing the door open, he motioned for them to enter. Reynard and Solace stepped into a narrow room that contained a bare, rough-hewn trestle table but no other furniture. A pair of lanterns sat on a shelf next to the door. The walls and ceiling were made of crudely cut planks of wood, clearly a recent replacement for whatever the original materials had been. The floor was old, cracked concrete. Opposite the entrance was a steel door painted green. This looked like part of one of the city’s original pre-Cataclysm buildings.

  Solace took one of the lanterns from the shelf and lit it. She turned and nodded at George, who had remained outside. He nodded in reply and shut the door.

  “He’s not coming in?” Reynard asked.

  “He’s the guard. That’s why he was a little…rough with you.”

  “Just a little,” he said, rubbing the back of his head with a grimace.

  She winced apologetically. “Sorry about that, but I’m kind of twitchy about strangers following me. Or old acquaintances I don’t remember right away. Sorry about that, too. There’s a lot up here.” She tapped the side of her head. “It takes some time to sort through it all.”

  “I know the feeling. Luckily, though, it’s usually not much of an issue. I don’t often run into people I haven’t seen in nine hundred years.”

  “Same here. I’ve met only a few others like us, though I’ve heard about maybe two dozen more.
”

  “Yeah, that about tallies with my own experiences. So just how long-lived are you?”

  She laughed. “Thanks for not saying ‘old.’ No woman wants to hear that, even if she is functionally immortal. Anyway, if you must know, I celebrated my thousandth birthday about two decades back. You?”

  “Nearly seventeen hundred.”

  “Wow. I think that might be the oldest I’ve heard of. Well, at least as far as humans go. I talked to a robot once that claimed to be over sixteen-thousand years old. And I’ve heard that fairies and dragons—”

  There was a click, and the steel door opened just enough to allow a woman’s worried face to peer out.

  “Hey, Dwan,” Solace said. “It’s okay. You can come out. It’s safe.”

  The door swung wide, revealing a tall, gray-haired woman in a brown wool tunic dress. Despite the hair, she looked to be only around thirty-five. In her hand was a burning lantern similar to Solace’s. Behind her, a door-lined corridor stretched away.

  “I wasn’t sure,” Dwan said, stepping into the room with a smile that was half relief, half embarrassment. “I heard the outer door open, and then some voices, but no one came in.” She eyed Reynard, then glanced questioningly at Solace.

  “This is Reynard,” Solace said. “He’s an Elder.”

  Like George’s, Dwan’s face collapsed in amazement.

  “Well now!” she exclaimed, giving Reynard a big, starstuck smile. “It’s a great pleasure to meet you.”

  “It’s an even greater pleasure to meet you,” Reynard said. “When most people find out what I am, they want to set me on fire.”

  Dwan gave a derisive snort. “Most people are superstitious primitives, ready to kill anything they don’t understand. Some of us know better.”

  “They’re just afraid,” Solace told her a little wearily, as if this were an old, recurring argument. “With all the chaos and strife in the world, who can blame them?”

  “They’re adults. They have eyes and ears and brains. They should know better.”

  “So, what are you guys?” Reynard asked. “Some kind of pro-diversity group?”

  Dwan flashed Solace a shocked look. “He doesn’t know?”

  “We just met up,” Solace said. “I haven’t had a chance to tell him.”

  “Well, you better show him around the place!” She grinned at Reynard. “Trust me: You’ll love it.”

  “You’re welcome to join us,” Solace said.

  “Can’t. Gotta finish the inventory before the meeting.” She heaved a sigh. “My slave labor is never done.”

  She began to turn back toward the hallway, but then started a little, suddenly remembering something, and turned to Solace.

  “I almost forgot. I take it everything went okay?” She gestured at Solace’s bag.

  “It was all completely hitchless,” Solace said.

  “Good.”

  Dwan headed down the hallway. Reynard and Solace followed, Solace shutting the metal door behind them. Halfway down the corridor Dwan stopped before a door on the right.

  “Well, I will be in my usual prison cell here,” she said. “If you need anything, just holler.” She paused a moment, eyes and smile fixed on Reynard. “I hope I get to see you again later.”

  “Likewise,” Reynard said.

  Dwan’s smile split into a grin. With a nod she opened the door and slipped into the room beyond. Reynard caught a quick glimpse of a wooden desk heaped high with papers, and then the door clicked shut.

  “She’s nice,” Reynard said.

  “Oh, she is. Very nice. But be careful: She’s also a scholar. Give her a chance and she’ll interrogate you about every minute detail of your life until you want to throw her out a window.”

  He laughed. “Sounds like you speak from hard experience.”

  “Alas.”

  She led Reynard to a blank metal door at the end of the corridor. Taking a key from a hidden pocket in her kirtle, she unlocked the door.

  “Welcome,” she said with a playfully melodramatic intonation as she pushed open the door, “to the Database.”

  On the other side of the door was a long concrete room full of wooden shelving units that were packed with books, parchments, boxes, statuettes, clothing, crystals, and a bewildering variety of other items. Luminous silver spheres the size of pumpkins had been strategically placed on pedestals throughout the room to provide light.

  “What is this?” Reynard asked as he followed Solace inside. He studied a row of scrolls on a shelf next to the door. They were written in a language he had never seen before. “Is it like a library or something?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Solace said. She dimmed her lantern and set it aside, the weird glowing globes having rendered it unnecessary. “The Database started out as a way of preserving knowledge from pre-Cataclysm civilizations. It was actually begun by the government of Drell shortly after the Cataclysm to gather information about monsters they were facing and technology they came across and things like that. Over time it became a bit less utilitarian and began to include pre-Cataclysm artifacts of any kind. More recently, it’s evolved once again to include items from all the different cultures and species of Eridia.” She glanced at him. “You’ve heard ‘Eridia’ before, right?”

  He nodded. Eridia was a term that had been swiftly gaining ground among humans as the name of the known world, which at this point extended from the Akai Desert in the west to the Ocean in the east, and from the Northern Wastes to the South Sea. No one was sure what, if anything, “Eridia” meant or where the word had come from, but most folks were relieved to finally have a halfway decent-sounding name for the landmass they lived on other than “The Land” or “The World” or something equally banal.

  “Now I understand your concerns about security,” he said as he examined a fist-sized cube made of bone, every side of which was carved with stars, skulls, trees, and other simple, iconic images. “Lots of people would love to raze this place to the ground. I take it the local government isn’t involved anymore?”

  “No. A few hundred years ago, they decided to shut the Database down and throw everything away to make room for an expansion to the city’s armory. Fortunately, the person in charge of the Database at that time—a fellow named Lummy Hood—managed to convince the government to let him cart it all off and store it at his own expense on the condition they be allowed to look at it whenever they wanted. As far as I know, they never wanted to, and at this point I doubt a single individual in Drell’s government even knows the Database ever existed, let alone that it still does.”

  “And you want to keep it that way, eh?”

  “Exactly. The militaristic xenophobes currently in charge would probably label the Database a ‘harmful outside influence’ and torch it on the spot.”

  They made their way through the room, pausing often while Reynard inspected some of the items: a pamphlet titled “Waste Disposal Procedures for BioDome 8 (NorthAm)”; two dozen color slides showing a black-walled room equipped with manacles, metal tables, floor drains, and scads of sinister implements bristling with blades and hooks; a bundle of letters addressed to someone named Appolei f’fff Kei AGA who resided in a place called Upper Quayr; a bright yellow oboe-like instrument that branched into two separate mouthpieces; a fold-out street guide to a city named Doomstadt; a red, white, and purple pin-back button that read “Re-elect Pandufin in ‘06!”; and a textbook titled An Introduction to Therianthropic Cellular Biology (Second Edition).

  “This is incredible,” Reynard muttered. And he meant it, though not in the way Solace probably thought. A lot of this stuff would be worth a fortune to certain collectors. He glanced around, trying to estimate the potential value of the room’s contents. He gave up around a hundred thousand gold pieces. Maybe if his Phlogiston scheme allowed him the time, he could orchestrate a little heist…

  Solace interpreted his looking around as an attempt to grasp the room’s layout.

  “The section we’re in is a
ll pre-Cataclysm stuff,” she said. “There are artifacts from thousands of civilizations here. As far as we can tell, most of those civilizations are just gone, with no known members surviving the Cataclysm. We’ve got old books no one can translate, images of creatures and things no one recognizes, machines no one can figure out how to use. Sometimes it gets to me a little. Sometimes I feel like I’m working in a graveyard.”

  “What’s the story with those?” Reynard asked, pointing at one of the glowing globes that lit the room.

  “Aren’t those amazing? They never stop glowing. They’re some kind of special crystalline thingies that were used as a natural light source by a pre-Cataclysm elf society. A Database scouting party found them amid some ruins in a ravine in the Peletite Mountains. We’re not entirely sure how they work, but they sure work well. I wish someone would figure out their secret so we could make them for everybody.”

  Reynard put his hand over the globe. He felt no heat, no sensations of any kind. “You sure it’s safe? These things could be radioactive.”

  “They seem to be safe. They’ve been in use here for over two centuries now without a problem. Besides, if they were radioactive, they would’ve affected the elves, too. After all, we’re not that biologically dissimilar. Which reminds me…”

  She opened her bag and carefully withdrew a large rectangular object wrapped in a cloth. “Our latest acquisition. Something really unusual.”

  “What is it?”

  She set the object on an empty patch of shelf and unwrapped it, revealing a box made of bright green coral. She flipped a latch and lifted the lid. Inside were twenty compartments, each containing a small ovate stone in a nest of intricately woven strips of seaweed. The stones bore tiny images of sea life and ocean-bottom geography, the images having been made by delicately chipping away at the stones’ outermost layers to reveal bits of other layers beneath, each layer being a different color due to some peculiar process of lithification.

  “This was donated to us by the sister of a woman who recently died,” Solace explained. “The story goes, the dead woman fell in love with a merman when she was a teenager, and he gave her this as a gift. Shortly afterward, he returned to the sea and never returned.”

  “Typical male.”

  Solace tutted, but couldn’t suppress a smile. “Cynic.”

  “Realist.”

  Still smiling, she shook her head, then picked up the coral box. “Come on. I need to put this with the other new acquisitions.”

  She led him through the stacks toward the far end of the room.

  “I’d hate to be the guy responsible for dusting all this stuff,” Reynard said.

  She laughed. “You think this is bad? This place is nothing compared with the Peridor Archives.”

  “The what?”

  “Peridor Archives. It’s a much, much bigger version of this. So far, it fills about five rooms the size of this one. And I hate to say it, but it’s much better organized. Then again, the woman who runs it is an Elder like us, and boy, is she a stickler for proper categorization. And I’ve heard there are a few other, similar data-preservation projects here and there, but none as big as the one in Peridor, or even this one.”

  “I had no idea this was such a booming business.” Maybe once he had heisted the Drell Database, he would move on to Peridor.

  She snorted. “A handful of rooms in all of Eridia versus enough armies and arsenals and irrational hatred to sink a continent? I’d hardly call that booming.”

  “It’s better than nothing.”

  “Very true. Here we are.” They had come to the room’s far wall, against which stood a trestle table that matched the one in the anteroom. Solace set the coral box on the table, where it joined a Palu-Batatan slave collar, a cameo of an old woman with a pair of stubby horns sprouting from her forehead, and a stack of moldy paperbacks written by an author named J.T.P. Bromanski.

  There were four chairs at the table, and Solace pulled one out, turned it to face the room, and slumped into it with a weary sigh.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve been on my feet for hours.”

  “Same here, actually,” Reynard said. “I could use a sit-down.”

  He settled into the chair next to hers, likewise with his back to the table. They sat in silence for a moment, staring out at the assorted products of this world and a thousand vanished others.

  “I keep hoping one day I’ll find something from Interon,” Solace said. She glanced at Reynard and answered the question forming on his lips before he could ask it: “That’s where I’m from.”

  “Ah.”

  “So far, though, nothing’s turned up.”

  “What was Interon like?”

  “Very technologically advanced. Nothing like this world. Everything was regulated and sanitary and safe. There wasn’t any war or poverty or disease. It was nice, if sometimes a bit dull. My crazy family more than made up for any dullness, though.”

  “Crazy how?”

  “Oh, all kinds of ways. For one thing, I had four siblings, two sisters and two brothers, which was highly unusual. In Interon it was frowned upon for any family to have more than two children. But my parents were iconoclasts, freethinkers who followed their own hearts. To be honest, I think they kind of regretted it a little in this case; my siblings and I were quite a handful. My parents had to develop a different parenting strategy for each one of us, because we all had such wildly different personalities.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. My oldest brother, Jonquial? He was the nicest guy you could ever hope to meet. He ended up becoming a peace liaison.”

  “A what?”

  “Um…kind of like a city guard, only…different.”

  “That’s helpful,” he said dryly.

  “It’s hard to explain. Let’s just say he served the peace.”

  “Got it.”

  “And then on the opposite side of the scale there was Ashema, my youngest sister. She was, shall we say, a bad seed. A very bad seed. We tried to help her as best we could, tried to get her to change, but nothing ever stuck. We finally had to let my brother arrest her. I mean, we loved her, of course. We never stopped loving her. It’s just…we didn’t know what to do with her.”

  “What was she up to that was so bad?”

  “Drugs, mostly.”

  “Ah. What was she taking?”

  “Oh, she wasn’t taking anything. She was making. And selling. It was this highly addictive stuff called Eclipse. I am so glad that stuff didn’t survive the Cataclysm. But anyway, it was the same way with all my siblings: No two of us had the same interests or temperaments or anything. My mom always hypothesized that our differences were due to the effects of her erratic diet during pregnancy on our sensitive fetal brains. But then, she was a biochemist.”

  “What about your dad? What did he do?”

  “He taught philology. University level.”

  “And you? What did you do for a living?”

  “Well, at the time the Cataclysm struck, I wasn’t actually working at all. I was back in school studying for my tenth degree, this one in Sociology. But as I’m guessing you’ll understand, I’d held a wide variety of jobs, everything from a political campaign aide to a nutritionist.” She flapped a hand dismissively. “I think that’s more than enough about me for the moment. What about you? What was your homeworld like? What did your parents do?”

  “My homeworld was a lot more primitive than yours, so there were fewer options as far as careers. My father was a farmer. My mom was a seamstress.” This was a complete fabrication. He never knew his father, and his mother was a whore. “Honestly, there isn’t really much to tell about my early years. Most of my childhood was spent on a farm.” This, at least, was partly true. He had spent three years working on one as a child; it was punitive labor, consequence of a pyromaniacal phase he had gone through at the age of seven. “It was all very…simple. Low-tech.”

  “You must feel kind of at home in this w
orld, then,” she said. She tried to sound chipper, pleased for him, but behind her gladness, something troubled lurked. Based on what she had told him about her own origins, it wasn’t hard to conclude that she herself didn’t feel even remotely at home in this world, that she felt alien, lonely. These were feelings he could use to his advantage.

  Before he could employ any of the stratagems that were rapidly unfolding in his mind, she said, “So how did you get to be immortal, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Magic,” he said, lying. It was a lie he had told before. The truth was, he had no idea why he stopped aging in his late twenties. The truth was dull, though, so he invented something more interesting. “I took part in this battle against a gigantic magical monster that was trying to conquer my homeland, Greater Teutonia. After a long, vicious battle, we finally managed to kill it, but as it died, all the powerful magic it contained exploded outward, altering reality in the immediate vicinity in strange, chaotic ways. Nearly everyone present was killed, and the handful who weren’t were changed in various ways. One guy had been turned into metal. Another had been literally turned inside-out. And me? I stopped aging.”

  “Wow. You got lucky.”

  “I know. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t tell myself that.” He turned sideways in his chair, facing her, and rested his elbow on the tabletop. “So what about you? I told you my secret origin; you tell me yours.”

  “Believe it or not, I volunteered for an experiment. I chose to be like this. See, this scientist in Interon had developed something he thought would halt the aging process. He’d tested it on a few lower mammals—mice, monkeys, stuff like that—but he needed to test it on some humans, so he asked for volunteers. I was one of six. The experiment was a rousing success for all six of us.”

  “So, what, you drank some potion, or—”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t a potion. The chemical was delivered as a gas. For sixty days we had to live in a sealed underground complex where this stuff was mixed with the air, and during that time I guess it sort of saturated our bodies, our cells, and altered them in some way. I think.” She laughed, a bit self-consciously. “I was never quite a stickler for the details, especially where science is involved. But anyway, yeah, I stopped aging, and I never get sick, and I heal about five times faster than the average person. At least from normal injuries. I don’t know what would happen if I got a really severe injury, like if I got a limb cut off or something. I’d really rather not find out, actually.”

  “What happened to the other volunteers?” he asked. “Did they survive the Cataclysm, too?”

  “No idea. I kept in touch with them until the Cataclysm, but after that…” She shrugged. “Honestly, as far as I can tell, I’m the only thing from all of Interon to survive.” She shook her head slowly. Her eyes were distant, unfocused, lost in memories. She gave a small sigh that hitched a little at the top. “I keep hoping the scavenging parties will turn up something.” She looked down at her lap. “I know it’s foolish—”

  “Not at all,” he said in a soft voice. He reached out with the arm on the table and cupped her shoulder. “I understand perfectly. I’m in the same boat myself. I mean, yeah, this world is similar to the one I came from in a lot of ways…but it’s not the same. It’s not mine. It’ll never be mine.”

  She flashed him a sad, grateful smile. “It’s good to know someone understands.”

  He let go of her shoulder but kept the arm extended so his hand lay right beside her, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from her body. She didn’t object to the continued closeness. On the contrary, she turned in her seat to face him, just as he had turned to face her earlier. It was then, with that movement, that he knew he had her.

  “Yeah,” he said. “There aren’t many like us out there. It can feel pretty lonely sometimes.” His eyes flicked to her lips, then back to her eyes. “You know?”

  She gave a small nod. Her own eyes likewise briefly dropped to his lips, then rose to meet his gaze again. “I do.”

  And here we go, he thought. He slowly leaned forward, his eyes still fixed on hers. She leaned forward to meet him…

  The door opened.

  “You guys still in here?” Dwan called.

  Solace breathed out a small, annoyed groan and stood up. Reynard did likewise, disappointed at the interruption but sure that the moment had simply been deferred rather than killed entirely.

  “We’re back here,” Solace said, striding across the room. Reynard followed close behind.

  “There you are,” Dwan said, meeting them in the middle of the pre-Cataclysm section. The trio moved doorward. “I finished the inventory, but there are a few irregularities I’d like to go over with you before the meeting. Um, that is, if you don’t mind my tearing you away from our esteemed guest.”

  “Sure.” Solace looked at Reynard. “I hate to do this, but we’ve got this really big meeting tonight—a Database workers–only kind of thing—and—”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Reynard said. “I understand.”

  “But I have some free time tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps if you’re not busy, we could meet then. I could show you around the Database some more. Maybe you’ll even find something from Greater Teutonia.”

  “That would be fantastic.”

  They reached the door. Solace picked up her lantern, and the trio stepped out into the hall. Solace shut and locked the Database’s door, then turned to Reynard.

  “So how about we meet here tomorrow afternoon at three?”

  He grinned. “Sounds perfect.”

  She grinned.

  Dwan loudly cleared her throat.

  “Inventory,” Dwan said to Solace’s half-querying, half-irritated glance. “Not a lot of time, you know.” She gave Reynard a wincing smile. “Sorry. I’m the bad guy. Hate me.”

  “Not possible,” Reynard said. “Besides, I really need to get going anyway. It was nice meeting you.”

  “Likewise.”

  He looked at Solace. “And I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She nodded. “Tomorrow.”

  Reynard headed outside. After briefly savoring the spate of servile smiling and head-ducking his sudden appearance precipitated from George, Reynard strolled away down the alley, all the while wondering what delicious pleasures tomorrow would hold.