Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “Is it true, then?” he asks, taking a careful step toward Reed. “Have you done it?”

  “The Doctrine lives,” Reed says. “It walks among us, prisoned in flesh, malleable, young, and foolish. I’ll have my day. As your ally or as your enemy, I’ll have it.”

  “Do you believe you can control it? A force great enough to remake time?”

  “I believe I already have.” The astrolabe, spinning, rewinding—oh, yes. He will control it.

  The universe is his to command.

  Daniels looks at him for a long, silent moment before inclining his head in acknowledgment. “Then it seems we must welcome you home, alchemist, for you have so much to teach us.”

  The other men look alarmed, unable to believe this is happening. Reed smiles, walking quickly across the vestry to kneel before the older alchemist. When Daniels’s hand caresses his hair, it is like being touched by the fingers of a mummy: papery, ancient, and scented with the votive oils of the tomb.

  “Believe in our works, and we will guide you to the light,” says Daniels.

  (Asphodel at the end, bleeding her life out on the floor, a look of strange contentment on her face, like she always knew this would be the end of her; like she has been waiting. Like somehow, by losing, she’s won. He rages at that expression, but it’s too late. She’s gone, she’s gone, and if this was her victory, she’s carried it with her to the grave.)

  “And the light shall guide me home,” says Reed.

  He is triumphant in his defeat.

  By the time they realize why, he knows, it will be too late, and Asphodel, who would never have been forced to create him, her killer, if not for the small-minded fools who now surround him, will be avenged.

  All he has to do is wait, and his cuckoos will spread their wings, and the universe will be his.

  The Astrolabe

  TIMELINE: 10:22 CST, JULY 3, 1986.

  Alone, Asphodel’s astrolabe turns. The planets spin through their fixed and finite orbits; the jeweled stars move, charting a course as precise as the heavens themselves. Forward and back they go, revolving, twirling, avoiding collision by millimeters, so that it seems impossible that anything so intricate could possibly exist in physical space, unbound from the actuality of the cosmos. By looking into the mechanism, it is almost possible to see time itself modeled inch by inch and day by day, transcribed according to a human being’s limited perceptions.

  When it stops, even for a moment, creation trembles. When it spins, time resumes.

  There are too many days between germination and growth to chart them all, and so the astrolabe spins on and on, faster and faster, until seven years have passed and the Doctrine—split between six bodies, six potential hosts, two by two and separated as far from one another as geography allows—is mature enough to make its presence known.

  The Impossible City is at hand.

  The girl was very pale, with waterweeds in her hair and tangled around her toes. Her feet were bare, and all of her glistened with a silvery sheen, like she had been dusted in glitter and set out into the world to see what could be seen.

  “What are you?” asked Zib, forgetting her manners in the face of her awe. Avery stuck an elbow in her side, but it was too late: the question had been asked.

  “My name is Niamh,” said the girl. “I come from a city deep beneath the surface of a lake, in a place so cold that the ice only thaws once every hundred years.”

  “People don’t live under lakes,” said Avery. “There’s no air. Only water. People don’t breathe water.”

  “Oh, but you see, the people where I’m from don’t breathe at all.” Niamh smiled, showing teeth like pearls. “And only when the ice melts do we come up to the surface to see how other people live. But while I was on the shore gathering stones, a storm came, and the Page of Frozen Waters appeared, and snatched me up, and carried me to the King of Cups. He’s a very cruel king, and he kept me so long that the ice froze solid again, and now I’m just a drowned girl with no city at all, until the next time the thaw comes.”

  “A hundred years is a very long while,” said Avery. He couldn’t let himself think too hard about the way her skin glistened, or her claims to come from a place where people didn’t breathe. Surely she was kidding. “Won’t you be too old then to swim?”

  “Not at all. When I’m home, I don’t breathe, and when I’m here, I don’t age. That way, I can always make it back to the ice, if I’m clever.”

  Zib, though, had what felt like a more important question. “Who is the Page of Frozen Waters?”

  Niamh sobered. “She is the worst of all the King’s subjects, because she loves him and hates him at the same time, and she would do anything to please him. She commands the crows, and they do her bidding. For him, she gathers every strange thing that comes into the Up-and-Under. She’ll gather you, if you’re not careful.”

  Avery and Zib exchanged a glance and stepped closer together, suddenly afraid of this glittering girl, and of everything her presence might entail.

  —From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

  BOOK II

  The Doctrine Matures

  Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist of creating out of void, but out of chaos.

  —Mary Shelley

  Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

  —Edward Sapir

  Introduction

  TIMELINE: 16:22 EST, APRIL 9, 1993 (SEVEN YEARS POST-EMBODIMENT).

  “Have you finished your homework?”

  “No,” says Roger, hiding his book under his desk before his mother sees. She likes the way he reads. She likes that he’s smart. He’s heard her bragging to her friends about her “little professor,” and how he’s going to change the world someday, just you wait. But she doesn’t like the way he reads when he’s supposed to be doing homework, and lately—after a few dismaying conversations with his teacher—she’s started confiscating his books when she thinks he’s using reading to get out of doing something else.

  Which, technically, he is. This worksheet should have been done an hour ago. But he was at a good place in his book (they’re all good places), and reading a little further seemed more important than multiplying a few stupid numbers. The numbers don’t need him to give them meaning the way the words do. Words don’t mean anything without someone to understand them. Numbers just are. He’s extraneous to the process. “Extraneous” is one of his new words.

  Roger Middleton is seven years old and so in love with language that there’s no room in his world for anything else. He doesn’t play sports or go on adventures in the nearby woods; he doesn’t want a dog or to spend the weekend at a friend’s house. He just wants to read, to listen, to expand his understanding of the syllables making up the universe around him.

  (His mother isn’t as bad as she could be. She takes his books when he neglects things like his math homework, but she gives them back, and she’s never told him something was too advanced for him. Instead, she showers him with books, as many as he asks for, and seems to delight endlessly in how fast he learns. She’s even given him some books written in other languages, like Spanish or German or Cantonese, and how she laughs when he reads her those stories! Even if she can’t understand what he’s saying, she still laughs. So he knows she’s proud of him. She has to be.)

  He looks at her and smiles hopefully, and she melts. She always does. “All right, mister,” she says, mock-stern. “I’ll be back to check your worksheet in fifteen minutes. You’d better have at least half the problems done, or I’m clearing all the books out of here for two days. Even the ones you have hidden in your drawers.”

  Roger gasps, horrified. “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and bends over his paper, pencil scratching out answers as he sets himself to the serious work of keeping his reading privileges.

  Ten minutes later, the short burst of productivity has burnt itself out, and he’s once again staring
at a sea of numbers and mathematical sigils, wondering whether he can risk pulling his book back from under the desk.

  “The answer’s sixteen,” says a girl’s voice. It is not, precisely, coming from the air next to him; it seems to be coming from the space he currently occupies. It is also not, precisely, one of the voices he sometimes hears in his head when he pretends to be a famous author, writing a new book, or a lauded teacher, explaining the definition of a newly discovered word to an eager audience. It’s a new voice, an outside voice, and not his invention at all.

  Roger stiffens. Voices from nowhere aren’t a good thing. Being clever and quiet means hearing his mother brag about his cleverness to her friends. It also means hearing his teachers tell her how it worries them that he doesn’t play with the other kids, that he prefers the company of books to the company of people. Maybe there’s something … wrong with him. They only ever say that in a whisper, and never when they think he could be listening, but he hears them.

  He doesn’t want something to be wrong with him. So he says nothing. Most people go away if he doesn’t talk to them.

  The girl sighs, exasperated. “Did you hear me? It’s sixteen, stupid. Write it down.”

  Automatically, Roger does. The answer looks correct, nestled under the eight and the two and the little “x” that means to multiply. Still, he doesn’t say anything.

  “I can do the rest for you. If you want.”

  “You can?” He claps his hand over his mouth, looking anxiously around in case his mother somehow crept into the room and heard him talking to the air. Lowering his voice, he asks, more softly, “You can?”

  “Sure. I’m bored. Let me?”

  “Um. Okay.”

  She rattles off answers as fast as he can write them down, sometimes skipping three or four problems ahead before doubling back. She never pauses to explain. He’s not here to learn: he’s here to do transcription, to let her scratch whatever strange itch would drive someone to do someone else’s math homework. When they’re finished, when the last math problem is complete—along with the four bonus problems at the bottom of the sheet, something he’s never bothered to do before—he drops his pencil and stares at the graphite marks covering his paper.

  “Wow.”

  “What? It’s really basic stuff. Boring. We should do some calculus.”

  Roger can’t take it anymore. “Who are you?” he asks. “Is this a trick?”

  “No, silly, this is math. Math is never a trick. Math never plays tricks. Sometimes it makes problems, but they always have solutions. Not like stupid English.” The girl’s voice turns frustrated. “Frogs don’t wear clothes and drive cars, and if you get sucked up by a tornado you wind up dead, not in someone else’s country, and a road can’t be improbable. It’s all a big dumb lie for big dummy liars, but they still make us learn it. It’s not fair.”

  Here is something Roger understands. “It’s not a lie,” he says, triumphant. “It’s a metaphor.” He pronounces the word with a long e, like “meet-a-for.” Neither of them notices. (In later years, when mispronunciation has become one of his greatest fears, he’ll look back on this moment and grimace, wondering how they could ever have become friends when he started their relationship with a mangled word.) “It’s using a thing that’s not true to talk about things that are.”

  “If something’s not true, it’s a lie.”

  “Not always.” He doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain why this is so: he just knows it is, that sometimes things are symbols for ideas bigger than they could ever be without help, that sometimes untruths are the truest thing of all. “I still don’t know who you are.”

  “Dodger Cheswich.” Her voice turns prim, and he recognizes that tone, because he’s heard it from his own lips: it’s the voice of the smartest kid in school being asked a senseless question. “We rhyme. Ro-ger and Dod-ger.”

  Roger goes very still. How does she know his name? She can’t know his name unless she’s really from inside his head, and if she’s from inside his head, there’s something wrong with him. He doesn’t want there to be something wrong with him.

  But she’s still talking, the words quick and unrelenting, and it’s easy to let the worry go. She’s real. She has to be real. He could never imagine anyone like her. “Maybe us rhyming is why I can do your homework. Maybe all rhyming kids are like this. Do you have any more?”

  “Names?”

  “No, stupid. Homework.”

  “Not tonight,” he says, and is dimly delighted to realize he’s telling the truth: he, and the voice in his head, have completed all the problems on the worksheet. What’s more, he did it all by himself, so the handwriting matches up. Then he frowns. “Is this cheating?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I argue with my teachers about whether I’m cheating a lot, and they never said ‘a voice in your head that gives the answers is cheating.’ So this can’t be cheating.”

  The answer just raises more questions. Roger is beginning to feel like he’s trying to run up the side of an avalanche. This Dodger girl—who isn’t real, can’t be real; voices in your head aren’t real—is too exhausting to be a good imaginary friend. “I don’t think we should do this.”

  “Come on. I’m bored.” She sounds frustrated. “Stupid Jessica Nelson hit me in the face with a red bounce ball during recess, and now I have to be in the nurse’s office until my mom comes to take me home. I’m missing math and dance and I didn’t get to eat my pudding cup.”

  None of this matches Roger’s understanding of imaginary friends. It doesn’t match what he knows about people who hear voices, either. He just knows she sounds so … so sad, and that she helped him with his homework. So he reaches for his pencil, and a clean sheet of paper, and says, “Let me teach you about metaphors.”

  When his mother looks in, sometime later, Roger is bent over the paper, mumbling to himself as he writes. She can see the finished worksheet off to one side, and she smiles.

  Maybe he can be taught to follow instructions after all.

  * * *

  Midnight creeps into the room one second at a time. Roger is deep in a comforting dream—one about trains and teddy bears and that weird noise the pantry door makes—when a hand touches his shoulder. He sits bolt upright in bed, eyes already open, searching for the intruder.

  There’s no one there.

  “Oh, good,” says the voice from before. “You’re awake. I was bored.”

  “Who’s there?” He looks wildly around.

  She sighs. “It’s Dodger, hello? Why’d I have to have an imaginary friend who’s a dumb boy who doesn’t like math? I wanted something cool. Like an elephant.”

  Roger sinks back into the pillows, scowling at the ceiling. He’s been in bed for more than three hours: the glow-in-the-dark stars have mostly lost their shine. A few still glimmer dimly, like he’s looking at them through deep water. “I’m not an elephant.”

  “I know. Why were you asleep?”

  “Because it’s midnight.”

  “No it’s not. It’s nine. My dad says I have to be in bed so I’m not a butt in the morning.” Dodger’s tone shows how little she thinks of this advice. “It’s not my fault I wake up before he’s had his coffee. What are you doing?”

  “Sleeping,” hisses Roger. “I’m not your imaginary friend. I have school tomorrow.”

  “Me, too. And you have to be my imaginary friend.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you’re not, I’m talking to myself.” There’s something familiar in her voice: fear. She’s afraid of what it would mean if she started talking to herself. Roger lets himself thaw a little. None of this makes any sense at all, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Maybe it would be good to have someone to talk to.

  “How can you be talking to me?”

  “I dunno.” He feels her shrug. “I close my eyes and you’re there. It’s like picking up a phone. I can see the stuff you see, too, when I try. Lik
e with the math. Do you have any more?”

  “No. Hang on.” He gets out of bed, limbs protesting all the way. His mind is awake, thanks to Dodger’s cheerful refusal to be quiet, but his body knows it’s supposed to be asleep. When he’s sure he can walk without falling he shuffles out of his room and down the hall. The house is as close to silent as it ever gets. The clock downstairs in the kitchen ticks to itself; a branch scrapes against the hallway window; the wind whistles through the eaves. There’s a dreamlike quality to everything, divorced from the waking world by the strangeness of it all.

  (It has to happen now, he realizes, dimly aware that the things he’s experiencing should seem impossible. Two years ago, he would have accepted voices in his head helping him with his homework as so natural that he’d have told everyone about it, cheerfully unaware that some things are best kept secret. Two years from now, he would think hearing voices meant he was going crazy and would claw himself to ribbons trying to make it stop. This is the perfect time. This is the one point on his timeline where contact can be made without trauma or damage. He doesn’t know how he knows that, or why he’s so sure that two years in either direction would change everything, but he’s seven years old; he accepts his conclusion without questioning it.)

  The door to his parents’ room is closed. He’s the only one awake. Well, him, and Dodger—but she doesn’t count, does she? She’s in a different house, a different place entirely. If she exists at all.

  He trails a hand along the wall as he walks, feeling the worn places in the wallpaper. His fingers have sketched them, night after night. When he was small, he used to reach up to find the wall, letting his hand land at a level even with his ears. As he got taller, his hand dropped to shoulder height. Now it trails slightly above his waist, following the same track it always has. Sometimes in the morning he looks at that worn strip of wallpaper and thinks about what it means: how soon he’ll need to reach down to keep running his fingers along the same patch of wall. How he’s growing, a little more every day, and nothing stays the same forever.