The Forbidden Lock

by Liesl Shurtliff

  “Sheep brains,” Jia said. “It’s a delicacy.”

  Matt felt himself go a little green, but nevertheless nodded and dished himself some. He wasn’t about to look like a squeamish child in front of the emperor. He took a bite and chewed for a moment. It tasted like very soft tofu.

  “My daughter tells me you have come in need of help,” the emperor said, speaking to Matt.

  Matt had to swallow the brains before answering. “Shi,” he said, glancing at his mom. “We’ve come because . . . there have been certain unintended consequences to our travels, some that have caused a fair amount of trouble.”

  The emperor nodded. “That seems logical. Time is a delicate tapestry, easily torn and unraveled. I would imagine traveling through it would cause a great deal of trouble.”

  Matt thought it interesting that he used the word tapestry to describe time. He thought of the scraps of Corey’s and Ruby’s time tapestries. He had them tucked in the pocket of his robe. He had an itch to touch them in that moment, but he resisted. There were too many eyes, and he felt that those small scraps were somehow sacred and perhaps the only link he had to his brother and sister.

  “We are searching for something to fix that tapestry,” Belamie said, clearly unable to stay quiet any longer. “Something called the Aeternum.”

  The emperor stopped eating. His eyes darkened and narrowed on Belamie. “Yhongzeng,” he said, speaking the Chinese word for “eternity.”

  “Yes!” Belamie said. “You know of it?”

  The emperor nodded. “My ancestors called it by another name. Jìnzhĭ Suŏ.”

  “Jìnzhĭ Suŏ,” Belamie repeated. “That means . . .”

  Matt was sifting through his own vocabulary. He thought suŏ meant “lock,” but he wasn’t sure about jìnzhĭ.

  “Forbidden lock,” Jia supplied.

  “It is an ancient legend,” the emperor continued, “one that has been mostly forgotten over time. Suŏ is the force that binds the three pillars of our universe—time, space, and matter. It is the power that creates order and rhythm to our world. The earth turns in its orbit because of Suŏ, the sun rises and sets, the seasons come and go, and we are born and age and die, all because of Suŏ. In order to change events of the past or future, you would have to break this lock, disrupt the order of time, space, and matter. But of course, this thing is forbidden.”

  “Forbidden,” Belamie said, “but not impossible?”

  The emperor studied Belamie. “Tell me, why would anyone wish to break this lock, the very thing that binds our universe together?”

  “To make a better world, of course,” Belamie said. “The world is cruel and unfair. If there is a way to make things better, to change them, why shouldn’t we do so?”

  The emperor was thoughtful for a moment. “How would you make this a better world? By making things exactly as you wish?”

  Belamie hesitated, as though she sensed a trap. “Why shouldn’t I make things as I wish? I would take away chaos of the universe. I wouldn’t allow people to needlessly die or suffer.”

  The emperor nodded. “And what of other people’s wishes? Would you make things as they wish?”

  “I could. If I deemed their wishes worthy.”

  “Worthy according to you,” the emperor added. “And by granting some wishes and rejecting others, you will create division, and therefore discontent, and so no matter what you do you cannot hope for a better world, only a different kind of chaos. The universe is cruel, yes, and often unfair, but it is foolish to suppose you can manage better than anyone else. To rule is a terrible burden. To do it well is more pain than pleasure. And often the more pleasure you take for yourself the more pain you lay upon others, and so let us be truthful. You seek not for a better world but for your own content. A better world is something that is achievable without the help of any mystical powers or magic.”

  “By what powers, then?” Belamie asked. “It seems to me power and magic is the only thing that has made things better.”

  “But you just admitted that it has made things worse. Otherwise you would not be here. Confucius said, ‘Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized qualities of men.’ Sadly, as far as I have witnessed, these qualities are scarce in mankind. They are only concerned with their own comforts and wishes. This is the cause of the world’s chaos and pain. We are our own worst enemies. To believe that somehow breaking the universe can solve that is delusion.”

  Belamie frowned at the emperor, but gave no response. Matt felt a small prick in his soul at the emperor’s words. Was he only concerned with his own wishes and comforts? Did he care anything for the rest of the world so long as he got his family back? Was he any better than Vincent? He wanted to believe he was. He did wish to right the world. It was Vincent who had made the real mess of things, who had clearly broken the “forbidden lock.” But who was he to say he could fix it? What if he only made it worse? And worse. And worse.

  The emperor wiped his mouth with a silk cloth and stood. A servant was there right away to assist him. He stepped down from his raised chair and looked as though he would leave them all, but at the doorway he stopped and turned back around. “Quejing, you and your friend will accompany me.”

  Jia stood immediately. “Yes, Father.” She looked down at Matt. He suddenly realized that he was the friend. He stood, knocking the table a little.

  Gaga, Haha, and Uncle Chuck stood as well.

  “The emperor has asked to speak to just Jia and me,” Matt said.

  “Over my dead—” Gaga started.

  “Please, Gaga,” Matt said in a weary voice. “It will be fine.”

  Gaga folded her arms. “What are you going to do? And what are we supposed to do while you’re off doing . . . whatever it is you’re going to do?”

  As if in answer to this, the servants that had assisted them in their quarters came and started chattering away about all the things they would do for them back in their quarters.

  “I promise no harm will come to Matt,” Jia said. “My father’s servants will be glad to entertain you with music and games, and they can give you a skin treatment that will make you look twenty years younger.”

  “Oh,” Gaga said, fluffing her silver hair. “Well, that should be fine. But if you’re not back in one hour . . .”

  “Gaga . . . ,” Matt said impatiently.

  “Two hours! If you’re not back in two hours, we will personally raid this entire city until we find you. You have been warned.” She glared around at all the servants.

  Both Haha and Uncle Chuck looked a little uncertain about this plan, especially as they eyed the armed guards by the emperor.

  “Don’t worry,” Jia said. “We will see you very soon.”

  “It will be fine,” Matt assured his family as he followed Jia out the door. He glanced back at his mom one last time. She was still staring down at her plate.

  But it was Albert who disquieted him most. He gazed at Matt with that cold, calculating look that told him to be on his guard.

  20

  The Summer Triangle

  The emperor led Matt and Jia outside of the building and again through the city. The glow of candlelight could be seen through some of the buildings, but mostly it was dark and quiet. A few guards and servants accompanied them as they walked through small alleys and narrow roads, then to the outer edge of the city along the wall. They came to a small door and Matt realized they were going to go outside the city. He looked at Jia, wondering if he should be concerned at all, but she seemed calm and followed her father without question or hesitation.

  “Is the forbidden lock truly what you seek?” the emperor asked as they walked.

  “No,” Jia said. “We’ve come because it has already been found.”

  “And broken,” Matt added.

  The emperor nodded. This information did not seem to surprise or rattle him. Somehow he must have known.

  The door opened to a tunnel lit by torches. Matt had to hunch down a bi
t as they entered.

  “The woman at dinner, then,” the emperor said, “she is not truly one of your companions.”

  “Yes and no,” Matt said. “She’s my mother, but before she’s really my mother. Our timelines got disrupted, and now she doesn’t remember me.” He felt something hitch in his throat.

  “It’s a long story,” Jia added.

  “Then you had better start telling it,” the emperor said. “It appears time is not on our side. Tell me all that has happened to you and all that you have done.”

  And so they did. Together, Matt and Jia told the emperor all they could remember. It was not a smooth story. Seeing as they were dealing with time travel, and their paths diverged and twisted around each other. There was no rational order of events, and they sometimes had to circle back and clarify certain things. Matt thought perhaps he was forgetting some details, and sometimes he and Jia disagreed on what happened and when, but the emperor listened patiently. He didn’t interject or ask questions. He just listened.

  When Matt and Jia had finished telling everything, or as much as they could remember, the emperor remained quiet. He seemed to be absorbing all the information. They’d been walking through the tunnel for at least a mile, when at last they came to a set of stairs. They climbed up several flights. The emperor stopped at a door, also guarded, and told them to wait outside. Matt only caught a glimpse of what looked like a library. The emperor was back in less than a minute carrying a large cylindrical tube. He motioned for them to follow him again, and they continued up the stairs a few more flights, until they were once again outside.

  They were on a rooftop. There were several large sculptures spaced around the floor, and Matt wondered if this was something of the emperor’s private art collection, but as he looked more closely, he realized they were not there for mere visual appeal. It was an observatory, the emperor’s private astronomy tower. There was a celestial globe, an armillary sphere with the sun represented at the center and the rings forming a sphere around it. There was a sextant as tall as Matt, more spheres and telescopes and instruments that he did not have names for but understood by their design that they were for measuring longitudes and latitudes and celestial navigation.

  There were others up on the tower, white men with long beards dressed in black robes and tall hats. The emperor went to one of them and spoke to him.

  “Who are they?” Matt asked.

  “Jesuit priests,” Jia said. “They have been something like tutors to my father. They have taught him much about astronomy. They also built this observatory.”

  “It’s amazing,” Matt said. He knew very little about astronomy, but as someone who loved math and science, he could appreciate all the angles and lines and spheres, the way they fit together. His mind started to immediately calculate and piece together what each instrument was for and what it could do. It felt familiar somehow. He wasn’t sure why. He knew he’d never been here before. Maybe he was foremembering.

  The emperor finished speaking with the priest and returned to Matt and Jia. “Come this way,” he said. They went to a corner of the roof where there was a table with a few hanging lanterns to give them light.

  “May I see your compass?” the emperor asked. Matt looked to Jia first. She nodded, and Matt reached inside his robe and pulled out the compass, holding it out for the emperor to see. The emperor reached in his own robe and put on a pair of spectacles. They made him look very scholarly. He leaned down so his nose was inches from the compass, but he did not touch it. It seemed to Matt that he was not eager to possess such a thing but rather studied it with the keen curiosity of a scholar, nodding and humming at the dials, the numerals and symbols.

  “It appears to be identical,” the emperor said, “or at least an identical design.”

  “What do you mean?” Jia said. “Have you seen the compass before?”

  The emperor smiled. “You are not the first time travelers to pay me a visit, nor is your mother the first to ask after Jìnzhĭ Suŏ.”

  Jia looked at Matt, alarmed. “Who did you see?” Jia asked, though Matt was fairly certain he knew exactly who.

  “Captain Vincent. The very man you have traveled with all these years. He paid me a visit just yesterday, in fact. I didn’t think it could be coincidence that you should come so closely together.”

  “Yesterday!” Jia gasped. “Is he still here?”

  “Not in the Forbidden City,” the emperor said, “but perhaps still in China, somewhere, seeking for what I could not give him.”

  Matt glanced at Jia. He must still be here in order to pick up Jia, unless Matt brought her to him outside of China. But Vincent told Matt he picked up Jia in China. He just left out that minor detail that Matt was the one to bring her to him. Maybe Matt had told him not to mention it, just like he told Jia.

  “What did Captain Vincent say to you when he visited?” Matt asked.

  “Our conversation was very similar to the one I just had with your mother,” the emperor said. “He also wanted the Aeternum so he could change the world as he pleased. He also was not pleased with my response. But, it seems he found what he was looking for anyway, despite my warnings. Please, may I see the inner workings of the compass? Just to satisfy an old man’s curiosity.”

  Matt took off the compass from around his neck and set it on the table. He removed the top piece, revealing the innards of the compass, the many cogs and dials and pathways. “Ingenious,” the emperor said. “And this is all your design?”

  “Yes, though truthfully, I saw it before I made it, so I’m not sure I can say it’s totally original.”

  “But of course it’s original!” the emperor said. “You are a time traveler, and so it was inside of you all along, even this observatory was clearly inside of you, though you had not yet been here when you built the compass.”

  “The observatory? What do you mean?”

  “You have never been to China, correct?” the emperor said.

  Matt shook his head.

  “Never been to China, never seen this observatory, and yet see how you have captured its design, the various astronomical instruments, all inside of your compass!” The emperor pointed to the inside of the compass. Matt leaned in and studied it, trying to see it with new eyes. He looked up at the various instruments on the roof, then down at the compass. He looked back and forth and each time was more and more astonished. The compass held every astronomy instrument in miniature form.

  “See the sextant and equatorial armilla,” the emperor pointed excitedly, “and the armillary, ecliptic armilla, altazimuth, quadrant altazimuth, and azimuth theodolite.”

  Matt was speechless. How could this be? He’d had no idea at the time what he was doing. He had been designing it all with some kind of intuition. Yes, there had been drawings and formulas and equations, but he hadn’t considered any outside sources or designs. It all just came from inside of him somewhere, and yet here he was, staring at his design in giant form, in seventeenth-century Imperial China.

  “Incredible,” Jia whispered.

  “The only thing that I don’t see is the celestial globe,” the emperor said. “A significant piece, but ah! I am thinking that the compass itself is the celestial globe! If I am not mistaken, the rings of this device can separate? This spot here,” the emperor said, pointing to the divot in the center. “This is the center, where the sun would go.”

  “That’s where the Aeternum should go,” Matt said. “Where it did go. Captain Vincent put it there, and then it unlocked the rings and made a sphere.”

  “And broke Jìnzhĭ Suŏ,” the emperor added.

  Matt remembered that moment, how everything had stopped and they’d all been flung back in time and then everything fell apart. Unraveled.

  “Is there any way we can fix it? Is there any way I can bring back my family? My brother and sister? My mom and dad?”

  The emperor shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t understand all this myself. Some of your story has confounded me. Th
ere are clearly missing pieces. You had Jìnzhĭ Suŏ all along but did not know it?”

  “Yes,” Matt said.

  “And you do not know who gave it to you or how it was formed?”

  “No. I didn’t know what it was then, and it was inactive, but then I met my future self, and when our hands touched it somehow activated it, and then Captain Vincent took it.”

  “And you did not stop him?”

  “I couldn’t,” Matt said. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s not that I wanted him to have it. I just couldn’t stop him. And now my mother doesn’t know me anymore. She’s forgotten my father, her two other children—my brother and sister—who all disappeared right before my eyes. I didn’t want that!” He nearly shouted at the emperor. The anger was rising in him, though he wasn’t sure why. He felt he’d had this conversation before with someone, but he couldn’t remember who it was or when it had been. He only remembered the feeling of being accused of something in which he had no defense except his own feelings.

  Jia placed a hand on his arm.

  The emperor waited for Matt to calm. “Now you say after this Captain Vincent put Yhongzeng inside of the compass, he was able to change things, manipulate time, space, and matter? You saw him do this?”

  Matt nodded.

  “But how did he do this? By what means? This is important.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “The time tapestries,” Jia said. “Show him the time tapestries from Corey and Ruby.”

  Matt had almost forgotten. He reached in his robe and pulled out the two scraps of fabric that he knew belonged to Corey and Ruby. The emperor leaned in closely to inspect the scraps. Though they had noticeably faded, the pieces of fabric gave off a subtle glow in the dark.

  “What is this material?” the emperor asked.

  “The captain called it a time tapestry,” Matt said. “It’s supposedly all the events of our lives woven together—everything we’ve done, everywhere we’ve gone, everyone we’ve met. Or will meet.”

  “Extraordinary. It’s like silk woven from water and light.”