At least, so Ophelia thought until Fox gave her a wink, magnified by the lens, between note-taking. With his athletic frame, bushy eyebrows, and abundant red side-whiskers, he looked more than ever like a chimney.
“Hello, boss. We’ll finish our calculations and be all yours. If we stop right in the middle, we’d have to go back over the itinerary from the start, and that would put my other boss into a bad mood.”
“Stop with all your ‘bosses,’” grumbled Gail, without raising her binocular magnifying glasses from the table. “You’re a trade unionist, talk like a trade unionist.”
“Yes, boss.”
The further the day progressed, the more Ophelia wondered whether she hadn’t fallen asleep at her waffle stand and was now dreaming!
“My traveling companions!” declared Archibald, still balancing little Victoria on one arm. “We wouldn’t make a very pretty picture, but that aside, we make a good team. I root out the Compass Roses, and they decode them. Seven of the eight doors here lead onto other arks, where other access points are to be found. Each Compass Rose is like this one in every respect: eight doors, a counter, a table of itineraries. You can’t imagine how many transits we had to make just to get from the Pole to Anima, and I’m not talking about our wrong turnings.”
Ophelia took a closer look at the round table and saw that its marble was entirely engraved with numbers, symbols, and lines of direction. The map of the Compass Rose network was like the most nightmarish of brain-teasers. Fox and Gail pointed out lines to each other, used measuring instruments, and then jotted down directions. They didn’t touch each other, didn’t look at each other, didn’t speak to each other; and yet, from the way they stood close to each other, Ophelia knew. She looked away, suddenly embarrassed to be watching them like this, as though intruding on their privacy. Stroking Twit, who had turned to her for what he couldn’t get elsewhere, she was disconcerted to see how much he, too, had grown.
She couldn’t shake the unpleasant feeling of having missed a stair. An entire stairway, even.
“What’s a trade unionist?” she asked Archibald. He had just put Victoria down, who immediately continued with her drawing on the counter.
“Oh, a new fad back at home. Compensatory rest, increased salaries, reduced working hours—it’s as if old Hildegarde were more alive than ever, putting her crazy ideas into the heads of servants. Customs have greatly changed since your departure.”
“You, too, have changed,” observed Ophelia. “Are you going to explain to me how you go about calling up shortcuts and unlocking Compass Roses? I thought only the Arkadians were capable of doing so.”
Archibald retrieved his top hat from Victoria’s head and spun it around on his finger. “I’ve already spoken to you about Augustine, my great-grandfather. And the little fling he had with old Hildegarde. Do you remember?”
Ophelia looked at Archibald with amazement. She was still crouching in front of the cat, her hand suspended mid-stroke, not noticing that now he was scrapping with her scarf. “You and Madam Hildegarde? You would be her . . . ”
“Great-grandson, yes,” giggled Archibald. “Oh, it’s a scandal that was carefully hushed up. I wouldn’t have known about it myself had I not suddenly started performing magic tricks. It started last year, one afternoon when I was particularly sleepy, the day after a wedding—I’ll spare you the details. I went into my bathroom; I landed instead in the courtesans’ thermal baths. Just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “from one end of Citaceleste to the other. And then I had the same experience again, and I set about creating transits more and more often. Give me a door, an enclosed space, and I’ll summon a shortcut for you. That’s how, one day, I came across an authentic Compass Rose. It was concealed in a fold within space and I . . . it’s hard to describe . . . I sensed its presence, do you see? Don’t ask me how it works, but if I turn a key in the lock of a door close to a Compass Rose, abracadabra, there we are! Any key of any door. It’s a pretty far-fetched power that old Hildegarde passed on to me, that one, but I adore it.”
While trying to separate cat and scarf, Ophelia had greatly to stretch her imagination to superimpose her memory of Mother Hildegarde on the man standing before her.
“And you’d never been aware of something so obvious before then?” Aunt Rosaline cut in, with her usual pragmatism.
Archibald tapped the teardrop tattoo between his eyebrows. “It’s the severing of the link with the Web that released my other family power. It was hibernating within me, patiently waiting for its time to come. And you, Madam Thorn?” he asked, point-blank. “What have you been up to these past two years?”
Ophelia opened, and then closed her mouth. Archibald had learnt to master a new power, Fox had become a trade unionist, but she, what had she spent her time doing? She’d remained imprisoned in an interminable parenthesis. No. It was even worse than that. She’d gone backwards, slipping into her old skin of solitary adolescent. She’d even put on weight, to top it all.
“I read,” she finally replied.
“Right, enough of the small talk,” Gail interrupted them, brusquely. “There’s a more pressing question to be settled.” She finally lifted her nose from the itinerary table and shook away the dark curls hindering her view. Her differently colored eyes, one black as night, the other blue as day, were inordinately enlarged by her binocular magnifying glasses. They may have been different, but they expressed the same cold rage as they looked deep into Ophelia’s glasses.
“Does God exist?”
THE DESTINATION
Time seemed to be holding its breath inside the Compass Rose. Ophelia, still tugging on her scarf to free it from Twit’s claws, looked from Gail to Fox to Archibald to Aunt Rosaline, who all suddenly appeared to expect her to answer their every existential question.
“Before going any further,” said Archibald, casually sitting on the itinerary table, “you must understand what has brought us all here. We’re investigating the death of old Hildegarde. Apart from Thorn, you are the only person still alive to have witnessed her final moments. You’re also the only one to know what was really behind that business of the GOD letters, in which she was implicated.”
The word “GOD” echoed around the Compass Rose, which had the resonance of an ancient cathedral. That single mention made Ophelia remember Baron Melchior and his deadly blackmail; Mother Hildegarde sucked into her own pocket; the corpses in the Imaginoir; the fingers sliced off by Thorn.
Oh yes, she knew exactly what it was all about. She still had nightmares about it.
“And then there was Farouk’s breakdown,” Archibald continued, cheerily, as though telling a good joke. “The entire court witnessed his inexplicable behavior, and the way you brought him back to reason. You alone. With but a few words.”
“Your Book is but the start of your story, Odin. It’s up to you alone to write the ending.” Ophelia remembered that, too, very clearly. Except that they weren’t her words; they were God’s words, uttered a very long time ago.
“Farouk hasn’t been the same since,” continued Archibald. “Lackadaisical and head-in-the-clouds, yes, but when it comes to the future of his family, he’s showing himself to be almost . . . how can I put it? Almost concerned.”
“Except it’s the Mother we’re talking about here,” Gail said, losing patience. She walked around the table and pressed her magnifying lenses against Ophelia’s glasses. Ophelia noticed that Gail had sewn—rather badly, in fact—an orange motif onto her flapped Russian hat. The orange was Mother Hildegarde’s emblem. “Listen to me carefully, my dear. The Mother knew her days were numbered. She knew that something else exists, something not very pleasant, something bigger than the family spirits, something beyond all that.” Gail thumbed over her shoulder to indicate the entire Compass Rose. “The Mother tried to talk to me, to prepare me, but me, I didn’t listen to her. I just wanted to stay hidden in my corner. I was
scared of ending up like the rest of my clan.”
An abrupt silence followed these words, a silence inhabited by the deceased souls of all the Nihilists. Ophelia had wondered why Gail seemed so annoyed with her, but now she understood that it was against herself that her anger was directed.
“You broke my monocle,” Gail grumbled. “For that, you owe me an apology. And me, I owe you thanks. Without it, I couldn’t hide what I really am from others for long. It was the kick in the pants I needed. The Mother was like a family to me, and I’m tired of behaving like an ungrateful brat. So, I want you to tell me right now, face-to-face: does God exist, and is it because of him that the Mother is dead?”
“Yes.”
Ophelia’s response produced an immediate effect. Gail let out a volley of swearwords, Fox pushed his magnifying lenses up onto his forehead, Archibald burst out laughing, and Aunt Rosaline pursed her lips. Only Victoria continued to scratch away at her drawing with her pencil, unperturbed.
Ophelia straightened up her glasses, skewed by Gail. Before disappearing, Thorn had advised her to speak to no one of what she knew, but she didn’t have the right to stay silent any longer. “Do you remember the Carnival Caravan?”
“The circus troupe?” Fox asked, surprised. “The one we visited with your little brother?”
“God was travelling in their midst, passing himself off as a Metamorphoser.” Ophelia cleared her throat. The memory of what she’d witnessed that night, in Thorn’s cell, still gave her the sensation of having swallowed sand. “He is much more than a Metamorphoser. God can reproduce the appearance, voice, and family power of all those whom he has approached. That’s why he wanted to provoke a meeting with Mother Hildegarde—he coveted her mastery of space. And that’s why Mother Hildegarde had entrenched herself in a non-place, behind a security cordon; she knew that whoever tried to cross that line would become more dangerous because of her. And that’s not all,” she continued, after another throat clearing. “God is the creator of the family spirits and, as such, considers himself the parent of us all. He imposes his law on us without our knowledge, with the help of men and women he calls ‘the Guardians.’ Oh, and a final detail,” she hastened to add, with a tense smile. “Thorn’s claws had no effect on him.”
She paused for a moment to assess the impact of her words on her audience, but that was no easy task: everyone around her had frozen in astonishment. Even Archibald, who had been rubbing his hands with excitement, had finally stopped, mid-movement.
“I have put you all in danger just by speaking to you of this,” continued Ophelia. “I don’t know what your plans are exactly, but be extremely careful. The Guardians are the eyes and ears of God, across all the arks. It’s impossible to determine with any certainty who is in his service, and who isn’t. I’m telling you this because you are the people whom I trust the most.”
It was Aunt Rosaline who was first to break the general paralysis. She crossed the room in a few energetic strides, long enough to calm herself down, her heels clicking on the mosaic and resonating right up to the cupola. Then she rubbed her forehead, sighing. “That’s you all over, that is. When it comes to getting yourself into a fix, there are no half-measures.”
Ophelia clenched her jaws. Her godmother didn’t know how right she was. If God had told the truth, he wasn’t the one to be most feared in the situation. There was the Other. That unidentifiable entity she’d freed from the mirror. That angel of the apocalypse who apparently broke up the world, and who, still according to God, was preparing to complete his work.
“Sooner or later, whether you want to or not, you will lead me to him.”
Had a link really been created between Ophelia and this Other? The only memory she retained—a distant, confused memory—was that of her own reflection in the mirror of her childhood bedroom, on the night of her first passage through a mirror. Since then, contrary to what God had predicted, no ark had disintegrated. Sure, sections of earth sometimes went crashing into the void, but that could just as easily have been due to natural erosion. No, truly, the more Ophelia thought about it, the less she saw the point of panicking everyone with a story as nebulous as that of the Other.
She suddenly realized, from the way he was waiting, head tilted to one side, that Archibald had asked her a question. “Sorry? You were saying to me?”
“That it was rather strange. On the one hand, you assert to us that God created the family spirits. On the other, you assert that he covets their family powers. To me, something doesn’t feel quite right.”
“There are many things that I don’t understand myself,” admitted Ophelia. “Why, for example, did God formerly say to the family spirits that they were free to make their own choices, only to make them his puppets today? For one reason or another, his plans have changed.”
Archibald merely nodded with his chin. Sitting on the itinerary table, legs crossed and hands clasping knee, one might have thought he was just chatting about the weather. “And when he doesn’t adopt the appearance of a mortal, what is God’s face like then?”
“I’ve not seen it,” replied Ophelia. “I don’t even know if he’s got one. What I do know, on the other hand, is that he has no reflection. And that he has a tendency to make slips of the tongue,” she added, cautiously, “but I don’t know to what extent that’s a reliable distinguishing feature.”
Archibald jumped off the table and exchanged a knowing wink with Gail and Fox, before returning to Ophelia. “Would you like to search for LandmArk with us?”
“LandmArk?”
“Old Hildegarde’s native ark.”
“I know that, but why LandmArk?”
“Because if Hildegarde knew about God, the odds are that her family does, too. You see, the Arkadians hold Compass Roses on every ark. They’ve been observing all that takes place across the world for generations. I believe they’re extremely well-informed. The problem is that all the Arkadians have deserted the Compass Roses; we’ve not yet encountered a single one of them.” With an eloquent flourish, Archibald opened a drawer at random and took out all manner of printed material—cards, stamps, passports, certificates—as if, now, they all belonged to him. “No problem, we’ll go and look for them all the way to their home, if need be!”
“And you were waiting for me for that?” Ophelia asked with surprise.
Archibald shook his head, in a flurry of blond hair. “We didn’t wait for you at all. In fact, we’ve been looking for them for a while. No, for the moment, we’re feeling our way, experimenting, roaming. That’s how we ended up finding the way to Anima. For technical explanations, it’s your turn.” Archibald bowed to Gail, who simply pushed him aside and banged the itinerary table with the flat of her hand.
“For weeks, now, we’ve been studying these coordinates! A whole load of blasted doors leading to twenty major arks, a hundred and eighty minor arks, and the myriad little islands floating around them. But not a single one that leads to LandmArk,” she railed, glowering at the table. “On every occasion, the Arkadians have kept this itinerary secret. And it’s impossible to get there by air.”
Ophelia sympathized. LandmArk didn’t feature on any maps. It was even said that the entire ark was concealed in a fold within space.
“There has to be some access to it,” Gail continued, hammering the table with her index finger, “but we’re going to need lots of time and application to find it. The Compass Roses are conceived like railway networks on a grand scale: there are direct lines, and hundreds of connecting lines. We must find the correct branch line.”
“But haven’t you already been to LandmArk several times?” Ophelia interrupted her. “I remember that you even brought back some oranges from there.”
“That particular shortcut has disappeared,” Archibald replied for Gail. “I can unlock a closed-down transit, but I can’t reconstruct what has been destroyed.”
Ophelia contemplated the ro
und table, with its chaos of numbers, its maze of lines and symbols, for a long time. “Why?” she murmured. “Why go to all this trouble?”
Archibald’s smile became more pronounced and the glimmer in his eyes intensified. Never had Ophelia seen him so determined. “It’s pretty obvious. Hildegarde was a stubborn old mule who was forever causing me problems, but she was under my protection. If God is responsible for her death, then God will have to explain himself personally to me.”
Gail spat on the ground as a sign of approval, and Fox automatically took out a handkerchief to wipe her mouth. “I wasn’t particularly fond of the old bag,” he sighed, “but what’s important to my boss is important to me.”
“I must now take this young lady back to her mother,” Archibald declared, stroking Victoria’s white hair. She had ended up falling asleep on the counter, still clutching her pencil. “You’re in a Compass Rose, it’s up to you to choose your destination, Madame Thorn! Would you like to stay on Anima with your family? Would you like to return to the Pole with your goddaughter? Or would you like to look for LandmArk with us?”
“The Pole!” replied Aunt Rosaline, without the slightest hesitation. “We’re going to return to be with Berenilde, aren’t we?”
Ophelia bit her lip. It would have been easy to say yes to Aunt Rosaline’s request, or to Archibald’s. She could have chosen to stay close to what was familiar to her, but that would have just deepened the void inside her. She was then seized by conflicting emotions, like those that churn the stomach when one gets on a train not knowing where it will take one, or whether one can turn back.
The Memory of Babel Page 3
