by Andrew Smith
“You’ve plenty of time,” said Mme. Rumella, accepting her book back. Then she explained about the Standard.
“I haven’t seen it, but then I’ve been doing a lot of reading and I don’t wander around the place as much as I have in the past. You could look.”
“Has anyone been hanging around here a lot lately, maybe?” Leila asked, having recovered her faculties.
The skeleton shrugged. “A couple of people have been in. Tourists probably.”
“Thank you anyway,” said Mme. Rumella, removing her gloves from her ancient, weathered handbag, and sliding ‘The Birth of the Anglican Church’ inside. “I’ll be back soon with some more books.”
“Great!” Jerry enthused
The trio exited the pyramid. The sun was setting.
“I’m starving!” Leila cried. “I can’t believe we’ve been in there all day.”
“It’s a large place,” commented Mme. Rumella. “Let’s get sandwiches.” She strode off with Leila close behind. The Crusader stood one the Street of the Dead, turning his helmet from side to side. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I must continue to search.”
“Of course, I’m terribly sorry this didn’t work out. We will tell you if we discover anything.”
The Crusader nodded and Leila and Mme. Rumella again turned to leave. They didn’t get two steps before Lionel the Necromancer came into view. He skirted the Crusader and headed centerwise, towards downtown. Wrapped in his knee-length, tattered black cloak, he moved swiftly without so much as acknowledging the others
Leila, who had heard about the necromancer’s fight with Mary, failed to stifle a giggle. The man turned swiftly, if a little off-balance, on his heel to face them. In the darkness, his facial features were difficult to distinguish, but even so, it was clear that he was not pleased
“I should hope,” said Lionel in a British accent whose specific origin Mme. Rumella had never been quite sure of, “that you were not laughing at me.”
“Oh no, Lionel, of course not,” said Mme. Rumella, who failed to keep the cheekiness out her tone.
Lionel brushed the hair back from his graying temples with the tips of his long fingers
“Good,” he said.
Mme. Rumella and Leila exchanged a glance. “After all, you just lost a little fight.”
“To a girl,” Leila chimed in
“Not that there’s any shame in it,” said Mme. Rumella
“Maybe a little,” Leila corrected
“But just a smidgen,” said Mme. Rumella.
“Really,” said Leila, nodding helpfully
Lionel narrowed his grey eyes at them. His long face, with its pointed chin, drew into a deep scowl. “I would be tempted to teach you two a lesson,” he said in an inflated tone of voice, “if you didn’t have a giant walking suit of armor with you. Here to kill some Incas, is he?”
“First of all, Teotihuacan’s ethnic identity is unknown,” said Leila. “And second, the Inca aren’t even on the same continent. You dumb bastard,” she added quietly.
Lionel sniffed, brushed some lint from his shoulder, and turned to leave
“I don’t suppose you know where the Standard of Uruk is,” Mme. Rumella asked. Leila gave her a questioning look. Mme. Rumella just gave a shrug.
“Never heard of it,” called Lionel over his shoulder, “though I’m sure it must be frightfully important to involve three such consequential personalities as yourselves. Best of luck,” he sneered and disappeared into the night.
“What a freakin’ jerk,” said Leila.
“Indeed,” said Mme. Rumella.
* * * *
The Crusader walked from Teotihuacan, in the city’s Fourth Quarter, to the nearest curving street and followed it. He pondered, in his way, the strange people he had met here. It had been a very long time since he last left his home and come to the city. The Street of the Dead must have been there at the time, but he never visited it. There were so many new buildings, and they ones that had been there when he had were all in different places, pushed radially outward by the expanding city.
The stars changed so often here, he noticed. And they were so much smaller in the sky than the stars at his home. He had sensed the presence of the Standard earlier, but only for the briefest second. It was confusing. Sorcery reached out to the world around it, but people had devised ways to mask it. He had been prepared for the Standard to be hidden, but something had disrupted that concealment, and he did not understand what.
He set off along the nearest curving street in hopes that the Standard might be along it, somewhere. Because sorcery reached out to the world around it. It followed lines. They were lines that no one anticipated, but surely the curving streets of the city, which were themselves shaped by some sort of sorcery, would be a likely conduit for that sort of reach. The Crusader walked down the curving street all night, but felt nothing.
The Standard of Uruk
Mary was last in a waning stream of customers. Since she had the time to chat, Mme. Rumella told Mary of their fruitless search, and encounter last night with Lionel the Necromancer.
“How strange,” Mary commented as she filled her coffee. “He hasn’t been out and about much in the last few years, as far I know. To be honest, I preferred it that way, instead of him skulking around all over the city.”
“He is up to something,” remarked Tina Virtue, who had a habit of coming up behind people like that
“Oh, thank you, Tina,” Mary said acidly. “Lucky for us all you have such great powers of deduction.”
“Be nice, dear!” Mme. Rumella ordered
Mary mumbled something not entirely apologetic and left her trade goods by the register on her way out. Tina, apparently unconcerned, stepped forward. “May I have a hot chocolate,” she asked, “but with coffee in it?”
“You mean a mocha, love?”
“If you like,” said Tina
Tina went on her way. She spotted an exasperated Leila Lanstrom, exiting the British Museum at a fevered clip. She had put her hair up, but bits of it were coming loose. She stopped in the middle of the street, and looked left towards her destination, then to Mme. Rumella’s Tea Shop. And back. And forth. Several times.
Finally she marched into the tea shop, demanding caffeine.
“Oh, pet, you look awful!”
“It’s this Standard business. It’s kind of starting to piss me off! I spent all night searching through the Museum-”
“You promised me you were going home to get some rest!”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Did you try?” Mme. Rumella rejoined
“Not really. But anyway, there is nothing in the whole place about the Standard of Uruk. I checked and checked and, well, I have another idea. But I need coffee.”
“You need sleep.”
“Coffee now, sleep later.”
Mme. Rumella narrowed her eyes at Dr. Lanstrom. “Alright. But go home early.”
“Umm... Okay.”
“Remember, the Museum might let you sleep there but other places will likely just throw you out on the street.” Leila nodded. “Where are you going, by the way?”
“The Hall of Apocrypha!”
The Hall of Apocrypha was the place where files on all the stuff that probably didn’t exist were kept. Actually, a lot of it probably did, but the British Museum never kept files on anything unless there evidence, of a convincing and reliable sort, that it existed. Its presence in their vaults, for instance. The Hall was housed in the Hagia Sophia, the great church of Eastern Christianity, famous mosque, and part-time museum of the normal world. The vast structure contained multiple domes, and sat in the city’s Fourth Quarter, in the ring of time which contained the sixth century (or just sixth in city slang: when the word ‘century’ became as ubiquitous as the word ‘street’, someone got the bright idea to omit it).
Leila entered it and gazed up to where the walls disappeared in the light of forty windows and the dome of the ceiling appear
ed to be suspended on a cushion of light. She found herself wondering whether it was an optical illusion here, or if the dome was actually hovering. Stranger things had happened. On a daily basis, as a matter of fact. The building was cool, despite the desert heat of the area outside. There were two half domes to the ‘east’ and ‘west’. Such directions were meaningless in the city, where buildings appeared in random orientations, which often changed as new buildings appeared.
At the center of the atrium area, there stood the famous fountain of purification, inscribed with the words ‘cleanse our sins, not only our face’. Someone was using it as desk. It was covered in scattered stationary, pens, and the like. There was a large book for guests to sign in on a stand nearby.
The man behind the desk, apparently in his early forties, wore a navy blue blazer. Even Leila, whose vocation and avocation in life involved wearing lots of khaki and digging in the dirt all the day long, found his red-with-black-polka-dot bow tie and suspenders painfully unfashionable. He was poring over papers, and, judging by the brim of sweat on his brow, rather hot despite the cool of the space. He dipped a glass in the holy water and took a drink while tugging at his collar with one finger.
“Excuse me,” said Leila, after he failed to notice her
The man looked up briefly, with a look that plainly told her she was interrupting something important, and then back down. Leila was sorely tempted to throw her hot coffee in his face.
“Excuse me,” she said again, rather gruffly
The man stabbed the air with his pen, indicating the stand. Leila stepped over to it and filled out the information in the sign-in book. Name, occupation, time in, first visit?
She looked around the space, wondering where all the files were kept.
“That way,” said the man at the desk, with utter disdain, stabbing the air with his pen
“Thanks,” she said, through gritted teeth.
She crossed the room, up a ramp, to a tall but rather narrow hallway. The divine figures of one of the Hagia Sophia’s many mosaics stared down at her. She greeted the saints in the arch and continued on. There didn’t appear to be any sort of records about, but there was a sudden stairwell in the corridor wall. The stairs spiraled down below ground level. The walls changed from hewn stone to rough earth and Leila had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. As she reached the end of her journey down, she saw the arms of catacombs spread out before her
Her shoulders slumped without her permission. “I can’t believe they arranged it in catacomb order,” she said to no-one, her voice echoing away into the torch-lit distance. “I bet there aren’t even any catacombs under the real Hagia Sophia! Stupid city.”
She stepped out into the earthen passages full of old wooden file boxes. This happened to her in the museum too. They called them ‘green rooms’, rooms that existed in the city but not in the normal world. Conversely, rooms that existed in the normal world building but not in the city version were called ‘red rooms’. It happened most of all in the basement, as though the city felt it could take liberty with the structures it brought to itself, especially underground.
Leila raised her Focus and said the words of the searching spell she used in the museum, followed by the name of the artifact she was searching for. Nothing happened. “Oh dammit,” she grumbled
Morning became afternoon as Leila wound her way around the catacombs, trying to get a handle on the organization of the place, which was defiantly non-alphabetical.
* * * *
There was a plaza. It once belonged to a Mediterranean city that was long ago sacked and burned to the ground. Leafy vines crawled upwards through the cracks between the white brick floor, wrapping themselves around the pillars and columns. A small platform and podium were set up to one side. Miguel Suerte, a Spanish man of modest height with a well-trimmed moustache stood next to the platform, surrounded by a pack of bodyguards so large that any one of them could have surrounded Suerte by himself.
There was no-one else in the place. The candidate cast a spell to amplify his voice, and stepped behind the podium
“My fellow citizens,” Suerte began, “we are all here for one reason: to hear why I, Miguel Suerte, should be the next mayor of our great home.” He paused, apparently for effect. “The city has gone without leadership for too long. The Peelers are answerable to no-one, necromancers and dark sorcerers walk among us unhindered, there is no regulation of the use of sorcery. Is this any place to raise our children?”
He paused and smiled. People, drawn into the plaza by the sound of his amplified voice, trickled in from various entrances. There were only a few
“I say that it is not! I say that this city needs someone to be bold and decisive. I have a portfolio of programs ready to be implemented upon my election, the very processes of which this city is in dire need. They will make our streets safe and clean and our homes secure.
“This,” he said, “is what the city needs. Cast your votes for Suerte!”
He stepped down to no applause. The few people present realized who he was, and were obviously disappointed that he hadn’t been spectacularly killed. With some disappointed shrugging the assembly dispersed and went on about their days
A dark-eyed woman took pains to be neither the first nor last to leave. She pretended to chat with another passer-by and then took off centerwise.
* * * *
Leila Lanstrom cursed loudly. No one heard her. The flames of the torches burned endlessly down seemingly endless passageways. “Who knew there was so much made up crap in this city,” she said to the file boxes.
The file boxes were full of scraps of paper and parchment, some printed or typed, but most handwritten. She had even found some cuneiform tablets that bordered on ten thousand years old. And for once since she came to the city, she was grateful for sorcery. Someone had gone through great pains to make sure that all the information in the caves was readable by all. She had picked up a cuneiform tablet, and glanced at it. Leila wasn’t that great at reading Cuneiform but the tablet appeared plain as English. She took off her glasses, blinked grandly, for her own benefit and replaced them.
“Woo Hoo,” she said nonchalantly, and continued reading.
Though cuneiform was precisely the language she was looking for, none of the tablets contained anything about the Standard. There were some tablets on the Obsidian City, which was supposedly somewhere in modern Turkey, and something called ‘the Creature of the Lapis Caves’, who didn’t sound the amiable type.
No Standard of Uruk.
She wandered around the passages, which were arranged almost like the arms of a spiral galaxy. Almost, the realization dawned on her, like the circular arrangement of the city itself. Leila had only been in the Woven City a little over a year, and the geography of the place was immense. She realized the cuneiform tablets, deep down the passage behind her, were all about things in Turkey, thousands of years ago. But the ancient Mesopotamian neighborhoods of the city were... “Where are they?” Leila asked herself. “Where...?”
Back at the core of the files, by the staircase returning to the surface, tempting her to daylight and fresh air, and soon after to bed, she looked at the various arms of the catacombs. She had just come from ancient Turkey
“Six o’clock,” she labeled the passage. “And if that’s six, then the Street of the Dead is... Is eight and Ur is... Two!” Leila shouted in triumph and scurried off down the corresponding passage.
The path wound its way down the centuries. Her natural curiosity forced her to stop and have a peek at a couple boxes along the way. She read about secret rooms of horror in the British Museum, at which she had to laugh. She saw the story of the Helm of Atlantis, supposedly lost in a Dresden museum. Of course, that sort of thing had happened before.
Leila continued back through the ages, coming to the thing she sought: more clay tablets. She rifled through descriptions of the cattle spirits of Jericho and real story about the whole wall thing, and finally: the Standard of Uruk
The English which somehow stowed away on the cuneiform’s journey between the tablet and her brain was simple and somewhat stilted and stoically refused to accept the definite article as a necessary part of itself. It was, however, unmistakably the right story. She removed her Focus from her pocket and conjured up a stenographer’s pad: one of the first tricks she had learned. She was shocked to learn later that object summoning was actually quite complicated. Especially considering the amount of time it took her to learn how to unlock her door
She jotted down all the details of the tablet. Leila was reasonably certain that the sweaty man with the bow-tie upstairs wouldn’t be all about letting her go with the tablet.
Plus with her luck, she’d probably break it before she got a dozen steps from the door
She replaced the tablet, smiled, and stood. Suddenly she noticed something. She was near the edge of the city’s history. She had assumed the tunnel stopped there. The light stopped there. The tunnel kept going, beyond the range of the sorcerous torch’s light. An impervious blackness, sloping down, into the earth. She took an unsteady step backwards. Something about the darkness frightened her, something her rationality couldn’t acknowledge. It seemed concealing... Consuming. She stumbled backwards, tripping over her own shoes. She landed hard. The jolt snapped her out of her absorption. She hopped to her feet and bolted for the exit, not bothering to pat off the dust
She was dodging ornate hanging fixtures and nearly at the Hagia Sophia’s door when the bow-tied man cleared his throat loudly. She halted as the echo reached her. The man looked meaningfully at the sign-in book. Leila rolled her eyes: she had forgotten to sign out. She filled in the ‘time out’ slot with the help of a nearby clock and hurried to Mme. Rumella’s Tea Shop.
* * * *
There was another campaign speech, in the evening. The same speech, verbatim. There were a very few people at it, including the same dark-eyed woman. She slipped away again, neither first nor last, and made her way to the Woven City Hall of Records.
