“Clock,” I said—my designated form of address that made it listen—“what’s the quickest way to get to the marked location?”
SEARCHING flashed up for half a second, and then a new set of projections joined the slowly rotating form of Laknuria: a map of London first, a teeming hub dominated by a very grand building, then another portion of London …
I frowned. “Is that Kew Gardens?”
“Looks like it,” said Heidi. “Via the Way-Crossing.”
“Why? We can get a tube ride there in about forty minutes.”
She shrugged. “The Way-Crossing must be faster.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Borrick muttered. “Looks like it wants to us go via the Entanglement. That’s a nightmare for queues.”
The clock’s face reconfigured, new text forming.
DELAYS ON LONDON UNDERGROUND (EARTH)
“Ah,” said Borrick with a nod. “That explains it.”
I frowned. Since when could it provide updates on London's Underground…?
I didn’t need to finish the thought. Antecessors. They wanted me to keep moving, obviously.
“Great,” I said. “Queues via the Underground, and queues via the Way-Crossing. Everything I loved most about being a Seeker.”
Borrick flashed an apologetic smile. “At least we’ll get to do some sightseeing?”
“The University does not count as sightseeing,” I said. “Although, having said that … there is a certain professor,” I added, thinking of Erbridge Vincin, who’d published the quest that led to my brother’s death, “who I would really, really love to give a piece of my mind right now.”
“Later,” said Heidi. She was up, moving, having taken photographs of the maps on her phone. Striding down the aisle to the wall marked with ‘LONDON’, her pace only quickened the farther she went. “Let’s go, all right?”
“Right,” said Borrick. “After you,” he said, waving me forward.
My lips thinned. Politeness, from a Borrick—what was the world coming to?
16
The Way-Crossing—a vast Seeker capital, teeming in the way that the Ostiagard of days gone must once have, with its vast riches of connections.
Even without the Entanglement, it wasn’t hard to see why Seekers had flocked here. They loved sparkling jewels—and the Way-Crossing was certainly that.
Once, a mountain had stood here. Much of it still did, rising out of a blanket of a rainforest that stretched as far as the eye could see. The peak itself had been a terrifically great thing, capped with a frigid layer of ice, so high above the rainforest that its temperate climes did not touch the mountain’s lofty heights.
Today, much of that mountain had been whittled down. What remained were a series of interlocked spires—although ‘spires’ was not exactly the correct word for it. They were wide as well as tall, like the cardboard tube forming the core of a kitchen roll. And rather than arranged disparately, they blended into one another, at many different heights, such that the Way-Crossing’s new peaks were all connected, with grand bridges strung between the dozens and dozens of plateaus. Those bridges were staggeringly huge too—but from a great distance they looked like little more than a strand of spider silk pulled taut between the spires. Fortunately, they were all forged of an obduridium-based compound, polished and shiny silver, so even if the spires themselves crumbled, the bridges would remain intact.
The rainforest still was out there too. But now enormous walls cocooned the Way-Crossing, crenelated, with defenses spread across them—strange contraptions that peered out into the surrounding world, sweeping back and forth of their own accord. They did not seem to be gun turrets—there was no aperture through which a stream of bullets could flow—but exactly how they did work, I couldn’t be sure. Tours were not permitted on the wall, so I couldn’t get up close for a look.
The Way-Crossing teemed. People were everywhere—and I mean everywhere. The city was like London on steroids, worse than Liverpool Street Station if a scheduling problem meant every single train arrived, full, at the same time. Seekers of all types bustled in a ceaseless flow, in every damned direction. There were orc Seekers, carving paths with their bulk and their barbed armor. There were the squirrelly little Seekers, like Saltlick, chattering and scurrying through gaps by people’s legs. In the five minutes we’d been here, I’d already narrowly kept myself from tripping over a couple of the furry little blighters.
I may have also stepped on the tail of one, stationary and doing business with a vendor who’d set up on one of the wide bridges (which was at least the width of a football pitch, and then some). The squirrel Seeker screeched at me, snatching her tail away. I hurried a quick apology and slipped into the crowd before she could launch herself at me teeth first.
“I love this place,” said Borrick with a pleasant sigh.
“So wonderful,” I said through gritted teeth, peeling myself off the back of a broad-backed reptilian thing that had shunted into me. At least nine feet tall, it spared me a brief look but no apology, then moved on. “Idiot,” I muttered at its back.
Someone else clanged into me.
“Watch where you’re going!” shrieked an effeminately-voiced suit of animated armor. Its arm had fallen, landing on the bridge with a whining metal clatter that drew the eyes of the crowd moving about us.
“Sorry,” I said, reaching down to grab the arm.
“AAAAAAH!” the suit shrieked again. A noxious mist was pouring out of the cavity where its arm had been.
“S-sorry!” I grabbed it up and thrust it back into the hole.
The high-pitched scream abruptly ended. The suit let out a disconcerting sigh. It shook, a metallic vibration that rumbled its entire body from foot to head.
When finally its helmet ceased shuddering, the suit said, “Be more careful!” And then it strode off, muttering, “Fleshbags,” and something that would’ve reddened Carson’s cheeks, and lifted Heidi’s spirits. Nothing like learning a brand new piece of profanity.
“How long ’til we get there?” I asked.
“Just up here,” said Borrick.
“Hurry it up,” Heidi ordered. Thanks to her small stature, and her almost preternatural grace, she’d woven her path through the crowd with an ease I was incredibly envious of. Borrick was doing his best to follow, but Heidi didn’t cut a path so much as she slipped through momentary spaces that closed after her.
We made it off the bridge eventually, past rows of vendors selling all sorts of paraphernalia, doodads that could’ve made my life easier if I weren’t giving this whole Seeking thing up.
The spire we were on had a spiral pathway cut around the outside of it. That was even wider than the bridge still, large enough that it could accommodate public gardens built into the slope, a teeming market, and, cutting through all of that, a train line—which meant another wait at a set of gates for it to pass.
“The Underground delays would have been faster than this,” I grumbled.
“The million-world clock said this was faster,” said Borrick.
“Maybe if the Entanglement went wrong and irradiated everyone in this city to death.” I folded my arms, pursing my lips and scowling down the track—just where was this train, and what kind of nerve did it have, keeping me from being done with this whole stupid thing?
“I don’t know,” said Borrick thoughtfully. “They’re very intelligent. Did you know that the man who designed them went on to develop the first artificial intelligence matrix?”
“Didn’t they shut that down?” Heidi asked, distractedly.
“And threw it into a void,” Borrick said.
“Why?” I asked.
“It figured out how to cheat its ruleset,” he explained—and then was silenced as the train surged past. It was not built onto tracks, but rather levitated between two magnetic rails, bringing with it a roar of air.
When it had passed, and the gates began to rise again—a pair of squirrel Seekers darted under the gap straight
away and scampered across before anyone else had moved—Borrick finished, “It converted the island around its processing facility into data centers overnight—not a pleasant way for the researchers stationed there to go, I’d imagine, converted to mulch and their trace elements harvested for superconductors and transistors.”
“Lovely,” I said, doing my best not to imagine it. I failed.
“We’re almost there,” said Heidi. “Let’s just hurry—there are always queues at the Entanglement.”
“Fingers crossed for an irradiation event then,” I muttered.
Ostiagard had faded in popularity among Seekers over the centuries largely because of the invasions that took place, scouting for its lost treasures. But that was not the only reason. The city had been richly connected to other worlds, at a density that, to my knowledge, had never been overtaken.
But then, as the mountain was excavated to build the Way-Crossing—the Entanglement was found.
What exactly the Entanglement was, I didn’t know. Most Seekers didn’t; there was little literature on it. I’d read plenty of speculation though—that it was an ethereal manifold, or a white hole, a fuzzy wormhole that had been wrenched inside out—even that the Way-Crossing existed in a fractured world, just one that had somehow largely survived the merging process in the early days of the Wayfarers.
Whatever the Entanglement actually was, what the Seeker community at large were permitted to know was this: it could be manipulated. The connections here could flex, so you could stand in one spot and jump through to London one moment, then travel to China the next. Other worlds too—there was no jumping back and forth between locations on Earth to world-hop here; you could go directly from here to Ostiagard, or Pharo—or Laknuria.
Access to the Entanglement itself was only permitted to students from the University—a very, very select crowd that was rumored to spend over a decade studying before one student might be allowed to see the Entanglement directly—and of course the scientists, engineers, researchers, whatever, who maintained it.
Instead, the public were funneled to a building set into the stone of the spire, with Grecian style pillars atop two dozen marbled steps.
Inside that were the promised queues: twenty of them, Seekers corralled into rows by rope fences, those same queues at least thirty or forty people deep before getting to the service stations where a location was requested.
“Brilliant,” I said. “This day is shaping up to be everything I hoped it would be and more.”
“This one,” Heidi said, already joining the back of the queue she’d decided was likely to move faster.
“Don’t sweat it,” said Borrick, patting me on the shoulder. “You’ll be good at this.”
I shot him a fiery look.
“You’re British,” he said by way of explanation. “British people love queues.”
“I am English,” I said.
“Aren’t you half Nigerian?” Heidi asked. Again, she sounded distracted. I knew that feeling; conversation was just an avenue to direct her focus so she didn’t get too antsy and do something stupid, like try to skip the queue—or spout off something offensive at the weary-looking clerk in the service station for not hurrying things along.
“Regardless,” I said, turning back to Borrick. “The people of Great Britain do not like queues. We despise them.” I added, “And can you stop patting my shoulder? We’re not suddenly pals here.”
He wrinkled his nose, looking not the least bit put out. Nevertheless, he conceded a flat, “Fine,” and crossed his arms, lapsing into silence.
As queues were wont to do, ours moved painfully slowly.
Heidi bounced from foot to foot, looking at the line next to ours. “Now they’re moving faster than we are!”
“We’ll get there,” said Borrick.
We stopped again five seconds later.
After a minute, we inched forward a little farther.
Heidi’s bouncing on her heels grew more manic.
Finally, when we’d been waiting for ten minutes and were still only a quarter of the way to the service station, she said, “That’s it—I can’t take this anymore. Do you two want something to eat? I’ll pay.”
Borrick shrugged. “Sure. I think I saw a noodle stool …?”
“Fine. What do you want?”
“They’ve got squid rings,” he said, “in sweet chili sauce.”
“Right. Mira?”
“Uh … not squid, thanks.”
“Come on, quick. What do you want?”
“I don’t know what they sell.”
Heidi huffed. “Plain noodles it is.”
“That or chicken?”
“They won’t have chicken,” said Borrick. “Possibly scrat wings, if I’m remembering rightly? In a kind of teriyaki. But … meatier. And blue.”
“How many times have you visited this stall?” I asked.
He shrugged. “A few.”
“Just the plain noodles,” I said to Heidi.
“Got it,” she said. “Back in a few.” And she excused herself, passing by the lone Seeker behind us, a seven-foot-tall slim man with widely set eyes and faintly blue skin—a Pharo native, or someplace around there. “Save my spot,” she called as she disappeared.
And so we were left alone—me and Borrick. Joy of joys …
He hummed.
My lips thinned. “You realize that’s really annoying, don’t you?”
He stopped. “Hm?”
“Humming. It’s only enjoyable for the person doing it. Everyone else wants to break your face.”
“Oh. Right. Just filling the silence.”
That silence fell over us again.
We moved forward another few inches.
The queue on our left wasn’t moving. Some sort of hold-up had stopped its movement at least five minutes ago. A bulky, snakelike pair of Seekers were arguing with the clerk helming the service station. He looked both harried and bored, which was a unique combination of expressions if ever I’d seen one. Right now he was chattering into an earpiece. The snakelike Seekers were hissing at him all the while.
I shook my head. Let the man talk, why don’t you?
Borrick caught me watching. The corners of his mouth lifted in a shallow smile. “You get all sorts out here, you really do.”
“Visit the Way-Crossing a lot, do you?”
“Now and again,” he said. “I’m surprised you’re not here more. It would make finding your quest destinations a lot easier than finding routes throughout Greater London all the time.”
“And how do you know I cut through from London?” I asked hotly.
“I don’t,” he said, rolling his shoulders. “Just an assumption.”
“Right. Well, you know what they say about assumptions.”
Another flash of irritation crossed his face. “You know, Mira, I’m just being polite. I would quite like to put the past behind us. I’m doing my best—I wish you’d do the same.”
“Polite,” I scoffed. “All right then, let’s do this. Tell me this, Borrick.” I rounded on him. “Why are you here? I assume you’re not exactly interested in finding Heidi’s mum.”
“What did you just say about assumptions?” Borrick asked. He smiled at my own look of annoyance. “No, I’m not in this to find Heidi’s mother.”
“And she knows that?” I asked. “Otherwise it’s pretty cold of you to intimate otherwise.”
He shook his head. “Heidi is under no illusions of that, you’ll be pleased to hear.”
“So what are you in this for?”
“We have a mutual goal,” said Borrick.
I lifted an eyebrow. “Which is …?”
“You’ve heard of the Steady Phoenix Flames of Grace?”
“The Stabilis Phoenix Gratia Flammarum?”
“That’s what I said,” Borrick retorted stiffly. “Heidi’s mother was following its questline.”
“The Flames are a myth,” I said thoughtfully.
Borrick smiled thinly. “
Just like the Chalice Gloria, right?”
Someone else, and I might’ve responded, “Touché.” This was Borrick though—and I was not in the business of admitting to him that he had a fair point. (Even if he totally did. Ungh.)
“Questions regarding the possibly mythic nature of the Flames aside,” said Borrick, “it’s part of an extended questline. There are other treasures along the path to it that confer their own sense of achievement—respect.”
“Right,” I said. “Like a commemorative ‘Girls of Essex’ coin set.”
“Yes, well,” said Borrick with a sidelong look and a thin look, “while you’ve cemented your own legend in our world, some of us are still on their own path.”
I brayed a sneering, derisive noise. “To hell with my legend.”
Borrick’s eyebrows rose, for a moment. His look of confusion was replaced with a frown. I hadn’t realized it before, at least consciously, but his face was surprisingly expressive.
“What happened to you, Mira?” he asked.
“You know exactly what happened to me,” I muttered softly, averting my gaze.
Borrick shook his head. “This isn’t just the loss of your brother. It’s like something has … I don’t know exactly … like you’ve come unanchored somehow. No—like you’ve become disillusioned—yes, that’s it.”
Disillusioned—it seemed like too tame a word to describe how I felt now. I’d learned the truth behind our world, the Seeker world—and it was a nasty, awful truth, no simple punch in the gut but a full on pulverization of every holy inch of my worldview. And all of these people, in these queues, passing through the Entanglement, out in a wide Seeker universe, alive and dead and yet to be alive, all of them were operating under exactly the same illusions—swept up in the same lies.
“I don’t understand it,” said Borrick. He was looking at me as if he very much wanted to. Eyebrows pressing inward, a faint comma indented between them, his gaze roved my face like I was a puzzle for him to hash out. “You’ve done things that have people whispering in awe about you. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
It was, once.
We Aimless Few Page 10
