Page 9

Living in the past is all we can ever do. The future has yet to be forged, and the now is gone too quickly for anyone to notice it. The only choice is how far to lag behind the quill tip as it records your story.

The Story of U , by Pauline Retro

Livira

“We need help now, Livira! It’s happening now! They’ve got your book. I’m reading it!”

The words were coming from Yolanda’s mouth and the voice was hers, but someone else was speaking through her, Livira knew it.

The girl’s pale lips writhed as if fighting to say more, but no sound escaped. Confusion filled her pink eyes.

“Don’t let them take it to the Mechanism!” Livira couldn’t even begin to imagine the harm it might wreak there. “Don’t take my book to the Mechanism!”

Yolanda shuddered and looked around, suspiciously. Leetar watched the pair of them, wrapped in her own confusion.

“I am myself again.” Yolanda patted her upper arms with her hands as if checking she wasn’t lying.

“Are you all right?” Leetar came closer, reaching out tentatively as if the girl might be wounded somehow.

“Who was talking through you?” An awful thought seized Livira. “Was it Arpix?” Saying it out loud made the answer obvious. It had been Arpix, scared and begging for help. She knew exactly what sorts of terrors Oanold’s camp held, and the thought of Arpix at the mercy of those monsters left her fighting not to be physically sick. “Get him back!”

“Get him back?” A rather put-out look managed to escape Yolanda’s normal imperturbable facade.

“Yes! Let me speak to him again!”

“That isn’t something I can do.” The girl gave her a withering stare. “I felt the book at work. This is one of what I fear will be many dangerous side effects of the damage you’ve wrought.”

“But we can still go back to when we left and save him?” Livira wanted to leave now. Whatever tricks time might be playing on her, the need felt too urgent to ignore until some more convenient day.

Yolanda shook her head. “Your friend has given you a new present. If you return to a time before he spoke to you, you will be a ghost. You can only have physical form from the moment that conversation ended. If he makes contact again the same thing will happen, and you will lose the ability to stop anything that has happened to him by that point.”

Livira wanted to object but realised that she didn’t understand enough to know what to object to. She paused, trying to wrap her thoughts around what Yolanda had said. Leetar just looked bewildered. “Each time he talks to me like he just did…everything that has happened to him is locked into the past. His past becomes my past. I can’t go there.”

“Except as a ghost to watch what has happened.” Yolanda nodded. “Yes.”

“Let’s do what we’re here to do and get back to where…to when I need to be.” Livira returned her gaze to the statues at the centre of the square. What had happened to Yolanda had been so strange that it had managed to drag her attention from the possibly even stranger thing standing before them. “That’s Carlotte!” She pointed at the queen. “My friend Carlotte, from the library.” It hadn’t been until she was level with the statue’s face that Livira was sure of it. From the ground it was hard to tell, though there was still something very familiar about the nose, the hair, the shape of the jaw.

“Impossible.” Yolanda still sounded distracted. “Whatever queen it represents must just look similar to your friend.”

“It’s her,” Livira insisted, though her confidence wavered now the face wasn’t immediately in front of her.

Yolanda shook her head. “It’s difficult to get a good likeness in stone. Especially at that scale.”

Livira continued to stare, her neck already uncomfortable from looking up at such an angle. It was true, she’d seen a number of very unconvincing statues, but better sculptors had produced work that looked as if a real person had been caught between moments and turned to stone. Though, she had to admit that she had never seen the live subject on whom those works were based…

“It’s her. You said we were here, now, for a reason. This is too much coincidence not to be that reason.”

“If she came to this time,” Yolanda persisted, “she would be a ghost just as we are. How would anyone make a statue of a ghost?”

Livira’s frustration spilled out and anger coloured her voice. “I’m not saying—”

“We could just go and see?” Leetar interrupted before Livira got into full flow. She had one arm extended, finger aimed at two vast bronze doors sitting atop a flight of steps on which guards in plumed helms stood to attention. “Whoever the queen is, she lives in there.”

Livira shrugged. The palace Leetar had pointed out would be their best option. She gestured with an open hand for Leetar to lead the way.

Yolanda followed on after Livira. “They tend to make statues of people after they die.”

“You don’t know Carlotte. She’d want to see it for herself.” Livira climbed the steps behind Leetar, all three of them passing unseen between watchful guards.

Livira opened her mouth to add what was both obvious and at the same time a revelation—namely that Carlotte must be married if she were queen. That she must be sharing her bed with a king. But as her lips parted, a sound like the cracking of the world ran through her, a knife of noise, as agonising in its volume as in its discordant sharpness. She felt immediately fractured, her mind in different places, too many images filling her eyes. Arpix bruised and bloody, head hung in defeat. Yute standing in some lesser library beneath an unwavering light, a slim, drab book in his hand, wonder on his face. Evar lying in darkness, his pale skin the only source of light, eyes closed, deathly still.

Her vision cleared slowly, other images of places and times she had known trying to claim a place, though none as vivid as those of Arpix, Yute, and Evar. Livira found herself lying on the steps, partly intersecting the stonework. She levered herself up wincing. “That really hurt!”

A white-faced Leetar got to her knees beside Livira. “I thought we couldn’t be harmed. Not here. Not like we are.”

“We can’t.” Yolanda corrected herself. “It shouldn’t be able to happen.” She got to her feet and directed her puzzled gaze at Livira. “It…it’s almost like the damage your book does. But it can’t be reaching us here. Not already?”

Livira found it hard to be guilty about her book. She didn’t feel that anything she’d done by writing it or by following her curiosity into the Exchange had been deserving of such an outcome or overmuch censure. “I’m pretty sure of one thing. We won’t find the answer out here on the steps.”

Leetar took the hint. She glanced around at the guards, sharing Livira’s sense of amazement at their indifference, then hurried on up the stairs. She stopped short at the great doors, glancing back for instruction. Livira simply took her arm and dragged her through.

“Oh, I didn’t like that at all!” Leetar stood shivering in her stained finery, looking back at the door, and flinching away as Yolanda walked through it as though it were a trick of the light rather than tons of bronze and timber.

Leetar pulled herself together and led on. Livira trusted the girl’s instinct to navigate the corridors of power even in a different nation and era. Leetar might be guessing, but those guesses would be more informed than any Livira or Yolanda might make.

The path to the king’s court proved to be a straightforward one, following the broad corridor—that in any other circumstances Livira would have called a grand hall—from the imposing exterior doors to a pair of similarly huge but far more lavishly decorated doors at the far end. In the process they passed a dozen chambers, all of grand design and indulgently furnished, but of unknown purpose.

The far set of doors stood open, though guards in elaborate armour waited to interrogate anyone that approached. Beyond them a capacious throne room, with walls of white and gold, held nearly a hundred of what must be the citadel’s most important people. Livira couldn’t tell if they were aristocrats, part of the royal family, or merchants, but she could tell that all of them were eye-wateringly rich.

The size of the room meant that it wasn’t crowded. The glittering courtiers mingled in groups. Musicians at the far end of the chamber entertained without their playing filling the space. And before a dais that supported two great thrones, one silver and one gold, a more favoured group of five spoke directly to the man on whose brow the crown rested.

Livira recognised the king from his statue. The sculptor had captured his features with rare skill, and little time seemed to have passed since completing the work, as the man appeared unchanged. The curling hair was brown and thick, the eyes sharp, intense, a light colour. The king was still young, closer to thirty than to twenty, but fresh-faced, not yet corrupted by the excess to which his station gave access.

“It’s him!” Leetar said.

“It is,” Yolanda agreed.

None of them needed to have seen the statue, nor for the man to be wearing a crown. Their eyes would have converged on his if he had been the pauper in the crowd, or the least remarkable of men, an average of his fellows, with no single feature to latch upon. Livira tried to understand it. The man was lit by a different light. As if the sun found him and him alone on a dull day. He seemed like a figure added to a painting at a later date, by a different artist, somehow at odds with everything around him, edged by a border that didn’t quite match the larger scene.

Livira wove her way towards the dais, avoiding the courtiers. Her gaze kept returning to the empty throne beside the king’s. Shouldn’t Carlotte be sitting beside her husband, just as her statue stood beside his?

Yolanda and Leetar followed, Leetar exclaiming in alarm when she inadvertently discovered the unsettling effects of having someone walk through you. As she stood shaking off the thoughts and memories of the old aristocrat, and the man walked on with a shiver of his own, the king’s head turned in their direction.

He raised a hand, and then, slowly, a finger on that hand. The lord addressing him faltered and fell silent. The king stood from his throne, looking from Yolanda to Livira to Leetar with a puzzled expression.

“We should go,” Leetar hissed.

“Why?” Livira asked. “What’s he going to do? Have the guards arrest us?”

“We should go,” Yolanda said. “He shouldn’t be able to see us. Such things are dangerous. Do not, under any circumstances, speak to him.”

“You three!” The king approached the edge of his dais. He pointed at Yolanda. “Am I the only one seeing this?”

A silence rippled out across the room, snuffing conversations. The courtiers closest to the king exchanged glances and stiffened their faces against expression. The woman most directly in the line indicated by the royal digit dropped into a deep curtsey amid a billowing sea of plush blue taffeta. “Me, sire?”

“No! Not…you.” The king shook his head, stepped from the dais, and advanced on Livira and her companions at a brisk walk.

Yolanda led off for the nearest exit at similar speed, her shorter legs necessitating a jog. Livira followed, unconvinced that an escape was necessary. The king was clearly the quickest path to Carlotte.

“Stop!” The sound of more rapid footfalls behind them prompted Yolanda into a run. Leetar gave chase, skirts flapping. All around the room courtiers stood immobile, faces paling, breath withheld, watching the king.

Livira gave a sigh and made to run after Yolanda, but a hand burst from her chest before she could. “Burst” was how it felt. “Emerged” would be more accurate as there was no broken skin, no blood, no shards of bone. She pulled free and raced after Yolanda.

“The wall!” Livira’s shout was enough to steer Yolanda into the wall. A moment later darkness swallowed Livira too, and in the next pace she joined the other two on the far side in a different chamber.

Livira stood, panting, not from exertion but from the flood of images that the king’s touch had nearly drowned her in. Carlotte’s face was front and centre of many of them. And not just her face.

“Ewwww.” Livira shook herself.

Yolanda looked up at her expectantly.

“You don’t want to know. But she’s definitely here.”

The ballroom they’d found themselves in was almost as echoingly empty as it was echoingly large. A single servant on his knees had polished around a tenth of the inlaid wooden floor and worked diligently to enlarge the gleaming portion.

“We need to find your friend.” Yolanda surveyed the chamber’s exits.

Livira gestured for Leetar to lead them. “Where would a queen live?”

Leetar headed towards the main entrance, and with less confidence, took a series of left and right turns, leading them along a galleried corridor that looked out over the lush gardens of an internal courtyard. She paused midway beside an imposing oak door flanked by two guards.

Yolanda gave the door a speculative look. “Here?”

Leetar pushed through. The room beyond lay sumptuously decorated, with statuettes in silver and gold set in niches along the walls. A servant stood in front of a lectern, reading aloud from a large book. It sounded like a romantic tale of star-crossed lovers, though Livira didn’t have much time to make her assessment.

“Down there.” Leetar led along a door-lined passage towards the distant strains of music.

“Why didn’t they invite the invisible queen to the ball?”

A loud, theatrical question reached out just as Livira passed the corridor’s only open door. She paused to look.

“They knew she wouldn’t show up!” The speaker, an extremely short man in the motley of a court jester glanced around the empty room then smiled as if acknowledging applause. He continued with admirable gusto, “Why did the invisible man run away?” A quizzical glance around the chamber. “He was a fade !”

“Ugh.” Livira shook herself and hurried after the others. The musicians in the beautifully appointed chamber at the corridor’s end were likewise playing to nobody in particular, though with great skill.

The melody followed them as Leetar led to an ornate doorway, and through it into a bedchamber, where, atop a perfectly made four-poster bed, a woman lay sprawled face down in her slumbers, the hard-used folds of an expensive blue dress spreading around her.

Leetar turned towards Livira. “Is that her?”

The woman on the bed lifted her head from the sumptuous pillows that had nearly smothered her. Eyes bleary with sleep fixed on Livira and a heartbeat later a screaming ball of angry silk launched itself at her.