“Are you . . . used to that sort of thing?”
Those were the first words that Blaise managed to utter, once back at ground level. He had leant against one of the ancient baths’ ruined columns, breathing in deeply through his nose, under the disdainful gaze of the fruit sellers. His pantaloons, soaked in sweat, had lost all their fullness.
Ophelia went to the closest fountain to get some water for him to drink. The searing heat of the bazaar, buzzing with people and flies, offered a stark contrast to the catacombs.
“I’m sorry,” she said, handing a beaker to Blaise. “Really sorry.” That was all she could say, again and again. All that she’d experienced in the Pole—the Clairdelune dungeons, the Knight and his hounds, Farouk’s tantrums, the countless assassination attempts, not to mention her encounter with God—had hardened her to intimidation. But that was part of her own life, not Eulalia’s.
Blaise looked at her, goggle-eyed. “Any more and my heart would have packed up. Mon Dieu! It’s him, isn’t it? It’s him who killed Mademoiselle Silence?”
“I don’t know.” And that’s what exasperated Ophelia. Had she met him in other circumstances, Fearless could have taught her a great deal. “Will you be alright?” she asked, concerned.
Blaise nodded, but that head movement alone made him regurgitate all the water he’d just swallowed. “You . . . you must find me very emotional, Mademoiselle Eulalia,” he said, shamefully wiping his mouth. “The truth is, I have a cat phobia. That one was . . . particularly large.”
“I’m really, really sorry,” Ophelia muttered, as the bazaar gongs rang out. “My leave is coming to an end. I must return to the Good family, and deliver my message, and . . . and . . . ”
“And claim my compensation,” she thought to herself. Much as she wanted to stay with Blaise, the need to know what Mediana had to tell her about Thorn, that was urgent.
“We’ll have to do this again,” she tried to joke. “Without the saber-toothed tiger.”
As she returned his turban, now like an unraveled ball of wool, Blaise contorted his lips into a grimace that was probably meant to be a smile. “Eh bien, another time, maybe?”
“So sorry, again.”
Ophelia would have liked to add something more intelligent, but once more, the words escaped her. She crossed the bazaar at a run, tripping on carpets and bumping into passersby. She was sure this meeting with Blaise would be the first and last. She was equally sure that it was best that way.
So why couldn’t she bear the thought?
With every stride, anger made her blood boil. Mediana had deliberately put her in danger. She hadn’t hesitated to make use of her most intimate secret, to play with her most fragile hope to satisfy her own curiosity. Now that Ophelia had fulfilled her part of the deal, she had an ominous feeling about it.
He who sows the wind shall reap the storm.
“If Mediana has lied to me,” she thought, clenching her jaws, “if she’s made it all up about Thorn, I’ll make sure that I myself become that storm.”
As though reflecting her inner state, the sky became increasingly oppressive. A miasma of clouds lowered above Babel, but it was a storm without lightning, or wind, or rain. Ophelia struggled to catch her breath as she went up the slope, fringed with umbrella pines, that led to the belvedere; those daily laps of the stadium hadn’t yet made an athlete of her.
She sighed with relief when she saw she’d arrived just in time. The birdtrain coaches were in the process of landing on the platform tracks, carried by the powerful beating of the chimeras’ wings. Soon, passengers were pouring out of them. Ophelia boarded one, inserted her card in the ticket machine, and looked for a seat. It wasn’t easy: the students of all the academies spent their Sundays in town, and always waited until the last birdtrain to return to their lodgings.
Barely had Ophelia sat down when she heard, on the other side of the window, a mechanical clicking that made her jump up. A wheelchair, maneuvered by an adolescent with dark skin and white clothes, was moving off along the platform, in the midst of the passengers who had just alighted. Ophelia rushed to the nearest door and leaned over the step.
“Ambrose?”
He had heard her. Ophelia knew that from the way his shoulders had shuddered at the sound of his name. He had heard her, but he continued on his way without turning around.
Ophelia never shouted. But she couldn’t help the imploring cry that burst from her lungs: “Ambrose!”
She saw the inverted hands grip the levers of the wheelchair, as though fighting the desire to halt it, but unable to make that decision. Ophelia wanted to run over to him, look into his eyes, ask him what she’d done to anger him, beg him not to leave her to face alone all that she still had to face.
That second of hesitation cost her the chance. The conductor closed the carriage door. She looked disparagingly at Ophelia’s toga and sandals, their whiteness lost to the dust of the catacombs.
“One does not make a spectacle of oneself on the public highway, powerless one. Draw attention to yourself once more, and I’ll book you.”
As the birdtrain sped along the tracks and laboriously took flight again, Ophelia sat back in her seat. Wearily, she removed her glasses, leaned her forehead against the window, and stared at the hazy clouds swirling in the void.
She felt downhearted.
Her ominous feeling had become a certainty. Mediana would tell her nothing at all. Blaise would want to have nothing more to do with her. He would withdraw his friendship, just as Ambrose had before him. Ophelia wouldn’t gain access to the Secretarium, wouldn’t discover more about God’s past, wouldn’t find Thorn. She would forever be a slave to blackmail, and spend the rest of her days punching little holes in cards.
It was the conductor’s voice, through the birdtrain’s loudspeakers, that jolted her out of her torpor: “Apprentice Virtuoso Eulalia, member of the second division of the company of Forerunners, is requested to present herself at the front of the train.”
Ophelia put her glasses back on and got up, under the students’ curious gaze. She was as surprised as they were. She elbowed her way through the succession of carriages to reach the inspectors’ compartment. The conductor, in the middle of repeating her announcement into the loudspeaker, stopped on seeing her arrive.
“What do you want, powerless one?”
“You called for me. I am Eulalia.”
“You’re an apprentice virtuoso? You’re an apprentice virtuoso,” she repeated, this time as a statement, having noticed the Good Family-stamped card Ophelia was handing her. “I imagined you to be more . . . less . . . anyway, it’s good news to have found you at last, Mademoiselle Eulalia. I’ve been making this announcement repeatedly, for two hours.”
“Two hours? Why? What’s going on?”
The conductor took off her cap and wiped a handkerchief over her pink, egg-shaped head, shaved the Cyclopean way. The air was even more stifling inside the train than out. “My only instruction is to take you to the Memorial. Lady Septima—glory to LUX!—has summoned you there very urgently. I don’t know what you’ve done, but it seems like a serious matter.”
Ophelia, struck suddenly by the obvious, felt her legs go weak. Mediana hadn’t sent her to the cabaret to make use of her, but to get rid of her. She’d denounced her to Lady Septima, no less!
Ophelia risked expulsion. Or worse, prison.
She quelled the panic and anger surging up inside her, and did some quick thinking. If Lady Septima wanted to see her at the Memorial, not the conservatoire, it was to avoid having to involve Helen. Perhaps Ophelia would have a chance by pleading her case with the principal.
“I must get off first at the Good Family,” she said, with all the confidence she could muster. “I’m in civvies, I can’t present myself to Lady Septima not wearing the regulation uniform.”
The conductor seemed to reflect on the matter, then grabbed her loudhailer: “Your attention please. Exceptionally, this train will not be stopping until the Memorial. We would ask you to bear with us; we will stop at each academy on the return journey. The Birdtrain Company will supply confirmation of the delay to anyone requesting it. You, Mademoiselle Eulalia, stay right here, like a good girl,” the conductor instructed, after hanging up her loudhailer. “If you have a clear conscience, like all decent citizens, you have nothing to fear.”
Ophelia sat on the foldaway seat assigned to her. The trap had closed. She clasped her hands together, on her thighs, to try to conceal their shaking.
She looked around for a way of escape, knowing full well she wouldn’t find one. All the train’s doors opened onto the void. There were no mirrors onboard, and even if there were, would she still be able to pass through them? Since her arrival in Babel, not a single day had passed without her lying to someone, about her identity or her intentions. This deception was greater than all the playacting she might have done in the past. It wasn’t merely a disguise, as Mime’s livery had been; it was a second skin that, day after day, had become second nature. After continually thinking of herself as Eulalia, could she still claim to be Ophelia?
The journey to the Memorial seemed both horribly long and abominably short to her. Her worst fears were confirmed when saw a troop of vigilantes awaiting her on the landing stage. They weren’t armed—the very word was an offense—but they didn’t need to be. They were all Necromancers, masters of temperature, capable of paralyzing with cold at a mere glance. They were also first-rate manufacturers of freezers.
They escorted Ophelia without uttering a word to her. As they passed the statue of the headless soldier, she felt like a criminal being led to a court-martial. Once through the Memorial’s big glass doors, she was overwhelmed by the silence reigning within. This quiet bore no resemblance to the usual whispering of readers; it was a total absence of sound. The great circular galleries on each floor were all deserted, giving the entire place the feel of an abandoned temple. The cloak of clouds bearing down on the rotunda cast its shadow over every nook and cranny. The suspended globe of the Secretarium, whose metal usually glinted in the sun, today looked more like a dead planet.
The Necromancers made Ophelia take the northern transcendium. She tensed upon seeing, in the middle of the huge vertical corridor, a small figure with red-glowing eyes. When Ophelia had gotten close enough, she was surprised to see that it wasn’t Lady Septima, as she had at first supposed, but her son, Octavio. He was watching her through the long, black strands of his fringe and his eyebrow chain. He exuded such suspicion that Ophelia felt condemned before having even been tried.
“You’re keeping everyone waiting, Apprentice Eulalia.”
She didn’t respond. She knew that, from now on, her every word could be used against her. She would say nothing for as long as she didn’t know of what, exactly, she stood accused.
She thought Octavio was going to take her to the private room, where Lady Septima and the Lords of LUX had their headquarters, on the top floor of the Memorial, but instead, he took out a key from inside his uniform. Ophelia couldn’t believe her glasses when he inserted it into the lock on a post, which then sprang a metal gangway over to the Secretarium. That terra incognita she’d been barred from when playing the model pupil, she was being invited into it, now that she’d fallen from grace? It was unbelievably ironic. She followed Octavio onto the spiral stairway that allowed one to swing from the horizontal position of the transcendium to the vertical position of the gangway. Barely had Ophelia set off down the latter than her hands clutched both handrails. She didn’t suffer from vertigo, but they were more than one hundred feet above the ground, and the thought of walking on a gangway that could be lifted by the mere turn of a key didn’t really reassure her. She glanced back at the Necromancers, who, having remained in the transcendium, were now standing perpendicular to her.
The closer Ophelia got to the weightless globe, the more she gauged its giant proportions. The red-gold coating of the earth’s crust dipped wherever there were oceans, and defined in relief the contours of continents. The reinforced door that Octavio opened, somewhere within a southern sea, was a perfectly respectable size, and yet it gave the impression of being a tiny keyhole.
Ophelia went through it, to the other side.
All that her imagination had conjured up of this inaccessible sanctuary was immediately shattered. The interior of the Secretarium was an identical copy of the interior of the Memorial. Galleries, served by transcendiums, were tiered in rings around a well of natural light. There was even, suspended between its atrium and its cupola, a terrestrial globe that was the exact replica of the one containing it. The architects had designed the entire place like a nest of dolls!
In the galleries to the right, thousands of antiquities glimmered from the length of glass-fronted cabinets, illuminated by the cold bulbs of Heliopolis. In the galleries to the left, entire rows of cylinders turned on their axles, humming continuously. Ophelia knew that, around each cylinder, a punched card was rolled, and that each punched card replicated a document. The whole complex combination of cogs and gears resembled the workings of a hurdy-gurdy.
“It’s true that you’re coming here for the first time,” commented Octavio, who was closely observing her every reaction. “The Secretarium, like the Memorial, is divided into two twin parts: the rare collections are stored in the eastern hemisphere, and the database in the western hemisphere.”
“And this?” she asked, pointing at the globe floating above them. “A second Secretarium?”
In spite of herself, Ophelia had broken her self-imposed silence.
“Just a decorative globe,” answered Octavio. “Ah, here comes the head of your division.”
She felt a surge of hope on seeing that Elizabeth was, indeed, crossing the atrium in their direction. She appeared more solemn than ever to her. Her tawny hair rose like a cape with her every step, and her face was even less expressive than usual.
“Anything new?” Elizabeth had addressed this question solely to Octavio.
“Nothing to report. No one entered the Memorial, or exited it, with the exception of Apprentice Eulalia.”
“Very good. Let’s go.”
Ophelia followed them, battling the vertigo that had beset her. Maybe it was the oppressiveness of the clouds over the cupolas, but she was starting to feel short of air. It wasn’t her descent into the catacombs that was behind this summons. It was something else that was even more serious.
Thorn’s watch, afflicted by her nervousness, snapped its cover from inside a pocket of her toga. The question was no longer whether Mediana had betrayed her, but to what extent.
They stopped in front of a compressed-air door. “We are not authorized to enter with you,” Elizabeth explained, after opening it. “All that takes place in there is highly confidential. Good luck.”
“Luck doesn’t exist,” Octavio chipped in, coldly. “We alone are the authors of our destiny. But that,” he added, in a hushed voice, “Apprentice Eulalia already knows.”
Ophelia knew nothing at all, and that was precisely the problem. With wary steps, she entered an austere room, seemingly designated for consulting documents. It boasted, as its sole piece of furniture, a large lectern made of precious wood, over which Lady Septima was leaning.
“The door,” she ordered.
Ophelia turned the steering-wheel-shaped handle until the lock clicked. It was so cold inside, she felt as if she were locking herself into an ice store. Her bare feet, in their sandals, started tingling, painfully, all over.
“Step forward.” Lady Septima had issued this command without hesitation. Calm and distant, as ever. Slowly, she turned eyes blazing like two beacons in the dimly lit room toward Ophelia. “Do you like jigsaw puzzles?”
Ophelia blinked. This wasn’t the interrogation she’d prepared herself for. Cautiously, she approached the manuscript on the lectern that Lady Septima was indicating to her. It was old, judging by its state of decay. The faded letters running across the page, in the few legible parts, were those of an unknown language.
It was the pages of notes lying on the other leaf of the lectern that particularly caught her attention. “Mediana’s translation,” she acknowledged. “Why are you asking me about this, rather than her?”
Lady Septima didn’t reply. Ophelia then felt every muscle in her body, which she’d been clenching since her birdtrain journey, relax to the point of making her unsteady. The anger she’d built up against Mediana evaporated in an instant.
“What’s happened to her?”
Lady Septima dropped the grin that had been stretching her mouth, ridding her face of any trace of personal feeling. “A division almost entirely composed of Seers, and not one among them capable of seeing the future of their own cousin. They bring shame on all the Frontrunners. In short,” she said, rallying herself with a lift of the chin, “Sir Henry demands to be provided with a replacement at a moment’s notice. Even if I have serious reservations about you, one has to admit that you are the fittest candidate for this work. The least incapable, anyway. You will have to prove yourself worthy of the honor that LUX is granting you, Apprentice Eulalia. I’m going to inform Sir Henry of your arrival,” she added, marching off. “You can cast a look at the manuscript, but do not, for any reason, touch it. Handling a document of this value is done according to a protocol that you have not yet mastered.”
Lady Septima entered a lift at the back of the room; it rose with a grinding of gearwheels as soon as she operated the lever.
Once alone, Ophelia leaned with both hands on the lectern and stared at length at the manuscript without seeing it. Waves of conflicting emotions crashed within her, making her glasses turn every possible shade.
Relief. Incredulity. Exultation. Distress.
Distress? After all Mediana had put her through, was it really possible that Ophelia felt concerned about her fate? She had become a Forerunner in order to find herself exactly where she stood right now; her real research could finally begin. She should have been overjoyed, so why was she terrified?
It was an imperious click-click from within her toga that distracted her from her turbulent thoughts. Ophelia tugged on the chain of her watch in order to examine it. Now, the cover wouldn’t stop opening and closing, as if in the grip of an epileptic fit. Click-click! Click-click! Click-click!
“Alright, calm down,” Ophelia muttered, as much to herself as to the watch. She blocked the cover with her thumb, but the hands immediately took over, spinning around in a frenzied waltz. At regular intervals, they all stopped at once, pointing, again and again, at the same time.
Thirty minutes and thirty seconds past six.
Ophelia turned to the lift, as its gearwheels had started up again. Sir Henry might be an automaton, but it wouldn’t make a good impression to wrestle with a broken-down fob watch in front of him.
She blinked. The hands had suddenly changed time, now all pointing obstinately at exactly midday.
No. The hands weren’t indicating the time. They were indicating a direction.
Thorn’s watch wasn’t, never had been, broken down. It had quite simply turned itself into a compass. A compass of which the three needles, at that very second, were pointing at the arriving lift.
The lift door opened onto Lady Septima and Sir Henry.
Except that Sir Henry wasn’t an automaton.
Sir Henry was Thorn.