“The Book of the Key,” Alastair said with a touch of the irony that Lily had already noted was characteristic of the Council of Four, “is a most impressive technological achievement. All the more impressive since we have no idea, really, how it works.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Alastair,” Anthony said in his whiny voice. “Of course we know how it works. It belongs to us.” But his fellow just looked at him mockingly as he led Lily up to a carved wooden stand on which a large, illuminated book lay open.
The Book of the Key was indeed the most impressive technological achievement that Lily had ever seen. Which was not surprising, seeing as how it was the most impressive technological achievement the Megalopolitan world had ever known…as Megalopolis never tired of telling itself. It was amazing. Death-defying. Unprecedented and godlike.
But it made the skin on the back of her neck creep unpleasantly. And it made her stomach feel a little sick.
This, also, was not surprising. For two reasons.
One reason was that Lily had depths of experience that went past the technological achievements of her race. But of these she had only the faintest of memories. Every child has this wisdom, from the moment she or he is born. But as we are human, we have a genius, too, for forgetting what is most important in our past. And Lily was no exception to this. Still, some of the memory remained, and was enough to make her very uneasy indeed, when confronted by the Book of the Key.
There was another reason, too. And this second reason was probably the more important.
For Peter had been right. The Angel had not died. Angels cannot die. It had waited, with angelic patience, for Lily to arrive. When she did, when she reached out to touch the Angel, the Angel passed into her. For the Angel had a task: a way to show and wisdom to impart. It is the way of angels to enter into us when these things are so. When their job is finished, they go out again. If we think about it, in silence and solitude, we will see that this is the way things are. We will see that we have felt angels coming and going before…perhaps many times before.
And if we do not see this, it should be cause for grief. For a person—and a country—who has never felt an angel is lost. And to be lost in this world is a dark and dreary thing indeed.
But the Book of the Key was remarkable, for all it made Lily feel queasy—and in its own way, it was beautiful, too. The Council of Four stood there, each of them trying to conceal his pride and pleasure in being able to show off the thing to someone who had never seen it before.
“Only initiates are allowed to see the Book,” Peter said in a sonorous voice. Then his beady little eyes gave Lily a sharp look, as if to make sure that she understood the magnitude of the honor being done her.
She dropped her eyes demurely. Livia, obviously pleased by the impression her protégée had made, came over and took her hand.
“Look,” Livia said. “This book—this precious manuscript—holds the secret of all that was, all that is, and all that is meant to be. You have been brought here because you have been called by the Book itself.” Then with a theatrical flair, Livia put her fingers under Lily’s chin and pulled it up to look the girl in the eye. “Do you understand what that means?”
“She doesn’t mean any of it,” Lily thought to herself. “It’s just a role she’s playing. And she wants me to play one too.”
Lily certainly understood what role she was meant to play. And the Angel that was inside her prompted her, so that her actions were everything that they ought to be.
“Indeed I do, Lady Livia,” she said in a clear, bell-like tone. “I, the humble girl chosen by Conor Barr, have been called to play a part in the forming of the Great Empire.” (If she had been able to see Phoebe’s face, she would have seen the girl suppress a laugh at this nonsense.)
Peter let out a heavy, sonorous breath of sheer admiration. “That is well said, well said indeed.”
“The Great Empire,” Auberon said seriously. “The End Which We All of Us Serve.”
“We are the same as our fathers before us,” Anthony said in his nasal, unpleasant voice. “We keep the same sacred vows.”
Only Alastair looked at Lily skeptically. Maybe he had noticed a slightly false tone in her voice. Or maybe he had noticed she didn’t look so surprised when she saw the Book. Whatever it was, something about Lily’s performance made him uneasy.
“Look at the book,” the Angel’s voice whispered inside Lily. “Turn the pages. Look admiring, humble, and afraid. Look all of these things. And I will tell you what to do next.”
Lily obeyed.
She stepped up to the glowing pages of the Book. And she turned the first page.
“It’s…it’s so beautiful,” she said. And she meant it, even though, as I’ve said, something about its beauty made her feel a little bit sick.
This was the truth. The Book was indeed beautiful. Encrusted with gold and gems, each page glowed with pictures so lifelike that one could imagine oneself inside of them. More than that: each picture moved, changed, told its own story.
I know this for I’ve seen the Book myself. It is indeed beautiful.
And then there were the stories, so many of them. The Book lay open now to the story of how Megalopolis became an Empire.
“Turn to page one thousand, two hundred, and forty-one,” Alastair ordered her, still watching her expression closely, as if to reassure himself of something.
Lily, obedient, did so. On that page, there she saw herself.
Herself.
And there was the picture, changing. Everything that had happened to her up until now. Arcadia. The Children’s Mine. Conor’s and her love (here Lily couldn’t help but blush and feel a brief, sharp longing for the lover she had left behind on the False Moon). Livia leading her and Rex across the Silver Bridge.
But there was more. The pictures changed.
“I…I’ve never seen these things before,” Lily said. And the Angel didn’t need to warn her to speak shyly. She did this on her own out of her natural awe.
“The future,” Peter said softly. And Lily, astonished, knew it was so. She was looking at pictures of the Future. As she did, she saw herself walk to the shore of a great ocean. She was alone. Rex was nowhere to be seen. Without hesitating, the girl in the picture walked into the sea. The green-gray waves closed over her head. She could smell the salt and the wrack and the tar. She could feel the water….
“Somebody catch her before she falls,” she heard Alastair say, as if from a great distance.
And then she fainted dead away.