The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One (22 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE
Hat Trick

“You know,” Jude said in a conversational tone, “the most difficult part of this entire year was that first week: cutting every reference regarding a particular murder from every paper in which it appears is an awfully big job. It took hiring almost seventy students in the end, but they managed to get the job done.”

Dizzy from the blood loss, Michael’s head swiveled around as he tried to comprehend what he was hearing. “Students …? You hired …students to … to clip newspapers…?”

“Nearly ninety thousand newspapers, at the final tally. Sure, they complained a lot, but most of them were accustomed to having plasma sucked out of them or wanking into a cup for the same amount I was offering them to pedal around the city and clip articles out of the papers. Not exactly an upwards move, career-wise, but that’s academics for you.”

“I … I don’t understand …” Michael replied weakly.

“I know, and I regret that, if nothing else—that’s why I’m here, to clear a few things up before you die.”

“I’m not … ambulance …”

“I’m afraid you are,” Jude said matter-of-factly, “And I wouldn’t count on the medical team getting here in time. Haven’t you noticed? You’re the one who got stabbed, but right now, the only thing anyone is concerned about is that one of the primary administrators of the oldest University in the entire German-speaking world just went bonkers in Bayreuth. I give it a good ten minutes before anyone even remembers you’re here.”

Michael summoned enough strength to lift himself up on one elbow before collapsing back into the sticky crimson pool growing beneath him. “What did the newspapers have to do with this?”

“You had to be prevented from reading this,” Jude said as he swiftly dropped to a crouch and pulled the crumpled newspaper clipping out of his pocket. Spreading and smoothing it, he held it in front of Michael’s face so the weakening man could read it, then put it away when he saw the expected looks of shock and recognition.

“Vasily?” Michael gasped. “Vasily Strugatski? Dead?” He looked at Jude, eyes darting in fear, “Did … did you kill him?”

“Me? Not at all. All I know about him is his paternal lineage and what I read in that clipping. Why should you ask?”

Michael chuckled, a weak, phlegmy sound. “Yeah, right … You’re the great connector, remember? And you … You didn’t know Vasily and I were related?”

“Related?” Jude exclaimed, shocked himself for the first time since he’d entered the opera hall. “In what way?”

“We were married to the same woman—at different times, of course.”

“That is interesting. It’s certainly another piece of the puzzle—and if nothing else, just validates further the course of events.”

“If you didn’t know … Then why go to such efforts to … Hide the newspaper clippings?”

“Because he was the first Erl-King to die in more than a thousand years—and I needed time to discover exactly what that meant and then act upon it before anyone else did. And in this case, ‘anyone’ also meant the same unique group of individuals who could also help me decipher the clues—specifically, you.

Michael blinked. “Back up, now—what was that about Erl-Kings?”

Jude shrugged. “Just what I said—Vasily Strugatski was an Erl-King.”

Michael let his head drop back and he closed his eyes. “Madness …” he muttered, “It’s all utter madness …”

“I can understand where you’d think so,” said Jude, “and I really wish you had the time for me to explain it all, but some things just aren’t meant to be.”

“Please … please, aren’t you going to summon help? We were colleagues…. Are you really just going to let me die?”

“No,” replied Jude, “I’m not ‘letting’ you do anything—the whole point was for you to die, or else all of this would have been a complete waste of time and effort.”

“B-Been working on this a while, h-have we?” Michael said.

“For more than a year, actually,” said Jude. “The first order of business was to locate two Erl-Kings—one who could be sacrificed, and one who could be controlled. I found three, but two of you were in the same city—at the same University, no less—whether by providence, or the machinations of Time, my task was made easier by half. With my credentials, attaining a post at the University was no problem. The next step was establishing a need for yourself and Galen to work together, while simultaneously encouraging your particular passions.”

“Why that?”

“Focus. There were times when I could have told you both that I’d found the book on the moon, and you’d have dismissed the niggling details of how I got there just to hold the manuscript a little longer. Maintaining that sort of focus throughout the year was a priority. With Galen, it was advancement and the promise of a glorious performance here. With you, it was the threat of dismissal.”

“Gee, thanks,” Michael said dryly.

“It’s nothing personal. Some people work better under pressure.”

“My tenure wasn’t anything you could influence.”

“It was when a simple theft could affect the University’s belief in your capabilities.”

Michael blinked. “The Æthelbert Document … you … you …”

“Me. Sorry. I’m also the one who arranged to sell you the Uppsala Dance for a price several times what you could have purchased it for—or did you really not recognize Bertram when you saw him at Obscuro’s performance?”

Michael felt like he would pass out, and not because of blood loss. “The smuggler … He was the man with the crowbar in his head. How could I not have caught that?”

“Focus - one, Langbein - zero.”

“What did you do with the Æthelbert …?”

“It went to good use—the Prince of Wales was very happy to get it, and paid a very generous sum.”

“W-What…?”

“What did I do with the money? I established the Eidolon Foundation. That’s also where the departmental funding went, as well as the previous Rector.”

Michael heard a click in his head as the puzzle began to take shape. The Eidolon Foundation was the name of the company which handed a blank check to Bayreuth for use by the Wagner Festival—on the sole condition that Michael Gunnar-Galen be barred from participating. Talk about focus …

“The most important element was keeping the two of you together until the inversion point could occur. This was the reason for the machinations at the University—if Galen’s ambitions could be channeled into the possibility of redeeming the missed opportunity of his youth, then you would have all of the University’s resources with which to do your work. Galen needed you to stay to translate the two layers of the palimpsest; you needed him to stay to champion your continued professorship at the University.”

“Fat lot of good that did,” said Michael. “I got sacked, remember?”

“Yes, but by that time, the principal work was already done—and the only necessity which remained was to ensure that on August twenty-sixth, the two of you were together.”

“And it had to be at the Wagner Festival? If it was so important, then why the move with Eidolon? Why not just let him do what he wanted, and run the festival?

“Because he is driven by desire—and we always desire most that which we …”

“That which we cannot have, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah,” said Michael, coughing. “Awfully convenient, finding that manuscript with the Wagner scumbled in.”

“I’ll confess—I made it all up.”

“What?”

“The margin notes on the
Edda
manuscript—the Wagner Addendum, or Liszt Addendum, or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t matter; I created it. Oh, not all of it was mine—I couldn’t create such a thing out of whole cloth in so little time. I researched Wagner’s writings and did find segments of preliminary versions of the cycle which he had discarded—so, in a way, only the writing itself was a forgery. The words were Wagner’s.”

“Why was it necessary to forge at all? Wasn’t the
Edda
itself enough?”

“The
Edda
would have been enough to get your attention, of that much I was sure. But more would be needed to entice Galen, and it was the only one of the volumes which also contained elements that would be attractive to both of you at once. A dash of Wagner did the trick.”

“One of the volumes?” asked Michael. “There were more in your possession? More than the one Galen and I worked on?”

“Oh yes—many, many more.”

“And you didn’t show the rest of them to us?”

“No,” said Jude with deliberate emphasis, “I didn’t show the rest of the volumes to
you
.”

“Why?”

“Three reasons: first, the only one which was integral to my plans was the
Edda
—the corresponding convergence point of the inversion was ancient Icelandic. Second, I knew that if you had even an inkling that I possessed other volumes, you’d be so inevitably distracted from our principal task that we’d risk missing the correct inversion point. And last, I couldn’t take the chance that you’d discover the truth about the Erl-Kings.”

In answer to Michael’s puzzled look, Jude smirked. “The eighteenth volume—the actual youngest book in the set. It was all spelled out fairly clearly, and Galen enjoyed it a great deal.”

Despite his injuries, Michael nearly sat up with a derisive snort of laughter. “Uh-huh. So you two have been plotting against me the whole time, eh?”

“Not the whole time,” said Jude. “But I digress, and you’re bleeding out.”

Was Jude waffling? Michael couldn’t be sure—the blood loss was beginning to close in the edges of his vision.

“I suppose while I’m owning up to things,” Jude said, “I really ought to mention that I’m also the one who arranged your firing. A couple of associates of mine snuck into the records vault and replaced the authentic receipts with forgeries.”

“How? They’d have had to have been Zen Illusionists themselves to get into …”

Jude nodded. Another piece fell into place.

“You brought them back with you from Meru, didn’t you?” Michael said. “Two of the anchorites.”

“Yes—the surviving U’s. But you knew them by different names—Rutland and Burlington.”

Michael began to respond, then coughed up a bloody mass to the floor, where he stared at it as if it were from an oracle. “Funny habit, that.” he said, cheeks tightening. “Did you ever notice that it’s very human to examine our discharges? Babies look at their feces, teenagers constantly smell their own armpits, and I don’t think there’s a human on the planet who doesn’t check the tissue after a good sneeze.”

He coughed again and spat out another bezoar-like chunk. “Do you suppose it’s our way of searching for patterns in the chaos?”

“Sounds more like the plot from a bad independent film,” said Jude. “Good try, though.”

The historian was suddenly overcome by a spasm of coughing, and Jude looked on concernedly. “Not in too much pain, I hope?” he asked. “I’m not one to make anyone suffer unnecessarily, and I am enjoying our conversation immensely. I do hope you can go on for a few minutes longer.”

Just long enough,
thought Michael.
Long enough for someone to come. How long had it been, anyway? Ten minutes? An hour
? There was no way to tell.

With an effort of will, he pushed his rumpled cloak further under his side, somewhat staunching the flow of blood from his back, and leaned into it where he could face the young man. “The other books?” Michael asked in honest curiosity. “I’d’ve liked to have seen them.”

“I’d’ve liked to have shown them to you, but I knew you’d get distracted from the Sturluson—and if this inversion were missed, I wouldn’t want to go through all of this all over again.”

Michael let his head fall back against one of the floor lights and laughed weakly. “Again? Now I know you’re screwing with me,” he said. “Get the hell out of here, Jude, or Obscuro, or Odin, or whatever your name really is.”

“You don’t think our little melodrama was the first time an inversion has occurred, do you?” Jude said softly. He knelt so as to make certain his words were heard and understood. “An inversion changes, but can never completely obliterate what went before. If what we have done this night is possible, then who is to say that previous inversions didn’t occur at the junctions of Ur-cities and the rise of the Mayan Empire, or that the founding of England coincide with the Garden of Eden?”

He sat back on his haunches and pondered the historian. How much to tell, and what harm, as he had already told so much? He decided.

“Let me tell you a little story,” Jude began. “The last time a Weltanschauung Inversion took place, the course of a history we should have known was changed.

“A pilgrim arrived to walk Kora around Mount Kailas, but asked a question no one had had the sense to ask in thousands of years—if the mountain were truly the home of the Gods, and a holy place, why exactly would it be blasphemy for a humbly worshipful believer to set foot on its slopes? He couldn’t arrive at a decent answer, and no one else could provide one. So, he decided to climb the mountain, and in doing so encountered the then-current teacher, a Roman, I suppose, called R.”

“You suppose?” Michael said sarcastically.

Jude shrugged. “Was Marx a Marxist?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Anyway, R was at a loss—none of the disciples had died, but a few minutes’ discussion, notwithstanding the fact that he could see R at all—he realized this pilgrim was obviously on the path which would qualify him to enter Meru.”

Michael’s eyes lit up as another jigsaw piece fell into place. “The other fluke—you said that there had been one other instance of a teacher arriving at Meru before one was needed.”

“Very good. This one, though, was unique in the fact that he was also an Erl-King. The anchorites had had occasion to associate with the Erl-Kings of history, but never before had one arrived as an initiate of Meru.”

“Why is that significant?”

“Because more often than not, a history was brought to Meru after an inversion, and after the rule or death of an Erl-King. This was the first time an Erl-King had come to Meru with his history still unwritten.”

Michael coughed. “Like H?”

“No—H’s history was unwritten, but he was not an Erl-King. His history would be witnessed, not ruled over. R’s acolyte, however, was a significant Erl-King, one whose inversion was expected to mark an endpoint of a cosmic Calendar Round larger than any which had gone before. What was not expected was that the acolyte’s inversion would obliterate a culture which one of the anchorites had had a direct hand in creating—R himself, in fact.