The Storm of Echoes Read online

  “A lot, in fact. My suppers . . . superiors . . . they don’t come down to see me often. I’ve not yet spoken to them about you.”

  “About you?”

  “No, not about me. About you.”

  “About me.”

  “Exactly. I don’t know if they will strand udder . . . if they will understand you. Even me, I’m not really sure I understand you. I struggle enough to understand myself.”

  “. . . ”

  “You’ve not yet told me your name.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And yet I think we’re smarting . . . starting to know each other well. Me, I’m Eulalia.”

  “I’m me.”

  “That’s an interesting reply. Where have you sprung from?”

  “. . . ”

  “Okay, my question was a little complicated. Where are you, right now?”

  “Here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Behind.”

  “Behind? But behind what?”

  “Behind behind.”

  RECTO

  IN THE WINGS

  He looks at the mirror; he has no reflection. Not important, all that matters is the mirror. It’s very modest, not very big, and not very straight, either, on its wall. Rather like Ophelia.

  His finger slides across the reflective surface without leaving a trace. It’s here that everything started, or, depending on one’s point of view, that everything ended. In any case, it’s here that things really became interesting. He remembers, as if it were yesterday, Ophelia’s first passage through a mirror, on that memorable night.

  He walks a few steps in the bedroom, casts a familiar eye over the old toys as they stir on the shelves, and stops in front of the bunk bed. Ophelia had shared it first with her big sister, then with her little brother, before leaving Anima in a hurry. He should know; he’s been watching her closely from the wings for years now. She always preferred the bottom bunk. Her family has left the rumpled sheets and flattened pillow just as they found them, as though they all expected her to return home from one moment to the next.

  He bends over and studies, with amusement, the maps of the twenty-one major arks that are pinned under the top bunk. Trapped here due to the Doyennes, Ophelia had long scoured the maps for her lost husband.

  He goes downstairs and crosses the dining room, where plates of food are getting cold. There’s no one about. They all left in the middle of supper—because of the hole, obviously. In these empty rooms he almost feels as if he’s present, as if he’s really there. The house itself seems to sense his intrusion: the chandeliers jingle as he passes, the furniture creaks, the clock lets out a loud, questioning chime. That’s what amuses him about the Animists. One ends up no longer knowing who, between object and owner, really belongs to whom.

  Once outside, he calmly strolls up the road. He’s in no hurry. Curious, yes, but never in a hurry. And yet, there’s not much time left now. For everyone, including him.

  He joins the gathering of neighbors around what they have dubbed “the hole,” as they exchange anxious looks. It’s like some manhole in the middle of the pavement, except that, when they move their lanterns closer, no light penetrates it. To gauge how deep it is, someone unwinds a bobbin, which is soon out of thread. The hole wasn’t there during the day; it was a Doyenne who gave the alert after almost falling into it.

  He can’t stop himself from smiling. This, madam, is just the beginning.

  He notices Ophelia’s mother and father in the crowd; they, as ever, don’t notice him. Shining from their staring eyes is the same unspoken question. They don’t know where their daughter is hiding—any more than they know that it’s her fault, partly, that there’s this chasm in the pavement—but it’s obvious that, this evening, they are thinking of her more than ever. Just as they hug their other children closer than ever, even as they are unable to answer their questions. Bonny, strapping children, bursting with health. The streetlamps make their golden locks gleam as one.

  He never tires of observing how different Ophelia is to them, and for good reason.

  He continues with his walk. A couple of steps, and here he is at the other end of the world, at the Pole, somewhere between the upper levels and lowest depths of Citaceleste, just outside the entrance to Berenilde’s manor house. This estate, plunged in a perpetual autumn, is as familiar to him as the house in Anima. Everywhere Ophelia has been, he has been, too. When she served as a valet to Berenilde, he was there. When she became Farouk’s Vice-storyteller, he was there. When she investigated the missing of Clairdelune, he was there. He witnessed the spectacle of her misadventures with increasing curiosity, without ever leaving the wings.

  He often likes to reconsider decisive moments in history, the important history, their collective history. What would have become of Ophelia if, among all the female object-readers in Anima, Berenilde hadn’t chosen her to be her nephew’s fiancée? Would she never have crossed paths with what they call “God?” Of course she would. History would simply have taken a different route. Everyone must play their role, as he will play his.

  As he walks through the hall, a voice reaches him from the red sitting room. He looks through the half-open doors. Within this narrow field of vision, he sees Ophelia’s aunt pacing up and down on the exotic carpet, as much of an illusion as the hunting paintings and the porcelain vases. She crosses and uncrosses her arms, waves a telegram that has stiffened thanks to her animism, talks of a lake drained like a sink, calls Farouk a “laundry basket,” Archibald a “bar of soap,” Ophelia a “cuckoo clock,” and the entire medical profession “public latrines.” Seated in a wingback chair, Berenilde isn’t listening to her. She’s humming while brushing the long, white hair of her daughter, whose little body is gently slumped against hers. Nothing seems to reach her ears apart from this light swishing between her hands.

  He immediately looks away. He looks away whenever things get too personal. He has always been curious, never a voyeur.

  Only then does he notice the man beside him, sitting on the floor in the half-light of the corridor, his back to the wall, furiously polishing the barrel of a hunting gun. It seemed these ladies had found themselves a bodyguard.

  He continues with his walk. In a single stride he leaves the hall, the manor, Citaceleste, the Pole, for another part of the world. And here he is now in Babel. Ah, Babel! His favorite field of study. The ark where history and time will reach their conclusion, the point at which everything converges.

  It was evening on Anima, it’s morning here. Heavy rain falls on the roofs.

  He paces up and down the covered walkways at the Good Family, just as Ophelia paced up and down them during her Forerunner apprenticeship. She came within a whisker of gaining her wings, and becoming a citizen of Babel, a situation that would have opened a good many doors for her next investigation. She failed, most fortunately in his opinion. It made his observation from the wings even more stimulating.

  He climbs the spiral staircase of a watchtower. From up there, despite the rain, he can make out, in the distance, the neighboring minor arks. The Memorial in front, the Deviations Observatory behind. The two buildings will have an essential role to play in history.

  At this time, the Good Family’s apprentice virtuosos should already be in uniform, radio-lesson headphones on their heads, Sons of Pollux on one side, Goddaughters of Helen on the other. Instead, they are all mixed together, up on the walls of the minor ark. Their pajamas are sodden from the rain. They are letting out horrified cries, pointing the city out to each other, beyond the sea of clouds. Even the principal, Helen herself, the only family spirit never to have had descendants, has joined them under an enormous umbrella, and is focusing on the anomalous scene with piercing intensity.

  From his privileged observation post, he looks at all of them. Or rather, he tries to look through their terrified eyes, to see as they do this vo
id that, today, has gained ground.

  Once again, he can’t help smiling. He’s benefited enough from being in the wings, the time has come to take to the stage.

  THE VOID

  Ophelia’s memory of Pollux’s botanical gardens remained vivid. It was the first place she had visited on Babel. She could still see the imposing tiers of terraces and countless steps she had to climb to get herself out of the jungle.

  She remembered the smells. The colors. The sounds.

  There was nothing left of it.

  A landslide had swept everything into the void, down to the last blade of grass. It had also swallowed up a whole bridge, half of the neighboring market, and several minor arks. Along with the lives of all those who happened to be there.

  Ophelia should have been horrified. She was merely dumbfounded. She gazed at the abyss through the makeshift railings along the new frontier between land and sky. At least, she tried to. The rain had stopped, but the sea of clouds had started to spill over the entire city. This seething tide, as well as reducing visibility, had misted up her glasses.

  “The Other really does exist,” she stated. “Until now, it was an abstract concept. Much as it was repeated to me that I’d messed up by releasing him, that he would cause the destruction of the arks because of me, that I was linked to him whether I liked it or not, I never really felt involved. How could I have let out an apocalyptic creature from the mirror in my own bedroom, and not be able to remember it properly? I don’t even know what he looks like, what he’s doing, and why he does so.”

  The fog around Ophelia was so dense, she felt like a disembodied voice in the midst of the void. She gripped the railings when a gap in the clouds revealed a fragment of sky, exactly where the northwestern district of the city had previously stood.

  “There’s nothing left. And what if Anima . . . perhaps even the Pole . . .”

  She left her sentence hanging in the air. Men, women, and children had plunged into the void that was before her, but her first thoughts were for her own family.

  A great swirl of disorientated birds searched for the trees that had disappeared. Where did everything jettisoned end up? All the arks, both major and minor, gravitated around a vast ocean of clouds to which the living never ventured. The core of the world was said to be nothing but a concentration of perpetual storms. Even Lazarus, the famous explorer, had never been that far.

  Ophelia hoped that no one had suffered.

  Only the previous day, she had felt so calm. So complete. She had discovered the true identity of the multifaceted God who controlled all of their lives. Eulalia Gonde. Finally knowing her name, realizing that she was originally an idealistic little author, understanding that this woman had never had any right to decide what was good and what bad: all that had lifted such a weight from Ophelia! Except that the most formidable enemy was, perhaps, not whom she thought it was.

  You will lead me to him.

  “The Other used me to escape from the control of Eulalia Gonde, and today, Eulalia Gonde is using me to find the Other. Since those two are involving me in their crimes, I take it personally.”

  “We.”

  Ophelia turned her head toward Thorn without seeing him. In this fog, he was himself but a distant, rather eerie murmur, and yet to her, his voice seemed more tangible than the ground beneath her sandals. With just one word, he had made her feel better.

  “If it turns out that this Other is linked at once to the Rupture of the old world, to the destruction of the arks, and to the transformation of a simple human being into an omnipotent one,” Thorn continued, in the tone of a ledger, “then he becomes an essential part of the equation with which I’ve been grappling for years.”

  There was a metallic click. It was the familiar sound of his fob watch opening and closing its cover as a reminder of the time. Since becoming animated, it had adopted the tics of its owner.

  “The countdown continues,” said Thorn. “For ordinary mortals, destruction such as this is a natural disaster. But us, we now know that not only is it no such thing, but, in addition, it’s going to continue. We cannot speak of it to anyone so long as we don’t know whom to trust, and how to prove it. So we must establish the precise nature of the relationship linking Eulalia Gonde to the Other, understand what they want, what they are about, where they are, why and how they do what they do, in order to use all this knowledge against them. And, preferably, we must do it fast.”

  Ophelia screwed up her eyes. The sea of clouds had just dispersed around them due to the wind, and, without warning, the light fell on them in a blazing cascade.

  She saw Thorn very clearly now. He was standing, like her, in front of the railings, watch in hand, gaze lost in the endless sky, extremely upright, excessively tall. The gold decorations on his uniform became blinding in the sun, but that wasn’t enough to make Ophelia look away. On the contrary, she opened her eyes even wider to let all that brilliance inside her. The determination Thorn exuded was as palpable as an electric current.

  With her whole body, Ophelia sensed what he had become to her, what she had become to him, and nothing in the world seemed as solid.

  She made very sure not to move closer to him, however. There was no one in the vicinity—the area had been evacuated by the authorities—but they maintained the same formal distance between them as they always had in public. They were each at opposite extremes of the social scale. Since her failure at the Good Family conservatoire, Ophelia no longer had much status in Babel. Thorn, on the other hand, was “Sir Henry,” a respectable Lord of LUX.

  “Eulalia Gonde has thousands of different identities, the Other doesn’t have a single one,” he added. “We don’t know what those two will look like when our paths cross, but we must be ready to face them before finding them. Or being found by them.”

  Thorn suddenly noticed how insistently Ophelia was staring at him. He cleared his throat.

  “It’s impossible for me to keep you away from them, but I can keep them away from you.”

  It was almost word for word what he had already told her in the Memorial’s Secretarium—minus the formal “you” this time. What worried Ophelia was that she took his word for it. Thorn had sacrificed his name and his free will to liberate her, once and for all, from the surveillance she had so struggled to extricate herself from, and that she could be back under if she just put a foot wrong. Yes, she knew that Thorn was capable of giving up everything if it allowed him to fulfill this one objective. He had even accepted the idea that Ophelia might put herself in danger by his side, as long as it was her choice.

  “We’re not alone, Thorn. Against them, I mean. As we speak, Archibald, Gail, and Fox are busy looking for LandmArk. Maybe they’ve already found it. If they manage to persuade the Arkadians to be on our side, it could make all the difference.”

  Thorn frowned, unconvinced. He and Ophelia had already broached the subject the previous day, before the sirens had forced them out of bed, but the mere mention of Archibald’s name invariably prompted this reaction.

  “He’s the last person in the world in whom I put my trust.”

  The sunny interlude was over; the sea of clouds engulfed them up once more.

  “I’m going on ahead,” Thorn announced, as his watch clicked impatiently. “I have another meeting with the Genealogists. Knowing them, the next mission they assign me will have a direct bearing on the business that concerns us. See you this evening.”

  A mechanical grating sound told Ophelia that he had set off. The caliper stopped him from limping, but that was the sole benefit the Genealogists had brought to his life. Thorn hoped to get closer to Eulalia Gonde’s secrets through them, since they also wanted to bring an end to her reign. But working for the Genealogists was like juggling with sticks of dynamite. Having given Thorn a fake identity, they could take it from him at any moment, and, without the facade of being Sir Henry, he was back to being
a fugitive.

  “Take care.”

  Thorn’s step halted and Ophelia could make out the angular outline of his silhouette.

  “You too. A little more than that, even.”

  He moved off and was then totally swallowed up by the fog. Ophelia had got the hint. She searched the pockets of her gown. In them were the keys to Lazarus’s home, entrusted to her by Ambrose, and the little note that Helen, her former apprenticeship director, had sent her: Come and see me some time, your hands and you.

  Ophelia finally found what she was looking for: an aluminum plate. Upon it were engraved the same arabesques as in the family spirits’ Books, a code invented by Eulalia Gonde that remained indecipherable. This plate, punctured in the middle by a shotgun bullet, was all that remained of the old sweeper from the Memorial. Ophelia felt nauseous just thinking about him. He had turned out to be a family spirit of a totally different kind, the guardian of Eulalia Gonde’s past, and he had almost terrified her, literally, to death. The son of Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless had saved her through wanting to avenge his father. Luckily for her, he had fired at the head on which the plate was bolted. Barely had the code been shattered than the old sweeper had faded away, like a nightmare. A life that depended on just a few engraved lines . . . Thorn really hadn’t appreciated this story when Ophelia had told it to him.

  She flung the plate through a gap in the railings. The aluminum glinted one last time before disappearing beneath the clouds and joining the poor souls who had plunged into the void.

  She thought, painfully, of her false papers. Eulalia. She had chosen, unintentionally, the same name for herself as that of her enemy. It went even further: she was sometimes assailed by unknown memories. Where did Eulalia’s memory begin and where did hers end? How could she progress in the present when her past was a puzzle? How could she think of the future when the world was collapsing? And how could she feel free when her path was destined to cross, once again, that of the Other? She had released him; she felt obliged to take responsibility for that; but she held it against both of them—Eulalia and this Other—that they had deprived her of what she could have been without them.