The Loretreaders  •  Act 3

Elweyn led Spark and the djinni into the chamber of a tower several stories tall, open all the way to the distant ceiling. Staircases and scaffolding climbed the walls around, many only wide enough to permit a creature the size of Elweyn access to the higher shelves. The shelves themselves bore thousands of books. Some were made of metal plates bound with rings, some might have been made from petals, and others, disturbingly, might have been made from bones. They ranged from tiny tomes the size of fingerprints to one so large that Spark mistook it for a wardrobe. There were more than just books, too. All kinds of artifacts cluttered the room: paintings, sculptures, clay pots, wood blocks, scrolls, folded sheaves of cloth, tapestries. Something that looked eerily like a sarcophagus leaned against a corner. From the ceiling hung a monstrous chrysalis-like jewel the same color as the oculus Elweyn wore around her neck. Watery lights danced across its surface.

{This is the Metapolis library,} said Elweyn. She hopped up onto a desk and turned to face Spark and the djinni. {As you likely have begun to suspect, there are a great many worlds beyond what either of you have ever known. Normally, these worlds—canons, as we call them—only overlap through tales, when a historical account in one canon matches a ‘fantasy’ story in another. Such is the case of The Azharian Epic. In Azharia, it is a chronicle of true events regarding the six noble tasks of Ali Sahin.}

The djinni clenched his fist so tightly that his nails pricked blood in his own palm. Elweyn continued, still focusing on Spark.

{In your world, however, it reads as nothing more than a construct of some author’s imagination. In this way, the realities of these two canons touch but don’t conflict with each other. Or, at least, they didn’t…}

“Until last night,” Spark finished. “Then the Epic Azawhatchamacallit at the library sprung an epic leak, right? Oh, this is just like that episode of Valor Patrol when the Gladorian dimension overlapped with downtown Murkham and Arrowman had to fight all the aliens and stuff! That’s awesome!”

{‘Awesome,’ perhaps, but also dangerous, as you have experienced.} Elweyn folded her dainty paws before her, fixing Spark with a grim look. {Vesper told me that at least a few humans lost their lives when Ali Sahin’s Guardian bled into your world through The Azharian Epic.}

Spark’s heart sank. “Oh. Right.”

{It gets worse than djinn or Guardians. The dark energy of these breaches—the distortion—is highly caustic. It unravels the essence of the canon’s reality. Left too long, it festers into gliars, which carry the distortion even further.}

“Those plague-rat things Vesper and I fought.”

{Indeed. As those vermin spread the distortion, the canon becomes even more unstable. In little time, the world will die.}

That information sank in for a moment while Elweyn guided Spark and the djinni to a large window. Elweyn nipped at a braided cord and tugged, parting the curtains. Brilliant light rushed in. The djinni’s oval pupils turned to slits, and he stepped back with a grimace. Spark, on the other hand, gasped and smooshed her face against the glass.

Beyond the window lay a city of tightly clustered buildings of all different kinds. Gothic arches butted right up against brilliant red pagodas. Minarets towered alongside fluted columns and glossy skyscrapers. Domes and gables and flat roofs and architecture that defied description (and gravity) stretched way out into the distance, giving way to a violet sea and a tunneled sky dotted with floating islands. Vehicles ranging from wagons drawn by two-headed oxen to sleek little pods that resembled spaceships threaded between the buildings.

“What is this place?” Spark breathed, fogging the pane in her wonder.

{We call it Metapolis. It is a crossroad between canons.}

“So, all these people are from other worlds…” Spark said, trying to make out the tiny little dots that moved about in the city below. She moved her face on the glass for a new vantage and continued to gape.

{Refugees from the distortion, yes.} Elweyn rubbed away the streaks Spark left on the glass with her paw before turning solemn eyes on the superhero. {Many…have no home to return to.}

Spark set her jaw and struck a dashing pose. “Well, I’m here to help! You just point me at this ‘distortion’ thing, and I’ll give ’em what for!” she said fiercely.

Elweyn chuckled softly. {That’s what I hoped to hear. Unfortunately, the only lead we have is that vexing Distortioness,} she growled.

“You mean Violin Girl? Goofy hat?” Spark pantomimed the shape of Serenadē’s headpiece.

{The very one. She’s surely causing the distortion, but we don’t know how…or why.}

“Have you tried asking her?” Spark suggested.

Elweyn clicked her beak and looked at Spark skeptically.

“Listen, if I’ve learned anything about bad guys from my comics, then it’s this: if you get a villain comfortable, and they’ll spiel their whole life story—INCLUDING their master plan. I mean, let’s face it—who doesn’t like talking?”

Elweyn and the djinni stared at her.

Silence.

“Well…maybe you two are the wrong people to ask,” Spark tutted. “But, seriously! This could work! Just point me in the prima donna’s direction, and I’ll have her talking in no time!”

{It will not be so simple,} Elweyn said.

“Perhaps a wish is in order?” the djinni purred.

Spark started. She’d grown so accustomed to Elweyn’s telepathy lapping against her mind that the sound of an audible voice was jarring—even one as soft and coaxing as the djinni’s.

“I’ve felled armies before,” the djinni continued, flicking his wrist in a dismissive brush. “Word your wish just right, and I’ll have this ‘Distortioness’ and her little minions obliterated by sundown.”

The feathers along Elweyn’s spine rippled subtly. {A possibility I’ve contemplated,} Elweyn said, as if loath to admit it. {But your power can only affect one canon at a time, and Serenadē can somehow move between worlds without an oculus. If we wished for her defeat or capture, she could evade the wish simply by moving to another plane, or even counter it somehow, just as she evidently thwarted Sahin’s wish for an inescapable pit by forcing you and the Guardian into the Earth canon. What we really need is more information.} She fixed the djinni with a shrewd look. {I know this of your contract, Thrall: knowledge is one luxury you can’t grant.}

The djinni’s expression darkened, but he said nothing.

{In the meantime, all we can do is try to close the breaches by sending interlopers back to where they belong. That is the task of the loretreaders—and one to which you two may be particularly qualified, even barring wishes.}

Elweyn slid down from her perch on the windowsill. Spark’s heart fluttered in anticipation as she followed Elweyn over to a narrow bookshelf. Elweyn rummaged in a drawer and emerged clutching a smooth, translucent orange stone in her beak. She placed it gingerly in Spark’s palm.

{This is an oculus. They allow us to travel between canons, return strangers to their own worlds, and purge the distortion. This one is named Flicker. For the time being, it’s yours.}

Spark turned the oculus over in her fingers, admiring its fiery sheen. Even the djinni dropped his cool indifference long enough to look it over.

“Everyone seems pretty upset about me having this,” Spark said, closing her hand over the oculus and looking up at Elweyn.

{Ah, yes. The oculi are very peculiar. They choose their own bearers, Spark, and Flicker did not choose you.} Her voice became softer, and she tilted her head. {But, I did. So long as you hold that stone, you are a loretreader. Do you understand?}

Spark met Elweyn’s gaze squarely, feeling for the first time that something large and terrible was at stake. Elweyn was making a dire gamble on a firecracker teen that didn’t even have her driver’s permit yet and a supernatural convict so infamous that there was a multi-dimensional book about him. And yet, she believed. At the ire of the rest of the loretreaders, Elweyn saw in them something worthy of making them agents in some sort of world-hopping special ops force.

Spark took a determined breath, letting it out slowly. “We won’t let you down, Elweyn,” she promised.

{Hm,} Elweyn said. Her attention shifted to the djinni, who smiled a little and bowed in the half-light.

{I’ll send you home for now. Since you are traveling with the use of an oculus, the distortion should stop spawning around you two. I will call upon you when we have need of your help.}

She passed by Spark, and Spark felt Elweyn’s voice again, but this time it was different—much quieter.

{Be careful, young one…} Elweyn whispered grimly. {Just because the thrall isn’t distorted anymore doesn’t mean he’s not still very, very dangerous. I pray we’re not making a mistake…}

She seemed to exhale. Spark could feel the weight of her words on her mind.

{Be wary of him, Spark.}

Hours later, Elweyn’s warning still echoed in Krissy’s consciousness as she sat in the window seat of her bedroom, looking out into the night sky.

Even if he can’t just grant the distortions away, he must be really powerful, Krissy thought. She looked across her room toward the djinni. He sat cross-legged on the floor, impossibly rigid. His arms were partially raised, hands angled toward his forehead, where a feverish light gleamed under the fringe of his hair. A similar glow leaked from beneath his closed eyelids, and Krissy could see his lips moving. Every now and then, she could just hear the whisper of his voice.

He was reviewing his “contract,” he’d said. Once a day, he sank into this trance and mentally recited every single rule he had to follow as a thrall. Krissy had thought trying to memorize the names of every U.S. president was bad. At least she didn’t have to do it every single day for hundreds of years. And how long did this trance take, anyway? It felt like he’d been muttering to himself for ages. She squirmed.

His eyes snapped open, and the light extinguished. He fixed Krissy with a weary scowl as his body relaxed.

“Oh! All done with your trance-thing?” Krissy chirped.

“No. Your mind is too anxious. I’ll have to start over later,” muttered the djinni.

“Wait, what?” Krissy stared at him as he climbed to his feet and loped over to join her in the window seat.

He held out his hand for the oculus that Krissy was toying with. She complied, dropping Flicker into his palm.

“I can only meditate while my master—mistress—is calm or distant. You’re too excited.”

As he spoke, he held Flicker up and squinted at it, measuring its size. He shook his empty hand in a sifting motion, and it suddenly filled with an assortment of bejeweled rings. He rolled them around until he found one set with a gem similar in size to the oculus. The other rings vanished in a plume of smoke, and the djinni drew a knife and began to pry the stone loose.

Krissy sighed happily while he worked. “Can you blame me? This has been the craziest day of my life!” She flopped back into the cushion and let her head loll against the window, smiling out at the night.

Just then, a streak of light shot across the sky. Krissy gasped and almost kicked the djinni in her excited floundering. “OH MAN, IT JUST GOT CRAZIER. Did you see that?! A shooting star! I gotta make a wish!” She scrunched up her face, crossed her fingers on both hands, and started whispering a little rhyme under her breath.

“Spark, don’t you dare,” the djinni said, pointing the knife at her in warning. Krissy opened her eyes to find him brandishing the blade at her. He quickly hid his threatening expression behind a charming chuckle and flipped the blade over in his hand so that the handle was toward her instead.

“Pet, I’ve told you, it’s very dangerous to make a wish without consulting me first,” he said in his most debonair voice.

Krissy was startled, but quickly taken in by his manner. “No, not a wish for you! For the star!” she giggled, jerking her head toward the window. Then she pinched her lips together, eyes round. “Although, now that you mention it, I probably shouldn’t wish on stars anymore, hm? It could be pretty bad if I said something silly and you had to grant it.”

“‘Pretty bad’ doesn’t begin to cover the risk,” the djinni scoffed, laughing. “There’s no telling what kind of terrible things could happen. You and I could cause quite a bit of trouble, you know…”

Krissy met his warm gaze and found herself smiling. Something about his voice made “trouble” sound fun. But as that thought crossed her mind, she sat bolt upright.

“That’s just the kind of thing the loretreaders are expecting me to do,” she said, horrified. “They’re just waiting for me to mess up and do something stupid or selfish.”

Resolve boiled up in Krissy’s core. “Well, I won’t give them the satisfaction,” she decided in a zeal that bordered on ferocity. “Elweyn won’t be sorry. I may not be an official ‘chosen one’ loretreader, but I WILL prove I’m a hero!”

“I’m sure you will,” said the djinni, and he handed the ring he’d been working with to her, now set with the oculus.

“Wow, thanks!” Krissy cooed. She took it, and a lopsided smile tugged at her mouth. “Dang, this is a chunky ring.”

“If you don’t like it, you could wish for something different,” he suggested with a smirk while Krissy tried to fit it on each of her fingers.

Krissy tittered. “No, this is fine,” she said, grunting a little as she forced it over the knuckle of her middle finger. She tilted her hand slowly from side to side to admire the oculus. “It kind of reminds me of Stunbeam’s solar signet. Pzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!” She pretended to shoot a laser from the ring, then she tightened her fist and grinned. “Man, just think of the mark this would leave if I punched someone with it!”

The djinni let out a breath of laughter. “You are the strangest person I’ve ever met.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Krissy announced cheerily.

She grew quiet for a moment, then looked up at the djinni. “What do you think I should wish for?” Krissy asked him. Before he could reply, she batted a hand, saying, “And don’t tell me you’d wish to be free, because I already know that. I’ll use my third wish to set you free, like in Aladdin!”

A strange expression crossed the djinni’s face. “I can’t grant myself out of my own contract,” he said.

“Oh.” Krissy wilted, rubbing her shoulder. “So, you’re stuck a slave…forever?”

“Immortality comes with a heavy price.”

At long last, the excited teen calmed down enough to drop off to sleep. The djinni had resumed his trance, starting at the beginning again. A voice he’d learned to hate whispered in his mind, its dark, cursed words dripping like venom against his consciousness. Hundreds of years, and yet he’d never quite gotten used to the sensation…

Krissy’s nightlight went out.

The djinni’s eyelids flickered to wakefulness, though it took him a moment to understand why. His mistress still slept. What had interrupted him?

He abruptly became aware of a very large presence looming behind him. He drew a sharp breath, and with a rush of smoke, he was on his feet and staring down the newcomer with guarded intensity.

A big man grinned at him through the long cigarette holder that he clenched in his teeth. He only had one eye.

“I saw you watching me earlier in Metapolis,” the djinni noted, recognizing the stranger’s sharp raiment: the fanned half-cape, the smartly tailored coat, the jaunty top hat.

“The same,” the man proclaimed. The djinni’s eyes jolted toward Krissy. Despite the man’s booming voice, the girl didn’t stir. The djinni’s gaze returned to the odd man’s face just in time to see him smiling in torment. “Must be tiresome, having to review your contract every night.”

The djinni felt his blood curdle. “What do you want?” he hissed.

“You,” the stranger responded with a little quirk of his eyebrows. “Your power.”

The djinni scoffed and leaned back against Krissy’s desk with his arms folded. “Ha. Get in line.”

“Ha-ha! I never was one to wait my turn,” the man burst loudly, throwing his cape back with one hand as he bent into a flourished bow. At eye level, he doffed his hat. “Mr. Sabo,” he quipped in introduction. His voice dropped to a pleased growl, and he slid the top of his cane under the djinni’s chin, tilting his head back as if inspecting a prize animal. “But, I hope you’ll soon call me ‘Master,’” he leered through his large teeth.

The djinni scowled and slapped Mr. Sabo’s cane away with the back of his hand. “If you know of my contract, then I trust you know what you must do.”

“Of course,” Mr. Sabo crooned, tapping ash from his cigarette holder. “Your previous master must be…disposed of.”

The djinni’s eyes shone as he stood, a dare. “Do it, then.”

“You will not intervene?” Mr. Sabo asked, regarding the djinni with a reading smirk.

“What does she mean to me?”

“Ha! You are as heartless as they say,” crowed Mr. Sabo, cuffing the djinni on the shoulder like an old friend. “Alas, there is no sport in killing a child in her bed…”

“If you want sport, wake her,” the djinni suggested contemptuously. “Let her transform. That should provide plenty of sport. She’ll yell bizarre puns at you even as she draws her last breath.”

Mr. Sabo chuckled. “Tempting. Unfortunately, like you, I also bear a curse.” He sat against the desk beside the djinni, uncomfortably close. “I cannot kill.”

“Pity.”

“But I may be able to arrange some sort of…accident,” said Mr. Sabo, fixing the djinni with his one eye. The iris was squared and bright red, like a die.

The djinni’s brow furrowed. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked slowly.

Mr. Sabo flexed his hand on the head of his cane, carved in the shape of a horse’s bust. “I need to know whether I can count on you to help.”

The djinni’s lip curled in disdain. “I cannot harm my mistress. My contract restrains me. If you want her dead, you’re on your own.”

“But you can protect her from harm,” hummed Mr. Sabo. He took a long drag on his cigarette and released the smoke. It gave off no scent. “Suppose there were an incident…would the dutiful servant rush to her aid?”

The djinni stepped past Mr. Sabo, glowering at him over his shoulder. “What is there to gain, either way? Whether I am her servant or yours, nothing changes for me.”

“Oh ho! Not so,” Mr. Sabo said, leaping to his feet. “If you remain loyal to your mistress, you will hang at her beck and call until she inevitably dies, and you pass to your next owner,” he said, as if reciting a terribly annoying piece of trivia. “But,” he continued, and his big toothy grin reappeared, “if you become mine…”

He leaned over the djinni’s shoulder, lightly grasping the padlock that hung from the thrall’s collar with one hand. The djinni shot an affronted look at this invasion of his personal space…until Mr. Sabo raised his other hand. In his palm lay a silvery key.

It matched the lock.

The djinni’s breath caught.

“I can set you free,” Mr. Sabo whispered in his ear, still wearing that Cheshire smile.

The djinni stared hungrily at the key.

“I’m listening…”

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