Root snorted another seed. It hurt just as bad as the first time.
“Damn it, this is the worst job,” she muttered. “Fuck you.”
“You’re doing great,” responded the king through the slightly-ajar mouth of her clutch.
She went through the motions again. When the mirage took effect this time, the cries were of confusion more than surprise or fear. If the same group of Anjeanette’s touring guests had still been by the case, that one man might’ve pulled something from jumping so instantly into an unnecessary alibi.
The crowds surged back from the courtyard into the hall, David and his guards at their crest. There was no mistaking the mask of concern and agitation on his brow.
Just as before, he wound around behind the huge display case and pulled the key from his neck. He slid it into the lock, lifted the lid—
—And as before, Root dropped the mirage. The halo shimmered back into view through the glass.
And as before, the case was wide open.
Vit jumped up at the first shout of confusion. They put on a convincing look of worry and intrigue as they ceremoniously set a glass and a rag on the bar top with all the show of someone doing their job and doing it quite diligently. They hurried along with the movements of the crowd.
They arrived on the sidelines just as David reached the case. He took out his key, unlocked the latch, and swung the heavy glass lid up. The halo, by some magnificent stroke of luck and certainly no other M-word, reappeared. With as much approximation as they could adopt from what the other guests were doing with their own faces, Vit put on a display of great relief.
With the sighs of the crowd, Vit wound in a little closer—still keeping to the outskirts of the crowd, but angling for a sideways view of David and the halo case. They tried not to elbow anyone out of their way, as most of the attendees were only tolerant of rudeness when it moved in one socioeconomic direction. But it was important they get to their mark, so a handful of toes may have been trodden on. With an apology.
David held the halo aloft, just as before, just for an instant. The glass all around, as the people had well seen, couldn’t be trusted; whether there was a crown on the inside or not seemed to matter little to the usually dependable transparency of glass, but there was magic involved, and that mucks up everything. And David couldn’t have people doubting, lest rumors start to spread. He quickly placed the halo back inside the case.
Vit took another step forward; David reached for the lid.
(Now, on its own, glass has that nice see-throughable quality that makes it work for things like windows. Other materials have been tried as windows, such as ceramic, rubber, and in Urk, bricks, but they all leave something to be desired. Glass always came out as the clear winner.
A few other things in the worlds had enough see-throughableness that they might’ve put up a better competition than what had been tried so far. We won’t get into that list, because some of them are quite strange indeed, but among them is one known well to every hiker, anyone with a cellar that occasionally warrants a bit of venturing into, and, as a final discovery of a life short-lived, bugs.
Strands of spider webbing weren’t see-through in quite the same sense as glass. Get a whole big wad all together and it came out mostly whitish—with some variation depending on the species of spider, and some spider-approximate spirits adding some outlying data points. Most of the invisibility of a spider web was thanks to the impressive thinness of the individual strands. And despite the thinness, they’re remarkably durable. They can wreak quite a lot of havoc on a particularly precise mechanism.
And, if the situation calls for it, they can do that with a healthy dose of see-throughableness.)
Vit spun a web and shot a strand straight towards the display case’s lid latch. It was a moving target as David lowered the lid, and jaw-clenchingly tiny—minuscule, no bigger than one segment of a finger. And Vit being back twenty paces…
(Well, it didn’t make the target any smaller per se, since most things in the worlds had signed onto the traditional laws of spatial relations, though there remained a few holdouts.)
The thin thread raced across the room, invisible to all. It found purchase—a dead hit, perfectly aimed. The length of it gathered all across the latch, adding a fine layer of gunk. David lowered the lid back into place.
There was a thunk. There was no click.
No one seemed to notice. Everyone noticed, however, when just as soon as the lid was closed again, the halo seemed to vanish inside the case.
Everyone in the room stared at where the halo wasn’t. (Except it was.) A second passed, and then with a hazy wavering, the halo’s likeness returned. Then it vanished again.
David tutted in exasperation. He pushed the lid of the case back up. Unsteady on his feet, it caused him to stagger back with the weight.
Again, David lifted the lid. Unlike the times prior, the halo’s image didn’t return to the glass windows. To all around, David seemed to reach inside, place his hands firmly on either side of the empty air, and lift the halo from the case. When it cleared the edges of the glass, all could see it clear as day. He returned it to the box where it faded from view once more. David closed the lid. The case still appeared to be empty.
“I’d like to express my deepest apologies for these malfunctions, everyone,” he said, his words lightly slurred. “I know many of you come here hoping to see the Crown of Samesh in its proper home here in the Hall. Well, I’m glad you’ve all gotten the opportunity to see it—out of the case, even! But it seems we’re dealing with some hiccups, yes. The Crown is well-protected by many enchantments, as you all know, and sometimes these things do occur, mhm.”
The crowd murmured with frustration but quickly began to disperse. An invisible crown wasn’t much worth looking at, after all, and the excitement had turned out to be less of a spectacle than they’d hoped when rushing into the room following calls of vanished artifacts. But the night was young.
Vit shuffled away as David turned to one of his staffers. “Bring someone in first thing tomorrow,” he said. “I want a full examination of these malfunctions.” The staffer nodded and wrote hurriedly on a pad.
As David started to walk away, the halo came back into view. He paused to watch it for a moment, then turned away.
“What are you doing over here?” asked a voice much too close to Vit’s ear. They turned to see the sharp face of Gilm.
“Just making sure—”
“Go on, go.” Gilm waved with agitated fingers. Vit nodded and hurried back to the bar.
A short while later, the halo returned. A few guests sent up the call, and several hurried over to see it. They got about three and a half minutes of admiration before it vanished again.
Vit watched David carefully as the mutters of vanishing crowns rippled through the courtyard again. David and Leslie cast a glance through the doors to the “empty” case, but then turned back to their conversation.
The halo did a little dance in its case—gone, then there, then gone again, then back, a rapid flickering of images. In one instance it even appeared to be upside-down. Aside from a few chuckles from the guests, no one bothered to pursue the matter further.
“We good?” came Root’s voice through the stone. “I can make it grow legs if we want. I think I could picture that.”
“David looks unconcerned,” said Saly. “I think we’re in the clear.”
“David looks drunk as hell,” said Root. “But I guess everyone’s got their vice.”
“Might’ve had a hand in that,” muttered Vit, keeping their voice low.
“What? No way, did you fucking roofie the Grand Priest?”
“No! Uh, Leslie might’ve. Unintentionally.”
“And Azriah?” said Saly, cutting in. “All looking good in there?”
“Mm,” said the unmistakable grunt of Azriah. He couldn’t say much, stationed only an (admittedly large) door’s width away from another guard.
“And Beel?” said Root. “Almost here?”
Beel sighed. “Yes, I’m on my way over.”
“Great. All right, then. Everyone buckle up for phase two. And then we can all get out of here for one hell of a nap.”
Penny followed the strange older girl’s instructions to a T. She’d never followed instructions quite so meticulously. Her teachers said she didn’t “apply” herself, but she wasn’t looking for a job or a university scholarship anyway, and there was no sun here in this stupid city and no need for sunblock, so she didn’t see the relevance.
She’d rarely been this far into Urk. She’d only crossed through the main gate a few times. Sometimes the outer-Urk schools had to take field trips inside to learn more about the church and its history—and yes, had to. Some kind of city mandate. They even had big squadrons of guards corralling the students and chaperones all around, not even letting the kids split away to pee without supervision. Stupid fucked up city with their weird propaganda programs. Down with the establishment!
Penny had seen the Eternal Palace, but only once before. Not counting the times in her dreams, of course, but it was usually crumbling and burning by her hand during those visits.
She found the northeast entrance that the girl had told her to go to. It was a small and unassuming door amongst the street-level structures that huddled in the palace’s shadow like deluded masses. Small and unassuming, in this case, just meant almost regular-sized and with less precious metal encrusting the face and with a doorknob of polished crystal rather than solid diamond. One guard sat next to it reading a book.
“Hi,” said Penny, who couldn’t come up with anything more scathing to say.
“M? C’Ielpyou?” asked the guard with a clear preference between work and his book.
“I’m… Sarfransa. I have this… I’m here to walk the dog.”
The guard twisted up his face in surprise as he took the paper Penny offered and gave it a quick scan. Surprise melted into the relief of someone with a number of questions but a perfect excuse not to ask them. Here was a solicitation of services, printed neatly on church stationery and signed. No arguing with that.
“Hm. ID?”
Already in her hand, Penny handed it over. The guard looked the pair of documents over for a moment, nodded, and handed them back.
He stood up and opened the door. “Hey Kerling, come escort this girl upstairs.”
“I can find my way,” said Penny quickly—and surprisingly boldly for someone whose experience existed entirely in buildings with a heavy family resemblance to tin cans. The words went unheard or ignored or both.
Penny soon found herself passed off like a relay torch to a second guard, but, more importantly, inside the palace. She couldn’t help but grin a devious grin. Her sister Siela would be so impressed… and probably more than a little mad, but that wouldn’t matter when Penny got back. She’d told a fib about where she was off to, but it was far from her first.
Up and up the guard led her in silence. Penny hadn’t been in many homes with even one staircase—not since moving to Urk, at least—and she’d long ago discovered the connection that more than one staircase to the same floor of a home was the true proof of riches. This quantity of stairs displayed obscene wealth.
Penny was breathing hard when at last the guard stopped outside a door. Another pair of guards stationed in the hall opened the myriad of locks with a series of keys.
Penny had to shield her eyes as the door swung open; the glint off every polished gold and crystal surface nearly blinded her.
A yapping dog came prancing up to the door as they went in, nails clicking on the tiles, a medium-sized hound with floppy ears and a black and brown coat. Around her neck she wore a dazzling collar studded with gems—each one certainly with a value greater than Penny’s annual dog walking income. It sported a gold tag that read Lucky. Penny gave the dog a firm scratch under the chin and a nice ruffle of her big droopy ears. A servant fetched a leash and handed it to Penny.
“I’ll see you back out,” said the guard, motioning towards the door.
“Oh, I certainly remember the way,” said Penny.
“No need.” The guard didn’t budge.
“Oh, uh. Just don’t want to keep you. I’ve got to get her leash on and everything.”
The guard gave the leash a confused look, then reached down to hold Lucky’s collar, the loop awaiting the click of the leash.
“I just like to get to know the dog first. To, uh, form a bond.”
“I’ll bring you back outside; there’s a nice bench just out on the street where you can sit with her if you must.”
Penny looked around—to the guard, the open door, the other guards, the servant still milling about David’s chamber wiping up smudges invisible to all other eyes. Perhaps she was getting her outsider schmutz everywhere just by proximity.
“I…” she started. What else could she say? She floundered for a second, then cycled through another couple species of fish, then finally resigned herself to being babysat. She clipped the leash to Lucky’s collar and followed the guard from the room.
They’d barely gotten around the corner before something zipped by, a blur of pink moving so fast it was like a streak of color and nothing more. At least until it careened face-first into a pillar.
Lucky barked and yanked at the leash. The guard yelped in surprise in a manner indicating a similar level of intelligence.
“Hey, you there! Halt!” he called. He started to run towards the figure—some sort of toddler-sized spirit. Then he paused.
He looked back and forth—to Penny, then the spirit, then back, then up and down the hall. They were alone.
The spirit recovered from the collision and sped off down another passage.
The guard seemed to come to a decision. “Go right back the way we came. They’ll let you out at the door. Come back to the same entrance when you’re done and we’ll let you back in with the dog. I’ve got to handle this!” He gave Penny a stern look and then ran off.
Penny stood frozen in the hallway for a few seconds. Could she really have gotten this lucky? That is, she’d been expecting to get Lucky, but…
It was a—
She looked around. Now she was alone, just her and the dog looking sadly off in the direction of what might’ve turned out to be an excellent playmate.
With a tug of the leash to get Lucky moving, Penny snuck off down a different hall, venturing deeper into the palace with the dog in tow.