“Come.” Yusuf saved me the embarrassment of blubbing on the stairs in front of them by leading the way down half a dozen steps to the door onto the Lambda level and taking us into a small room off the main corridor.
We sat down around a polished table, the room crowding around us, lined as it was with scrolls and fat tomes bound with leather. Yusuf poured three tiny cups of very strong java from a silver jug standing in the window slit.
“I need to get home,” I said, wincing as I knocked back the java. No point in beating around any bushes.
“Where have you been?” Omar, a smile still splitting his face. “You came south after escaping the fire? Why south? Why pretend to be dead?”
“I went north as it happens, in a hurry, but the point is that I’ve been . . . incommunicado . . . for a few . . . um. When is it?”
“Sorry?” Omar frowned, puzzled.
“It’s the 98th year of Interregnum, the tenth month,” Yusuf said, watching me closely.
“For . . . uh . . .” I’ll admit to a little shame, struggling with subtraction in front of a master mathmagician of the Mathema. “About, well, damn it! Months, nearly half a year!” It hadn’t been half a year, had it? On the one hand it had felt about two lifetimes, but on the other, if I considered the things that actually happened it seemed you could easily fit them into a week.
“Kelem!” I blurted the name out before deciding if that were a wise thing to do or not. “Tell me about Kelem, and the banking clans.”
“Kelem’s hold on the clans is broken.” Yusuf’s hands moved on the table top, fingers twitching as if he were struggling not to write down the terms and balance the equations with new information. “Calculations indicate that he has lost his material form.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You don’t know?” Yusuf’s left eyebrow suggested it didn’t believe me.
I thought of Aslaug and Baraqel, remembering how Loki’s daughter raged against Kelem when I set her free, and the look of hurt in her black eyes as I let Kara drive her back into the darkness. “The Builders went into the spirit world . . .”
“Some of them did,” Yusuf said. “A small number. They used the changes they wrought in the world when they turned the Wheel. They escaped into other forms when their flesh betrayed them. Others were copied into the Builders’ machines and exist there now as echoes of men and women long since dead. The Builders who left their flesh were as gods for a while, but when men returned to the lands of the west their expectations became a subtle trap. The Builder spirits found themselves ensnared by myth, each tale growing around the spirits, reinforced by them, weaving them into a fabric of belief that both shaped and trapped them until they could scarcely remember a time when they were anything other than what men believed them to be.”
“And Kelem?” He was the one that worried me. “Can he come back? Will he remember . . . uh, what happened?”
“It will take him time to gather himself. Kelem was rock-sworn. If he has not died properly then in time he will go into the earth. And yes, he will remember. It will be a long while before he’s snared into story. Perhaps never since he is aware of the danger.”
I stared at the stone walls around us. “I need to—”
Yusuf raised a hand. “The rock-sworn are slow to act. It will take time before Kelem shows his face to the world again, and time is what he doesn’t have, what none of us have. The world is cracking, Prince Jalan. The Wheel the Builders turned to change the world did not stop turning and as it runs free those changes will increase in size and speed until nothing that we know is left. We are a generation of blind men, walking toward a cliff. Kelem is not your worry.”
“The Lady Blue . . . the Dead King.” I didn’t want to say their names. I’d done a good job of keeping both out of my thoughts ever since escaping Hell. In fact if that damned djinn hadn’t sparked my memories then I might have managed never to think about the whole journey and poor Snorri ever again. “Those are the two I need to worry about?”
“Even so.” Yusuf nodded.
Omar just looked more confused and mouthed “who?” at me from across the table.
“Well.” I leaned back in my chair. “That’s all beyond me. All I want to do is get home.”
“It’s a war your grandmother cares about.” Yusuf spoke the words softly but they carried an uncomfortable weight.
“The Red Queen has her war and she can keep it,” I said. “It’s not the kind of thing men like me can change one way or the other. I don’t want any part of it. I just want to go home and . . . relax.”