Memoranda

7

"They know he is sleeping" said Misrix as we sur-veyed the damage to the lab. Not one beaker or test tube was left unbroken. Brightly colored liquids had spilled out, painting the floor like a dream. There was a horrific stench of chemicals and werewolf excrement.

"How do they know?"

"You don't understand; the wolves know things that we can't know. They have been waiting for this for a long time. Once, when I hid above them in a dark nave of rubble among the ruins, I heard them whispering of revolt. I told my father about it. He called them to him from the plain and the ruins the next evening and served them large platters of a green, raw meat. They ate ravenously and when they were satiated and lying on the ground in a daze, he put a pistol to the heads of two of them and blew out their brains. The others cowered. He kicked one in the side and put a few bullets into the ground near Greta. Later that night, I was awakened by them howling out on the fields of Harakun."

"They've done a thorough job, here," I said, stepping over a pile of shit. "Still, we might find something."

"They've marked this place as their territory," he said. "I think they knew we would come here."

"Take anything that appears remotely interesting," I told him. "See if there are any vials of the antidote, any written notes." I moved farther into the lab, pushing aside nets of wire, glass shards grinding beneath my boots. The stench was blinding.

I followed a row of wooden tables along the back wall. Gingerly picking through the remains of beakers, I searched for a shred of Below's thoughts. Instead, I uncovered a dozen palm-sized creatures that mixed the attributes of man and fish. The heads were bulbous and gilled. Although there were legs with feet, there were also tails. I stared far longer than I should have.

It was slow going, and the discoveries were all wondrous but unsettling. I found gears made of bone, and bones grafted from metal. These lay in a patch of grass that grew out of the top of a table as if it were dirt instead of wood. Next to this was a collection of female heads of a lime complexion. They lay drenched in a clear viscous solution beneath the shattered remains of the huge jars in which they had once floated. There were racks of instruments, none which I could identify, and springs and gears scattered amidst the glass.

Every few minutes a machine in the shape of a diminutive lighthouse at the center of the lab would begin to glow and project three-dimensional images of colorful, long-tailed birds flying through the air. Their different songs filled the lab. As abruptly as the device turned on it would suddenly go dark, and the sounds and images would fade. It was during one of the flights of the birds that I found a scrap of paper on the floor. On the shred of rumpled parchment, rendered in ink were two objects, an hourglass and an eye, with an equal sign between them.

"Come here, Gey," Misrix called. I put the paper into my pocket and carefully made my way past an operating table rigged with wires and tubes and around a chair made of metal. When I reached him, he was pulling a case out from beneath a worktable.

"What do an hourglass and an eye have in common?" I asked him as he hefted the object up onto the table.

"The past has run through both of them?" said the demon, then flipped the latches on the sides of the case and opened it to reveal a blue-velvet lining and five vials of some liquid arranged in a star-shaped pattern, their corked tops almost touching at the center.

"What is it?" I asked.

"This isn't it," he said, and shook his head. "I remember Father telling me that he called this mixture Holy Venom. What it does, I can only remember is not good."

"Have you seen any other cases like this one?" I asked.

"None that haven't been broken into and the vials shattered."

"Let's keep looking," I said, but just then Misrix held his hand up, motioning for me to stay quiet. He leaned his head back as he had done earlier and sniffed at the air. I could see his ears actually twitch slightly as if tracking some vague sound.

"They are coming, Cley."

"We haven't had a chance to find anything."

"There's nothing to find. Everything is destroyed, and Father never committed his ideas to paper. We've got to leave now."

I looked around one more time to see if there was anything promising I had missed. The sight of the place in ruins saddened me, for I would have liked to have seen all of the products of the Master's obtuse mind. It was the thought of the werewolves approaching that brought me to my senses. "It's better off that all of this is destroyed," I said.

We made quietly and cautiously for the door. Misrix leaned over my shoulder, and whispered to me, "When we leave the building, don't stop running." He had us wait what seemed an incredibly long time before he broke into the daylight and took off down the street. I followed close behind, running away from the stench of the lab as fast as I could. I knew there was nothing more I could do to save my neighbors.

If the werewolves were there, I didn't see any and began to get suspicious as to whether Misrix had merely panicked again. I slowed down to a walk when we reached the boundary where the rubble began, mounds of treacherous wreckage sloping toward a distant ridge formed by the southern wall of the Ministry of the Territory.

"Hurry, Cley," the demon called back. "They're coming."

"I don't see them," I said, climbing onto the first boulder.

"You won't see them until it is too late."

"Where are they?" I asked. Just as I said this, I looked over my shoulder and saw ten sleek forms charge out of the laboratory door and head up the street in our direction. I scrabbled to the next rock and from there kept climbing, leaping with a precision that seemed unnatural. I could see Misrix ahead of me, spinning and tumbling in his leaps from spot to spot while behind me the baying grew louder.

When I saw the demon scrabble down into the rubble, I went to my stomach and followed him through a tight passage which led to a fall through darkness and an abrupt landing in the underground network. As I fell I heard the wolves pass overhead like a distant wave, their claws tapping on the coral.

Misrix helped me to my feet. "The beauty showed me this escape a long time ago," he said.

He motioned for me to follow him, and we began walking down the winding tunnel. "I want to show you a secret," he said, and put his tail around my shoulders.

The instant we left the tunnel, I knew where we were. In the center of the huge underground expanse sat the shattered crystal egg that had at one time been the false paradise.

"This is part of the story," he said.

I nodded.

"I named this place Paradise," he said.

I looked through the jagged remains of the crystal shell and saw beneath barren trees the skeletons of exotic beasts scattered in the dirt. The fresh water that had at one time run through the center of the transplanted territory had dried up.

"Why that?" I asked.

"A strange thing," he said. "The first time I discovered this place, I found, lying on the ground out there, the head to one of my father's gladiators. I'd seen them before among the ruins, but this one caught my interest because it had belonged to the man that I, myself, had fought here in the underground. It was the man who had snapped off my horn.

"I picked up the head and considered taking it home for my collection. The moment I lifted it, I could feel a light vibration coming from inside. I looked down to where I had it cradled in my arm, and I saw the lips move. The gear work inside the head began to whine as the eye lids fluttered open. The mouth moved, and it whispered the word Paradise. I dropped the head and kicked it away from me. But ever since then, I call this Paradise," he said, pointing to where a cold, floating ash had replaced the once brilliant sun.

I said nothing.

We continued on through another tunnel that finally opened onto the street across from the entrance to the public baths. I looked toward the dark opening we would have to enter, but halfway up the mound I saw six of our pursuers sitting on the rocks, staring down.

"Not good" said Misrix, and I saw the werewolves turn in our direction. They began to growl and slowly descend.

"Back underground," I said.

"No," said the demon. "Run for the hill and climb as fast as you can, straight at them."

"What should this accomplish?" I asked.

"I can't explain; go," he said and pushed me with all his might.

I ran forward and began climbing. The werewolves snarled, and I snarled back at them as we drew closer. Misrix climbed behind me, yelling for me to keep going. When they were within ten yards of me, I felt a breeze begin to blow at my back. I heard the wing thrusts just as I felt Misrix's hands grabbing me beneath the arms. He lifted us up, away from the gathering danger, straight into the sky. We remained there for a moment, treading air, and Misrix said, "Where are the birds?"

"There," I said, pointing off to the east.

"That's them," he said, and stopped beating his wings. We dived headfirst, then glided along an arc that swept us down over the leaping beasts and suddenly up toward the top of the hill. Misrix put me down beside the opening into the baths. The werewolves had reversed direction and were now climbing toward us.

"Let's go," I said, but the demon waited until he made certain that the metallic birds had fixed on our position. When they dropped in altitude to exactly the height at which we were standing, he called over his shoulder, "Now."

I slid through the hole and Misrix followed close behind, his wings snagging for a moment on the top of the entrance. Carefully pushing down on the dark flaps, I was able to free him. As he got to his feet, I crouched down and looked back through the opening. The birds were less than fifty yards away, and I could hear the growling of the werewolves directly below us. Again, he lifted me beneath the arms and leaped off the top of the inside mound. We flew low over the debris and dived into one of the cisterns. The water was freezing, and I had only had a second to hold my breath. I tried to struggle free of the demon's grasp, but he would not let me go.

He placed his hand atop my head, and I instantly felt my thoughts swirling through a storm that spun my consciousness into a globe. I became like a tornado in a paperweight and flew upward through a tunnel whose walls rippled with orange energy. The demon flapped his wings behind my eyes, and suddenly I found myself deep in the Beyond, staring down from a tree branch. I flew off the tree, now a demon myself, out across the inland ocean. When I wheeled around and headed back toward the shore, I saw the outline of a fantastic walled city, the buildings, huge dripping mounds riddled with holes. I knew it was the Palishize, that deserted city that had been described in Aria's recollections of her grandfather's journey through the territory.

Then there was the muffled sound of an explosion, and I came to beneath the water. Bits of rock and debris pelted the surface and fell slowly around us. Misrix pulled his hand off of me and let me float to the top.

The next thing I knew, he was dragging me out of the pool and standing me on my feet. "I don't know how many of them the birds destroyed, so we have to hurry," he said.

We made for the door and reached it without a moment to spare. As Misrix turned the key in the lock, one of the creatures leaped the width of a pool and came bounding straight at us. The door opened, I was pulled inside, and it was shut.

"We made it," I said, leaning back against the wall.

"Yes," he said, catching his breath, "but now they know where we are."

I dried off and was given an old suit of Below's to wear. The fit was unsettling in its perfection. In the room that had served father and son as a kitchen, Misrix made me a salad. I sat down at the table with my bowl of food and bread. The demon sat across from me with a cup of real shudder. I asked him if he could make me a cup, and he pushed his across the table to me. Then I asked him for a cigarette. Again he accommodated me, and together we smoked. The taste of the shudder almost brought tears to my eyes. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper I had taken from the lab. Spreading it out with one hand on the table, I took a quick look at the symbols and handed it to him.

The demon blew smoke and brought the scrap in line with his spectacles. "This is what I was looking for" he said. "This is a torn corner from a handwritten book—the only book my father always kept nearby. It was written by his mentor, Scarfinati, and it described the secrets of an ingenious memory system. Now the werewolves have it, and Greta is quite capable of reading"

"Below had mentioned it to me once in the old days, but my recollection is vague," I said.

"Father would talk to me about it at great length. The idea of it is this," and as he paused to inhale I could see that he relished the role of teacher. "The adept creates a palace in his memory. He envisions this palace with a clear mind and total concentration. Once it takes root in his memory, he fills it with objects—a vase of yellow roses, a mirror, a white fruit. Each of the objects he places around the palace stands for something he wants to be able to remember. For instance, the vase of flowers might represent a concept like a mathematical formula. If the adept wishes to regain that formula, he travels through the memory palace, and upon seeing the vase, instantly remembers it."

"Everything in the palace is symbolic," I said.

He nodded. "My father designed the Well-Built City with this method. Once it was rebuilt in coral and steel, every portion of the architecture was, for him, the physical representation of a concept, a theory, an experience, worth remembering. Out there," he said, pointing behind him, "those ruins are the devastation of his memory. Every now and then, as we wandered among them he would come across a broken gargoyle or a fallen column, and I could tell he was momentarily recovering a lost fragment of himself. He found a piece of a pressed-tin ceiling that held the likeness of a pelican, and this made him weep."

"The white fruit exploded that memory palace from his mind, and, through some strange property, also destroyed its representation in the real world."

"I love to think of that white fruit," said the demon with a smile.

I stubbed out my cigarette and cut into the salad as if it were a steak.

"He's built another one," said Misrix.

"Another what?" I asked.

"Another palace. He's built one in his mind. It is magnificent, and in addition to the objects carrying symbolic meaning there are even people in this one who stand for certain ideas."

"How do you know?"

"I've been there," he said.