The Lost Enclave Page 14

  “Who says they aren’t free?” Marisol replied.

  She led them into the entry hall of the palace. People came and went. The place sparked strong feelings in Nathaniel. It seemed so much like the place he remembered from so long ago. Their footsteps echoed along the stones, and he wondered if there was a basement in this palace, and if so, would there be equipment that could turn a Great One mortal for a set amount of time?

  “They don’t understand the reality of their world,” Lilli said. “They obey what the Prophet and the Authority tell them. Is that freedom?”

  “It’s order,” Marisol said.

  “That’s not really an answer,” Lilli said.

  Marisol brought them into a room that had once likely served as a casual meeting spot for Great Ones but had been converted into an official looking office space. “Sit down wherever you like,” Marisol said, settling herself into an overstuffed chair along one wall. “I’ll tell you what I can, and you tell me what I want to know, and then I hope you will spare me a headache and return to whatever you say is beyond the perimeter.”

  “I appreciate you taking the time,” Nathaniel said. “We did not anticipate such a welcome from the leader of the Authority.”

  “Because your Authority was still fully enmeshed in the fantasy?” Marisol asked.

  “Aye. The world I left behind was a violent one.”

  “And you two…how were you able to survive in that world?”

  “We aren’t from there,” Goldman said. “If you think Nate’s story is weird, ours is a whole lot more out there.”

  Marisol frowned at this. “Expand my knowledge slowly, please. There’s only so much I can process at one time. You see me as someone who sees the light, but it is very hard to shake off the yoke of the stories I grew up believing were true.”

  “That’s understandable,” Lilli said. “So there were no Great Ones in your time?”

  “No. The Authority controlled everything. As I said, even at its worst, there was an order. I’ve tried to make the Authority a force for good as well as a force to control things, and I’ve had mostly success in that regard.”

  “How did you get to be in charge of the Authority?” Goldman asked.

  “It’s a process,” Marisol said. “You have to work your way up through the ranks, but at the end only the Prophet can choose from all qualified candidates.”

  “Did you meet the Prophet then?” Nathaniel asked.

  Marisol shook her head. “No. He doesn’t meet with just anybody, not even candidates for the highest position in the world. I met him after I was selected.”

  “Then how does he choose?” Lilli asked. “How does he know anything about you?”

  “I always wondered that myself. People say he just knows. Because he’s the Prophet. But it didn’t seem right to me.”

  “Something is leaking out to him,” Goldman said.

  “Maybe,” Marisol said. “When I think that he might actually be from outside the walls and not from Heaven, everything unravels.”

  “Tell us about your meeting with him,” Nathaniel said.

  “First you tell me how it is you left your world and came here.”

  Nathaniel began the story, and the others joined in. Marisol nodded repeatedly but asked few questions as they detailed their experiences.

  “You think there’s one of those magic books in my land?” she asked when they had finished.

  “Aye,” Nathaniel said. “No reason to believe otherwise, unless the Authority compromised it at some point, but the rulers of my domain only found the book because my teacher had discovered it and he was being watched.”

  “I don’t know anything about anything like that,” Marisol said.

  “Forgive us if we don’t accept that at face value,” Lilli said. “You seem nice enough, other than when you tried to break my friend’s jaw, but you represent a repressive leadership set in place by a very bad man.”

  Marisol grimaced at the remark. “You think you know what the Prophet is. And maybe you’re right, but that remains to be seen.” She turned to Goldman. “As for you, I’m sorry for my attempts at intimidation. It is a reputation I am forced to maintain in this land.”

  Goldman rubbed at his jaw. “It’s fine. We all do what we gotta do.”

  “Still,” Lilli said. “Just because you say you haven’t seen the book doesn’t mean you haven’t seen the book. And if you’re telling the truth—”

  “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t captured before,” Marisol finished. “I see your point. But the secrets of the Authority are for all leaders of the Authority to access in every generation. I have never heard of anything like that.”

  “We have told you our story,” Nathaniel said. “Now to my question. Tell us about your meeting with the Prophet.”

  Marisol began to speak, but there was a polite knock at the door. They all turned and saw a man standing there, looking apprehensive about interrupting.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “Ma’am, you are needed in the east wing. The meeting about the blight.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marisol said to Nathaniel and the others. “This is a very important meeting. I would like to offer you room and board here in the palace. At least for one night. That will give us more time to talk, and then perhaps I can offer you my services to track down the item you seek.”

  “That is very kind of you,” Lilli said.

  17

  Goldman had wondered about the palace that had been home to the Great Ones. Seeing the building in the new territory, even if it wasn’t exactly Nathaniel’s version, was exciting and it brought out deep curiosity in him. If he could, he would explore every angle of the place, studying it, analyzing it, trying to understand everything about it. It was a building where immortals had roamed for millennia, and that fact unlocked a part of him that he hadn’t truly seen since childhood.

  Though, of course, there had been curiosity in Ethos. Accepting the mission Howard Sims had dumped on him had been in part because he wanted to save his country, and in part because he secretly suspected he had no real choice in the matter. Yet hadn’t he been curious what the world would be like beyond the confines of his hometown? And hadn’t he wanted to see what it would be like to go undercover? He still bore faded hints of the bruises that those explorations had brought him.

  As he was separated from the others in his party, he leaned over to Nathaniel. “Are we sure it’s a good idea to be divided like this?”

  “I know not. But we must go along for now. Do as they say, but do not relinquish your weapon.”

  “Okay.” He turned to the servant who was to escort him to his room. “Lead on, Jeeves.”

  The man brought him down a long, lavish hall, lit as the meeting room had been with dim wall fixtures. The carpets were in too-fine condition to have been around at the time of the Great Ones, but he could imagine the god-men and god-women strolling along, pretending that their incredible abilities and nearly endless lives were totally normal.

  But they weren’t endless, were they? In this territory, the Great Ones had gone extinct. The exact nature of that disappearance remained a mystery, but Goldman thought the truth didn’t matter all that much. Maybe the Authority of the territory had played some part in the decline of the Great Ones, but there was no point fighting with the present-day Authority about it. Whatever craziness had ensued was deep in the past.

  The man turned a corner, and then entered a room on the right. “This is where you can stay,” the man said. “I will bring you food. The leader of the Authority wishes for you to relax and enjoy the evening here. In the morning she will meet with all of you again.”

  “Thanks. Listen, I’m not a prisoner here, am I? Like if I wanted to walk out the door I could?”

  The man smiled. “You are not a prisoner. However, the palace is an extremely restricted space for all but the highest levels of the Authority. You are here as a welcomed guest, but that doesn’t mean there will be tolerance for you wandering in and out o
f rooms. Please stay in here until I come for you.”

  “Mmhmm. Okay. Got it.”

  The man closed the door. Goldman looked around at the fancy red wallpaper and the magnificently carved bedposts. He sighed, and rolled his neck. He wasn’t feeling any lingering effects of Marisol’s attempt at intimidation, but the travel of the last few days was catching up with him. He’d been beaten, bruised, and malnourished, and that was before wandering in a true abandoned wilderness for days. He had reservations about everything they were doing, and he thought Nathaniel and Lilli had similar concerns. But he was in a room with a shockingly plush bed, and he wanted to be in it.

  He sat down, sinking into the mattress, and flopped to his back, jostling all the decorative pillows. He wondered what they had stuffed the mattress with, since they seemed to be an almost completely plant-based society. That thought stayed with him as his eyes closed and he drifted to sleep.

  Nathaniel watched his companions as they were led away by servants. A young woman came up to him and smiled. “Sir, could you follow me?”

  He obliged, and was led down a corridor opposite where Goldman and Lilli had gone. If he had been asked, Nathaniel could have drawn a map of the building. The floorplan seemed nearly exact. He followed the woman in silence, feeling the ghosts all around him.

  The Great Ones of this palace were not his family, were they? Certainly not close relatives, since any connection between the territories would have preceded the creation of the territories themselves. And who could say how long a time that had been? He wondered about the known history of this territory. His own world was limited by tightly controlled information, though of course Duncan Mycroft had his stories of the origin of all things. Had there been a Duncan Mycroft in this land? Someone so old that he must be believed? It was impossible to say.

  He was brought to a room that more closely resembled a fancier version of the hotel he had seen in Ethos than anything in the inns in his world. The palace he remembered did not have guest rooms of this sort. The area he was in should have been used as short-term storage of perishables. He assumed that meant the Authority had taken over the living quarters for themselves as apartments or possibly more offices.

  He did not know what to make of Mirasol and her numerous claims. He had a healthy amount of distrust of anyone associated with the Authority, but she seemed to be something different. She appeared to be frustrated by the very organization that had given her power. That wasn’t all that surprising, if she had seen through the ruse. Despite his obnoxious bravado, Gustavus had been blindsided by the knowledge of the other territories. He had tried to hold onto some kind of upper hand by surprising them with his revelation about the Prophet.

  Nathaniel looked around the room. He did not care for the trappings of the place. He had never been a fan of that kind of thing, even when it was his own race spoiling itself. Was that really true? Maybe the Authority was the entity spoiling the Great Ones to keep them occupied and unquestioning. Too late to worry about that. It was just uncomfortable to see any version of the Authority treating itself to the kind of opulence that had belonged to his people.

  Nathaniel sat on the bed. He did not feel tired, which was a pleasant change from how things had been going for him lately. The whole idea of needing to sleep had been foreign for most of his life, but recently he had been so broken that he had been compelled to sleep, sometimes dropping into long periods of rest and recuperation without realizing sleep was coming.

  His body had healed from all the recent events, at least as much as it was going to heal. He was still dying; he had no delusions about that. His mind had been restored, as far as he knew, with no more secrets hidden away. There were positives and negatives to that. The memory of Amara weighed on him every second, eating away at his spirit, distracting him, and keeping him off his mark.

  What had happened to his happy life was as much the fault of the Great Ones as the Authority, and this Authority had nothing at all to do with any of it. Still, he had rekindled an anger that was seeking an outlet. Truth be told, he had wanted resistance from the Authority. He had wanted its leader to come for him and his with maximum aggression, so that he could fight back.

  Right now, it seemed there was not going to be any resistance, and he would have to live with that. There would be an exchange of information, and an opportunity to get some answers that might bring them closer to dismantling the Prophet’s work. That would have to be enough. In time, he would get his hands around the throat of the Prophet, and he would make that vile being pay for the endless death and destruction he had caused.

  Nathaniel lay back and looked up at the ceiling. Countless layers of repairs had been made to the surface above him. To all the surfaces all around. Yet somewhere in the structure was material that existed back in the time when he had been young and his Amara had been alive. The thought made him ache inside and he pushed it away. Though he did not need sleep, he thought he might take a brief nap anyway, if only to quiet the voices of the dead.

  Lilli found the dinner to be surprisingly delicious—a greenish-brown vegetable stew that she downed in hearty gulps. When she was finished, she pushed back the chair from the small table in her room and looked around. In some ways, being in a room like that was like being in a posh prison cell. There was no television, nothing to read, nothing at all, really. Two narrow windows poked holes in the surface of one wall, but there was nothing to see through them but an empty courtyard.

  The series of events that had brought her to that room were a jumble to her. The days and nights had blurred together and it all had a tinge of surrealness that made her wonder if she wasn’t going to click her heels at some point and wake up in bed with those she knew and loved looking down at her with concern.

  Well, Nathaniel didn’t resemble any Wizard of Oz character she could think of, and she was no Dorothy. Still, the journey did seem like something out of a movie. Everything that had happened since her chance meeting with the ailing superhuman had been bizarre and surprising. She had rescued Ben Goldman, only to find him surprisingly charming for someone who relied so much on ridiculous humor.

  She liked him, which was a new and slightly perplexing sensation. There was something in her, perhaps the part of her that felt like she was in a movie, that had thought she was supposed to fall for Nathaniel, when the aging bodybuilder won her over with his confused fish-out-of-water charm. She knew that was never going to happen, thank God. It wasn’t as if Nathaniel didn’t have his own love issues; a story that sure as hell trumped anything she could tell about abusive ex-boyfriends and guys who just disappeared into the night.

  Ben on the other hand...he was different. Different than Nathaniel, and different than every man she’d ever known. He was calm under pressure, and having someone so level-headed with her made a difference. Having that someone be from the world she knew made a huge difference.

  And now here she was, in what Ben was convinced was the distant future, fighting for answers that might help them save their present. It was all too much, and yet she embraced it in some weird way that surprised her. Being out in the wilderness with Nathaniel and Ben had been so nice…not just as an escape from what had happened to them on their way out of Ethos, but as a reprieve from everything that had happened to everyone since Weber had refused to leave office years earlier. Just being alive in that era meant carrying a weight of anxiety all the time, and she hadn’t truly understood that until that weight was gone. Even the attack by the mutant thing hadn’t changed that feeling of liberation.

  She missed her life back home in some respects, though she knew she’d be returning eventually. She didn’t know if she’d be able to return to her normal existence since the Loyalty Guard was on to her…or were they? She could still fall back on having been dragged into conflict by Nathaniel and Ben, but she didn’t want to do that anymore. They had pressured her into the adventure, but she no longer felt pressured. Somewhere along the way, she’d decided this was something she wanted to
do. God help her, she was going to see this through with them.

  When Lilli fell asleep that night, showered and wrapped in a comfortable robe, it was with a feeling of certainty. Maybe not certainty of what would come next, maybe not even certainty about her current surroundings, but certainty of purpose. There was a comfort in that.

  18

  Nathaniel slept better than he had in a long time. When he woke, the earliest morning sun was poking through the windows, casting tall, thin patches of light on the far wall. He got up and paced the floor. He had a desire to explore, but he did not want to be caught wandering the halls. He wanted Marisol to trust him as much as he wanted to trust her.

  He took off his clothes and folded them on a chair. He entered the bathroom and stepped into the shower. He turned on the water, which became almost instantly hot. Such had been life in the palace. His home with Achmis and Esther did not have that kind of hot water.

  When he emerged, drying himself on a white towel, he noticed that his clothes were gone and had been replaced with clean clothes that resembled those worn by others in the territory.

  Eventually, there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” Nathaniel said. The door opened, and the same woman who had been assigned to him the prior day entered the room.

  “Sir, if you’d follow me, your presence has been requested at breakfast.”

  “Where are my clothes?” he asked.

  “They have been taken to be cleaned.”

  “Is somebody watching me in here?”

  She laughed politely. “No, sir, I knocked on the door a little while ago and when you didn’t answer, I simply peeked in. Would you like to follow me to breakfast?”

  Nathaniel nodded, and trailed the young woman. This time, they went deeper into the complex. It did not take long for Nathaniel to get a sense of where they were headed, and when they reached the large central gathering place, he felt a pang of something deep within him. He could not tell if it was sentimentality or remorse or some other pain, but it was undeniable as he looked at a copy of the room where he had shared meals with those he loved, and where his trials as a normal had officially begun.