Revolving Door: Volume 2
ĪRA DRACONIS - II
Hong Yi’s fingers pause over his phone screen. “Okay, okay. Pause right there. This is…a lot. And I have questions.”
Bathed in the gleam of the morning sun reflected off skyscrapers, he looks each of his new travelling companions in the eye, seated around him in varying states of attention. “Well?” says Orobelle from the edge of the bed.
He taps his temple with his fingers. “So. I’m a Core. A Core as in, a person with powers and some sort of prophecy we’re meant to be fulfilling. And Dorian and Vesper are also…Cores.”
“Yes. That is the entire reason I have come seeking you.”
“But Honourless is a…a ghost, AKA she can universe-hop. And you've been using her to leap from one universe to the next on some sort of epic quest to collect all the Cores.”
“Yes? Which part of that doesn't make sense?”
“It makes sense, it's just kind of, I don't know, completely rewriting my understanding of reality?”
Orobelle sighs. “Take your time. But not too much time.”
“Okay. So, you don't actually know who the next Core is, or if there even is one living in the next universe. Just like you didn't know who I was, or where I was. But you have a magic compass—”
“Corefinder.”
“—a magic corefinder that will show us which direction to go looking for the next Core. But we don’t know what the next universe looks like, what year it might be, what tech they have, bla bla bla.”
“That's right.”
“Really? You have no clue at all?” Hong Yi lowers his phone again. “Can we at least…check? It would be nice to know if I can use my phone there.”
At this, Orobelle fixes her stare on Honourless. “Well, can you check what the next world looks like? Whether Hong Yi can use his,” she waves vaguely in his direction, “smart transmitter?”
Honourless grumbles under her breath, propping herself up off the ground.
“You have five minutes,” the duchess snaps.
With a sigh, the woman closes her eyes and scrunches up her face, scars rippling. Hong Yi is swept by a brief wiggliness that he thinks must be the warping of spacetime—not unlike how he feels when using his powers on himself. Then he stumbles back as Honourless’ form warps and thins, space pulling close around her—
—and disappears. At once, space snaps back into form, as if she has been plucked from the world.
“That was quick,” he breathes.
“I certainly wish it were that quick every time,” Orobelle mutters, as flippantly as if she saw this occur every day.
For a while, the room is motionless, but the moment reverberates in his head. His eyes search for any sign of a trapdoor, a magician's gimmick that could offer any explanation more plausible than the one right in front of him—that everything Orobelle has said is true.
“So. We are living in a real, actual multiverse. And you don't actually know how many universes there are.”
Orobelle nods. “Wonderland only ever documented three universes, over millennia of searching. But now, we have found two more. And it seems the gap between three and four is uncrossable even to ghosts. Instead, we found a Tunnel and passed through it.”
“So…there could be a hundred more worlds other than these. A million. Maybe one universe for every possible reality that could—”
“Stop! Do not talk in infinites. I do not like them.”
“Okay, okay. But, you are the Knot of Worlds, and you're like…the thing holding this whole multiverse together.”
“Yes.”
“Damn.” He draws in a deep breath. “I hope you don't mind that this is gonna take me a hot minute to wrap my head around.”
Honourless pops back into existence right then, tumbling halfway from the air, banging her knee on the bedframe and landing again on the floor. Rolling over, she begins to speak, and Orobelle glares, but does not reply.
Then the duchess turns to Hong Yi in a flash of platinum hair. “Alright, Honourless thinks the next world is less advanced than Wonderland. There is no clockwork, there are no engines, and she saw only wheeled carriages pulled by beast of burden.”
Hong Yi draws his mouth into a line. “Great. That means no power outlets, and definitely no Wi-Fi. Okay. Sure.” There's no surviving this trip. Nevertheless, he looks at his notes again. “So, you found me with your corefinder by triangulating my location from three other points. But I have to ask, uh…what did you use to do that? The triangulating?”
“This.” Watching the proceedings till now, Vesper finally speaks, picking up the rolled map from the desk and unfurling it for his benefit. The map is colourful and faded, and scrawled across its face are a dozen arcing pencil lines.
“Whoa. And you just…guessed the great circle routes by eyeballing the curvature of the Earth?”
“It was not guesswork. I was trained in finding Great Circles. Still…it can be…imprecise.”
He frowns. “Okay, better idea. How about I download an app for that?”
“Down load?”
“Oh, uh, get a virtual map with arc-plotting features on this.” He pulls out his smartphone.
“Didn't you just suggest you could not use your device in the next world?”
“Oh, these apps won't need internet. I only need charge for my phone,” he says. “And for that, I have an idea.”
*
The wonders of the smartphone are not lost on Hong Yi as he looks up the voltage of the average American power outlet. Nor are the wonders of standard units of measurements as he asks Vesper if she is able to generate a hundred and twenty volts.
“A hundred and twenty volts?” She grins as they convene by the desk. “That's all you need?”
He laughs. “Okay, show-off, the hard part is not going over that. You could fry my charger.”
He places the plug in her hand, gesturing out the two parallel pins, and plugs his phone into the micro-USB end of the cable while she is studying it. “Ready when you are,” he says with a thumbs-up. “If you start feeling the plug heat up, ease off a little.” She nods, placing a finger on each pin.
Almost as soon as she does, his phone screen lights up. The charging icon flickers, flickers, and stays.
“No way.” Both pairs of eyes are glued to the battery icon.
“How long do I hold the voltage?” she asks.
“A couple of hours should do it.”
She squints. “All right…well, I can’t repeat this every day, if only because I’d rather be doing something less…dull. But if your phone can plot routes with such precision, then it’d be worth the time. ‘Specially after the debacle of finding you.”
He laughs, prying the plug out of her fingers, feeling the hairs on his fingers stand. “Hey, you don't have to stand around for two hours a day being my charging port. Thanks for being cool with testing it out. But I'll try and conserve my battery anyway.” He shoves it back into the top of his trolley bag. “And can I just say…I’m so glad someone here has their entire head on their shoulder. You’re generally quite cool.”
“Why, thank you.” She smiles. “And likewise. I reckon this journey will be more bearable just with you around.”
“Aw, shucks. Speaking of the journey, Little Miss Diamonds is probably about to kick us out of the hotel. Let’s go get showered and changed.”
Vesper frowns. “About that…”
:::
Hong Yi soon learns the most startling fact of the morning: Vesper owns two paltry changes of clothes, and Honourless has no luggage whatsoever.
With a grimace, he insists at once on a shopping trip.
All at once, he is playing audience to a bout of impromptu theater as the two proceed to harangue Orobelle for funds. There is a crossfire of complaints and insults, until Vesper says, “You have a minor fortune, no thanks to Honourless!And it will all be worthless in the next world.”
Groaning, Orobelle gestures to Dorian, who fetches from her luggage a wad of US dollars. Ten, twenty, thirty, he watches her produce two hundred dollars and shove them in Vesper’s face.
And they just have that sitting in there? he thinks as they exit the room with a keycard. What else does she have in her bags?
Hong Yi has not gotten so far as contemplating how he will explain the purpose of their trip to Honourless yet, let alone how the woman will conduct business with anyone. But it quickly grows clear, as they wander out of the sunlight and into a thrift shop, that she catches on quickly. Two minutes of watching shoppers later, she is the first into a fitting room.
Vesper lingers by the entrance. “I know little about fashion,” she mutters. “If I come out looking a right clown…don't make fun of me, all right?”
Hong Yi laughs, patting her shoulder. “You think I have a fashion sense? Relax, just wear what you wanna wear, and that's cool to me.”
All said, he finds that neither of his companions dresses anything like what he would call “a clown.” Honourless favors t-shirts and big shorts, some with abstract print and some with none at all, although she concedes a pair of cargo pants. “A fellow connoisseur, I see,” he says, leaning on the thrift store counter, and she grins back, perhaps understanding his demeanour.
“Nikain a soneth,” she answers, fanning out a handful of cash. He glances at the register and pulls out thirty dollars.
Hong Yi knew Vesper would like button shirts—the nondescript patterned kind, no less. And the moment she unearths a brown lapeled coat from the bargain rack, she seemingly cannot resist its pull. At once she disappears into a fitting room, and emerges a minute later in a grey plaid work shirt and canvas trousers. “How’s this?” she calls out.
“Looking good!” he says. “You’d look right at home at a truck convention.”
She chuckles. “Can’t say I wouldn’t attend one, either.”
With the severity of a seamstress’ blade, Orobelle declares their hotel stay over the minute they set foot back in the room.
She shoos them back out, and with only a little protesting, they are soon roll their luggage out of the hotel lobby. Down the streets and around junctions, they quickly locate a secluded alley, Dorian waving them into its shade. With their bags between them, the crew gathers in a circle.
Hong Yi watches as his companions link their hands. “Is this some sort of ritual?” he whispers.
“Do you want to come along or not?” Orobelle hisses. Honourless, wearing a new t-shirt with a nondescript eagle print, growls at her. “Well, save that bad feeling for after you've tried!”
“We can do this in two jumps, can't we?” Vesper snaps back.
The duchess peers around, then curtly answers, “Dorian, come with me. You two,” she glares at Vesper and then at Hong Yi, “Stay put. Especially you, Hong Yi.”
Sitting down on the edge of his trolley bag, Hong Yi lifts his hands. “Look, if I wanted to run off, I'd have done that already.”
He feels a hand on his shoulder as Vesper urges him backwards. Both dart back just as Honourless begins to groan and roar as if lifting an invisible weight. Vision of the trio warps, unwarps, and warps again.
Then a snap—and they are gone.
“Is Honourless gonna be doing this every single time?” he murmurs.
Vesper nods. “I feel sorry for her, to be honest, getting dragged along by the little princess.”
“What is Honourless’ deal in all this, anyway?”
Vesper shrugs. “From the sounds of it, she has a crime on the books, and Orobelle is offering to scratch it out in exchange for, erm, being the group mule for a time.”
“Daaamn. I can't blame her for it.” Hong Yi turns. “And you? What's your stake in it?”
She smirks. “It's easier than the frontlines. I’ll never fire a gun again…or I should hope—”
The air wiggles again, and out pops Honourless from the disturbance, grabbing both forearms with a shout of “Ey!”
“Whoa, you're in a hurr—y!”
Hong Yi’s last syllable tears into a shout as gravity oscillates, weakening and strengthening, and as if by a reflex he has never known he has, he strains against it. The world briefly stabilises—then the storefronts are streaks and the lampposts are lengthening—like crossing the event horizon of a black hole, all is in disarray, and yet too quiet—the honk of car horns, the chatter of pedestrians, the rumble of engines, all slipping away.
As they snap from the world, he hears Honourless shout, and that shout deepens and deepens until it descends out of audibility.
They land on the plaza of a market, surrounded by sunbaked walls that soar in square terraces.
Hong Yi only has several seconds to feel the first chill of amazement rake over him, gaping about at this new city, so rough and textured and real that it cannot possibly be a vision.
Then the heat pounces, and an uproar of voices drags his attention in, and he spots Orobelle and Dorian, holding back a tide of milling onlookers.
“We’re not gods! Or ghosts!” the duchess shouts. “Most of us aren't, anyway! We just need directions, a map…argh!”
Amid all her screeching and foot stomping, a man is shoved out of the throng to face her—small, robed in colours, with a sack of tubers cradled in his arm. His short dark hair sits in tight curls, and he speaks timidly—Hong Yi cannot understand a lick of what he says, though the combination of syllables, the crowd’s sense of dress and the arid air tell him they must be near the Sahara Desert.
With the stranger’s words, Orobelle retracts her hackles, and slips back into her imperious bearing. “Sir, take us to a navigator,” she declares. “Someone who can tell us about the cities of the world.”
At once, the commotion begins to take a new bent, inquiring, eager even—and amid this all, the man waves them after himself, pointing down a street away from the square.
Orobelle glances over her shoulder at the straggling band. “Well, don't dally already.”
*
The establishment that the man takes them to—hefting his sack of yams, no less—is half a mile on foot in the direction of the hills. Between mud and drystack walls they thread their route, trailed by the rattle of Hong Yi’s wheeled bag over rocks and gravel. Strangers stare at the entourage with their own produce on the backs of camels and mules. Orobelle grimaces in the sunlight. The few times they pass under woven canopies, they linger a little longer than they have to.
As they cross the town, a tower starts to rise over the roofs ahead, its red columns topped by wood protrusions, tapering to a pinnacle. It gazes down upon the streets in the noon sun, casting no shadow.
“What's your name?” Orobelle asks the man, through her panting. She has concluded that he must be an apprentice to the tower they are approaching.
“You may call me Komlā,” he answers.
“Komlā, what is the name of this city?”
“Kumbi Saleh, the heart of Wagadu. You have chosen the right place to seek directions—Master Raheem is the finest geographer in the kingdom.”
Their guide ushers them inside through a foot door, and the heat lifts from their backs as they pass into the grand hall. The interior, too, is molded from mud and stone, decked in colourful weavings and tiles and sloping inward. Through minuscule triangular windows, light streams into the interior, illuminating concave tables that stand upon intricate legs. Komlā leads them down the aisle between them, to the door at the end.
“Master Raheem, sir, it's Komlā,” he calls. “I bring guests—a band of travellers seeking directions!”
A muffled voice answers: “Travellers from where?”
At this, Komlā turns to look at them.
“We are from—” Orobelle begins, then halts. Where are they from?
“—Rome,” Hong Yi cuts in.
Komlā’s eyes dart to him, and he considers his answer for a second. “Roma!” he shouts then.
“Roma? Not a conquest, is this? Do they speak Latin?”
“One of them speaks our tongue, though she is white as a bone.”
“My complexion is perfectly normal!”
“It is a strange travelling band indeed,” Komlā continues. “All look to be from different lands, and all dress like no people I have ever seen.”
“They sound like Romans, alright. Their emperor calls captured peoples his own! I shudder for the day their armies learn to cross the desert. If they want directions, they must be polite about it!”
With that, their guide pushes open the door with the flat of his forearm, and they enter the astronomer's study.
The lamplight gleams off a hundred different instruments, and that is the first thing Orobelle notices. Then she sees the rest of it—a lived-in office, the pigeonhole shelves barely enough to contain all his scrolls, which also lie in stacks among telescopes and orreries. A single triangular window peers out into the day.
At his desk is seated the owner of the documents and instruments himself. Raheem lifts his head from a scroll, and Orobelle sees that his greying beard hangs to his belt. A circular gold and green cap sits in his curls, and his face is pulled into a frown.
The duchess braces herself. She can put on airs for ten minutes.
“Good afternoon, sir,” she says, striding up to the desk. “My name is Orobelle.”
His startled eyes dart to meet hers. “And good afternoon to you, child,” he answers. “I am Raheem. You are the one I am to speak to?”
She seethes at being called a child again, but this time, she withholds her vociferations. “I am their leader.”
“I see. Orobelle—lucky that you have come to the right place for help. My protege was in the right place at the right time. How may I assist you?”
“I would like to know,” Orobelle says, with a quick beckoning gesture at Hong Yi, “of the great cities of the world, as many as you can name. We have travelled far, and are seeking out an unknown person in one of these many cities, at the behest of a…prophecy.”
“A prophecy! I do not dabble in such mysteries,” says Raheem, “but I can tell you of the cities documented in the known world, if you have the means to record them.”
“Will you want payment for your help?”
“Payment? No, no, this is but a favour, and a chance to share the fruits of my study with those needing it. I have plenty enough from the king.” The man turns in his seat to sort through his scrolls, muttering to himself now and then about the possible locations of the item.
He returns a minute later, unrolling a parchment on his desk with a flourish. All peer over it. “This, my friends, is one of my crowning works, itself an extension of the seminal work of the scholar al-Khwarizmi.” He waves his hand over the northwestern coastline of the southern continent. “All of this, from Qartaj to Jenne, was mapped by me.”
It is as intricate a map as any the Queendom has produced, rivers and cities sketched among snaking coastlines. “That looks like Arabic,” whispers Hong Yi over her shoulder. “I wish I hadn't procrastinated on learning it.”
“I wish I could call my Grandma,” Vesper replies.
“This is impressive,” Orobelle says, and it is no lie. “I congratulate you on your superior work.”
The man seems to puff up at the acknowledgment. By now, Hong Yi has taken his “phone” from his pocket, and as he does, Orobelle notes Raheem eyeing it oddly, though more out of confusion than of suspicion. The duchess extends a hand towards Dorian, who already has her translation glass ready for her use.
“Strange devices you have,” says the astronomer.
“They are navigational tools we bring from our lands,” she answers.
“Well, on the matter of navigation—here is Kumbi Saleh, where we are,” says the astronomer, pointing out a city in the western half of the map. Orobelle traces the northern coastline with her glass, dotted with the names of cities: Tarābulus, al-Jazāʾïr, Qāhirat al-Muʾizz…
“I got a photo,” says Hong Yi. “We can go study it on our own, and not bother our good scientist more than we need to.”
Orobelle turns to question him, but finds, lifted before her eyes, the display surface of his phone. As her eyes focus, she finds glowing upon that surface a perfect replica of Raheem's map.
“Impossible,” she breathes, but she obscures her amazement by turning to Raheem again, and taking her journal from Dorian to note prominent points he has raised. “This is excellent, sir. The clarity of your work may just have saved us months of aimless wandering—I believe we may know where we are headed next. We shall have to discuss it, of course. But I offer you my deepest thanks.”
“It is my pleasure,” he answers, stateliness masking relief of his own. “Is that all? Do you need anything else?”
“Not at all, besides a spare table, if you have one?”
“Ah, Komlā!” He waves at the younger man. “Show these good travellers to the desks. A good day to you and fortune in your travels!”
She nods. “I wish you the best of luck in your studies, likewise.”
As they follow Komlā away from Raheem's study, Orobelle hears a chuckle of, “that wasn't so hard,” from the astronomer. That sentiment, she decides, is mutual.
Orobelle lays her translation glass and corefinder atop the stone table. Four needles settle, as before.
Then, it is merely a matter of solving a puzzle.
The settlements of this world, Hong Yi reasons, are fewer than those in his own. “And I reckon we could find a pretty good list of inhabited settlements if we can work out what era it is. The key to that…will be the map.”
Here in the study hall, there is only one other occupant, but that is enough for them to speak in a hush. As the duchess names each city, they locate its modern counterpart. Each discovery about Hong Yi’s device startles her even more, and it is when he begins placing illusory pins upon its luminescent cartography that she concedes, “Perhaps I was hasty in calling your world a poor one.”
Hong Yi snorts, sweeping hills and coasts aside with his thumb. “Hey, no offence taken. I’m not patriotic about it or anything.” His eyes dart to the map. “Murrakus, was it? That looks like Marrakesh, the name matches…aaand, pinned.” He hands the phone back to Orobelle, who runs her glass over the photographed map. “I'm almost positive this is, like, late first millennium. God damn…we really are here, huh? I wasn't expecting time travel on day two.”
“You will get used to it,” Orobelle answers without looking up. “What's Tanjah?”
“That's Tangier,” Vesper says.
“And…Qartaj?”
“Oh, Carthage, which is modern day Tunis,” Hong Yi answers as Orobelle hands the phone back to him. “This is like a fun trivia game. Out here on the edge of the Sahel, solving geographical riddles…”
“This is no game.”
He lifts his hands in mock surrender. “I know, I know! Just coping with light humour…”
In this way, they pick away at the map, city by city across the Mediterranean, finding each modern twin from names and coastlines. At last, Hong Yi’s map is peppered with pins, all naming the known cities on Raheem’s. Then Orobelle lays the corefinder beside his phone, and Vesper adds her compass to the table.
Hong Yi peers down at it. “Our mystery person is forty-five degrees from here, almost spot-on,” he says, already tapping figures into his phone. “Okay, we have…a line.”
He lays the phone map on the table, where a red line has appeared, bisecting the map. Orobelle watches as he flicks the image about, then she points. “Stop. This region here.” She points at a peninsula southeast of the line’s midpoint. “Somewhere here can be our triangulation point. Find us a city.”
“On it, boss,” he says, and with a few button taps, the city pins return. “Okay, how about Aden? Pretty sure that one has the same name in this era.”
She glances at Dorian and Honourless, conversing one table over. “A name is enough to find it by,” she answers. “Let’s get moving.”
According to Hong Yi, Aden is a city almost as old as the peoples of the Arabian peninsula. Indeed the name alone, around which ages of story and song orbit, is enough to take Honourless to its heart.
From there, it is easy as counting to three. Orobelle plots a second arc. The two lines cross almost precisely at a single city: Istanbul. Upon the old map, its name is Qusṭanṭinīyya.
While the group contemplates the findings, Hong Yi lifts his head with a sigh. “Constantinople. Of course our person lives in one of the most populous cities in the world.”
“You did, too,” Orobelle answers curtly. “It won't stop us. Let’s go.”