Well, I thought, that’s not exactly a no.
Time was passing. Hours of daylight still remained, but I didn’t know if the moons needed to kiss above Empis for the Dark Well to open; for all I knew they could pass on the other side of the world with the same terrible result. The eyes of Bella and Arabella on the sundial’s high centerpost tick-tocked back and forth as if to underline this idea.
I turned and called for the others.
7
We walked around the sundial, but with an exception: Radar walked across it, stopping just long enough to piss beside the centerpost, which made me think of Eris and the fallen giant.
The pinwheel paths merged into the broad central path. It ended at seven doors. I tried the one in the middle and found it locked. I told it to open in the name of Leah of the Gallien, the Empisarian version of open sesame, and it did. That I had expected, but something else happened that I had not. The building seemed to recoil at the sound of the princess’s name. I didn’t see it so much as I felt it, as I had felt the thud in my feet when Hana’s six or seven hundred pounds of newly dead weight crashed to the ground.
The tangle of whispering voices, heard not so much with ears as in the center of the head, suddenly stopped. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe the entire palace had been cleansed—exorcised was the word I’d used to Iota—but it was clear to me that not only the Flight Killer had power. It would be stronger if she could speak herself, I thought, but of course she couldn’t.
Inside the doors was a vast lobby. Once, like the Trolley House, it had been decorated with a circular mural, but it had been splashed with black paint so that nothing remained but a few high-flying monarchs near the ceiling. I thought again of ISIS zealots destroying the cultural artifacts of civilizations that had gone before them.
In the center of the lobby were a number of red-painted kiosks, not much different from the ones my dad and I had passed through many times at Guaranteed Rate Field when we went to Chicago to see the White Sox play. “I know where we are,” Iota muttered. He pointed. “Wait, Charlie. One minute.”
He pounded up one of the ramps, looked, and ran back.
“The seats are empty. So is the field. They’ve all gone. Bodies, as well.”
Leah gave him an impatient look that seemed to ask what else had he expected, then led us to the left. We traveled a circular hallway past a number of shuttered booths that almost had to be concessions. Radar padded beside me. If there was trouble, I expected she’d sense it first, but so far she seemed alert but calm. Just past the last of the booths, I stopped, staring. The others did, as well. Only Leah displayed no interest in what so amazed me. She went on a little way before she realized we weren’t following. She made that circular hurry gesture again, but for the moment we were frozen.
Here the stone sidewall had been replaced by a panel of curving glass at least thirty feet long. It was dusty—everything in the palace was dusty—but we could still see what was inside, lit by a line of overhead gas-jets, hooded so they acted as spotlights. I was looking into a vault heaped with drifts of gold pellets like the ones I’d found in Mr. Bowditch’s safe. They had to be worth billions of American dollars. Among them, scattered carelessly, were gems: opals, pearls, emeralds, diamonds, rubies, sapphires. Mr. Heinrich, the old limping jeweler, would have had a heart attack.
“My God,” I whispered.
Eris, Jaya, and Iota seemed interested but not even close to gobsmacked.
“I’ve heard of this,” Iota said. “It’s the treasury, ain’t it, my lady? The treasury of Empis.”
Leah nodded impatiently and gestured for us to come. She was right, we had to move on, but I stayed a few moments longer, drinking in that enormous cache of wealth. I thought of my many trips to see the White Sox, and that one special Sunday to see the Bears play at Soldier Field. Both stadiums had glassed-in displays of memorabilia, and I thought this might be something similar: on their way to whatever game or games they’d come to see, the common ruck could stop to gape at the riches of the kingdom, no doubt protected by the King’s Guard during the reign of the Galliens, more recently by Hana. I didn’t know how Mr. Bowditch had gained access to it, but what he’d taken, with permission or without it, was no more than a drop in the bucket. So to speak.
Leah gestured more strongly—both hands tossed back over her shoulders. We followed her. I took one look back, thinking that if I jumped into one of those drifts, I’d be in gold up to my neck. Then I thought of King Midas, who died of starvation—according to the fairy tale—because everything he tried to eat turned to gold when he touched it.