Chapter 13: Chapter 13

Sir Huxley's private café was wedged between the dining hall and the Five Seas Aquarium. Reinforced "hybrid glass" meant that the star attractions of this aquarium—thirty-foot spotted sharks, spectacular ribbon eels, and petite mermaids with the gnarled faces of mummified monkeys—could swim above visitors' heads.

Jacob and Pip passed under the so-called water bridge, walking markedly faster than the other guests. Aetham-backlit water threw speckles of color everywhere.

"Jacob, do you ever have nice dreams?"

The question was so close to romantic that it almost made Jacob flinch. If he'd been drinking, he could have retched.

"Like dreams in the literal sense," he said.

"Yeah, those!"

"Rarely. I'm not a very visual thinker."

"Or that imaginative."

"Not in the conventional sense, maybe. My mind doesn't fire like that."

Soon they were out, hurrying past cutout windows showing select tropical fish and statistics on which ate how much per day. There was so little here that resembled a clue. Not even a single magical monster to give Jacob's mind a place, or sky island, to wander to. It was so immaculately frustrating. He felt like he was working on a puzzle that'd long since collapsed into pieces.

And with Pip bolted to his side. Even with her providing support, his body still felt so limited after the Curse by Woman-Whose-Identity-Was-Soon-To-Be-Proven (If-We're-Lucky). But he was getting better at ignoring the early tingles. As long as his body wasn't on the verge of hemorrhaging, he was fine. After all, behind the veil of the Curse, he still had his old limits, didn't he?

With Pip as his walking stick (or "walking Pip," as he would never call her even in his own mind), maybe he didn't have as much to fear as he thought.

She was right next to him...until she wasn't.

Because he wasn't gonna follow her into the damn bathroom. And not vice-versa either.

Since the lounge chairs outside of the bathrooms were taken, he parked himself against a wall, under a slant of darkness untouched by the calming aquarium light. His legs threatened to quiver. He straightened them against each other, held firm and steady. That didn't prevent a wave of nausea and a crackle of blackness in the corner of his vision. He felt his forehead, wouldn't have been surprised if a pounding headache was soon to come.

He also found words dropped into his head.

Words in Common, so, not very amazing as god-given clues go. If it was even a clue, and not just his inner muse being bored.

"Underfoot, unfettered, through the furrows, a shadow comes smiling."

He "read" the line a few times over.

The alliteration was cute, but his inner muse just sucked. Was that Cursed too? Was nothing sacred?

Or was it just his brain that was Cursed, doomed to roam these museum halls in circles of futility? Doomed to wonder and wander while others gloried in—

"Are you ruminating again?" Pip said, hooking an arm around his without invitation.

"Let's just move. I need lunch."

And his hungry mind brainstormed. The black splotch left, but the words remained, and Jacob slapped them together with his other plans for Huxley. He realized this meeting could turn out very, very well. Assuming he'd learned the right lessons from Federline.

Pip tugged at his shirtsleeve. "Cheer up! Maybe Huxley's paying!"

"Pip, this voyage is all-expenses-paid," he said tiredly. "Also, I live in a castle."

***

The ambient sounds of a chic, bustling café in the booming city were pumped into Sir Huxley's private nook, where only a single table, four chairs, and a tiny gaggle of waitstaff could fit. Three walls were screaming with lushly painted advertisements for random fine dining. A clown on a unicycle juggled cans of pineapple. A winking lady transformed into soup.

The fourth wall beamed strong blue light at Jacob, Pip, and Sir Huxley's profiles.

"The window. It's a double layer of sorts," Huxley said by way of introduction. "Can you guess what it is?"

"The closest part is a layer of sea," Jacob said.

"I meant to ask your darling maid," Huxley said, stirring a mug of strong tea with an idle hand. "Of course you would know it."

Pip gave it a shot. Immediately outside the window were schools of fish shimmering by in cyan water. Past them could've been an alien landscape. She had to stare at one unmoving amoeba for a long while before realizing it was a cloud.

"First it's the sea, then it's the sky!" Pip said.

"Good show!" Huxley cheered.

Jacob, knowing what he knew now about Pip's inner integrity, genuinely hoped that she didn't hold any affection for this childish loser and was just schmoozing.

Sadly, Jacob's hopes were unfulfilled. (She liked attention, okay? Especially from the rich.)

Two cups were set before Jacob and Pip. Sugarless green tea for the prince. Fruity black tea with three sugars and three creamers for the maid. Pip looked askance at Jacob's brew. She was certain it tasted like trees.

With a single clap, Huxley folded his hands. "So," he said, "why don't I start?"

"If I may," Jacob said, "why don't I start? Ralphie, your museum is just marvelous. What you have on display—it's enriching, it's engrossing."

"Hm, hm..." Huxley was nodding.

"And I can't get over the fact that you're touring the world. The whole world as we know it."

"I believe that through this whole grand investment, we, my supporters and I, have reached a summit of manly wisdom," Huxley said. "At last, a vehicle that brings knowledge, not war. Nor even corruptible trade!"

"Pip," Jacob offered, "why don't you share your favorite part?"

"Still the washing machines. They're an acquired taste."

Huxley laughed thinly and wheezily like a drunk donkey. "Something for everyone," he said, "something for everyone."

"Now, Ralphie," Jacob went on solemnly, moments before plates of strip steak and greens landed on the table, "I want to reassure you that despite any little mishap that's happened onboard, I have had an excellent time. Neither of us will be forgetting what we've seen until the day we die."

"Mmhm!" Pip nodded hard enough to launch her head off.

"My deepest apologies," Huxley said. "That you have suffered so greatly on my own ship, yet shown me such kindness in refuting it, is a true testament to the spirit of a great gentleman in the classical sense."

Jacob bowed his head, taking the compliments with practiced humility.

Then he said, "Before you talk more about last night, I'd like to share my side of that story. I know you're a man of culture. You like to poke your nose around twice as much as I do, so you're bound to take serious interest in this."

Huxley leaned in the slightest bit. Buttered up.

Did Jacob have any information that was both world-shattering and worth giving away to a man he wanted only to exploit? No. But he'd make it important. Enough.

"Ralphie, would you call yourself an artist?"

"A connoisseur," Huxley said with a flourishing hand by his chest, "but every true art appreciator is an artist at heart."

"Well, would you say you have a muse?"

Huxley smirked. "If you're, ah, wondering if my muse is more gifted than anyone else's, I would say no. She hits me like lightning: fast, hard, and rare."

"What about here, in the sky?" Jacob gestured to the window, which Pip was trying her best to stick her head out of (though, strangely, it couldn't be done). "It's an artist's paradise, isn't it?"

"You want to make a deal? An artist's retreat, a paradise, up here somewhere?"

"Not at all...though that's a great idea for the future." When we're off this damn thing. Or, alternatively, never. "No, I mean that I've begun to distrust my own muse. See, you reminded me of the Zhufra Incident, when something like a demonic muse infected a whole village with the same junk."

Huxley's eyebrows scrunched together, frowning despite his neutral mouth. "I wouldn't say 'junk...'"

Hm.

Yes.

Another odd word choice for Jacob to put in his back pocket: "zhufra" wasn't junk, possibly had a meaning that those with systems would know intimately.

But Jacob continued. Thankful for the aching black mind-spot he'd seen for a fleeting moment by the bathrooms, he said, "And just a few minutes ago, while I was coming here, I received a scrap of verse that, any other time, I would've blamed on my shitty muse. It was this: 'Underfoot, unfettered, through the furrows, a shadow comes smiling.' And at the very same time, I got a black thing in my head-space. That's especially odd, considering I'm not a very visual thinker." He clasped his own hands together and leaned forward a tad, mimicking Huxley's movements. He smiled. "What do you make of that?"

"I make very much," Huxley said, stroking his chin with a rapid metronome of a finger. "Closer to the heavens as we are, it makes sense that the more sensitive, artistic individuals aboard would experience such epiphanies."

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"And no blame on you for this," Jacob added, "but with all the things I've been learning and relearning up here, all the blurring of fantasy and reality, of my intentions and those of some imagined other..." He smiled. "It's enough to make me question my own sanity."

"I would agree if we were not equally mad," Huxley said. "Something quite similar happened to me, and this is what it dropped in my head."

Jacob focused. He didn't keep the focus off his face—he knew Huxley wouldn't shy away.

"'This sentence will grant you power and glory. Power and glory, as you wish.'"

The prince consciously widened his eyes by two degrees. Then he made a wry smirk, a mask.

"I get the sense you're not just talking about some ordinary Common poetry, Ralphie."

"But it came into my mind as Common! That's the wondrous thing. I feel I've been let in on God's secrets! He reached right into his head and drizzled a dream on me."

(Gross metaphor, but anyway...)

One part of Jacob's mind replied: It's odd that messages assumed to have dropped from the sky would use our language and not some heavenly tongue, isn't it?

Another one replied: Something something system.

Just didn't have enough clues to fill in the blanks in a way that sounded smart.

To put it as bluntly as he could, given the info he had: were systems written by the gods, whoever they may be?

And could he assume that Huxley knew, somehow, that he'd uttered a godly sentence, a godly command? That he knew it the same way Pip knew she should talk to someone in the sky?

"I sense you're not done theorizing yet, however," Huxley said, interrupting thoughts that ran like rapids. "We haven't gone back to the deplorable events of last night yet."

"Exactly. One of the waitresses tried to kill me. So I thought, until I tried to get info out of her and, for the most part, failed, after which she tried to Curse me, of all things. That gave me an idea about her psychology: hard to torture a mere vessel for a Curse."

He paused to let that part sink in. Unless Huxley's background check had succeeded spectacularly, the idea that "Susan" could've been a princess would be news to him. Huxley's face showed no change.

Jacob said, "There wasn't anything deadly in the syringe, was there?"

Huxley said, "No. It was vodka."

"Proves my point. Here's what I've been wondering about." Now Jacob was getting to the meat of it. "Let's suppose that the Curse was true. Even if it's just for the hell of it."

"Oh, I can believe it," Huxley said.

"Given that, we've got two possibilities for her identity. One: she wasn't a commoner at all, she was a full-fledged royal with a Princess-Class System. Two: she wasn't, and yet she had a system that had nothing to do with her real class at all.

"And this opens the floodgates for strange ideas about the nature of systems.

"Here's my favorite, Ralphie. Imagine that a system isn't like a passing of the torch, that it's not even like—a command," he said, pulling brief, sudden inspiration from Federline's old words. "That a system is like an infection. A plague, but a good one, an advantageous one."

When royals passed systems down to their children and nephews, nothing was copied over. No stats and no powers. Those children, if they took the crown, would not even inherit the same weapons.

The rituals of passing on systems were closely guarded, and each kingdom had one or several. Scant details leaked out: dark rooms and candles would be spotted in one land, baptisms in another, and so on. Some families announced the passage publicly. Most kept it vague and secret, to the point where one could neither tell nor remember which aging kings and queens had lost use of their systems. Trying to track it became quite complicated.

Jacob had just proposed that this sacred rite was equivalent to passing on a bug. Coughing.

"And this alternate method or type of system—plague or whatever—could be a way of truly giving systems. It'd be a lot different from the story we spoon-feed commoners about them, for sure." Jacob carefully avoided comparing these ideas to the real method of passing on systems, which he didn't know, of course, but was convinced Huxley did.

"A system passed from a royal to a rando, bearing pre-encoded information?" Huxley wondered aloud. He did seem awed by Jacob's apparent creativity. (God, Jacob hoped Pip was listening so she could eat her words.)

After about a minute of concentration on his steak, the gentleman said, vaguely but pleasantly, "I like the cut of your jib, man."

"I'm honored, Ralphie," Jacob said with another head-bow. He added another thing, a half-truth just to sweeten the deal: "There's more theories where that came from. Call me up anytime you need a muse."

Huxley laughed heartily, a real "ha ha ha!" laugh. “Rest assured, I will! For now, though, let us return to the reason I have called you in the first place. Have you heard of..." He raised an eyebrow. "Uxhilia?"

"Yeah, who hasn't."

Huxley reached over and elbowed Pip like an old chum. Come on, man, Jacob thought, your other "friendly" behavior was already borderline...

She turned and, as frazzled as if she'd just woken up, cried, "I'm listening!"

"Well, get a load of this, children..."

He grabbed a newspaper that'd been sitting on the seat next to him from the start. Shaking it open and folding it over, he found the article he'd been looking for and pointed straight at the image that, without a doubt, closed the case on Susan the Unknown.

It was a pencil sketch, and the paper was from five years ago.

"Good one, Ralphie." Jacob said as if it was, indeed, a good one.

The picture showed the Royal Family of Uxhilia. Not only was this as trustworthy as a cartoon, and old, it also depicted the leaders of a country that didn't even exist anymore. The devastating war from two decades back had reached far and wide, even into that "exotic" continent that contained Old Uxhilia. And for weak nations like Old Uxhilia, the war's aftereffects had kept gnawing and gnawing at its foundations until they finally tore.

So now Old Uxhilia was split into rival states. "Split," though, wasn't the right word when several of those states overlapped, or were the same exact territory with competing names and claims.

Jacob didn't know shit about what was going on there now, he couldn't lie. But neither did anyone in Alzeny who wasn't a seriously invested diplomat.

Like his eldest brother? Plausible...

But Jacob would need much stronger proof.

"Look here," Huxley said, "Princess Biku is toward the back, but we can barely see what looks to be a scar on one side of her face..."

"Hold on. She wouldn't be a princess of anything, at this point. She got deposed, last I heard."

"Why not un-deposed?" Huxley replied. "Hm?" The way he'd phrased it made it sound totally ridiculous, and yet...it kind of could make sense.

Jacob mulled it over.

Huxley looked at Jacob quizzically. "So it's not convincing you?"

"It's truly not convincing me."

"But let me paint the picture for you!" Huxley jabbed his fork and a slice of steak toward the sky. "The dissembled pieces of Old Uxhilia, staggering up from ruins. Success is rare, responsibility is crushing—failure, absolute. Princess Biku sees heirs and heiresses ahead of her and knows that she is safe. But they die, enter exile, are imprisoned, or are murdered one by one. Suddenly her coronation comes terribly close! So she does what anyone might do: she runs away!"

Jacob's mind filled in the other blanks, coupling these guesses with the things Huxley didn't know. Prince John the Valiant makes his annual round in the old eastern quarter...or Prince James the Just, the more outwardly crafty one, follows such tracks in secret. Meets a dissatisfied princess. Gives her Persuasion upon Persuasion, promising her ecstasy in death so long as she can fulfill his comfortably predictable aims...

But hadn't she said "I'm part of Alzenian history?" Wouldn't she have had enough of being any nation's history? Was that line mocking, bitterly ironic?

Huxley noted reflectively, "See, I find this more intriguing than a system passed on pre-recorded: the idea of a conscious and wildly intelligent system. Or system-god. Or system-gods. Take your pick. How else could a system track the princesshood or non-princesshood of a royal in the middle of warring states that constantly regenerate and degenerate? In my mind, it just about proves the existence of the spiritual realm!”

Jacob nodded, putting Huxley's idea in his back pocket.

"Hate to say it, Ralphie, but I'm still not convinced about her being a princess," Jacob admitted. "Let me put it this way, though: either way might be equally true, and I—really neither one of us has a chance of proving her story either way."

At the phrase "neither one of us," Huxley's eyes drifted to Pip. She was looking surprisingly serene beside the window, watching fish flow and clouds ever-so-slowly glide. During the conversation, her mind had filled with poor dead mutineers and beautiful crystalline islands where her feet would sadly never tread.

But she had been listening.

"I dunno," she said, turning. "I think there's something romantic about the idea that she ran away and gave up everything."

"Wasted everything?" Jacob said grimly.

"Wasted everything."

Then, nodding to Huxley, she said with a saccharine smile, "Do you mind taking requests from a lowly maid?"

"Why, not at all!"

Pip smirked and said, "Give me the sky!"

(Which meant "give me a map.")

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