Love and World Eaters (4 page)

She couldn't remember what time she'd fallen asleep when she woke up the next day. Four... maybe five in the morning. But definitely late enough to have overslept her alarm by two hours.

Flying out the door, Aliah barely remembered to grab the box of latex gloves she'd started to depend on. When she finally arrived (unremarked) at work, Aliah focused on churning through the next batch of artifacts to be photographed. If she concentrated—and kept her hands covered—then everything was fine. It helped that the soon-to-be-obsolete storeroom from which she needed to fetch today's objects could only be reached by going through public space; navigating second floor crowds with a packed cart was too nerve-wracking to allow time for thinking about much else.

Until 3:30, when Aliah's hand started itching as she rounded the Chinese exhibit. She tried to ignore it—at least until she was back in the employee-only area—but the itch turned to pain within a few seconds. Somehow, she managed to swallow most of her cry of shock; only a few people gave her funny looks. The pain kept increasing, though, and now something dark was starting to pool under the blue latex.

Panicking, Aliah tugged her cart into an alcove, ripped off her gloves... And stared in horror.

A perfect circle was gouged into the back of her hand. Next to it was the splinter, visible again and wiggling furiously.

With a sharp grunt, Aliah tried to snatch the bone sliver with her good hand. But it was still too quick, darting away from her grasping fingers and scoring another bloody line in the process.

Aching and defeated, Aliah slumped against a nearby exhibit and grabbed her wrist instead. “What do you want?” she hissed in frustration, shaking her occupied hand as if doing so would fling away the splinter like water from a wet dog.

A flashback started to push against the mental barrier she'd begun erecting last night. Aliah felt this internal shield bend... But she kept it from breaking with another grunt. She couldn't stop the splinter from making another angry slash, however, angled so that her hand now sported an oozing X within a dripping O.

“What do you fucking want?” Aliah pleaded once more, feeling the resolve drain out of her as she let her injured arm fall limply to the floor...

... The young man fingers the bone bead around his neck, nods at another of the soldiers who looks equally tense, and runs.

Past the other five soldiers, onto the stage, and up behind the old man as the scene lurches forward with his wild sprint.

The crowd's noise changes from adulation to alarm, and the old man begins to turn, his white cloak billowing around him in a slow arc. Just as the young man closes with him, something flashes on the old man's chest. Something... golden. And round...

... The ring.

Aliah gasped as loud as she'd grunted moments earlier, her sight refocusing on the here and now of the bustling Field Museum. Philip had found the ring Pausanias slapped down in front of his king's door... Found it and kept it. Around his neck, on a chain eerily similar to that worn by his former lover. Pausanias had seen it as the old man turned... And still gone through with the assassination.

She took a deep breath and breathed another question, unsure if it needed to be voiced out loud, but unwilling to acknowledge a mental connection with the splinter if she could help it. “Am I... am I supposed to find the ring?”

The splinter wiggled once—in a gross parody of a nod—and then plunged back into her skin.

#

Over the next several days, Aliah used her spare time to scour the museum's holdings. It seemed logical to start with the “World Eaters'” assemblage, but nothing in its catalogue said anything about “Philip's ring.” And running her hands over the exhibit's jewelry pieces when she had a moment alone with them didn't turn up anything except more unwanted, unfamiliar memories.

Browsing the museum's larger holdings wasn't any more productive. The database didn't list any Philip-specific artifacts, and going through the large clusters of anonymous Greek rings was taking forever. To speed things up, Aliah had experimented with touching several at once, but the resulting overlap of competing vignettes was too much of a strain.

After two weeks of this, she was close to breaking down. Her hand wasn't healing well—wearing gloves kept irritating the scabs—and she hadn't had a full night's sleep since before she learned who Pausanias was. At least the splinter had stayed quiet: her continued efforts to find its counterpart seemed to be enough to placate it for now.

But Aliah knew she was about to hit a wall. It she didn't find the ring in the museum soon... The next step was probably to go online and start searching other institution's catalogues. Which meant expanding the scope from one haystack to a world's worth. And what if the ring was tucked away in a private collection somewhere? Or circulating on a black market she had equally as little chance of tapping into...

Fittingly, though, it all came down to coincidence.

Three weeks after her life turned upside down, Aliah was temporarily reassigned to photograph a set of Turkish artifacts. It was a rush job for a visiting scholar, which apparently had to be done by this afternoon “come hell or high-water” (the fact that Terry had actually said the phrase kept it echoing around in Aliah's head). On automatic again, she was coasting through the new objects, taking advantage of the mandated break from “World Eater” artifacts and all her related concerns.

But then her hand throbbed as she picked a golden goblet off its shelf.

Somehow, Aliah managed not to drop the delicate looking vessel. Her reward was another jab of pain, as the splinter pierced through skin and glove to tap against the cup's surface. A droplet of her blood oozed down the splinter's shaft, touched the cup, and sparked a new set of images...

... Grubby grave robbers shout in triumph as their spades hit something solid. They waste little time in unearthing the body they've discovered, yelling again as they slide jewelry from its skeletal hands and decaying neck...

... The grave robbers throw up their hands to beg for mercy. But the road bandits have none of it; they butcher their quarry with the same dispassion they evidence afterward when they loot the corpses...

... The bandits hand over a bag of rings and pendants to a smiling merchant, who repays them in coin...

... A young noble buys one of the rings with an anticipatory smile...

... And offers it to a young, excited woman...

... The ring passes to another person...

... And another...

... Until a pragmatic, Middle-Eastern looking smith takes possession of the ring, melts it down with several other gold objects, and works hard and long to form the resulting metallic liquid into a shining goblet...

... Aliah pulled herself out of the montage and set the goblet back on the cart, quickly but carefully. Then she exhaled forcefully.

The splinter had stayed on the goblet.

Feeling suddenly lighter, Aliah took a big step backward, trying to put enough distance between her and the bone fragment that it couldn't jump the distance or do something equally insane. But all the splinter did was keep tapping against the base of the goblet with decreasing force... As if it were losing its essence now that it was no longer contained in her body?

Part of her wanted to leave it there to... to die, if that was the right word. Something about the splinter's relentless, diminishing efforts made her head to the elevator, however. Some part of her that wanted closure, even if she was already free of her impossible parasite.

As luck would have it, no one was in the lab when Aliah emerged into the main Anthropology room. Which meant no one witnessed her pocket the rest of the bone bead—still unfixed; she'd overheard Terry grumbling about how resistant it was proving to repairs—and walk back to the elevator.

The splinter was still moving when Aliah returned to her photography corner, but only barely: if she hadn't been looking for the motion, she never would have noticed it. Feeling a strange sense of urgency now, she withdrew the bead, rubbed her thumb lightly over the Greek inscription that might or might not read “Justice,” and set the artifact gently on top of its missing fragment.

Faster than her eyes could follow, the two pieces merged into one... And started thudding against the goblet with renewed—and increasingly loud—force. The noise panicked her for a few moments before she had a sudden insight into
why
it was being made: if the bead had once been part of a finger, and the goblet was partially comprised of a ring...

Breathing quickly, Aliah cast around for something with a point. The first such object to catch her eye was an ornate dagger lying on a nearby shelf.

Trying to ignore the fact that she'd be fired on the spot if anyone caught her at this, she scooped up the knife and started gouging out a hole near the goblet's upper edge, picking the cup up by its base to get enough leverage. The bead seemed to approve; looking creepily like an expectant dog, it raised itself up on one of its shorter sides to watch her work.

And it was definitely work: the knife wasn't an ideal tool. But the cup's gold was soft, and after no more than a minute of furtive scraping, Aliah succeeded in making a hole. A minute later, she'd hollowed this aperture out to a size that looked large enough for its purpose.

Holding her breath now, Aliah carefully upended the goblet so that her crude handiwork would be more accessible and set it on the cart.

The bead shook once—with excitement?—and glided into the opening. It lay there for a moment, motionless and serene... before turning to dust, along with several portions of the goblet that might have amounted to a ring's worth of metal.

#

That night, Aliah finally noticed what a pigsty her apartment had become. It never would have done Martha Stewart proud, but piles of notes and articles had sprung up everywhere, the detritus of her almost month-long search for answers.

Now she had one... along with some questions of her own to answer whenever someone noticed the pocked, corroded looking goblet and the missing bone bead.

What she didn't have, though, was the ability to sift through an object's history any longer. It seemed to have left her when the splinter ejected itself from her hand; nothing had happened when she touched the dagger... Or anything since.

Overall, Aliah mused as she flopped down on the couch—deciding that cleaning up could wait—it was probably for the best. Even if she'd learned to fully control the power, it was too disruptive, too unbalancing... But she had to admit that part of her would miss the historical insight.

Reaching absently for the remote, she noticed with detached amusement that it had been lying on a printout about Alexander's supposed role in his father's death. Aliah still wasn't sure about the particulars of his involvement: none of the scenes she'd delved into had shown a dark compact being made. Then again, Pausanias had
nodded
to that other guard, and there had been two horses... It seemed likely that more than just tainted love had been in play, but she no longer had the means to unravel any such conspiracy.

With a quiet sigh, Aliah shook her head, her eyes lingering on a sentence in the article about Alexander's patricidal motivations. What a strange connection this had been. Alexander subjugated Persia shortly after the scene she'd relived so many times; Persia was her ancestral homeland... And then something triggered her memories, her memories of Pausanias's memories. Which she could now control, adjust, and focus as she liked...

... The young man fingers the bone bead around his neck, nods at another of the soldiers who looks equally tense, and runs.

Past the other five soldiers, onto the stage, and up behind the old man as the scene lurches forward with the wild sprint. The crowd's noise changes from adulation to alarm...

…That must be Alexander on the other end of the stage; according to most accounts he'd walked on with another potential heir before the procession of statues. Rewinding the scene, Aliah zeroed in on his portion of the background…

... From his closer vantage, the regal, dangerous looking youth seems to catch sight of the coming assassin before most of the crowd does. His face tightens in shock as he realizes what's about to happen... but he doesn't shout a warning, opening his mouth only slightly before closing it, as if changing his mind. The knife falls, and the picture moves frantically forward...

So. Aliah set down the remote to contemplate this revelation. It didn't look like Alexander had been in on the plot... But he didn't seem to have been opposed to its outcome either.

She chewed this over for several minutes before another stray thought intruded: that morning she'd overheard one of her Muslim co-workers speculating that the new moon would be sighted in the evening, signaling the end of Ramadan. If it proved to be the case, then Eidu eul-Fitr, the festival for breaking the ritual month of day-time fasting (which, as usual, she hadn't observed), would be happening the next day.

After another moment's pause, Aliah reached for her backpack and rummaged through its outer pocket until she found her cell phone.

“... Hi, Mom... Yeah, it's me... do you mind if I come home for dinner tomorrow?”