Magnus Flyte - City of Lost Dreams

“I’ll press the pedal,” he said. “Max, you just concentrate on the notes.”

Max was not asking her why she wanted him to do this. He heard the certainty in her voice and he trusted it. Because he loved her, as she loved him.

“Just play,” she said. “Just keep playing.”

The notes filled the room. The theme from Pols’s opera. Pols had said Sarah would understand. And now she did.

Sarah gave herself to the sound. She scooped up the girl in her arms. Pollina was so light, so fragile. Sarah wrapped the girl’s long legs around her waist and Pollina snaked her arms around Sarah’s neck. Sarah held Pols tightly to her chest.

E, B, C, A, G.

Sarah moved deeper into the music. Deeper into the trance.

Music filled the room, filled her brain, her breath, her blood.

Sarah looked at the body of the woman in the corner.

Elizabeth Weston was standing now, clad in golden armor, her face set in a mask of resolution, a long golden sword at her side.

She looked at Nico and Max. Nico’s shadow on the floor, monstrously long and broad now. A giant. And Max’s wings were playing the armonica. Yes, wings. A dragon and a giant. She had dreamed this. She had dreamed this.

She looked down at her own hand, which was veined with gold. She was the knight from Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze .

She looked at Pols, who was holding Elizabeth’s hourglass in her hand.

E, B, C, A, G.

“It’s time,” she said to Pols.

Pollina raised the hourglass and threw it to the stone floor, where it shattered, the sands spilling in a mound at her feet.

“Hold on tight,” she whispered to Pollina. She felt the muscles of the thin arms and legs contract. Sarah listened. She heard Pollina’s heartbeat, faint but distinguishable.

Max touched the glass for E.

The sand of the hourglass began snaking across the floor, streaming into lines and patterns. A repeated series of perfect squares each containing a six-pointed star. The sands rose and fell, swooped and glided. Fully formed, the squares formed a kind of labyrinth, which led to a central and larger square. Sarah walked the path carefully until she reached the center. She took the last step into the center of the star.

In an instant, cold blackness enveloped her. No breath. The blackness was heavy, dense. There was nothing to equal this density. No air. Her lungs were crushed. Sarah felt them splintering into needle shards.

And then nothing. She was part of the heaviness, of the cold blackness. She could not move her hand because in this airless smothering void there could be no movement. But she could hear Pollina’s heartbeat, feel her arms and legs around her, and because of that she could think of her own hand, of the space where she used to have a hand. Which still existed somewhere, surely.

And from out of the darkness and the cold and the heaviness, the sound of the second glass: B.

Now there was light in the dark. A golden thread that floated and twisted and coiled in a sinuous dance. The thread was alive. Nearly alive. Now truly alive. The thread grew thicker, began to pulse. Features began to form on its surface, onyx eyes, a flickering ruby tongue. A snake. A snake with a white-gold tail. It floated before them, waiting. Breathing. Watching.

I am not afraid, thought Sarah. I am not afraid.

The snake opened its mouth and sang the third note. C.

The most beautiful C. The C at the center of all things. The snake swung its tail up and brought it to its mouth. It turned one black jeweled and lidless eye toward Sarah, then swallowed its tail, creating a perfect ring. An ouroboros . Sarah found that she could move, or at least imagine herself moving. She could float into the circle of the snake. Sarah, with Pols, moved into the ouroboros and as she did so she reached out her hand and stroked the golden skin of the snake, which rang.

The fourth note: A.

The snake released its tail and stretched, expanded. The golden scales fell away and Sarah could see veins with blood, glowing blue, then dark red. It was a column, a river of blood. Branches shot out of the river like tree limbs, reaching out, groping, feeling. Sarah could hear them singing to one another. Pols’s heartbeat was growing louder now, but Sarah no longer felt the girl around her.

She was inside. Sarah was inside Pollina. Like Nina had described the nanotubes, going inside her veins, her blood. And the blood was getting darker and closer and heavier. And the song of the tree limbs became harsh and discordant. Sarah felt as if she were in a tunnel now, and the tunnel was getting smaller and smaller until it was so narrow that Sarah could not move forward any more. The blood slowed, then stopped. She could not go forward. She could not turn around and go back. She could not move.

But the heartbeat was still there.

One more note.

The fifth note.

Please, Max.

Yes, there it was. G.

The tunnel immediately began to expand, fusing and forming a ladder that twisted and turned. The ladder ribboned around her, seemingly without end or beginning.

A double helix.

Somewhere in this chain was the thing that was killing Pollina.

So they needed to go beyond that. They needed to go farther.

Sarah took a deep breath; and as the last vibration of the last note faded into silence, the chain shattered.

They had arrived back at the Star Summer Palace. Sarah stood in the center of the star, in a round white room.

A round white room with five doors. Exactly as in her dream. Pure white, polished to a high shine. Max and Nico and Elizabeth had all vanished. Sarah became aware of Pollina against her chest, grown suddenly very heavy. Sarah looked down at her and the girl drew back her head and raised her face toward Sarah.

Pollina’s eyes were open. They were almost all white, all iris, the pupils almost swallowed by the white. Pollina shut her eyes.

“Where are we?” the girl asked. Sarah set her gently on her feet and Pollina stretched out her hands.

“We’re at the Star Summer Palace, but it’s a little different. It’s all white now. I mean, empty. And we have five doors.”

Four of the doors had keyholes and looked quite ordinary.

The fifth door was different.

Sarah took a step away from it.

They should not open that door. It was not a hell portal. It was something else.

Pols snapped her fingers and they listened to the sound, which was not at all commensurate with the space. Pols might just as well have snapped her fingers in the Colosseum.

“Big room,” commented the girl.

“What do you think we should do?”

“It’s a classic scenario.” Pols shrugged. “The whole thing seems a bit obvious. Room-with-doors as metaphor. We must be in your brain, not mine.”

“I’m not sure about that,” said Sarah. “There is no color. Anyway, we have four choices.”

Technically they had five choices, but every cell in her body was telling her not to touch that fifth door.

Pollina was swaying. Sarah caught her just before she crashed to the floor. The girl’s lips were dry and cracked, but her forehead was beaded with perspiration.

“Sarah,” the girl whispered. “I think you should . . . hurry.”

Sarah took off her jacket and cradled it under Pollina’s head. The girl curled up in a ball, coughing weakly.

Sarah moved to the nearest door and sank to her knees, peering through the iron keyhole.

She saw a stream and a cluster of moss-covered rocks. The air was misty, and Sarah caught the scent of fir trees. The figure of a man sat on the largest of the rocks, singing in a flat, deep voice. Da-da-da, he rumbled, then paused. He tootled experimentally, like a trumpet, then honked a series of minor notes. Then sang again: Da-da-da . . . Pa! Pa! PA! He turned his head, keeping time in the air, as if he were conducting the water before him.