will be your downfall. Do I make myself clear?”
“As always, you are nothing if not clear, James.”
Reed turns.
Master Daniels was old when Asphodel Baker was young: all her accomplishments, while they have prolonged his life, have not been enough to turn back time. He is old now, old beyond measure, and he walks into the vestry of the church that is not a church with the ponderous slowness of a man whose hurrying days are far behind him. Unlike the others in their sensible suits, he wears the red robes of his office, timeless and antiquated in the same moment.
If there is anyone in the Congress who understands showmanship as Asphodel did, it is Arthur Daniels. Reed’s smile as he beholds the man is genuine. They may stand on opposing sides of a divide, but at least Daniels stands with style.
(Asphodel at the end: Asphodel the penitent, begging her own master to understand what she has been trying to accomplish all the days of her life, head bowed, hands clenched against the ground. Asphodel, her eyes full of tears, pleading with the old fool to listen to her, to see past her woman’s form and her youthful face and hear her, for what is alchemy if not the use of all the myriad pieces of creation to forge a better whole? Refusing women their place in the upper reaches of the Congress only limits them, only lessens what they can do. And Daniels, the old fool, turns away.)
“Is it true, then?” he asks, taking a careful step toward Reed. “Have you done it?”
“The Doctrine lives,” Reed says. “It walks among us, prisoned in flesh, malleable, young, and foolish. I’ll have my day. As your ally or as your enemy, I’ll have it.”
“Do you believe you can control it? A force great enough to remake time?”
“I believe I already have.” The astrolabe, spinning, rewinding—oh, yes. He will control it.
The universe is his to command.
Daniels looks at him for a long, silent moment before inclining his head in acknowledgment. “Then it seems we must welcome you home, alchemist, for you have so much to teach us.”
The other men look alarmed, unable to believe this is happening. Reed smiles, walking quickly across the vestry to kneel before the older alchemist. When Daniels’s hand caresses his hair, it is like being touched by the fingers of a mummy: papery, ancient, and scented with the votive oils of the tomb.
“Believe in our works, and we will guide you to the light,” says Daniels.
(Asphodel at the end, bleeding her life out on the floor, a look of strange contentment on her face, like she always knew this would be the end of her; like she has been waiting. Like somehow, by losing, she’s won. He rages at that expression, but it’s too late. She’s gone, she’s gone, and if this was her victory, she’s carried it with her to the grave.)
“And the light shall guide me home,” says Reed.
He is triumphant in his defeat.
By the time they realize why, he knows, it will be too late, and Asphodel, who would never have been forced to create him, her killer, if not for the small-minded fools who now surround him, will be avenged.
All he has to do is wait, and his cuckoos will spread their wings, and the universe will be his.
THE ASTROLABE
Timeline: 10:22 CST, July 3, 1986.
Alone, Asphodel’s astrolabe turns. The planets spin through their fixed and finite orbits; the jeweled stars move, charting a course as precise as the heavens themselves. Forward and back they go, revolving, twirling, avoiding collision by millimeters, so that it seems impossible that anything so intricate could possibly exist in physical space, unbound from the actuality of the cosmos. By looking into the mechanism, it is almost possible to see time itself modeled inch by inch and day by day, transcribed according to a human being’s limited perceptions.
When it stops, even for a moment, creation trembles. When it spins, time resumes.
There are too many days between germination and growth to chart them all, and so the astrolabe spins on and on, faster and faster, until seven years have passed and the Doctrine—split between six bodies, six potential hosts, two by two and separated as far from one another as geography allows—is mature enough to make its presence known.
The Impossible City is at hand.
The girl was very pale, with waterweeds in her hair and tangled around her toes. Her feet were bare, and all of her glistened with a silvery sheen,