The Stranger's Magic: The Labyrinths of Echo: Book Three (28 page)

I dropped her off by the Headquarters and drove home. Nominally, of course, the Armstrong & Ella tavern wasn’t my home, yet I was absolutely sure I was driving home. Where else? To
compensate for leaving Droopy at my so-called royal residence for three dozen days, I decided to bring Droopy along with me. Moreover, I was hoping to bring him with me to work, even though I
suspected that for such folly Sir Juffin Hully might turn me into ashes. Personally.

“Max, now you’re really going too far,” said Tekki. “First you bring me your cats. Then you offload your numerous wives on me, putting me in charge of their upbringing.
Now you’re going to make me take care of this beast?”

The aforementioned cats, furry Ella and Armstrong, stared scornfully at their enormous fellow pet from the height of an old cupboard. They were in no hurry to climb down and introduce themselves
to Droopy. One could understand that.

“Dream on,” I said, climbing onto the bar and pecking Tekki on her nose. “I’m not going to part with him yet.”

“It’s the ‘yet’ part that worries me!” she said. “In a dozen days, you’re going to leave him here, saying you’re attending an audience at the
Royal Palace and that dogs aren’t allowed in. Then you’re going to say that Droopy looks fantastic, and that I’m taking much better care of him than the inhabitants of the Furry
House, and that his fur looks great against the color of my hair and the pattern on the carpet in the bedroom, and that means that the dog should stay here. I won’t object, you’ll kiss
me, and by the time I come to my senses, this dog will have taken me for his new master. Max, I know you too well, and I’m freaking out in advance.”

“Oh, no. I’ve had enough today of beautiful ladies who fear looking into their future,” I said, sitting down on my favorite barstool. “Trust me, a personal bedroom and a
couple dozen servants all longing to fill his food bowl await this beautiful dog back home. They don’t have anything else to do anyway. As for my ‘wives,’ you could have put them
to good use. The trio would look fantastic behind the bar, and you and I could go on a well-deserved vacation somewhere. You could also up the prices. As far as I know, the inhabitants of the
Capital have never before been waited on by three beautiful identical foreign queens at the same time.”

“Great idea, but it reeks of international conflict a mile away,” said Tekki. “Besides, they are too serious to fill the glasses of drunken
Echoers, if you haven’t noticed.”

“When would I have the time to notice anything?” I said. “I’ve seen them three times tops.”

“It’s your own fault. Also, who’s the ‘beautiful lady who fears looking into her future’?”

“You have three guesses.”

“I see,” said Tekki. She smiled, came out from behind the bar, and sat down beside me. “You had the pleasure of listening to Melamori’s dramatic reading of the story of
the distant and beautiful Arvarox and her alleged cowardice.”

“She only covered the latter,” I said. “I tried to explain to her that her problems are not unique, and that the inhabitants of all the Worlds—known and unknown to
me—face them on a daily basis. I only mentioned in passing, however, the fact that very few of them are actually capable of dealing with and overcoming said problems, and only
barely.”

“Ah, so you can be wise sometimes, too,” said Tekki. Then she buried her nose in my shoulder and added in a quiet voice, “To leave or to stay: I’d give anything to have
that kind of problem on my mind.”

“How so? Can’t imagine your life without wild anxieties?” I said.

“I could do away with wild anxieties, Max. You don’t understand. I simply have no choice. And I’ll never have one. I can’t leave Uguland unless I want to continue my
existence as a ghost, you know.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can’t get too far away from the Heart of the World, or I’ll die. I’ll expire like any other miracle that’s been slapped together in a hurry. That’s just my
nature, honey. Or did you think the children of Loiso Pondoxo were ordinary people?”

“I didn’t think about any such thing at all. Plus, I still don’t quite understand what you’re trying to say. I guess I don’t want to understand.”

“There isn’t much to understand. We—my dead brothers and I—are not ordinary people. I think our prankster of a father simply couldn’t have normal children. We are
the products of his strange magic and his . . . dark humor. On the one hand, it’s not that bad. In a sense, we are immortal. I have no reasons to doubt it since my brothers, after dying
during the Troubled Times, became functional beings rather than apparitions. On the other hand, we’re not completely free. Forget about traveling between Worlds or to Arvarox—I
can’t even leave Uguland. My best option is to stay in Echo until the day I die. It’s only then that the true life of strange creatures like us really begins. Is this too shocking for
you, Max?Maybe I shouldn’t have started this conversation. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, no. Please don’t be sorry. It’s good that you’ve told me. It just makes me a little sad. I had hoped to show you my favorite dreamworld, the little town in the
mountains near Kettari. And then maybe some other place worthy of your beautiful eyes. But it’s okay. I’ll gradually get accustomed to the fact that you’re a stay-at-home Tekki
and that you’re revolted by the thought of someone willingly swapping his favorite bedroom for a room in a cheap inn.”

“Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t paint it all black. Everything changes. I don’t know how, but sometimes ‘everything’ just up and changes.” Tekki laughed.
“Who knows, maybe someday you and I will have our chance to take a long walk there.”

I had nothing left to do but kiss her. The tavern was still empty, and kissing was much more pleasant than processing the information she had just let loose on me.

I felt someone’s heavy stare drilling into the back of my head and turned around. In the doorway stood Sir Shurf Lonli-Lokli. He was absolutely calm. Then again, I’d be surprised to
learn that such a trivial spectacle as a kiss could shock this guy. I think that even if Tekki and I had decided to move right along to the next stage he would have simply sat down at the farthest
table, taken out some interesting book from the folds of his snow-white looxi, and waited until we were done.

Tekki didn’t know Shurf as well as I did, so she hurried to retreat behind the bar. There she gave a big sigh of relief, as though this change of location had invalidated all the actions
she had committed on the other side of the bar.

Droopy recognized in our visitor an old friend but restricted his excitement to wagging his ears. He was smart enough to know which of my friends were okay with him jumping on them, and which he
should keep a polite distance from.

“I’m always glad to see you, Shurf, especially here,” I said. “Why are you standing in the doorway? Come over here.”

“I am not standing in the doorway,” said Shurf. “I am trying to close the door. It is cold outside. The wind is blowing in from the Xuron. I have read a great deal on the
positive effects of conditioning oneself to the cold, but I do not think drafts are a particularly good source of health. Lady Tekki, I believe it is imperative that you have this door handle
repaired as soon as possible. I have reason to believe that it will never keep the door latched as it should without a good spell.”

“You’re right, Shurf,” said Tekki. “I’ve been meaning to take care of it, to call someone to have it fixed, or whatever it is one’s supposed to do in such
cases. Then I tell myself that it’s much easier to cast some spell to keep the damn thing closed. Please don’t frown: the second degree of Black Magic does the job nicely. Even your
beloved Code of Krember or Magician Nuflin the Terrible himself could have nothing against it.”

Lonli-Lokli shook his head and sat down beside me. “I have come to ask you for a favor, Max,” he said, taking a sip of the best kamra in Echo.

“Anything,” I said.

“You told me you would someday try to obtain another book from your World,” he said.

“And completely forgot about it,” I said. “No worries, though. I’ll get to it right away.”

“Right away?” said Lonli-Lokli.

“Sure, why wait? I’ll forget again, and then, a couple dozen days from now, you’ll remind me about it politely, and I’ll be ashamed. Why go through all this?”

“Sometimes you can be very rational,” said Lonli-Lokli. I thought I spotted the shadow of a smile in the corners of his mouth.

“First I need to relocate,” I said, looking around. “There’s no place to hide my hand here.”

I walked around behind the bar, where, admittedly, I wasn’t supposed to go. Nor was I supposed to crawl on all fours behind it. In this place, however, I could get away with far worse
things. Tekki either enjoyed my intruding on her turf or mistook me for the dog—I don’t know which. In any event, she patted my head and even scratched behind my ear.

Here I had to rack my brains over where I could hide my hand, which was absolutely necessary. Even experienced magicians, not to mention some novice like me, couldn’t fumble in the Chink
between Worlds in plain sight. I gave up and just stuck my hand under an old floor mat. I couldn’t find anything more appropriate.

My hand got numb right away, as though it had been longing for this job and was now making up for what it had missed. First I got hold of yet another umbrella, a ladies’ model: it was
yellow with little flowers. The Chink had always been very generous in presenting me with umbrellas. I think it had to do with the fact that people lost umbrellas more often than anything else. But
I am not a collector by nature and had no intention of augmenting my collection of multicolored umbrellas with another specimen. Instead, I stuck my hand under the mat again and tried to focus: I
thought of a library, its bookshelves filled with hundreds of thousands of good books.

For a few moments, I didn’t get anywhere. My head was crammed with unrelated thoughts: about my unfinished kamra, for example. Then it occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind smoking a
cigarette. Also, Tekki was hanging around all the time, and I couldn’t get rid of the idea of grabbing her leg. It took an enormous amount of concentration to shoo away these fragments of
useless thoughts and get hold of the only necessary one: The Library.

My hand got numb again. I tried my best to imagine myself climbing a ladder to reach a book with a bright-red cover on the top shelf. The next thing I knew, a red paperback book was falling out
of my numb fingers onto the floor. Lonli-Lokli was on a streak with cheap editions. Both the book, Big Earth in Small Space, and its author, Steve Harris, were unknown to me.

“What the heck!” I said. “Why can’t I fetch something I know and love? It shouldn’t be that hard. I used to be such a bookworm in my day.”

“Are you unhappy with the book you got for me?” said Shurf.

“I’m not unhappy. I just got another unknown title by another unknown author, just like before. I think it’s our fate, Shurf, to read different books. I’m warning you,
though: you’re going to have to tell me what it’s about again. I doubt I’m ever going to read it, but I might easily die of curiosity.”

I gave my haul to Shurf and returned to my spot at the bar. Tekki, true to form, ignored everything that was going on. She was tactful enough to bury herself in yesterday’s Echo Hustle and
Bustle, though I suspected that she was more interested in the contents of the newspaper than Shurf’s and my bibliophile issues anyway.

“Why are you so surprised that you landed an unfamiliar book? Or do you think that during your lifetime you have read everything that has been written?” said Lonli-Lokli.

“Well, not everything, of course,” I said, smiling, “but you’d be surprised by how much I have read. I used to be quite a reader, I’ll have you know. That was basically all I used to do. It wasn’t the worst pastime, frankly.”

“It seems you do not read as much now,” said Shurf.

“No, not a whole lot,” I said. “Basically I don’t read at all nowadays.
But everything changes, especially when one life ends and a totally new one begins, right?”

“You are quite correct. I should have taken into account the fact that your present life might seem very rich and eventful to you.”