All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [10]
“Always and never the gentleman,” Audrey said, and stood. “I accept your offer.”
“Splendid,” Henry cooed. He turned to Cecilia, and his slender hand reached out to caress her face. Cecilia recoiled before this gesture. “Ah, I would bring you as well, my lovely,” he said, “but there are some on the Council who would love to part your head from your shoulders should you cross their path.”
Cecilia gripped a butter knife.
Henry spared a glance at its edge. “Perhaps another time you and I will dance.” He moved to the stairs. “Today, regrettably, we have business to attend to: The Council wishes to discuss its newest members, and provided they are allowed to live . . . we shall discuss how to avert the end of the world.”
Audrey gathered her courage and followed. “I expected no less.”
4. Fragments of one Towers set were found in the Neolithic hunter-gatherer settlement, Göbekli Tepe (southeast Turkey c. 9000 B.C.E.). This makes Towers the oldest (nontrivial) game, predating Chinese Go and Egyptian Senet by more than four thousand years. A Towers board is circular. Lines radiate outward to make thirty-two spaces of alternating color on the circumference, a second tier closer of sixteen spaces, a third tier with eight spaces, and a single circular space in the center. Placed on the board are sixteen white cubes and sixteen black. A simple checkers mechanism was assumed, but in 1753, a set was discovered in Pompeii preserved in the middle of a game. Cubes were stacked into towers (of increasing size) on the inner circles, while others remained as single stones, indicating a complexity of rules that experts agree no Neolithic hunter-gathers could have developed. Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 1, Earliest Myths.
3
ENTRANCE EXAM
Eliot had this creepy feeling he and Fiona were being watched. Fog and shafts of sunlight swirled around them on the sidewalk. He glanced up at their new house.
He liked it. It wasn’t “home.” That had been their apartment in Del Sombra. This place, though, made up for it by at least having more than one bathroom.
It was a modern Victorian squished on all sides so it towered three stories tall on their lot. The trim was green and gold geometric art deco lines. Three scalloped balconies cupped the sides of the house like bracket mushrooms. A gold solar system weather vane topped the highest spire. It was an odd melding of styles . . . but it somehow worked, like something a mad genius architect might have sketched.
Every building was tall and quirky on their street—stacked at least three stories tall. Most had been built with so little room, they actually touched their neighbors. Cee said it was the high cost of real estate that made every home tiny and built this way.
That feeling of being watched, however, was still there. Eliot squinted, but the windows of his house were solid reflections of sky.
Fiona glanced around, too, perhaps sensing the same unease he felt.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“Hang on a sec.” Eliot tightened the strap of his canvas backpack. Inside were pencils, notebooks, Cee’s lunch, and a battered violin case (sticking slightly out of the top of the pack), which contained his most prized possession: the violin Lady Dawn. He shifted his shoulders inside his too-big Paxington jacket. No luck there—it still looked all wrong. “Okay,” he told her. “Let’s go.”
Fiona unfolded their map, got oriented, and then pointed. “That way to Lombard Street.” She marched ahead and Eliot followed. She was in her figure-it-out mode, and nothing got in Fiona’s way when she was like that.
For several blocks they tromped in silence and then turned onto Lombard.
A nonstop stream of cars and trucks rolled by. Eliot and Fiona took a step back. The scents of coffee and freshly baked bread drifted with the odors of exhaust. People queued in line for coffee from latte carts.
“All we have to do is follow this street west,” she told him. “That’ll get us there.” She scrutinized the map but looked unconvinced.
“What’s the matter?