Not even Rasalom would be able to find it in the muck a mile down.
“Need some company?” she said.
“Not if you get seasick.”
“I was thinking of Eddie. We’re having lunch later. Wants to talk to me. He hasn’t got much else going on.”
Jack thought about it a sec. “Sure. Why not? I’ll see if I can set it up for early tomorrow.”
She smiled. “Great. We done with the sword?”
“Yeah. I’ll-”
The Lady held up a finger. “One minor thing.”
“Yes?”
“I wish the return of my skin.”
The request startled him. Since it didn’t seem to want to leave him, he’d come to think of it as his skin, his memento of Anya-a grisly one, but a memento nonetheless. Then again, Anya had been simply another manifestation of the Lady.
“Of course.” He held it out to her.
She touched it-immediately the two slices Jack had made with the sword sealed up-but she did not take it.
“I wish it returned to my person.”
With that she turned and her housedress split, revealing an identical map on her back. Jack would never get used to her clothes not being clothes, but part of her. As she said, I am all of a piece.
The split also revealed the two tunnels running back to front through her flesh, scars of her first two deaths.
“Lay it against my back but please align it properly.”
Jack handed it to Weezy, who was closer, but she backed away, shaking her head. But finally she took it. Gingerly, she aligned the pattern on the Lady’s back with that on the flap, and pressed it against the Lady. It blurred, then melted into her. The Lady’s back was unchanged, but the flap was gone.
3
“My turn again,” Weezy said when the Lady had reseated herself.
She watched Jack lean the wrapped katana against a wall, then return to the seat directly opposite her. She wondered at his almost feline grace. When, how had he developed that? He’d been such a gangly kid as a teen.
She shook off the questions and pointed to the Compendium, still before Glaeken. “Still on the same page?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
That was weird, but fortunate. Weezy had come prepared for the opposite. She’d expected the Compendium to lose that page, so she’d uploaded jpegs of last night’s photos to her laptop.
Turned out to be wasted effort. She’d brought the laptop and the Compendium over to the Lady’s place, but when she arrived, the book opened to the same page. A virtual miracle, since the Compendium never showed you what you wanted most to see. And it had stayed on the same page.
She’d been counting on Glaeken to translate the gibberish.
“I still can’t translate this,” Glaeken said, staring at the page. “I recognize some of the Old Tongue, the language we spoke in the First Age, but that gibberish in the middle is not any language I’ve ever seen.”
Weezy said, “The section I can read talks about ‘The Other Name,’ but why can’t I read the rest? I mean, you’ve told us about the Seven Other Names and all, but what’s this page talking about?”
Glaeken shrugged. “I wish I could tell you. Each of the Seven had three names, two of which were given, and one chosen. The first given was from their parents and, like everyone else, they had no control over that. The second was one they chose when they aligned themselves with the Otherness. They had to discard their old name as a symbolic way of renouncing everything they were before. The man we know as the Adversary or the One chose ‘Rasalom.’”
Jack said, “So ‘Rasalom’ didn’t come from the Otherness? He actually chose that? You’d think he’d come up with something better.”
“Like what?” Weezy said.
“Like Mordan… or Omen… or Dethlok.” He smiled, but it had a sour edge. “Or Stimpy.”
Glaeken didn’t seem amused. “He chose Rasalom-which is why he can’t seem to let it go. His third name, his Other Name, was, like his first, also given-by the Otherness. Each of the Seven received an Other Name when they were elevated to the group. Each Other Name consists of the same seven characters in a unique arrangement.”
Weezy tapped the table. “Seven times six, times five, times four, times three, times two, times one gives us five thousand forty permutations.”
Jack shook his head. “You just did that in your head?”
Yeah, she had. Without even thinking about it. Just the way her mind worked.
“It’s a gift. And that’s a lot of names.”
“Especially if you don’t know the seven characters. And I can guarantee none of them is from our alphabet.”
Weezy remembered something… from 1983. “Remember that little pyramid we found as kids?”
“Sure. The little black thing with six sides.”
“Seven if you count the base. And each of those seven faces was carved with a symbol.”
Jack straightened from his slouch. “Hey…”
Weezy looked at Glaeken. “Do you know the symbols we’re talking about? The same ones were on the big pyramid on your property in the Pine Barrens.”
“I do,” he said.
“Could they be the seven characters in the Other Names?”
“Who can say? I never saw or heard the One’s Other Name or any of the Seven’s. But it seems a possibility.”
Other possibilities flashed through her head as she grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper from her backpack and began drawing. She held up the result and showed it to the other three.
“That’s what they looked like.”
Jack was staring with an awed expression. “You remember? After all these-” Then he shook himself. “What am I saying? Of course you remember.”
“So…” she said, “if Rasalom’s Other Name is composed of these seven characters, we can arrange them in the five thousand forty possible sequences, and know that one of them is his.”
“So? What does that get us?”
“Well, if people saying his ‘Rasalom’ name used to get him worked up, think what saying his Other Name will do?”
Jack shook his head. “You’re talking five thousand possibilities. And even if we do find the right one, how would you pronounce it?”
That brought Weezy to a screeching halt. “Oh, right. Didn’t think about that.”
“And even if we could antagonize him by spreading his Other name around, what good would it do?”
“It might bring him out in the open where you could get a bead on him.”
The smile broadened. “I like the way you think. Make him come to us.”
“How’s the search going, by the way?” she said. “Any luck with the moving people?”
Jack’s smile faded as he shook his head. “Dead end.”
The Lady pointed to the Compendium. “May I see this mysterious writing that no one knows?”
She’d fully intended to show the Lady, but she’d been so quiet, Weezy had forgotten she was there. She placed the book before her and pointed to the middle section.
“That gobbledygook there. Does that make any sense to you?”
The Lady stared little more than a heartbeat, then nodded. “Of course. I know all the languages of Earth for all time.”
Of course you would, Weezy thought, chagrined that she hadn’t figured that out on her own.
“Well?” Jack said, sounding more impatient than usual. Weezy guessed he didn’t realize that the Lady’s responses were very literal at times.
“What language?” Weezy said, almost as curious about that as the translation.
“It is the original language of the small folk.”
Glaeken’s eyes lit. “The smithies.”
Weezy leaned forward. “‘Small folk.’ I’ve seen them mentioned in the Compendium. Like gnomes, elves?”
“I’m sure they’re the source of those tales,” Glaeken said. “Tiny people skilled with metals. As soon as I could afford their services, I allowed no one else to make my weapons.” He looked at the Lady. “So this is their tongue. I’d heard them talk among themselves but never saw it written down.”