“I’m not exactly who I used to be.”
“And you seem to be getting less like him every day.”
Jack glanced at Glaeken and remembered what he’d said last night about the Ally.
The Ally wants a tool… a relentless tool.
He raised his hands in surrender. “Peace. You’re right, I’m wrong. I’m open to suggestions-anything but ‘let’s just sit back and see what happens.’ Anything but that.”
“All right,” Weezy said. “Let’s play a game.”
“Weez…”
“No, I’m serious. And this is a serious game.” She closed the Compendium and stood it up on its spine. “Guess which page it will open to when I let go of its covers.”
Had she lost her mind?
“Weez…”
“I’m going to guess the page about the Otherness Naming Ceremony.” She let the covers go and the book fell open. She looked down and said, “Well, well. What do you know: the Otherness Naming Ceremony. Let me try it again.”
She did.
“How about that? The Otherness Naming Ceremony.”
Jack moved around for a look. Sure enough. He recognized the page.
She called Eddie over and he got the same result.
Jack took the book from her and tried it himself: same page.
“What the-?”
He knew this book. Before Weezy had come back into his life and taken over the Compendium, he’d owned it, studied it-or at least tried to until its sequencing went on the fritz and pages began appearing in random order, anywhere they damn well pleased.
In all his time with the book it had never done anything like this.
“Since coming across that first reference on Wednesday I’ve been finding more and more mentions of the Other Naming Ceremony. Think about that: In all those months, not one reference till last week, then one after another, and now the book won’t open to any other page.”
“Another malfunction in its pagination?” Glaeken said.
“I showed it to Gia this morning and she said it looked like the book was trying to tell me something.”
Jack laughed. “Yeah, but she was-”
“-joking, or at least half joking, sure. But it got me to thinking. Could it be trying to tell me something?”
“It’s a book, Weez.”
“But the Compendium isn’t like any other book in the world, maybe not like any book ever made-and I emphasize ever. I’ve been studying it a long time. I’ve become attuned to it. It’s kind of, well, almost interactive, and I’m wondering if maybe it’s somehow become attuned to me.”
Silence around the table.
Jack didn’t know what to make of this. A book-even the most maddening and amazing book in the world-trying to tell them something? It didn’t sit right. His instinct was to reject the idea out of hand. But Weezy had instincts too, and he’d learned to respect them.
Finally Glaeken cleared his throat. “What do you think it’s trying to tell us?”
“That maybe what we talked about when I first showed you the page is a way to go.”
Jack vaguely remembered. “Putting someone through the Naming Ceremony and giving him Rasalom’s Other Name?”
She nodded. “That’s it. ‘ No two humans may have the same Other Name. The First-named shall be powerless as long as the Second-named lives. ’ That sounds pretty good to me. In fact that sounds like just what we’re looking for.”
Glaeken said, “You neglected the rest of it.”
Weezy remedied that: “‘ The First-named shall hear the Name within the Second and thus be able to resolve the duplication. ’”
Glaeken was nodding. “Which means the One will be powerless until he hunts down the usurper and wrings his neck. Which won’t be very long if he can ‘hear the name’ within the unfortunate who has it.”
As before, Jack was thinking that would be an excellent way to make Rasalom come to him, but he saw a couple of major problems.
“Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?” He turned to the Lady. “Once again, I volunteer, but you’re the only one who can perform the ceremony and you’ve already said you won’t.”
“It is a death sentence,” she said, shaking her head.
He turned back to Weezy. “But even if we can change her mind, we don’t know his Other Name.”
Weezy looked at him, her expression intense. “I have an idea where we might- might be able to find it.”
“I’m all ears. Where?”
“Under the Johnson Lodge.”
The previous silence around the table had been baffled. This one felt more like stunned.
Finally Eddie said, “Johnson? Our Johnson?”
Jack said, “You mean those tunnels, that buried town?”
She nodded. “Remember we came across a big model of the Order’s sigil down there, the one made out of the same black stuff as the little pyramid we found?”
Jack had a vague memory of it. He’d archived most of his childhood and pretty much everything else that had happened before his break with his past and arrival in New York. Most of what he could dredge up from their teenage venture into the dark region beneath the Lodge involved running from some bearlike creature they never saw clearly-what might have been the last q’qr-and trying to keep from drowning.
“What about it?”
“It was damaged, remember?”
He shook his head. “Sort of.”
More like hardly. He remembered finding it and calling Weezy to take a look, but the details…
Looking frustrated, she pulled a pad and a pen from her backpack and began drawing. When finished she held it up for all to see.
“Here’s the sigil as we know it. Check the outer border-the rows of boxes running between the points. Each row has seven boxes.” She looked at Glaeken. “Didn’t you tell me that each of the Seven’s Other Names had seven characters?”
Glaeken nodded. “As do their taken, worldly names-like Rasalom. The original sigil belonged to the Seven. Seven points for the seven agents of the Otherness, interwoven to show a unity of purpose. Each of their public names was carved into the boxes of the great sigil that overlooked the hall where they would meet to draw up their plans for rule by the Otherness. After the Cataclysm, when the Seven and their schemes and their armies were no more, the Order adopted the sigil, but without the names.”
“The great sigil is mentioned here,” Weezy said, tapping the Compendium. “But so is another sigil-seven of them, in fact-all engraved with the Other Name of each of the Seven.”
“I’d heard rumors of that back in the First Age,” Glaeken said. “But I thought it was just wishful thinking on our part.”
“Why?” Jack said.
“Knowing their Other Names would give us power over them.”
Jack didn’t get it. “What are we talking about here? It’s just a name.”
Glaeken shook his head. “The Conflict was out in the open back then. The laws of nature were different and could be bent in ways no longer possible. The things we could do in the First Age would be called magic now.”
“Okay. I’ll take your word for that. But that makes it all the less likely that they’d share this Other Name with anyone.”
Glaeken gave a wry smile. “The Otherness did not cull the Seven from the cream of humanity. They were vicious and ruthless and without honor. Those of us fighting for the Ally were flawed in many ways-some fatally-but compared to the Seven, we were the First Age equivalent of choirboys.”
“All the more reason not to let the Hank Thompsons and Ernst Drexlers of their day in on your closest secret.”
“Ever hear of mutually assured destruction?” Weezy said.
Of course he had. “With nuclear weapons, yeah, but names?”
Glaeken was nodding. “It does make a sort of sense. If one of them or even a pair of them went rogue, the others had the means to bring them into line or wipe them off the face of the Earth.”
Weezy started erasing parts of her drawing.
“Okay, what if I told you we came upon a sigil, six feet high or so, and certain parts of it were missing?” She held up the edited drawing. “What if it looked like this.”
“See?” she said. “Six of the seven borders have been removed. Only one remains-and that’s got a name on it.”