Melamori grabbed my hand and returned me to an upright position without losing a beat. She was a strong lady. She kept her word and ordered us some exotic booze. I’d never met anyone whose tastes were so different from mine. During the tasting, I had to exert a great deal of effort to make it look like I was enjoying the drink. It would have been rude to make expressions of disgust upon imbibing a drink chosen by a beautiful lady.
Things were getting better: my “bug” stunt, combined with a hefty dose of the strange bitter beverage, did a quick job of chasing away the clouds that had started gathering over my mood. I was again the Max of the present, the happy slapdash owner of the Mantle of Death, the experienced sorcerer from the Secret Investigative Force, the novice traveler through Xumgat. The love-struck nutcase I had been two years ago was gone. Good riddance, I thought, to him and other ghosts from the past.
I was so happy about my quick return to my beloved self that Droopy got a much greater share of caresses than he deserved after what he had done. The dog was wagging his long ears: he had no idea he could wag his tail like his fellow dogs in my home World.
“See? I’m totally fine now,” I said, smiling at Melamori. “A brazen, complacent son of a gun. Exactly the way I like to be. Does this vacant gaze, the mindless glint of my eyes, suit me? What color are they now, by the way? I’ll bet they’re blue!”
Melamori grew very serious. She stared into my eyes for a good minute and then said, “No way, Max. They’re yellow, like Kurush’s. Well, almost—a little darker.”
“That’s something new,” I said. “By the way, it was you who first noticed that my eyes change color. And you reported this phenomenon to me at this very spot, remember?”
“How can I forget it? It had been one of the most stubborn of mysteries to me. I came up with the craziest explanations. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I even wondered whether Loiso Pondoxo’s infamous promise to return to life and come back from hell had come true. Stop laughing! I grew up hearing and reading about the mysterious disappearances and returns of great ancient Magicians. They were my bedtime stories. Our house was chock-full of these books. And dinner conversations? I wish you could have heard them, Max! By the way, it’s all your fault. You should’ve just said right away that you had come from another World.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “‘From another World,’ you say? Nah. You’re all brave now, sure, but back then? I’d like to see how you would’ve taken it. Plus, Juffin had told me not to tell anyone, though I still don’t understand why he pretended that my origin was such a big mystery and why you guys were left in the dark about it all that time.”
“It was something of a test,” said Melamori with a sigh. “Not for you, for us. We were supposed to solve that little mystery by ourselves. Unfortunately, I turned out to be the dumbest pupil in the entire Secret Investigative Force. But I know why: a personal interest always dulls the mind. Sir Kofa and Shurf had guessed way earlier. Lookfi doesn’t count. He can’t be bothered with such trivia.”
“That’s all right,” I said, comforting her. “You beat Melifaro, which wasn’t too shabby, either.”
“Are you kidding, Max?” said Melamori. “Melifaro knew everything the moment you guys met. He just looked at you and knew it. It happens to him sometimes. True, he doesn’t like to boast about his abilities, but you might have guessed.”
“Ouch,” I said. “Don’t count on taking away the honorary title of Biggest Dummy of the Secret Investigative Force. That title has already been taken by yours truly. Seriously, until now, I’d been absolutely sure that Melifaro was the only one who still believed the silly story about the Barren Lands that Juffin and I made up. Believed it despite everything, just because it makes things funnier.”
“That’s partly true. He’s so used to playing along that sometimes he forgets which one of your biographies is the real one. Then again, he couldn’t care less.”
“Instead of this nonsense”—I waved my palm with the ancient letters of my “True Name” written on it in front of Melamori’s nose—“instead of this nonsense, this should read, in plain language, ‘People are not what they seem.’ And I should begin my day with a mandatory mantra of this simple truth. Otherwise I’m going to fall victim to yet another predictable surprise.”
“Don’t say that! You shouldn’t give other people so much credit. If any old person could take you by surprise, we would be living in a completely different, incredible World—terrifying, yet beautiful,” said Melamori. “But that’s a big ‘if.’ I don’t think you should write any such words on your palm. In any case, I’m not going to be the one to surprise you. That I can promise. I think I’m exactly what I seem. Maybe a little dumber. And maybe far more cowardly.”
“Good golly, Melamori,” I said. “What’s with all the self-criticism all of a sudden? You have a duty to love and cherish yourself. You can’t entrust others with such a momentous task.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Melamori. “I’ve been disgusted with myself recently. I’m tired of dealing with the consequences of my own stupidity and cowardice.”
“Are you regretting not having gone to Arvarox with Aloxto?” I finally understood what the whole conversation was about. “But that’s exactly one of those rare occasions when you can change everything. He’s coming back in a year, give or take a few days.”
“Even sooner,” said Melamori in a gloomy tone. “You know, I managed to talk Kamshi into giving the Arvaroxians their precious ‘filthy Mudlax’ this spring. I convinced him that Aloxto’s warriors and their encampment by the ferry were spoiling the landscape. Well, that alone wouldn’t have been enough to convince him, of course, but it so happened that I was the proud owner of a small piece of information about a minor job violation that could’ve cost that stubborn warden his career. Yes, Max, I resorted to blackmailing a high-ranking government official: my kin in the Order of the Seven-Leaf Clover would be proud of my performance.
“Anyway, I then sent a call to Aloxto. He’s happy, of course. He can manage to live without me, more or less, but he dreams of his long-lost ‘filthy Mudlax’ every day, nonstop. So our magnificent Sir Allirox has already put his ‘two times fifty Sharptooths’ on a ship and is bound for Echo, sword in hand. He dreams of beheading that poor, hapless king who lost some stupid war. They should be here come spring—that is, in two or three dozen days, barring any mishaps on the way. Then again, what accident could befall such a horde of herculean studs?” Melamori’s voice was full of anger and derision. I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Wait, then I totally don’t understand why you seem to be growing gloomier and gloomier by the day,” I said.
Up until then I was sure that the reason for her permanent depression was the absence of the blond beauty boy Aloxto Allirox. Now that her reunion with him was in the cards, things should have been looking up for her. Or not?
Melamori punched the bench with her little clenched fist. I watched a few splinters fly off in different directions following this careless gesture of my elfin interlocutor.
“Of course you understand it perfectly!” she said, irritated. Then she tempered justice with mercy, and ire with sorrow. “No, I guess you don’t. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not going to happen, Max. It will be just like before. I’m going to weigh everything again, and again I’ll come to the conclusion that the better is the enemy of the good. My parents would be proud to know how well they’ve raised me. I used to think I was so brave, strong, and independent. Now I don’t think so anymore. My mother’s carping that ‘a lady shouldn’t hang around strange places by herself’ doesn’t faze me a bit when I’m determined to go out and have some fun. But when I begin to think about leaving everything behind and going to Arvarox, it turns into a powerful mantra. A spell. A curse. Once I close my eyes and imagine how I disembark the ship and step onto an alien shore, I start thinking that Mother was right: a lady shouldn’t hang around strange places by herself.”
 
; “Well, I can relate,” I said. “I don’t think I’d have the guts to up and leave for Arvarox myself. You’d have to be some big-time hero to survive there, what with all their crazy customs.”
“You wouldn’t have the guts?” said Melamori. “That’s a baldfaced lie if I’ve ever heard one, Max! You had the guts to up and leave your own World, the place you were born, and come here. Going to Arvarox is nothing compared to that.”
“Trust me, for me the decision to leave was much easier. I was just lucky. I had nothing to lose there, where I was born. Absolutely nothing. Life sucked. But for someone who was about to run away to another World, that was an ideal situation. One couldn’t have wished for anything better. You, on the other hand, have something to lose. Am I right?”
“Of course I do,” said Melamori. Then she paused and shook her head. “It’s only an illusion, Max. In fact, I also have nothing to lose. Of course, I love Echo and love my job. There are a lot of nice people around whom I love to spend time with, but none of that matters. Let me tell you something. Back then, when I refused to go with Aloxto, my main motive wasn’t my love and attachment to everything I had to lose. My decision was governed by caution. Cowardice, rather. Panic in the face of the unknown, to call things by their true names.”
“Kurush would have said something like ‘Humans tend to fear the unknown,’ and he would’ve been right,” I said. “Fear is the most fundamental human quality. It’s probably even more significant than other anthropological traits.”
“And yet I’m sitting next to the person who once decided to set out on a journey between Worlds,” said Melamori. She touched my shoulder, as though my material existence could be a forcible argument for her claim. “This means that this ‘fundamental human quality,’ as you put it, the fear of the unknown, can be overcome. In my case, it’s simply a journey to another continent. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“You know, I think it’s even simpler.” I decided to be blunt. “If you really want to leave with Aloxto, you will. If not, then you won’t. Isn’t that what it all comes down to?”
“Oh, Max, you’re so funny!” said Melamori. “What’s Aloxto got to do with any of this?”
I was taken aback. “What do you mean? You had one heck of an affair with him, which shocked all your relatives, certain Secret Investigators, and Echo in its entirety, to boot.”
“It doesn’t matter what I had with him, or what I will have,” she said impatiently. “Aloxto is an unusual creature. He swept me off my feet, I lost my head, whatever—I know, I know. But passion is just passion, Max. You and I both know very well that a person is capable of saying no to his passion, and it doesn’t mean that his life goes to rack and ruin. Do you really think that I’m suffering only because, only because—”
“Yes,” I said. “Until now, that was exactly what I had thought. Was that silly of me?”
“Silly? No. A bit too romantic for my taste.” Melamori’s mood had visibly improved. “Maybe I’d even want you to be right,” she said. “One true love, broken hearts, they kiss, they die—in the end, everybody cries. But my actual problem lies elsewhere. I only knew what I was really worth when I declined to go with the beautiful blond giant Aloxto. At first, I thought he was offering me a romantic voyage, very much to my taste. I was very excited and almost said yes. But then I got scared, so scared that I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even budge. I should’ve realized it sooner, when I felt so scared of you and your strange dreams. I should’ve asked myself, ‘What are you so afraid of? Your own cowardice?’ But I hadn’t yet learned to uncover the reasons for my own actions, dispassionately and without bias.”
She gulped down the rest of her drink, tossed the glass away, and dropped her head onto her arms. Now her voice sounded muffled, as though it came from the depths of her bodily crypt, where under the vault of a happy human life and charming flesh, the real Melamori—a beautiful, weightless creature I had barely known until now—was suffocating.
“The fact is, I’m governed by my banal cowardice and banal attachment to the familiar. True, it won’t kill you. In fact, many people live long and happy lives with it. They have families and raise children, future little cowards, much to their loving mothers’ joy and satisfaction. I am alive and well and quite attractive. But in light of what I’ve just said, I find it very difficult to respect myself. I shouldn’t have boasted about my one-of-a-kind life. Mom was right: a lady from a good family should live a life of propriety. Get it, Max? Pro-pri-e-ty. I guess propriety is what I opted for. It’s who I am now.”
For all intents and purposes, Melamori should have burst out crying long before reaching that conclusion. Instead, her rigid gaze was fixed somewhere straight ahead, her eyes completely dry.
“Did you decide to discuss all this with me because you thought I was an expert in radical change of one’s place of abode?” I said. “Well, I guess you’re right. On the other hand, I couldn’t have imagined sitting here with you and trying to persuade you to forsake Echo for the devil knows where. It sends shivers down my spine thinking that I might come to the House by the Bridge one day and you won’t be there.”
“That isn’t going to happen,” said Melamori. “Your devil can’t possibly know where that ‘where’ is because I’m not going there. For better or for worse.”
“You never know what’s going to happen when a good person realizes he has to turn the world upside down just so he can carry on living somehow,” I said. “You know, when I was seventeen, I realized that I couldn’t—didn’t want to—live with my parents. But it took me another year and a half to muster the courage to leave because, just like you, I’m a creature of habit. And deep down inside, I was sure I wouldn’t be able to make it on my own, however silly that might sound. I did go through some hard times, but I made it, as you can see. I still think it was the most daring thing I’ve done in my life. The rest just unraveled on its own once I got the ball rolling. You know, there are two things that can help a lot in this situation.”
“What two things?” Melamori stared at me, her mouth agape. My candor had taken her by surprise.
“First, it’s your stubbornness. You can’t imagine what a person can do in spite of something. Doesn’t matter what you do or in spite of what you do it—you just do it. And you have plenty of stubbornness in you. Way more than I do, trust me.”
“Maybe I do,” said Melamori, cheering up. “What’s the second thing?”
“The second thing is fate,” I said. “Sounds too bombastic, doesn’t it? Yet when fate has plans for us, it finds the means to make us act according to its script. If there is a reason for you to go to Arvarox, fate will keep throwing the opportunity at you over and over again until you do what it wants you to do. That troublemaker fate is also in the habit of making the clouds gather overhead when we resist its persuasion. Only once did you refuse to do what it wanted you to do, and your life has become much worse than it used to be. Fate is very good at persuading us. On those rare occasions that it fails to persuade someone, it kills the poor disobedient hero. Where I come from, there is a saying: ‘Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant.’ This is true. Yet when it drags you along, it drags the lifeless corpse of a fool who had lost his only chance.”
“Sinning Magicians, Max! Is this really you?” Melamori was staring at me as though she’d never seen me before. “I had no idea you could speak like that!”
“I can do a lot of things. I’m a jack-of-all-trades,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m also master of none. I used to write poetry, and very lousy poetry it was, let me tell you. I guess it shows occasionally. Like a tic.”
“I’m sure you used to write good poetry,” said Melamori, smiling. “At any rate, your passionate monologue about fate was just what I needed. You put my mind at ease. Well, you also scared me, but that’s even better.”
“Really?” I said. “Well, you know best.”
“We should go now,” she said, getting up from the bench.
“Shurf will be dropping by your place soon, and I should probably head back to Headquarters. Life goes on, right?”
“And how!” I stood up and stretched my limbs. “There’s one more thing. You’ve probably forgotten, but I remember it well: I once stopped by your place dressed as Ms. Marilyn Monroe.”
“Oh, I remember,” said Melamori, laughing. “She was a nice girl. She did manage to trick our clairvoyant Melifaro, by the way. He never figured you out until you told him. It’s still my favorite story.”
“I’m glad I left a lasting impression,” I said. “I wanted to remind you about something else, though. You served some wine that came from the cellars of your uncle Kima. It was called Gulp of Fate, if I remember correctly. When we drank it, we saw little blue sparks playing and glinting in our glasses. You said it was a good sign, that the sparks appeared in the wine only when everything was fine between the people sharing it—wait, not fine but right. That’s what you said. So you and I have no reason to be sad. Whatever is happening between us is right. This memory has saved my life on many occasions.”
“But that’s just a silly sign,” said Melamori, shaking her head.
“Right, it’s just a silly sign, but it’s a good sign,” I said. “And one good sign is still better than nothing.”
“All right, I’ll keep that in mind, too,” said Melamori in a serious tone and nodded. Then she grabbed Droopy’s shaggy ear and they both raced off, challenging everything that lay in their path. Our heartfelt, soul-searching conversation was over. The score was 1–0, only I had no idea know who was winning.
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.