Slowly being ushered into another room along the crowded little hallway from the conference room, Ellen looked down at the beautifully embroidered purple and gold hijab Ahoo wore over her shaved head. “But… how does the story end?”
The merely slightly taller than average woman craned her elegant neck to look up at the much taller young nurse, and patted her hand as she guided her charge into a slightly larger, and better appointed, room. “Elgin only needed that twit Tamir to see that Ara was not the ruler and progenitor of the gods of Egypt. Once that shock had made the man doubt himself, and doubt Amra’s supremacy, Elgin will now have a little conversation with the man before sending him back to his employer with a counter offer in hand.” Ahoo then smiled, and led Ellen to an overstuffed seat set between a small fireplace and a bookshelf that was built into the wall. Ellen didn’t know how large the interior of this building was, but it was already so much larger than the deceptively little cozy shopfront had suggested.
Sitting now as Ahoo wandered over to another shelf across the room to browse some of the titles there, Ellen wondered about the look of anger on the face of that image of Elgin from long ago, and the shifting emotions as he saw Mydius talking with the Amra of that age, and the young princess who he had shepherded to the island from a kingdom of Egypt of an age now long gone. He had been, if the spell Elgin had woven was accurate, absolutely furious. But was it just at Mydius, the slob of a greedy king? The presence of the princess who had looked so happy to see the man she had addressed as “GRANDFATHER!” Was it because of Amra being there to give away one of his… cousins?... she wasn’t certain of the family tree there, but the young girl being given to the obviously horrible king for the purpose of political union?
Was it because Di had been imprisoned?
Was it all of these things? Ellen didn’t know, and sighed as she settled back into the thick cushions of her chair. As she sank further into the deep, warm embrace of comfort, Cole ambled into the room depositing a tray on a coffee table piled high with some brightly iced biscuits. What most Americans still insisted on calling “cookies,” for some obscure and irascible reason. The other end of the tray was counterweighted with steaming cups of what Ellen hoped might be tea.
Around her, the chairs littered about the room looked like the chair in which she now sat, though every one was different in color scheme, pattern, and even style of construction. Some were even more like the kind of deeply cushioned and richly upholstered Edwardian monstrosities in her father relaxed every evening while taking his nightly snifter of brandy and reading some old tome on history, or warfare, or the HISTORY of warfare, while her mother sat in a matching, if smaller chair, knitting.
Ellen had always thought her father’s insistence on reading actual bound books, rather than downloading the books to a datpad to read was a pretentious affectation. Once she had moved away from home, there were nights when she not only missed the presence of her parents, but missed the presence of her father’s book collection. Growing up she didn’t even realize that books had a smell until she was living a life without them. Everything at work was either on datpads, projected from crystal sets, or accessed by implanted datpad screens in one’s forearm or hand. No “books” in the physical, archaic sense at all. It had been her adult life for close to a decade.
And now, in this room that could only be described as a library, she felt oddly at home, and comforted by the archaism of it all.
“Ellen,” Ahoo’s rich, lovely voice startled Ellen from her memories. “If you would like to know the rest of the story, Elgin will be done with Tamir soon, and I’m sure he would love to tell you how that all ended. It’s not a tragic story, like most of his tales, so as long as you just ask him about this one event, you’ll get a happy tale.” Ahoo smiled at her then, and Ellen could almost feel the enzymatic shift as endorphins rushed and surged for her attention. It reminded her of those first few pleasant moments of having anesthesia, when you would swear the slippery substance of the cold chemical bath moved up through your veins to invade the mind with silk lined pleasure and odd and awkward dreams.
“Ahoo…” She began, causing the elegant woman to turn back to her from where she stood by the book shelf on the far wall. Once she was certain she had the smaller woman’s attention, “I can't help but feel like I may have been shunted aside and set to wait here in this little shop with all of you nice people.” Ellen thought her use of “nice” here was a better and more politic one than her intended “odd,” or possibly “weird.” Her mother would have been so proud. She wouldn’t be crass enough to actually express that pride, she was English, but Ellen knew she would be.
Ahoo blinked at Ellen from where she stood, her lovely eyes thrown wide as windows in an obvious “child caught being sneaky” expression.
Ellen felt the need to explain. “And I don’t just mean this morning. I don’t know where Banner has gotten off to now. But, last night, once we had arrived at the safe house, he was whisked away by Cole, and… Well, now I’m here in this very nice little library, with tea and biscuits, and I don’t know where my charge has run off to. Again.”
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She gathered herself, and taking a deep breath moved to sit in the smaller but still overstuffed chair closest to the gargantuan upholstered monster that was even now attempting to drag Ellen’s large frame down into its depths.
Sitting on the edge of the chair, Ahoo looked deep into Ellen’s green eyes, and said, “Yes.”
Ellen waited for more.
“Yes, you have been.” Ahoo finally continued. “Alvin filled us in on your trip over from Scotland. You refused to be left behind. You had spent nearly a year and a half with ‘Tj’Chin’Ker as your patient. And from what Elgin tells me, the boy cast some kind of charm on you. It was a spell of some kind, which I don’t understand, my people don’t use magic like this, that both kept you from seeing how much he had healed, and kept you talking to him so that he could learn English and some basic things about how the world is now and how to get around in it.”
The older woman looked ashamed, and dropped her gaze to her hands in her lap. “You were not supposed to come along. At all. I hope you understand how hard Alvin tried to keep that from happening, but I think you intimidate him somewhat.” Ellen snorted at this.
“No, it’s true.” The Djinni said. “Alvin comes from a culture where women give orders and their men follow them, because to not follow the orders and advice of their women can lead to mine collapses, and devastation. But, that isn’t what is happening here.”
Ahoo’s long fingered hand reached furtively out and picked up a small, purple macaron to nibble. “We have set up safe areas, and we have a set of friends, allies, and employees that we have put up to be a wall between you and harm.”
“But…”
“No, hear me out.” Ahoo held up a hand to halt Ellen’s objections. “You just don’t realise how far out of your world you have wandered. We, well Elgin mostly, but all of us, really, have no intention of seeing you becoming yet another body in a morgue because one of Elgin’s great grandchildren has refused to accept that the world has changed. Many of his direct descendants have fallen down that path. Elgin has plans for shepherding humanity down the ages, and it’s one that lifts up humans to take their place in a world filled with magic that only a very small minority have had access to as yet. Those of his …his children and their children who want to go back to a time when they were all kings and queens and gods…”
The willowy woman sitting across from Ellen looked like she was about to descend into tears. Ellenn reached out awkwardly to her hostess from the smothering recesses of her chair.
“But, Elgin wants every human to have access to the same magic that all of the Secret Races of the world have been using since before humanity started making tools from bones and rocks.”
“How will he do that?” Ellen asked. She felt like her voice carried more hope in it than maybe it should have.
“This plan is one that will use human’s own technologies to reshape both humanity and the world. And he is still centuries from his goal. But, according to my husband, every step he has taken has been a step towards this one destination. And his great-grandson, Amra, wants to conquer the world. He has almost done it several times in the last twelve centuries, or so.”
“Have you witnessed these attempts? You can’t be that old…” As she said it, the thought occurred to Ellen that accepting the ancient nature of men like Elgin, Amra, and even Banner, she might have missed out on the ideas of the lifespans of everyone else around her.
Ahoo let out a throaty laugh that would have put a bear’s roar to shame. “Of no, Miss Ellen! Ha! No. I’m only a few centuries old.” She laughed again, this time more quietly, and in tones more like the slender woman that she looked like to Ellen. “My People generally live to, at most, five hundred. Maybe a hair longer, but not much.”
Ellen thought about what she was hearing. It occurred to her that the conversation had wandered a bit. It may have been her own fault. “So, you all are trying to shelter me from what Amra is attempting to do, and he is… Well, I’m not even certain I know what his plans are. I only know he wants to take Banner away. And I don’t know why.”
“My dear girl,” Ahoo cooed. “My husband helped ‘Tj’Chin’Ker’s people escape from a war they had no real hope of winning against humanity. They started it, and when they were on the verge of being swept from the Earth, Elgin helped them flee to a place where they could live in peace away from humanity.”
Ellen nodded at this, as she, Banner, and Trutt had spoken about it during their flight.
“Amra had been kept in check by ‘Tj’Chin’Ker’s people for centuries. And it had been several centuries after they had fled before he knew of their migration. He then resumed his plans to dominate and rule humanity, but now his ego had been wounded because he thought he had somehow been tricked. Now, according to Elgin, Amra is trying to keep “Tj’Chin’Ker’s people from returning. He thinks taking, or killing, the boy will keep that from happening.”
Ellen stared. This made no sense to her.
“It won’t stop the ‘Tj'Shae' from returning. If anything it may accelerate Elgin’s plans to bring them back. And if Amra kills the boy, I fear Elgin may get upset and do something he will never forgive himself for doing.”
“If he knows he won’t forgive himself, why would he do it?” Ellen asked.
Ahoo smiled sadly up at the taller, much younger woman. She shook her head slowly. “As Elgin will tell you, if you ask, some trees need to be cut down to allow the forest to grow, no matter how sorry the axe may be for the act.”