The lock on the Book of the Seed would not yield to King Coyote's key or to any other key in Princess Nell's possession, and because this book had been built atom by atom, it was stronger than any mortal substance and could not possibly be broken open. Princess Nell did not know what this book was about; but the cover bore an inlaid illustration of a striped seed, like the apple-sized seed that she had seen used in King Coyote's city to build a crystal pavilion, and this foreshadowed the book's purpose clearly enough.
Nell opened her eyes and propped herself up on one elbow. The Primer fell shut and slid off her belly onto the mattress. She had fallen asleep reading it.
The girls on their bunkbeds lay all around her, breathing quietly and smelling of soap. It made her want to lie back down and sleep too. But for some reason she was up on one elbow. Some instinct had told her she had to be up.
She sat up and drew her knees up to her chest, freeing the hem of her nightgown from between the sheets, then spun around and dropped to the floor soundlessly. Her bare feet took her silently between the rows of bunks and into the little lounge in the corner of the floor where the girls sat together, had tea, brushed their hair, watched old passives. It was empty now, the lights were off, the corner windows exposing a vast panorama: to the northeast, the lights of New Chusan and of the Nipponese and Hindustani concessions standing a few kilometers offshore, and the outlying parts of Pudong. Downtown Pudong was all around, its floating, mediatronic skyscrapers like biblical pillars of fire. To the northwest lay the Huang Pu River, Shanghai, its suburbs, and the ravaged silk and tea districts beyond. No fires burned there now; the Feed lines had been burned all the way to the edge of the city, and the Fists had stopped at the outskirts and hunkered down as they sought a way to penetrate the tattered remains of the security grid.
Nell's eye was drawn toward the water. Downtown Pudong offered the most spectacular urban nightscape ever devised, but she always found herself looking past it, staring instead at the Huang Pu, or the Yangzte to the north, or to the curvature of the Pacific beyond New Chusan.
She'd been having a dream, she realized. She had awakened not because of any external disturbance but because of what had happened in that dream. She had to remember it; but, of course, she couldn't.
Just a few snatches: a woman's face, a beautiful young woman, perhaps wearing a crown, but seen muddily, as through turbulent water. And something that glittered in her hands. No, dangling beneath her hands. A piece of jewelry on a golden chain.
Could it have been a key? Nell could not bring the image back, but an instinct told her that it was.
Another detail too: a gleaming swath of something that passed in front of her face once, twice, three times. Something yellow, with a repeating pattern woven into it: a crest consisting of a book, a seed, and crossed keys.
Cloth of gold. Long ago the mermaids had brought her to her stepfather, and she had been wrapped in cloth of gold, and from this she had always known that she was a Princess.
The woman in the dream, veiled in swirling water, must have been her mother. The dream was a memory from her lost infancy. And before her mother had given her up to the mermaids, she had given Princess Nell a golden key on a chain.
Nell perched herself on the windowsill, leaned against the pane, opened the Primer, and flipped all the way back to the beginning. It started with the same old story, as ever, but told now in more mature prose. She read the story of how her stepfather had gotten her from the mermaids, and read it again, drawing out more details, asking it questions, calling up detailed illustrations.
There, in one of the illustrations, she saw it: her stepfather's lock-box, a humble plank chest bound in rusted iron straps, with a heavy oldfashioned padlock, stored underneath his bed. It was in this chest that he had stored the cloth of gold-and, perhaps, the key as well.
Paging forward through the book, she came across a long-forgotten story of how, following her stepfather's disappearance, her wicked stepmother had taken the lock-box to a high cliff above the sea and flung it into the waves, destroying any evidence that Princess Nell was of royal blood. She had not known that her stepdaughter was watching her from between the branches of a thicket, where she often concealed herself during her stepmother's rages.
Nell flipped to the last page of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
As Princess Nell approached the edge of the cliff, picking her way along carefully through the darkness, taking care not to snag the train of her nightgown on thorny shrubs, she experienced a peculiar feeling that the entire ocean had become dimly luminescent. She had often noticed this phenomenon from the high windows of her library in the tower and reckoned that the waves must be reflecting back the light of the moon and stars. But this was a cloudy night, the sky was like a bowl of carved onyx, allowing no light to pass down from the heavens. The light she saw must emanate from beneath.
Arriving cautiously at the rim of the cliff, she saw that her surmise was true. The ocean-the one constant in all the world– the place from where she had come as an infant, from which the Land Beyond had grown out of King Coyote's seed, and into which it had dissolved– the ocean was alive.
Since the departure of King Coyote, Princess Nell had supposed herself entirely alone in the world. But now she saw cities of light beneath the waves and knew that she was alone only by her own choice.
"'Princess Nell gathered the hem of her nightgown in both hands and raised it over her head, letting the chill wind stream over her body and carry the garment away,' " Nell said. " 'Then, drawing a deep breath and closing her eyes, she bent her legs and sprang forward into space.'
She was reading about the way the illuminated waves rushed up toward her when suddenly the room filled with light. She looked toward the door, thinking that someone had come in and turned the lights on, but she was alone in the room, and the light was flickering against the wall. She turned her head the other way.
The center span of the Causeway had become a ball of white light hurling its marbled shroud of cold dark matter into the night. The sphere expanded until it seemed to occupy most of the interval between New Chusan and the Pudong shoreline, though by this time the color had deepened from white into reddish-orange, and the explosion had punched a sizable crater into the water, which developed into a circular wave of steam and spray that ran effortlessly across the ocean's surface like the arc of light cast by a pocket torch.
Fragments of the giant Feed line that had once constituted most of the Causeway's mass had been pitched into the sky by the explosion and now tumbled end over end through the night sky, the slowness of their motion bespeaking their size, casting yellow sulfurous light over the city as they burned furiously in the wind-blast created by their own movement. The light limned a pair of tremendous pillars of water vapor rising from the ocean north and south of the Causeway; Nell realized that the Fists must have blown the Nipponese and Hindustani Feeds at the same moment. So the Fists of Righteous Harmony had nanotechnological explosives now; they'd come a long way since they'd tried to torch the bridge over the Huang Pu with a few cylinders of hydrogen.
The shock wave rapped at the window, startling several of the girls from sleep. Nell heard them murmuring to one another in the bunk room. She wondered if she should go in and warn them that Pudong was cut off now, that the final assault of the Fists had commenced. But though she could not understand what they were saying, she could understand their tone of voice clearly enough: They were not surprised by this, nor unhappy.