Serpents and Stairways

Chapter I - Part 5

One Mrs Bennet assisted Dinah in getting a room in the Grand Hotel Imperial, while the other bought her clothes in a ready-made dress shop and took care of fitting it in the evening. One Mrs Bennet read her the fourth out of thirteen volumes of Frazer's "Golden Bough", and the other treated her scratches. One Mrs Bennet was explaining to someone on the hotel staff that Miss Gremin couldn't eat a supper cooked in a common kitchen, and where exactly they could get a replacement, while the other... the other lingered by a window—for no more than a second or two, a glance at something that Dinah wouldn't have been able to see—that's all that she had learned about the nature of the women who shared a hotel room with her that night, even if in a separate servants' room.

When the door behind them closed, and a light switch clicked somewhere behind it, Dinah was left alone for the first time that day. She stayed in bed for some time, closing and opening her eyes, checking if sleep would come. It didn't, apparently frightened by the swarm of thoughts inside her head

Dinah lowered her bare feet on the floor, went up to the door and explored its cold floral engraving with the tips of her fingers, pressing her cheek against it. The whitewash left lime powder prints on her face.

"I fell from the sky and got captured by forest bandits," she once again thought of the words that had been clanging in her head since the morning.

She was finally ready to unwrap them like a candy that had spent a long time in her pocket. The whole ordeal reminded her of a fairy tale motif—but which one?

A girl encountering robbers, hunters, or some other forest dwellers, was a classic initiation story, but it would have prescribed her to stay there in their forest hut, hidden in some grove, helping its inhabitants "as a sister" would. Snow White was a very well-known example, but there were others; even the recent "Snow Queen" employed this trope, albeit transformed. But no—she hadn't stayed with the robbers.

Could she read these events as a rescue motif? It was hard to tell. In stories of the "saving a girl in trouble" kind there was supposed to be a definite malicious captor—an evil king, a sorcerer, or... a dragon.

Something clicked, ticked and rang in her head. Georg. The name of the young man she met was Georg. Just like Saint George, George the victorious, the serpent slayer, out of the "Saint George and the Dragon" legend. Well, she did notice that immediately, but didn't pay much attention, and simply considered it amusing. Now however...

Dinah covered her smile with a hand. Someone else would have deemed this a grotesque coincidence, but the reason that brought her here was precisely to assist the secret mystical chancellery in making sense of the informational layers that have ingrown into the truth about the dragon that had appeared in these mountains. The layers were ancient, tangled, consisting of tales, prejudice, legends, forgotten rites and mistranslated old songs. And of coincidences, of course.

That's why Dinah was in such a hurry to get to Silen—more than anything else in the world she needed to be in the office of the chief secretary, figuring out the details of the matter, and then, then...

Maybe she could not explain to master Bolyai the way that automatons work, but she knew the ways of Aether fairly well. It could be viewed as some analog of electricity for those to this side of the Veil, or as the source of all in this world that's magical, but crucially, it was neither made of matter nor behaved like a wave. Aether was information, no matter how hard it was to comprehend.

A classical experiment, and the way that schoolchildren learn about the aether, is to take an aether potential measurement device and two closed envelopes with photographs of different people inside. If the experiment conductor had no knowledge of either person portrayed in the photographs the measurements would be the same. However, the potential reading would be much higher for the envelope hiding a familiar face—and it didn't matter whether the conductor saw the image or not.

In the dark, Dinah found and ignited a small gas lantern that stood on an elegantlegged writing table. The feelings rising in her were begging her to put on a vinyl and join it in its revolving dance, but instead she carefully circled by the door to confirm that she wasn't about to trip on something, and started going around in a childish box step, counting to three as if reciting the multiplication table. That always helped her to think.

Yes, the aether was poorly studied. Some saw in its flow a miraculous essence, meant for sorcerers to condense castles out of smoke; some looked within it for alchemical and philosophical meanings, or for an all-pervading ever-present medium, the disturbance of which manifested in electromagnetic waves; but for Dinah and other devotees of applied philology that hardly mattered.

Like others believed in Saviour and Destructor, in Physics and Chemistry, in the Bright Humanist Future or the Inevitable Degeneration of All, she believed in Text and everything it enveloped. And, unlike people, Text has never let her down.

For all of her misfortunes of the passing day there was a reason that—far from simply causing her a headache—was actively guiding her towards something, she could feel it. Extending her arms, holding on to the shoulder of her invisible partner, Dinah stepped and revolved, spinning the room faster and faster.

"One."

All of this could've been a huge coincidence, distracting her from what's important. If so, she'll never meet Georg again. In the end, it was just a name, and their meeting could've simply meant that Dinah was following the right path. Or nothing at all. But if they meet again, Dinah will definitely figure out whether the man had something special in him, something that was worth taking with her on her journey.

"Two."

She wondered where he was right now.

"Three."

After all, from Georg's point of view, it was he who was the protagonist of his story. And everything that a protagonist does before their fairytale begins impacts the way it continues.

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This concludes the first chapter! If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to star it and subscribe for more updates! I'll keep publishing each Thursday!

The Golden Bough was published in twelve volumes. This and many other inconsistencies with real life are a part of the story, so if you have any questions about the world, if something wasn't clear, let me know in the comments!

Let's leave Dinah to have some rest until Chapter III; it's time to learn what has been going on with Georg.