The most beautiful pair of eyes in the world focused on the mechanism, sitting there like a silent, black lump of parts.
“What do you think?” Tonbeau Nuvenberg asked.
“It’s been tampered with,” said the lord of the Resurrection Room, Doctor Mephisto.
“Kikiou?”
“So it would seem.”
Mephisto’s confidence was not mistaken.
“What a pain in the ass that old geezer is. The next time our paths cross, I’m giving him a piece of my mind.” She pressed her sausage-like lips together and delivered several karate chops to the air with her hand. When she’d calmed down a bit, she said, “What are you looking at?”
“There’s a woman here in Shinjuku you remind me of. An information broker.”
“Oh, well, she must be a real piece of work then.”
“That she is indeed.”
Tonbeau nodded contentedly, then said in a flurry, “What about Setsura?”
“That world has separated from the nexus and I have attempted to reestablish a connection. But there’s been outside interference. That world is—”
The smooth flow of his words came to an abrupt halt. A cold chill ran through Tonbeau’s body. “What’s become of it?”
Mephisto didn’t answer. With a wave of his right hand, the particles floating in the air solidified into a projected image. “Ah!” exclaimed Tonbeau. They were looking at the director’s office of Mephisto Hospital. Two pairs of eyes were drawn inexorably to the object lying akilter on the floor.
“That’s—that’s the box! And the lid—!”
The lid was open. It had fallen into the wooden box.
“Just barely managed to get it back.”
Not listening to him, Tonbeau ran for the door. “What are you doing? Hurry up and examine what’s inside! It’s gotta be worth a fortune!”
Paying no attention to the big woman galloping out of the room, Mephisto examined the image hovering in the air.
“It’s back, but where are the contents?”
Exactly as he’d observed, when Tonbeau barged into the director’s office—that hardly anybody was allowed into or even knew where it was—this very powerful witch stared inside the box and shouted in surprise.
She said to Mephisto, a few steps behind her, “How do you explain this?” And thrust the wooden box in his face.
The box wasn’t empty. When Tonbeau had calmed down, Doctor Mephisto reached out and took the milky-white lump out of the box and set it on the table.
From its shape and size, everything was a half of itself, a bas-relief. The fine details were amazing, breathtaking. It was a garden carved in ivory. No, far more than any sculpture, it was imbued with the look and feel of an entire world—the lake brimming with water, the green woods and verdant forests, the blue mountains—
Every last one of them revealing only half of what it was. And yet Doctor Mephisto could feel the blue sky enclosing that world like a dome, just as Tonbeau Nuvenberg could see the white clouds floating through it.
The delicacy of the whitecaps on the lake, the boldness and ferocity of the animals peeking out from the trees in the forest—the sharpness of each cross-section, neatly divided down the middle, was rendered with such perfection as to suggest the work of an artist who’d sold his soul to the devil to achieve it.
The history of ivory carving in China was said to have begun in the Ming Dynasty. Up till then, bamboo had been the standard material. One of the prized items in the collection of the National Palace Museum was an ivory carving known as the “Dragon Boat.”
The length, width and height came to a mere two-point-five by three-quarters by one-point-five inches. The tiny vessel was equipped with paddles and oarlocks, masts and rigging, pagoda-like decks and staterooms. The miniature windows could be opened and closed.
Approaching the ideal of a “world in a box” was a Huang Zhen Xiao ivory landscape from the Middle Qing Dynasty. The sculpture, rendered from a single tusk, created the illusion of sublime mountain ranges far in the distance, men fishing in the lakes dotting the foothills, animals frolicking in the fields. people lounging in gazebos and teahouses hidden within the stands of pine, bamboo, and plum.
An unbounded world that could be contained in the palm of the hand. Except even those treasures were crude facsimiles compared to what had appeared before the eyes of these two wizards.
“There’s no manor house,” said Mephisto. “And no boat. They must have disappeared somewhere.”
“The boat sank.”
Tonbeau Nuvenberg pointed to a single point among the cresting whitecaps. A thin dark line, a shadow painted with India ink beneath the water’s surface.
“One of the waves is severed. That slit is not supposed to be there. The only person who could have put it there is—”
“Setsura Aki.”
He spared no praise for Tonbeau Nuvenberg’s eyesight, able to discern a single imperfection from the sea of waves rising the barest fraction of an inch above the surface, and instead stared off into space.
“Where is the other half of your world, Setsura?”