12
There. Found it.
Jack sat alone in his apartment's front room, hunched over the Compendium ofSrem at the round oak table with the paw feet. The glow from the hanging lamp lit the table and nothing else. The rest of the apartment lay dark around him.
He'd rather be doing this over at Gia's.
He pulled his copy of Kick over and compared its cover image to the one in the book.
Identical. He could have superimposed one on the other. But below the one in the book were printed five words: The Sign of the Q'qr.
It looked unpronounceable. Que-quer? Was that how you'd say it?
Everything else read as English. Why not that? Unless it was a word that had no translation. Like a name.
The verse below that was even more frustrating:
And then the Seven became One
But the One could not hold
And all with him were vanquished.
Yet though the Q'qr was cast down it endured
The Q 'qr died yet lived on
The Q 'qr is gone yet remains
Absent from sight
But present in deed
Present in spirit
Present in body.
What the hell did that mean? The lines might have rhymed or had some cadence in their original tongue, but now they were simply a clunky progression of contradictory statements about… what? A stick figure?
The author was obviously telling a story, but seemed to assume that the reader knew the details. Jack figured it was like showing a drawing of an egg sitting on a wall and reciting "Humpty Dumpty" below it. If you weren't familiar with the nursery rhyme and didn't know Humpty wasn't real, you'd be left scratching your head. Just as Jack was scratching his.
The bigger question that remained was where Thompson had come up with the figure. He'd said in a dream. If that was true, where had his dream come from?
Shaking his head, Jack copied down the lines and bookmarked the page. Then he began to leaf through the rest of the Compendium, looking for other appearances of the figure. The book was thick, the pages thin. He had a long way to go.