Master of the Revels

by Nicole Galland

  Erzsébet had Sent him in the early evening. There’s collective unease about safety—that’s why Erzsébet is staying here with Frank and Rebecca and why Tristan has pretty much started bunking at my place. So I remained to wait for him at East House (which Mortimer has now decided we must call Sessrumnir, as that is the hall where Freya lived. He has shortened it to Rumnir, or, as Rebecca pronounces it, East House). Erzsébet and I were in the living room. I was researching a tip from Chira.

  Chira has taken to socializing with the Chronotron techies in the break room at DODO, hoping to catch stray remarks about outlier data that might be useful to us. Earlier today, she overheard a reference to the photographer Julius Berkowski. In the context of the conversation—a particular algorithm they are forever fine-tuning to maximize causality—she perceived that there is an active DEDE with some connection to Berkowski’s famous 1851 photo of a total solar eclipse. Everyone in DODO, no matter their position or duties, is aware of that photograph as a thing of significance, the way Americans know there was a Boston Tea Party. Because the photo’s existence marks the end of magic, Chira suspects that Something Might Be Up With That. She could not find a safe way to pursue more intel about the DEDE.

  So I was on the couch with one of the cats curled up against my leg, doing a deep dive on what little is known about Berkowski personally. Erzsébet was reading, or pretending to. Suddenly we heard a ruckus in the basement. Tristan was back—very quickly. Too quickly? The sounds that came up from below were agitated, and he ascended in half the time he normally would, hair still wet and uncombed from the decontamination shower, shirt untucked, no socks. He strode into the living room, face red, one eye swollen, expression contained—but, by Tristan Lyons standards, borderline feral. Finding Erzsébet, he moved directly toward her.

  Erzsébet had the look of a beast of prey . . . but not a surprised one. She dropped her book, stood up fast, and pulled her arms in close to her, as if she were cold. It took me a heartbeat to realize she was cowering, before he’d even accused her of anything.

  “Why did you do that?” he demanded, jaw tense. The cat made an unpleasant noise and went full-on Halloween, with a scolding hiss in Tristan’s direction, before tearing out of the room. I heard Rebecca, who was neatening the side table in Frank’s study, call out, “What?” from across the hall.

  “I did not—” she began.

  He held up his thumb and forefinger less than half an inch apart. “This close,” he cut her off fiercely. “This close to triggering Diachronic Shear.”

  And Erzsébet looked terrified—but again, as if she had almost expected it. “You are to blame!” she said in a high-pitched, defensive voice. “You distracted me.”

  “How many times have you Sent me to Rose’s? You can do it in your sleep.”

  She was shaken but recovering. “No, I could not do it in my sleep, that is not how magic works.” She took a deep breath, adjusted her body to its usual pertly upright state. “It is good you are safe.”

  “What happened?” I demanded. Rebecca had entered, and I could hear footsteps pattering down the main staircase—that was Mortimer, who had been putting away some fencing gear in the attic.

  Tristan glared around the room. “Hey, Freya, it’s Tristan,” he said in a growl.

  “You don’t have to identify yourself now that she knows your voice,” Mortimer said, as he bounced in, in a rush. “Hey, Freya, begin archive. What’s up?”

  Tristan took a moment to calm himself, taking in slow, deep breaths and releasing them carefully between tense lips, like an awkward student surprised to be called to the front of the class to speak. Then he grimaced, abruptly began pacing, and gestured all of us to sit down as he worked a serpentine path around Rebecca’s handsome, ancient furniture.

  I sat back on the sofa and Mortimer sat near me; Rebecca took the overstuffed chair near the floor lamp. Erzsébet remained standing. Since we (Rogue-DODO) have only been based here for a few weeks, Tristan has not yet figured out the best path of travel for his pacing, but he deliberately avoided the wainscoted corner where Erzsébet stood.

  “Erzsébet Sent me—”

  “You should mention our conversation in the ODEC before I Sent—”

  “Erzsébet Sent me to November 1605 London,” said Tristan. “DOers in that DTAP are always Sent to Rose. Rose expects diachronic travelers, she has clothes for anyone who arrives. She’s discreet. Erzsébet knows the protocol is to Send me to Rose’s house. Erzsébet knows how to Send me to Rose’s house. Erzsébet did not Send me to Rose’s house. But as it turns out, she did Send me near to where Rose was, because Rose was not at home.”

  Immediately Erzsébet recovered. “Then I did not make a mistake!” she said defiantly. “I Sent you to Rose! Those were my orders. You are welcome.”

  He shot her a warning look, then turned to the rest of us. “Obviously I’m disoriented on arrival, but after five years of doing it regularly, I recovered quickly. I expected to find myself in Rose’s barn, since that’s where Erzsébet had been instructed to Send me.”

  “Pffff,” she said with a shrug.

  “Instead, I found myself in an unfamiliar indoor environment that felt subterranean. It was dark and cold and had a musty smell. The floor beneath me was chilled stone, and in the microsecond before the chaos started, I got the sense I was in some kind of corridor or hall. Before I had taken a breath, someone slammed into me.”

  He slowed from his pacing and stood in one place—across the room from Erzsébet, as if he didn’t trust himself to stand near her.

  “I’d arrived about a yard ahead of the man, so he smacked right into me and fell.” He demonstrated this with more abandon than his usual self, slamming the flat of one hand down onto the back of the other, in case we didn’t know in what direction people fall. “He panicked, as if I were there to murder him and he had to beat me to the punch. He got up faster than I could, kicked me in the stomach, and as I was bracing myself in recovery, he threw a punch that landed here”—a reference to his swollen eye—“and then raised his leg to kick me a second time. But now I was ready for him. I grabbed his leg—at the ankle with one hand, and right above his knee with the other. As he tried to yank his leg away, I lost my grip on the ankle, and my other hand slid down over his knee and connected with his garter. I grabbed that for purchase, but his leg just slid out of it like a sausage out of its casing, so I ended up holding his garter, stocking, and shoe. I went to grab for him again, but something cold suddenly pushed against my cheek and I realized it was the flat of a blade. I froze. Then I slowly turned toward the man wielding it. There were two men, each with a lantern. One was older, about sixty; the other was maybe forty and tall—he was the one pressing his dagger against my cheek. There were more men behind them, but those two were in charge. I could have disarmed him pretty easily given our positions, but I was already in too deep here, and I had a terrible suspicion about where I was.”

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  He gave Erzsébet a look.

  “It sounds like he was perhaps in an undercroft,” she said, her diction exaggerated on the final word, like a child demonstrating new vocabulary.

  He shook his head. “The barrels were in the undercroft. We were in a passageway near a port door. My attacker and I both got up, and of course, I was naked, so for all they knew, we were sodomites who were just having rough sex. I identified myself as Tristan Lyons, an adventurer from the Isle of Man, and the other guy identified himself as John Johnson, servant to the royal bodyguard Thomas Percy. They wanted to know what we were doing there and why we were fighting and, obviously, why I was naked. The man with the dagger brandished it like somebody who was more used to brandishing a pen, and my mind was racing because now I definitely knew where I was and what was going on, and I couldn’t establish how to get out without interrupting what I knew had to happen.”

  “What was going on?” I asked.

  Tristan turned toward Erzsébet, irritated. Fully recovered now
, she flounced to the arm of the sofa and settled on it, the skirt of her dress making a neat half-circle drape about her thighs. “I will explain,” she said. “Because I am such an avid reader, I was reading about the background to Macbeth. There are many theories about why Mr. William Shakespeare wrote this play at this time, but the one I found intriguing, and decided to mention to Tristan in case it was useful information for him, was that Mr. Shakespeare had indirect connections to the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot. And that perhaps he wrote the play to demonstrate to King James that he does not approve of assassination, because Macbeth commits an evil assassination. So I was thinking about it too much, and it had an effect on my Sending.”

  “The Gunpowder Plot . . . ?” I said, inviting more of an explanation.

  “A group of Catholic conspirators smuggled three dozen barrels of gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament in London,” said Tristan. “They were planning to blow it up while King James and all the lords were celebrating the opening of the new parliamentary session. The plot was stopped at literally the eleventh hour, when their explosives expert, Guy Fawkes, using the name John Johnson, was discovered by . . . who?” he asked Erzsébet.

  Now she preened a little for knowing. “Thomas Knyvett and Edmund Doubleday,” she said. “They were searching the grounds because one of the lords had been tipped off by an anonymous letter. They had already searched earlier in the day, found Mr. so-called Johnson, questioned him, and let him go. But the King demanded they look one more time, around midnight. Even so, Guy Fawkes almost got away undiscovered.”

  “Guy Fawkes!” said Mortimer. “The guy the Brits burn in effigy on Bonfire Night?”

  “It was like a bad dream,” said Tristan. “Erzsébet had just been describing it, then bam, I was in the middle of it. I couldn’t fight my way out of it. I couldn’t reveal who John Johnson really was, or I’d be meddling with history. If I told them about the gunpowder, they’d assume I was somehow involved. Without an alibi, I’d be interrogated and tortured as a traitor alongside him. But if my alibi distracted them from him, he’d get away, and Parliament would blow up and the world would change.”

  “Plus you were nude,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I exploited my nudity.”

  I deserve credit for not saying a host of things I might have said then, and settled for “Can you be more specific . . . ?”

  “Name a good reason for a naked man to be prowling around the House of Lords at midnight.”

  Silence.

  “Exactly,” said Tristan. “No good reason. But some bad ones. So I used those. I feigned drunkenness. I smacked John Johnson across the face and told him never to speak that way about my mother again. I told the men who apprehended us that I’d lost at cards and Mr. Johnson had won all my clothes except my garters—I was still holding Guy Fawkes’s garters, so now I held them out to him and wailed, ‘You might as well take the whole kit! I’ve nothing to hold up with them!’ and so on.”

  “I would give anything to have seen your performance,” I said drily.

  He ignored me. “They were confused. Naturally. The taller one took off his cloak and swung it around me, and they had some of their men take us upstairs to a vestibule, to hold us while they continued to search the building for anything that looked suspicious. They hadn’t found the gunpowder yet, so they didn’t treat us like criminals, but of course our presence was irregular. They ordered us to follow the guard, so we did, and I kept ranting. I knew they were on high alert, so there was danger that whatever I said might sound like I was either speaking in code as part of a conspiracy, or equivocating, or practicing witchcraft. So I started singing, making sounds, not even words—stop it, Stokes,” he said curtly in response to my amused snort. “The guards got us up to the vestibule, while Knyvett and Doubleday kept checking the undercroft. The lanterns threw a decent amount of light on the walls, and our shadows were looming over us, and I kept up the act. The guards were laughing at me and paying no attention to Fawkes, who slipped over to the wall near the door, out of the peripheral vision of anyone who would walk into the room. Then the door was thrown open and in came Doubleday. ‘What be this clamorous hubbub?’ he demanded, and started toward me—and the guards, standing on ceremony I guess, fell in behind him. He didn’t see Guy Fawkes against the wall by the door. Guy Fawkes was about to get away, meaning Parliament would blow up, so I was counting the minutes until Diachronic Shear if I didn’t stop him. I began to push past Doubleday and the guards to stop Fawkes from leaving. But then . . .” He paused and blinked, looking for the right words. “Suddenly time slowed down. It was as if Fawkes were entombed in honey so he couldn’t move fast—all of us were, even my singing slowed down. A second person appeared at the threshold, blocking the entrance. It was Rose, the witch, standing there with a quizzical look on her face.”

  “Really?” I said, as Erzsébet said, “You see? If I’d Sent you to her house she would not have been there! I knew what I was doing.”

  “I’ve never seen Rose do any magic other than Homing me,” he said. “Diachronic travel is pretty much all we ever ask of witches, even though it’s something they have little interest in themselves.”

  “I tried to tell you this five years ago, but you would not listen. And now, here we are,” said Erzsébet, shrugging like Marlene Dietrich.

  “But of course Rose does other magic. Turns out, Rose excels at psy-ops. Before Fawkes could reach the door, she redirected Doubleday’s attention, and direction, from me to Fawkes. I can’t believe how quickly she did it. That sense I felt of everything slowing down—she did that to let me process it, nobody else was experiencing it. And then time got normal again. So now Doubleday was focused on Fawkes and finding it annoying that this large, naked drunk guy was bellowing for his woman. And then, conveniently enough, there was the drunk guy’s woman, eager to take him away. So she did.”

  “They let you go without interrogating you?” I said, incredulous.

  “Doubleday didn’t know they were about to find three dozen kegs of gunpowder under the House of Lords,” Tristan said. “His attitude was this is all paranoid nonsense, and I’m phoning it in.”

  “Still . . .” I said.

  “Well, Rose worked them, of course. She used magic to convince them that she and I had been having sex, when I’d gotten it into my head she was cheating on me with a warden of Westminster, so I’d rushed out of bed butt naked to find the villain and beat him up. She said she was willing to pay a fine for disturbing the peace or trespassing or whatever they wanted to charge me with, but please could she just get me back home. I was feeling the magic equivalent of secondhand smoke: she almost had me convinced she was my wife.

  “Still, the whole time this was happening, I was wondering, What the hell is she doing here? We were a forty-minute walk from her farm. And who would come to the Houses of Parliament now? Turns out the answer is: someone with a connection to the Gunpowder Plot.”

  “Rose?” I said, shocked. “I thought Rose is an asset because she’s apolitical.”

  “She is.” Tristan nodded. “But her cousin is the mistress of Francis Tresham, one of the conspirators, and the cousin tipped her off. The cousin’s not a witch, so she sent word to Rose and begged Rose to use magic to prevent the plot. Rose had come to Westminster herself to find Guy Fawkes and use her psy-ops magic on him, to prevent his lighting the fuse. As she was about to start a spell to sort out how to find him, she’d seen glamour around one of the buildings, which she knew meant something magical was going on inside of it. What she was seeing was the glamour from my arrival, only of course she couldn’t know that. But she moved toward it, and when I started yowling, she followed the sound and then made everything up as she went along. When she saw that Fawkes had been apprehended, she realized she could stop worrying about him and decided to get me out of there instead.” He shook his head.

  “So,” Erzsébet said into the silence, “no
foul, no harm.”

  He had been narrating this mostly to Rebecca and me, but now he turned and faced her directly. “That was the most careless thing you have ever done.”

  “No, I did something much more careless in 1848,” she began, but he spoke over her, demanding, “What’s your plan for preventing a repeat mistake?”

  “You must stop talking to me once we are in the ODEC. I only mentioned it because you asked if I had learned anything interesting in the book. This was entrapment. You will refrain from such questions in the future. It’s irresponsible.”

  Almost shaking with frustration, Tristan started to pace again. “I want to pivot on strategy here and approach Shakespeare as he’s finishing Macbeth, rather than starting it. I think that means April of 1606, but there’s no way to know exactly what day. And I want to go right away, right now, before we lose any more time.”

  “Get a good night’s sleep so your body can recover from trauma,” I said. “Let me put some arnica gel on that bruise at least. Are you scraped up anywhere else? Let me take a look at you.”

  “This is Melisande’s way of asking you to take your clothes off in private for a while before I Send you again,” said Erzsébet with titillated disapproval. “It is because the sudden fear of your death arouses in her a kind of—”

  “He’s got it, thanks,” I said.

  * * *

  Tristan still drives his beat-up Jeep. Before we got into it, he turned on his phone’s flashlight and used it to examine under the hood for wires that shouldn’t be there, then checked the undercarriage for plastic explosives.

  “They’re not going to do that,” I said, watching him. “Blevins wouldn’t stoop that low—and even if he would, he’s been made to understand he can’t.”