There was a bit of silence in the room, although in the ballroom, the Georgetown Boys played the Quadrille. Mr. Bridges could hear hooting and laughter. His wife frowned. Mr. Bridges stood. Then Jerome stood as well, still elegant and well-creased after his sojourn on the floor, and his pitiless eyes narrowed to slits. Fawley stumbled slightly as he stood. He turned away, his face pale and mournful, and he leaned against the far wall, exhausted already by events that had not yet occurred.
What happened next happened very quickly. The back door opened and Monsieur Rasháh marched in, his face a parody of mirth. He was alone. He locked the back door, and Allen Jerome locked the door to the ballroom. Rasháh had a pistol in his right hand. The Quadrille ended. Rasháh waited till the Heel and Toe Polka began, and the Opera House was noisy again. He fired a single shot at Bridges, which entered neatly through his forehead and lodged harmlessly in a wooden beam behind him. Nearly no blood, no skull fragments. Rasháh was like a surgeon. Bridges died immediately, without even a gasp. He remained standing for a moment, then fell quietly backward to the floor, like an exhausted man collapsing into bed. In the ballroom, one of the Tabor daughters laughed and laughed, so beautifully, her laughter like little palace bells.
Rasháh stood by the locked door.
“Loyal to Sidonia, yet out of town on business this whole week,” Allen Jerome said. “Whom did he need to meet with out of town, without my knowing about it first?”
He turned to Rasháh.
“I assume you were puzzling that out these last few days?”
Rasháh nodded, but his gaze had turned to Mrs. Bridges, who shrank into the corner.
Angry but frightened, she asked breathlessly, “Why is he looking at me like that?”
“Quantitative analysis,” Allen Jerome said. “Now your husband is dead. Is it possible that you might yet be of value to the Sidonian movement, or do you present a threat? Are you harmless? Just an angry but frightened and harmless woman who will slink off somewhere and look over your left shoulder for the rest of your life? Maybe get a job down in Denver to support your — ” His eyes narrowed. “Three children, yes? He is adding it up. He is naught but a great abacus, who only looks somewhat human. That’s all he is. A machine. He doesn’t even look very human at all, when you examine him closely.”
“What is he thinking about?”
“He’s running the numbers. Analyzing the variables. It always takes time.”
Jerome rolled his cigar between his thumb and pointer finger.
“It’s common sense to me. But he must generate random simulations. For the record, he uses Brother Edvin’s ‘middle square’ method. It’s time consuming and not entirely reliable, but if he tries to peek into the future and change the past, he’ll be swept off the interlinear Maze, so we’re stuck with the middle square method. I don’t think that I quite have time to explain. But to make a long story short, I think by the bye, he’ll conclude that there’s some feasible scenario in which a woman whose husband was shot down by Sidonian forces in cold blood proves not to be particularly beneficial to Sidonia. He’ll get there eventually.” Nodding, looking at his cigar. “I think your children shall be orphans, before the hour is out. Give or take a moment or two.”
Out in the ballroom, the Denver Boys were in the middle of a raucous version of Varsouvienna. Whoops and hollers echoed through the opera house, and the blood drained from the poor woman’s face. Darryl Fawley looked away.
“Can we not set her loose?” he asked plaintively, more for Lucy’s sake, to retain some vestige of the humanity in her grand dream, than out of any real hope that his business partner might show some pity. Lucy would have wanted to free Mrs. Bridges from her female bondage, from her fear. She would want to teach her to be strong. Still, he knew the answer.
Varsouvienna slowed to its conclusion amid enthusiastic applause, and the Leadville Merchants struck up a Quadrille.
“All we ever did was love Sidonia,” the woman whispered.
“We will not tell your children that you were traitors,” Allen Jerome said. “We will tell them that you were heroes of the Revolution. I suspect that Rasháh will see no reason to kill your children, in all likelihood. Their money may remain intact.” With a nod in Rashah’s direction. “But it’ll be up to him.”
She stood from her husband’s prone body, and she tried to run from the room, her limbs flipping and trembling as she went. She pounded on the thick wood of the locked ballroom door and called for help, but none of the guests could hear her over the blare of the trumpets, in crescendo. Without hope, still she pounded on the door, she shrieked, she cried.
After a while, Rasháh completed his quantitative calculations, and he smiled with his red lips.
Sitting beside the two bodies, Allen Jerome crossed his legs.
“We can make them dissolve, can we not, Fawley?” he asked. “I hope that we can make them dissolve.” He was scribbling on a sheet of rumpled paper, which was filled with numbers surrounded by a bar graph. He scribbled a bit onto the graph, then sat back with satisfaction, before re-noticing with some shock the dead couple who still lay at his feet.
“Can we not make them dissolve into nothingness?” he asked Darryl Fawley, his voice almost pleading.
Chapter 13
A few miles south of the Montana mountains – the self-same mountains that purportedly held the legendary city of Sidonia – we found the little clearing shown on the map that Billy Golden had given us. The clearing was hidden from the world by the thick of the forest and not connected to civilization by even a single path. In the center of the clearing was a friendly little inn, with small, stained glass windows in the attic, far above.
Hester tapped the reins, and her horse stopped.
“This is it,” she said. “This is where Billy sent us.”
“Why are we stopping here?” I asked, and she said that we were stopping here because Billy told us to stop here, and that if we didn’t do what he told us, he would undo all the Magic that had reconnected my ruined bones back in the Wyoming penitentiary, and I would collapse to the ground, ruined and wrecked.
I smiled. I wasn’t entirely sure that Billy could undo Madame Tang’s healing without her help, but I supposed it wasn’t worth risking it.
Now that I had something to live for, it mattered to me whether I died in a heap. I would indeed prefer not to die.
Lady Amalie greeted us on the path that led to the inn, a cheerful, elderly woman with clear, sparkling blue eyes, and she led us to our room on the third floor, a suite somehow larger than the space allotted within the little house. I stepped out on a balcony that had not been visible from below, and Hester joined me, and we looked out over an impossible forest, filled with trees I had never seen before. Birds like flying peacocks perched on the branches. In the far distance, a white city was carved from the rock in a snow-covered mountain.
“You see?” Hester said to me. “This is an inn out of Time and out of Place. We could stay here forever, and never age.” She slipped her arm around me. “But we cannot, of course. History awaits us both.”
She smiled at her grandiosity.
And we stood there, just looking at this world that we didn’t know but that we loved, until the sun set. An unfamiliar sky bloomed, filled with strange stars.
I really don’t know where to begin or end when I talk about my life at Lady Amalie’s inn, that cheerful hostel that was bigger on the inside than the outside.
I don’t know how long we stayed there, and in reality, we stayed there no time at all.
To whit: As you already know, but which I did not at this point in our yarn, Hester was with child, just barely.
She said nothing to me as we left South America, because I would not have allowed her to travel, and I might have put off the trip altogether to stay with her and see it all through, and to welcome my son into the world.
But nothing that happened at Lady Amalie’s inn gave me cause for suspicion. We might have been there for months,
but Hester grew no more pregnant. She was approximately two months pregnant when we arrived in July of 1879, and she remained ever-so as the days stretched into weeks, and perhaps into months.
During my stay in the golden cradle of Lady Amalie’s realm, I sometimes wondered idly at our proprietress’s age, but I know now that the answer could be only that she was no older and no younger than she had been a moment ago, as were we all.
In the mornings, we would descend the stairs to Lady Amalie’s dome-ceilinged dining hall and start the day with a breakfast of fruits I could not identify, eaten alongside neighbors whose life stories seemed, at the time, to be a figment of my own imagination.
The second morning, for example, we were joined by a young girl who insisted that she was a refugee princess from a floating island, whose companion was either a very well-trained monkey who behaved almost like a little man, or a exceptionally odd little man who resembled a monkey. The monkey-like fellow (or fellow-like monkey) could not speak, but he sang with the voice of an angel. The third morning we discussed mathematics with a professor of a university that I am quite sure has never existed. He wore a purple robe, and his eyes were golden blue, and his views on the golden theorem of mathematical residue moved Hester near to tears.
Sometimes in the early afternoons, we explored looping corridors and twisting stairways, and in the late afternoons, we climbed the rolling hills behind the inn, wandered among the orchard fruit trees, and when day sank into night, settled beside the observatory at the top of the highest hill, opened a bottle of the inn’s singular wine, and quietly spied on the terpsichoreans of North Sadlareeyah as they strummed their peculiar melodies and danced their strange, leaping dances on the bank of the roaring river far below, under the meteor showers and streaks of purple light that painted Lady Amalie’s nighttime skies.
One early morning, while Hester was still asleep, Lady Amalie greeted me in the meadow behind the trees that sheltered the inn. The dew was cool on my bare feet. The peacocks lumbered overhead, plummeting from branch to branch, and above them, a few hawks circled.
Lady Amalie pointed.
“They could be Sidonian scouts,” she said, her brow creased. “Or they could just be hawks. They know that we are here, you see, Mr. O’Hugh? They know that we are here, but cannot yet do anything about it. One day, our immunity will end. Time will collapse in on us. And retribution will be swift.”
She watched the hawks for a while, till they circled up above the clouds and vanished from view. Then she smiled and touched my arm gently.
“It won’t happen to-day,” she said, “or to-morrow. And as I said, sometimes a hawk is just a hawk.”
After we had resided at the inn for some time, Hester and I visited Lady Amalie in her study on the third floor to let her know that, at the earliest suitable circumstance, I would embark on my journey, and I would march over the hill to Sidonia.
The stars had come out, and the study was shrouded in shadow. Lady Amalie sat at a polished, dark wood desk, scratched and dented and well-loved, and a dim oil lantern flickered on the desk’s edge.
“I am grateful that you are ready to go,” she said gently.
“Not ready,” I admitted, and my voice cracked a bit, unheroically. “But,” I added, “although not ready, I am drawn somehow to fulfill my obligation without further delay.”
And so I would do it, I would leave on this mission that I knew I could not avoid if I were ever to be a complete man again, this ugly mission inextricably linked in my mind to one enchanting night in South America under the influence of beautiful opera music and a beautiful deadling.
Shelves filled with old books lined the walls.
I found myself muttering to the floor.
“I do understand the conflict you are feeling in your heart,” she said, “and the sacrifice you are making as a result.” With affection in her shaky voice, she smiled and said, “Mr. O’Hugh.”
Lady Amalie smiled.
“Love peace, pursue peace,” she said, “and love your fellow creatures. May your light burst forth like the first sunrise, and may there be peace among us.”
Eventually, I thought. But first, fight and kill.
The next morning, when the day was yet still new, a Chinese guide rapped on the door of our room.
He was small, youthful and enthusiastic, with a wide smile, and he introduced himself as Chu Ying. The light of the sunrise glowed on a face that already glowed with eagerness for the day’s adventure.
“If we are lucky,” said Chu Ying, as he hurried us from our room, “we might seek the audience of a legendary wise man, who lives in the mountain peaks.”
Without much delay, he took Hester and me up the side of the nearest mountain – a fabled, storybook mountain still on this side of reality – to a peak some feet below the very top, where we arrived when the sun was yet halfway across the sky. We were still shaking the sleep from our eyes when we stopped to await the great man’s arrival. In the valley below, I thought I could dimly discern the faded outlines of the great Sidonian metropolis, shrouded in morning fog.
“He is a truly exceptional wise man,” Chu Ying said. “He might have some valuable insight into your mission, and perhaps a bit of helpful Magic as well.”
Chu Ying leaned back, staring across the narrow passage that led between the two cliffs.
“What if he doesn’t show up?” I wondered.
“Then we will go back down the side of the mountain,” Chu Ying said. “And your mission will be more dangerous without the weapon of his wisdom, I would think.”
He smiled thoughtfully.
“But I do hope he comes,” he said. “Magic might come in handy, when one is faced with omnipotent evil.”
“This sounds,” I agreed, “like a very good idea.”
I thought I could use some Chinese Magic. Some spells, hocus-pocus, and whatnot. And it seemed to me that a Chinese wise man who lived ascetically in mythical misty mountains would be just the fellow to provide what we needed.
We waited an hour or so, with no sign of a wise man, and then Chu Ying said that perhaps we should travel a bit farther east, so we crossed the path between the two cliffs into a mountain pasture surrounded by peaks and hidden from the inn and from the smoky distant city.
Then, suddenly, there he was, appearing from around the bend, a heavy-set man in a gigantic black hat, galloping along on the strongest horse I had ever seen. His long gray-black beard waved thickly behind him as he rode forward in the mountain wind, his black coat flapping at his side.
Our Chinese wise man was not what I had imagined.
Chapter 14
John Dead-Man and Yu Dai-Yung woke before dawn and rode to the West, the Chinese poet on his brown horse with strong legs, and the sad Indian on just the sort of horse one might imagine for the last lonely heir to the forgotten legacy of a once-great nation: sagging in the middle, snorting with exhaustion, spitting frequently, more like a dying camel than a noble horse. Master Yu gathered that this horse had once been strong and proud, like the Peking Indian nation itself.
After just fifteen minutes of this, Master Yu could take no more, and he tapped on the reins.
“We’re going into town, John Dead-Man,” he said. “We’ve got one more piece of business in town, you and me.”
And so they detoured from their western course and headed south along the dusty cow-trail, and they reached town, turgid and hot and near-deserted, by the sleepy mid-morning. They stopped at the end of town out-front of an establishment known as Ed Hessel’s Stables. Master Yu made arrangements for the Indian’s frail horse. While she deserved a quick and compassionate bullet in the head (the horse glue industry was not due to reach our shores till the end of the 19th century), the poet noted an emotional attachment between the near-dead nag and the near-dead Indian and didn’t have time to argue. He demanded a new steed from the wrinkled and wiry proprietor, whom he assumed to be Hessel himself. John Dead-Man argued that “Waukendah” had always served him we
ll, and Master Yu promised that Waukendah would await him at the end of the journey, subject only to the unpredictable will of the Jade Emperor, “and would you truly wish to subject such a loyal old friend to the dangers of our perilous mission?”
The Indian said he supposed not, and he looked into old Waukendah’s eyes, and he whispered a few words in a language that neither the poet nor the old horse trader understood, and Master Yu knew there was a great chance that these two old friends would never see each other again, for one reason or another.
He turned to old man Hessel.
“We need something in the way of a steed,” he told the old man, “that would be more suitable for the last scion of a great, fearless people.”
Hessel clucked to himself – he was apparently less awed by John Dead-Man – but presently he returned with a great black horse, with a curly mane, wild eyes, and thin, tightly muscled legs.
“Here,” said Hessel, his words whistling in his toothless mouth. “A wild pinder. Not an ordinary horse. Only wild pinder I’ve ever seen. Two years old.”
Master Yu paused, looked the steed up and down, looked in its mouth, behind its ears, stroked its flank, and then he nodded with admiration.
“I think this is just right,” he said.
His irises shrank and his corneas clouded over until they were a foggy gray, and he looked out over the rolling prairies to the West of the town and watched things happen that the other two men could not see. He smiled in the gluey air. Then his eyes cleared, and he ran his fingers through the horse’s wavy mane.
“That’s right.” Nodding. “A wild pinder is just what the Peking Indians rode. This is exactly the horse for a noble Peking Indian.”
The horse cost Master Yu a pretty penny.
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 18