Allie's War Season Three
Page 21
Chandre didn't answer, feeling her mind turn over his words. Finally, she gave a low snort, aimed in Stanley's directly.
"You felt it?" She gave him a hard look. "How, brother? How is it that you felt it and I did not?"
Stanley's eyes shifted away, gazing up at the hacienda on the cliff. After a few more steps, he clicked softly. "Varlan has me monitoring your light..." A touch of apology reached his words. "He was concerned that Balidor might be running his own game...or perhaps the Sword."
"And what if they were?" Chandre said, biting back her irritation that Varlan assumed a male would be behind any devious or infiltration-style planning. Clearly they didn't know Allie very well. "...Could you do anything about it?" she retorted. "Or did you just plan to kill me, once I'm no longer an asset to Varlan's own ends?"
Still, it was difficult to be surprised...or even truly offended. Of course they would view her as a possible threat, just as she did them. In some ways, it made her trust them more.
"In the strictest sense, no," Stanley said, smiling a little. "We could not do anything about it, sister Chandre...and we certainly don't desire displeasing your masters by killing one of their trusted friends. But it never hurts to be prepared."
Chandre conceded his words with a tilt of her palm.
"So he is a seer then, this Eddard?" She didn't look back that time, and kept her voice low, despite the skepticism she let leak into her words. "How do you know it was not channeled through him...by one of his masters?"
"It was him. Clearly, he no longer cares if we know."
Chandre made another short clicking sound, shaking her long braids. "What you are suggesting is not possible," she said, her voice lower still. "He worked for the Sword...for years. They lived in the same home. Dehgoies may not have been active then, but he was no fool. He knew this human worked for the British. He would have noticed, if he had even a sliver of structure in his light..."
Stanley's expression remained unperturbed.
"I do not know how, sister," he said. "But I know what I felt. He has the sight. I would swear to it...on my own blood. You can see my memory of it, if you like..."
Chandre felt her jaw harden a little more.
But she found she didn't doubt his words. Despite the African-looking seer's confession of monitoring her light...or perhaps because of it, in part...Stanley's words rang true. She believed him, although she couldn't have said why.
"I will look at it," she said. "If your offer is sincere."
"It is, sister."
In the same instant, his light hovered briefly yet smotheringly over hers, locking her aleimi inside what felt like a miniature cage. It had to be a construct, and due to its portability, it had to be supported either by one of the new organic machines, or by something in the Barrier.
Meaning, something like the Dreng.
Chandre found herself hoping for the former, even as she felt a whisper of Varlan's presence behind the cage-like walls.
She barely had time to react to the compression and the shield around them both, when Stanley's memory replayed for her in a swift, layered collection of thought, including every detail of a soreness he had in his shoulders, his hunger and desire for a warm drink, the cold breeze cutting his cheeks, the smells of smoke and salt in the air, Eddard's aleimi as he spoke, her own words as she cursed at him. She felt Stanley's attempt to discern the oddity of Eddard's appearance here...then all of it cut short as Eddard's light darted to hers, triggering the trace Varlan and Stanley had woven into her aleimi.
The memory held impressions of Eddard's face as his light flickered back, the sense of communication between him and someone else...a signal that, without question, resided somewhere in that high-walled castle.
The transmission was over in less than a second, and after he'd sent it to her, Stanley withdrew at once.
Still hiking up the driveway with long strides, Chandre replayed the memory a few times on her own, once she had it imprinted on her light.
She found it difficult to disagree with Stanley's conclusions about what she saw. No matter how talented Stanley might be...or Varlan for that matter...he could not have tampered so seamlessly with his own memory so quickly.
"You see?" Stanley prompted.
"I see," Chandre replied. Her voice remained grim. "Thank you, brother. This is good information to have. For both of us, I suspect."
Stanley didn't answer, but she got a flicker of his nerves, too. Unless he was a very good actor, he didn't appear to be very happy with developments so far, either.
"Do you believe Varlan?" Chandre said then.
"Believe him in what, sister?"
"That he has never met this Shadow before?"
For a moment, they walked together in silence, their feet skidding and squeaking periodically on the slick, steep surface of the stone driveway.
"I believe him," Stanley said finally, his voice thoughtful. "He sees the same connections you do, however, sister...those past and present. He is fairly certain his orders came from this person indirectly before now..."
Chandre puzzled over this for another few seconds. Then her brow cleared.
"Galaith," she said softly.
"Yes, sister Chandre," Stanley affirmed. "I believe him that he did not know this until recently, however. It is part of why he distanced himself from the traitor when Galaith was killed. Due to his instability, this other group's interference became more noticeable, in terms of guiding the network. Their influence quickly became overt..."
"The traitor?" Chandre smiled faintly. "You mean Terian?"
"Yes," Stanley said. For the first time, anger touched his voice. "Yes, I do, sister."
She didn't answer. She did wonder, however, if he or Varlan knew what exactly had happened to Terian...or that he was currently chained to the wall of a business suite in a five-star hotel in New York, a quasi-guest of the Sword and the Bridge.
She kept those thoughts very much away from the forefront of her mind, however.
Her thoughts drifted back to Eddard, to what Stanley had shown her, instead.
It occurred to her that she might not have seen fit to mention Eddard's involvement to Balidor...nor to the Sword, when she spoke to him. It struck her as a strange omission now, that she hadn't made a point of telling either of them that the "human" manservant Deghoies had lived with in England for over twelve years had offered to aid her and Varlan in their attempts to deal with this human-killing disease. She knew the reason why, in part. She hadn't wanted to bring up Maygar's involvement, not until she had a better idea of whether he was alive or dead. She knew Dehgoies likely still harbored strong feelings towards Raven's son.
Chandre knew that Allie might as well.
Either way, she didn't want to risk distracting them until there existed a real cause.
Leaving Maygar's name out of things also meant leaving out Eddard's, given that the significant thing about both of them had been their disappearance from the lab in California. Now Eddard was somehow a part of this business with Shadow...and perhaps he had brought Maygar here, too, assuming he hadn't killed him.
The fact of Eddard's connection made her nervous, however.
What if this connection was not a new one, either? What if the human or seer, or whatever Eddard was, had been working for Shadow since the beginning? That could mean the Sword had been under surveillance for the twelve years they lived together in London...and not simply by SCARB or British Intelligence, but by Shadow, too. The Sword could have been monitored for years, long before he'd been awakened to his intermediary status...and by the same beings who now unleashed a deadly virus on the world's humans.
The more Chandre thought about it, the more she wondered if this may have been an unintentionally costly omission on her part.
She'd been so focused on Maygar, Eddard's disappearance seemed almost trivial. All four of them, meaning Varlan, Stanley, herself and Rex, assumed both Maygar and Eddard had been taken into custody by someone at the scene.
If Eddard truly wasn't human, and if he'd managed to somehow evade detection living in the house of a mid-ranked infiltrator for over twelve years, then what the hell was he? Dehgoies may not have been the Sword yet, back in those years when he worked as a lecturer for the Royal College of Defence Studies when he wasn't watching over Allie...but he'd been competent, even talented as an infiltrator. He'd also been paranoid as hell. He would have watched anyone the humans sent to keep an eye on him, and watched them closely.
Clearly, Eddard must have had help. Was it so far-fetched to think that help could have come from these quarters? Eddard would have needed to be constantly and heavily shielded to hide his race. More than that, his light would have required a constant cloak to disguise his race well enough to evade an infiltrator of Dehgoies' experience, particularly for so long.
And what could have been the possible purpose?
The only answer that made sense was that somehow, this Shadow person knew who Dehgoies truly was. Which meant they also must have known about Allie.
So where had this Shadow been, all of these years? Why had they not taken the Bridge themselves, trained her or indoctrinated her to work for them, like Menlim had with the Sword? Pretty much everyone else seemed to be attempting to abduct her in those years, including Dehgoies himself once he began working for Salinse.
More to the point, why hadn't they taken the Sword? Why wait for Terian to discover the boy in Sikkim, years later?
More relevant to Dehgoies and Allie right then, had Eddard been the first of such long-term plants living among them? Was he the last of Shadow's people hiding on the outskirts of the intermediaries' lives? Or were there others left there, having insinuated themselves long before any of their real allies would have known to look for them? Were some of them keeping a watch over the Sword and the Bridge even now?
The more Chandre turned over the questions in her light, the less she liked the answers that wanted to complete them in her mind.
THEY WERE BROUGHT to a long, lodge-like dining hall.
Centered perfectly in the rectangular, high-ceilinged room stood an equally long oak table whose thick top looked as if it had been carved from a single log...though Chandre knew how unlikely that was. Either way, the table itself, as well as the surrounding decor, belonged more to the Old World than the new.
Hands still shoved in the pockets of her down-filled coat, Chandre stared around at walls dotted with dead animal heads and a number of expensive-looking European tapestries, most of them Spanish and German. Paintings covered the remainder of the white-washed walls, along with wrought-iron candle holders filled with thick white candles. Stained glass windows, twenty feet tall, stood along the entire of the far wall, bounded by forest-green curtains of some heavy material that looked like velvet. A silver serving set stood atop a waist-high china cabinet against one wall, also of oak and also appearing to be a genuine antique.
Chandre noted a coat of arms that stood over the door. She made a point of snapping an image of it with her light, storing it in her aleimi.
As she did, she squinted up at the insignia, seeing a stylized symbol that almost resembled the sword and sun. The more she looked at it, however, the less sure she was that the design similarities weren't just a coincidence. The rest of the coat, she didn't recognize. Given how many families from the Old World and new sported coats simply for vanity, that wasn't wholly surprising. Anyone who would own a castle like this and surround it by human serfs clearly had the ego necessary for inventing their own nobility.
Still, there was something strangely familiar about the design, too.
Unlike many European crests she'd seen, the central figures on the design were people. Otherworldly wraiths, they wore simple cloaks that could have been Roman, or even Greek. Chandre stared at the image for a few seconds more before something else dawned on her.
Four wraiths took up the center of that design.
Each wore a colored band around their wrist...in white, green, black and red.
Chandre blinked, and the design clicked into place.
The crest depicted The Four...meaning, the four intermediaries meant to steer the course of the Displacement: Bridge, Sword, Rook and War.
Chandre felt Varlan reach her side. When she turned, he was staring up at the same coat of arms, his face impassive.
"Are you warmer, Sister Chandre?" he asked politely.
Chandre turned her head, staring past him to the flames darting shadows around the room from an enormous grate. At the nearer end of the banquet hall, a mammoth stone fireplace housed a raging fire that emanated heat all the way to the middle of the room. Another fire burned at the opposite end of the hall, in a smaller stone fireplace next to doors that probably led to the kitchen. That one appeared to be a working fire, however; she could see an old-fashioned tea kettle steaming from an iron hook over the coals.
"Perhaps we should take a seat," Varlan suggested.
That time, Chandre heard the warning in his tone.
Feeling her jaw tighten, she glanced at Stanley even as she complied.
Wooden, high-backed chairs surrounded the oak table, providing enough seating for what Chandre eyeballed at around fifty guests...maybe closer to sixty-five. She walked to a chair positioned closer to the fire and pulled it out without preamble, sitting in the hard, wooden seat without saying a word.
From there, she resumed her appraisal of the high-ceilinged room.
It reminded her very much of old hunting lodges she'd seen years ago, owned by rich humans in Germany or France. Down to the oddly-carved wooden tables against the walls, the in-built shelves and dark-colored velvet couches in front of the larger of the two fireplaces, the wood-beam ceilings that criss-crossed overhead...it had certainly been built to evoke that simultaneous feeling of charm and opulence which trademarked such lodges prior to the first world wars. The Nazis had been fond of this design too, Chandre recalled.
Resting her arms on the oak table, she stared into the fire, careful to keep her thoughts to herself. She had felt the construct's edges as they entered the door to the hacienda. Further, she suspected they now resided within a secondary construct...if not a tertiary or greater. The OBE likely disguised another level of that shield, and the house clearly contained several more. Chandre had no illusions that her thoughts would be private in such a place. Her only real defense was that of a human...to be careful not to think unwise thoughts at all, and try not to be provoked into letting her mind wander.
As a defense, it was a poor comfort, at best.
She still sat there, wondering idly how long this piece of the charade would be drawn out, when the door opened just past the smaller of the two fireplaces. Human waiters who looked local, who wore white coats and polished black shoes below clean-shaven faces and spotless white gloves, carried silver trays covered in what looked like boar's meat and stewed tomatoes and vegetables braised with butter and fresh herbs.
Chandre's stomach growled as they set trays down in front of her and the other three seers, who had clustered in a disjointed ring by occupying the chairs across from and beside hers.
Stanley, as usual, occupied the seat directly to her right.
"Do you think it is safe?" she said with a wry humor, raising an eyebrow at him.
Stanley's expression didn't change.
"I think they know we will eat it, despite our misgivings," he said after a pause. Giving her a returning smile, he added, "If they wanted us dead, I also think they would not need to be careful about it, given where we are."
Grunting in a flat kind of humor, Chandre gestured a yes in return. In the same motion, she leaned forward, reaching for the serving fork of the plate in front of her...but a ser
vant who'd come up from behind without her noticing took the utensil neatly from her fingers.
"Allow me, please," he said, in accented English.
Chandre sat back in her chair, now feeling dirty and distinctly underdressed as the human began loading bread and meat and cheese and olives and mushrooms onto her plate, pouring her olive oil and sprinkling herbs into a shallow bowl beside her utensils, filling her wine and water glasses and adding a plate of salad to the table near her left elbow. Within a few blinks, Chandre saw a feast laid out before her...in human food, it was true, but unlike many seers, she had a good appetite for what the humans ate, as long as the quality remained high.
None of the other seers waited to be invited, either. As soon as their plates had all been filled, they began to eat.
Chandre was chewing on a piece of the homemade bread after dipping it in the oil, when the doors opening behind her caused them all to look up a second time, pausing in their various poses of eating. Recognizing who stood in the opening between the double doors, Chandre felt her eyes widen abruptly. She rose to her feet without thinking, but the other man standing there raised a warning hand.
"Remain seated, sister," he said, his voice stern.
Following the motion of his other hand, Chandre saw the gun he tapped with one finger. Chandre sank back to the seat of the wooden chair, swallowing the bite of bread still sitting in her mouth. Her eyes never left the armed man's companion however.
It was Maygar.
He looked like he'd lost weight...and frankly, as if he'd survived more than one beating at the hands of someone in this place. Bruises continued to heal on one side of his long jaw, as well as on the visible portions of his arms and hands. In addition to the handcuffs locking his wrists and elbows behind his back, he wore a collar around his thinner-than-usual neck.
Chandre saw his eyes on hers, as well, and couldn't help reacting to the hope she saw in his expression. He didn't try to speak to her, which was unusual in and of itself.
It also likely meant they'd schooled him in their particular brand of manners, as well.