The autocarriage rumbled to a stop, and then rumbled on again. Bettina watched through the window as the shopping district gave way to small homes and then to larger ones with wide green lawns and small white walls and wrought iron gates. And as the traffic thinned and their car gained speed, the sounds of the streets were gradually replaced by the sounds of ships on Lake Sherrat.
At the bottom of the lane, Oster turned onto a lakeside road called Water Street and the afternoon sun dazzled the detectives as it reflected off the sparkling waves. Ferries and fishing boats chugged back and forth through the shipping lanes and fishing grounds near the center of the lake, and sleek white sailboats and extravagant steam-yachts cluttered the inlets and anchorages near the marinas near the shore.
Arjuna looked out the window and raised an eyebrow. “You wanted to stay in a bed and breakfast here? In this neighborhood?”
“It’s a historic heritage site,” Bettina said as she pretended to inspect her fingernails through her pale pink gloves. “Countless scientists and generals have stayed there at pivotal moments in history. And some believe the foundation of the original building dates all the way back to the founding of the republic.”
“Oh, really?” Arjuna smiled. “They don’t by any chance serve lobster there, do they?”
Bettina looked up with a profoundly innocent expression. “You know, I believe they do.”
The autocarriage slowed again, but not for pedestrians. Three other autocarriages were attempting to navigate around each other at the next intersection, and it took several minutes of turning and reversing for them to disentangle themselves and proceed on their various journeys. Finally, Oster turned off Water Street onto Aehlingen Lane, a narrow road that ran out into the lake from one small island to another across a series of small, rusting iron bridges to their ultimate destination: the elegant and isolated chateau of the Aehlingen Arms.
As the car zigzagged across the bridges, Bettina was able to appreciate the view of the historic inn from several angles, which revealed to her the soaring white columns on the portico, the wide verandahs wrapping around the sides of the house, the little stairs and paths running down the sloping sides of the island through the gardens, the eclectic assortment of picture windows, circular windows, narrow windows, and stained glass windows, the enormous stone chimney on the south side, the shining greenhouse on the north side, the conical witch’s cap roof at the northeast corner, and countless other architectural flourishes contributed by countless different architects over the centuries.
When Oster pulled the car up the gravel drive to the front door, a tall footman stood ready to open the door and assist them in dismounting while a pair of young porters hurried out to the back of the car in search of luggage.
“Please, that isn’t necessary,” Bettina said to them. “I’m afraid we’re here today on business, not pleasure.”
“Madam.” The footman nodded curtly and gestured them toward the main doors, both of which were propped wide open to reveal the soaring ceiling of the foyer, from which hung an enormous crystal chandelier that rotated slowly in the gentle breeze and cast rainbow-hued refractions of sunlight upon the walls.
Bettina strode smartly through the lobby to the reception desk where a stern-faced gentleman and a smiling young lady greeted her. Arjuna paced by behind her, peeking around corners and out the rear doors that led into the gardens.
“Good afternoon,” Bettina said to the staff. “I’m here looking for a friend of mine, and by friend I mean a negligent business partner who owes me a great deal of money. I believe you’ll find the reservation under Nacht.”
The young lady behind the desk glanced nervously at her associate. The man cleared his throat. “Yes, Miss Nacht is our guest here, and if you would care to leave your business card we would be more than happy to deliver it to her along with a message.” He offered her a sheet of stationery and a pen.
Bettina noted the watermark on the paper and the way its edges matched the mysterious markings around the cosmic clock design from the raven’s drawing. “No, I’m sorry, but I haven’t come all this way to leave a message. I wish to speak to Miss Nacht now. Shall you send for her, or shall I simply go room to room, asking each of your guests if they have seen her or my investments?”
“Madam, please, I must insist that you not disturb our guests,” the concierge said in a low voice.
“You’ll insist no such thing,” Bettina said loudly, rapping her cane on the tiled floor. “If you cannot assist me, I’ll send my associate upstairs right this instant and—”
“Allow me.” The young lady swept out from behind the desk, casting a warning look at the concierge and then a bright smile at Bettina. “I’ll go up myself and see if Miss Nacht is available to meet with you now.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Who should I say is calling?” the young woman asked.
“Cornelia Van Hassendaller.” Bettina smiled at her and watched her hurry up the wide, polished steps to the upper floors.
“Would madam care to wait in our lounge?” The concierge gestured toward a glass door to one side of his desk.
Bettina was about to accept his offer when a sudden commotion from the floor above them broke out. Feet thumped quickly across the ceiling, and then a woman screamed, and glass shattered.
“Arry!” Bettina pointed to the stairs but her husband was already running toward them and he leapt up the steps two at a time with his coilgun in his hand. Then she paused to stare up at the ceiling and listen, trying to follow Arjuna’s footsteps from the top of the stair to the room where the woman had screamed.
A second crash of shattering glass broke the silence, but it did not come from upstairs, and it was followed by a deep thump and crystalline clatter in the yard. As the concierge gaped at the rear doors, Bettina turned and saw a figure in black step out of the bushes and hurry down the narrow gravel path into the gardens and out of sight beyond the flowering cherry trees.
“She’s in the garden!” Bettina hurried out the rear doors as quickly as her cane and foot would allow and surveyed the colorful beds of flowers and the rich brown mounds of mulch around the tree roots, and the silent ponds full of white and orange fish. But she saw no people, and she heard no footsteps. She was about to call out again when she heard a wooden creak and saw Arjuna leaping down from a tree, whose branches reached up to the broken window above the verandah.
Bettina raised an eyebrow but declined to comment on her husband’s choice of exits. Instead she pointed across the garden, saying, “I think she went that way.”
“I’m on it, Cornelia!” Arjuna bolted down the path, vaulting over shrubs and benches as he plunged into the shadows of the trees.
With a grimace, Bettina set out through the gardens by herself, puncturing the gravel and earth with her cane as she scanned the grounds between the inn and the island’s shore less than a hundred paces away. There were plenty of tall bushes and carefully manicured clusters of flowering trees, benches and bird baths, and small fish ponds all within a short distance of her, and they conspired to cover the gardens in wavering green shapes and shades and obstacles to hide the elusive Miss Nacht.
A few paces from the first fish pond, Bettina paused at the intersection of two paths and glanced at the ground. It was easy to see Arjuna’s heavy footprints where his shoes had dug into the gravel, gouging regular holes in the path. But there was another disturbance in the ground, a twisting swirl of stones and dust at the edge of the walkway. Bettina placed her foot over the swirling shape, turning her foot to try to see how a person might have made that pattern.
She ran through here, then turned suddenly toward… a row of hedges?
Bettina peered into the hedges, but there was no obvious hiding place, no dense wall of foliage, only a tall barrier of slender twigs and tiny green leaves that would be unpleasant to walk through, but did nothing to hide the view of the grass beyond. Frowning, Bettina lifted her cane and poked it through the hedge repeatedly, each
time a bit lower than before.
Nothing.
Nothing here, either.
The cane thumped against something hard.
A stone?
She leaned forward into the hedge, trying to see down near the earth, and she saw the toe of a black shoe, but only the toe. The rest of the shoe faded into the deep shadows at the base of the hedge. The shoe had no heel and no wearer.
What on earth…?
Bettina leaned down for a closer look at the half-shoe that seemed to simply fade into the darkness, and a pair of ice-cold hands closed around her shoulders and pulled her forward. Bettina plunged headfirst into the shadow of the hedge and instantly the entire world was transformed. For a moment she thought she had somehow fallen into the water because her entire body was so cold, and everything near her appeared dark and muted, while the distant lake and sky blazed with an impossible light. She opened her mouth and discovered she couldn’t breathe.
A tiny sliver of panic sliced through her breast, but she closed her mouth and focused on not breathing. The two cold hands were still on her shoulders, but then one let go of her, and the other loosened its grip. Unable to see who or what had grabbed her, Bettina lashed out into the darkness with her cane and struck something solid right in front of her. She grabbed hold of the dark figure, feeling the soft folds of clothing and the familiar shapes of arms and shoulders.
As her lungs began to burn and her body rebelled against her for holding her breath so long, she grabbed hold of the dark figure’s neck with one hand and squeezed with all her strength as she slammed the head of her cane into the figure’s face.
For several interminable seconds, she grappled with the dark, icy stranger. Her lungs screamed out for air and her fingers began to shake from the cold, but still she clung to the stranger’s throat and beat at anything she could reach with her cane. Suddenly she felt the weight of the stranger thrown against her body and the two of them were falling backward, back the way she had come, back toward the too-bright lake and sky.
Bettina slammed down onto the hard gravel path just as her will crumbled and she gasped for air, and was rewarded with a lungful of warm, sweet breezes. The strange creeping cold was gone, the muted and distorted view of the world was gone, and the person lying on top of her was no longer trying to strike her. She blinked hard, took a second breath and yelled, “Arjuna!”
For the first moment, all she could see of her assailant was the top of a black hat resting on her chest, but when she shouted the black hat jerked up and turned to reveal a hideous black and red mask. The mask covered the person’s entire face, including two darkened lenses over the eyes. But the most striking feature was the long bird-like beak protruding from the nose.
Bettina almost cried out at the bizarre face staring up at her, with its inhuman nose and glassy eyes, but she mastered herself quickly and smacked the masked figure in the side of the head with her cane. “Get off me, you miserable thing!”
The masked person scrambled up and by the fit of the black pants, tailored black blouse, and well-heeled knee-high boots, Bettina was certain that it was a woman. “Miss Nacht, I presume?”
The Shadow woman dashed away, narrowly leaping over the cane that Bettina thrust at her legs, and she took off across the lawn heading down to the shore where a short wooden dock extended into the water. Several small row boats bobbed at the end of the dock.
Arjuna burst through the hedge just as Bettina got to her feet and pointed down the lawn. “To the dock! Quickly!”
He bolted toward the dock, leaving Bettina to catch her breath and lean on her cane in the soft earth. By the time she was ready to start walking again, the Shadow had jumped into one of the row boats and already pulled away from the dock, and by the time Bettina reached the foot of the dock, Arjuna had freed a second boat and he too was racing out into Lake Sherrat, leaving his wife to stand on the shore and watch.
“You found him?” a low voice rasped.
Bettina turned to see a familiar black shape hunched in the branches of the cherry tree behind her. “Ah, Mister Scratch. It would appear we have found the person who hired your friend Ripper to assist our Mister Kaiser. That person is a Shadow.”
“Pulled you into a shadow, did she?” the raven croaked.
“It would seem so.” Bettina shivered despite the warm spring air.
“What was it like?”
She hesitated. “Like drowning.”
Scratch swooped down from the tree and alighted on the edge of the dock. “Never seen anyone come out of one, except for the Shadows.”
Bettina wobbled and touched her brow as the vertigo swam through her brain. The memory of those few seconds inside the shadow, her chest aching to breathe, her eyes smarting from the glare of the sun, her skin shuddering out of control in the cold, it all conspired to turn her stomach and spin her senses.
“If you want to find Ripper so badly, go help Arjuna!” she snapped.
And mercifully, the raven leapt into the air and flew away.
Chapter 7. A Business Matter
Arjuna hauled on the oars and felt the little row boat surging across the bright waves of Lake Sherrat. On every stroke, he glanced over his shoulder to mark the distance to the other boat, the one being clumsily rowed by the woman in black wearing the ugly bird mask. He grinned.
Easy pickings. Half a minute, at most.
He pulled on the oars three more times and when he next glanced back at his target, his eye traveled up just a hair and he saw something else.
Damn. Well, that just figures, doesn’t it?
They were quickly approaching a sheltered anchorage on the leeward side of another island quite similar to the one they had just left, except that this one had no bridges, only a small inlet filled with dozens of tall-masted sailboats casting long shadows across the waves as the sun hung low in the western sky, setting the skyline of Eisenstadt aglow in shades of molten gold. On the beach he could see people lounging on long chairs and grilling bratwursts and drinking from small glasses while a small army of children ran and laughed in the shallows.
A private party on a private island? This brings back memories.
He drove the oars hard through the waves and the little boat raced as fast as it could toward the anchorage. Arjuna squinted over his shoulder again just in time to see the Shadow rowing into the dark waters beside the first sailboat. The woman in black stood in her wobbling boat, adjusted her mask, and held up something small and shiny in her hand. Then she stepped off the boat into the shadows, right onto the surface of the lake itself, and plunged down not into the water but into the shadow itself, and she vanished.
Arjuna grimaced, trying to make sense of what he had just seen, but it didn’t make sense.
No splash. No ripples. No bubbles. What the hell are these people?
He rowed up beside the empty boat and studied it for a moment, but there was nothing in it except the oars. As he sat there, looking around at the nearby boats and listening for sounds of swimming or walking on the sailboat decks, Arjuna heard a sudden squeal from the beach. He turned to see a handful of children scampering away from a figure in black lurching up out of the shallow water onto the sand.
How the hell did she get all way over there? She must have swam underwater, but in all that clothing? With that stupid mask on? She couldn’t have gone so far so fast.
Maybe they really do have dark powers. But what sort of god or demon would grant a boon like this to an assassin?
Arjuna dug the oars into the water once more and quickly rowed through the many anchored sailboats to the beach, where the brief excitement over the stranger had already died down. When he got out of the boat, he saw a dozen baffled parents peering over their grills and chairs toward the trees, and he saw the wet footprints in the sand leading from the shore into the shaded woods. With his coilgun in hand, he ran up the beach through the smells of alcohol and charcoal, past the confused and frightened faces, and into the trees.
With no clea
r trail to follow, Arjuna slowed down to better peer into the dense foliage all around him. The sun was very low now and the shadows of the trees lay long and dark across his path. A cool breeze sighed through the trees, setting the leaves to shivering and waving.
“Miss Nacht?”
He saw nothing. No movement, no outlines, no tracks. He stopped and straightened up, frowning.
“Miss Nacht? I know you’re out here. Listen, I don’t know what just happened back at the inn, but I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here because I need your help,” he said loudly to the trees. “I’m looking for someone. Not you. One of your clients, I think.”
“Maybe you are, and maybe you aren’t,” a woman said.
Arjuna squinted at the trees and ferns, but still saw nothing. “I’m telling the truth. I’m looking for Ranulf Kaiser. Do you know him?”
“Maybe.”
Arjuna spun and pointed his coilgun to his right, but there was no one there.
“Listen, madam, I really don’t have time for this, and I really don’t care about who you are or how you do… that thing you do,” he said. “I just want Kaiser.”
“Back at the inn, would you care to know what your lady friend did wrong to tip me off?” the woman asked from the forest.
“Not particularly, but if you must, what did she do wrong?”
“She claimed to be Cornelia Van Hassendaller,” the woman said. “A vengeful character from a very tragic poem. It’s a very obscure poem, of course, the sort of thing you wouldn’t expect another soul to have read, but it was her poor fortune that I have, in fact, read it. But kudos to her on her good taste in the classics.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that along.” Arjuna frowned. There was a suspicious black shape about twenty paces away. It could have been a person pressed up close against a tree, or it could have simply been a lumpy tree. “So what do you say I put away this gun and you stop being… difficult, and you just tell me what I want to know about Ranulf Kaiser? You can start with where he is.”
The Kaiser Affair (The Drifting Isle Chronicles) Page 6