The Kaiser Affair (The Drifting Isle Chronicles)

by Lewis, Joseph Robert

  “Bear left! Bear left!” Bettina cried.

  “Your wish is my command,” Arjuna shouted back. “But the wind doesn’t share my dutiful nature. There’s nothing I can do, the controls are useless now!”

  “But we’re going to crash into the lake. Do something, please!”

  Arjuna reached back into her seat, snaked his hand over her lap, and deftly released her safety harness.

  “This is hardly the time!” she shouted.

  He glanced back with a grin. “We’ll need to jump. As soon as we strike the water, climb out of the gyro, or else we’ll be dragged down with it!”

  He was right, of course, and she nodded sternly at him. As he returned his attention to the gyro’s flight stick and pedals, she freed her legs and bag and cane from the straps and readied her belongings in her lap.

  I’ll jump the moment before we touch the water, and leap to the side to avoid the rotor. I must remember the rotor!

  The silvery shimmers of the grassy hills and leafy trees were now quite far away, as though an inky void had bubbled up beneath the descending gyro, pushing back the land and opening its watery maw to swallow them up. Everything below them was wavering darkness, like black liquid chrome shining with starry glimmers.

  The rotor above them spun slower and slower, becoming louder and rougher. The gyro began to vibrate and Bettina clutched the edge of her seat and her belongings tighter.

  Almost there now. Three… two…

  The belly of the autogyro slapped down against the black lake and a bright splash of water flew out and up on every side. Bettina snapped forward in her seat, nearly smacking her head on Arjuna’s back, but her husband was already leaping out of his seat, sliding over the side and into the water. In one graceful turn he was clinging to the side of the sinking gyro and reaching out to her.

  Bettina rose up on shaking legs, all too aware of the huge spinning rotor blades just above her head, and she was about to spring forward into Arjuna’s hands when—

  “Wait.” Arjuna frowned and then straightened his back. The water sloshed about for a moment, and suddenly he was standing quite high above the gyro with the tiny waves of the lake slapping at his knees.

  Bettina looked at him, and then she looked down the other side of the gyro and saw that it was no longer sinking, if it ever had been sinking. And as she raised her eyes a bit, she saw the edge of the inky waters lapping at the grassy shore just a stone’s throw to her right.

  “Oh.” Bettina blinked. “Well, that was lucky.”

  Arjuna nodded. The overhead rotor was now swinging in lazy circles and he reached up to stop it with his bare hand. The mechanism squeaked to a halt and the sudden silence, the sudden absence of mechanical noise, washed through Bettina’s head like a cooling mist. She exhaled slowly.

  Then she stood up inside the gyro with her bag and her cane and looked pointedly at her husband. “Arry, be a lamb.” She held out her gloved hand.

  “One moment.” He circled around to the other side of the gyro and swept her up in his arms, and with a few long sloshing strides he carried her to shore and set her gently on the grass.

  She brushed at her skirt and kissed her husband lightly on the lips. “Thank you, dear.”

  “My pleasure.” He kissed her hard as he wrapped his arms around her waist and back, pulling their warm bodies tightly together for a long, sultry moment. Then he let her go and stepped away. “I’ll see about the gyro.”

  While he waded back out into the lake to inspect their vehicle, Bettina turned to inspect their surroundings. The pale outline of the town was now a distant starlit gleam beyond the trees, and beyond the lake, but no other signs of human civilization marred the landscape. She stood patiently on the grass, breathing in the faint scents of fruit trees and something that reminded her of charred fish, but wasn’t quite right. Fireflies danced in the woods, chasing each other lazily through the shadows.

  So this is it. Inselmond. The drifting isle. The island in the sky. It’s strange. I expected… more. In fact, aside from the thin air, there’s nothing to tell this place apart from the ground. I can’t even feel the faintest shudder under my feet.

  She shivered.

  Hopefully it’s warmer in the day time.

  Arjuna grunted and muttered as he wrestled with the huge machine sitting in the silt and no doubt slowly sinking into the soft floor of the lake. He had managed to turn it a bit to point toward shore and now he was attempting to shove it up out of the water on its small wheels.

  Bettina looked at the dark water with a wince.

  If I must, I must.

  “Darling, do you need a hand?” She started to set her bag down on the grass.

  “No, no… everything’s… fine…” His words came in between wordless straining noises, and the occasional splash as he slipped in the soft mud.

  She sighed and started forward.

  “Stapa richta der, evin yow plasa,” a woman’s voice said.

  It took Bettina’s ear and mind a moment to chew through the strange accent, the extra vowels, and the rough consonant blends, but there were enough similarities to her native Rhendalian that she felt certain that the stranger had told her to stop. Maybe.

  Ordinarily I would mind, but since I was about to wade into this unpleasant lagoon, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to linger on dry land and find out if this person is pointing a pistol at my back.

  Bettina turned and saw a dark figure at the edge of the trees near a gap that might have been a path into the woods. She held up one empty hand in greeting. “Hello, madam. And how are you this fine evening?”

  The woman came a little closer, clutching a long wooden stave in both hands. Her light skin appeared sunburnt or perhaps windburnt and a long black braid of hair ran down over her shoulder and across her chest. She wore an undyed cotton dress of pale, dingy gray, and she carried a leathery bag over one shoulder that thumped heavily against her hip as she walked. The leather appeared to be green.

  “Wara? Adachta nar?”

  Again the woman’s vowels were all wrong, contorting her words to the brink of a foreign tongue, but Bettina quickly learned to let the sounds of the words flow together so that while many of them made no sense individually, together they formed a crude image of what the stranger was saying, like a constellation emerging from a scattering of stars in the darkness. Whatever the woman had asked, it sounded more curious than threatening.

  The detective offered a friendly smile. For a moment she considered trying to imitate the islander’s accent, but she quickly decided against it and simply spoke a bit slower than her usual cadence. “My name is Bettina. This is Arjuna. We come from Eisenstadt, the city below.”

  There’s little point in trying to conceal who we are from these people. Our real identities will mean nothing to them, and the last thing we need now is to be caught in a lie and subjected to some sort of primitive corporal punishment. Who knows what sorts of barbaric laws these people have been clinging to on this tiny island!

  The stranger came a little closer, squinting in the pale moonlight. “Ow Dunalow?”

  “Dunalow?” Bettina paused. “You mean, down below? Yes, down below. Dunalow. We come from Dunalow. But we call it Eisenstadt.”

  “Ice-dod?” The woman frowned as she stood her staff upright on the grass beside her and cast another thoughtful look at the detectives, and then unleashed a string of incomprehensible words.

  “We flew here.” Bettina gestured to the machine still mired in the shallows of the lake beside her husband. For a moment she considered trying to explain in more detail, but she felt the press of the passing moments as Ranulf Kaiser slipped farther from her grasp, and besides, there was no telling how baffled an islander might be by a machine as bizarre as the autogyro. “This machine flies, but it is broken now.”

  Arjuna looked up at the two women. “Darling, are you having trouble understanding her?”

  “More than a little. Why? Can you make any sense of what she says?”
<
br />   “More than a little.” He grinned. “It’s strange, if I don’t really focus on her and just listen to her, like music in the background, I can get a clear sense of what she’s saying. Her language is pretty similar to yours. At least, to my ear it is.”

  “I see.” Bettina smiled briefly.

  Take that, Peter Finkel.

  She cleared her throat. “So dear, would mind interpreting for me?”

  “I’ll do my best.” He looked at the stranger and in a garbled Rhendalian accent he said, “We came in this machine. It can fly.”

  “It flies?” The woman looked at the dark shape squatting in the water. “Are you liars?”

  “No,” Arjuna said calmly.

  “We hang liars.”

  “Do you really?” he asked breathlessly, a nervous smile flashing across his face.

  “No, but sometimes I think we ought to,” the woman said casually. She paced a small circle around Bettina to inspect her dark frilly dress and then backed away again.

  “The machine won’t hurt you, if that’s what’s worrying you,” Bettina said. “Although after that landing, it may well be leaking.” Arjuna translated for her.

  “Leaking? Leaking what? Doesn’t matter, just get it out of the Cache!” The woman beckoned at Arjuna, as though he might simply pluck the gyro up and toss it onto the grass. “Can’t have it fouling the water.”

  “The water? Oh yes, I see. This is some sort of reservoir, of course,” Bettina said. “Darling, is there any hope of getting the gyro out?”

  “Very little,” he said. “If I had a few more hands, maybe.”

  “Course, of course.” The islander woman strode past Bettina into the water on the opposite side of the gyro, where she struck her staff into the mud and used it to lever the machine upward and forward. Arjuna grabbed the lip of the cockpit and hauled upward, and the autogyro began rolling up and out of the lake. Together they grunted and shoved, occasionally giving each other brief directions to push here or to pause there, and within a few minutes the gyro was sitting safely on the grass and dripping steadily on the dry earth.

  “Well, thank you very much.” Arjuna smiled broadly, and then turned to his wife. “She’s really quite strong.”

  “So noted,” Bettina said lightly, before turning back to their new friend. “I’m sorry, I don’t believe I caught your name, miss…?”

  “Mielke. Melora Mielke.” They shook hands. “I’m the rainwarden here. This is my Cache.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re in charge of maintenance here.” Bettina nodded at the shallow lake.

  “Are you rainwardens?” the islander asked.

  “Are we…?” Bettina hesitated, wondering if Arjuna was really translating everything as well as he thought he was.

  How much does this woman need to know? How much would she even understand?

  But the rainwarden mistook her hesitation for not understanding the question. “Rainwardens? Do you know the one hundred and eight principles of rain?”

  Bettina smiled faintly. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Miss Mielke nodded. “That’s all right. Not everyone can afford an education.”

  Arjuna winked at her. “No, I suppose that’s true. We’re very sorry for disturbing your reservoir. It was not intentional, I assure you. We’ve come here to find two of our people, a man and a woman from Dunalow. They would have arrived a few hours ago using a gyro like this one. Have you seen or heard anything of them?”

  “No, I haven’t.” The rainwarden shook her head as her mouth pressed down into a serious expression. “Why are they here? And why are you looking for them? And why at night?”

  Bettina winced.

  Apparently life among the clouds hasn’t made them as simple as one might have hoped.

  “They’re thieves,” she said bluntly. “They stole the gyro to come here, and we’ve come to take them back home as quickly as possible. We’re officers of the law.” And she held back her lapel to display her badge.

  Miss Mielke inspected the badge briefly and asked, “Why would they come here? To steal our water?”

  “I don’t think so, no. You see, the flying machines are new,” Arjuna said. “So while many of our people will want to visit your island and become your friends, some of them will try to…”

  “Steal from us? I see.” The rainwarden nodded, and then slowly turned her head to stare at Arjuna. “And what sort of man are you? You look… strange to me.”

  Bettina didn’t know whether to be annoyed or amused at the earnest confusion on the islander’s face. “He’s from a distant country called Dumastra. Our nations are friends, and our people travel freely back and forth. I imagine you’ll be seeing more Dumastrans, as well as Jerans and other foreign peoples now that we can visit your island.”

  Miss Mielke nodded again, seemingly satisfied with that explanation.

  Well, that’s enough small talk with the locals. Kaiser and Strauss won’t be nearly as gentle, wherever they are.

  “Miss Mielke, we’re going to need to go find our missing thieves now,” Arjuna said. “Could you lend us a horse, or a pony, or something that we can use to find them?”

  The rainwarden blinked. “Horse?”

  “Oh dear.” Bettina glanced at her husband and back again. “Yes, an animal to ride. Or a wagon? A cart? Whatever it is you use to travel about.”

  “We walk on the road,” Miss Mielke said slowly, as though trying to teach a particularly dull-witted child. She pointed in the direction of the path she had emerged from. “Do you know about roads?”

  Bettina sighed. “Yes, thank you. We do know about roads. We need to get to town as quickly as possible. The large town we saw in that direction.” She pointed across the reservoir. “Can you give us directions, or should we simply follow the road?”

  The rainwarden shook her head. “Not from here. The road winds a spell this way and a spell that way, and once close to the edge.”

  “The edge of what?” Arjuna asked absently. He was studying the dripping gyro.

  “The edge,” Miss Mielke said a bit more firmly.

  “Oh.” Arjuna raised one alarmed brow. “The edge.”

  “Then I’m afraid I must ask that you lead us into town, please,” Bettina said. “We must hurry. There’s no telling what sort of damage Magdalena Strauss could do in a place like this.”

  “I cannot leave my post,” the rainwarden said. “But I’ll fetch you a courier in my stead.”

  “A courier?” Arjuna asked. “I’m not sure that we have the time. And I’d rather not let anyone else know that we are here. It’s important that we find these thieves without disturbing anyone. To keep the peace, of course.”

  “I see.” The look that the islander woman gave her said that she did not see at all, but Miss Mielke did not press the matter further. Instead she whistled a funny little tune and there came an answer from the far side of the shallow lake. A honk. And a moment later a large fat goose glided out of the darkness and thumped down on the earth to waddle across the grass at the water’s edge and look up at the rainwarden.

  “Aye?” the goose honked.

  “Hello dearie,” Miss Mielke said. “Could you wing and fetch me young Jennian, please?”

  “Now?” the goose looked suspiciously at the two newcomers.

  “Yes, now, and quickly please. But don’t tell her about these strangers,” the rainwarden said. “Don’t tell anyone, if you please.”

  “Who would I tell?” The goose waddled back toward the water, flapped her wings, and leapt into the dark sky.

  “There you are,” Miss Mielke said. “Your guide is on her way.”

  Chapter 11. A Brief History

  Bettina stood massaging the warmth into her hands for several moments as she watched the goose flying away over the reservoir, and then she looked down again in search of something to sit on while she waited. The only object in sight was the gyro, and it was still dripping with lake water, so she deftly placed her long-handled head of her c
ane beneath her rear and leaned back against it as though it were a tiny stool. It took the strain off her aching foot, a bit.

  “So.” Arjuna sauntered away from the gyro to gaze out across the water. “How many people are there up here?”

  “In all of Risenton, you mean?” Miss Mielke paused. “As many as ten thousand, I reckon. Though, I can’t be certain. However many it is, we’ve water enough for all. That’s my concern.”

  “Naturally.” Arjuna nodded. “And what do you eat up here? I don’t suppose you have enough water for many animals up here.”

  “We have plenty of animals,” the rainwarden said. “Geese, owls, eagles, falcons, vultures, swans.”

  “But those are all birds,” Bettina said. “You don’t eat birds, do you?”

  “Of course not!” Miss Mielke stared at the detective with wide white eyes.

  “Then what do you eat? Come to think of it, what do the birds eat? Eagles and falcons are raptors. They must be hunting something.”

  “Surely. They eat anglers, same as we do. Frogs as well, but mostly anglers.”

  Arjuna pointed casually at the reservoir. “Anglers? As in fish?”

  “Fish?” The rainwarden shook head. “Can’t say I know what you mean. Anglers are… well, there’s a few over there.” She pointed into the trees.

  Bettina followed the line of her finger and saw a handful of tiny yellow lights in the woods. “Fireflies? You eat fireflies?”

  Arjuna paused, and then sauntered across the grass to the tree line where he stepped over some bushes and broken sticks, and slipped into the shadows.

  Instantly the forest came alive with Arjuna’s wordless shouts, cries of surprise and horror, and yelps of confusion and perhaps even of pain, and a cacophony of snapping branches and rustling leaves chased his movements. Bettina leapt up, clutching her cane in one hand, and she started forward but the rainwarden restrained her with a hand on her shoulder. Bettina looked back and saw the amused look in the stranger’s face, and though a part of her still wanted to rush to her husband’s aid, there was a moment as she looked into the other woman’s face that told her that her husband was in no danger. So she waited.