Arjuna stumbled out of the woods a moment later. With one hand he was slapping at his hair and jacket and pants, swiping all across his body as though trying to knock something away. And in his other hand was a long crooked stick, and impaled on the end of that stick was a large black lump about twice the size of an apple. As he came forward out of the shadows of the trees, the starlight revealed that the black lump had several long crooked legs as well as a long crooked horn at one end, from which emanated a soft yellow glow.
“This is not a firefly!” Arjuna pointed at the creature on the end of his stick. He spoke with a forced sort of anger, as though trying to mask his brief fright and panic with an altogether different display of emotion, but there was also an incredulous little smile on his lips that told Bettina her husband was neither angry nor even embarrassed by his encounter in the woods. “A firefly is the size of your thumbnail, not the size of your head!”
“Yes, darling, quite right.” Bettin nodded seriously, and then she smirked a bit. “I apologize for my erroneous statement earlier. An angler is clearly not a firefly.”
Arjuna walked up to them with a final shiver, as though finally rid of the sensation of very large insects flying past his face or crawling up his arms. He held up his impaled captive to display how the moonlight glimmered across the creature’s black carapace with shining metallic hues of blue and green. “What is it? A beetle?”
“Yes, I believe it is.” Bettina glanced at it and then stepped back to a polite distance from it. She looked pointedly at their host. “And you eat these?”
“Of course,” Miss Mielke said. “They breed like wildfire. If we didn’t eat them, we’d have to kill them just to save the crops. Fortunately for all concerned, anglers are quite tasty. They say an owl first taught our forefathers to eat them. I take it you don’t eat anglers in Dunalow?”
“I’m afraid we don’t have them, no,” Bettina said. “Which raises the intriguing question of where these creatures came from in the first place. They must have evolved up here, all by themselves. Perhaps due to some quality of the air up here, or the heat of the sun, or…”
“Or maybe it was the same thing that made the drifting isle rise up out of the ground in the first place,” Arjuna said. He tossed his stick aside and wiped his hands clean. “And seeing as how we have time to chat about the local cuisine, maybe we could talk a bit about how exactly Inselmond came to be… up here?”
The rainwarden frowned. “You call it Inselmond? Hm. That’s one of the funnier words you’ve said yet. And the answer to your question is no, I don’t know how Risenton came to rise, as it were. The stories are all a bit muddled. Some folk tell stories about earthquakes and geysers hurling the land up into the sky, and some folk tell of strange winds and lodestones carrying us about in the clouds, but the only folk who might know the truth of it are the starcasters, and they claim to know nought at all. Not that I believe them.”
“Starcasters?” Bettina raised an eyebrow. “Is that your word for astrologers? Predicting the future by studying the stars?”
“Precisely.” Miss Mielke nodded approvingly. She turned slowly to inspect the woods, where the soft creaking and droning of the insects, and perhaps the huge anglers, had risen in volume by several degrees. “They claim to have no histories from the early days, but folk say they’ve got books hidden away someplace or another, books that tell what happened back then.”
Bettina smiled. “Back home, we have people who say the same thing, that there are secret societies and cults who know what really happened on the day that Inselmond rose.”
“Inselmond again!” The rainwarden’s eyes lit up. “Such strange names you have. Aye, that reminds me of the tales my granny used to tell me when I was little. Course, there’s not much left of the old city now. After the land rose, the survivors had to take the old places apart to build new homes, and to build the Cache, and to make tools.”
“That makes sense.” Arjuna turned to frown at the trees where the hissing applause of giant beetle wings had risen in volume again so that he had to raise his voice to be heard over them. “Is that normal? Are they usually this noisy?”
Miss Mielke shook her head and raised her staff. “No.”
A dozen amber lights glowed among the trees, and then a dozen more, and on and on they came, lighting up the dark forest until there were a hundred tiny glowing horns bobbing and wavering in the shadows. And then they erupted from the leaves, waves upon waves of huge insects flying through the night air, hissing and buzzing with their armor raised to let their wings flutter freely. Their glowing horns drew soft yellow trails in the darkness as they swooped and swirled against the cool breeze, and then they descended on the three people standing beside the water.
Bettina dropped to one knee with her gloved hand clutching her hat to her head. Several times she attempted to swat the huge beetles our of the air with her cane, but the mottled shadows cast by the clouds and the tiny lights on the anglers’ horns conspired to ruin her night vision and her depth perception, and so not once did she strike the beetles. But they struck her. Again and again she felt a heavy armored lump smack into her arm or ribs or thigh and it was all she could do not to scream at the thought of the little monsters swarming over her body.
Then a new sound began to punctuate the droning of the beetles’ wings. She heard a man grunting and a wooden cracking and thumping, and she raised her head to look up. Arjuna had taken the rainwarden’s staff, and while the islander woman crouched beside Bettina, the Dumastran man stood over them like a tower, and in his hands the staff became a whirlwind of dark violence. He spun and swung the staff from hand to hand, battering the creatures out of the air.
Anglers fell with musical precision, pattering and thumping on the grass all around Arjuna’s feet, and quite a few were sent flying across the sward back into the trees. But as quickly as the battle began, it was over. The beetles turned their attention away from the man and the two women and dove in another direction. They descended upon the autogyro.
Bettina and Miss Mielke rose to their feet. The detective could still feel her pulse racing and for the first time since taking to the chilly skies she felt hot and stifled in her tightly buttoned dress. Arjuna remained in front of them, brandishing the staff, but the anglers were now all in a single mass of clacking black carapaces as they swarmed over Hildegard Goldstein’s machine. They bounced on the rotors and tumbled into the cockpit and climbed over each other upon the engine housing.
“What are they doing?” Bettina asked as soon as she had the breath to speak.
“I don’t know,” the rainwarden said. “I’ve never seen them do that before.”
“Arry, we can’t let them damage the gyro!”
“Right.” Her husband sighed and waded back into the fray, but this time the anglers put up only a token defense and as soon as he began scraping them off the fuselage, they took wing and buzzed off into the sky, scattering in all directions toward the trees or across the reservoir. Arjuna stepped back and shrugged. “Well, that was easy.”
Bettina watched the huge insects vanishing into the darkness, and then turned her attention back to the autogyro where a half dozen of the iridescent black creatures lay motionless on the ground. She approached them warily, and then nudged them with her cane. “What happened to these here? They don’t appear to be crushed, and most of the ones you hit flew over by the trees.”
Arjuna knelt over the dead beetles. Then he touched the ground and his fingers came away black as ink. “It’s the fuel, the black mercury. A bit of it leaked out.”
“And it killed the anglers?” The rainwarden stormed forward to inspect the ground, and then she glared out at the lake. “It may have fouled the Cache as well. I’ll have to keep a keen eye on it, and let no one drink from it for a week at least. When folk find out what happened, they’ll…”
“…they’ll be irritated at the inconvenience, but grateful for your dedication to your duty, and to their safety,” Bettina said.
“Just as long as they never learn the real reason for the restrictions. We can’t have anyone knowing that we were here, not before our government officially contacts you. Remember, we were never here, and neither was this machine.”
Miss Mielke appeared none too pleased with this arrangement, but she said nothing as she took her staff from Arjuna and began gathering up the dead angler bugs to toss back into the forest.
Bettina and Arjuna exchanged a weary shrug, as if to say they both regretted what had to be done but neither of them could see any way around it. If word spread across the drifting isle that visitors from Dunalow were crashing about, stealing their heirlooms, and poisoning their wells, it would no doubt cause a disaster for the first official envoys from Eisenstadt when they arrived.
If they’re even allowed to arrive. For all we know, these people have an entire corps of archers who could stand at the edge of the isle and rain arrows down on any approaching gyro. Or even on the city itself.
Arjuna cleared his throat and said loudly, “I imagine it must take a great deal of hard work and careful planning to make certain there is enough food and water to go around. You must have to manage your resources with exceptional discipline and record-keeping.”
“We do,” the rainwarden said tersely. “If the rain falls even a tenth less in one year, it can mean sacrificing whole fields, whole farms! We have a lean year about one in twenty. The last one was nine years ago, and we had to ask all the owls and geese to leave for two seasons, and even so, a dozen folk starved that winter.”
Bettina nodded grimly. It was difficult to imagine an entire county’s worth of people living a knife-edge existence, battling famine and drought on a regular basis, and not thousands of leagues away but just a mile above her own home.
As soon as the government has worked out some sort of trade agreement, I’ll have the ladies of Alzig Corner prepare a relief fund and begin sending up food, clothing, and anything else these poor people need.
“Mind if I ask a question?” Miss Mielke said. “Why are the fires in Dunalow so big?”
“Fires?” Arjuna frowned.
“The smoke, I mean. We see it every day, mostly on the north side of the lake,” the rainwarden said. “But it always goes out again when evening comes. Is there some disaster that sets the city on fire each morning? Or is it the work of thieves and killers?”
Bettina raised a thoughtful eyebrow. “The north side of the lake is where we have many of our factories. Huge buildings made of stone and steel. People work there using machines to make clothing and tools and food. Those machines make the smoke that you see every day. The factories begin smoking in the morning when the people go to work, and they stop in the evening when the people go home.”
The rainwarden took a long moment to consider those ideas. “More machines?”
“That’s right.”
Miss Mielke sighed and shook her head. “I think I’ll take a little walk along the shore and see if anything’s amiss. I’ll be back before Jennian arrives for you.” And she set off, ambling slowly along the grassy edge of the reservoir.
Bettina shivered as a thin breeze slithered through her hair and across her neck. “I’m worried, Arry. We should never have come here, never allowed Ranulf Kaiser to leave the city. This place is fragile. It won’t take much on our part to break it.”
“You’re right,” he said, wrapping his warm arms around her from behind. Together they gazed out at the rippling reflections of the stars on the water. “But what’s done is done. All we can do now is be swifter than before, and keep a bad situation from becoming worse.”
“And yet here we are, standing still, and waiting for yet another person to come see us and learn about us.” Bettina shook her head. “Maybe we shouldn’t wait. Maybe we should go now, before the guide arrives, and try to find Kaiser on our own. Our Mister Scratch should be here somewhere, don’t forget.”
“No, my love.” Arjuna’s voice was soft and yet commanding. “We’ll stay and wait. A hunter who chases blindly is more likely to break his own ankle than catch his prey, and a warrior who charges alone is only remembered for his courage when his friends gather to bury him. And I have no desire to be broken or buried tonight.”
Bettina nodded. “When you speak that way, are you quoting someone?”
“Just one of my old teachers. He was a soldier,” Arjuna said. “As smart as he was deadly. And for a time, I wanted to be just like him.”
“But no more?”
“No. He was…” Arjuna smiled a mysterious smile. “You know, I just realized that we never ate supper, did we? Perhaps I can call back our new friend and ask about the best way to prepare one of these delicious-looking anglers.”
“Why do you always do that?” Bettina turned around within the circle of his arms to look up into his laughing eyes. “When you talk about your home or your brothers, just before you say something you always stop and change the subject. Why?”
He kissed her. “I’m here now. My thoughts should be here now as well. When I go home, then I’ll let my thoughts go back there as well.”
“When you go home?”
He nodded. “When.”
“Yet another subject for future discussion.” She kissed him chastely on the lips. “Perhaps the next time I have you in private and more thoroughly distracted.”
“You mean when you have me tied to our bed?”
“Naturally.”
“Perhaps.” He sighed and looked up at the night sky, and he began to sing in a soft, deep voice. The Dumastran words rose and fell in a gentle chant as though Arjuna wasn’t quite willing to truly sing them, but only to recite them in a melodic fashion.
Bettina closed her eyes and suddenly realized how tired she was, how sore her foot was, how heavy her eyes were. She leaned against her husband, and…
“Here comes our guide now,” Arjuna said abruptly.
Bettina forced her eyes open and turned to see a young girl striding along the side the reservoir beside the taller rainwarden. The detective sighed. “Yet another witness to our follies. And this one looks to be no more than fifteen.”
“I know. What a wondrous night we’re having.” Arjuna smiled and held out his arm for her to take. “Shall we go to meet them?”
Chapter 12. A Swift Search
The introductions were short and swift, once more re-establishing Arjuna as their interpreter. The young courier, or messenger-in-training as she explained, seemed only slightly bewildered by the strangely dressed travelers and their need of a guide. As Bettina tried to tell young Jennian Oakley as much as she thought prudent, Arjuna took Miss Mielke aside for a slightly different negotiation. The stern-faced rainwarden agreed to keep an eye on the damp autogyro sitting beside her Cache and she strode away across the moon-drenched lawn.
The smiling Dumastran raised his hands. “Ladies, are we ready?”
“I reckon so.” Jennian gave him a second look, and then a third with a hint of a smile. Bettina banished that smile with a sly wink and a curt shake of her head, which the girl seemed to interpret just fine, and the new threesome set out down the shadowy lane.
The girl was slender and short, and she wore her long brown hair loose over her shoulders. Her clothing was just as simple as that of the rainwarden, being undyed linen with a few greenish leather pieces, including her belt and dusty boots. Jennian led them along the edge of the Cache for quite a ways, and Bettina wondered how wide the reservoir truly was, for indeed it could hardly be very deep even in its center as the drifting isle itself was not very deep from top to bottom.
“We appreciate your help very much,” the detective said. “As well as your discretion.”
“Aye, Melora said this was all to be kept a secret, and I suppose I can see why,” Jennian said. “So you’re really from Dunalow? You’ve seen the city?”
“I’ve lived my whole life in the city,” Bettina said. “I suppose you’ve been able to look down on us your whole lives. You must know much more about us th
an we know of you.”
“Maybe.” The girl frowned. “But I hear you have carts that roll with no one to pull them, and boats that swim with no oars and no sails. I suppose they’re just too small to see.”
“Actually, no. We do have carriages that are pulled by steam, and ships as well.”
“Really?” The girl spun to walk sideways so that she could stare at the detective. The look of wonder in her wide eyes and parted lips told of countless nights dreaming of the world below and countless whispered tales with close friends or indulgent grandparents about the wonders of the place called Dunalow.
Bettina smiled at her.
All this time I never seriously considered that there might be people living up here. And now that I know there are, the strangest thing about them is the thought that they’re just as curious about us as we are of them.
Damn it, Betty, of course they are. They’re just people, not… not… whatever strange characters you think they are. Get your head straight! Wake up!
“So these thieves of yours,” Jennian said with a grin. “Are they dashing heroes in disguise? Do they take from tyrants and give to beggars? Should I be leading you astray and helping them to escape?”
“I wish that were true,” Arjuna said with a sigh. “But the man is a lawless genius who lives only to take for himself and to shame his family, and the woman is a violent animal who kills innocents for sport and money.”
The girl winced and cringed. “Oh.”
“But try not to worry, I don’t think your people are in much danger from them tonight,” Bettina said calmly. “These two have a plan, and whatever it is, it hasn’t included violence yet.”
“Well, there was a little violence,” Arjuna said. “At Kaiser’s house. And later at the inn. And then at the warehouse.”
“Arry, please.”
He shrugged.
Bettina cleared her throat. “I meant that their plan hasn’t included any attempts to target anyone in particular, and only to harm those who get in their way. So far, all of Kaiser’s efforts have been bent toward coming here to Inselmond as quickly as possible. And considering his past exploits, there is every reason to believe that his goal is to steal something. Something remarkable, something priceless, something ancient and unique, no doubt. And back at the warehouse, he very nearly left Strauss behind, which tells us that she is not an integral part of his plan. Therefore we can safely conclude that his goal, whatever it is, does not include any intentional violence.”
The Kaiser Affair (The Drifting Isle Chronicles) Page 11