by Rod Duncan
The gun roared. The ammunition belt leapt into life. Straw bales to the left of Janus exploded into dust. As the technician began to pull his aim around, Edwin closed his eyes. The barking roar of the gun went on and on. Then stopped, the silence somehow more dreadful than the noise had been.
Later that night, Red agreed to the treaty and it was signed. Edwin never knew if it had been the Vanishing Man that had persuaded him, or the brutal demonstration of the new gun. Either way, he had achieved his goals and Janus was gone. It should have been a moment for celebration but he felt sick. He thought of his family: his parents divided, their argument bequeathed to him and Elizabeth. He had won, true enough, but could not be glad of it. Nor could he forget the image of his fallen enemy, broken and pathetic, revealed by the settling of the dust.
CHAPTER 40
The prison guard sat with his back to the wall. One hand rested on an earthenware jug, the other cradled a wine glass. His eyes did not open as Elizabeth approached. She looked to the keys at his belt, then to the door he guarded. His breathing sounded slack, but she didn’t trust his sleep.
“What are you doing, man?” she growled, the masculine rumble tickling the very back of her throat. She poked him with the toe of her boot and his eyes snapped open.
“Get up, you fool. The king would have you whipped.”
He scrambled to his feet, panic in his face, wine glass still clutched in his hand.
“I was awake. I’m sorry. Please…”
“Unlock the door!”
His hands were shaking. The keys jangled like a tambourine. The door opened and a cold wind blew in, tugging at her clothes and hair. She stepped through and then turned to face him.
“It’s a feast night. So I won’t report your drunkenness.”
There wasn’t enough light to see his expression, but she could hear the relief and gratitude in his voice. “Thank you, sir. Thank you. It won’t happen again.”
“Lock the door behind me,” she said. “And never speak of the magic I am about to do.”
She saw his head nodding. He wouldn’t understand until the morning. And then, perhaps a night of sleep and wine would make him doubt his own memory.
She made her way out along the wooden slats of the walkway, letting the cold chain links run through her hand. At the end, she crouched and whispered, “Are you awake?”
Mary’s voice came up to her: “Always.”
“I need to come down.”
There was no questioning from below. Just a scraping of wooden shingles. Elizabeth reached down between the slats and felt the outline of a hole in the roof of the cell. It would be big enough for her to drop through. But to reach it, she would have to let herself over the edge and somehow get her feet and legs back underneath the walkway.
“If I start to slip…”
“I’ll hold you,” Mary whispered.
The planks of the walkway had been weathered smooth. Elizabeth lay flat, her feet projecting out over the void, then inched backwards until her hips reached the edge. She felt her balance shifting. Clinging on with her hands, her feet scrabbled under the walkway, trying to find contact, slipping against the sloping roof. Worming backwards again, arms straining to keep hold, she swung her legs under and felt a hand close around one ankle. Then her other ankle was gripped and she was sliding back. She fell the last few feet, her back landing heavily on the roof shingles, but her legs were inside, and then her hips. She dropped down to land on a floor of planks, in the darkness of the cell.
“Welcome,” Mary whispered.
All Elizabeth could do was pant, catching her breath, feeling her heartbeat beginning to slow.
“You’re not Edwin,” Mary said.
“When did you know?”
“The second time you came here. You have the voice. But the things you were asking… They weren’t like him.”
“Do you have the rope?” Elizabeth asked.
“I do. But who are you?”
“My name is Elizabeth.”
“That’s not what I meant. Who are you really? What happened to Edwin?”
“He is still in the castle. And he’s still the magician. I am…” She faltered. “I am no one.”
“That’s not true.”
The wind gusted, rattling the roof. In the darkness, Elizabeth heard Mary getting to her feet and replacing the missing shingles.
“Will you come with me?” Elizabeth asked.
“You’re going down the rope?”
“Yes.”
“Escaping?”
“Yes.”
“If I go missing, they’ll come after us.”
“We’ll travel at night.”
“If you go alone, no one will follow. And if I went with you, I’d only be giving the king what he wants.”
Elizabeth said: “If you die in this cell, what will it achieve?”
“I don’t know. But then, I could never have guessed that you’d be here like this. You’re going to go out into the world and you’re going to tell other people what I’ve told you. The world is going to change.”
There was the warmth of a smile in Mary’s voice.
The wind slackened. Elizabeth found herself listening to near-silence.
“You’re his sister,” Mary said.
“How did you know?”
“You’re so similar. Yet different. Let me hold your hand.”
The skin of Mary’s fingers was rough, her grip firm. “Remember me,” she said.
“If I live, I will never be able to forget.”
The cell had been bolted to the wall by four iron brackets. Onto one of these, Elizabeth tied the end of the rope. Mary unlatched a section of the end wall and swung it inwards. The rope dropped into the blackness. There were no more farewells. Elizabeth let herself over the side, keeping her body close to the rope and gripping it with her feet, she began letting herself down, hand over hand.
The wind gusted again, blowing her against the rock. The further she went, the more the rope stretched to her movement. Then the cliff began to slope outwards, so that she could find footholds. Two times she stopped to rest her arms. She couldn’t see the ground, but at last heard the wind in the tree tops. She was among the branches when her feet slipped off the end of the rope. She dropped, landed on loose scree, began to slide down the steep slope, but came up hard against the slim trunk of a sapling.
She heard the rope falling before feeling it. It landed in loops all around her. Mary had cast off from above.
The next morning, the king stood with his magician at the top of the highest tower, looking east towards the mountain, its edge lit by the rising sun. The feasting had gone on all night.
“Your fight has cost me a counsellor,” he said.
Edwin bowed in that way that Janus had once done, a suggestion of agreement, but yet not. “I’ve gained you the whole of Newfoundland,” he said. “A king for a counsellor. It’s not a bad exchange.”
The king’s frown deepened. He had seemed uneasy since the grand illusion: a darkening of his brow whenever he glanced in Edwin’s direction. It must have been comfortable to think that magic could tell the future and that tricks could manipulate the minds of lesser men. But the Vanishing Man had been too perfect. It had upset the balance between them. Edwin had gone from being a useful tool to something more powerful. A rival, perhaps. The king’s unease would only grow.
“It was a trick,” Edwin said, too quietly for the guards on the stairs below to overhear.
The king stared at him. Shook his head. “I saw the impossible.”
“But you didn’t see what you thought you saw.”
Clouds hung heavy in the northern sky, making the water of the river dark. After the treaty had been signed, he’d slipped away, run back up the stairs to tell Elizabeth he had won. The room was empty. He asked the gate guards. They told him that no one had passed. After that he searched the room again, and found the rope missing.
Somewhere out there she was struggling back towards Le
wiston, carrying the third copy of the treaty document. If she made it across the border, the forces of the Gas-Lit Empire would learn of their plans. He remembered what she’d said: I can’t weigh a single life, let alone a hundred million.
All he had to do was tell the king. Hunters would be sent out. They’d get her back and stop that parchment getting into the hands of the enemy.
“How did you do it?” the king asked.
“I built the crate of fruit just like one of my mother’s cabinets. And there was a flash bomb to blind the audience for long enough.”
“But how could you have gone from one end of the courtyard to the other so quickly?”
Edwin remembered the warmth of his sister’s touch. “Did you not see the sweat on my face when I emerged?” he asked.
The king shook his head.
“I scrambled back underneath the trestle tables, then up through a trick hatchway in the bottom of the crate. I had longer than you think.”
Some of the tension drained from the king’s face. He sighed. “When you tell me how your tricks are done, they seem… so much less. And yet you fooled our guests. I will need a new counsellor, Edwin. More than one perhaps. People who disagree with you. Yours can’t be the only voice in my ear.”
“Yes, sire. It is the best way.”
At that the king smiled, and more warmly than Edwin could remember. “I should have trusted you,” he said. “History has proved you faithful.”
Edwin knelt. The king’s hand rested on his head, a royal blessing.
When he stood, the king held him by the shoulders and looked straight into his eyes. “We have much to do, and little time. Are you ready for the challenge?”
Edwin said, “I am.”
CHAPTER 41
Wars are won in battles. But also in those battles never fought. The historians of the End, those people who would study the great collapse of the Gas-Lit Empire, would point to this as the moment that divided time. The event that the future-casters of the Patent Office feared had come to pass. The Americas were being cut off from the rest of the world. Change had become inevitable, but its outcome could not be predicted. It was the greatest unknown in the Map of Unknown Things.
As for Elizabeth, she walked until she came to the Columbia River, then found a thicket to sleep in through the day. At nightfall she set out again, walking always against the flow. In this way she reached the mouth of the Snake River. Her food ran out after four days. Beyond that, she walked hungry, and would soon have died but for a trader’s camp where she stole two loaves of bread.
The vastness of that great country seeped into her, a kind of delirium, awe mixed with fatigue and hunger. The river always flowing on her left. The brown hills reaching up to the sky on her right. When she turned her head, the horizon swam.
When the loaves had been eaten, she chewed grasses and leaves from the scrubby bushes next to the river, trying to fool her body with the illusion that it was still being fed. It could have been the wrong river. She might have been walking into an endless wilderness. But one day she saw an insubstantial line cutting across the world. Wooden posts and barbed wire. It would seem more substantial on a map. She remembered the words of Mary Brackenstow.
There was no way to find the place where the Arthurs had made the crossing. So she walked along the fence, on the wrong side, so to speak, until she came to a small gully where the wire didn’t quite reach the ground. With her last strength, she lifted it and crawled underneath, hardly feeling the barbs raking against her shoulders.
Some feelings are too complex to be rendered into words, but tears are enough to express them. So she lay down and wept for all the tragedy she’d seen, and the loss, and for the chaos that was to come. One piece of her own history had been completed. A void that she’d not previously been aware of had been filled. And on this foundation she felt somehow stronger.
In the dust next to a mile marker she dug a hole, scooping it out with her hands until it was deep enough to feel moisture below. Then she laid the parchment in the bottom and back-filled it, flattening the earth until all that remained was a darker patch, which grew pale as it dried in the wind. Then there was nothing but the marker stone itself. Twenty-three miles to Lewiston.
Later, it may have been the next day, though afterwards she couldn’t remember the sky becoming dark, a wagon came rolling along that track. Two outriders found her first, men dressed in the dark blue of the border regiment. They took her up, laid her in the back of the wagon, gave her water and food. This is how she returned to Lewiston.
None of them recognised her, though there were wanted posters on the wall of the guardhouse. It was a bad likeness. She could have stepped out from that place and disappeared from history. Instead she pointed to the poster and pointed to herself, still too weak to express herself in any other way. Then they understood.
Patent Office agents arrived within the hour and took her into custody. It took two more days before she was strong enough for questioning to begin. After the first session, she asked after Mrs Arthur. No one could tell her anything. But two days later, as she was being escorted to the air terminus, one of the agents said that he had checked it out. No one had seen Mrs Arthur or Conway for several weeks. As they escorted her onto the airship, hands cuffed, she found herself weeping once again.
In New York, the agents tried to threaten the story out of her, as they’d done in Niagara. But Julia and Tinker were free already. The Patent Office had nothing left to bargain with except her own life, which they’d already said they could not protect, and which she despaired of saving.
In response to every question she replied: “I will talk to John Farthing.”
After three days they moved her from comfortable accommodation to a bare concrete cell. Three times a day they brought food and water. Otherwise she was left alone.
But on the fifth day, the door opened and Farthing stepped inside. His cheeks had hollowed since she last saw him. He covered the spy hole with one hand, holding her with his free arm. She clung to him, as she had in the washroom above the falls.
“You’re thinner,” she whispered.
“You’re just the same,” said he.
She breathed in his scent and felt a wave of warmth pass through her body, as if every vessel and capillary had dilated in the same moment.
“I’ve done it,” she said.
“What have you done?”
“I know their plans. I know what they’re doing. In Newfoundland. And in Oregon.”
“I’m supposed to ask you to talk. I’m supposed to say that you’ll be hanged as a mutineer if you don’t.”
“They’ll still hang me if I do,” she said.
“I know.”
She felt the sag in his body as the truth of what she was saying took hold of him. “They’ve offered me no deal. They say it’s not in their control, and in any case my words aren’t so precious to them. The sailors – they’re demanding my death. Once I’ve told my story, the Patent Office will hand me over.”
“Elizabeth – you’re so much stronger than me. I don’t think I can take this anymore.” He struggled free from her embrace, still covering the spy hole, and from his pocket drew a small glass vial of pale green liquid. “There’s enough in here for both of us. It’s painless, they tell me. Once I crack the seal, I’ll drink half. The rest is yours.”
“The Patent Office wants to know the things I’ve seen,” she said. “And I want to tell them. But I can give them more than words. If they had something they could hold in their hands, something to place before the governments of the Gas-Lit Empire…”
“It’s the Navy that will kill you. It will be a hanging. In public. Oh, my darling. Oh, my Elizabeth.”
She took the vial from him. “I will die sure enough. And so will you. But not for nothing. There may be a deal to be done. If your masters had hard evidence in their hands, they might persuade the governments to act. And to do it now – before it’s too late. You must take a message for me.
And trust me.”
It seemed that he did, for they kissed then. More like true lovers than they’d ever been. Not just with the passion of their first kisses. But also with the knowledge of each other and themselves that all the trials and separation had given them.
CHAPTER 42
FUGITIVE MUTINEER DEAD
Elizabeth Barnabus, fugitive mutineer from the Battle of the Grand Banks, recently recaptured by agents of the International Patent Office in New York, was yesterday discovered unconscious in her cell. Despite valiant efforts to resuscitate her, doctors arriving half an hour later pronounced her deceased. According to constabulary sources, no third-party is being sought in connection with the death.
This brings to a close the remarkable scandal of Miss Barnabus who, having been uncovered masquerading as a sailor on the whaling ship Pembroke, joined forces with a band of female pirates, took part in the imprisonment and cruel treatment of the crew and later led the attack on the mother ship of the North Atlantic fleet, which resulted in its capture.
– FROM THE TIMES OF LONDON
At about the same time as the newspaper article was being read on the other side of the world, in an anonymous office on Fifth Avenue, John Farthing and the five most senior Patent Office agents in North America were sitting down to a meeting. The seventh man at the table, a recording secretary, had written the date and the names of all present. Now he waited, face impassive, pen poised.
There was a soft rapping on the door.
“Come,” said the most senior agent.
A young man with dark hair stepped inside. John Farthing stood, the others following his lead. Only when the newcomer was sitting did they retake their places.
“Thank you for coming,” said the senior agent.
The recording secretary transcribed the words, but then looked up, confused. “What name shall I give?” he asked.
The newcomer smiled at him. “I’m Elizabeth Barnabus.” The feminine voice was at odds with the masculine face. The recording secretary squinted, his eyes widening in surprise.