“Sir, this is Reece. There’s been an accident.”
His message was brief. Every word of it burned in his throat like a shot of Pantedan burnthroat.
After a few minutes, the log interface gave a startlingly loud beet, and the sound of the duke’s voice rolled out from the speaker, low and smooth and as cold as deep space. Reece involuntarily jumped when the screen winked on, facing him with a head-and-shoulders view of his father. At a glance, he was an older man who had come into his prime past his middle years, getting handsomer with age. He was taller than Reece, fit and square-shouldered, and his head was neatly shaved.
At a glance.
“I’m leaving Cronus now,” the duke rumbled. He couldn’t see Reece, not with Reece’s lens turned off, but he seemed to stare him straight in the eyes. “How is your mother?”
“She’s shaken. But she’ll be fine.”
“Take care of her until I get there.”
“I will.”
The duke paused, not blinking, his curveless lips pulling tighter at their corners. Beet. The interface turned off with a lingering crackle, and the screen went dark.
Slowly, Reece leaned forward and flipped the switch to hide the screen, but he didn’t leave. Instead, he slouched in his chair, idly pulled the book sitting on the desk into his lap, and tapped his fingers on its leather cover. He sat like that for some time, tapping and thinking until suddenly, it hit him. Nivy! Bleeding bogrosh, he’d completely forgotten!
He stood so quickly that his knees struck the desk on their way up, rattling it and sending pens rolling noisily. Grumbling, he tried to gather them back together before they skittered off the precipice of the desk. With his back bent, and his head level with the shelf over the desk, he stared at one of Liem’s antique candlesticks, the stout kind with a flat top and aged yellow wick. Four silver cufflinks sat perfectly balanced atop the candle, one on top of the other. They were the cufflinks carved into the Aurelia’s winged emblem, the very ones Liem had worn earlier that day. An odd place to put them, but then, Liem was an odd fellow.
Something nagged at Reece as he replaced the pens, making him hesitate. Scooping up the cufflinks, he held them under his nose and squinted at them. Thread and tattered fabric clung to the posts of the small pins. Liem had either been in a hurry to undress, or his kidnappers had been rough with his jacket and popped the cufflinks loose….and then balanced them on a candlestick? Strange kidnappers.
Or clever Liem.
Bouncing the miniature emblems on his palm and then dropping them in the chest pocket of his nightshirt, Reece crossed the study and turned into the corridor, which was busy with servants and now also sentries that had been called up from the capital to investigate. Abigail was in the middle of it all, fanning herself with her handkerchief and allowing herself to be comforted by several of her maids and a man whose grey uniform’s badges named him the Sentry Captain. Reece made sure the ALP was carefully secured under his shirt in the band of his trousers.
“Mum!” he called. Abigail froze in the act of dabbing her eyes and gawked at him. He hadn’t called her that since he was an Eleven, but desperate times, desperate measures. He had her attention. “Have you seen Nivy?”
“Nivy?” Abigail repeated vaguely. “Oh, you mean that horrid little ragdoll. No. I imagine she fled the scene when…” Her eyes widened, and she lowered her handkerchief thoughtfully. “Of course! The dollymop must have let some of her dimridge Westerner friends into the mansion and—Sentry Garth, you must have her found immediately—”
Reece was already off and running, leaving behind the crowded hallway. Nivy couldn’t be involved like Abigail thought, because Liem had known Nivy would be left alone if he was taken. Why had she run?
It wasn’t till Reece had reached the mansion’s ground floor that he realized he was still clutching the book that had been on Liem’s desk. Crossing the parlor, where a sentry with a voice transcriber was recording the testimony of a maid with her hair in a net, Reece flipped it open. He paused. It was antique-bound with real parchment and fabric, and its pages were so thin, they were nearly translucent. But that’s not what held his attention. Every one of the pages was crammed to the edges with writing in a strange language made up of blocks and strange squiggles. What was this? He didn’t have time to wonder.
Nivy couldn’t have gone far, and she couldn’t outrun a bim.
VIII
The Merits of Minding Your Own Business
…laryngotracheal groove in the caudoventral wall of the primitive pharynx…
Hayden was studying. Every other student home from The Owl was probably enjoying the brisk yet sunny weather, but he wanted to make sure he entered his final clinicals especially ready for Tutor Macintosh’s infamous exams. Besides, he liked studying. And he was enjoying the nice weather.
The Rice home was number nine on Chippenham Way, a road of identical brick row houses all squeezed for space. It had a flat face with green and red ivy curling about its white shutters, an iron picket fence in bad need of repainting, and a single rocking chair on its front step. Hayden was sitting cross-legged on his patch of a yard, letting the sun light up the pages of his books, The Neurosciences by G.H. Smith and Qualifying for Physics by Rudolf Ayre.
He moved his hand back and forth over the pages of his journal, filling out an equation with fervor. Numbers spoke their own carefully articulated language. That language made sense to him, while a lot of other things, things that Reece or Gideon excelled in, confounded him. Girls. Guns. Those were the two biggest, but there were more.
Speaking of Gideon. Tapping his writing wand thoughtfully against his chin, Hayden looked up just as the Pan vaulted over the picket fence. He was supposed to be staying with the Rices for the holiday, since Mordecai’s house was back on Atlas, but since leaving The Estate at Emathia, he hadn’t been to Chippenham Way once.
Hayden wearily set down his journal and looked him up and down. He hadn’t changed his clothes, he hadn’t shaved, and he looked decidedly smug. The first two weren’t all that surprising, but the smugness was something to be uneasy about.
“Do I even want to know where you’ve been?” He’d probably been catching up with some of his more unruly Pantedan comrades or visiting with Ariel, his stop-and-go Pantedan flame (who Hayden thought was a bit of a nightmare, to be honest).
With a wolfish grin, Gideon crouched down on the grass, letting the canvas bag he’d been lugging over his shoulder flop down beside him. “I would.”
“You and I aren’t exactly similar. But fine. Where—”
“Pullin’ a job for Mordecai. Paid pretty good too, considerin’—”
“Stop, just stop.” Hayden waved his hands with a grimace. “Forget I asked.”
Gideon shrugged, eying Hayden’s books with a twinkling eye. Hayden’s study habits had always been a joke to him. Him, who never scored higher than a .3 in any of his classes except his GR’s (Generally Required courses, meaning his handcraft elective, which was Artisan Carpentry, and his physical application class, which was…was it Ship Repelling or Gentleman’s Combat?). Thinking this, Hayden colored and busied himself with piling his books in a neat and alphabetized stack. It hadn’t been a very nice thing to think.
“We have a bed made up for you on the sofa, and there’s celery soup in the coolant pantry.”
“Sophie home?”
“She’s at the postal office,” Hayden answered, lifting his books with a strained grunt. Gideon swept them out of his hands with one arm and started for the house. “She’s been working a lot recently.”
“Huh,” Gideon humphed, kicking open the front door. He marched in through the kitchen, narrowly avoiding a run-in with a tower of Father’s books, leaning in a precarious stack on the yellow-tiled floor. “Those ginghoos in her department still botherin’ her?”
Gently closing the door, pulling off his scuffed-up clogs, and then lining them up evenly against the wall, Hayden laughed. Sophie worked sorting mail for pneumatic tube del
ivery with other children her age, including some rough-around-the-edges Westerners. There had been a few times she had come home from work in tears because of a hurtful word from one or another. One of those times, Gideon and Reece had been visiting. The way Hayden understood it, their next visit had been to the postal office.
“Not since you spoke with them, no.”
Gideon snorted as he dropped Hayden’s books onto the wooden countertop. “You mean not since we mussed them up.”
“You didn’t do that.”
“Dirt straight we did.”
“They were just a couple twelve-year-olds.”
“Big ‘uns, though. Almost had to shoot them.”
Hayden opened his mouth, cross, but paused when he heard heavy footfall on the drive. He turned around just as his father came rushing in, nearly tripping over the doorstep. He only had one arm in his jacket; the other was struggling with an overstuffed briefcase.
“Boys, there you are,” Hugh gasped, panting. Hayden hurried forward to take his jacket and fold it over a kitchen chair. “I only just heard.”
“Heard what?” Gideon asked as he opened the tin coolant pantry built into the wall, rummaging around to find the celery soup. He made a noise of triumph and reemerged with a small pot and ladle.
Sitting down with a heavy sigh, Hugh pulled off his spectacles to rub the bridge of his nose. “The duke is coming home.”
“But you said it would be weeks yet before he was done on Cronus Twelve,” Hayden said, surprised, as he pulled a chair out from the table for himself.
Hugh altogether folded his spectacles and placed them to the side, then laid his palms flat on the table. “There’s been…an accident. At Emathia.”
CLANG, Gideon heavily set down the pot of soup. “What kind’a accident?”
“Reece?” Hayden added anxiously.
“No. Liem. It’s all over the log casts and wireless waves. He was abducted from the mansion last night.”
The room was silent for a moment as Gideon and Hayden took this in, each in his own way. For Hayden, that meant putting his face in his hands and absorbing his father’s words in thoughtful silence. For Gideon, it entailed slamming himself down into a chair with a grumbled curse that made Hugh frown disapprovingly.
“Abducted?” Gideon repeated.
Hayden said quietly, “Kidnapped.”
“I ain’t stupid, I know what it means!”
Hayden let him stew, his mind hard at work on something else. The timing. Reece was right—this was all too coincidental to be coincidence at all.
“Would…” Hayden chewed his lower lip as he lifted his eyes to his father’s. “Would you happen to have access to the duke’s personnel files?”
Hugh considered for a moment, staring steadily at his son though without his bifocals, he probably couldn’t see much beyond his nose. After a moment, he let out a breath, felt around till his hand found the spectacles, and stood to start gathering the accoutrements needed for tea, a red tin kettle, a strainer, and a leather sheaf of herbs.
“I do, but that’s the last you’ll ever hear about them from me. Every last one of them is confidential. Put it out of your mind, boys. The duke will have sentries and Vees on the case. If there was any reason for him to doubt someone in Parliament—”
“Not Parliament,” Hayden interjected as he reached into the cupboard behind him to ready three stout mugs for his father. He paused to shudder as the word Vees caught up to his ears, tinkering the mugs, giving away that he sometimes still had nightmares about The Veritas, about what Parliament allowed them to do. “Eldritch.”
Realization dawned on Hugh’s face, followed by horror. He noisily dropped the kettle on the thermal burners. “You are not to get involved in this, Hayden! Headmaster Eldritch is not a man to be trifled with! What do you think he would do to you if he thought you were being a busybody? Expel you, at the very least. Promise me you’ll leave it alone. If the headmaster has anything to do with this—perish the thought—The Veritas will smell it out.”
Ashamed, Hayden made himself small in his chair and avoided looking at Gideon, who he heard snort dismissively. But he didn’t know. He’d never met a Vee, like Hayden had when Parliament had sent one to appropriate Mum’s body for medical research after The Five Year Pandemic. That’s when the nightmares had started.
The kitchen door swung open so unexpectedly that Gideon and Hayden both leaped to their feet, Gideon brandishing his revolver quicker than Hayden could have brought up his fists—not that he did, of course.
Reece stared at them, looking amused, but first and foremost tired, with red, bleary eyes.
“Tea, Reece?” Hugh asked politely, as if nothing were out of the ordinary about the lot of them behaving like a bunch of jumpy first-time-flyers.
“No, thank you.” Reece reached into his black flight jacket and pulled out a floppy leather book, which he dropped on the table in front of Hayden with a thud. He pulled his riding goggles out of his wind-tousled hair and pocketed them. “Do you recognize this language?”
Hayden took one glance at the book’s strangely shaped letters, like different-sized squares and little decorative spirals, and shook his head. Peering down over his shoulder, his father made a fascinated noise and asked, “Where did you get this? I’ve never seen such a script…and the book itself…it’s in pristine condition, despite its obvious age. Beautiful.”
“So you have no idea where the language is from?”
“No,” Hayden and Hugh said together.
Frowning, Reece swung a chair about and straddled it. “It was Liem’s.” He pulled a handful of tiny metal fragments out of his coat pocket and rolled them in the flat of his hand. Cufflinks, Hayden saw in bewilderment. “It’s the only thing I got out of his study before the Veritas swept in and confiscated everything down to his dirty socks. That and these cufflinks.”
“We just heard, I’m so sorry—”
“Think it’s important?” Gideon broke in, grabbing the book out of Hayden’s hand and squinting down at it.
“Wishful thinking, I’m sure.” Wrapping his fist around the cufflinks, Reece rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes. “But look at the last page.”
Licking his thumb, Gideon turned to the last page. His dark eyebrows pinched together. “I don’t get it.”
“What?” Hayden asked, craning his neck to see.
Reece raised his head and gratefully accepted a cup of tea from Hugh even though he hadn’t wanted one. “It’s on a few other pages, too. I found it early this morning when I was flipping through there. It struck me as odd after these.” He rattled Liem’s cufflinks in a fist.
“What?” Hayden repeated.
Gideon brought the book around to Hayden and Reece’s side of the table and laid it open on its back. He jabbed a finger at the emblem messily scribbled in the margin of the righthand page—an A inside a circle, inside a pair of wings.
“Aurelia’s emblem. It keeps turning up. Like I wish Nivy would.” Reece sighed. Aware of the confused looks passing over his head, he explained, “She’s gone. She bleeding disappeared with all my answers the same time Liem did. I searched for her all night on my bim, but it’s like she just vanished. I couldn’t have picked up a trail if I had a Triton-class ship to level the whole forest.”
Thumbing the barrel of his revolver, Gideon raised his eyebrows, impressed. “You want I should go look for her?”
Before Reece could say either way, Hugh cleared his throat pointedly, cupping his mug of tea in long, bony fingers. “Reece, Gideon, you know you both are like sons to me. And while I know that doesn’t guarantee me any sort of authority…maybe you’ll hear me out as a friend.” Gideon and Reece both looked up curiously. “Don’t do this. The deeper you delve into this—”
“Hey!” Sophie’s delighted voice broke in. She was so light and quiet when she walked, they hadn’t even heard her come in the back door. Standing in the doorway in a faded yellow dress and bloomers, she looked like a flowe
r, like a bright posy. “Golly, it’s crowded in here. I didn’t know you were coming over, Reece.”
Reece smiled and straightened up in his chair, smart enough to know not to let Sophie think anything was wrong. If she was a posy, she was a posy with the most curious disposition a flower ever had. There was also her knack of remembering things she heard almost to-the-word to consider; it made her a quick learner, a valuable employee at The Postal Office, and a very adequate little spy.
“Does that mean you didn’t make me any biscuits?” Reece teased.
Glowing, Sophie stepped up to her father, who stooped to let her plant a kiss on his pale cheek. “I’ll make a batch quicker than you can say chimera.”
As Reece started teasingly, “Ccchhh….”, and Sophie laughed, rushing about to gather her ingredients, Hayden thoughtfully fiddled with the red pin on his father’s jacket, a lion’s head in the shape of a heart. It had been Mother’s. Juliet Rice had had such a strong personality, warm, selfless, brave—lionhearted—sometimes he felt the echo of her here in this house, like she’d left an imprint of herself behind for them. He tried to wrap up himself in that now, to ward off the sudden cold he didn’t know if anyone else felt.
Another week passed, the first uneventful one in what felt like ages. Hayden didn’t see much of Gideon and Reece, Reece because he was being forced to help Abigail in her preparations for the duke’s return, Gideon because he kept slinking off in the middle of the night to work jobs probably of the illegal sort, but he was busy enough on his own. He watched six projector books cover-to-cover, practiced his physician skills on elderly Mr. Muggets next door (who had the hissing sniffles), dug the house out of the dust and disrepair that Hugh never had time to tend to, and tried not to think about what his return to The Owl would entail.
Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) Page 7