by Sharon Shinn
He gave the smallest smile. “I know. I have been so fortunate to find you—” He stopped abruptly, as if there was more to that sentence. Then without another word, he thrust open his side door and leaped from the car. I followed more slowly. At the front of the building, he was bending over an electronic keypad inlaid on the sturdy metal door. The code seemed long and complicated; he certainly did not want unexpected intruders breaking into this facility.
We stepped inside a wide, half lit room that under normal circumstances would have seemed comfortable—its furnishings were quiet and well-made, its proportions were pleasing, its green and blue colors were easy on the eyes. But tonight it was anything but welcoming. Two of the chairs were overturned, crockery had been broken and scattered across the woven rug, and a man lay, bleeding and moaning, on the pretty tapestried sofa.
While I stood at the doorway gaping, Mr. Ravenbeck crossed the floor in a few strides and knelt by the injured man. “Merrick! Can you hear me? Are you better?”
“Everett,” a faint voice whispered back. “I cannot breathe.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you can breathe,” was the brisk response. “If you could not, you would be dead by now. I have been gone a good fifteen minutes.”
“My throat—she has broken my windpipe—my God, she is so strong—”
“Your throat may be bruised. There is nothing I can do about that. What about your arm? Has the bleeding stopped?”
“I don’t know, I can’t—I can hardly feel it, it is pain but it is numbness too, like the nerves have failed—Oh, God, Everett, will I lose my arm? Will I lose my life?”
“You most certainly are not going to die, and if you lose a limb, well, there are very fine clinics on Brierly and Corbramb where you can get a replacement, you know. It is nothing to be so fretful about.”
I thought Mr. Ravenbeck spoke with great callousness to a man who was clearly in great distress and, perhaps, mortal danger. It occurred to me, however, that Mr. Ravenbeck was also blazingly, blindly furious with Mr. Merrick, and that some of his lack of sympathy sprang from that fact. I wondered what the poor man had done to deserve such wrath, and I took a step into the room. “Perhaps, the PhysiChamber back at the manor—” I began.
Mr. Ravenbeck did not even look at me. “No! On no account is he to go anywhere he might be seen. Which eliminates the PhysiChamber at the compound as well.”
“But he seems most dreadfully hurt, sir,” I pointed out.
“No more than he deserves for his stupidity,” Mr. Ravenbeck muttered. “I told him not to—” He stopped, and shook his head violently.
“No matter how stupid he has been, you cannot wish him to die here,” I said, coming closer. “We must get him some care.”
Mr. Ravenbeck nodded. “I have given him drugs that will ease his pain, and when they have taken effect, I will fly him to the spaceport. He has a small, private craft docked there which, no doubt, has its own medical systems. He will be fine once he is installed there.”
“If he survives the trip!”
“He will survive it.”
I knew a moment’s flash of anger myself. “Why did you call me here, then, if it was not to help you administer to this poor injured man? Certainly it was not to accept my advice.”
“No—it was your expertise I wanted, not your opinion. This building is protected by the fields of the mining compound, but it has its own generator system on the next level down. Something went awry there, which is why the sirens sounded. I need you to check for any glitches in the system—make sure the inhabitants of this cabin are not in danger.”
“Inhabitants?” I said sharply, for I had seen no one except the unfortunate Mr. Merrick. “Who might they be?”
“Persons who will not trouble you,” he said tersely. “My job is to stabilize Merrick, then fly him to town. Yours is to study the systems below and make whatever repairs might be necessary. I will return for you as swiftly as I can, but I warn you, it will be a matter of hours. I want you to stay downstairs, no matter what noises might sound above you. Do you understand? Go below, and wait for me there, no matter what else you think you hear.”
“Mr. Ravenbeck, is someone else in this house in trouble?”
He hesitated a moment, as if contemplating a lie. “There is someone else in this house who is not fit company,” he said at last. “I swear to you on my life you are in no danger. The guards are in place, the locks are secured, no harm threatens you. But I am uneasy about the systems below, or I would not have dragged you out of your bed so late at night.”
I brushed this aside. “I am happy to render to you any service that I can. I am willing to do more, if more is required.”
He smiled so briefly I thought I might have imagined the faint lightening of his features. “Someday you may be called upon to redeem that promise,” he said. “For now, it is your professional skill I require.”
“Everett!” Mr. Merrick gasped from his couch. “I am dying! Do not leave me here!”
Mr. Ravenbeck glanced back at the injured man. “In a moment. Five more minutes and the drugs will take hold. Then you will feel much better, and I will take you away.” He looked back at me. “Can you find your way downstairs? I do not like to leave him.”
“I believe so. I will look for you when you return, no sooner.”
I turned to go, but he stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Do PanEquists believe in angels, Jenna?”
I smiled. “No, sir.”
“For you cannot be what you do not believe in. But I believe in angels, Jenna, and you most assuredly are one. Now go. Be good—and do not stir until I fetch you.”
I left the room and made my way to the hallway, where a series of three doors could be found. The first one I tried was a closet, but the second one led belowstairs, and a simple wall switch illuminated my way. In a few moments I was down in the small generator room, looking around to assess the situation.
At first glance, there was nothing amiss here—nothing so overt as the destruction that had been inflicted on the systems at the manor. But upon closer inspection, I found that a few crucial switches had been thrown—nothing to cause profound damage, but certainly enough to trigger the alarms. Since they were still in the alarm position, I concluded that an override had been engaged somewhere in the mining compound, and that none of my tasks here would be urgent. Nonetheless, I was here and charged with safety; best I should look around and see what else I could do to make the systems functional again.
I had not been long in investigating the layout when I heard Mr. Ravenbeck hauling Mr. Merrick from the room. At first I thought the sounds of his hearty swearing were drifting down the stairwell, but then I realized that an air vent of some kind was carrying noises from the ground-level floor to the basement. I could quite clearly catch Mr. Merrick’s pants of pain and Mr. Ravenbeck’s responsive oaths, as well as what sounded like heels being dragged across a hardboard floor. Then the door slammed, and I heard the faint beeping sound of the lock being reset. A few minutes later, the muffled roar of the motor, and then silence.
Back to my work. It seemed to me that this generator room was ill-maintained and rarely serviced, for the waste disposal system was flashing a steady “near-full” message and a few of the safety breakers had blown and not been replaced. Secondary systems had apparently selfactivated to keep the energy flow continuous, but there was no reason for me not to fix the breakers while I was there. I could also start the waste-disposal mechanism that would carry the radioactive byproducts into the underground storage units where the waste from the manor was also stored; it was a simple enough process, though it required a series of well-timed steps, and whoever was watching over this system seemed to have never found the time to perform the task.
Well, I had plenty of time. Hours and hours. I could clean the whole basement by hand with a bucket and a rag, if I wanted.
I had been absorbed in my work for perhaps an hour when I heard the first inexplicable noises f
rom upstairs. There was a heavy thud, as if a sofa had been overturned, and then a series of frantic grunts and clicks and squeaks that came in such rapid, planned patterns that I almost believed they had to represent speech. Did Mr. Ravenbeck keep some kind of wild animal locked up here—something part bird, part ape, part native life-form? Was that what had slipped its leash, assaulted Mr. Merrick, and scrambled downstairs to toy with sophisticated machinery? No—that last supposition, at least, made no sense. The switches had been thrown with intent; their deployment had not been the random act of a savage mind. More likely would be the sort of havoc I had seen wreaked upon our systems in the manor basement, unthinking and undifferentiated violence.
The passionate, incomprehensible voice spoke again, its tone simultaneously so mad and so pleading that I began to feel the skin on my back wrinkle in horror. Softer, more muffled, another voice answered, and I could not tell if this individual spoke true words or responded in kind. My hands began to tremble; I had to stop a moment to compose myself. Another sudden stomp, as if the creature above were throwing a tantrum, and this time the other voice spoke more clearly.
“Enough, then. Quiet, you. You’ve already caused enough trouble for one night, don’t you think?”
My arms, my face, my stomach prickled with unease. For that was a voice I knew. That was Gilda Parenon.
Whom was she watching, in this unused, ill-kept house on the fringes of the manor, and what kind of threat was posed to us all by her charge?
For a few moments I stood, tensely listening, almost refusing to breathe in order that I might hear more of the strange conversation transpiring above me, but there were no more sounds. My thoughts were racing. If the creature herself (Mr. Merrick had called her a “she”) had not flown downstairs to meddle with the machinery, had Gilda Parenon performed that task? How had the scenario gone? Perhaps Mr. Merrick had arrived unannounced on the doorstep—perhaps he, like Mr. Ravenbeck, had some emotional or financial stake in this beast upstairs—and he had let himself in without sufficient warning. And the animal had broken loose and attempted to brutalize him with so much ferocity that Gilda Parenon could not with her own strength save him. So she ran to the basement and flipped the switches that would cause the sirens to howl, hoping only to draw enough attention to receive aid. Yes, that seemed likely enough to me—if any of this could be called likely, if any of it could be possible, if I was not having some strange delusional dream of my own.
Unfreezing from my watchful stance, I moved more slowly around the room, continuing to listen over the faint sounds of my own progress. So quietly that I first did not realize what I was hearing, the thing upstairs began a weird clicking and panting sequence that sounded less like true breathing than a faulty motor trying to cough itself to a functional revolution. I stopped again, feeling once more that unpleasant premonitory shiver down my back. Click-click-click-pant-click-click-click- pant-click ... click ... click ...
Then a rattling, jolting sound as if someone smashed a crowbar along a metal grate. Gilda Parenon heaving a pipe across the bars of a cage? “Quiet, I said! Be still! You shall not get out again tonight, oh no, no matter who else is abroad.”
And then I heard a sound that reversed the blood in my veins, and caused my scalp to lift a quarter inch from my skull. For the creature began a high, steady keening, faint but piteous, that went on and on and on and on. She did not pause to breathe-not for five minutes, not for ten—not for the hour that followed. Unbroken, unvarying, inhuman, the thin heartbroken wail continued, as tireless and unstoppable as a siren with a shattered failsafe. I sat petrified in my basement stronghold, made stupid with fear, and listened forever to the sound of that alien cry.
Mr. Ravenbeck found me sleeping four hours later. Reeder, you may ask (no one else will, since no one else will hear this story) how I could possibly have slept under such bizarre circumstances. I cannot answer this myself. I suppose my exhausted body could not endure its tightly coiled posture for longer than an hour or two; adrenaline sucked every ounce of alertness from my brain and turned my fatigued muscles to jelly. I fell asleep alone and in darkness, the sound of that hopeless whimper bleating in my ears. I woke to weak daylight clawing in through the small high windows and Mr. Ravenbeck shaking me by the shoulder.
“Jenna! Are you awake? Jenna!”
I gasped and leaped to my feet, terrified lest that animal abovestairs had gotten loose and come searching for me. My fear must have been plain to read, for Mr. Ravenbeck’s face was instantly flooded with remorse and concern.
“It is only I, Jenna, come back from the spaceport to relieve you,” he said kindly. “What demons were you expecting?”
I tried to catch my breath and calm my heart. “Whichever ones are lurking in the bedrooms above me.”
He gave me a sharp look. “Ah! And what did you hear during your vigils?”
“The voice of Gilda Parenon trying to soothe—some creature who would not be comforted. Mr. Ravenbeck, what is it you keep here?”
He shook his head. “I cannot answer that, Jenna. Not now, at any rate. Someday. Suffice it to say that I am struggling to act for that creature’s good—that I would let nothing harm it as I would strain every nerve to keep it from harming others. There is a story so long it cannot be told, and so brief I could say it in a sentence—but it is not a story I can tell. The words will not cross my lips. Will you accept that? Will you believe in me, and trust in me, till a later day, when I gather my strength to offer you the truth?”
I was speechless. His words were spoken with such solemnity and such desperation that I could doubt neither his sincerity nor his agony. I had never seen a man so near to complete despair. Yet he still kept a quiet dignity, a pride borne of much grief. I should have asked him a million questions—I should have recounted for him the nightmares I had just endured. And yet I nodded dumbly, too moved to speak.
He smiled, as if it cost him reserves of energy he did not have to make that brave effort. “That’s my Jenna,” he said. “You are a rare angel, indeed. Someday—when I can—someday—” He shook his head, unable to complete his thought.
Impulsively I put out a hand, to silence him or comfort him or comfort myself, I do not know. “Tell me at that distant time,” I said. “For now, we both need to return to the manor and sleep.”
“I have guests to entertain.”
“If you do not plan to entertain them with news of this night’s escapade, I do not know that you will have much to say,” I retorted with some of my usual asperity. “How is Mr. Merrick, by the way? Did he survive your rough handling?”
“He did, and now is safely ensconced upon his own vessel. And let me tell you, I was not half so rough with him as I would have liked to have been! But that too is part of the story that will come at a later date.”
“Come,” I said, urging him upstairs with my hand still upon his arm. “I am exhausted if you are not. Return me to the manor.”
There were no noises except those we made as we climbed the steps and let ourselves out the door. Mr. Ravenbeck conscientiously reset the lock, then helped me into his vehicle. Somewhere-perhaps on his journey to the spaceport—he had abandoned the mining car and retrieved his own aeromobile. I leaned against its luxurious seat and willed myself not to sleep until I was safely back in my room. We did not speak again until we had pulled up at the rear of the manor.
I gave him a sideways look; he smiled. “I thought we might encounter fewer people if we came in the back way, so that we might have fewer questions to answer,” he explained.
“Mrs. Farraday—the cook—Mary and Rinda,” I enumerated. “We are likely to run into all of them.”
“Yes, and they may feel free to interrogate you, but they would not question me so boldly,” he said, his smile growing.
“That is a comfort,” I said dryly. “Since I have done you such a great favor this day, I have one to ask in return.”
“Granted.”
I nodded. “Then I will not see you at d
inner tonight, for my request is that I be excused from further interaction with your guests.”
“I see that I spoke too hastily,” he said. “I will give you this night free, but I will expect you at the table with us tomorrow.”
I opened the vehicle door and stepped out. “No, you granted the gift unheard, and now you cannot rescind it. And I thank you. Almost the dreadful evening was worth it if it has rescued me from worse torture in the future.”
And on the sound of his low laughter, I entered the back door of the manor and escaped into the lower reaches of the halls.
Chapter 9
When I woke that afternoon, it was to a sense of well-being that I could neither justify nor explain. Perhaps the hours of unbroken sleep had something to do with my feeling of quiet exhilaration, but I did not think so. What a night! A terrible night! And yet what a chance to prove my worth to Mr. Ravenbeck and spend precious moments alone in his company. I had acquitted myself well, and he had been grateful to me, and so even such a wretched adventure must be counted a success.
Still, I had to admit to a slight embarrassment when, once clean and dressed, I ventured downstairs to see if I could find food. It was well past the lunch hour, so I did not expect to find Mrs. Farraday or my other usual companions at the table, but I was not surprised to find the seneschal in the kitchen going over the evening’s meal.
“Jenna! My gracious! I had begun to think you would never waken! Mr. Ravenbeck told us you returned early this morning and that I was not to disturb you on any account, but I had begun to fear you had fallen ill, and I was just wondering if I should come in and check on you.”
“No, I am perfectly fine. I do not know that I have ever slept so long, however.”
“And what was the cause of the alarm being raised last night? Do you know? I did not like to ask Mr. Ravenbeck.”
“Genevieve, could I have some bread and cheese perhaps? Oh, yes, the fruit compote would be delicious,” I said to the cook, stalling for time while I mentally reviewed my story. It seemed likely that she would not be able to follow me if I gravely answered her in technical jargon. “Yes, there was a problem in one of the outbuildings in the mining compound. An electrical malfunction in one of the switches. We had to rely on the mine tech’s override command to keep the forcefields whole, which of course is just a temporary measure, so I worked to repair the damage with a few reinforced cables—”