Fool Me Twice (Filidor Vesh)

by Matthew Hughes

  “To your specifications, full and complete.”

  Erslan Flastovic stared across the table at the Archon’s apprentice, and the older man’s face was the battleground in a war between a present fear and a lifelong yearning. It was clear to Filidor which had won even before the man nodded and said, “Very well.”

  But then the chief mummer raised an admonitory finger and added, “But only so long as you remain undiscovered. If they come for you, we must disown you. A dream’s no comfort when you’re shackled to a wall.”

  “Agreed,” said Filidor, and looked to the Florreys.

  In one voice, they said, “We’re in.”

  Flastovic acquired fresh bed linens from a closet, then showed Filidor to the cabin that had been Ovile Germolian’s. It was a small space, efficiently laid out, though now its drawers and cupboards hung open in testament to the sudden removal of the disclamator’s possessions.

  The robe and mask the seducer had worn during his public performances hung in the back of a built-in armoire. Filidor examined both and found a small glass vial in the garment’s inner pocket. He pulled the stopper and sniffed the crystalline powder within, detecting a faint musky odor.

  “Integrator,” he said, “what is this?” He described the substance.

  Does it taste bitter or cloyingly sweet?

  The young man wet his fingertip and touched it to the stuff. “Sweet.”

  In light of Germolian’s relationship with the girl, it is most likely extract of the espolianth plant. It stimulates a discrete region of the brain to induce an obsession of affection in the victim, focused on the first person seen after the powder is administered. The effect is intense though short lived, yet while the stuff is working, the victim will do anything for the object of love. After a day or two, the drug wears off, unless the victim is freshly dosed. Be careful not to inhale it, or the next person you see may find you tiresome.

  “Is the Germolian of your realm known for such tricks?”

  The voice paused, then said, No. But then he is probably not known for them here either, or Flastovic would not have engaged him.

  Filidor made his bed and lay in it. He was troubled by what he had learned about espolianth extract. He had experienced a similar upset upon first sight of Emmlyn Podarke, the event from which all of his present troubles had descended. Now he wondered if it might all have been the doing of some errant molecule in that morning’s cup of punge, some chemical fragment that had happened to lodge in a particular synapse of his neural matrix just as he chanced to look up and see her. But as he thought of her, that same feeling of breathless possibility again tickled within his lungs, the sensation almost as strong now as when she had been before his eyes. He reasoned that his emotion could not be a mere happenstance of transient chemistry, not unless the same molecules were coincidentally to be found in the coarse purplish wine from Henwaye’s storehouse.

  “I will find Emmlyn Podarke and we will see how things fall,” he murmured to the darkness of the groundeater’s cabin.

  May I suggest we deal with other priorities first? said the integrator, but Filidor was not listening.

  ***

  The morning was difficult. Filidor arose and took a dose of Colophant’s Universal Assuagement, which repaired the effects of the purple Pwyfus. He found all three Flastovics seated at the galley table, but the Florreys were absent. The young man offered appropriate words and gestures for the beginning of the day, and accepted Erslan Flastovic’s invitation to sit, which was followed by the offer of a cup of aromatic punge, a thick slice of toasted bread and some small flavored sausages. A few days earlier, Filidor would have found the breakfast impossibly dull, but his standards had been altered by the devastation of Henwaye’s cuisine.

  Gavne regarded the new addition to their number with a less than welcoming eye, but she soon made him aware that her disapproval did not arise from any qualities of his or from the circumstances in which he had joined the troupe. “I am accustomed to be consulted,” she said to Filidor, but her attention shifted to her husband as she concluded, “and not to find my affairs settled for me.”

  Flastovic apparently had discovered something absorbing in his half filled mug of punge, and could not tear his gaze away. But he muttered something that suggested an apologetic attitude, to which his spouse said, “Well, then,” and picked up her knitting.

  The girl Chloe sat at the end of the table. Filidor’s side-eyed appraisal of her mood left him in no doubt that she found every detail of her surroundings to be far from satisfactory, especially her father. She picked at a plate of fruits and toasted grains steeped in cream, her narrow lips thinned further by being drawn into a frown.

  Filidor unobtrusively brought out the vial of espolianth extract and showed it to Flastovic. “I found this in the cabin,” he whispered, then quietly described the powder’s use and properties.

  The mummer chief’s eyes seemed to swell in their sockets and his face grew pale. His hands clenched upon the edges of the table. “I had thought it the strange passion of a strange child, but this...,” he said, and could not find the words to express his rage and horror. For a long moment, he was silent except for the sound of breaths that seemed to come from deep within him, while his wife looked from her husband to Filidor and to the little vial in the young man’s hand.

  “There must be another condition to our help,” Flastovic said, at last, his voice grim.

  “I will see that Germolian is brought to an accounting,” Filidor said.

  “Our reckonings of his debt may vary,” Flastovic said.

  “I will be stern,” the Archon’s nephew assured him, tucking the vial away in an inner pocket.

  Then, of course, the matter had to be explained to Gavne. Flastovic suggested that Chloe withdraw, but she would not, and sat with her head bowed as her father made her mother understand what the disclamator had done to their daughter. Gavne’s expression grew severe, and she described Ovile Germolian in terms not usually heard from respectable matrons, even among show folk. Then she put an arm around her daughter.

  “I am sorry,” Filidor said, and at the sound of his voice, Chloe briefly raised her head and flashed him a look of such bitter animosity that the young man felt as if some chilled liquid had been splashed into his face. Then she fled the lounge, her mother’s sigh following her.

  Filidor opened his mouth to speak, though he was not at all sure what words might come out. He was never to know, because at that moment, the outer door flew open and the Florreys came clamoring in, one of them clutching a rolled up copy of the Implicator, which he quickly spread over Filidor’s plate. “Here’s news,” he said, “and none of it to the good.”

  The Archon’s apprentice looked and did not care for what he saw. This time, his image had been subjected to artistic alterations, a heavy darkening under the eyes and a deep shadowing of the hollows in his cheeks, and he thought to detect a slight lengthening of his chin. All of this combined to recreate him in a sinister and villainous mode, a creature of cold appetites and devious stratagems. To underscore the impression, a block of text next to the perverted likeness read, Hunt for a Madman; Day Four.

  But it was not his own bastardized image that struck a chill into Filidor. It was the larger picture, occupying a good portion of the page, showing a man with disordered hair and staring eyes, his hands bound before him in official restraints. The headline beneath the image read, Fugitive’s accomplice?, and the face staring out at Filidor was that of Etch Valderoyn.

  The young man turned to the accompanying text, which again lay under the byline of Tet Folbrey: Scullaway Point’s peerless constabulary last night brought to bay a suspected henchman of the notorious transgressor Filidor Vesh, who is sought for dastardly crimes against the common peace and for an unprovoked attack upon the person of a high Archonate official.

  Quickly, Filidor skimmed the rest of the article, t
hen returned to the top and read it more slowly, translating the gossip columnist’s overexuberant style as he went. It appeared that Etch Valderoyn and a group of “unidentified ne’er-do-wells” had been drinking at Tinkum’s Reach, a waterfront haunt, when talk at a neighboring table had turned to the man wanted for assaulting Faubon Bassariot. Some uncomplimentary speculation concerning Filidor’s character, offered by a large dockworker and overheard by Valderoyn, had prompted the latter to fling himself across the former’s table, after which several punches had been thrown, one or two of them landing. Both sets of companions had enlisted themselves in their friends’ service, creating a general melee, which had dissolved into mutual flight through several doors and windows when a squad of constables had arrived to intervene. Valderoyn had assaulted a number of these late arrivals, vowing to defend the name of Filidor Vesh against all comers. He had been taken to the local jail -- called the Scullaway Point Osgood -- and a search was underway for those who had been with him, whom Folbrey characterized as “two or three defaulters of similar mold, believed to be associated with the ill-famed sea-reiver, Gwallyn Henwaye, whose name was heard being bandied about in the tavern before the altercation.”

  The last paragraphs particularly summoned and held Filidor’s attention. They declared that the prisoner was to be held only overnight at the Scullaway Point jail; in the morning, he would be transferred to the Archonate bureau, and there he would be collected by the acting Archon himself, Faubon Bassariot, described by Tet Folbrey as “he who with admirable pluck and bravery withstood the treacherous blows of the evil Vesh and rallied to the ancient cause of the Archonate.” The Archon himself, “increasingly vexed and disheartened by his nephew’s opprobrious conduct, has retired to a point of obscurity, leaving the affairs of the realm in the capable hands of worthy Bassariot.”

  A vision revealed itself within Filidor’s mind. He saw an open square outside the local Archonate office, its staff arrayed in formal order to receive the occupant of a green and black volante that has just swept down from the sky. The vehicle’s door opens and out steps the portly architect of all his ills, an expression of bland serenity on his porcine features. The officials smartly salute and blow their whistles of rank, and just then Filidor appears by Bassariot’s side, cloaked in Obblob invisibility, and commits upon the person of the “acting Archon” all the outrages and injuries he is unjustly accused of, and a few more besides, before escaping in the ensuing confusion.

  The young man took a moment to savor the image of Faubon Bassariot rolling on the flagstones, batting ineffectually at his unseen assailant, then he put the vision aside. The issue, he told himself, was not the discomfiting of Bassariot, but the rescue of Etch Valderoyn, before that simple and sincere man fell into the clutches of the usurper and his friends. Filidor was sure that the honest sailor would not willingly reveal what he knew of the fugitive’s doings since the Empyreal, but he had no doubt that Bassariot would have the truth out of the prisoner, by guile if not by more vicious procedures.

  Something must be done. If this had been a romance, and Filidor its stalwart hero, he could have swept in and dazzled his opponents with a display of martial skills, seized Valderoyn and dashed off in some conveniently available vehicle, losing his pursuers by a further demonstration of skill and daring. Unfortunately, Filidor had stark reality to deal with, and doubted that his slim capacity for heroics would carry him through. He decided he had best confer with the voice in his head. “I must be by myself for a while,” he told the mummers.

  He had left the bottle of purple wine on the galley counter the night before. He picked it up and turned to leave, but noted that it was now only about a third full. “Could one of you arrange a supply of this stuff?” he asked them. “I believe it is called purple Pwyfus.”

  “You could afford better,” said Flastovic.

  “No, I have a reason for choosing this particular label.”

  Flastovic’s features arranged themselves into that expression that conveys agreement with a point of view while dismissing whatever reasoning may have led to it. One of the Florreys brought his hand near his mouth and made his fingers tremble. “Like a fish,” said the other one, but by then Filidor was behind his cabin door.

  “Integrator,” he said, after several swallows of the purple, which threatened not to achieve harmony with the sausages, bread and punge already in his stomach, “I would have your counsel.”

  When the voice responded, Filidor quickly outlined the situation regarding Etch Valderoyn. “I was wondering,” he concluded, “how your Filidor might have dealt with the situation.”

  The voice was silent for so long that Filidor thought he had lost the connection. I regret, it finally said, that I do not know what to tell you.

  “Surely you must know your Archon better than any other observer,” the young man said.

  Indeed, said the voice, I know him to his last jottle. But my Filidor has never fallen into circumstances even remotely similar to yours. Nor could he.

  “Conjecture, then.”

  Another pause. I cannot. You may as well ask how Fizrayal -- here he referred to a bygone epicure whose exquisite taste had become the feedstock of legend -- would fare at a pie-eating contest.

  “I would be comforted to know how your man would respond in my situation,” said Filidor.

  He would probably, said the voice, ask for your advice. For my own part, I counsel boldness, invention and, most of all, speed.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  No. Not unless you continue to drink that incapacitating liquid, in which case no amount of advice will assist you. You should know, as well, that something in it is almost as corrosive to my sheets as the pilkies. After which, it would say no more.

  Left to his own resources, Filidor sat on the bed and felt a churn of fear in his stomach, which was already beset by his breakfast and the drink that had followed it. Briefly, he thought of doing nothing, his preferred strategy in so many prickly situations; but then he recalled that it was his penchant for acting like some small bundle of fur and senses, quivering in its hole in the ground, that had brought him to this disquieting moment of choice.

  Besides, there was the question of what he owed to Etch Valderoyn. On that point, he would have liked to have compared views with the other Filidor. He wondered if his alter ego, the acknowledged light of his generation, would have rated the sailor’s naive loyalty above his own safety, or whether he would have weighed both in a statesman’s balance and decided that the lesser man must be sacrificed for the greater.

  But he knew the question was pointless. The pragmatic view was that Valderoyn in Bassariot’s hands meant that soon the enemy who thought Filidor dead would know that he was not. At the moment, the purported search was probably a blind, a false emergency behind which Bassariot’s circle could consolidate their power. If the full wherewithal of the Archonate was brought to the task of finding him, the Archon’s apprentice knew he would not long stay free.

  Again, Filidor wondered where his uncle was and what was happening with him, and again felt a longing to be reconciled with the little man. He consoled himself that, as the integrator had said, the dwarf could fend for himself, but that was a thin blanket against a chill night.

  “Enough,” he told himself, and rose from the bed. “I’ll do what I can.”

  The mummers were able to tell him where the Archonate bureau stood. It was not far from the park, and Flastovic drew him a simple map. “Make all readiness to depart,” Filidor said. He laid a jewel from his store in the troupe leader’s palm. “You may hear a commotion. If I do not return soon after, pull up and haul away, and I will try to catch up with you on the road to Thurloyn Vale.”

  He turned and reached for the door, but Flastovic stopped him. From a cupboard, the mummer produced a box that unfolded into a chest of many compartments. From several of these he brought out a selection of wigs and facial h
air, as well as various prostheses for altering the shape and arrangement of the face. A few moments later, Filidor’s fine hair was buried under a thatch of coarse curls and his elegant features were distorted by the addition of a false nose, boneless mass that resembled a tuber grown between his eyes and lips. Small pads between his gums and the flesh of his cheeks altered his physiognomy to such an extent that he scarcely recognized the pug that stared back at him from the make-up box’s mirror.

  “That’ll help,” said one of the Florreys. “And if you want people not to look at you, stare them in the eye.”

  Feeling oddly emboldened by the disguise, Filidor made his way across the parkland and into the ways of Scullaway Point. The town, he now saw, was a collection of mainly wooden buildings, tall and angular and painted in bright colors, haphazardly arranged along wide, straight streets shaded by dark leaved trees that rustled constantly in the sea breeze. The square where the two-story Archonate bureau stood was small and cozy, and Filidor soon realized that his imagined assault upon the usurper could never take place as he had envisioned it: the reception berth for arriving air-cars was on the building’s flat roof.

  The young man loitered about the area for a while, seeing no indications of the bustle and pomp that must inevitably attend even an “acting” Archon’s presence. He also noted that a gaggle of gawkers had congregated at a side door, and sidled up to the group to learn what he could by eavesdropping. He discovered that they were gathered to glimpse the desperado Valderoyn, who was expected to be brought to the Archonate office at any moment. Fast upon this intelligence came the realization that the journey would be a short one: the Osgood, where felons and defaulters were confined before trial, was in the basement of the town hall, just across a narrow alley from the Archonate office. Etch Valderoyn, when he was transferred to the Archon’s care, would be walked across the short distance by a brace of constables.

  Filidor stepped back to survey the scene, and a plan began to unfold in his mind. He realized that, as plans went, this one did not go far. It would not win him any laurels at institutes where grand strategies were studied and praised. It was barely above pranksterism, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.