Chief Brome was outside the bar looking in through the door, clearly preoccupied with the goings-on, her hand resting on her holstered sidearm. She was a full-figured woman, older than me but not by much, with hair the color of steel wool pulled back in a ponytail.
“Chief?” I asked. “I’m Special Agent Romulus Caul.”
“One of the Regulators, yes. We were told you’d come to Harvest Home. Welcome.”
Brome’s demeanor was open and congenial enough, but I was feeling neither. “Special Branch is investigating a disappearance,” I said. “I thought it best that you and I meet and come to an accord before I proceed any further.”
“The vanished Maker, I know. Glencolumbkille sent us her dossier, and my people will offer any assistance, of course. But you’ve lost me, luv.” She cocked her head. “Exactly what kind of accord are you expecting? Dun Aenghus wasn’t on the woman’s itinerary. She had no reason to stop here.”
“And my only reason for stopping is in deference to your flight ban. You know I can countermand it.”
“Ah. In that case, I’d advise that you not,” she said. “Whatever happened in the sky last night spooked the local population of wyverns into a frenzy. One of those monsters alone can take down a gyrodyne. Three or more, a fully loaded dirigible. We don’t want to chance it happening again.”
“Horrifying, I’m sure.”
She stepped back. “Are you a gambling man, Agent Caul? Wyverns are nocturnal and black as night. You’d never see them coming.”
In point of fact, I was a gambler, but baiting Chief Brome into a jurisdictional pissing match wasn’t the prudent thing to do. She knew it, and I myself had been down that road too many times with Johanna. I swallowed my sour disposition.
“Well, then,” I said. I held out my hand, and was relieved when she accepted it. “My partner and I are at your disposal for the duration.”
“I appreciate that,” she said. It was the first time she’d smiled since our conversation began. She looked back inside the bar, and I followed her cue.
It was a crowded little dive, heavy with the odors of roasted hob and cutty-fish. Her deputies had said there might be trouble here, but all seemed harmless enough. Simply furnished, with a herd of barmy young boozers, many of them pilots downed by the advisory. Most were clean shaven; only a few wore the traditional beards of men fully baptized into the community. On the other side of the room, keeping to themselves, were native taurgs downing drinks the size of wash tubs. A red symb in natural centipede form scuttled back and forth behind the counter—Harry, I presumed—serving up libations with five sets of his hundred hands.
“Lively place,” I said.
Brome shrugged. “Not customarily. They’re still winding down from Lughnasadh. August Eve,” she answered my unspoken question. “Old calendar. Beginning of the harvest season. Barn dances, thanksgiving for the grain, sturdy young men getting bladdered and pissed....” Hoots and the crash of breaking furniture accentuated her point. “The bishops turn a blind eye to it this time of year.” She looked me up and down with the shrewd eyes of a horse trader. “You’re quite the sturdy man yourself. The workmanship is remarkable. Does every—?”
She trailed off, but I knew the query all to well. Does everything work?
I’d first heard those words a decade before on Albion, in New Philadelphia, after three-quarters of my body had been blown to Hell and back. Arms, legs, and most everything in between.
I felt the pressure of the Chief’s fingertips on the artfully scrolled chest plates beneath my garments (Plio wasn’t the only one with a sense of style), which, in turn, housed the cardio-respiratory pumps, pistons, and valves that kept my human half alive; gifts from the Crown after I’d thwarted the would-be assassination of William, Lord McKinley, then the governor-general of Her Eternal Majesty’s possessions in North Atlantica. Total rewire job. Industrial alchemy, a soul bound in burnished steel.
Our attention was thankfully drawn back to the pub before I could answer. A boy who looked like a weasel sat next to the staircase, loud and drunk off his ass. A serving girl in frills and black lace struggled in his lap. Her features were rendered in rich deep azure. A blue symb, in human guise. Her color and lack of heraldic beadwork marked her as having been born into Gant’s lower castes, a menial in their Aspect’s red-dominated culture. The weasel was all over her, his hands locked about her wrists.
“Laney’s a tough girl,” Brome said. “She can take care of herself....” But Brome’s hand tightened around her sidearm nonetheless.
I turned up my aural augmentations.
“You’re lookin’ powerful likely tonight, Laney,” the weasel said. “C’mon here an’ give us a snog.”
“Axel, keep it up and I’ll snap your twig from your berries.” Despite her retort, though, the tendrils writhing on her head belied her agitation.
He laughed. “You’d best mind that sass, girl. Me an’ my lads are gonna own this town. Our blessed Lady might not fancy me no symbie whore then.” He planted his lips on her smooth blue neck.
Laney cursed in the Shaper’s Tongue and drove a spiked heel onto the toe of Axel’s boot. He yowled and doubled over. She spun free and slammed her knee into his weasely face, then in the blink of an eye reverted to her true Symb’ral form. Black lace ripped to shreds as her spine stretched and arched into a long serpentine ‘S’, fifty pairs of blue segmented legs erupting from her sides.
The boy’s head snapped back, blood spraying from his nose. Another blink of the eye and Laney was human again, covering her nakedness with scraps of lace.
Axel’s posse moved as one and pinned her. He jumped to his feet, hands over his face, gore streaming between his fingers.
“Get away from her, dammit! Get away!” He whipped a gun from his ratty overcoat and leveled it between Laney’s golden eyes.
The weapon shone dully in the amber light: an Umbran Immolator. Dammitall! It was a blunt, ugly thing; its chitinous surface rough and scabbed over, as if it were made of materials that had once been alive. The pistol grip had been adapted for the human hand, but it was a device unmistakably manufactured by the Proletariat of Umbra-Nine.
What the bleeding Hell was it doing here?
“I knew it! Shit,” Brome hissed. “Cover me, luv.” She drew her sidearm and bolted round the corner into a side alley.
The mechanicals in my chest hummed into overdrive. Having been raised in the backwoods of Westsylvania, I’d seen my share of drunken indiscretions (and participated in more than I cared to admit). Most resulted in a bloodied nose or a night spent cooling off in the neighborhood lockup. But some of them turned nasty, and this one had “calamity” written all over it.
I pulled my Webley-Electrick Nullifier from my weapons harness, non-lethal but wickedly effective. The Immolator was still trained on Laney’s head, pyromantic energies building within the spinning parabolic mirror affixed at its end. I had to time this to the instant.
Chief Brome stepped in through a backroom door and inched forward, her sidearm fixed on the boy’s head. “Axel Creevy. Don’t be a fool, lad. Hand that dratted thing over.”
“Bugger off, you old chook. I’m gonna learn this pretty blue bitch some manners!”
“I’d take the Chief’s advice, son.” I stepped through the front door, arm locked, the Nullifier trained upon his heart. “You’ve got exactly two seconds to get righteous. Put the gun down. Right now.”
He flinched, turned his eyes to me but kept the heat-ray pointed at Laney. My steel-jacketed fingers tightened around the Nullifier. Precision wireworks give me perfect hand-and-eye coordination. I never miss.
Axel swung his weapon, and we fired. My leather greatcoat burst into flame at the same time as a stream of electrified flechettes from my Nullifier hit him dead center. The Immolator flew from his hand.
“Grab it!” someone yelled.
Axel’s boys leapt from the right as the remaining farmhands dove from the left, two waves crashing together with the myste
ry gun as the prize. And me caught in between. They hit from both sides and knocked me down, oblivious to the flames, the weapon rebounding from my fingertips. They wanted the Immolator, and I was simply in the way. I shoved back, which meant a good dozen of them went flying into walls and support beams.
“Go back to the scrap yard, Tin Man!” Fists and thrashing limbs hoisted me up in a concerted effort (despite the weight of my augmented mass) and hurled me through the front windows. I hit the walk in a cascade of flying glass. I leapt to my feet, tearing off my burning coat when earsplitting static burst into the center of my brain, followed by a voice I could not place:
“Caul! Get down!”
I dropped as the Immolator fired again, golden-white beams igniting what remained of the window casement above my head.
That did it. No one shot at me twice. “Marsallay!” I called. No answer.
I drew my Persuader hand cannon; loaded half a dozen pulse rounds and fired into the eclipse-blackened sky. If the Renunciates really were trading with Umbra, Heaven knew what other contraband was present.
Six sharp cracks roared, six alchemic pulses to overload wiring on either side of the thoroughfare (myself excluded, protected by military-grade fortifications). Most of the windows in Dun Aenghus went dark.
I dashed across the lane, grateful at having escaped near-certain immolation. My guardian angel had focused a tight ansible burst directly into my aural implants. An impressive trick if you had the wherewithal to do so. My annunciator chimed—Plio.
“Your timing leaves much to be desired,” I said.
“If you could refrain from trouble for more than five minutes’ time, this wouldn’t be an issue. What in blazes is going on over there?”
“Barroom brawl out of control, brother, with a complication you won’t believe.”
“I’ve got Brome’s deputies with me. We’ll be there any moment.”
“Give them my thanks for the save.”
“What save? I’ve been with them all the while.”
“No one called?”
“Called whom?”
“Blast, never mind. Just keep your heads down. They’re armed and barking mad.”
“Heed your own advice, Romulus. My head will grow back. Yours will not. And don’t even think about unleashing the Gaze of Doom.”
“Nag, nag, nag.”
Brome’s officers hurried round the corner no sooner than I’d reloaded, some of them packed into steam lorries and others on the backs of riding-beasts: chirons, striders, galleytrots, claws and hooves scraping the damp cobblestones. Plio hopped down, his own weapon drawn. (Toppled down was more like it, having never ridden a live mount in his life, but he recovered nicely.) Brome herself reappeared, battered but indomitable, with Axel in one hand and her sidearm in the other.
The brawl fell apart as quickly as it had come together, vanishing into lanes and alleyways thick with river mist and the dark glow of plant life. August Eve antics out of control, they all agreed. The taurgs had no such excuse; they just liked a good row. It was Brome’s business now, regardless, as was her insistence that none of her officers possessed the means to broadcast the warning that had saved my life.
The presence of Umbran weaponry in a tank town like Dun Aenghus was another matter entirely, one the constables wanted to keep quiet at all costs. The Immolator was nowhere to be found, spirited away in the confusion of the brawl—presumably the reason I’d been lobbed through the window in the first place. I put the question to our boy Axel as Chief Brome snapped a pair of electrick shackles on his wrists.
“You mind your place, cobber,” he said, still groggy from the Nullifier. “I got nothin’ to say to the likes’a you.”
“Keep yammering, son, and see if we don’t go a few more rounds.”
The front of his shirt was torn open. Tattooed in silver beneath the hairs on his chest was the circle of a full moon flanked by two crescents, one on either side.
“Come along, Axel,” said Chief Brome. “You’ve bodged up enough here already.”
“So that’s it, then?” he slurred. “The great Lady passes judgment and the very Earth trembles in awe and humility....” He made a grand show of bowing deeply at the waist, wrists still shackled, then rammed his head into Brome’s gut. “...but you gotta find me first, you sorry crone!”
I caught Brome, and Axel was gone, hooting and howling as he bolted up the thoroughfare.
Then the sky was torn by a deep harrowing screech.
It was upon him in an instant—swooping down on wings as black as night, the long serpentine tail slashing the air like a whip. The thing caught Axel in its talons before he could utter a word and soared upward again to be lost in the night, black-on-black. But not before I saw the boy ripped in two, viscera raining down from both halves of his torso.
Plio was beside me. I hadn’t even realized he was there. “What...?” he stammered.
Sometimes there are no words. I couldn’t say a thing.
He shook himself and brushed the dirt from his otherwise spotless attire. “I’ve had just about enough excitement for one outing, thank you very much. What in Niista’s Name happened?”
“Lughnasadh,” I finally answered, not knowing what else to say.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Old calendar.”
“Ah.”
The blue symb Laney watched us from Hundred-Hand Harry’s, having wrapped herself in a tattered blanket. She caught Plio’s eye, then backed through the broken door into the dim amber glow of gaslight.
Plio raised a brow and followed her inside. I trailed behind. Smashed furniture and glass covered the floor. Harry scurried about in a mad frenzy, whistling and clicking and pushing three brooms at once.
With tentative steps Laney approached Plio and knelt before him. His birth-caste held a queer theological significance that an iconoclast like myself couldn’t begin to understand, though he was happy to drone on about it without end. The two spoke in whispers. He reached down and touched her hands, his fingertips melting into hers, red into blue, in a ritual born thousands of years ago on Gant. Communion on a biological level. I looked away. Shit like that unnerved the Hell out of me.
Plio introduced us once their ritual was completed. “Special Agent Caul, this is Lan Ylan Ir.”
“Are you hurt, milord Romulus?”
“You know me?”
“Word gets around. The Earther Brethren aren’t as simple as they appear.”
“I’m fine, thanks. High and fly and too wet to dry.”
Laney stared.
“That’s alright,” Plio assured her. “I don’t understand what he’s saying half the time either.”
“You stood up to those cobbers by yourself,” Laney said. “It’s rare that anyone ever does that for me.”
I brushed debris from my high collar and necktie. “I was lucky.”
She hesitated, then pulled us away from the broken windows, away from prying eyes and monsters hunting in the dark. She wanted to share something, clearly, but was reluctant. Or afraid. Likely both.
“Laney, I’m looking for a girl who came to Harvest Home and never found her way back again. I need to find her. And I’m counting on the expectation that word really does get around....”
She glanced outside to the horizon darkened by Boru’s great shadow, at something only she could see. “I don’t know where she is. But Baloq the Beatified may well guide you to where she was.” Laney offered us an empathetic smile. “I wish you both well. Good night, milords.”
Plio blessed her, then she knelt before him one last time and departed upstairs.
I rubbed the back of my neck; a force of habit, as most of my body no longer possessed the muscles with which to feel stress in the first place. “And Baloq the Beautiful is...?”
“Baloq the Beatified,” Plio said. “He was Fourth of the Seven Priest-Kings of Iy’samine during the Fifth Gantish Age. Exceptionally fierce in battle. It’s believed his blades were the manifestation of Death
itself. Paradoxically, he advocated charity for the poor and dispossessed. Castes like the one into which Ylan was born regard him as something of a patron saint.”
“And that helps us how?”
“It doesn’t. As much as Ylan is of the opinion otherwise, our honored dead have no communicative powers from beyond the grave.”
“At this point, I’ll take any opinion I can get,” I said. “Talk and walk. I need to catch up with Chief Brome.”
I left a few pounds sterling on the countertop to help Harry cover his losses, and we stepped into the lane. Plio drew Kavita Patel’s memory-glass from his pocket and studied the glowing script within it.
“Whilst you were busy playing knight errant,” he said, “I confirmed that Kavita’s hodometron has indeed been compromised. I submitted my analysis to the Seeing Stone. The conclusion is certain.”
“Damnation. Now we’ll never get this put to bed.”
“Not necessarily. Shadows of past configurations are often left behind in a device’s clockwork movement. Fortunately, I have more than a passing familiarity with the interpretation of patterns.”
Touché. “So what was altered?”
“Unknown. Given enough time I can use the hodometron to back-trace her vehicle’s actual route, but at the very least it will take....” His voice trailed away as he read. “Orda’s Eyes.”
“What? What do you see?”
He waved me off. “Nothing. Honestly, my mistake.”
I snatched the prism from his hand. Displayed within the alchemically rendered ledger were the names of ansible sites Kavita had not yet inspected; among them Blasket and Ith along the Callanish, and Myddleham-on-Tyne further eastward in FiannaProvince.
I read the names again. Myddleham. Myddle....
“Plio. That patron saint. What did you call him?”
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #142, Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2 Page 9