“I know where you’re going, Romulus. Ylan was mistaken.”
“Plio!”
“Right. He was Fourth of the Seven—”
I pulled him away from curious passersby and steered us next to the soot-covered bricks of a smokehouse.
“That’s it, brother. Kavita went to Fianna. That’s what Laney was trying to tell us.”
“And you’re basing that on Ylan’s turn of phrase? I can interpret ‘fourth of seven’ any number of ways, all of them equally valid.”
“Don’t interpret. Take her words literally. What is the fourth position of seven?”
Plio hesitated. He was caught in the double standard of a provincially driven symb assimilating into the modern age of Instrumental Enlightenment. His insular perspective wouldn’t allow Lan Ylan Ir to act beyond the limits of her station, even though his “humanity” was telling him quite the opposite.
He sighed. “It’s the middle.”
“Laney told us to go to Myddleham, brother. The only way she knew how.”
“And you believe her?”
“I do.”
He grumbled. “Entrails again.”
I looked down Dun Aenghus’s lanes to the river’s edge and the horizon beyond. Couldn’t see a thing. But past the deep blue and black was something Laney did see, and that was good enough.
* * *
Chapter 4
The Shape of Things to Come
We were on our way before second dawn—the Sun’s emergence from Boru’s shadow—flying above the northward road to Dalriada as if we were returning to Glencolumbkille. The thought of being followed hadn’t escaped either of us; at first opportunity we arced about and headed east through the Belagog Expanse to Fianna, speeding over patchwork fields large enough to swallow small nations. Plio was at the helm. My headache had returned with a vengeance, a continuous pounding throb behind my facial plates. I administered myself a liberal dose of laudanum and settled back, closing my eyes.
Umbran weapons and wildflowers. How in blazes were we supposed to find Kavita with that?
Plio woke me as the rugged hills of the Fenian Ridge rose beneath us. We followed the silos and docking masts of a grain distribution facility to a nearby cluster of river towns, then dropped altitude and came about.
Myddleham-on-Tyne was one of the smaller of the Renunciate communities but we’d arrived on market day. The hillside lanes bustled with men and women in hook-and-eye plainness, most of them driving gigs and buckboards pulled by animals from Aspects scattered throughout Creation; domesticated rotchets and m’ugs tramped alongside them as would earthly dogs. The steep terrain inclined further, climbing into a group of high knolls.
“Plio, set us down!” I said. “There!”
He landed the Speedtwin on loose black dirt. I jumped out and ran for a better view. There it was. By Heaven, I was right after all.
Nestled in a glen of heavy native ebonyleaf was a chapel abandoned since the Before Time, its walls overgrown with blue-green vines. Broken windows reflected Boru and the baubled faces of its moons overhead.
The glen was covered in twilight-fire.
Plio caught up with me. “Sacred ProvenanceRiver....”
The grass was thick with them. Exotic flowers of purple and red blanketed three-quarters of the slope.
I stood there and heard Kavita Patel’s voice as if she were alongside us, the wind rustling her long black hair.
Lord of the Worlds Above, it’s beautiful.
“She was here, Plio. She was here, I know it.”
“You never cease to amaze me, Romulus. Remind me to give Ylan due credit in my report.”
I climbed into the gyro. “Now we begin the real work, brother.”
We followed our map back to the ansible site, Kavita’s most likely destination: a large tract of farmland in one of the high valleys overlooking the villages below. A half-timbered cottage stood in a clearing, surrounded by hawthorns and yew imported from Albion. A small barn and outbuildings in the back, along with silos and what looked like a fanning mill.
An elderly man sat on the porch, cooling his brow with a tattered hat. He was a long, gangly old gaffer with brown skin darker than mine and clothing patched many times over. A white beard hugged the lines of his jaw. He stood as we landed outside the open gate.
“This is not at all what I expected,” Plio said.
“What has been? Commence with a full-circle sweep, radial increase every twenty yards or so. I want to know what’s out here.”
Plio reached behind the seat and withdrew a divining-assay from his field pack. “What about our friend over there?”
“I’ll see to it. He might be more comfortable with me.”
“Right. Says the mechanical man with electrick blue eyes. Do me a courtesy and be nice. He looks like your great-great-grandfather.”
We stepped out of our conveyance as Plio focused his assay on the green Fenian countryside, wreathed in mist spilling through gaps in the ridge.
“Good day, sir,” I said. “If you don’t mind we’d like a moment of—”
The farmer bolted inside and slammed his door with a crash that shook the house.
Plio glared at me.
“I was nice!”
“You could’ve done without the silly blue lenses.”
The muffled scrape of claws on gravel sounded on the road behind us. A peace officer and his mount emerged from round a bend and slowed to a loping gait, the strider’s narrow tongue testing the air.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” I muttered.
Plio followed with an all but invisible nod of his head.
A blonde youth in Government livery swung down from the saddle. Perspiration darkened his hat and riding cloak, and a badge of office was pinned to his vest. Despite the whiskers on his face, the boy barely looked old enough to shave.
“Mornin’, gentlemen.”
“Constable,” I said.
“Deputy Chief Constable, truth to tell. Thought I’d stop by and—blessed be.” He looked at the beadwork in Plio’s tendrils and lit up like a beacon. “Cor. Ascendant caste, innit?”
Plio raised an eyebrow in quiet appreciation. “Very good, Deputy. Fifth Sect of Gant, Chromatic Semitone. Keepers of the Sacred Stones of Veo Veo Vash.”
“Brilliant.”
I watched the bizarre exchange for a moment. “You’ve got quite an eye for Gantish heraldry, Deputy. Get out of these valleys very often?”
“What? Oh, no sir.” He blushed and stepped back. “My cousin Gilbert had him a scholarship to Oxford-on-Athene when he was younger. Sent me copies of his schoolbooks an’ such.”
“I’m Special Agent Caul. My friend with the stones is Special Agent Plio Plio Ah.”
“Hollis Foley, Junior.” He shook my hand. “Talk from the lads in Glencolumbkille says the Hero of New Philadelphia is on the loose. You’re a right long way from home.”
“We’re sightseeing,” said Plio.
“Tell you what. Glencolumbkille may as well be on the other side of Creation. I reckon I don’t have to say nothin’ to ‘em if you don’t.”
I nodded. “I appreciate a man who goes his own way.”
The boy smiled again and patted the strider’s sinuous neck. It was a handsome animal, a lanky feathered reptile built for speed. “Go get somethin’ to eat, Dejah. There’s a good girl.”
Foley’s overgrown lizard snapped its jaws and trotted off in the direction of the barn. Striders were carrion eaters. I didn’t want to think about what its meal might entail.
I looked out over the cropland instead. “So what’s the story, son? You find our girl yet?”
“Ain’t no one to find. It’s pretty quiet right now. Most of the fields are lyin’ fallow. Just finished up a harvest of witch’s minge to feed the livestock. Winter wheat’s next. I ain’t seen nothin’ to prove your bird made it this far at all.”
“Is that a fact.” I didn’t say anything about Kavita’s vehicle or the wildflowers. “What’s on your as
say, Special Agent?”
“Minge.” He pointed to the phosphor screen.
“Brilliant.”
“Traces of field corn, chaff, assorted grains. I’m noting the presence of helium, however. Very faint. It could be an echo of noble gasses from the bauble periphery overhead. The stratum here is highly reflective.”
“Helium?” I read the gauges on his bewildering brass-and-wood apparatus. “We’re going about this backward. Run another assay, a deep one. Access the Seeing Stone again and cross-reference all known constants in surroundings such as these. I mean all of them, native and imported. Factor out the common cause variables. We’ll see what’s left.”
“That will take some time.”
“Understood.” I tapped the corner of my eye. “Telegraph the results directly through here. I want to review them firsthand. Deputy Foley?” I pointed my unshaven chin to the farmhouse.
“Name’s Linus Caines,” Foley said. “He’s a harmless ol’ sod. Been here forever.”
I found myself wanting to pace, stroking the unaccustomed presence of whiskers on my cheek. We were getting nowhere very quickly.
“Deputy, I have it on good authority that my girl made it as far as the ansible propagator in Myddleham-on-Tyne. Which against all logic is apparently right here. So if you don’t mind....”
Foley counted the stitches in his boots. I thought he might keep us at arm’s length like the constables in Glencolumbkille had, but he turned and faced the house.
“Linus? It’s Hollis Foley. Why don’t you c’mon out here an’ talk to these gentlemen.” Silence. “Linus Caines! I don’t want’a have to come in there an’ get you!”
“We just want to ask him a few questions, son. He’ll feel better if you’re alongside us.”
“These are my people, sir. Let’s go pay us a visit.”
The boy was turning out to be a stand-up fellow. I liked that. We approached the house.
“I’ve got the assay conjuring,” Plio said. “We’ll receive the results soon enough.”
We stepped onto the porch, and I knocked on the door.
“Mister Caines, this is Agent Romulus Caul from Special Branch. Deputy Foley is here with me.” I knocked again. “Please open the door, sir.”
Nothing.
I motioned to Plio that Foley and I would circle the house and come round from behind. He nodded and prepared to hold Caines’s attention from the porch.
“Mister Caines,” said Plio. “A young woman with the Royal Company of Makers may have passed this way. Anything you might know with regards to her whereabouts would help us immeasur—”
A shrill mechanical whine rose from inside the house, and the door exploded in wood and high-density shot. Plio flew backwards and crashed to the walk with a nauseating thud, wet goo spurting from a dozen holes in his chest. I grabbed Foley’s cloak and threw him sideways, diving after him as a second explosion thrummed. Railgun. A Goliathon 8-gauge, from the sound of it.
“To Hell with you!” A man’s voice, deep and heavy with years. “Sod off now while you’re still able!”
I pressed Foley between my back and the wall; drew the Navy Persuader, and fixed it on the gaping cavity where the door had been.
“Plio!” I yelled. “Plio! Status, brother!”
He lay sprawled on his back, immersed in a pool of the thick lavender ichor his race used as circulatory fluid.
“Well, that’s bloody wonderful,” he answered, his voice strained and gurgling. “I just bought this suit.”
He stopped twitching, and the gleam in his eyes went dark.
Shit! Shit, shit. I should have seen this coming. Damn my cocksure arrogance.
“Back me up, Hollis.”
I dove through the ruined door and rolled behind a quilt-draped settee. Another blast roared overhead and shattered a cupboard behind me. The old fool was packing a Hell of a wallop, I’ll grant him that.
Foley’s sidearm barked in response. I waited, my vitals pumping madly, then surveyed the room as best I could. It was finished as befit a simple country house: low ceiling, narrow doors and windows, a wood-burning stove to heat the small space.
A door slammed in the cook room, followed by rapid footfalls. I ran in. Breakfast dishes were drying in the basin. Through a kitchen window I saw Caines duck into the barn, the railgun cradled in his arms. I followed, charging across the yard in anger-fueled overdrive.
I slid to a stop beside the barn doors and weighed my options in the space between seconds. I spun inside...
...and was immediately confounded by the perspective-shift of dimensional transition. The walls and slate roof receded away faster than my electrick eyes could follow.
The barn was a foldbox, thaumaturgically built to occupy more space inside than it did outside. Dammitall. Harvest Home was proving to be an endless pain-in-the-ass full of surprises.
It was dark, just a few shafts of sunlight beaming through gaps in the slate, and was thick with the brown odor of animals and dry grass. I expanded my eyes’ capacity to see in shadow and fired the Persuader two or three times at random.
“Come on out, Pop,” I said, circling the cavernous space, keeping my back to something solid at all times. Luminous motes flitted out of the straw underfoot with each heavy step. “I’ll bring the whole place down if I have to. There’s nowhere you can go.”
Which was a lie, of course. There was no way to tell how many exits had been built into the foldbox. The space was taken up by threshers, grain cradles, and mountains of rolled hay; enough to service the entire community. Draft animals were lowing in stalls along the wall, most of them galumphers and great horned thunderbacks. All I could do was keep the old fool occupied while Foley took him out from behind. I cranked up my hearing.
“Let’s talk about the girl, Pop. Her name is Kavita. Did you know that? A happy girl, with a beautiful young woman at home waiting to marry her. You’ve seen Kavita, haven’t you. Couldn’t have missed her, a pretty thing like that. But we’ve got a problem, Pop. We don’t know where she is, and I’d truly like to believe that you do. So why don’t you tell me about it. I’ve got plenty of time.”
Timbers creaked, above and behind.
He was in the loft.
“Clear off!”
I turned, Persuader up, as a heavy cask of rainwater crashed down like one of the Hercules mass-drivers they use to drill tunnels in the Downbelow. I spun out of the way as it hit the floor and shattered. Metal bands whipped back, slicing above my eyes, slamming into my shoulder. My arm rang like steel before I’d even hit the ground.
I lay there, hanging onto consciousness, blood trickling from my forehead; heard the rainwater draining through cracks in the split timbers, wet splashes echoing far away. There was an open space beneath the barn, a deep one.
Caines peered over the loft’s edge, crying, the railgun shaking in his hands. He was older than I’d thought, his face like care-worn leather.
“I ain’t touched that girl,” he wept. “I just ran her off is all. Why cain’t you buggers let me be?”
Dust and allergen-laden straw floated down about me, as if my less-than-perfectly attuned immunities weren’t taxed enough already. I was sure my shoulder was broken. If I’d been any slower, my entire left side would have been crushed. I silently cursed the alchemic wirework in my mechanicals and their dratted capacity to relay pain.
A placement-marker blinked in my eyes—the telegraph from Plio’s divining-assay, still functioning. The familiar dots and dashes of Mr. Morse’s code slid across an exhibition display that only I could see:
Seeing Stone access/begin: Compositional cross-reference aborted. Target area obstructed by ionized helium, surface to minus thirty feet. Reconnaissance divination cannot penetrate. Adjust assay constants to include ionized particles. Seeing Stone access/end.
What the Hell was this? Helium....
Aw, shit. Foley, you stupid, stupid bastard....
The young deputy chose that moment to catch up with us. He ra
n into the barn through a side door and skidded to a stop three or four yards away. A nasty welt blemished the side of his face where I’d tossed him on Caines’s porch. Blood matted his beard.
His weapon was drawn and pointed directly at me.
I thought it best not to move any more than was necessary. The electrick recoil was agonizing. I really wanted to be back on Johanna’s ship.
“Nice to see you, Deputy,” I said through clenched teeth, born of equal parts pain, anger at Foley’s betrayal, and my own failure to reason it out sooner. “Where’ve you been, time enough for tea or did you need to use the loo?”
“I’m sorry, Agent Caul.” Perspiration beaded on his brow. I could see straight down the barrel of his gun. “You should have left when I told you there was nothing here to see.”
“That did occur to me, but then we would have missed all this country hospitality.”
“Again, I’m sorry.”
Think fast, Regulator. My weapons were mere inches from my fingertips but even I couldn’t outpace a bullet. The pounding in my head increased by the second.
“I have to hand it to the old codger,” I finally said.
“Meaning what?”
“I keep thinking about Kavita Patel, you know, and the ways in which she might have disappeared. It gnaws at me. You can bury her, chop her up, even burn her to ash with only bits of teeth and bone left behind for your trouble. But you know what really sparks the imagination? You can turn her invisible, so to speak. It looks as if your friend Caines here figured out a way to accomplish just that.”
“What’s goin’ on down there, Hollis?”
“Linus, not now.”
I had to keep their attention focused solely on me. “Know anything about glamours, Deputy?”
One of his eyes twitched. “Can’t honestly say that I do.”
“Neither do I, truthfully, not in the strictest sense. Now I don’t mean glamours of a thaumaturgical nature, the sort that can hex a man into seeing something that isn’t really there. I mean quite the opposite—a glamour within which you can’t see anything at all.”
“What’s he on about, Hollis? He talks like a book.”
“Linus, please!”
“You see, Deputy, if a steady current of electricks were to be administered to a gas—a noble gas—it could result in some very interesting military applications, which is something I do understand. The presence of, say, ionized helium, to pick a random example, can be manipulated to confuse reconnaissance divination, the same way a glamour can confuse the mortal eye.”
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #142, Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2 Page 10