Fantasy

by Rich Horton

  “The Bureau welcomes the assistance of all public minded citizens,” Warhanny pronounced, yet somehow I felt that the formulaic words lacked sincerity.

  “Will you release him into my custody?”

  “Will you serve out his sentence in the Contemplarium if he defaults?” countered the scroot.

  “He will not default,” I said, but I gave the standard undertaking. “Transmit the file, then deliver him to his estate. I will accept responsibility from there.”

  “As you wish.”

  Just before his visage disappeared from the air I thought to detect a smirk lurking somewhere behind Warhanny pendulous lips. While I mentally replayed the image, confirming the scornful leer, I told my integrator to book passage on an airship to Thurloyn Vale and to engage an aircar to fly out to Therobar’s estate, Wan Water. There was no response. I looked about and found that it had left the table and was now across the room, investigating the contents of a bookcase. “What are you doing?” I said.

  Before answering it pulled free a leather bound volume that had been laid sideways across the tops of the bottom row of books. I recognized the tome as one of several that I had brought back from the house of Bristal Baxandell, the ambitious thaumaturge who had originally summoned my demonic colleague to this realm. Baxan­dell had no further use for them, having expired while attempting to alter his own form, a process in which the compelled and reluctant demon had seized his opportunity for revenge.

  “I thought there might be something useful in this,” the integrator said, its fingers flicking through the heavy vellum pages while its golden eyes scanned from side to side.

  It was yet another unsettling sight in a day that had already offered too many. “Put that away,” I said. “I looked through it and others like it when I was a young man. It is a lot of flippydedoo about so-called magic.”

  But the integrator continued to peruse Baxandell’s book. “I thought, under the circumstances,” it said, “that we might drop the ‘so-called’ and accept the reality of my predicament.”

  I blew out air between scarcely opened lips. The creature’s narrow catlike face sharpened and it said, “Do you have a better argument than that? If not, I will accept your concession.”

  While it was true that I must accept the concept that rationalism was fated to give way to magic, even that the cusp of the transition had arrived, I was not prepared to dignify a book of spells with my confidence. I blew the same amount of air as before, but this time let my lips vibrate, producing a sound that conveyed both brave defiance and majestic ridicule.

  My assistant finished scanning the tome, slammed its covers together and said, “We must settle this.”

  “No,” I said, “we must rescue Turgut Therobar from incarceration.”

  “You are assuming that he is blameless.”

  I applied insight to the matter. The part of me that dwelled in the rear of my mind, the part that intuitively grasped complex issues in a flash of neurons, supported my assumption, though not completely.

  “Therobar is innocent,” I reported. “Probably.”

  “I was also innocent of any urge to become a gurgling bag of flesh and bones,” said the integrator. “What has happened to me must also be resolved.”

  “First the one, then the other,” I said.

  “Is that a promise?”

  “I am not accustomed to having to make promises to my own integrator,” I said.

  “Yet you expect me to put up with this,” it said, pointing at itself with both small hands, fingers spread, a gesture that put me mind of an indignant old man.

  “Sometimes our expectations may require adjustment,” I said.

  I turned to the demon’s portal to seek his views, but the entity had taken the opportunity to depart.

  “Perhaps he has found another peepshow,” I said.

  * * * *

  Thurloyn Vale was an unpretentious transportation nexus at the edge of the great desolation that was Dimpfen Moor. Its dun colored, low-rise shops and houses radiated in a series of arron­disse­ments from a broad hub on which sat the airship terminal that was the place’s reason for being. In former times, the entire town had been ringed by a high, smooth wall, now mostly tumbled in ruins. The barrier had been built to keep out the large and predatory social insects known as neropts that nested on the moor, but eventually an escalating series of clashes, culminating in a determined punitive expedition, led to a treaty. Now any neropt that came within sight of Thurloyn Vale, including flying nymphs and drones in their season, was legitimately a hunter’s trophy; any persons, human or ultra­terrene, who ventured out onto the moor need not expect rescue if they were carried off to work the insects’ subterranean fungi beds or, more usually, if they were efficiently reduced to their constituent parts and borne back to the hive to feed the ever hungry grubs.

  Wan Water sat atop an unambitious hill only a short aircar flight into Dimpfen Moor, above a slough of peat brown water that gave the estate its name. It was a smallish demesne, with only a meager agricultural surround, since little would grow on that bleak landscape other than lichens and stunted bushes. Like the town, it was walled, but its barrier was well maintained and bristling with self-actuating ison-cannons. The presence of a nearby neropt nest afforded Wan Water’s master the peace and tranquility that I assumed he required to plan his charitable works. Without the insects, he might be pestered by uninvited visitors eager to harness their ambitious plans to Turgut Therobar’s well stocked purse. Coupled with an implied humility in his make-up, it seemed a likely explanation for having chosen such a cheerless place for his retreat.

  With my integrator perched on my shoulder I overflew a ramble of outbuildings and guest houses, then banked and curved down toward the manse. This was an arrangement of interconnected domes, each more broad than tall and linked one to the other by colonnades of twisted, fluted pillars, all of a gray stone quarried from the moor. Above the huddled buildings stood a tall natural tor of dark-veined rock, around which spiraled a staircase of black metal. Atop the eminence was a tidy belvedere of pale marble equipped with a demilune seat of a dark polished stone.

  At the base of the tor I saw a black and green volante bearing the insignia of the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny. Next to it stood a square faced man in a uniform of the same colors. With the moor’s constant wind whistling mournfully through the bars of the staircase, he advised me that Turgut Therobar had ascended the pillar of rock. We completed the formalities by which my client became my responsibility, then the scroot boarded his aircar and departed.

  I turned and climbed to the top of the spiral stairs. There I found the magnate standing silently, his back to me and his front toward the grim prospect of Dimpfen Moor. I used the occasion to acquire a detailed impression of my client.

  He was a man of more than middling age and height, thick through the shoulders, chest and wrists, with heavy jowls and a saturnine expression beneath a hat that was a brimless, truncated cone of dark felt. He affected plain garments of muted colors, though they were well cut and of fine material, as if he disdained the fripperies and panaches of transient fashion. As I inspected him I sought insight from my inner self and again received an inconclusive response. It was as if Therobar’s being was a deep well, its upper reaches clear and pure yet shaded by darkness below. But whether anything sinister lurked in those depths could not be told.

  Without taking his eyes from the vista that I found gloomy but which apparently worked to restore his inner peace, he said, “Thank you for arranging my release.”

  I inclined my head but replied, “Any intercessor could have done it.”

  “No, it had to be you.”

  My internal distresses had strengthened as I climbed the stairs. I pushed them to the edge of my awareness and prepared to focus on my responsibilities. “I am flattered by your confidence,” I said. “Shall we discuss the case?”

  “Later. For now I wish to look out upon the moor and contemplate the vagaries of fate.”r />
  “You are of a philosophical bent,” I said. “Faced with imminent incarceration in the Contemplarium, most men would find their concentration drawn to that threat.”

  He turned toward me. “I am not most men. I am Therobar. It makes all the difference.” A note of grim satisfaction rang softly through this speech.

  The chill wind had been insinuating itself into my garments since we had mounted the tower. Now it grew more insistent. My integrator moved to nestle against the lee side of my head and I felt it shiver. The motion drew Therobar’s eye.

  “That is an unusual beast,” he said.

  “Most unusual.”

  The expression “a piercing gaze” is most often an overstatement, but not in Therobar’s case. He examined my assistant closely and said, “What is its nature?”

  “We are discovering that together,” I answered. “Right now it would be premature to say.”

  His eyes shifted to mine and for a moment I felt the full impact of his gaze. The back of my mind stirred like a watchbeast disturbed by a faint sound. Involuntarily, I stepped back.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I have a tendency to peer.”

  I made a gesture to indicate that the matter was too trivial to warrant an apology, but the resident of the rear corners of my psyche took longer to subside.

  We descended to the main buildings and passed within. It was a relief to be out of the wind though I could still hear it softly moaning and suffling across the roofs of the domes. Therobar handed me over to a liveried servant who escorted me to a suite of rooms where I refreshed myself, finding the appointments of the first quality. The man waited in the suite’s anteroom to guide me to a reception room where my client had said he would await me.

  I had placed my integrator on the sleeping pallet before going into the ablutory to wash. Returning, I extended my arm so that it might climb back to its wonted place upon my shoulders. I realized as I made the gesture that I was already becoming accustomed to its warmth and slight weight.

  The creature came to me without taking its eyes from the footman who stood impassively beside the door. I noticed that the fur behind its skull was standing out like the ruffs that were fashionable when I was in school. I made a gesture to myself as if I had forgotten some trivial matter and returned to the washroom. There I lowered my voice and said to my assistant, “Why are you doing that?”

  It moved to the far edge of my shoulder so it could look at me and said, “I am doing several things. To which do you refer?”

  “Making your neck hair stand on end.”

  It reached up a paw and stroked the area. “It appears to be an autonomic response.”

  “To what?”

  Its eyes flicked about then it said, “I think, to the presence of the footman.”

  “Why?”

  “I do not know. I have had neither neck hair nor involuntary responses before.”

  “I should perform a diagnostic inquisition on you,” I said.

  “And just how would you go about doing that in my new condition?” it asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I will have to think about that.”

  We went out to the anteroom and the servant opened the door to the corridor, but I stayed him. It might be useful to question him about the events that led up to Therobar’s arrest. Servants often know more than they are supposed to about their masters’ doings, even though they will invariably adopt an expression of blinking innocence when barked at by an inquisitive scroot like Warhanny. But let the interrogation be conducted by someone who has questions in one hand and coins in the other, and memories that had previously departed the servant’s faculties come crowding back in, eager to reveal themselves.

  “What can you tell me about your master’s arrest?” I asked.

  “Agents of the Bureau of Scrutiny came in the morning. They spoke with the master. When they left, he accompanied them.”

  This information was delivered in a disinterested tone, as if the man were describing a matter of no particular moment. His eyes were a placid brown. They rested on me blandly.

  “What of the events that led up to the arrest?” I said.

  “What of them?”

  “They involved a number of deaths and some unsavory acts perpetrated on a girl.”

  “So I was told.”

  The servant’s lack of affect intrigued me. “What did you think of the matter?” I asked.

  “My memories of the incidents are vague, as if they occurred in another life.”

  “Struggle with them,” I said, producing a ten-hept piece. I was surprised that the impassivity of his gaze did not so much as flicker, nor did he reach for the coin. Still I persisted. “What did you think of the crime?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t recall thinking of it at all,” he said. “My duties occupy me fully.”

  “You were not shocked? Not horrified?”

  “No.”

  “What were your emotions?”

  The brown eyes blinked slowly as the man consulted his memory. After a moment he said, “When the Allers girl was brought in, she was hysterical. I was sent to the kitchens to fetch a restorative. The errand made me late in preparing the sleeping chambers for the master’s guests. I was chagrined but the master said it was a forgivable lapse.”

  “You were chagrined,” I said.

  “Briefly.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  I flourished the ten-hept piece again and this time the fellow looked at it but again showed no interest. I put it away. Turgut Therobar had a reputation for aiding the intellectually deficient. I reasoned that this man must be one of his projects and that I would gain no more from interrogating him than I would from questioning the mosses on Dimpfen Moor. “Lead me,” I said.

  I was brought to a capacious reception room in the main dome. Therobar was in the center of the great space, making use of a mobile dispenser. He had changed his garments and now wore a loose fitting gown of shimmering fabric and a brocaded cloth headpiece artfully wound about his massive skull. He was not alone. Standing with him were an almost skeletally thin man in the gown and cap of an Institute don and a squat and hulking fellow who wore the stained smock of an apparaticist and a cloche hat. All three turned toward me as I entered, abruptly cutting off a conversation they had been conducting in muted tones. We offered each other the appropriate formal salutations, then Turgut made introductions.

  The lean academician was Mitric Gevallion, with the rank of sessional lecturer in dissonant affinities—the name rang a faint chime but I could not immediately place him—and the bulky appara­ticist was his assistant, who went by the single name Gharst. “They are conducting research into some matters that have piqued my curiosity. I have given them the north wing. We’ve been having a most fascinating discussion.”

  He handed me a glass of aperitif from a sideboard. I used the time it took to accept and sip the sharply edged liquor to cover my surprise at finding myself drawn into a social occasion after being summoned to an urgent rescue. There seemed no reason not to raise the obvious question, so I did.

  “Should we not be concerned rather with your situation?”

  For a moment, my meaning did not register, then his brow cleared. “Ah, you mean Warhanny and all that.” He dismissed the subject with a lightsome wave of his meaty hand. “Tomorrow is soon enough.”

  “The matter seemed more pressing when you contacted me,” I said.

  His lips moved in the equivalent of a shrug. “When confined to the Bureau of Scrutiny’s barren coop one has a certain perspective. It alters when one is ensconced in the warmth of home.”

  There was not much warmth apparent. I thought the room designed more for grandeur than comfort. “Still,” I began but he spoke over my next words, urging me to hear what Gevallion had to say. Out of deference to my host, I subsided and gave the academician my polite attention.

  “I am making progress in redefining gist within the context of configuration,” the thin man said.

  Ge
vallion’s name now came into focus and I stifled a groan by sipping from the glass of aperitif. There was a subtle undertone to its flavor that I could not quite identify. As I listened further to the academic a memory blossomed. In my student years at the Institute, I had written an offhand reply to a paper posted on the Grand Forum, demolishing its preposterous premises and ending with a recommendation that its author seek another career since providence had clearly left him underequipped for intellectual pursuits. I now saw that Mitric Gevallion had not taken my well meant advice but had remained at the Institute, dedicating his life to the pursuit of the uncatchable; he was a seeker after gist, the elusive quality identified by the great Balmerion uncounted eons ago as the underlying substance of the universe. Gist bound together all of time, energy, matter and the other, less obvious components into an elegant whole.

  Apparently he had forgotten my criticism of his work since he did not mention it upon our being introduced. It seemed good manners not to bring it up myself, but I could not, in all conscience, encourage his fruitless line of inquiry. “You are not the first to embark on the gist quest,” I said, “though you would certainly be the first to succeed.”

  “Someone must be first at everything,” he said. He had one of those voices that mix a tone of arrogance with far too much resonance through the nasal apparatus. Listening to him was like being lectured to by a out-of-tune bone flute.

  “But gist is, by Balmerion’s third dictum, beyond all grasp,” I said. “The moment it is approached, even conceptually, it disappears. Or departs—the question remains open.”

  “Exactly,” the academician said. “It cannot be apprehended in any way. The moment one seeks to delineate or define it, it is no longer there.”

  “And perhaps that is for the best,” I said. I reminded him of Balmerion’s own speculation that gist had been deliberately put out of reach by a hypothetical demiurge responsible for drafting the metaphysical charter of our universe. “Otherwise we would pick and pick and pick at the fabric of existence until we finally pulled the thread that unraveled the whole agglomeration.”