The Tide of Ages (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 2)

by Robert J. Crane

  To top it all off, we were on the streets of Kensington. Replete with grand apartment buildings many stories tall, London’s elite were well at home here. I pictured majors or judges walking these streets hundreds of years ago—the ones with those funny old wigs, you know? Fast-forward to May 2017, and now an unlikely gaggle of misfits made these streets a semi-regular haunt.

  How the mighty had fallen. A moment after we rang the bell, my ears pricked up at a whirring sound from behind the door. Then the door was being pulled open—and greeting us from the other side was one of Lady Angelica’s clockwork butlers.

  “Ah—visitors!” it chirped in a happy, mechanical tone.

  The butlers were strange contraptions. A series of ever-spinning gears nestled into a coppery carapace, there were six in all: one for each floor of the house. They moved on wheels, so they couldn’t escort you up and down the stairs; but they had some kind of silent communication system, because one would always be waiting at the top for your arrival, to guide you on the next leg of the journey. Each had a faceplate of a slightly different color—this one was bronze—and each faceplate was etched with a permanent smile.

  “You’ve come to see the lady of the house, I presume?” it questioned.

  “Correct,” said Heidi.

  “Of course you have,” the butler said. “Please wait while I enquire as to whether Lady Hauk is presently entertaining visit—”

  “The answer is yes, Archibald.”

  Lady Angelica had stepped out into the corridor from one of the side rooms. Now she was someone who would be well at home in my picture of Kensington. Not at all unlike paintings of the time, she wore a dress whose skirt jutted widely from her hips, fabric ceasing just an inch or two above the floor. This one was a dull crimson with cream running up the center of the chest. A matching hat topped her head, her hair swept up beneath it. Her face was thin, lines radiating from the corners of her eyes and mouth. Today, they were tight: she looked at the butler—Archibald—with a vaguely irritated expression, the sort I was accustomed to seeing on Heidi.

  “Lady Hauk,” the butler began, wheeling around to face her. “You have visitors! Would you like me to invite them in?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said irritably.

  Archibald wheeled back to us. “Please, visitors: come in.”

  I obeyed, leading the charge. Heidi followed, stepping huffily in front of Carson. I caught her shoot him a look full of daggers in the corner of my eye.

  Lady Angelica was reprimanding Archibald.

  “Really, could you please at least invite our guests in and then consult with me as to my availability? Anyone in the world might see you in the doorway while you make visitors dawdle on the step.”

  “What if you should be unavailable, Lady Hauk?”

  “Then you’ll have to see them back out, won’t you?” Were she a few decades younger, I was certain Lady Angelica would have rolled her eyes at the well-meaning automaton. Instead, she met my eyes and shook her head. “Ninety percent of the time, they’re incredibly useful. The other ten percent, they do frustrate me.”

  “Terribly sorry, Lady Hauk!” Archibald said, still sounding perfectly cheery.

  “Like that. The man who built them was utterly brilliant. His mind was so precise, so focused, and his solutions were so novel, if occasionally somewhat inelegant. He crafted a brain for these things, a living mind—a collection of them, even; you’ve seen how they communicate, of course, how one on the third floor may pick up a conversation from the first.” Lady Angelica cast an appraising eye over Archibald—then shook her head again. “And yet the fellow didn’t think to give their voices a bit of nuance. All happy, all the time.”

  “That’s not bad though, is it?” Carson asked. “The world needs more happiness.” He didn’t glance toward Heidi, but I did. I received a flat look back, and she folded her arms.

  “You’re certainly correct,” said Lady Angelica, “but when an apology sounds happy, it’s hard to believe it is genuine.”

  “I truly am sorry, Lady Hauk,” Archibald responded—happily.

  “Mm,” was all Lady Angelica replied with. “Do come join me in the sitting room, yes?” she told the rest of us.

  We peeled away from Archibald. He remained exactly where he’d stopped, just shy of the front door, at an odd angle. Both Carson and I gave him a final look as we went, but he didn’t turn.

  “Did you know they have names?” he asked me.

  Lady Angelica cut in before I could. “Of course they have names, Mr. Yates. Did you think I referred to them all simply as ‘butler’?”

  Carson awkwardly shrugged. “I guess I didn’t really think about it.”

  Heidi said, “What’s new?”

  Carson bit his lip. So did I. Better to do that than blast her, especially in front of Lady Angelica.

  The sitting room was as expansive and expensive-looking as any other room in the house. Bedecked in deep, dark wood panels midway up the wall, patterned wallpaper stretched to the ceiling. It was a pastel purple, with muted spirals that reminded me of interwoven flowers. A rich, plush carpet covered the floor, so deep that you might be able to nestle down into it and fall asleep. The couches had curving armrests. Though I had been in here once before now, I still did not dare sit, even when directly invited; even on my cleanest days, I was certain I was impressed with a coating of invisible dirt that would become quite apparent the moment my backside touched the white material.

  Lady Angelica perched at the very edge of one of the seats. “Do please sit yourselves.”

  Heidi obliged without a second’s hesitation. Carson dawdled, shooting me a long glance.

  “Oh, perch your arse down, why don’t you?” Lady Angelica said snippily.

  I blinked. A wide-eyed look passed between me and Carson and Heidi—and then, suppressing a grin of my own, I pulled him onto the sofa beside me. But only at the very edge of the cushions; a stately sort of sit, like Lady Angelica’s.

  Heidi, on the other side of Carson, had pushed as far back as she could go. One arm was slung across the rest. She was so casual about it, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d sprawled out across it with her feet. Okay, well, not on the other arm—her legs weren’t long enough for that—but at least resting on the seat cushion Carson now occupied.

  “So,” said Lady Angelica. Fingers steepled, she leaned forward. “Should I dispense with the how-do-you-dos, or shan’t I?” Then, after a hesitation, she bowed just the tiniest bit closer, and said, “How are you, Miss Brand?”

  “Well enough,” I answered. “How are you, Lady Angelica?”

  The ghost of a smile crested her face at that. Reclining and dropping her hands, she said, “Rather well, thank you. I am expecting a courier, hence my presence on the ground floor this afternoon.”

  “A courier?” Carson asked.

  “That’s someone who delivers packages, just FYI,” Heidi put in.

  Carson shot her a dark look. “I know what a courier—” Then, without finishing the thought; apparently Heidi wasn’t worth it today, he continued to Lady Angelica, “Couldn’t one of your butlers take the delivery? Uh, Archibald?”

  “He certainly could,” said Lady Angelica, “but at some point quite soon after, I would need to venture down the stairs to get it.” Eyes glinting, she said, “That inelegance I mentioned earlier. Brilliant creations—and yet utterly useless at stairs.”

  “You need a track put in.”

  Lady Angelica gave her closest approximation of a smirk: a slight upward quirk of one corner of her mouth. For that tiny fraction of a moment, the lines around her lips deepened.

  “I daresay you’re right, Mr. Yates.”

  “Who was your delivery from?” Then, quickly, “If, err, you don’t mind me asking.”

  If she did, Lady Angelica didn’t say. “Not Benson, if that’s what you’re getting at. These days it’s quite rare for him to make house calls, with his back.”

  “Was the package anything to do
with our—?”

  “Purchase on Tuesday?” Lady Angelica shook her head. “No, Miss Brand; you are quite all right in that regard.”

  I nodded, holding back a sigh of relief. Since making off with the obduridium plate, our week had been fairly dull. The trip to Benson’s had come the following day, immediately preceding a visit to Lady Angelica for another spell. This one called for three days’ brewing time—which had left me kind of bored and listless since. The plus side to the delay had been time for me and Carson to throw ourselves into research, flicking through books in the library that was my hideout. Admittedly we had done very little of it relative to the sheer number of tomes lining the shelves … but I would have expected us to have done enough to turn up something. That we hadn’t was … worrying.

  “Speaking of,” said Lady Angelica, and she pushed up onto her feet, hands on her knees as she rose. “I rather imagine you’re in quite the rush to collect your purchase.”

  “A little,” I admitted sheepishly.

  She flashed me another faint smile. “Perfectly understandable, Miss Brand. Adventure awaits. I simply wished to rest another minute or two before taking the stairs. This way.”

  She led us out.

  Archibald wheeled around to greet us, but Lady Angelica put up a hand before he could begin. “I’m quite all right escorting our guests myself, thank you.”

  Again, I was shocked by just how spry Lady Angelica seemed to be. She walked fast enough that short-legged Heidi needed to put some real effort into keeping up. Even Carson struggled, in spite of his loping gait. Lady Angelica also made the stairs with barely any effort. In fact, given that her dress obscured her feet, if not for the sound of her footsteps on the wood I could have believed that she was a machine like the butlers, only instead of wheels she had some kind of silent jetpack where her hips should be.

  What an outlandish and stupid idea.

  Still, it wouldn’t stop me trying to catch a glimpse if I could.

  The conversation up to the fifth floor, and Lady Angelica’s brewing room, was fairly idle. Mainly for Carson, she pointed to the strange objects or paintings as we passed, describing the places from which she had acquired them. There was a globe which had an ever-changing surface, purchased from a cartographer mapping the worlds he had visited. A strange shape Lady Angelica said was called a tesseract was constructed in a wireframe of light. Apparently it was the three-dimensional rendering of a four-dimensional square, and it spun, folding in on itself over and over as the light it was made from changed from red to yellow to green and blue and so on and on. A great mathematician had bequeathed this to Lady Angelica in her youth. She did not say why, but a note of fondness crept into her voice as she related this to us, and I wondered if perhaps a romantic link had existed between them.

  Carson started at a new painting which moved.

  “Like Harry Potter!” he cried, pointing as a sun rose and fell over a hillside, replaced by a crescent moon. “Where have the people gone? Are they visiting other paintings right now?”

  “People?” said Lady Angelica with a hint of confusion. “It doesn’t have any; it’s simply a landscape. And what do you mean, are they ‘visiting other paintings’?”

  Carson went on to describe in great detail how portrait subjects in Harry Potter were able to travel to and fro. Heidi harrumphed, rolling her eyes.

  To be fair, I was with her on that one.

  When we reached the brewing room, Lady Angelica waved us in. “After you,” she said.

  I passed by, followed closely by Carson and Heidi.

  The room was much as I remembered it. A veritable apothecary’s paradise, it was full of brewing stands and glass jars swirling with liquid or filled with ingredients necessary for Lady Angelica’s spells. Some were recognizable—cuttings from plants, insects, a particularly gruesome looking spatter of gore—but many more were not.

  Lady Angelica bypassed us and stepped to her station. “Three vials, as promised,” she said. She waved a hand at a metal stand. Three gripper arms were affixed on alternating sides, left, right, left, with a stoppered, round-bottomed flask in each. A black wax seal coated the corks. Each flask was no more than three inches from top to bottom—and every single one swirled with a misty blue liquid. “I presume it will be one for each of you?”

  I nodded. “That’s right.” I cleared my throat. “And, err … the price?”

  “One-twenty,” Lady Angelica answered. “Forty each.”

  “Pounds?” Carson asked with some alarm. For some reason, it always sounded totally unnatural whenever he spoke of good old England’s currency.

  Ignoring the daggered look Heidi shot Carson, Lady Angelica said, “Coup, Mr. Yates.”

  “Oh. Right. Yeah.”

  I fished in my pocket, doing my best to mask my … not disappointment, as such, because she had of course estimated the cost at one hundred and twenty coup anyway. But after eroding the coup we had received from Benson with the purchase of elvish rope, the cost of this spell had more or less wiped us out again—and it wasn’t even for something I had any particular interest in finding. Going after this “Tide of Ages” thing, that was all for Heidi. Perhaps I’d have to pressure her into selling it, like she had been pressuring me with the Chalice Gloria these past weeks.

  I handed over the fee to Lady Angelica, all notes plus some coins, counting it out as I went.

  “One hundred and twenty,” I finished.

  “Thank you.” She placed it on the stand, not unlike Benson had when disappearing into his back room, and I wondered, glancing at Carson, whether the thought of stealing it yet again was crossing his mind; then she set to removing the flasks, passing them to us one by one.

  I received mine last of all.

  “Same deal as before?” I asked, looking into the glass bulb. Movement had set the interior into swifter motion, and it churned around and around. Not unlike the tesseract, I thought.

  “Drink it this time,” Lady Angelica said. “Although perhaps pinch your nose as it goes down.”

  Carson asked, “Pinch our nose … why?”

  Lady Angelica smiled. “Let’s just say it lacks for good taste and leave it at that, hm?”

  Spells in hand and paid for, Lady Angelica escorted us back to the ground floor, where Archibald announced that her courier had not yet arrived.

  “Wonderful,” Lady Angelica replied. “I shall be allowed some time to recuperate at the stairs, then.”

  She bade farewell upon the step rather than letting Archibald do it. I thanked her once more. And then, with flasks safely nestled—mine in my pocket, Carson’s in his manbag, and Heidi’s I wasn’t sure where (she had vanished it away the instant she received it)—we ambled down the shadowed streets of Kensington.

  “So … we’re ready to go?” Carson asked after some quiet. “After this Time of Ages thing?”

  “Tide,” Heidi corrected from up front. She’d marched slightly ahead. “And yes. Right, Mira?” She looked over her shoulder at me, eyebrow raised. Questioning—but at the same time, telling me.

  And could I blame her? It had been almost a month in getting to this point.

  Now that we had the spell in hand, we were out of reasons not to pursue it.

  “Yes,” I answered. “We’re ready to go.”

  Heidi gave a short nod. “Good.” As though she half-expected me to say something different.

  “Perfect timing,” said Carson to me, “seeing as we’re now … what do you call being broke? Skinned?”

  “Skint,” I answered.

  “Right. Skint. This Tide of Ages thing can change that for us. Right?”

  Heidi didn’t shoot anything back. So I answered for her, as diplomatically as I could: “Maybe,” and a shrug.

  Whatever her intentions with the relic, I knew I wouldn’t really push. We were pretty much destitute again, but we would surely find something in our research which would allow us to refill our coffers again once the Tide of Ages was ours. And much as it sh
amed me to admit it to myself, knowing that Carson provided a kind of lifeline in this world, with his small inheritance, eased some of the pressure.

  Still, I couldn’t help but be troubled as we walked in silence under too-warm mid-May sun. Once we had the Tide of Ages, we effectively had nothing left to search for. No goals. Nothing to work toward.

  And I did not like the idea of being aimless.

  6

  Carson sat poring over books. I perched at the end of a bookcase, sunken down to the floor, head in a tome of my own and a stack at my elbow, ready to go. And Heidi slouched amidst the shelves just opposite, scowling at a small, leatherbound book she held but which she did not appear to be reading; I hadn’t heard her flip the page in at least ten minutes, and when I looked up, her eyes didn’t appear to be moving.

  Carson sighed, and slouched over the desk, pushing his latest object of research aside. “I can’t find anything.”

  “Ditto.”

  Heidi made a short “Mm” sound in agreement, snapped her book shut, and ran her hand through her hair.

  “Read it to me again,” Carson said.

  We’d found a riddle in our research for the Tide of Ages. It was perhaps the most substantial nugget of information we had … and it meant absolutely diddly-squat to any of us. Hence the attempts at finding something more to show us the way.

  I recited it, seeing as the thing had been burned into my brain:

  Beneath the ceaseless rays of light,

  The endless sea in frozen time,

  Two must turn—

  Two must turn.

  The fallen kingdom lieth drowned,

  And where the king and queen were crowned,

  Two must turn—

  Two must turn.

  “Endless sea,” Carson repeated slowly. He twisted toward Heidi—or at least in her direction, seeing as she was obscured by shelving from where he sat. “Are you sure what you read is right and that there is a land mass on this world? It’s not just ocean?”

  “I have no reason to doubt my research,” she replied shortly.