A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  A Tapestry of Fire

  Applied Topology Book 4

  Margaret Ball

  Galway Publishing

  Copyright 2018 Margaret Ball

  Published by Galway Publishing

  ISBN Paperback: 978-1-947648-14-2

  ISBN eBook: 978-1-947648-15-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover art: Cedar Sanderson

  Formatting: Polgarus Studio

  Table of Contents

  1. A particular talent for seeing hidden connections

  2. Two truths and a lie

  3. Something fishy

  4. Practical demonology

  5. The ice princess and the floozy

  6. The imminent prospect of being unmasked

  7. A rajah’s palace

  8. Headstrong, reckless and irritating

  9. What is your good name?

  10. I have no fiancée

  11. Two thousand pounds of water

  12. Loaded for grackle

  13. A destructive force of nature

  14. The jewel in the forehead of the idol

  15. The experience of being a fish

  16. Bombers’ moon

  17. Falling stars

  18. The death of a city

  19. An order is an order

  20. Lampposts wilting like flowers

  21. “London can take it!”

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  Also by Margaret Ball

  1. A particular talent for seeing hidden connections

  Wimberley, Sunday

  The Inner Light guest house was actually two buildings: a narrow three-story frame house and a long, low and much more modern building of native stone, which was where the office was located.

  Getting to the retreat at Inner Light Guest outside Wimberley this afternoon had supposedly been so urgent that nobody had time to brief me, so urgent that I couldn’t take time to look the place up and get an idea of the setup, so urgent that I had to throw a few respectable clothes into a suitcase and take off with faith that the GPS in the car would find the place. But apparently it hadn’t been urgent enough for one of the owners to wait in the office and give me a clue where to go.

  I dropped my suitcase on the stone-flagged floor and headed for one of the squashy leather sofas under the chandelier. Doubtless not where the hired help were supposed to hang out, but I could hardly be blamed for that, could I?

  I had just sat down when I heard a couple of people laughing and joking outside. The French doors opening on the deck out back were brilliant with afternoon sunlight; the couple who stepped inside paused for a moment, blinking, no doubt readjusting to the shadowy interior. My new bosses? No, they looked too young, too rich and too carefree to be the Fosters. Guests, then; some of the people I would be expected to wait on as soon as the Fosters turned up and briefed me on my duties.

  “Oh, you’re here already!” the girl, a lanky brunette with an incipient sunburn on her exposed shoulders and midriff, squealed as soon as she registered my presence. “Isn’t it marvelous, Chet, she won’t miss any of the activities!”

  The young man with her looked like a Chet. Probably short for something like Chester Allandale Whitehead III. Artfully cut blond hair, horn-rimmed glasses, designer shirt, khakis: he could have posed in GQ over a caption like, “Weekend Chic.”

  The brunette closed in on me while I was making these observations. “Hi, I’m Ginny,” she said, holding out her hand, “and you must be Sally. I do hope we’re going to be friends.”

  Sally, yes. Potential friend, no. “I think there must be some mistake,” I said. “I work here – that is, I hope I’m going to work here. Is Margo Foster around anywhere?”

  Ginny dimpled. “Oh, don’t bother with that silly cover story!”

  Damn. Busted already? I was going to have a hell of a time getting out of this big, squashy sofa. And then there would be the problem of running in these high-heeled sandals. I hadn’t exactly dressed for flight. But then, hadn’t it been reasonable to expect my cover would hold up for more than fifteen seconds?

  In emergency, I could always teleport, but we were discouraged from doing that in view of outsiders. Maybe I could sneak out using camouflage.

  “The Fosters told us at lunch that you’d be coming,” Chet said.

  “But you don’t really expect us to believe that you’re just some extra help they’ve hired, do you?” asked Ginny. “Not after that story in Whirred?”

  What story?

  “We know you’re here to spy on us,” Ginny said. “But it’s just silly for you to pretend to be some little waitress, especially after that photograph! We don’t have any secrets! We all talked it over after lunch and decided the best thing was to include you in all the retreat activities. After all, the whole point of the retreat is for us all to get to know each other better and make a stronger team. And obviously you’re going to be a team member – at least I hope you will.”

  “What photograph?” This time I said it aloud.

  “Just this afternoon. Didn’t you see it? I’ve got my phone set to alert me every time there’s a new posting on Whirred. They have all the best Austin-area industry news and gossip, and usually before anybody else.” Ginny’s coral-painted nails tapped at the surface of her phone. “See?”

  The words “Secret Love” dominated the screen. The man who was the reason for my coming here was pictured just below that, with a paragraph of dreadfully coy, gossipy innuendo about how the reclusive Austin financier Shani Chayyaputra had lost his heart to a certain young lady. Below that was a blurred picture that, okay, could have been me. Could have been almost any short girl with spiky black hair, though.

  “Mr. C. probably thought it would be funny to slip you in here without telling us who you really are. Tell the truth now: didn’t he want you to find out what we say about him behind his back?”

  “He never suggested any such thing to me,” I said with perfect truth.

  “And is your name really Sally? Or is that just part of the cover?”

  “For now,” I said, trying to look knowledgeable and mysterious, “Sally will do just fine.” And if I was slow in answering to that name, well, they’d already come up with an explanation for that, hadn’t they?

  “But you are Mr. C.’s fiancée,” Ginny pushed.

  I looked at my nails. “I wasn’t supposed to…”

  “It’s all right,” Ginny said, “when he gets back we’ll explain to him that you tried to slip in incognito but we saw through your act. He can hardly blame you for the fact that you couldn’t fool a group of brilliant, highly intuitive people with a particular talent for seeing hidden connections!”

  When she put it that way, I had to admit that it seemed silly even to try.

  “And I love your belt,” Ginny added. “Did Mr. C. give it to you? Is it, like, some piece of antique Indian jewelry?”

  I warmed to her. Some people thought that the belt of silver scales, finished off with an elaborate silver knot around a beaky protuberance, was a bit excessive on somebody as short as I was. “Actually,” I said, “it’s Mesopotamian.”

  Chet looked down his patrician nose. “I heard a lot of Iraqi national treasures disappeared from their museum during the war.”

  “Well, this isn’t a museum piece,” I told him. Even if part of it was three thousand years old, the rest was all modern manufacture. And I hadn’t gotten the authentic part of it out of a museum; I found it in a turtle pond. Or you could say that it found me.

  I wished one of the Fosters would turn up. I wanted to unpack. I wanted a shower. And most of all, I wanted to get away from
ebullient Ginny and patrician Chet, and call back to find out how I was supposed to handle this.

  Not that anybody I could ask was likely to have a good answer.

  Like an answer to prayer, a slim middle-aged woman in leggings under an embroidered tunic glided into the room. “I’m Margo Foster,” she announced. “And you must be Sally. Come along now, you’ve barely time to change before we start serving dinner, and you certainly can’t wait tables in those heels.”

  “Oh, Sally isn’t going to be working here as a waitress,” Ginny said.

  Margo Foster managed to raise one eyebrow without disturbing her makeup. “She isn’t?”

  Ginny produced a positive shower of dimples. “She may have fooled you and David, but I stay up to date with industry news!”

  “Industry gossip, anyway,” said Chet.

  “Oh, you!” Ginny elbowed him and giggled. “Sally is Mr. C.’s mysterious fiancée. He sent her down here to find out how we talk when he’s not around, but I saw through her at once!”

  “You… did?” Margo couldn’t frown; it would have cracked her makeup. The most she could manage was a slightly puzzled expression.

  “She had to admit it when I asked her straight out, didn’t you, Sally?”

  “Oh, well, in that case…” Margo’s voice trailed off.

  “She needs to join the retreat with us,” Ginny said. “That way we’ll really get to know all about her.”

  Oh, I hoped not.

  “And she’ll know all about us.”

  At last, something consistent with my original plan.

  “Now don’t be difficult, Margo darling,” Ginny urged. “You know there’s plenty of space. Your brochure says you can handle groups of up to ten, and there are only six of us – well, seven, now that Sally’s come.”

  “And how am I supposed to handle any groups without a waitress?” Margo snapped.

  Ginny shrugged. “Put out everything buffet-style,” she suggested, “and we’ll serve ourselves. Nobody will mind. And now that we know who she really is, we’d be much more uncomfortable having Sally wait on us!”

  By the time I got to the guest bedroom Margo had hurriedly assigned to me I was exhausted just from agreeing with Ginny’s assertions and saying nothing that would contradict the story in her head. Well, actually that second bit wasn’t too hard; what would have been difficult was getting a word in edgewise.

  Ginny would probably have been exhausting even if I hadn’t been acting a part; that woman should come with a warning sign reading CAUTION – HIGHLY INTERACTIVE. Pretty much the exact opposite of me, that way.

  Once alone, I sagged down on the end of my bed and tapped the ornate flourishes of my belt buckle. The tapered silver coils unwrapped; the turtle head looked up at me with bright black eyes. Mr. M. slithered out of my belt loops and undulated across the floor to the bureau. (Mr. M. is short for Mr. Mesopotamia, which is what we called him after it became clear that our American tongues were never going to wrap around a Babylonian name that started with ‘Niiqarquusu Adrahasis Galammta-uddua’ and went on from there.) Anyway, there he was on the floor, giving the bureau the evil eye.

  “Climbing this thing will be too much work,” he complained. “I need coffee.”

  “Can’t you fly?”

  “That would be even more work. Coffee!”

  I was not going to deal with a hyper-caffeinated, snake-bodied turtle mage on top of everything else. He would never be able to hold still enough to pass as an ornate belt if he got into the coffee. Worse, he’d probably want to sing.

  Instead, I scooped him off the floor and set him on the top of the bureau, where he promptly arranged himself in a spiral around a ceramic candleholder.

  “Mr. M., what am I going to do now?” I asked him. “I was going to be a waitress. A semi-invisible servant. I can’t possibly pass myself off as Shani Chayyaputra’s fiancée!”

  “The role is, indeed, loathsome and abhorrent,” Mr. M. agreed, “but since you are not required to consort with the man in person, I see no reason why you should not allow these people to believe what they will. Participating in their planned activities should give you a far better chance of penetrating SCI’s secrets than merely eavesdropping on them at their meals.”

  “Yeah, until they see through me. Then what?”

  “If they suspect you,” Mr. M. said cheerfully, “then boot, saddle, to horse and away! Or, to be literal, Brouwer! and away!”

  “If I have to teleport out of this mess,” I said, “Chayyaputra will know exactly who’s been spying on him.” I flipped my suitcase open and stirred the scanty contents: a few solid colored T-shirts, denim and khaki skirts and shorts, sandals and running shoes. Not very me. Amazing that I’d been able to assemble such a bland collection; I must have too many clothes. I’d have been happier if I’d been allowed to take just one vintage rock band T-shirt. “Do these look like the holiday clothes of a mysterious international beauty who’s just latched onto Austin’s most eligible bachelor?”

  “You packed appropriately for the part of waitress,” Mr. M. said, “which is what we have claimed Shani dev asked you to do. You can say that it’s not your fault that Ginny penetrated your disguise so easily.”

  “And that’s another thing.” His mention of Shani dev had reminded me. “He’s not a man; he’s a god. How do I play the part of a god’s fiancée?”

  “He is not a god here in America. Only in India.” Mr. M.’s sniff suggested that anybody could become a god in a country as lax as India. He was inordinately proud of his own origins in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon and his years of experience, even though he’d spent the majority of those years living as a common box turtle with a spelled ring inhibiting most of his powers.

  The ring had been removed by an unethical jerk who didn’t mind decapitating Mr. M. to get it. That in itself wasn’t necessarily a problem; it took more than mere beheading to kill the mage. Unfortunately, the unethical jerk had been unskilled with a hatchet; instead of taking one neat whack, he’d turned Mr. M.’s body into scrap meat. Mr. M. lived briefly as a disembodied head until we found a robotics engineering student who consented to join the head with one of her spare robot snake bodies. The project had required a continuous feed of the mini-stars Mr. M. had brought with him from Babylon. It had also required a serious suspension of disbelief on the part of the engineering student, who had spent much of the subsequent weeks muttering, “Holy shit,” and “If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  Mr. M. rather liked his spiffy snake body, which was a lot faster than his turtle body and which had subsequently been augmented by Meadow, the engineering student, with Wi-Fi, GPS, retractable lasers and focused ultrasonic beam projection. She had just added something resembling retractable torpedo tubes for launching miniature flash-bangs; that was the least lethal of the enhancements he’d been demanding.

  Since our first meeting with Mr. M., we’d learned more about the infinite set of little sparkling points of light he had brought with him. Mostly they could be used to augment and power the things we could already do by mentally applying various bits of topology to the real world. The Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem, for instance, could be visualized in a way that teleported the user to a pictured location. The only catch was that my maximum distance, pre-stars, had been two feet – and that was the record in the Research Department. With stars? We hadn’t yet found a maximum distance.

  Mr. M. also possessed an enviable level of self-confidence. He’d never yet encountered a situation which he didn’t think he could deal with. Me, I wasn’t quite up there with him. This project, for instance, was beginning to seem way beyond me. They should never have sent the worst liar in the Center for Applied Topology on a mission which was shaping up to be nonstop lies. Our receptionist and official liar, Annelise, might not have a talent for achieving paranormal effects via topology, but her personality was much better equipped for this job. We didn’t need applied topology skills here, we needed imaginative fiction
skills. Why had I let Ben hustle me into this when his girlfriend would have been the ideal candidate?

  Well, it was done now. After that gossip piece in Whirred, there was no way I could trade places with a tall, leggy blonde. I needed to talk to Jimmy DiGrazio. He was the only person at the Center with the computer skills to slip something like that into Austin’s favorite news-and-gossip site for the silicon-based community. Actually, I needed to kill Jimmy. Why hadn’t he warned me?

  And just in case I didn’t already feel overwhelmed, my phone rang and precipitated me into the middle of yet another mess which was definitely beyond me. And which I had foolishly thought I could escape for a few days by accepting this assignment.

  “No, Mom, I haven’t arranged any cake tastings with bakers. Why don’t we just have baklava? Everybody will like that.”

  Outraged screeches. Evidently my wedding wouldn’t be legal unless it was celebrated with a multi-story wedding cake equipped with white icing balconies, pergolas, gardens and a tiny bride-and-groom pair perched on the very top. And I was also supposed to ensure that this monstrosity would taste good? I was prepared to argue that point, but before I got my words in a row she’d moved on to the next absolutely crucial decision.

  “No, I don’t really care what color the tablecloths and napkins are. How about white?”

  More screeches. Apparently white was de rigueur for cakes but absolutely unacceptable for napkins. Who knew?

  It took me nearly an hour to get off the phone; now that she had me, Mom wanted to discuss wedding dresses, wedding shoes, florists, hair and makeup artists, photographers, music… the list was endless. Partway through, Ginny tapped on my door and opened it. “Dinner,” she whispered.

  “Look, I really can’t talk any more now,” I said, interrupting the discussion of bouzouki bands versus string quartets.

  It didn’t work. We had to cycle through endless other decisions. What color should the flowers be?

  I wasn’t sure whether flowers were have-to-be-white or cannot-be-white. “Um, red?”