The Great Restoration (A Tale of the Verin Empire Book 2)

by William Ray

  The valet smiled placidly, although it looked like he was simply biding his time to punch Gus in the face. When Gus finally set the card down on the tray, the valet asked, “Any message, sir?” His tone certainly indicated he thought there should be no message.

  Gus doubted Miss Aliyah Gale would meet with just any caller and particularly not an inquiry agent, but he didn’t have any other card to offer and couldn’t think of how else to find her. The Exhibition’s deadline for the tower was looming, and he wasn’t sure yet if it was worth his time to just sit outside her building in the hopes of spotting her.

  “Just tell her I’m interested in discussing Doctor Phand, I suppose.”

  The valet nodded, setting the tray down on an extravagantly carved table near the elevator that seemed to exist just for that purpose. Looking around again, Gus commented, “This is amazing stuff. She’s obviously doing pretty well to have acquired it all. Must be nice to work among all this.”

  The valet nodded patiently, and when Gus continued to linger for a reply, the valet finally responded, “It is, sir. The décor was brought in by her predecessor, and Miss Aliyah Gale has felt no need to change it.”

  “Predecessor? To the business? I assumed she inherited it from family or something.”

  There was a distant rumbling, like a storm still miles out or perhaps a small earthquake.

  “Yes, sir,” came the valet’s useless reply, and the man stood silent, clearly waiting on Gus to take the hint and politely depart. Whatever the rumble was, it was not unusual enough to spark comment or even a glimmer in the valet’s eyes that he had heard something. Gus hadn’t packed an umbrella, so he hoped it wouldn’t rain.

  The quickest way to the right answer was sometimes to give the wrong one, and faced with the valet’s lack of specificity, Gus just picked a possibility and pressed on. Gus focused his gaze on the Easternist décor—in his experience people usually loved to talk about their art, and with that sort of in, sometimes they’d tell him more. “Then Mister Gale laid all this down, but now she’s in charge. That’s some great art. I’d love to know who picked it out. How long have you been with them?”

  “Forty years, sir. I was hired by Cornelius Zephyr to this position, and he was the one whose collection you are currently admiring. For anything else, you would have to ask him, though he’s unlikely to tell you much.” He spoke with a sinister air that made Gus uneasy.

  “Really? Why is that?”

  “Dead, sir. Coming on twenty years now.” The old valet’s eyes met Gus’s in a chilly stare that left no question he was unwelcome as he pronounced, “Will that be all, sir?”

  Gus grinned sheepishly and gave a resigned nod of defeat. “Yes, quite. Please do convey my regards.”

  The valet nodded coolly, and Gus retreated to the elevator, stymied. That distant rumble sounded again, and Gus heard the valet mumble something to himself as the cage was closed and the elevator began its descent. He supposed he could use a newspaper to keep dry, but that would be useless if it got windy—and thinking about wind brought another thought.

  Gale was a pseudonym. It had to be. Zephyr then Gale? One wind following another seemed too ridiculous to be anything else. She could have been Zephyr’s mistress, inherited his wealth, and taken a similar name, but why do that rather than marry him? She would have been young back then, at least several decades his junior, but that sort of scandal was common enough.

  She hardly looked to be much over thirty now, so perhaps Zephyr’s tastes had run too young even for that. Zephyr certainly seemed to have had a younger man’s taste in art—older men tended to go for more traditional things, and Easternism was a recent fad.

  That thought made him pause and reconsider. Easternism was made popular by the opening of trade through the Aelfuan Strait a decade ago. Gus had been in just the right circles in Gemmen to watch it rise, but Zephyr was long dead by then.

  Even twenty years ago, it would have been monstrously expensive and tackily exotic. Khanom at the time would have been nothing more than a scenic frontier trading post. The rails wouldn’t even have run here yet, so each piece would have been carried through the wilderness by horse-drawn cart. As unlikely a pursuit as it seemed for an early frontiersman, no matter how wealthy, it seemed an even stranger thing for the valet to bother lying about. Why would someone wealthy enough to import art from the other side of the world settle so far from civilization?

  There was also the issue of Miss Aliyah Gale’s considerable influence in town. Suffragists were gaining ground, but men wouldn’t easily accept a woman as a political equal. Gus wondered if he might not be considering things provincially enough. If all those construction companies were really hers, she probably ran at least half the crews in town.

  When the Elves left, the roads were here, and the ground already flattened and cleared, but constructing all these towers on the plateau would still have been a monumental undertaking to the tune of millions of peis, and most of that would have been spent in the twenty years since Zephyr died. None of the other councilors were lord anything of anything, so all that money might be enough to give her political clout out here, even if she was a woman.

  Foundations had to be dug, pipes for water and gas connected, cement poured, and so on. The business savvy to maintain all that might adapt to planning a kidnapping like the one in Gemmen. Perhaps she was a front these new Wardens used for their above-board dealings, or perhaps they were a front for her illegal ones.

  If she ran the city’s construction rackets, it could also explain her private meeting with Doctor Phand. That made more sense to Gus than the wealthy and beautiful Miss Aliyah Gale having a secret affair with a tubby engineer. The man hadn’t seemed upset when he left that rendezvous though as he probably would have if he were being leveraged somehow by Khanom’s queen of crime. Whatever it was though, it put her in the city as the crime happened and beating a hasty retreat the next morning.

  The elevator reached the ground floor, and Gus paused in the lobby, peering out the door. From the earlier rumbling, he had expected to find it raining, but happily, there was no storm outside. He emerged from the building and couldn’t see a single cloud on the horizon, so he decided to walk back to Rondel’s to change for dinner. It was several blocks to Rondel’s from Miss Aliyah Gale’s building, but his leg wasn’t bothering him too much, so he decided it wasn’t worth the fare.

  Dressing for dinner was not a custom he had grown up with, but during his brief celebrity in Gemmen after his testimony in Parliament, Gus had quickly learned that people of a certain class considered it quite uncouth to just show up for the evening with whatever it was you wore during the day. To have any chance at talking with someone at the Viridian who knew Richard Saucier, he needed to look like he belonged there.

  The walk gave him a chance to look around the upper city a bit more, and he found its polished glamour grew quickly repetitive, leaving him stuck thinking about the case.

  As mad as it seemed, there really was a society in Khanom that called itself ‘the Wardens’. It was tempting to assume they must be the culprits, but having met Ulm, Gus was far from certain. For one thing, he was skeptical that any club that claimed Ulm as a member was possessed of the criminal experience that seemed evident in their plan.

  Using Gus to trail their victim, rather than doing it themselves, was farsighted for someone unpracticed in masked ambush since the witnesses to that tailing might call out Gus but wouldn’t be able to recognize whoever had hired him. They hired him under a false name, and even if he were so inclined, the best he could offer the Crossing was that there was a tall blonde woman involved.

  The kidnappers had known to offer him just enough money that he wouldn’t think about it too hard until it was too late. If not for Louis’s murder, he might even have let it go and just given Ollie Clarke’s goons what little information he had. That murder pointed even more strongly to something more sinister than a social club for wealthy gentlemen wi
th poor taste in costume.

  Louis had been charismatic yet tight-lipped. He would have shrugged off false Wardens and wouldn’t have ventured to argue with them over the kidnapping once they’d convinced him to do the job in the first place. Even had he thought they were real Wardens, he wasn’t the sort to confront them himself.

  Arriving at Rondel’s, Gus saw the familiar desk clerk on duty, winked at him, and was satisfied with how unsettled the clerk seemed to be by the gesture. Apparently, his threat to the clerk’s partner was working. Gus went upstairs and shook out his dinner clothes. They were rumpled from travel, but maybe the Viridian would be dark enough that no one would notice.

  Gus was pretty sure viridian was a color, and it meant either red or green, but he wasn’t sure which. His guess was that a red club would probably be brighter lit than a green one, and since there wasn’t time to get his suit pressed, he hoped for green. After dressing, he went back down and asked the Rondel’s doorman how far Blisan was down 6th and was pleased to learn it was only a few blocks more.

  That seemed sufficiently close enough to regale Emily with how he had cleverly selected a hotel right in the middle of all the important things and thus saved them untold coin in taxi fare. The downside was that the moment his feet hit the sidewalk, his thoughts returned right back to the dismal reflections he’d left off of it with—Louis’s murder.

  If there hadn’t been any argument from Louis to set things off, that meant the murder was planned. Not only that, it meant whoever planned it sent along someone who could spend however much time they needed to with Louis and then murder him in cold blood. Such men were thankfully rare and seldom travelled in the same circles as men like Sandal Ulm. Perhaps the social club was just being set up to take the fall.

  Gus still expected he might find something useful by following Ulm to his ‘Wardens’ meeting the following night but knew the best bet to find Phand was to figure out why he’d been kidnapped. The kidnappers had already planned to stoop to murder, so it wasn’t just a symptom of moral apprehensions.

  With no ransom, why did they need Phand alive? Extortion would do no good because anything they made him sign to while kidnapped, he could just refute afterwards. What could a living but unavailable Doctor Phand get the kidnappers that a dead one could not?

  All anyone was talking about with Phand was his tower. It was an enormous project, worth millions of peis, and that was just the sort of financial speculation that could drive a complex crime. The problem was, no one else seemed to be in line to get that money if something happened to Phand.

  The tower would draw more people to the Exposition, which meant more money for everyone involved. According to the council, without the tower, it would just stay a park. People like Thomas might prefer a park for some reason, but those sorts of preferences probably wouldn’t inspire the kidnapping, especially when another, bigger park already sat just across the street.

  Had the kidnappers seized Phand’s partner too? Since so much of the kidnapping had seemed carefully planned, and being mysteriously absent while his partner was kidnapped was not the sort of thing calculated to look innocent, Gus doubted Saucier was behind everything. The tower’s opponents had gone after it financially once it had been approved, and Saucier seemed likely to be the moneyed half of Phand’s firm.

  Perhaps there would be some additional reward to be had in finding him too. Once he found Saucier, Gus supposed he could wire Emily to ask after it. If Saucier had been out of touch for weeks though, where had Phand gotten the money to promise Thomas and Sylvester that he could complete construction?

  Thousands of tons of steel and the labor to erect it would be an enormous undertaking to pay for, and when the city suddenly dropped its financial support from half the cost to a mere quarter of it, then it must have seemed impossible for anyone to come up with that kind of money in time.

  Ulm had been part of that effort to short the tower and was clearly involved in something, but Gus couldn’t see any way Ulm would profit from the kidnapping of Doctor Phand.

  Miss Aliyah Gale had initially opposed it, but Phand had seemed very upbeat after their meeting. Had she changed her mind? Why oppose it at all when she stood to make a fortune with a construction project like that?

  Even if Phand hadn’t hired her firms, that would mean fewer competitors for everything else being built for the Exposition. Perhaps she was so prideful the money wouldn’t matter if she’d been snubbed on the deal.

  If she was at such odds with Phand as to arrange the complicated kidnapping though, then why had Phand gone from nervous to cheerful after their rendezvous at the Harrison? Gus felt he really needed to meet her to figure out her part in it.

  The deadline for Doctor Phand’s signature on the Exposition’s contract was only six days away. If this were really about that tower, then that gave Gus only five days to find him.

  ~

  “Upon the Book: Caerleon and Geology”

  Dr. Edwin Kipps’s latest work, Caerleon and Geology, first printed just three months ago and already passed into a second edition, has already been discovered by a large section of the reading public. The author’s ambition is no ordinary treatise; it is an attempt to harmonize Caerleon’s Compiled History with the latest discoveries in science and to confirm the order of creation as established in religious tradition.

  Modern scientific theories of the world’s formation have undoubtedly brought questions upon the veracity of our records upon divine interaction that touch the deepest interests of all men. We will not undertake to determine whether Dr. Kipps has succeeded in his rationale; but if he shall have comforted those of wavering faith, he possibly will not think himself unrewarded for the vast time and labour evidently spent and will have earned the warmest thanks of those who suspect that the science of to-day is fast tending to unsettle their faith.

  – Gemmen Standard, 13 Tal. 389

  ~

  - CHAPTER 19 -

  A temple of the Hidden Moon was hidden in the very heart of Gemmen. Emily and the others gathering there had each separately made their way there through various passages in the sewers, which were icy and particularly treacherous this time of year. Although they followed different paths, they all arrived at the same time, emerging from the various passages that converged upon the temple.

  Built beneath an ancient well, the temple was a dome of old stonework decorated with signs and symbols of the faith writ in a silver inlay that reflected dimly in the collective lantern light of the assembling worshippers.

  The water around them was deep, but stone tiles rose just above the surface, forcing a somewhat awkward intimacy among the goddess’s faithful, who had to stand in close groups to keep from falling in. The underground waterways were cold even in summer, so despite the closeness of her fellows, Emily was still forced to pull her coat tight against the chill.

  Fortunately, the ceremony was designed with speed in mind. The temple had been founded when worship of Maladriel was still forbidden by the Triumvirate, so its services were brief and promptly delivered. No sooner had the last stragglers arrived than the three veiled women conducting the ceremony emerged from shadows across the water from their congregation.

  Each was cloaked in gray, but the gray was split at the front, and beneath they wore dresses bedecked in silver brocade that vanished into the blackness as the various lanterns around the room were extinguished. There was a soft rustle as every head turned upward, peering at the only light remaining—the starry night sky visible only through the opening of the well beneath which they all stood.

  “We live in an era of rapid change.” Madame Jande’s voice echoed, the room making it seem to come from the darkness all around them. This time, her accent seemed a more southerly Verin. “Factories crank out the future faster and faster each day. Railways speed us through the continent, and great ships let a man see nearly any corner of the world he chooses. A telegraph can deliver messages across the nation faster than
a messenger could carry it across the street.

  “The world has never moved so fast, yet even the words to describe it aren’t fast enough anymore, forcing us to constantly relearn the newest versions of shorthand!”

  That brought a round of shared laughter from the group at one of the common blights of the age.

  “The whole world is in motion, constantly racing ahead, and at times, it seems away from us. It is easy, in all that, to lose sight of our journey—to see where we are, so far away from where we wish to be, and forget we began so much further away. The future is always beyond our grasp. We cannot ever reach it, but we must always reach for it.

  “In those moments where you dwell most in darkness, you need only turn your eyes heavenward.”

  As she spoke, a soft light began to suffuse the room, barely noticeable at first, as the blackness gloamed into obscura, changing the world from impenetrable darkness into shadowy uncertainty.

  “Remember that even when blocked by clouds, the stars still shine. The attention of the queen of gods may seem to wane,” she said, and Emily could just barely make out Madame Jande’s profile across the water, her arms rising up to reach towards the well shaft overhead. “But for those who hold the faith, her love always waxes, bright and full.”

  Madame Jande then intoned their communal invocation. The words were in Rejjun, spoken by Caerleon’s first faithful as they witnessed the goddess undo the Shadow Negus. Although few Verin understood that language, they all knew the meaning of the words as they closed their eyes and spoke them. “Holy Maladriel, Divine Queen, ruler of the heavens, mistress of hope—your faith is not lost.”

  Opening her eyes again, Emily found the room transformed.

  Above them, the full moon filled the circle of the well, and its reflection shone brilliantly in the pool below. The light danced from the water and caught the silver filigree in the walls, giving the symbols there a luminous glimmer that seemed nothing short of magical.