The Grand Ellipse

by Paula Volsky

  “Do I detect a note of personal dislike?”

  “No. I don’t know the fellow. I’ve no love for Grewzians, that’s all.”

  “In that case—”

  The blare of a brass band drowned her voice. Luzelle wheeled to face the musicians, whose presence she had hitherto overlooked. They were grouped near the foot of the stairs, and were now launching into the first bars of the Hetzian national anthem. The crowd in the foyer fell silent. Scores of respectful hands pressed themselves to patriotic Hetzian hearts. Foreign heads inclined politely. The anthem concluded and all eyes rose to the center of the staircase, where King Miltzin IX stood flanked by attendants.

  Luzelle studied the king with more than academic interest. There was nothing particularly repulsive about Miltzin IX. His expression was brightly benign, his greying walrus moustache nicely groomed, his numerous medals and insignia lined up in neat rows across his chest. With his protuberant eyes, she thought, he resembled a giant grasshopper. Pleased with the simile, she amused herself by mentally coloring his face green and affixing imaginary antennae to his pomaded head.

  Miltzin began to speak, his voice enthusiastically high pitched, his gestures distractingly expansive.

  “My dear friends, this morning witnesses the commencement of a competition that is more than a sporting event, far more than a quest for personal fame or even for national glory—”

  Quite right. Sentient Fire and safety for Vonahr, independence and freedom for Luzelle Devaire—these were the prizes, worth any price, any price, but probably that wasn’t what Mad Miltzin had in mind. What was he running on about? Only then did Luzelle notice that the king of the Low Hetz was speaking in perfect Vonahrish, which wasn’t surprising. His audience was polyglot, and, amid a multiplicity of differing tongues, Vonahrish was the language of diplomacy, the language comprehended by all civilized folk. Though the head tl’gh-tiz of the Bhomiri-D’tal tribe might disagree with that assessment.

  Miltzin IX burbled on. The key to the future, he confided, lay in the marriage of magic and science, presently expressing itself in mundane practical terms of transportation and communication. Did he really think that anyone cared?

  The king’s address, larded with optimistic inanities, spouted forth interminably. Luzelle cast a covert glance about her, wondering how many others shared her impatience. The neighboring faces revealed nothing. Beside her Girays v’Alisante stood listening with a practiced air of respectful interest that would have convinced anybody who didn’t know him. A few feet away the Rhazaullean giant Bav Tchnornoi waited, still and expressionless as a monolith. The Festinette twins were whispering to one another, grimacing and giggling. Catching her eyes upon him, one of them smirked and blew her a kiss. Nitwits. Her gaze returned to Mad Miltzin, whose verbal torrents were dwindling at last.

  “… to go forth, my friends, and astonish all the world!” the king concluded, and Luzelle felt her breath quicken and her stomach tighten. An attendant proffered a scarlet cushion upon which lay an ornate pistol. Miltzin accepted the weapon and raised it aloft. “In sight of the city of Toltz, the Grand Ellipse commences.”

  He fired, presumably a blank, and the shot blasted. Simultaneously, the velvet ropes edging the enclosure were released, and the crowd gathered in the foyer seemed to explode. A tremendous shouting arose, a roar of excitement that dwarfed the report of the gun, and a wave of humanity surged forward, overturning the flimsy barriers that marked the center aisle. As the racers sprinted for the exit, the precarious passageway vanished. An instant later the doorway was solidly choked, as racers, journalists, gamblers, and ordinary spectators struggled vigorously and vainly for egress through a portal held shut by the pressure of packed bodies.

  For a moment Luzelle stood watching. She could not find Girays v’Alisante; he had already vanished into that boiling human mass. Fortunately, she herself was not obliged to do the same. Blessing the inspiration that had moved her to station her cab at the side of the building, she departed the foyer through a rear exit, threading her quick path back the way she had come along corridors relatively clear and navigable. Many a hallway loiterer stared at her in frank curiosity as she hurried by, but nobody hindered her progress. Moments later she emerged into the morning sunshine, to discover that she was not the only racer to have dodged the crush at the front of the city hall.

  Her own cab still waited where she had left it, and silently she blessed the driver. Behind the cab waited a second carriage of slightly larger size and infinitely greater elegance, drawn by a pair of matched blacks built for speed. She caught a glimpse of a strong profile at the window and fancied the face familiar, but scarcely pondered the matter, for her attention anchored at once upon a third vehicle standing there, a conveyance unlike any she had ever seen in her life.

  The contraption was long, low slung, silvery in color, and equipped with eight gleaming wheels. Its rear portion projected in a confusing tangle of pipes, coils, wires, tubes, flanges, cogs, vanes, and glass bulbs, while the front tapered to a featureless conical snout. Something resembling a triangular metal sail reared itself high above the roof.

  No harness. Was the thing some sort of boat? With wheels? Trackless locomotive? Even as she paused to wonder, a gaunt figure passed her at a smart stalk, made straight for the mystery vehicle, and climbed in. Luzelle glimpsed shabby, grubby, loose-fitting garments, straggling grizzled hair, and grim jaw, which she recognized readily; Szett Urrazole, the Szarish inventor of the so-called Miracle Self-Propelling Carriage.

  The door slammed shut. Seconds later the vehicle roared deafeningly to life. Luzelle flinched and clapped her hands to her ears. Pedestrians shrieked and ran for cover, horses plunged and reared. Gouts of flame spurted from its posterior orifices, and the Miracle Carriage sped off in a burst of fire and a cloud of dust, traveling at impossible speed. Luzelle gazed after the lightning Szarish carriage and wondered if the race were already lost.

  Another figure hurried by her. Fair hair glinting in the morning sun, Overcommander Karsler Stornzof arrowed for the second carriage, with its splendid matched blacks and its waiting passenger, whom Luzelle now recognized as the older gentleman she had spied dining with the Grewzian hero in the Kingshead Hotel restaurant. Overcommander Stornzof cast a sidelong glance at her as he passed. Blue eyes, very blue. She wished she’d gotten a better look. Not the time to be thinking about it. Luzelle ran for her cab.

  “Train station!” she commanded the driver in Vonahrish, amending in Hetzian, “Toltzcentraldepotrailwaylines!”

  The Stornzof equipage had departed. Not five minutes into the race and she was already falling behind.

  “Top speed!” she shouted, then realized her own folly. She already held a ticket for a seat on the southbound Ilavian Whistler, which wasn’t scheduled to leave Toltz for another hour and a quarter. Risking life and limb to shave five minutes off the trip to the station was absurd.

  The driver took her at her word, however, and the cab rattled off at a dangerous clip. Before it had advanced more than twice its own length, a series of sharp bangs, like the explosion of firecrackers, peppered the morning air. The horse snorted and shied, while the driver cursed and plied his whip.

  Luzelle stuck her head out the window, craning her neck to see around the angle of the building. She beheld vast clouds of dense black smoke billowing over Irstreister Square and she heard the muffled cries of a panicked multitude. Even as she watched, a second series of sharp reports crackled and the smoke clouds darkened. Choking, soot-grimed citizens came stumbling from the square, tendrils of black vapor swirling in their wake.

  “Was anyone hurt?” Luzelle called out, but received no answer, for the cab was bearing her away at top speed, as she had commanded.

  Girays. Back there in the midst of that smoky chaos, perhaps injured? Probably not. M. v’Alisante, that superior person, was more than capable of looking after himself. Moreover, the smoke-bomb assault upon Irstreister Square seemed more designed to create confusion than to inf
lict real harm. In any case, what concern was Girays v’Alisante’s safety to her? No more than hers was to him. Let him cough his smoke-filled lungs out, served him right.

  She wouldn’t let herself think about him; there were other matters to consider. The explosions, the smoke, the resulting tumult. What or who was the cause? She couldn’t know, but one point was certain. The commotion in Irstreister Square had delayed the majority of Grand Ellipse competitors, and benefited any racer leaving the city hall by way of a side exit.

  3

  SHE REACHED THE STATION with time to spare, and the Ilavian Whistler departed on schedule. Luzelle relinquished her ticket to the conductor and settled back in her seat with a sigh. Nothing to do now but sit watching the quaint Lower Hetzian scenery roll by. She would not allow herself to worry about Girays.

  It had been startling—almost shocking—to meet up with him in Toltz, and her nerves were still jangled. But it was not likely to happen again. Along with the rest of the Grand Ellipse contestants delayed in Irstreister Square, he had missed the Ilavian Whistler. He would have to wait at least a couple of hours for the next southeast-bound train, and by the time he boarded, he would already have missed the best connections to carry him on to the Ilavian coast. She would not see him again before the end of the race, because she’d drawn well ahead and he hadn’t a prayer of overtaking her.

  Resolutely she unfolded the newspaper purchased at the station, and for a while managed to distract herself with it. No mention of the smoke bombs outside city hall, of course—that news would not hit the headlines before the next edition. Plenty of front-page space devoted to the Grand Ellipse, however, and she saw her own name mentioned more than once. Lots of war news. The hurricane Grewzian conquest of Haereste was already complete. Many pages given over to accounts of local happenings uninteresting to a foreigner, but Luzelle made herself read them all, plowing laboriously through the tangled Hetzian syntax, and in this manner whiled away the hours.

  The Ilavian Whistler chugged its way southeast, stopping at town after town. Time passed slowly until the late afternoon, when a couple of villagers clad in their relentlessly starched finest boarded Luzelle’s car at Ploysto, and took the seat across the aisle from her. Their conversation caught her attention at once, for they spoke of an extraordinary occurrence unmatched in all the years of the town’s history. Hours earlier an outlandish vehicle had passed straight through the center of Ploysto, traveling at fearsome speed. The conveyance, indescribably bizarre in appearance and driven by a woman of correspondingly eccentric aspect, seemed to generate its own power of movement in the manner of a locomotive, but it was no locomotive—it resembled nothing in the world that anyone had ever seen. Belching black smoke and demonic fire, the thing had roared into the market square around midmorning, to the terror of the local poultry; swerved hard, just in time to avoid collision with the town well; barely missed overturning the infirm Grandmother Deederkint, out to take the air; and sped off in a cloud of stygian vapor. One might have thought the uncanny apparition some sort of dream or delusion, had not a host of witnesses testified to its reality.

  The countrified accents weren’t always easy to comprehend, but Luzelle picked up enough to know that Szett Urrazole and her Miracle Self-Propelling Carriage were drawing farther ahead with every passing hour. Perhaps at some future point in the race the Miracle Carriage would break down, or better yet, run head-on into a tree.

  Otherwise, she’s already won.

  Her fingers drummed. Deliberately, she stilled them. No point in fretting.

  Luzelle’s attention returned to the Hetzian newspaper, the passing scenery, the passengers boarding or departing at each stop. The hours passed, the sun set, and the scenery disappeared. At eight in the evening she sought the dining car, which was well appointed and well filled. The moment she entered, her eyes lighted upon the Overcommander Karsler Stornzof, sitting opposite his usual silver-haired, square-jawed companion. Stornzof saw her at the same time. Their eyes met, and for the longest moment she found herself unable to look away.

  Idiotic. She was making a fool of herself. She could only imagine what the Judge would have to say. Tearing her eyes from his face, she seated herself, deliberately presenting her back to the Stornzof table, which removed all temptation to stare. Or so she thought until she happened to notice the high polish upon her soup spoon, whose convex bowl reflected most of the car, affording a tiny, distant image of a blond male head.

  She ordered, and the prompt arrival of her soup deprived her of her mirror. Before she finished dining, Stornzof and his companion exited. Presently Luzelle returned to her seat and, not long thereafter, repaired to her berth in one of the sleeping cars.

  She slumbered soundly and woke early. Around eight in the morning the Ilavian Whistler reached the Beroussean frontier and paused there puffing as the customs officials boarded to check passports. Luzelle’s documents received the appropriate stamp. The inspectors completed their work and withdrew, and the train passed from the Low Hetz into the tiny duchy of Berousse.

  Luzelle examined the customs stamp with satisfaction. A tangible sign of progress, with many more to follow. A succession of such stamps would testify to her advance along the curve of the Grand Ellipse. Her satisfaction died a quick death when the train pulled into the station at the Beroussean capital of Huizigar, where a forty-five-minute stopover afforded time to purchase a newspaper, books, a puzzle block, and lemon drops in the station. The newspaper was printed in Hetzian, official language of the duchy, and the front page proclaimed the previous evening’s blazing passage through Huizigar of the eccentric Szarish inventor and Grand Ellipse contestant Szett Urrazole in her Miracle Self-Propelling Carriage.

  Luzelle tossed the paper aside with a scowl.

  Her dissatisfaction deepened around lunchtime, when she lurched her way forward to the dining car and there caught no golden glimpse of Overcommander Stornzof. She was either too early or too late. She ate slowly, dawdling over countless cups of tea, but he did not appear. At length abandoning the vigil, she returned to her own seat, heated with annoyance at her own folly.

  Little Berousse was past in a matter of hours, and the Ilavian Whistler crossed the border into Dinsifise, first of the Mid-Duchies. Another stamp upon her passport, this time adorned with the circular Endless Fire of the Grewzian Imperium, for this was the first of the territories along the Grand Ellipse route to acknowledge Grewzian rule. A particularly close examination of her travel documents, an annoyingly thorough investigation of her belongings, told her that a Vonahrish passport drew suspicious notice within the confines of the Imperium, but nobody detained her.

  The train whistled southeast through the mill towns of Dinsifise, and the Endless Fire emblem turned up everywhere—on station platforms, on warehouses edging the tracks, on railway overpasses, on the caps of the Grewzian soldiers now glimpsed with increasing frequency. Here upon subject soil the demeanor of the Grewzians waxed lordly, but Luzelle scarcely noted the alteration until the Ilavian Whistler paused for half an hour in the town of Glozh, and she made the mistake of venturing from the train.

  Strolling to the end of the platform, she halted and drew a deep breath of springtime air blighted with smoke and cinders. There was little to see from her present vantage point—just a nondescript station house, shadowy copse behind the station, flat-topped hills, and drab wooden houses and shopfronts—for Glozh was neither interesting nor picturesque. Before her, however, the tracks stretched on into the distance, curving their way southeast through the hills toward Ilavia, with its coastline bordering the Sea of Silence, its great port city of Ila, its merchant freighters and passenger vessels, one of which would bear her on along the Grand Ellipse to the great island of Dalyon.

  Thanks to the minions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, her passage aboard the steamer Persistence was already booked. Persistence was scheduled to embark from Ila early tomorrow morning, and the timing seemed impeccable. Barring freak disaster, the Ilavian Whistl
er should be pulling into the port city around midnight. Her room at the Shipwreck Inn was reserved, and there would be time enough for several hours of sleep. All was going well; or would be, but for a certain damnably gifted Szarish inventor.

  She strained her eyes southeast, as if by effort of will her vision might overtake the Miracle Self-Propelling Carriage speeding for the coast. But Szett Urrazole remained elusive and inscrutable.

  Luzelle’s reflections were interrupted by the creak of the platform boards behind her, the flicker of a shadow, the intrusion of a voice.

  “You come with us.”

  The words were spoken in Grewzian, a tongue she comprehended imperfectly. Surprised, she turned to face a couple of soldiers, ordinary conscripts clad in the grey of the Imperium. One of them—short, meager, dark haired, and palely rat faced—was impossible to place. The other—tall, burly, fair, expressionless—was classically Grewzian.

  Her expression must have communicated incomprehension, for the big one repeated clearly, “You come.”

  “We will take a walk,” the white rat added. His broad gesture encompassed the shadowy copse behind the station house.

  Luzelle’s brows rose. In the course of her solitary travels she had often encountered just such overly hospitable young military men, and she knew how to handle them.

  “No. I cannot, thank you,” she replied firmly, in her awkward Grewzian. “I return to the train now.” She took a step toward the Ilavian Whistler, and halted as a large hand closed on her arm.

  “Come,” commanded the big one, and she noticed then what an unusually stingy mouth he had—nothing more than a tiny, lipless slit, almost lost in the wide white-skinned wilderness of his face.

  “Your hand—make it to go away!” she exclaimed, bad Grewzian deteriorating. Strange men rarely presumed to touch her, but when they did, firm measures were required. “Do not make the hands, or else difficulty! I return now train!” Her frown and the sharpness of her tone should have made her feelings clear, but the Grewzian soldiers seemed remarkably obtuse.