Scryer's Gulch

by MeiLin Miranda

  There was that one flicker, but they got it all wrong, and it was so long ago they don’t even show it on the classic flicker channel. Black and white, and old, but not a classic.

  Is it fair that I tell you what they thought and felt, when there’s no way to be sure? Of course it isn’t. I’m a writer. We trade in unfairness and inequity; we know everything about the story, or we make things up so we think we know, and then we tell you what we want to tell you when we want to tell you, or don’t tell you at all.

  But I digress.

  I was talking about the ethergraph system. In Scyer’s Gulch there was only one ethergraph receiver, and it belonged to Simon Prake. He had his own little office a few storefronts down from Prakes Hardware. A talented man, one of the best ethergraph operators of his day, for that was back when the technology was new, and the operator had to have some serious natural ability. Simon had plenty, and the education to go with it. When he decided to leave his ethergraph engineering job in Jackson, the partners tried to keep him. Even offered him a full partnership. No one understood why he left.

  Agent Duniway was not one to swoon when confronted with a shock, but Annabelle decided Schoolteacher Duniway should feel a little faint at the sight of the vandalized schoolhouse. She staggered gently into Mr Prake, who caught her elbow with a concerned murmur. “There now! Do you carry smelling salts in your reticule?”

  She never needed them, and so, unlike most respectable women, she didn’t even own any. “Oh dear...left them at the Hotel, sir!” she faltered. She made an immediate plan to find a vial somewhere, even if she had to order Misi to steal one.

  “Never mind, dear,” he said. “Let’s get you sitting down. A cup of tea, perhaps. Come now, Mrs Prake will see to you.” He guided her down the block to Jackson Street and his comfortable-looking house, the town’s second-largest, sitting back from the street behind a brave little garden.

  There working among the hollyhocks and young rose bushes were Mary Prake and her daughter Amelia, who came running up to open the gate. “Mama, look! It’s Papa and Miss Duniway!”

  “Goodness, Miss Duniway, are you unwell?” said Mrs Prake, hurrying up behind Amelia.

  “She’s had a bit of a fright, Mary,” said Mr Prake. He steered the unresisting Annabelle through the front door into the parlor, explaining to his wife as they went.

  “Go tell Cook to put the kettle on, Amelia. Georgie!” Mrs Prake called as they entered the house, “Georgie! Go fetch the sheriff.” Georgie skidded into the room, took one look at Miss Duniway, and cocked an eyebrow at his sister, who glared back. Georgie gave an exasperated shrug and took off running.

  Tea was served and Annabelle let the color return to her cheeks just in time for Sheriff Runnels to arrive. Annabelle kept her eyes down after a brief glance showed he was observing her closely without looking directly at her. “Who could have done such a thing?” Mrs Prake asked him.

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” he answered. “But I’m putting Rabbit out to watch the schoolhouse tonight.”

  “It’s not...?” said Prake.

  “No, not for another week,” said the sheriff, with a warning look.

  The mayor thinned his lips. “Well. I suppose the best thing to do now is get a crew to put the fences back up and repaint the place. It’s time for me to go down to the store, anyway, and there are always a few men dangling for work near there.”

  “I did tell you not to put the school so far back from the street,” fretted Mrs Prake. “Oh, now, don’t you both run off, who’s going to escort Miss Duniway back to Hopewell’s?”

  Annabelle objected with a show of feebleness, but in the end, she took Sheriff Runnels’ arm and let him walk her back to the hotel. “I heard you speak of a Rabbit, Sheriff,” she said with a smile. “I cannot imagine you keeping a pet.”

  Runnels’ face broke from its usual hardness into an affectionate grin aimed down the street. “Rabbit’s my brother. He’s my deputy. He’s got good night vision--most of the time...” The smile disappeared.

  At the door of the hotel, she slipped her arm from his. “Is there cause for me to be concerned, sir? Should I leave town? I’m most inclined to stay, I confess, but if you think there’s really a danger--”

  “Nothing you can’t handle, I would guess, Miss Duniway. Good day, now.”

  She gave him her reserved gratitude, and hurried up the stairs to her rooms. Nothing I can’t handle...? Once behind closed doors, she opened the window and whispered, “Misi!”

  Across the rooftops, the demon cat’s ears pricked up. He was still prowling around Mamzelle’s Palace, trying to find a prudent vantage point into the building, to no avail. Their magical safeguards were crap, but the actual edifice was hard to spy upon. His hearing was excellent, even for a demon, but so far all he’d made out was a great deal of groaning, and that the high C on the piano was a shade flat. And try as he might, he couldn’t pinpoint the demon that had to be below him. It had to have sensed me, though, he said to himself. “Misi!” Annabelle whispered again. “Come here right now!” He gave a small sneeze, rubbed his cheek once against the shingles, and bounded lightly along to Annabelle’s open window.

  “What’s the lay of the land?” she said, scratching under his chin as he stood on the sill. She gathered him into her arms, closed the window, and sat down, running her hand down his glossy back.

  Dammit, I’m purring, he thought. “Unexpected,” he said aloud. “Can I change, please?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “...I didn’t get very far.”

  Annabelle stopped petting him. “Misi, you should have been able to cover most of Main street at the least--it isn’t that long! How far did you get?”

  “Only to the big whorehouse a few doors up the street,” he squirmed, then let out a squeak as she dumped him off her lap.

  “What kept you riveted to the whorehouse roof, might I ask?” she said in a cold voice.

  “I...”

  She crossed her arms, and the cat winced as if he’d been caught sleeping in her underwear drawer. “Misi, I order you to tell me.”

  “There’s a demon in there!” he blurted. “Another demon. Has to be a captive--you know we don’t come round a find this big on our own!”

  Annabelle gaped, then put one hand to her mouth in thought. “Any chance it could be the source of the contamination?”

  “None,” declared Misi. “We can’t control ourselves around it enough to do any kind of working of that magnitude.”

  “Why is it here, then? What would a demon want with a whorehouse?”

  “What would its owner want, you mean,” sniffed the cat. “I dunno. We make good bouncers. My grandfather was a bouncer at a whorehouse in Prague for the better part of the 17th century, and that was back before you lot figured out how to catch us. Good job, he always said... Accountancy? We’re surprisingly good with numbers.”

  Annabelle sat back down in the chair and put her feet up on the footstool. “C’mere, kitty, I need to think.” Misi jumped into her lap. “We need to get you into Mamzelle’s.”

  “Why can’t you go?” said Misi, flopping onto his back in her lap.

  She ruffled the fur on his belly. “I’m the schoolmarm! I can’t go into a fancy house, nitwit.”

  “You have before.”

  “Undercover!”

  He lay purring as she gently rubbed his tummy. “Speaking of which, can you pet me just a little lower?”

  “Pervert.”

  Down the street next to Prakes Hardware, Simon Prake sat in the ethergraph office, focused on a small ingot of hermetauxite. Notes on foolscap, and a stack of reference books, covered his desk; a thick tome lay open to one side. As the ethergraph operator for Scryer’s Gulch, he was often busy sending messages back and forth, but in his interstitial time, he fooled with ideas for improvements to the ethergraph network. As an up-and-coming ethergraph engineer in Jackson, he’d inscribed several spells of such grace they approached art more than technology, and thou
gh he’d never told his family, the patents on his work had made him more comfortable than anyone could have guessed.

  Now, he felt he was on the verge of a great discovery, something that might revolutionize the way the ethergraph system worked--might change it into something else entirely. If he was right, every home might have its own sort of ethergraph device, a way to send messages back and forth without the individual services of an ethergraph operator; the new breed of operators could each handle dozens of calls an hour, and would no longer be required to have their own personal ethergraph equipment, or the kinds of education and raw talent operators did now. Those who did--skilled professionals like himself--would then be freed to improve the system, to be pure engineers. He’d never told the other engineers at Feargal and Feargal; after all, his work might transform ethergraphy or destroy it completely. Hard to say how things would play out, but he didn’t want them trying to stop him.

  He consulted the open reference book one last time, then held his hand over the ingot and let his skill flow into the hermetauxite. Its internal structure flared into his consciousness, blotting out the rest of the world. He wove himself in and out of the ingot’s matrix. If I can just twist this part here, then--

  “Simon!” came an insistent voice for what must have been the third or fourth time. The hermetauxite’s inner map vanished as a small hand tugged at his sleeve. He opened his eyes, and stared down at his little brother.

  “What now, Georgie, I’m busy!”

  “Someone’s done and torn up the schoolyard!”

  “What?”

  Georgie nodded emphatically. “Yeah, and painted a message on the side of the schoolhouse in black paint, it said ‘Teacher go home!’ Messed up all the work everyone did!”

  “Don’t say ‘yeah,’ Georgie, say ‘yes,’ like a gentleman. You’re a Prake, not a barbarian.” He gave the boy the eye. “What do you know about this, young man? Do you have idea who did it?”

  “Why would I know anything about it!” protested his brother. He put his hands behind his back, but not before Simon saw a telltale smudge of black paint on his cuff.

  “Just a thought,” said Simon.

  Further up Main Street, Mamzelle paced her upstairs parlour, an opulent affair done up in gilt and red velvet. Thick carpets brought all the way from far Araby muffled her agitated footfalls, and her satin skirts twisted and bunched as she marched fretfully around the room. “Écoutez-moi, dere’s another demon here!”

  Jed Bonham reclined on the settee, stretching out his legs and crossing them at the ankles. “Mamzelle, what would a demon be doing here? You say yourself it’s reckless at best, suicidal at worst. I mean, look at you.” Jed gazed at her through hooded eyes. “And I do like looking at you.”

  Mamzelle stopped pacing and retorted, “Eef you don’t believe me, order me to tell you the truth!”

  “All right then, I order you to tell me the truth.”

  “Dere’s another demon here, and when I am free I will slaughter you like ze pig!”

  Jed laughed. “Well, I did ask you for the truth. I intend to die of old age, in my own bed, surrounded by my loving family.” At her derisive hoot, he added, “All right then, by my avaricious family. I never intend to free you, sweetheart. I’ll just hand you over to Tony. Don’t give me that look. If you’re a bad girl, I’ll hand you over to Nathan instead. He’s the eldest anyway. See how you like that!”

  “I wouldn’t like eet at all!”

  “Well, then,” he purred. “Come over here, and be a good girl.”

  Episode 4: Detectors and Detectives

  Most of you took spellcoding in school, but I bet you don’t remember a lick of it. You haven’t the faintest real idea what goes into your spellphone, or your EV set. How many of us become etheric enginers, after all--well, besides me. At least in the US--hell, most of our stuff is forged and encoded in China these days. Even if you remember your spellcoding, you couldn’t read the encoding in your phone. And don’t get me started on technical support.

  In those days, we still made stuff. Oh, we’re still mining hermetauxite, a little of it still in Scryer’s Gulch--the “BB” is closed, but the Li’l Levy and the Madcap are still in production, have been for nearly 130 years. But it all gets shipped overseas now. Along with the jobs. Why, here in my own home town, the Chinese, or the Indians, or someone, bought a whole mill, took it apart and numbered the pieces, shipped the whole thing back to wherever it was and rebuilt it there. Took 1500 jobs with it.

  But I digress.

  In those days, we still made stuff, and that was the problem: some of the stuff we were making was coming out wrong, dangerously wrong, and Annabelle Duniway’s job was to find out why.

  While Annabelle waited a day for the schoolhouse repairs, the best use of her time would be to visit her students in their homes, get a sense of them. That’s what a real schoolteacher would do, she decided the next morning, and it gave her a chance to scan for the anomalies she’d been sent to investigate without raising suspicion.

  “What exactly are we looking for, anyway?” said Misi from a perch atop the wardrobe. “You might have said,” he added sulkily.

  Annabelle looked up at the demon cat as she buttoned up her bodice. “Daniel asked me to wait as long as possible before telling anyone anything, including you.”

  “Who’s Daniel?”

  Annabelle colored slightly. “Chief Howman. Remember? My boss?” She fastened a cufflike bracelet to her left wrist, then shook it in Misi’s direction. “Like it?”

  “Present from Daniel?”

  “Stop it. It’s a detector.”

  “What’s it detecting?”

  “Hermetauxite encoded with a certain pattern.”

  Misi flicked his tail contemptuously. “All hermetauxite is encoded, unless it’s unrefined. Are you looking for a particular smelter’s mark or what?”

  “If that’s all it was, we would have sent a squad of agents here, arrested the smelter and been done with it. This is subtle, and dangerous. Do you think you can control yourself enough to look inside the detector?”

  Misi jumped down from the wardrobe onto the bed, and sniffed at the bracelet. “Gold?”

  “Just a coating over the top. Hermetauxite against the skin.”

  “You don’t have to tell me where the hermetauxite is.” He sniffed again. “I think I can handle it.” He lay down on the bed, tucking his four legs beneath him, and sent his inborn skill into the hermetauxite. Oh, so delicious! No, no, can’t eat, must concentrate. He wove in and out of the metal’s webby spirit substance--smelter’s mark, forger’s mark--when he came to the caster’s mark, he paused. Here would be the purpose of the detector. “If hermetauxite, then look inside”--standard, don’t want to bother looking inside tin, but where’s the security-breaking pattern--ah, there...if security overcome, then find marks...discard smelter and forger marks...boy, this pattern is really digging deep...if one of remaining marks matches this specific pattern at this specific depth-- “Pollution!” he spat, recoiling from the bracelet. “Oh, Mother of the Dark One, I won’t be able to get that taste out of me for a lifetime! Who would encode such a thing! How can you wear such a thing! Get it away from me!”

  “It’s inactive inside the detector. I can’t taste it the way you can, and I never was much of an encoder,” she said, slipping her gloves on. “When I look inside, it’s just a tangled mess to me. But no one can say I’m not the best wielder in the Department, least of all you, eh?”

  Misi thrashed his tail. “You take perverse delight lately in reminding me of my state.”

  “Sorry, kitty,” she soothed. “This is the first case we’ve been on like this--so magically oriented--and I guess it reminds me of old times.”

  “Me too,” he said sourly. “I have to say, though, I’ve never seen an encoding like it. Few other than a demon would be able to see exactly what’s going on--the pattern you’re looking for is subtle, and it’s really buried deep in the matrix. I have to admire
the skill of the encoder who wrote it, even if it’s disgusting.”

  “Whoever he is, he’s wildly talented, possibly beyond his own safety, and he shows a disregard for the safety of others unlike anything we’ve seen. Thanks be that Treasury has an encoder even better.”

  “I don’t like it,” shuddered the cat. “This is dangerous, Annie.”

  Annabelle tied the ribbons of her bonnet. “This is the job I signed up for. Besides, if I die, you go free--it’s hardly dangerous for you! And on that cheerful note, let’s be about the people’s business.” Misi grimaced, the expression overly large for his pointed muzzle, but when Annabelle opened the window, he slipped outside without further comment and went patrolling across the rooftops.

  Annabelle surveyed herself quickly in the mirror: a dove gray poplin with thin white stripes, modestly bustled, but very becoming. Her straw bonnet made a simple, perfect frame for her face, and she allowed one or two little tendrils of golden hair to escape on her forehead and at her nape. She was supposed to be a teacher, but Annabelle never could resist a bit of dash.

  Meanwhile, down at the Sheriff’s office, John Runnels was in conference with his brother. “Naw, I got a week,” said Rabbit. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it, Rab,” said John. “I’m just sorry to put you on a ridiculous assignment.”

  “Nothing too ridiculous about someone threatening the new teacher, right, Jamie?” Rabbit ruffled his nephew’s hair, but the boy ducked his head. “Aw, I know you don’t wanna go to school, but you gotta, kiddo! How’re you gonna learn your figures, and history, and letters and such?”

  “Already know my letters,” grumbled Jamie. “I wanna stay with you and Pa here in the jail.”

  “Have to own he’s a powerful help, Sheriff,” called a voice from the corner cell.