SANITY LINE
III. Same Old Song
While it was far from his area of expertise, Vidcund Därk now spent most of his days hoping that somehow, some way, Hugh Everett might have been right.
Granted, nobody out there knew whether or not any one particular interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was correct, even in Agency’s understanding of the world, which was advanced of the popular consensus in terms of both acceptance of complexity and completeness of understanding. But Vidcund hoped Many Worlds was the reality. Mostly, he wanted to be able to take one of those other worlds and hold it up, so that he could thrust it in the face of his detractors.
Somewhere among the many worlds, there was a world where he was not so cold; where his professionalism was sufficiently lax that basic human decency had stayed his hand. A world where Kraterburg stood, in whatever form the Sleeping God and his cult had built upon its remains. “Look,” he wanted to tell them, “How is this any better?”
Of course, there was no way to look between such worlds, if they did in fact exist, and so he stood silently before a tribunal of white-uniformed Agents. Two women and a man, which surprised him, as such agents were universally referred to as Men in White. He supposed it was high time he get with the times, even if Agency didn’t.
“Your actions in Kraterburg were some of the most reckless and destructive in the history of the Agency.”
“If I may?”
Vidcund could feel the tension in the room rising. The Men in White were accustomed to pontificating – they were the highest-ranking agents in the entire division, each in charge not of task forces or regional commands but entire fields of operations. For a simple Special Director to interrupt them before they could even build steam was unheard of.
The man who was speaking, who had been sitting on Vidcund’s left, could barely muster a frown. “… Special Director Därk, the action you have been charged with is a very serious matter.”
“Let’s not call it charged, Agent Albus. I specifically described performing the action in great detail in my report of the event.” Vidcund shifted his angle slightly, to face the man directly. “I deliberately caused an antimatter containment breach and destroyed the city of Kraterburg. I changed the face of the world and clouded it in the kind of artificial winter that makes Mount Saint Helens look like a blip in the weekend weather. I traded, potentially, a million lives to kill a single entity.”
There was a pregnant pause. Everyone expected him fight the charge, in spite of dutifully reporting the event. To somehow explain it wasn’t his fault, or that the release had been inadvertent. He chose to capitalize on the conversational momentum. “… It’s helpful to start saying that out loud.”
The Men in White shifted uncomfortably, and the middle Agent, his former handler, Stamatia Dowd, was the first to break the silence. “This is the sort of thing Agency Division was specifically created to avoid.”
“I hold, Agent Leukos, that any damage I have done is proportionately lesser than the damage the entity released by the cult could have caused itself. If I could direct your attention to the following presentation…”
---
“Food rationed tighter than a nun’s asshole and you’re wasting calories on exercising.”
Niles hissed, partly for air through his poorly-ventilated mask, and partly out of annoyance. Prodigal had always been the worst among them for a general lack of consideration. Ironic, frankly, given his relatively high breeding. Proof that there was more to being a man than the accidents of his birth.
Reaching up, he grabbed the rafter he’d wrapped his knees around, and carefully rolled across his shoulders to dismount, letting go before he could strain the joints. “You’ve really got to be careful what you say, man.”
“What, you catholic or something?”
“Don’t have to be a catholic to be a fun-hating, grumpy son of a bitch, now do I?”
The former detective paced back to his bunk, where he’d left a towel, his shirt, and his jacket. He wore the mask out of long habit, in the warehouse, whenever there was light enough to see by. He, at least, valued his anonymity, and Scion had made it abundantly clear that the identities of the Grey Angels were to be kept secret.
“No,” Prodigal countered. “I suppose not. We’re sending the last round of folk up to today’s refugee ship now. Kid’s going with them.”
“We found her mom?”
“Sort of. Banker has a record of her being sent to Zvanesburg two or three ships ago.”
It irritated Niles that some stupid banker had managed to figure that out before him. “… Good for her, then. Someone going with the kid?”
“She’s travelling with another family.”
Niles nodded, trying to convince himself that was good enough. He’d pulled that kid out of a nightmare, personally. Seemed the least he could do to see her off – but how would he get back, in anything resembling a timely fashion?
He looked to the door as heavy footfalls approached it, and it swung open three full strides ahead of the man who was entering through it. Scion only walked like that when he was angry. “Pack your things. We’re moving out.”
---
Why the hell was it always a dark and stormy night?
Viscount Rainwright might have enjoyed the pathetic fallacy when he was viewing the event in hindsight, but he wasn’t the one freezing her butt off in the pre-dawn rain, doing her difficult best to stay dry with the dubious shelter of an awning for protecting a telephone, wondering if the whole farce mightn’t end with the weather dashing the ship she was waiting for against the pier she was waiting on and spilling her, or its precious cargo, into the drink.
Holly Bell was to be disappointed. The wait was tedious, as the ship and the tug guiding her gently danced themselves into place, the sailors secured her with line, and somebody finally thought to throw her down a gangplank. She was nimble enough – even with the rain and the high angle, she made the weather deck of the salvage ship easily.
The Brass Tacks was a salvage and recovery vessel hired out, ostensibly, by the Royal Arcane Society – specifically at the request of the overlap in membership between them and the Order of the Wheel and Pinion, which her master, the Viscount, headed. She did not pretend to know much about the mission or goals of either, but it was obvious to anyone with half a braincell to run current through that you’d only poke around what was left of Kraterburg, months after the fact, because you wanted to know what had caused the Eruption in the first place.
A person who knew Rainwright half as well as she did knew it wasn’t just for curiosity’s sake. One day and the Gods willing, she’d slip a knife between the man’s ribs. He was more dangerous than anyone guessed.
“You Rainwright’s secretary or something?”
She pressed a shiny coin into the hand of the man who helped her over the last foot or two. “Best to go with ‘or something’. This one is expected.”
Inside, at least, was warm, and Holly figured she must have cut quite a figure. To ordinary eyes, she was a peculiar-looking thing. She was gaunt, a glazed expression on her face, short dirty-blonde hair tucked behind her ears. The only nod to her station, really, were the furs she was wearing – the particularly plush band around her neck probably raised the price of the jacket all by itself.
“This one takes it, Captain McGregor, that you found something interesting.”
The captain, and old man who had been at the bottle recently, gave a slow nod, and looked decidedly unhappier once he recognized Rainwright’s Assassin. “I was wondering who Rainwright would send. Here… Come Below.”
Something about the ship smelled wrong, stinging the woman’s sensitive nose – more sensitive than any mere human would have had. It was a strangely familiar smell, though she couldn’t place it, and in her experience, anything she remembered that vaguely was usually bad news.
---
Rebuilding the Union would begin here, with the wound that had sundered it entirely. Edward Coultier was a man who knew no limitations, but made sure to remind himself of what he didn’t know. He was neither an expert in politics nor social science. He could build camaraderie easily enough, however. And he knew the first order of business in organizing any new group.
Locate and isolate the bad seed, immediately.
He wasn’t a eugenicist by any stretch. The mainland would be more than happy to accept any refugees he sent their way. But in his city, at least, there were going to be some ground rules. He’d overlook any minor criminal offenses, of course, but certainly anyone involved in looting, rioting, or other violence post-disaster was going to be on the first ship out of here, along with anyone he could identify as a magic user.
He had a knack for it, a sight-beyond-sight that he supposed was a form of magic in and of itself, albeit a benign one. Compensation from God or Darwin or whoever, he supposed, for his other visual shortcomings. It was a learned talent, one he’d cultivated, but one he also had had a natural knack for.
Like rolling your tongue, you had to have the gene for it.
Working from the records the Grey Angels had kept, he’d stayed up through the night, in the relative plenty and comfort of the ship, whose idling engines provided plenty of electrical power for lighting, heating, and the operation of computer equipment. Cellular service might have been down, and naturally, there was no wired infrastructure to speak of, but he could use the ship’s extensive wireless suite to get all the information he needed. He’d made a list – cross referencing the Grey Angels’ lists of refugees and survivors with what criminal databases he could legally access.
After a brief nap and a shower, he emerged from his wardroom in his Crimson Knight uniform, with the red stab-vest and the black slacks, to find Francis already in the companionway, wearing much the same. “Ready, sir?”
“I believe so. Tell the Grey Angels they will be moving out on the next refugee transport. All survivors are to report to the quay for further instruction.”
---
Gladfen was a rather depraved place these days – falling victim to that old cycle of the moods of the Sidhe. It was, however, a freehold, and a rich one, which made it a busy territory, and its relative proximity to the edge between Dreaming and Waking meant there were many a visitor among the Dreamers of Galba Dea, and that the Seers who practiced their arts in Gladfen were in a position of prime viewing.
These factors, and countless others, had no doubt helped Duke Adron make Gladfen the seat of the Duchy of Fenmarch. Most of his Dukedom had become unstable in the wake of the blast, becoming a shifting morass of memories and parables instead of a gleaming reflection, wonder-lit, of the Waking World behind it, when some blunder of the humans had removed that Waking World, and replaced it with an Infant Sea.
Fair Folk like Adron got their legendary proclivity for a trickster nature for good reason, and his membership in the Unseelie Court meant that the ageless sidhe tended to fall toward the darker spectrum of the Fae’s tricks. He was not precisely malevolent, though he did occasionally like to torment the artists that fell under his sway by inspiring them with nightmares rather than muses. The same deathly disbelief that was killing the commoner kith was weakening the Sidhe, too.
But ever since the Battle of Kraterburg, the balefire in Adron’s dining hall had burned brighter than ever, and fae of all kinds from all around gathered to revel and bask and feast in its glamour. Adron himself was returning from just such a feast, the musicians’ music still in his ears, the taste of wine and women still on his lips, when he spied Caprice Frostburn up on the parapet. She was a Pooka, a commoner, but held a high position in his court all the same, as the chief of all those Seers which served him.
Such was his respect for the lynx-faced sage, that he waited patiently at the periphery of her visit for her to notice him. Such was her respect for her Duke, that she did not take this to heart. “… You require something of me, your grace?”
“To the contrary. I missed you at dinner, which can only mean you must have something to tell me.”
The pooka extended her gaze again, and with difficulty, Adron could force himself to see into the waking world, along with her. It was getting easier, these days, which was telling. The Sidhe had the hardest time of the craft, since they were so firmly connected to the Dreaming in the first place.
“I see spiders swarming up from a great wound in the earth. The mists they once helped to weave in place are dissipating, draining into that wound. They wish to repair the damage their envoy had done.”
The Mists, the great Forgetting… that was the cause of the plague that was killing the Fae, and that kept them isolated here, coming no closer than the edge of the Dreamlands, unable to step into the waking world beyond. Adron, with his eye on a loftier title, could not help but to grin. “I would rob them of the chance.”
---
As usual, Holly was coming to realize she should trust her nose a hell of a lot faster than she had been. The smell in the hold was overpowering, and it didn’t take long to realize why.
Caged, in the centre of the room, was the most bizarre, extraordinary creature she’d ever seen while lucid. It was dead or slumbering, to tell by the limpness of its limbs, of which there were many. Four or five tentacles bursting from the top of its body. No head to speak of, but eyes in the groin of each of… five legs? The eyes themselves were interesting – she peeled a membrane back, shining a light directly at one to get a better view. Three independent pupils set against an iris that seemed to be either slowly fusing or slowly splitting.
Belatedly, she realized she was probably never going to get the smell of its excretions off of her gloves. Another good set of printless leather gone to waste prematurely.
At last, she reluctantly realized she was going to have to break the silence. “… Quite the specimen you’ve found, Captain. This one is impressed.”
The captain, whose booze rivaled the smell of the caged monstrosity, seemed unconvinced. “You’ve seen that sort of thing before?”
Holly paced around the caged creature, taking long, stalking strides on her long, slender legs. Hunting it. “… Maybe. Memory can be the most reliable part of the brain, when it wants to. How are you sedating it?”
“We aren’t. It’s laid like this since we caught it in the first place.”
She nodded, slowly, tucking hair behind her ears. “… This one will make all the arrangements for it to be delivered quietly to where it is going. But there was something else, yes? Something, perhaps, even more interesting?”
The captain sighed heavily, and with the air of a man complying only because he had a gun to his head, approached a locker, which he opened with a key he kept in his wallet. From this locker, which was empty save for the following, he extracted a long, unmarked cardboard box, which he opened carefully. There, wrapped in newspaper, and surprisingly unharmed by its time at the bottom of a new sea, was one of the most beautiful knives Holly could recall having seen.
She took it into hand and moved into better light through which to see it. It was a long knife, and the double edge clearly marked it as one meant for combat. The metal itself was black as the night – not some powder coating or enamel, but the actual metal, whatever alloy it was, was entirely black.
It was not, as Rainwright was hoping, the Living Bone Knife supposedly used in the attacks. So far as Holly was concerned, however, it was just as good. She thought, as she slipped it back into the box, she could spy the faintest of lines on its surface.
“You have done very well, Captain. This one will have to see about a bonus.”
---
If nothing else, Niles supposed, salt air and the light rain they were sailing into felt soothing on skin that spent too much of its day behind a mask. He and his fellow Angels had all ditched their too-recognizable masks as soon as they’d had the privacy to do so, and now he found himself, as no doubt quite a few other people were, gazing at the retreating, broken skyline of Figaro with a mixture of regret, annoyance, and relief.
Regret, at not having said something to satisfy his annoyance at having been effectively exiled back to the mainland. Relief, in that, by all accounts, life was already much closer to normal in the Terrwald Precinct, which is where their destination, Zvanesburg Port, lay. It would be good to get back to civilization, such as it was. And there was something relieving about being allowed to be himself again.
If he himself actually existed. It was a tough question – there hadn’t really been time, between his revival and the Battle of Kraterburg, to either reverse the legal reality of his death or construct some new identity to hide behind. Not that it mattered. He was sure the system was still in shambles enough that he could get by entirely as a paperless entity – a non-person whose impact on the world was as great, in some way, as the considerable number of people out there who exist only on paper.
“You’ll catch your death out here.”
Niles looked to James, as the slightly older man joined him at the railing. The Professor looked very different without his Grey Angels garb. Modest jeans, hooded pea coat, a scarf. Less menacing and more… bookish. Which, the detective had to remind himself, the man was. “You’re one to talk. You should wear a hat.”
“Take the log out of your eye before you complain about the one in mine. Or something.”
Niles rolled his eyes. The geneticist loved to taunt him with badly-quoted bible verses, for some reason he’d yet to divine. “What’s the plan?”
“No plan. We hit Zvanesburg and we split up. Most of us – you and I seemingly the exception – have families that have probably spent a few months now worried we died. And we’ve spent a few months worrying about them.”
Niles nodded slowly. Prodigal, for certain, would be relieved to finally get back to the easy living of his wealthy family’s life. Driver would probably tag along. Banker… well, Banker didn’t talk much about his family. “… You don’t have anyone waiting back home? Some special sweetheart? A cat?”
“Oh, I gave up on the broken hearts game long ago,” James said, smiling sadly. “I’m thinking of driving back up to the Sepulcher. See if it survived the earthquakes.”
“See what Eli left behind for us, you mean.”
The scientist smirked at him. “You’re perceptive.”
“It doesn’t take a psychic to read people, buddy.” Niles turned, intent on going back inside. “You got any of that instant coffee left?”
---
Vidcund gestured broadly, causing the holographic projection that filled the room through the auspex of everyone’s Augmented Reality glasses to waver, and ultimately fade. “… This concludes the recrimination section of my report. You have a question, Agent Albus?”
Albus seemed slightly put out by being called upon directly. “Yes. Throughout this process we have been very patient with you, Agent Därk.”
“And I thank the tribunal for it.”
The three nodded back to him, and Albus continued. “You continually reference a precedent to this case, some exemplary situation which required a similar response, thus excusing you of any wrongdoing in your actions, which, I will say again – resulted in the destruction of the national capital and all the people in and near it, causing untold and lasting ecological damage to the entire world in the process.”
Vidcund winced internally, not allowing his discomfort to show on his face. The ecological damage had been an unintended consequence. “Yes sir. I trust everyone in this room is familiar with the Rains of Terror Incident?”
He gestured again, and a new AR scene unfolded around them – the tiny company town of Anfangsburg, in its pre-1969 splendor. “I will spare everyone present a retelling of the publically-known version of events, and cut to the heart of the matter. The relevant document is Agency Brief 1969-08-74-b. Prior to the event in question, an Agency-sponsored virologist by the name of Rudolf Crantz began experimentation with bioweapon development under the auspices of the Self Defense Forces. At our request. The resulting weapon, a virus codenamed Virgil, was tested on a small number of mine workers in the town of Anfangsburg.”
Vidcund gave a subtle gesture, and animation in the scene, which had been suspended, began to advance. “The mine workers who succumbed to the illness were publically diagnosed with acute radiation sickness – the mine had intersected a region rich in Pitchblende, which provided a convenient excuse. The bodies of the victims were incinerated to prevent spread of the Virgil virus.”
The “sky” became overcast in reddish clouds, the red originating from the smoke of stylized crematoria near the mine. “What nobody expected was that the virus had survived in particulate form, borne in the smoke to form clouds, and fall out over Anfangsburg in the form of rain. Infection was nearly total. The virus passed easily from human to human, human to animal, animal to human, and was later determined to even be capable of spreading in water. Virgil’s long latency time and sudden, simultaneous outburst into the active strain allowed total infection of the town before anyone knew what was happening. Would anyone care to guess Agency Division’s response?”
Stamatia pursed her lips slightly. “We eradicated the town.”
“We saturated it with materially harmless radiation from neutron bombs.” Vidcund said, as though he was correcting her. “Because, as you well know, they could be used to kill everyone present without damaging the town any more than a heavy windstorm would have. And the radiation had the added benefit of destroying the Virgil virus.”
He gestured, cutting off the animation as airbursts of radiation began to play. “For the record, I have it on good authority we still have some living samples of Virgil tucked away in a lab someplace.”
The throats of the agents sitting in judgment against him tightened uncomfortably. “If I may, I would like to move on to my Retroactive Threat Assessment on the entity I destroyed…”
---
Working for Rainwright meant walking a tightrope between double-lives, for very few of his employees had a single role. While it was true that he had a small household serving staff that ultimately reported to his butler, Walter, a great many of his other apparent-servants were also agents in his network of spies and contacts – not to mention the much larger network of people he merely influenced rather than actually employing.
Holly was one such individual, with the good luck of being housed in residence, by virtue her cover identity as his housekeeper, one of a dozen supposed-immigrants who quite literally did his dirty work for him.
She worked, as her role necessitated, at the Town House. It was a cramped thing, compared to the Summer Home out in the countryside, especially once one remembered there was only one basement and a sub-basement to cram the covert-purpose rooms into. She was presently in these lowest of basements, in her unflattering uniform as a cleaner, conversing at length with her master, who was pontificating on the creature that had been brought up from the deep.
“It is usually called a Crawler, and properly it fits into the lore of the Cult of the Sleeping Eye. Gloria Creena’s brood.”
Holly sneered. She had no love for the Cult. “This one has heard the name before. But the instincts it has suggest there is something more to the story.”
She could not abide her peculiar mode of speech – Rainwright didn’t like it either, and frequently berated her for it. It was, however, a deeply engrained thing, a form of conditioning – a lesion on her brain, no doubt – which both were having little luck in breaking. He frowned slightly. “Yes, well, your instincts aren’t all wrong, Miss Bell. A Crawler is not a unique thing at all.”
He crossed to the rows of books that lined the walls. He had moved much of his arcane library here, for the duration of the cold weather, and his stay in the townhouse, which looked to be the foreseeable future. From it, he selected a newer-looking volume, which was little more than a sketchbook someone had been working in. Around the time of the Second World War, Holly decided, when he placed it in her hands. She could feel some measure of its age, and smell the mark of the years in the leather cover and the acid-wearing paper. He’d left it open to a cluster of illustrations of the thing… or at least, things which shared the peculiar eye.
“When Emilio Ordos – a member of the Zaxtonian Army, as it was still called at the time – first recorded these, he assumed he was seeing several interconnected species. There’s a bit of old lore you’re better off not being exposed to that suggests he was wrong.”
Holly’s eyes glazed over the illustrations. There, in the top corner, was something, small by suggestion, which looked not unlike either a winged trilobite or an armoured jellyfish. The eye was not the same – it seemed almost to have five three-pupiled segments. Then there was a drawing much like the crawler they had in their possession. Another, further down the page, showed something that looked more sedentary, like a many-eyed anemone. As she studied them, and read the soldier’s notes, she began to have the sense of feeling the walls closing in on her, and unintelligible whispers behind them.
This was not a unique experience for her, so she simply spoke to interrupt the approaching psychotic break. “They are a larval form. A step in the progression. It is born like this, and then progresses down, across the page.”
“Very good,” Rainwright said, and his tone told her he meant it. “The creature is just one of a number of stages in the life cycle of a creature called a Labyrinth. I am tempted to destroy it outright, to prevent it from ever developing into one.”
“If this one may say so, my Lord, that seems out of character for you. Your lordship is more inclined to study things.”
Rainwright was on the point of answering when a familiar knock came at the door, which opened a moment later, to admit his blindfolded butler. The blindfold was silk with a cotton core, similar in construction to a tie, fitted at the back and of a pattern to match the man’s rather ornate vest. He preferred it, over the older standby of sunglasses, because he felt it made a statement, but also because it concealed the deformity or damage that had rendered him blind in the first place. “Forgive the interruption, my lord. His Highness, the Crown Prince, awaits your audience in the sitting room.”
Rainwright nodded, looking to Holly. She was the closest thing to a bodyguard he had, these days, and would naturally be coming along. “Tell him I will be along presently, Walter. You,” he said to Holly, directly, and handing her the box which contained the knife. “Bring me this in five minutes, and tell me it was just recently delivered from the ship. Make up some bull about why this and this alone deserves my attention.”
Far be it from the Moth to question her master’s directions. “Yes, My Lord.”
---
Niles was surprised to find himself relieved that the Terrwald was largely unchanged. The Boreal Rainforest, protected by long tradition and, later, national law, was an ancient landscape, and there was a comfort in that. It was always changing, as all wild things did, but it was also always the same. The highways were somewhat worse for wear, and along the Number 16 – which was the next best to a coastal highway, as it followed the edge of the forest where the Blasted Bay had carved out a new edge in the southwest - there were plenty of downed trees. The further north they got, the thicker and foggier things became, until it began to feel normal again.
“… You’re going to ask anyway.”
James sighed, and Niles didn’t need to share the other’s latent psychic powers to understand why. There was a lingering tension that had hung over the pair of them for the entire trip, and it was all because James wanted to talk about something that Niles certainly, certainly didn’t. There was, frankly, only one way to do away with that tension, and that would be to call it out.
Being an adult could suck sometimes. “… It’s that book. Die Vermiis Mysteries. I know it.”
James risked a moment’s inattention on the road to shoot the other a bit of side-eye. “You’ve conjectured it. None of us knows where he got the spell.”
While there were questions of all sorts that occupied Niles’ mental notebook of such things, none had been as engagingly pressing as his attention. Why am I alive? For most people, this was an academic question, but for Niles, a practical matter. It all went back to that day, what seemed like a lifetime ago now, last summer. He owed a man a grave debt. A mass murderer.
He needed to know how it was achieved. “Someone knows. If nothing else, he knows.”
Niles, as passenger, had great opportunity to study James’s reactions. Everything about them, from the sudden tautness of his grip on the wheel to the thoughtful expression on his face, spoke of nervousness. Pensiveness. “I doubt the book even exists anymore. He would have destroyed it once he’d saved what he needed from it.”
“What do you mean, saved?”
“… He had a book. A Black Book.”
---
“Barracks!” The clarion call rang out over a roomful of men who were busy with last-minute spot-cleaning. “Attention!”
In a small room that had once been half of the floor of a warehouse, sixty people suddenly snapping to attention all at once could create a hell of a bang. Edward was pleased by the uniformity of the sound, standing in his stridently-perfect uniform at the shoulder of Francis, who was nodding just slightly, as was the man’s way. “Knight Captain Coultier wishes to inspect the men’s barracks! Fall in for inspection.”
There was not much moving to do, in the crowded space, as men moved to the ends of their bunks. The room was small, if not unfinished. The unfinished quality gave it imperfections Edward knew would hide the minor details from him as he walked up the row to the other end of the room. In truth, he could have cared less about the room. He was more impressed with the knights – their deportment, their behavior.
He had always run the Crimson Knights TC – for Tournament Club – in a paramilitary fashion. But now that they were invested with paramilitary authority, he was pleased to see, if anything, an increase in vigor. Reaching the end, he returned the salute of the young man in charge of the barracks. “Knight First Class Lowell.”
“Captain Coultier, I have sixty two men prepared for inspection.”
The three, now, conducted themselves back down to the end where Edward had entered, now more formally inspecting. Edward was careful to pick out what small details he could, both as an exercise in overcoming his imperfect vision (which was quite good, actually, with his glasses), and as an exercise in teaching others attention to detail.
Reaching the far end, he turned. “Gentlemen, I must congratulate you all for quickly settling this barracks. We have arrived on the island of Figaro in short order and established a presence to be felt. Some of you have served long enough to hear me say this before. Membership in the Crimson Knights is not a game. It is not enough, merely, to be good fighters. We must make ourselves good soldiers, so that when duty finally calls, we can answer. Gentlemen, you have answered well.” He inclined his head to the left as he turned to exit. “Sir Lowell, on me.”
“As you wish, sir.”
In the hastily-erected “corridor” between two sets of partitions that had divided the open-planned barracks into male and female camps, Edward turned quickly to face the younger man. “In your cleaning, you discovered something unusual?”
“Yes sir. A notebook.” He handed it over, and Edward studied it. It was a beaten-up, aged old thing. Definitely something that had lived in a pocket. “Whole thing’s written in code. I’d have thrown it away, but… just seemed odd, you know.”
This was where the Grey Angels and their followers had overnighted. If Edward had just gotten lucky… “Thank you, Sir Lowell. That will be all.”
“Thank you, Sir. Lieutenant Le Blanc.”
Edward could tell from Francis’s look as the man lowered his hand that they were both thinking the same thing.
---
The parlor that Rainwright maintained in the town house was a richly appointed thing, suitably anachronistic for a man of his rumoured age and affected aura. The floors were not carpeted wall-to-wall, but instead a custom rug with contours cut out for the hearth and the non-rectangular shape of the room lay perfectly centered over rich, waxed wooden boards. The upholstery was fresh and firm, and Prince Valarian found he had difficulty finding flaw at all in the state of the room. A rarity, even in his own chambers.
The prince and his host were sharing a mid-afternoon refreshment of tea and light pastries while verbally eviscerating one another.
“I’ve had some time to think since our last conversation, Viscount, and I think I’ve decided what to do about your little maritime adventure.”
“One should always make the time to think, Your Royal Highness. I think in time you’ll come to realize how useful a habit it is.”
Valarian was unmoved. “The unauthorized use of naval vessels is a troublesome problem, since there’s no real legal charge which would apply.”
“Suggesting, perhaps, that I’ve done nothing wrong,” Rainwright offered, hopefully.
“In this particular instance, you mean?”
From the hallway, Holly was listening to the sparring, standing in the doorway of Walter’s office, which was just off of the hall from the entrance to the house. “Is it always like this?”
Walter was, perhaps, the only person in the building with hearing to rival hers, and for a moment she thought the blind man was ignoring her. “… His Royal Highness and His Lordship have never gotten along well. The Viscount calls it a simple matter of failed parenting.”
“What do you call it?”
“Frankly, it isn’t my place,” Walter replied, turning his face in the direction of the other as he started closing the ledgers he had open in front of him. “And I’m not entirely sure it’s yours, either.”
Holly considered that for a moment, before slinking away, silently. Of late, she had been growing more and more resentful, not just of Walter’s attitude, but of the fact that Rainwright did not give her her due. She was, she reasoned, his most valuable of servants, and like many masters before him, he had failed to see it. That he had not yet met their same end was due in part to only two factors – she had yet to give him the full year and a day’s service she’d sworn to, and, moreover, he had yet to do anything outright abusive to her. He was gentle. Demanding, exacting, and precise. Sloppy with his promotions. But, at least, he was not a beast of a man.
She knocked smartly on the door, before entering. As always, her voice was unusually hoarse –s he had difficulty ever speaking above a whisper. “Forgive the interruption, My Lord. Your Highness.”
The two men nodded, and it was Rainwright who spoke. “What is it, Miss Bell?”
“A package was delivered for you by courier, along with a message.” She handed the parceled-up knife over to him. “It is from Mister Cutting, with the Arcane Society, and he requests that you, personally, attend to identifying it.”
“Thank you, Holly. Would you kindly tell Walter to thank him for me?”
Holly bowed, and stepped out. A few more weeks, she thought. Then, we will re-evaluate our priorities.
---
The drive up to this place had been long, and arduous. More than anything, Niles wanted a rest. Months of living nocturnally, following god only knew how long living beneath this very ground, had left him with a fatigue for the sun, and while he often craved the dawn or dusk twilight, several hours on uncertain roads wasn’t what he had in mind.
Rest they did, waiting for the proper time to enter the Sepulcher with its intricate locks, and whatever was left of the warren beneath it that served as the principle base of operations for the inner circle of the Grey Angels… an inner circle to which Archangel had inexplicably promoted him in orders apparently given to Scion before his death.
True to form, however, Scion, First of the Four, had seemingly no appreciation for the gravitas of moment or place, and quickly righted what was left of a picnic table that was laying in the shadow of what used to be an outer wall around the property, clearing it off with a gesture that directed invisible force along the surface of the table, removing all the dust and leaves.
James Derrida, it seemed, was just as comfortable using his powers in and out of costume.
“You actually knew Edward Coultier?”
“Better than most people,” Niles said. “Not that he’d know me. Or even pick me out of a lineup. I worked on NPF investigations of his group, the Crimson Knights.”
“The drugs business?”
Niles thought about that. It was an open secret, having come out just a few short years ago, in fact, that Edward was a drug user – addicted to an obscure prescription painkiller named Yggdrasil. He did the usual media circuit common among the famous, after that, talking about his struggles with the drug and rehab and whatnot. “That was barely worth anything. We used it as an excuse to dig a little deeper that year when it came time to renew their license to operate. Actually, he runs a very clean operation.”
“What did you think of him?”
Niles considered that longer than most people might. James asked him that frequently, whether it was Scion asking Prince or James asking Niles. What did Niles think of the last person we met. “… You’re a telepath. Not just a… I don’t know the word. Person who does telekensis?”
“I’ve been going with psychic,” James smirked a bit, like a man who’d been caught cheating at cards.
“… Your impressions of people must be pretty good,” Niles said, leading himself to a conclusion. “You’re testing my skill as a profiler.”
“Yes. I am.”
Niles collected himself. Like most people, even most detectives, he wasn’t a savant. He’d had to learn a few tricks to help memory – and most of those tricks involved keeping pretty exhaustive records, records he variously either had no access to, or at least no way of getting at from here. Still and all, his memory was good. He could retreat, given a moment to think about it, to the filing cabinet in the back of his mind and pull up at least an overview of Edward Coultier. “He’s a runaway. You don’t hear about it in the press but it’s something a few older guys on the force who are into the Tournaments liked to talk about. Wound up working for Slipher Corporation for a few years. He was working with them around the time they went out of business.”
James considered that. Both these men remembered Anfangsburg and all that they saw there a bit too well. It would have been enough to drive lesser men to drink. Niles preferred to exhaust himself to the point his body had no choice but to grant him dreamless sleep. Scion, well… he’d seen weirder still. “Think he lost his job before or after the tower got shot up?”
“Well, now, I asked him that once,” Niles said, choosing his words carefully. “… You asked me what I think of him. Not for a personal history.”
“That’s true.”
“He’s a driven individual. Talented his own way and perhaps in the top 10% of the country in terms of general intelligence. He’s managed to inspire a whole legion of followers that was a big and skillful enough militia that the College of Judges has decided to give him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted in Figaro. And his first act was to round up everyone connected with us and anyone Banker’s files suggested might have…” He hesitated. Niles hated to admit that the supernatural was as real as it seemed to be. Things had reasons, after all, and it was aggravating to think that “magic” was suddenly on the table for those reasons, so common as to be mixed among the survivors. “Unusual qualities.”
James smiled softly. “… I was worried at first he might have other plans than to exile us.”
Niles considered that for a while. “… No. You’ve missed your mark, Mister Mind-Reader. He’s not a eugenicist.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because, two years ago, he risked everything he had – even his precious Club – to get his little brother out of dutch with someone you might have heard of named Donnovan Kline.”
James looked away somewhat. Niles marked his pensive expression and instinctively distrusted it. The psychic was trying to hide his recognition of Kline’s name from him. “His brother?”
“Professor Malvolio Coultier of the Saffron Academy – a noted proponent of the use of magic.”
---
“I want to ask a question.”
Vidcund inclined his head slightly, looking to the third member of the tribunal, who so far had yet to speak. He did not recognize the woman at all – in fact, he was having some difficulty deciding if she was a woman at all, or if that was merely the cut of her suit and the shape of her face playing with his perceptions. “That would be your prerogative, agent…?”
“Valkoinen,” came the reply. “Throughout this entire presentation, you have touched extensively on both the necessity of your actions and the precedent in both Agency and precursor operations. You haven’t discussed the legality.”
“Determining the legality of my actions is the purpose of these proceedings.”
Valkoinen nodded gently. “I understand that, Agent Därk, and I can assure you are all taking that process very seriously. However, there is one other matter I would like to explore, and I would like to put to you the following question: Do you regret what you have done?”
Vidcund considered that at length, creating a long pause. He had, without much time for forethought or consideration, killed countless innocent people in order to strike a blow against a single target. He had done so without any compunction on his part, and yet… hadn’t he just been wishing that there was a world in which he hadn’t had to do it?
“Given the choice,” he said, picking his words carefully, “I would have preferred more time. I do not deny that other solutions would have been possible, though I have yet to think of one. Even knowing what I know now, were I to be faced with the same decision, I would have taken the same action. I am dissatisfied being placed in a position where I had only the one option. I do not regret following through on that action.”
Valkoinen nodded gently again, and looked up the table, to Albus, who sighed. “That will be all for now, Agent Därk. You will be remanded back into the custodial care department until we have reached a decision.”