SANITY LINE

A Simple Game

Walter had seen more than his fair share of winters in Galba Roy, and for his part he was pleased that this one came with the relatively modern luxury of the heated interior and seats of the auto that the Viscount kept in his carpool for days like today. There was fresh snow falling – some of it was still melting in the butler’s hair from the short walk to the vehicle – laying down a blanket that Walter estimated would lead to a delay on the order of an extra fifteen minutes, once he had cautioned the driver to take the time. There was no hurry; the butler was leaving the house several hours ahead of his master, doing what he did best – taking care of the Viscount’s business.

 

These winters had once been much worse, he knew, before the Viscount’s grace had fallen over him. It was this memory that informed his generosity in his donation to the young vagrant who addressed him on his way from the car to the station steps, and again to the carolers nearer those, before ascending back up to the warmth of the station proper. His coat was long, wool trimmed with wolverine, though the chill got into his bones almost immediately. It reminded him he was getting soft.

 

In hours to come, faced with long hours with nothing to do, he would reflect on this scene and wonder how much of what he did then was out of self-preservation, and how much was self-pity, and whether any of it was for the ‘right reasons’, whatever those were.

 

He crossed the station fairly well to the ticket desk, chiefly because of others clearing a path for him, and also because one of the agents had called over to him, rescuing him from the uncertainty of ascertaining whether or not there was a cue, and whether or not it was his turn. “Mr. Smith-Jamison. You’re a bit early...”

 

“Miss Ramsey,” the butler countered warmly, offering her a warm smile as he set his cane, and hands, before him. “You say that as though it isn’t the least bit unusual.”

The woman smiled back. Walter had a gift for faces – well, voices, she supposed. She’d never heard him misname anyway, and he seemed to be willing to use names freely. “Mr. Lewis is in his office. He asked us to take you to him when you arrived, though I don’t think he was expecting you quite so early.”

 

Mr. Lewis, as it turned out, was a beady little man long worn out by decades of service to the Railroad, though he had a voice that loaned him an aura of gravitas Walter felt he’d likely earned. He could be found in an office far smaller than his authority should have allowed, tucked into an unfortunately noisy section of the station, between the communications room and station operations. There was little there by way of luxury, which made Walter, with his fur-lined coat, bespoke suit, and brocade-work in blue and silver, all the more incongruent, matching blindfold notwithstanding.

 

“Mister Lewis,” he said, with a warm and slow tone that also marked the contrast, as the door was closed behind him. “I hazard to guess that you are about to tell me something uncomfortable.”

Lewis peered up at the butler over his latest stack of communiques. “Ah, Mr. Smith-Jamison. Come in, come in. Would you care for some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Walter said, feeling for the chair and moving it out generously before he lowered into it. “Though, don’t let me stop you.”

“Oh, no, I was just being… never mind.” Lewis straightened in his chair. “Walter, I am afraid I have some bad news.”

Walter could appreciate a good dissemble, but his master was on a crunch for time, and that meant the butler had no time for the traditional Dean act of dancing around the point. “If the train is delayed by weather I can make other arrangements.”

For Lewis, this bordered on being a threat. Walter had twice taken this move out of necessity, and on the last occasion had remarked, in his usual, offhanded way, that it would soon be cheaper to charter an aircraft on retainer, rather than be bound to the strict schedules of international rail. “Oh no sir, nothing so extreme. It’s just, the one luxury car we assigned to this train had been double-booked. My yard-master predicts adding another to the train could delay departure by as much as half an hour.”

 

Walter considered it for a moment, nodding twice as he did so. “So delay departure.”

“… Sir?”

“I’m sorry, Frank, but I like you. I genuinely do. And I enjoy traveling by train.” Walter checked the time, the repeater-watch he’d fished from his pocket marking off the hours, then the minutes, in bell-tones. “… His Lordship has required that I begin searching for an alternative means of travel on a more permanent basis if there are any more unfortunate delays in the future. Between ourselves, I think we can both admit neither of us wants the hassle that terminating our agreement would cause.”

 

“No,” Mr. Lewis agreed, slowly. “We don’t.”

Walter shifted uncomfortably. “Then I suppose, if the offer is still on the table, we might share a cup of tea while we smooth this little glitch out.”

“Ah, yes, of course.”

 

While the Stationmaster slipped out of the office to see to the most immediate necessities, Walter sighed, and drew a deck of printed cards out of his pocket, gliding sensitive fingers over the faces to scan the transcribed headlines of the daily papers. He had to recheck the first in the sciences section twice – to his knowledge, a coelacanth was some extinct genius of fish, so the report of one having been found in South Africa was unbelievable. With a stylus, he punched through the card near the headline, as a simple reminder to have his press agent pull the relevant cutting and have it transcribed for him.

 

Oh, what a world.

 

---

 

In the literal sense of the word, at any rate, Donnovan Kline kept few servants. It was less true when you considered the extensive web of contacts he had accrued over his career, and the favours and social-debts that came along with such liaisons. As Great Games went he was playing his well, and had little need for the coercive power of money in retaining loyalties. He had evolved to the point of payment in any kind seeming crass, and so reserved the treatment only to two appropriately-crass figures.

 

The Hounds of Tindalos were a hazard to anyone at all with the faculty of imagination, and therefore were inordinately dangerous to sorcerers, wizards, conjurors, medjai of all kinds, and anyone else with even an ounce of magical talent, blood-born or otherwise. This great threat without number, hunting from the deeper trods of angular time, were avoided at all costs. So dangerous was the knowledge that they existed that only a fool would name individuals of their species.

 

So then, we come to Kline’s servants, Socrates and Plato Tindalos. Brothers, by face if not by blood, if relationships could truly be drawn between Hounds, the two had been altered all but irrevokably by the act of their Naming, having been reformed and repurposed by that great and powerful act. Kline was among a very few left alive who knew this origin, and was, by that measure, one of a very few left alive who could have held sway over them at all, putting him in the unique position to feed their unnatural hungers without great expense on his own part. He was no mere over-read librarian, after all.

 

Plato stepped back into the cabin, the Professor’s sole travelling companion for the day. This private car had been added to the train from Galba Roy to Zvanesburg at great material expense, in order to give Kline some semblance of the loneliness he craved. The hound’s entrance caused the reclusive master to look up, setting his book aside. “I suppose you are about to tell me the reason for the delay, Plato?”

“Yes, master,” The Hound tucked his hands into his trouser-pockets, frowning deeply to himself. “One of the Dean Peerage have exercised their authority and ordered the train delayed long enough for another luxury car to be removed from the Four-Fourteen and appended to this train. A Viscount Rainwright.”

 

Kline knew Rainwright by reputation. The Viscountancy had been established in the man’s father, a rarity at this point in history, with new peerages created only in an individual, rather than a dynasty. The elder Rainwright had been a mentalist without peer, and a talented investigator, thus the honour. That the son had carried the title suggested the King was equally impressed, though Kline privately doubted it. The Viscount had been rejected twice over from a position with the faculty at the Royal Academy of the Arcane Sciences, and apart from the occasional venture, seemed content to live professionless off of the proceeds of the family holdings.

 

A headache, vague and unwelcome, began to simmer behind the professor’s left eye, and he gently lifted his hand to massage his temple with long and delicate fingers. “… I see. Since we have time, would you kindly head to the baggage car, and collect two bottles of the merlot and my lexicon from my luggage?”

 

The Hound passed a suspicious glare to his Master before turning to leave.

 

---

 

For Isambard Louis Rainwright, about the only measure in which travel by rail had the better of chartering an airplane was scenery. He contemplated the unfolding landscape from time to time, between reading over press-clippings and unimportant correspondence – anything relevant would have been a violation of proper tradecraft. As the train bore them east it passed from the rolling foothills of Galba Roy into the grassy flats, fens, and low-lying copses of Kraterburg Precinct. They had passed through the city itself over night, and now, as the time for lunch approached, the grasses grew longer and the firmament more secure, giving way here and there to copses and stands before, seemingly at once, they crossed the river and continued into the twilight fastness of the Terrwald.

 

This immediate transition pleased Rainwright, who smiled slightly in the dappled glow of sunlight through his window, before turning his attention physically inward, to his obedient servant, who sat with his hand over the vellum pages of one of his Braille transcriptions, engrossed in his reading.

 

“Walter?”

The butler deftly flicked a bookmark into place before his master could have seen where the man was keeping it, closing the book adroitly. “My lord?”

“We’ve just passed into the Terrwald. Please go up to the radio car and have a message sent to Master Lafayette.”

“At once, sir.”

 

The Butler carefully set his book down on the table between the two of them, and stood, smoothing out his vest and taking a grip on his cane in the same measure. He knew, from memory, that the radio car would have been just behind the tender. He would have to traverse six cars to reach it, which, while being hazardous, was not so hazardous that he couldn’t achieve it. He made his way carefully foreward, then, one door at a time, belatedly remembering that he was going to traverse the other luxury car as he did so.

 

Kline looked up at his passing, finding the interruption unexpected, though the surprise was very quickly transferred to the nature of Rainwright’s most unorthodox manservant. The butler was known to him by reputation – rumour-laden Galba Roy with its social norms could not but help have been set ablaze by this blind man’s uncharacteristic refinement and steady social climb. Rainwright had placed absolute faith in the man to handle his day-to-day business, but Kline knew, through his web of acquaintances, that the Butler maintained extensive sidelines in the criminal element of the Brass City as well.

 

Walter seemed to pause, part way across the room, and turned. Kline realized that the man must have heard him setting down his book. “Terribly sorry for the interruption.”

“Oh, no need for that at all, my good man,” Kline said. Walter found his accent most remarkable. It had a timbre reserved for the stage, and though the root was certainly Dean, there were layers of other accents built atop – Terrik and Zaxti and Alsatian. “If it would make your life any easier, I could have my valet guide you.”

 

Walter had taken offense, but he was at least as skilled an actor as any in the Great Game, and his face showed no sign of it. There was only the telltale change in aura and tone, so slight any could have missed it, for Kline to pick up on. Walter would be a terror at the bridge table. “I certainly wouldn’t want to inconvenience either of you,” he said evenly, with the slightest of bowing nods. “Especially not a gentleman of your esteem, Mister...”

 

The drawn syllable was indication enough of the question, and Kline was suitably stung, leaning his head back slightly. Introductions were of the highest order on meeting new people, and it was polite to ask in this way, though somehow the Butler had implied in tone that Kline had failed by not immediately offering his name. This only amused and intrigued him the more. “Ah, Donnovan Kline. I’m the Professor of Terrik History at Zvanesburg College. It’s a pleasure to make your aquaintance.”

Walter smiled softly and off-centre, as though he was pleased with this answer, giving a slight bow. “I suspect the pleasure is mine, Professor. Walter Smith-Jamison, of the Rainwright Estate. I am afraid you will have to excuse me, as I would hate to waste any more of your time.”

 

Waste any more of your time, you mean, Kline thought. The butler held an overly ornate brass and burl cane in his left hand, upon the middle finger of which he wore a gold ring with a wolfram shield upon the face of it, which marked him as a relatively high-ranked member of the Society of the Wheel and Pinion. A membership in the Society was beyond the purview of someone of the serving class. A mastership, or whatever the gold signified, seemed all the more remarkable. “Of course, sir, of course. Perhaps on your way back from your errand, you could do me a small service, and inform your master I am in possession of two fine bottles of Anfangsburg merlot, if he should care to come and play a round or two of chess. To help us all pass the time, of course.”

 

Walter inclined his head just slightly, in much the same way Plato did, when he found one of Kline’s directions interesting. “… I would be happy to, professor.”

 

---

 

Sometimes the universe could throw you a bone in the most unexpected way. Though he had long devoted some part of his attention to a forgery of reading, turning pages and scanning an ungloved hand across the vellum-set braille in service only to the illusion of polite and idle distraction. There was a point, however, when some subtle shift in the pace of conversation had turned it into a game as surely interesting as the round of chess passing between his master and their new host.

 

It was to be expected that the men would begin to spar once the small talk had been extinguished. Walter was thankful that such talk had been brief. The men had a sense for one another almost from the moment they had shaken hands.

 

Kline smiled softly, swirling his glass idly while Rainwright considered his next move in the trivial chess, letting the wine take a bit more breath. “You wear two rings, my lord, but your speech is not that of a married man.”

Rainwright castled in seeming decision no other move was necessary, chuckling lightly. “I am no cleric, if that is what you are implying.”

Kline sipped from his wine, moving in the same action in uncharacteristic brevity. “No, you are not. Catholicism is a vice unique to Zvanesburg, and the Anglicans wear no rings. Among your many decorations is the Viscountcy, and you wear this mark upon your left hand. Upon your right, however, is the more interesting mark.”

 

Rainwright paused, sipping his wine. At length, he risked a bishop to spare a knight. “… You are a studied man indeed, to recognize such machinations.”

“I have long made the habit of study a sort of second breath. I am quite pleased you feel it is paying dividends.”

Walter’s ears pricked. There was a correct response to such a compliment. That had not been it. Just what manner of man was Kline? Rainwright seemed to realize this himself, going by his response. “If I may be so bold, the jeweler’s craft is a bit beneath the gravitas of a professorship. You must have made quite a broad study.”

 

“Broad,” Kline agreed quietly, refilling the nobleman’s cup, “and deep.”

Rainwright sipped, pausing to admire the nose, in mourning of his realization of the impending loss of the game. “Deep knowledge is what some might call a tower to rival babel.”

“I hardly think my knowledge could be compared to such grand works,” Kline said, dismissively.

Rainwright tipped his king. “… A tower must be built upon a solid foundation or else it shall collapse.”

“The knowledge of study is more like a deep pit,” Kline said, choosing his words with visible carefulness. “To be carved broadly, then deeply, so as the sides do not fall into the middle, and the inquisitor is buried beneath a rubble of his own making. A solid scaffolding about the walls of the pit will forestall the inevitable, but digging to deep will kill a man as surely as building too high.”

 

Kline smiled softly, and began setting up the pieces again. “I believe you and I have very different conceptions of the quest for, shall we say, arcane understanding.”

Rainwright marvelled slightly, resetting his own side, before turning the board around. “… What did you say your field of study was, again, Donnovan?”

 

Kline smiled slowly. “Whatever book crosses my desk. Would you care to play another round, Viscount?”

 

---

Walter had had ample time to make a decent survey of the hospitality services available to visitors of Zvanesburg Port City’s charms - which was saying something, as the city being the Union’s only year-round seaport had put the industry into a state of thriving, weed-like sprawl. Still and all, he enjoyed his stays at the Zaxton Oriental the best. The Oriental retained some of the luxuries the Viscount and his staff had access to in Galba Roy, without being so costly as to preclude regular use or draw attention simply by staying there.

 

It was as good a home-away-from home as any, and by this point, Walter had been staying there for three nights, having arrived well ahead of the Viscount himself, to prepare for his arrival. It was plenty of time to become familiar with the latest variations on the breakfast menu, such that he had no longer needed to have it read to him, and merely needed a moment or two to reflect on the choice, while he waited for his tea to arrive.

 

“I shall have the Eggs Benedict, if you would be so kind,” he responded, when prompted, and handed over the rather superfluous menu he had been babysitting.

At his side, Viscount Rainwright did the same. “Quiche Lorraine.”

 

As the waiter’s footsteps retreated, Walter returned his head to a more neutral posture, smoothing his napkin over thoughtfully. “His Majesty requests you telephone for him at 11:15.”

“You will have to tell your counterpart in His Majesty’s household that I am otherwise engaged, Walter. I already have an 11 o’clock appointment, don’t I?”

 

Walter shook his head internally, giving no outward sign of his exasperation, except perhaps in the deliberateness with which he refused to answer until he’d taken a sip of his tea. It was something of a local style, with most houses in the Terrwald Precinct offering under-fermented “green” teas that didn’t respond correctly to almost any addition. The corners of his mouth flexed slightly at the astringent flavour before he responded in no less dry a fashion. “We shall have to invent a more significant excuse, then. I hardly think His Majesty would be much pleased by being deferred for a game of chess.”

“Yes,” Rainwright countered, sipping coffee, “you shall.”

 

Walter enjoyed another extended pause, idly trying to sort out by smell alone just what the centrepiece of the table had been. Lilac, perhaps, though they were terribly out of season, and no doubt procured at some great expense. Assuming that wasn’t someone’s lingering perfume, anyway. “I’m not sure I understand the fascination of these games with Professor Kline, my Lord. I agree that there’s opportunity to play any time we find ourselves here in Zvanesburg, but there’s certainly no great mystery over the outcome.”

 

The gentle jab earned the well-worn butler a subdued chuckle from his master. “I am going to get the upper hand on the man one of these days, Walter. Excuse me.”

 

Walter listened as his master left his seat at the table and paced out of easy range of hearing, no doubt in the quest of a public rest-room, or having spied some significant local or another from across the room. The noise of the busy dining room was enough to leave Walter feeling more than a little alone in the silence, leaving him to polish off his tea in peace. The upper hand against Kline seemed unlikely. The man was too old, too experienced, and too connected. The more Walter had made inquiries, the more clear it became that, to the extent there was any organization among the Kitabists, Kline sat somewhere near the top of that ragtag pile of disparate sorcerers.

 

Beside him, Miss Bell, the latest addition to Walter’s own network, set her mug down on the table. “Shall I read you today’s headlines, Mister Smith-Jamison?”

“If you please.”

“Right. Well, the last Soviet forces in North Korea were withdrawn yesterday, -“