Any Other Name (18 page)

Lord Iris plucked out a hair – the brief sting barely registered above the pain in her wrist – and then tipped his head back and dangled the hair into his mouth like a length of spaghetti. He closed his lips around it and pulled it back up and out as if he was sucking something off it. As the strand emerged, no hint of the natural brown remained. He let go when the entire white length was free of his lips and the strand became a powdery dust that drifted to the forest floor.

“Lord Poppy may be mercurial, but he’s no fool,” he said, taking her chin and directing her attention back to him. “Now I know what it was he saw in you, and it was not artistic talent. There’s no capacity for art within you. Even if you struggled for years you would produce nothing more than the mediocre.” His thin lips formed a smile. “Very clever. I won’t underestimate him again.” Still holding her chin, he tipped her head back slightly, exposing her throat, then moved her from side to side, taking in every detail of her face.

As his words penetrated her fear, she wanted to ask questions and demand to know what her potential was if not artistic in nature. Why had Poppy lied? But she didn’t dare open her mouth, especially with her wrist still skewered.

“How many days have passed in Mundanus since the wedding?”

“Four, my lord.” And she still hadn’t had a chance to find someone to teach her how to paint. If the Shopkeeper’s special Charm didn’t arrive in time–

“Instead of hankering for a life that’s not yours to lead, obey your husband and focus on how to serve me to the best of your ability. As for this painting nonsense, your loyalty is to me now, not Poppy. Now it’s time for you to go back and be a
good wife
.” He punctuated the last words with a slight squeeze of the nails into her skin, before releasing her.

She swayed, the blood tickling her wrist as it flowed from the puncture wounds. Fearing he would be angry if she soiled her dress, she struggled to her feet, holding her arm out at the side. She curtsied inelegantly and then backed away, head still bowed, like a medieval courtier knowing better than to turn her back on the King.

When Lord Iris looked away it felt so different to be free of his intense stare. She reached the edge of the clearing, turned and hurried along the path, grateful to see a Way open before she even got to the edge of the copse. She could see the bedroom and staggered through, lightheaded and clumsy.

“Catherine!” William had waited the whole time, out of sight from Exilium. “My God.” He paled as he took in the blood, grabbed a neatly folded handkerchief from his pocket and rushed to her side.

“Go away.” She glanced back to see the Way closing. She sank to her knees, her legs too watery to stand. William knelt in front of her, wrapped the silk around her wrist and pressed tight.

“What happened?” he asked, but she couldn’t speak. He drew her into an embrace and she pushed at his chest briefly then accepted the comfort. She sobbed into his frock coat, the two of them kneeling on the floor of the bedroom.

After a few minutes the worst of it was over. Her wrist throbbed dreadfully beneath his makeshift bandage and the hand that was still wrapped tightly around it. His other hand was rubbing her back gently as he reassured her she was safe.

She pulled back until she could see his face, ashamed to be snivelling like a child. He wiped away a tear with a thumb and stroked the back of her neck before kissing her on the forehead. “You need tea, and a rest,” he said, in such a gentle voice she started to weep again. “And we should put a proper bandage on this.”

“God, what is wrong with me?” She sniffed. “Honestly, William, I’m not like this.”

“Shush, I don’t mind, it must have been terrifying. Did Lord Iris do this?”

She nodded. “To make me talk about Poppy.” The words unravelled as her chest heaved and the memory brought fresh tears with it.

“You’re home now,” he said, kissing her forehead again. “Let me take care of you. You’ve had a terrible shock.”

“I don’t want to–”

“For God’s sake, Cathy,” he said, standing and picking her up to carry her to the bed. “Stop fighting for just five minutes, will you?”

She rolled onto her side and curled as much as she could in her evening gown. She cradled her injury as he pulled the bell cord and then slipped her shoes off her feet. It felt too intimate and too demeaning to be cared for like this, like a wife. She should be keeping him at arm’s length and the barriers up but she was so tired and wrung out she said nothing.

“Can you tell me what he said?”

“I don’t want to think about it.” She started to shiver again.

He sat next to her, stroking the wayward strands of hair away from her face. Where did he learn this compassion? How could he be capable of kindness, coming from a family so rigidly controlled and so cold?

He let her eyes search his, seeming happy for the moment to stretch. He gave the butler instructions for tea and the medical box to be brought, his hand never leaving her hair.

“I promised you I’d find a way to make this life bearable,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten that.”

She thought of ten different ways to shoot his words down but spoke none of them. She could feel herself drawing inwards, no fight left. Iris had made it clear he could summon her back even if she did find a way back to her mundane life. There was no hope of escape any more, and, without that, what was there to push against? “You called me Cathy,” she whispered.

“Do you mind if I do?”

“No. Only the people I hate most in the Worlds call me Catherine.”

His smile was beautiful. “Then call me Will.” The butler returned with a box and a maid set tea out on a nearby table. Will sent them both away. “I shall now impress you with my bandaging skills,” he announced, opening the box. “All you need to do is watch with admiration and be thankful that Oliver Peonia is one of the clumsiest companions one could ever have on a Grand Tour.”

She managed a smile, even though she could see his false cheeriness was just a means of covering up his fear. But wasn’t that what they were all condemned to do with patrons such as theirs?

 

15

 

The Way closed behind them and Max shivered in the cold air of Mundanus. They were standing at the bottom of a hill and the lights of Stirling cast an orange glow on the distant cloud base. The bitter wind blasted through his coat, and he fastened the top button and pulled the compass out of his pocket. As his eyes adapted to the darkness he could just make out the needle’s gentle glow.

“The Tracker should be at the top of the hill,” he said to the gargoyle.

They both looked up and saw nothing but different shades of black. “I’ll go and have a look,” the gargoyle offered and Max nodded. He didn’t want to struggle up a grassy slope with his walking stick unless absolutely necessary.

The gargoyle bounded off like an eager dog that had been shut indoors all day. Max quickly lost sight of it so he turned his collar up against the wind and looked at the town’s lights. The gargoyle returned swiftly.

“We got a problem.”

“Guards? Magical defences?”

“No. There’s nothing there.”

He checked the compass needle again. “The Tracker is up there somewhere. Are you sure?”

“Come up and see for yourself.”

It was slow going and the gargoyle got more and more frustrated as the climb went on but Max went as fast as his aching leg would allow. At the summit there was nothing but a strengthening of the wind. Leaning on the stick as the gargoyle snuffled about, Max examined the needle and slowly closed in on the Tracker’s location.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked the gargoyle. “Can you even smell anything?”

“I don’t know,” it replied. “I get this urge to sniff at things. It’s been coming on stronger lately.”

“Have you told the Sorcerer?”

“No.” They looked at each other for a moment. “Do you think we should?”

“I’ve found it,” Max said, distracted by the needle spinning round. “Have a dig about here, will you?”

The gargoyle did as it was asked and Max pulled out a penlight torch. He pointed it where the gargoyle rooted in the grass and a sparkle ended the search. The gargoyle scooped out a divot and handed it to Max.

Max plucked the Tracker from the clod of earth. It looked like a tiny clockwork ladybird with a brass shell. Max dropped the compass in a pocket and rummaged in another for his jeweller’s loupe. He tucked it under his right eyebrow to inspect the details.

“It’s a wonder you don’t clank like a tinker’s cart with all that stuff in your pockets.”

Max ignored the gargoyle as he checked the Tracker was still intact, then inserted the tiny key he’d been given, which looked like a pin to the naked eye. The Tracker’s shell opened and the workings inside looked in order as far as he could tell. Nothing was broken, it all seemed to be in the right place and when he pressed the minute nubbin at the heart of the workings with the key the six legs-cum-hooks extended and retracted exactly as they should.

Trackers were used for covert ops. They were designed to hook into clothing, or even sometimes into the hair of an animal, and stay hidden to monitor the movement of the target in and between Mundanus and the Nether. The formulae, too tiny for Max to read even with the loupe, could be altered to effectively programme the Tracker to alert the Chapter to whatever variable they needed. This Tracker had been set to wait for the target to stay in a location for more than three hours, then detach, leave the building and slip back into Mundanus to send a signal by arcane means beyond Max’s understanding. Ekstrand told him that wherever the Tracker was would be less than two metres from the anchor property, but the top of the hill was devoid of any structures at all.

“Don’t blame this on Cathy,” the gargoyle said.

“I wasn’t even thinking about her.”

“You were about to. She wouldn’t have screwed up with the Tracker, I know she wouldn’t.”

“Why are you so keen to defend her?”

“Because no one else will.”

“I’m not sure she’d appreciate that. She seems capable of fighting her own corner.”

The gargoyle wrinkled its muzzle. Max focused back on the Tracker. There was no way to tell if it had failed or not, so he closed it up again and put it into the pouch Ekstrand had given him to bring it back safely.

“What do we do now?” the gargoyle asked.

“We could go back to Ekstrand and verify if the Tracker failed,” Max said, “but we’d miss the perfect time to look around. Everyone will be asleep now. So, let’s assume it has worked but has ended up further away from the anchor property than it should have.”

“Maybe it mostly worked, then crapped out at the last moment,” the gargoyle suggested.

“The Tracker couldn’t have moved all the way up here, to the other side of the country and outside of the Heptarchy, all by itself.”

“Perhaps the guy found it and attached it to something else to lead us to the wrong place.”

“That’s possible. Or he could have come through the Nether to a place in Stirling and walked up here to dump the device. I doubt that.”

“Maybe they were watching the hill, saw me and thought, ‘Bloody hell! A walking gargoyle! I’m not touching this with a six-foot bargepole,’ and went home again.”

“Perhaps…” Max looked around the hill. “But why here?”

“No witnesses.”

“True. But what if the Tracker did work? Ekstrand was right when he talked about assumptions. We’re assuming that, just because we can’t see an anchor property, there isn’t one here. What if there’s a place hidden inside this hill?”

The gargoyle grinned. “I like it. Where shall we start?”

Max pointed to a spot close to where the Tracker was found and shone the torch at it. The gargoyle started gouging out huge clumps of earth until there was a scrape of stone against stone. “Found something!”

Max directed the torch beam, peered in and saw a large block, buried. “Dig around it a bit, see if you can work out some dimensions.”

The gargoyle dug a shallow trench quickly, exposing more of the stone and a couple of new ones. Max inspected them. “This isn’t the top of a bunker,” he said as the gargoyle groaned with disappointment. “These are old foundations. There was probably a fort here a long time ago. That disproves my theory.”

The gargoyle shook its head. “I’ve got a feeling there’s something here.”

“You just don’t want to go back to the Sorcerer and admit defeat.”

“No, it’s not that.” It dug another couple of feet down. “You got that Peeper you used on the stolen house in Aquae Sulis?”

“Of course.”

“Use it on this stone.”

“Don’t be daft.”

“It’ll only take two minutes.”

Max shrugged, located the Peeper and gave it to the gargoyle. “Let’s see if you can use it,” he suggested, not wanting to struggle down onto his belly and lay his leg against damp, cold earth.

The gargoyle nestled down in the hollow and pressed the Peeper up against the stone.

“You’ll have to adjust the lens to cope with the thickness of the stone,” Max instructed.

“I know.”

Max expected the Peeper to detach after alignment, as it would with any mundane surface without a Nether property anchored to it. Then they’d be left with no choice but to force the puppet to reveal how she’d stayed hidden.

“There’s something there!”

“A bunker?” Max asked.

“No, I can see the floor, this is at ground level. The room goes up about another eight feet.”

It made no sense; the gargoyle was looking through the side of the stone as if it formed a wall, not a ceiling. “But that’s impossible, there’s nothing above that stone for a room to be anchored to.”

“Come and look for yourself.”

The gargoyle helped Max to lie down and the cold penetrated his clothes immediately, making him all the more aware of the stubborn ache in his leg. Max peered through the circular device and saw a polished wooden floor stretching ahead of him. There was a row of desks, like an office rather than a schoolroom, and filing cabinets lined one of the walls, with shelves and shelves of huge ledgers above them. It was all visible thanks to the familiar pale grey light of the Nether. Max noted the lack of curtains on the windows. It wasn’t like a private residence where heavy drapes were used to give the illusion of day and night. It looked like whoever worked in that room still kept a day/night schedule, however, because all the chairs were neatly tucked under the desks and it was empty of staff.

The gargoyle was right; the stone formed part of an anchor wall, close to the floor, but only the foundation seemed to remain in Mundanus. He’d never seen or heard of anything like it before. In fact, he wasn’t sure how it was possible. Buildings owned by the puppets could only exist if anchored to a property in Mundanus. The cloisters that housed each of the Chapters were sometimes combinations of several reflections, but all of the parts were still anchored to a physical property in Mundanus. As far as he knew, the Fae were incapable of doing the same and the Sorcerers had taken great care to ensure it remained that way.

Had a Sorcerer revealed a secret technique? With the corruption in London the Sorcerer of Essex was the prime suspect. But why provide the Agency with that knowledge? If it became widely available to the puppets it could undermine most of the techniques used by the Arbiters to keep close tabs on Fae-touched society.

“This is big, isn’t it?”

“It’s big,” Max said and detached the Peeper. “Just goes to show that it pays to be thorough.”

“How do we get in?”

Max got the Opener and pushed the pin into the place the Peeper had been, the powerful formulae making it as easy as pushing a stick into mud. He twisted it and watched the familiar burning outline of the doorway form in the stone. He expected it to fail once it tried to progress past the stone but instead the outline continued upwards, as if a thin line of the air itself began to burn. The doorway formed just as it would have if the anchor property had been there. Max made mental notes of the details as the gargoyle jumped up and down, gushing about how it hadn’t expected that and how exciting it all was. Max found it hard to believe it really was his soul trapped inside it.

The door formed. Max opened it and pulled out the Opener. He let it close behind him once the gargoyle was inside too. At least it had the sense to shut up.

The air inside the room had the familiar staleness of any Nether property. Max went to the one internal door that led to the rest of the house and gestured to the gargoyle to stay out of sight should anyone be walking past outside. It dropped low on all fours and slunk between the tables to lie beneath one of the large sash windows.

Max listened for movement on the other side of the door but all he could hear was the ticking of the clock above his head.

“I think they’re all asleep,” he whispered to the gargoyle.

“We should go outside, see what the whole place looks like,” it replied. “These windows are too big for a fort, I want to see what kind of a building it is, and how big.”

Max shook his head. “We only do that if we have time. We need to prioritise finding the information about the Rosas.”

He went to the nearest filing cabinet. There was a small card in the holder on the first drawer he came to, with the letters “Y–Z” written on neatly. Max walked down the row to the one with “Ra–Re” written on it and moved down the drawers until he got to one labelled “Rosa”. It made sense that one of the largest family lines should have an entire drawer dedicated to them.

He glanced up at the shelves above the filing cabinet and saw “Rosa” plus a range of numerals inscribed on the spines. “Come and get one of those down,” he said to the gargoyle, pointing at a ledger on the nearest shelf. “Look through and tell me what’s recorded in them.”

He opened the drawer as the gargoyle did as it was told. It was stuffed with files, all labelled with names in alphabetical order, making locating the Gallica-Rosas very easy. He pulled out the one on Horatio Gallica-Rosa first, knowing he was involved intimately with the kidnapping of the Master of Ceremonies. There was a yellow dot next to his name on the file tab.

There were only two sheets of paper inside. One was a yellow slip with “Archived: HGR2475-L” written on it. The second listed his name, gender, family line, height, weight and physical description, even down to locations of scars and birthmarks. It read like a processing sheet at a mundane hospital or police station. Beneath the basic data, in a box labelled “Preliminary assessment” there were a few lines of cryptic notes.

 

Emotionally unstable without int & man.
 

GTs – good rfs, nat. athl
 

PSs – fencing, chess
 

T – Strategy
 

VS – 8
 

Sf AS? = 0
 

SfAn? = High
 

Recommended for: BP AP1 & An. entry prog.
 

 

Focused on the information, Max stretched out a hand to rest it on the gargoyle’s shoulder. “This is a report to the head of Chapter intelligence, to be filed under–”

“What are you doing?” The gargoyle twisted round to look at him, the open ledger resting on top of the filing cabinet.

Max shook his head. “Habit.” He felt a flicker of irritation, then sadness before breaking contact. “It was trained into me so hard, I wasn’t even thinking. We need to get this data back to Ekstrand for analysis.”

“We need a Chapter, we can’t do this by ourselves. Look at all this stuff. This would take our Chapter months and months to process.”

Max nodded. “I bet there’s a file on every puppet in Society here. It could revolutionise how we monitor them.”

“I know, it’s very cool.” The gargoyle grinned. “I think these ledgers list everything the Agency has provided, and what they’ve been paid in return.”