The Gist Hunter (11 page)

"Ah," I said, "so it can become addictive?"

"Addictive is a strong term."

I considered my integrator and said, "It seems an appropriate occasion for strong language."

With reluctance, the demon said, "For some of us, an appreciation of forms can become, let us say, a predominant pastime."

"Is that the common term in your dimension for 'all-consuming obsession'?"

He made no spoken response but I assumed that the mixture of periwinkle-blue spirals and black starbursts were his equivalent of guilty acquiescence. I could not keep a note of disappointment out of my voice. "I thought the attraction of visiting here was the contests of wit and imagination in which you and I engage."

"They were a splendid bonus!"

"Hmm," I said. I had a brief, unwelcome emotion as I contemplated being profanely peered at by a demon who derived titillation from my form. Then I realized that anyone's form—indeed, probably the form of my chair or the waste receptacle in the corner—would have had the same salacious effect. I decided it would be wise not to dwell on the matter. "To move the conversation to a practical footing," I said, "how do we return my assistant to his former state?"

"I am not sure that we can."

The integrator had been surreptitiously scratching behind one of its small, round ears. Now it stopped and said, "I am receiving another communication from Turgut Therobar," it said. "He has added an 'urgent' rider to his signal."

"You seem to be functioning properly," I said, "at least as a communicator."

"Perhaps the demon is correct," said the integrator, "and essence trumps form. My functions were the essence for which you designed and built me."

I thought to detect an undercurrent of resentment, but I ignored it and homed in on the consequences of my assistant's change. "I have spent decades dealing comfortably with forms. Must I now throw all that effort aside and master essences?"

"Turgut Therobar continues to call," said my assistant. "He claims distress and pleads plaintively."

So the magnate was not calling to enlist me in some good cause. It sounded as if he required the services of a private discriminator. My insides remained troubled, but it occurred to me that a new case might be just the thing to take my mind off the unsettling change in my assistant.

"Put through the call," I said.

Therobar's voice sounded from the air, as had all previous communications through my assistant. The magnate dispensed with the punctilio of inquiries after health and comparisons of opinions on the weather that were proper between persons of respectable though different classes who have already been introduced. "I am accused of murder and aggravated debauchery," he said.

"Indeed," I said. "And are you guilty?"

"No, but the Bureau of Scrutiny has taken me into custody."

"I will intercede," I said. "Transmit the coordinates to my integrator." I signaled to the integrator to break the connection.

The creature blinked and said, "He is in the scroot holding facility at Thurloyn Vale."

"Hmm," I said, then, "contact Warhanny."

A moment later the hangdog face of Colonel-Investigator Brustram Warhanny appeared in the air above my table and his doleful voice said, "Hapthorn. What's afoot?"

"Much, indeed," I said. "You have snatched up Turgut Therobar."

His elongated face assumed an even more lugubrious mien. "There are serious charges. Blood and molestation of the innocent."

"These do not jibe with my sense of Turgut Therobar," I said. "His name is a byword for charity and well-doing."

"Not all bywords are accurate," Warhanny said. "I have even heard that some say that 'scroot' ought to be a byword for 'paucity of imagination coupled with clumping pudfootery.'"

"I can't imagine who would say such a thing," I said, while marveling at how my words, dropped into a private conversation the week before, had made their way to the Colonel-Investigator's sail-like ears.

"Indeed?" he said. "As for Therobar, there have been several disappearances in and around his estate this past month, and outrageous liberties have been taken with the daughter of a tenant. All lines of investigation lead unerringly to the master."

"I find that hard to believe."

"I counsel you to exert more effort," Warhanny said. "And where you find resistance, plod your way through it."

"Turgut Therobar has retained me to intercede on his behalf," I said.

"The Bureau welcomes the assistance of all public-minded citizens," Warhanny pronounced, yet somehow I felt that the formulaic words lacked sincerity.

"Will you release him into my custody?"

"Will you serve out his sentence in the Contemplarium if he defaults?" countered the scroot.

"He will not default," I said, but I gave the standard undertaking. "Transmit the file then deliver him to his estate. I will accept responsibility from there."

"As you wish."

Just before his visage disappeared from the air I thought to detect a smirk lurking somewhere behind Warhanny's pendulous lips. While I mentally replayed the image, confirming the scornful leer, I told my integrator to book passage on an airship to Thurloyn Vale and to engage an aircar to fly out to Therobar's estate, Wan Water. There was no response. I looked about and found that it had left the table and was now across the room, investigating the contents of a bookcase. "What are you doing?" I said.

Before answering it pulled free a leatherbound volume that had been laid sideways across the tops of the bottom row of books. I recognized the tome as one of several that I had brought back from the house of Bristal Baxandall, the ambitious thaumaturge who had originally summoned my demonic colleague to this realm. Baxandall had no further use for them, having expired while attempting to alter his own form, a process in which the compelled and reluctant demon had seized his opportunity for revenge.

"I thought there might be something useful in this," the integrator said, its fingers flicking through the heavy vellum pages while its golden eyes scanned from side to side.

It was yet another unsettling sight in a day that had already offered too many. "Put that away," I said. "I looked through it and others like it when I was a young man. It is a lot of flippydedoo about so-called magic."

But the integrator continued to peruse Baxandall's book. "I thought, under the circumstances," it said, "that we might drop the 'so-called' and accept the reality of my predicament."

I blew out air between scarcely opened lips. The creature's narrow catlike face sharpened and it said, "Do you have a better argument than that? If not, I will accept your concession."

While it was true that I must accept the concept that rationalism was fated to give way to magic, even that the cusp of the transition had arrived, I was not prepared to dignify a book of spells with my confidence. I blew the same amount of air as before, but this time let my lips vibrate, producing a sound that conveyed both brave defiance and majestic ridicule.

My assistant finished scanning the tome, slammed its covers together and said, "We must settle this."

"No," I said, "we must rescue Turgut Therobar from incarceration."

"You are assuming that he is blameless."

I applied insight to the matter. The part of me that dwelled in the rear of my mind, the part that intuitively grasped complex issues in a flash of neurons, supported my assumption, though not completely.

"Therobar is innocent," I reported. "Probably."

"I was also innocent of any urge to become a gurgling bag of flesh and bones," said the integrator. "What has happened to me must also be resolved."

"First the one, then the other," I said.

"Is that a promise?"

"I am not accustomed to having to make promises to my own integrator," I said.

"Yet you expect me to put up with this," it said, pointing at itself with both small hands, fingers spread, a gesture that put me in mind of an indignant old man.

"Sometimes our expectations may require adjustment," I said.

I turned to the demon's portal to seek his views, but the entity had taken the opportunity to depart.

"Perhaps he has found another peepshow," I said.

Thurloyn Vale was an unpretentious transportation nexus at the edge of the great desolation that was Dimpfen Moor. Its dun colored, low-rise shops and houses radiated in a series of
arrondissements
from a broad hub on which sat the airship terminal that was the place's reason for being. In former times, the entire town had been ringed by a high, smooth wall, now mostly tumbled in ruins. The barrier had been built to keep out the large and predatory social insects known as neropts that nested on the moor, but eventually an escalating series of clashes, culminating in a determined punitive expedition, led to a treaty. Now any neropt that came within sight of Thurloyn Vale, including flying nymphs and drones in their season, was legitimately a hunter's trophy; any persons, human or ultraterrene, who ventured out onto the moor need not expect rescue if they were carried off to work the insects' subterranean fungi beds or, more usually, if they were efficiently reduced to their constituent parts and borne back to the hive to feed the ever hungry grubs.

Wan Water sat atop an unambitious hill only a short aircar flight into Dimpfen Moor, above a slough of peat-brown water that gave the estate its name. It was a smallish demesne, with only a meager agricultural surround, since little would grow on that bleak landscape other than lichens and stunted bushes. Like the town, it was walled, but its barrier was well maintained and bristling with self-actuating ison-cannons. The presence of a nearby neropt nest afforded Wan Water's master the peace and tranquility that I assumed he required to plan his charitable works. Without the insects, he might be pestered by uninvited visitors eager to harness their ambitious plans to Turgut Therobar's well-stocked purse. Coupled with an implied humility in his make-up, it seemed a likely explanation for having chosen such a cheerless place for his retreat.

With my integrator perched on my shoulder I overflew a ramble of outbuildings and guest houses then banked and curved down toward the manse. This was an arrangement of interconnected domes, each more broad than tall and linked one to the other by colonnades of twisted, fluted pillars, all of a gray stone quarried from the moor. Above the huddled buildings stood a tall natural tor of dark-veined rock, around which spiraled a staircase of black metal. Atop the eminence was a tidy belvedere of pale marble equipped with a demilune seat of a dark polished stone.

At the base of the tor I saw a black and green volante bearing the insignia of the Archonate's Bureau of Scrutiny. Next to it stood a square-faced man in a uniform of the same colors. With the moor's constant wind whistling mournfully through the bars of the staircase, he advised me that Turgut Therobar had ascended the pillar of rock. We completed the formalities by which my client became my responsibility then the scroot boarded his aircar and departed.

I turned and climbed to the top of the spiral stairs. There I found the magnate standing silently, his back to me and his front toward the grim prospect of Dimpfen Moor. I used the occasion to acquire a detailed impression of my client.

He was a man of more than middling age and height, thick through the shoulders, chest and wrists, with heavy jowls and a saturnine expression beneath a hat that was a brimless, truncated cone of dark felt. He affected plain garments of muted colors, though they were well cut and of fine material, as if he disdained the fripperies and panaches of transient fashion. As I inspected him I sought insight from my inner self and again received an inconclusive response. It was as if Therobar's being was a deep well, its upper reaches clear and pure yet shaded by darkness below. But whether anything sinister lurked in those depths could not be told.

Without taking his eyes from the vista that I found gloomy but which apparently worked to restore his inner peace, he said, "Thank you for arranging my release."

I inclined my head but replied, "Any intercessor could have done it."

"No, it had to be you."

My internal distresses had strengthened as I climbed the stairs. I pushed them to the edge of my awareness and prepared to focus on my responsibilities. "I am flattered by your confidence," I said. "Shall we discuss the case?"

"Later. For now I wish to look out upon the moor and contemplate the vagaries of fate."

"You are of a philosophical bent," I said. "Faced with imminent incarceration in the Contemplarium, most men would find their concentration drawn to that threat."

He turned toward me. "I am not most men. I am Therobar. It makes all the difference." A note of grim satisfaction rang softly through this speech.

The chill wind had been insinuating itself into my garments since we had mounted the tower. Now it grew more insistent. My integrator moved to nestle against the lee side of my head and I felt it shiver. The motion drew Therobar's eye.

"That is an unusual beast," he said.

"Most unusual."

The expression "a piercing gaze" is most often an overstatement, but not in Therobar's case. He examined my assistant closely and said, "What is its nature?"

"We are discovering that together," I answered. "Right now it would be premature to say."

His eyes shifted to mine and for a moment I felt the full impact of his gaze. The back of my mind stirred like a watchbeast disturbed by a faint sound. Involuntarily, I stepped back.

"Forgive me," he said. "I have a tendency to peer."

I made a gesture to indicate that the matter was too trivial to warrant an apology, but the resident of the rear corners of my psyche took longer to subside.

We descended to the main buildings and passed within. It was a relief to be out of the wind though I could still hear it softly moaning and suffling across the roofs of the domes. Therobar handed me over to a liveried servant who escorted me to a suite of rooms where I refreshed myself, finding the appointments of the first quality. The man waited in the suite's anteroom to guide me to a reception room where my client had said he would await me.