The Sea Peoples Page 14

  The speaker turned to one of the uniformed officers on the platform: “I declare the Lethal Chamber open.”

  Then to the crowd: “Citizens of New York and of the United States of America, through me the Government declares the Lethal Chamber to be open.”

  An officer barked a command, a bugle echoed it—Pip even recognized the sequence of notes—and the hussars fell in behind the carriages that drew up to take the dignitaries and commanders. The lancers wheeled neatly, the tall steel-tipped shafts swaying and reforming like a thicket of reeds bowing to a breeze, and clattered off with an endless rumbling clop of shod hooves on pavement. The crowd began to break up, voices slowly filling the void.

  “There,” Deor said quietly, pointing out one nattily-dressed young man. “Him. Follow him.”

  “That I can do,” Pip said. “Mummy had the Police chief in Townsville City run me through an urban surveillance course once and gave me pointers herself—said you never knew when that sort of thing would come in handy.”

  The man Deor had pointed out wasn’t remarkable. About thirty, medium in stature—an inch or less taller than Pip, who’d inherited much of her father’s height—with reddish-brown hair worn trimmed above the collar and parted in the center and a clipped mustache, and faded green eyes. He was handsome in a slightly wasted way, but slim in a manner that suggested he’d been more active once and with the pallor of someone who spent most of his days indoors. His clothing was black except for a silver-gray waistcoat, and a dark-gray homburg hat, but fitted as if it had been done by a very good tailor.

  He was ordinary for this time and place, until you saw his eyes. They skipped over Pip without acknowledging her, then lingered for a moment on Toa as if slightly puzzled. Once you saw those eyes he didn’t look ordinary at all. They seemed to open on vistas, across a sea whose waves were cloud. . . .

  Pip fought down a snarl and made herself retract her claws. . . .

  Wait a minute. I have claws? she thought, startled. I mean, I literally have claws?

  For a moment she thought she did, claws like curved knives that could rip flesh apart with a drive of shoulders stronger than Toa’s.

  Pip would have liked to dismiss the idea as a fancy, but she wasn’t fanciful.

  And I’m in a place where the usual rules don’t apply. Though after months on Baru Denpasar I was starting to think those are a bit more elastic than I’d always assumed anyway.

  The man walked on, walking with the stride of someone who knew where he was going but wasn’t in a hurry.

  “Bunch around me,” Pip said quietly. “Talk a bit. You don’t think a group is following you.”

  “You don’t?” Thora asked conversationally.

  “Not on a city street. One tail is more conspicuous there. It’s completely different from countryside tracking, according to my instructor.”

  Thora and Deor closed up, with Toa still bringing up the rear. He was attracting the odd glance, once from what was apparently a mounted policeman, to judge from his cloth-covered bobby-style helmet and long riot-stick, but then the eyes flicked to the folk ahead of him and lost suspicion.

  Bet if he was here alone it would be a difficulty, Pip thought. Though more of a difficulty for anyone who tried to accost him!

  The man they were tracking moved through the crowds easily. The clump with Pip had a little more difficulty, but she’d noticed before that if you moved without the slightest doubt that people would get out of your way, they usually did. It helped if you were well-dressed, too, and judging from the passers-by the clothes they’d . . . arrived in . . . were the local equivalents of the gentry’s costume.

  Pip noted the street signs and memorized them; they crossed one called South Fifth Avenue, and walked along its western side to a Bleecker Street. There was the same mix of older and newer buildings she’d noticed around the Lethal Chamber, and then it was solidly older; five or six story brick buildings divided into apartments and attached shops. The crowds were thicker, and less well-dressed, with many more cloth caps and women in dowdy, tired-looking dresses longer than what she or Thora wore. Now and then the man they were following attracted sullen-hostile glances, or jeers from ragged urchins, and the narrower streets had a number of pushcarts selling anything from sausages she wouldn’t have tried on a bet to old clothes.

  Beside one door was a row of signs. The first and largest read:

  HAWBERK, ARMOURER

  Thora snorted, and Pip spared her a glance and a raised eyebrow: they were both inwardly groaning at the obvious pun, since hauberk was precisely what you called a mail shirt . . . though she thought the term was more common in everyday use in Montival, which from what she’d heard and John confirmed had a taste for terminology culled from history.

  Or historical novels, she thought, with a slightly snide edge to her mental tone. Whereas in Oz, we call it a mail shirt or a fence-wire jumper.

  The man they were following went through the part-glass door, giving a glimpse of a long dim hallway ending in a stairwell. The entrance rang a bell as it opened. On its heels came a hearty voice crying:

  “Come in, Mr. Castaigne!”

  Then a continuing murmur of voices as it closed, ringing the bell again; she thought she could hear another voice, a man’s, and then a woman’s, but too muffled to catch what was said.

  Pip slowed, dawdling, watching the street for a little until she could see out of the corner of her eye that their target wasn’t loitering just inside, then held up two fingers and went through the door. Deor followed, while Toa leaned on his shovel and held the box so that it shadowed his face, while Thora pulled a piece of paper out of her handbag and pretended to read it . . . or possibly really did.

  It would help if I knew what I was supposed to do with this thing once we catch it, Pip thought. As the dog said when he took out after the stagecoach!

  The dim hallway within had a door to the armorer’s shop, left slightly ajar; the distinctive tinka-tinka-tinka of a metalworkers’ hammer sounded within, absurdly familiar in this alien place, and then voices. On the wall opposite was a list of other establishments, not terribly different except in detail from Townsville or Cairns or Darwin or even Hobart; tailors, cobblers, a used and antiquarian bookshop, a maker and repairer of musical instruments (at which she could feel Deor twitch with interest) and one truly strange one reading:

  A. Wilde, Repairer of Reputations, 3rd floor.

  Deor didn’t twitch at that one; he stared at it fixedly, then slowly lifted his gray gaze to the stairs.

  “Carefully,” he said, his voice almost a murmur. “We’re in the right place, but gang very carefully from here. There is that here which might know what we are, and destroy us if we’re unwary.”

  Pip nodded.

  “That is a lovely piece of embroidery,” the voice of the man they’d been following said through the doorway to the armorer’s shop.

  “It’s the arms of the last Duke of Burgundy,” a woman’s voice said. “See, I’m doing it from this colored plate in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of European royal families’ arms; it will go with a suit my father has restored.”

  Someone about my age, Pip thought. And sounding genuinely enthusiastic.

  Pip had a better-than-nodding acquaintance with heraldry, through her parents. The Abercrombies had a perfectly genuine and rather complex coat from the College of Heralds which they’d brought with them to Queensland when Queen Victoria was middle-aged; the Balwyns’ was so old it was simple, a red lion rampant dexter. One of her ancestors had worn it on his shield when he followed Godfrey de Bouillon over the walls of Jerusalem in 1099 in steel cap and hauberk, screaming Ville Gagne! with the best, slaughtering anything that moved, wading ankle-deep in blood and looting the place bare.

  Embroidery, though . . . I’d rather fight giant squid in a bathtub full of large-curd cottage cheese.

  “See,
it’s Philip the Bold’s.”

  “Complex arms,” the man said again.

  “Yes, they became very elaborate then, towards the beginning of the Renaissance. One and four quartered azure, semé-de-lys or, a bordure compony of argent and gules; two per pale, bendy of six or and azure, a bordure gules and sable, a lion or, armed and langued gules; three per pale, bendy of six, or and azure, a bordure gules and argent, a lion gules, armed and langued or. Overall, or, a lion sable armed and langued gules. Distinguished from his father’s because it’s brisured by a label argent.”

  Heraldry attack! Pip thought. Then: She’s nervous, but chattering because she’s trying to hide it.

  The young woman spoke under the sound of the other man’s hammer, and then a metallic clicking and rustling; adjusting tiny bolts and rivets, she thought, and the jingle of mail, and the scuffa-scuffa of a polishing cloth and emery used to remove rust.

  “Who is this for?” the first man asked.

  The deeper voice replied, listing a complex search for a suit that was apparently of historic value to some collector; it all sounded a bit old-country and odd, since Pip had been brought up in a world where armor was a new craft patterned on designs pulled from books, and valued for its ability to keep your hide unpunctured by the slings and arrows and lances and spears and boomerangs and whatever of outrageous fortune. As embodied in your more outrageous neighbors.

  And he’s nervous too. An older man . . . and he’s got a different accent. Rather like Mummy’s or mine, in fact. English, and very wellborn. Odd, here in New York, and working at an artisan’s craft. But then again, Mummy spent most of her life after the Blackout until she married Daddy on the opposite side of the planet from England, doing some rather déclassé things, or ones that would have been if buccaneering weren’t such an old tradition in our family. The girl sounds the same way; the Yank sounds like a Yank, except a bit plummy and old-fashioned, like a book talking. No contractions.

  Pip knew what pre-Blackout American accents sounded like; Auntie Fifi had a twanging one that she proudly described as Original Western Trailer-Trash, and there were a variety of others sprinkled thinly about the parts of Oz she’d seen, mostly rather elderly by now. The people with John mostly had very distinctive and different patterns of speech, apparently grown up since the Change, though Captain Feldman’s was more like the pre-Change standard.

  The American continued to the English armorer: “Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty of the greave being still in existence?”

  “Of course,” the posh Englishman replied coolly.

  “It was worth something to you.”

  “No,” the older man with the English accent replied, laughing. “My pleasure in finding it was my reward.”

  “Have you no ambition to be rich?” the American asked, with a sly smile in his voice.

  The tone put Pip slightly on edge, as if it were a cat toying with something small and helpless.

  “My one ambition is to be the best armorer in the world,” the Englishman answered gravely.

  The conversation ended and Deor hissed: “In here! He mustn’t see us!”

  They opened the door on the opposite side and entered. Pip gave a brilliant smile at the proprietor, sitting at a desk piled high with the musty-smelling books that crowded the shelves all about. They were ancient-looking for the most part, the leather of their binding wrought in ridges or tooled, often cracked and dried with age. They were the sort of thing the Bunyip aristocracy of Station-Holders in Townsville would have paid through the nose for if some salvager could get them out of the dead cities.

  He peered at her over reading glasses with narrow lenses and cackled. “Not often we see a young miss like you in here! What might I help you with?”

  Behind them the door to the armorer’s shop clinked open and shut. Footsteps went down the hall to the stairwell, and then up it with a tap of shoe-leather on boards and a creak.

  “What’s that you have there?” Deor asked, nodding his head at the slim volume the old man was reading.

  “Oh, just something French,” the man said, smoothly sliding another book across it.

  From the brief glance at the page it was a printed play with stage directions and dialogue.

  And with naughty pictures, probably, Pip thought; though what she’d seen had been only a chastely-robed woman gesturing wildly. Now what?

  “Follow,” Deor said.

  They filed out with the merchant staring after them in bewilderment—Toa reluctantly putting down a book on Gothic cathedrals, a style for which he had a passion, which had also astonished the proprietor—and went to the stairs. Pip put her hand into the bag over her shoulder, reaching for her slingshot. Somewhat to her surprise, it was still there rather than being transmuted to some fascinatingly archaic firearm of the ancient world.

  Deor put a hand out as they filed up the stairwell, Toa walking crabwise next to the wall so the steps would creak less. Pip paced up quickly on quiet cat-feet, the slingshot clamped in her hand. The building was strange, obviously old and run-down, but equally obviously built in the modern fashion for natural ventilation and lighting from windows, lanterns and candles, though electric lights had been added later in a slapdash fashion.

  Deor stopped at the top of the stairs. Thora followed him, hand on the gun in her handbag as it would have been on the hilt of her sword, and pointed to a door. Deor nodded, then made a sign towards the next one down the corridor; it had a disused air, and he listened at it and then nodded again.

  “John,” he said very quietly.

  Thora tested the knob, then began to lean against it, her leanly muscular arm tensing. Pip stepped forward:

  “Let’s be subtle, shall we, eh?” she said.

  Thora stepped aside, frowning faintly. Pip felt slightly abashed for a moment at the implied professionalism.

  Tsk, tsk, girl. Mind on the prize, what?

  She pulled her lockpicks out of the bag—they were there, and in the same chamois-leather wrap she usually kept them in, an identical replacement for her mother’s.

  Perhaps it’s better that I’m not Supreme Goddess after all, she thought mordantly as she unlimbered two of them; the lock was a straight French, the antique straight-through type with two studs on the end of the key and much easier to jigger than a Yale style. I seem to be rather unimaginative even when I’m in a sodding spirit realm and can make things by thinking about it!

  Her fingers moved carefully, slow steady pressures and then . . .

  Click.

  Picking locks is not for the nervous, as Mummy always said, she thought, rocking back on her heels as Thora went through with a nod and her hidden hand undoubtedly still clenched on the gun-butt.

  They all followed, Toa last and closing the door delicately, with a hand that made the chipped glass knob look like a bead. Then he braced the door with his long-handled shovel, digging the point into the battered, splintered boards of the floor.

  The others fanned out to search the suite of rooms. Most of whatever furniture it had had was gone, or draped in dingy sheets. There were four rooms, and one included a toilet and tub. The water wasn’t connected, and the tub was coated with a thin film of what Pip thought was actual marble. Thora exclaimed from another room, and she went into it. The Bearkiller woman was looking at a flower in a vase. . . .

  Except that it wasn’t a rose, as she first thought. It was a carving, done in marble too, a creamy white color. The work was exquisitely detailed, and she wouldn’t have thought it was possible to catch the fleshy delicacy no matter how skillful you were. She looked at it in fascination and reached a finger out towards it.

  “No!” Deor said sharply, his eyes fixed on the rose.

  “It’s a dangerous carving of a rose?” Pip asked in exasperation.

  “It’s not a carving at all,” Deor said. “That was a
rose, and it has been changed. So it begins, here, and leads to that day we saw, the day of fire.”

  Pip snatched her hand back.

  He found a set of wineglasses on a table. “Toa, keep watch. The rest of you, listen with these. We’ll all get something, and we can put what we hear together.”

  Pip took up the tulip-shaped glass—rather dirty, with red-wine crystals at the bottom—and set it against a spot where the plaster had fallen off the lath of the wall. A murmur of voices came through as she pressed her ear to the base.

  She caught a name. Castaigne, she thought. Might be useful.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

  Alan Thurston dreamed. A cat was singing in human words, but not to him, its voice as sweet as clover honey dripping from a comb of beeswax on a hot August day. Honey of the type his mother had given him, smeared on a hunk of fresh bread as a treat when he’d done his lessons well:

  “Hush, child

  The darkness will rise from the deep, child

  And carry you down into sleep, child

  The darkness will rise from the deep, child

  And carry you down into sleep.”

  Alan stirred, and felt chains clink. He was in a bare room, brick and boards, sitting with his hands above his head and manacled to the wall. The prison around him was dim, the details strangely indefinite—as if it were somehow a generic representation for the concept of prison itself. Alan knew he’d been here for a very long time. Perhaps he’d been there always, though he’d never been aware of it. Or one of him had always been here.

  One of me was always here. One of me lives a man’s life elsewhere. They are coming . . . coming together . . . I feel it . . . as if the halves of my soul are becoming one, for the first time. Will be one.

  He could see another man in the dimness, hanging in bonds that fastened his wrists to a bar of wood hung from the ceiling at a height that made him stretch his toes to touch the floor. The cat sat at his feet and crooned: