The Pyramids of London

by Andrea K Höst

  "All ready to go then?" asked a bright-eyed girl underneath a very proper chauffer's hat. It took Eluned a moment to recognise the dragonfly girl, Sun Li Sen, who'd fetched them an umbrella.

  "Mama Lu has a small transport empire," Aunt Arianne said, in response to Eluned's unspoken question. "And yes, all ready. Might Griff ride up front? It may help his travel sickness."

  "'Course," said Li Sen, and opened the front passenger door, adding to Griff: "Let me know if you want me to pull up."

  Eluned settled onto the right of the back seat, with Aunt Arianne between her and Eleri, and Melly and Nabah opposite, both formally thanking Aunt Arianne for the invitation. Melly had pulled her hair into two short, fat braids, the ends threaded with silver and puffed out into little balls, and Eluned admired the way they bobbed whenever she excitedly turned her head.

  True to Aunt Arianne's assessment, there was no shadow on the tall girl's face, only pleasure at a rare treat.

  "Which do you like more?" Griff asked their driver, bouncing on the front seat. "The tiger or the dragonfly?"

  "Dragonfly's a fun challenge. The tiger goes fast." Li Sen swung them sedately around a corner, heading west past the Great Barrows. "But it's a new thing coming out of Nathaner's that I like best—a courser—basically two wheels in a line with an engine between them. It's got the tiger's speed, and going around corners—!" She sighed happily.

  "Driven something not released yet?" Eleri asked, proving that she was, after all, listening.

  "Grandama has a controlling interest in Nathaner's," Li Sen said. "I get to do test-driving sometimes."

  "Do you worry about having your fulgite stolen?" Griff asked.

  "It's a risk," Li Sen said, and fished a pistol out of a pocket in the driver's door. "Getting enough to keep the business going's as much a problem as stopping it from being taken. Nathaner's is looking at motopetrol engines. Smelly and noisy, but a nice surge of speed."

  At this point conversation died away as they joined a larger road heading west out of the city, and Li Sen demonstrated that tigers could indeed go fast. Not enough to outrun the morning windstorm, but it was a fortunately weak one, buffeting but never threatening the tiger's swift racing.

  For a time they simply gaped out the windows, but they had a nearly two hour journey ahead of them, so Nabah was soon asking Aunt Arianne about the places she'd travelled. This was a formidable list: Aunt Arianne didn't seem to have stayed more than a year in any one place.

  "Did allegiance not concern you?" Nabah asked intently. "If you had died in these lands, you could have been trapped in an unlife, or a punishment Otherworld."

  "That's why so many travellers attempt a bond of allegiance with Epona, whose Otherworld can be reached almost anywhere—though given that in Epona's Otherworld you get to be a horse, you do need to genuinely like the things to want that future. Some do as I did and thoroughly research a new country's laws, then obey them strictly. So long as the land has a strong territorial allegiance, most gods will accept a traveller who has respected their edicts even if they were not born there—they want observant souls in their Otherworlds, after all. There are places I would never visit, but most because of how I stood under secular laws, not the requirements of the Answered."

  "But even then, if your soul didn't go to Annwn you would have no chance to meet…"

  Melly, turning to peer at a roofless house, elbowed Nabah in the ribs. This brought a moment's annoyance, then Eluned could practically see the forthright Nabah remember why the Tennings were with Aunt Arianne in the first place.

  "Wasn't it dangerous, though?" Nabah asked instead. "Being a Prytennian woman travelling alone?"

  Melly and Eluned exchanged helpless winces, for that was a question even Eleri would think twice about asking when you considered some of the stories about other lands and their ideas about Prytennian women. Aunt Arianne was wearing only a light veil today, but being able to make out her features didn't help with guessing her feelings.

  Sounding as unconcerned as ever, she said: "I usually travelled in the company of friends or relatives, which does make matters easier, wherever and whoever you are. There were occasions where the stories told about Prytennians drew some uncomfortable attention, but nothing more. Still, don't think of Prytennia as some blessed haven of safety in an unjust world—the nearest I've ever come to being attacked was in my parents' own house."

  "What happened?" Eluned asked, startled into the kind of prying she'd usually back away from.

  "One of your grandmother's students, very drunk, decided I liked him far more than my own opinion on the topic." Aunt Arianne shrugged. "I kicked him somewhere memorable and spent the night in my treehouse."

  "What did Grandama Seaforth do to him?"

  "I never told her. The next day he behaved as if he couldn't remember the night before, and I couldn't decide whether he was lying. But that was around the time your grandmother's illness started to really impact her, and soon she had no energy for students."

  In the silence that followed this, Griff, from the front seat, said: "Can we have a treehouse?"

  This was such an entirely self-centred thing to say even for Griff that Eluned drew breath to snap at him, but Aunt Arianne simply said: "I gather it's not me, but Cernunnos that you'd need to ask that." And then she laughed, a spontaneous sound lifting above her usual calm. "Oh, though I would enjoy the reaction of the next deputation of the Wise. Don't tempt me. Plus we must remember that the trees are full of folies, and they don't seem to love company."

  They all speculated on whether the folies really could be cats wearing bushes as a disguise, and then Melly began to ask about France, and whether Aunt Arianne had ever met any of the winged god-touched of the Cour d'Lune. Eluned sat back and listened, and tried to work out how old Aunt Arianne would have been when Grandama Seaforth died.

  Seventeen

  With a name like Tangleways, and so much talk of strange feuds, Eluned was disappointed when Li Sen turned down an orderly driveway bracketed by regimented and freshly clipped rows of cypress. The building ahead looked no more interesting: three stories of windows arranged in a flat horseshoe around a gravelled courtyard.

  "Boring," Griff said, as Li Sen drew them around a plain central obelisk and stopped neatly behind a horse-drawn carriage.

  "Looks new," Melly said, following Eleri out the door. "Perhaps they knocked the original building down."

  "That would be a rather dull approach," Aunt Arianne said. "Let's hope the promised refreshments can make up for it."

  She paused to speak briefly to Li Sen, while Eluned stole admiring glances at the occupants of the carriage, now crowding the wide entry-way. Three sisters, very handsome, with wonderful manes of bronze hair.

  "…don't care whether it's convenient or not," one was saying, in a carrying whisper. "Any school run by Folly Fennington's bound to be a madhouse."

  "…half the fun," another replied.

  "Just because you think school is for swinging from the chandeliers," the first said bitterly, while the third cast an apologetic, amused glance at their accidental audience, and followed her family indoors.

  "This trip will be worth it to see whether Lord Fennington's half as strange as they say," Melly murmured. "Or are we all gullible for believing he never wears the same shendy twice, and has an automaton for brushing his teeth?"

  "And a whole mechanical menagerie," Griff said, striding ahead up the broad, flat stairs. Animal automatons rarely bothered him, unless they were covered with fur. Then he stopped short.

  Eluned quickened her pace, but Griff's reverential sigh told her there was no crisis.

  "Oh, they built in front of the old house," Melly said, glancing around at orderly stairways and halls leading off to either side, and then through a matching set of double doors to a semi-enclosed garden where a festive marquee and a clock tower partially blocked the view of a house where logic and symmetry had long been abandoned.

  "Two front doors," Eleri murmur
ed. "Moat."

  "Sunken garden," Eluned corrected, catching glimpses of the tips of what looked like a collector's bounty reaching up around the two separate bridges into the main house.

  There must once have been a simple square building, large but unexceptional. Eluned could see a patch of bricks of a slightly different red where the original front door would have stood, before being replaced by the tall, skinny green door and the fat, nearly rounded blue door. Impossible to guess what came next: the tower on the right or the crenellations on the left. The bulbous bay windows or the opposing series of portholes. The statues or the ironwork filigree. And then the extensions, entire wings of completely contrasting design bulging to either side. Beyond them, smaller buildings.

  "Follies," Melly said, grinning widely. "Appropriate."

  "There's tunnels," Griff said, in an urgent whisper, pointing to the arch of a brick drain out of the garden moat, and then he was off, circling the house.

  Eluned wanted very much to join him in exploration, but she could not forget what they were there for, and looked around for the real reason for their visit. Both the green and blue door were firmly closed, and there was no movement behind the many windows in either the new or old buildings.

  "Follies and folies," Melly said, half under her breath. "Fools, follies, folies."

  "But no Fennington," Nabah said. "There's hardly anyone here. Are we early?"

  Eluned looked about for Aunt Arianne, who had detoured toward the shade of the marquee. Yesterday she had instructed them to look around for anything unusual while she approached Lord Fennington—though Eluned had no intention of missing out on his answers—but the whole trip would be wasted if the man wasn't even there.

  Eleri and Nabah started after Griff, and Eluned hesitated between following and checking the marquee. They shouldn't let their guard down. Even if Lord Fennington did turn out to be the person who had commissioned the stolen automaton, that didn't guarantee that he hadn't found a reason to hide any discoveries Mother had made. They needed to be careful.

  "Is your sister feeling ill?" Melly asked. "She seems very quiet today."

  "Ah…" How to answer that? "I guess she's been thinking a lot about her future." Would Eleri want the whole neighbourhood to know her feelings for Princess Celestine? "Mother and Father were both brilliant in their fields, and for Eleri no school is going to be able to replace them. This place, or the one in Lamhythe, will be a total waste of her time without at least a very good science teacher, let alone a practical mechanics workshop."

  "Oh." Expression lightening, Melly led them off toward the corner where Griff had disappeared. "I'm not much for the sciences, so I couldn't say how good the teachers are at Tollesey. Nabah would probably know. Though, all other things being equal, I'd choose this place over Tollesey—for the sheer entertainment value, to say nothing of the connections. Lord Fennington would be enormously useful."

  "For poetry?" Eluned asked, startled.

  "For the business empire I will one day command," Melly said, with a quick, amused smile. "Though for poetry too, since Folly Fennington's mad keen on Prytennian literature, and I'd love to get among his collection of folios and first editions. I'll have to get my hands on the prospectus and see if they've bothered to put the prices, so I can work out whether I could swing the fees."

  "What kind of business empire are you going to run?" Eluned asked, fascinated. She could not have been more wrong about Melly's reaction to this trip.

  "I call it 'Finders Keepers'. People were always coming into the store and asking for discontinued products, or things that aren't sold locally. My Da and I had a lot of fun tracking remainders down—you just need to know the right people to ask—and it's turned into a nice sideline. I've lots of plans for expansion, for mail order and advertisements, and one thing I particularly want is to break into the kind of clientele who could afford to send their kids here. Not," she added, glancing back toward the marquee, "that this Tangleways looks like it's going to end up with much in the way of students."

  "I guess a reputation for inspired silliness isn't the best basis for setting yourself up as a teacher."

  "I'd feel sorry for him, but I expect all that money will console him."

  They rounded the corner of the sprawling house and found stables to their right, a pair of long heads tossing restively. Knowing Griff would never head that way, Eluned moved in the opposite direction, toward a smaller building like a pepper pot. There were three more of different shapes behind it.

  "This place is like a little village," Melly said. "What did they want all this for?"

  "Lots of guests?" Eluned looked around, and spotted Griff leading the others toward a white pavilion full of people. Headless people.

  "Oh, clothes mannequins," Melly said, sounding as relieved as Eluned felt. There were only two real people: one very tall and a bit fleshy, and the other lithe and lightly muscular.

  The taller one had noticed them approaching, and turned, beaming. "Halloo!" he said. "Welcome, welcome, welcome! What perfect timing. I need a second opinion, and a third and fourth as well!"

  "Folly Fennington in the flesh," Melly murmured, and hurried to catch Griff up.

  Eluned took a moment to steady herself before following. Here he was, this man, finally standing right in front of them. He might be a murderer. He might simply have commissioned an automaton. Or he might have had nothing to do with them at all. Now was their chance to find out.

  Lord Fennington had a mournful face, floppy brown hair, and a booming sort of voice, and he rounded out his words as if playing with the way they sounded. "Come, come, come," he said, beckoning them toward the pavilion and holding out an anxious hand toward the display he'd apparently been working on. School uniforms. There were a dozen mannequins, all dressed in dark blue and creamy-beige.

  "Now tell me bluntly, no holding back. Should it be the double line of red, or the single?"

  Eluned didn't see any red at first, then spotted a pencil line around the cuff of one of the jackets. And the four-panel summer shendy had a plummy double line making a border around the two side panels.

  "There's hardly any difference," Griff said, as Griff would. "But I like the double more."

  "One vote for the double!" Lord Fennington said. "Can we gain a consensus? Any champions for the opposing view?"

  "Two is better," Nabah agreed.

  "One," Eleri said immediately.

  "One," Melly said.

  "A tie! But one last vote to settle the matter."

  Since he sounded so serious, Eluned took a moment to study the collection of uniforms, personally doubting most people would even notice the difference. Then she fished in the small pouch she had laced to her new day-belt, and found one of the coins Aunt Arianne had distributed earlier that week as an allowance.

  A simple toss and catch, and then she said: "Two."

  Lord Fennington, fortunately, found this funny, his long face lighting as he laughed. "Yes, yes, the judgment of Sucellos! Two it shall be."

  "Lakshmi's smile," Nabah added, looking pleased.

  "And how nice that the Daughters are taking an interest in Tangleways!" Lord Fennington added approvingly to Nabah, before saying to his companion, an excessively handsome blond man, "Matthiel, take these appalling one-line variations away."

  "My Lord," said the man, then picked up two of the mannequins with effortless grace, and walked off.

  "Have you been on the tour?" Lord Fennington asked then. "You mustn't miss it. Hedley's been with the estate for decades, and has endless tales of Lord Webley's experiments and inventions."

  "Inventions?" Eleri said. "Engineer? Or scientist?"

  "Both, in a manner of speaking. He called himself a deiographer and was devoted, you might well say, to the Science of Gods. What sparks them to Answer? Is there some unifying purpose or meaning? Can devices be constructed to quantify their energies and boundaries? A brilliant man, though, of course, more than a little mad." He gave them a small, shy sm
ile. "Speaking as an authority on the subject, quite potty."

  "Eccentric," Griff corrected, before Eluned could decide if it would be rude to laugh. "If you have money, you get to be eccentric, which sounds a lot more fun." Then he held out his hand with the grave formality that he sometimes produced to get his way, and said: "My name is Griff Tenning. These are my sisters Eleri and Eluned Tenning."

  Eluned held her breath, searching the man's face for any hint of recognition, but all he did was shake Griff's hand with matching formality and say:

  "Dyfed Fennington. And do only two of your companions have names?"

  "Melly Ktai," Griff said slowly, a little too obviously still searching for some hint of reaction. Then he shrugged, adding: "Nabah hasn't told us her last name."

  "Satkunan," Nabah said. "Do you mean to say there are machines here designed to—to measure gods?"

  "Indeed! Or there were. Unfortunately the Mini-T carted most of it off years ago, and handing over anything interesting left behind was part of the conditions of sale. Not," he added, with a conspiratorial gleam, "that we didn't give everything a good and thorough dusting before shipping it off. And you can see the housing of some of the larger pieces during the tour, since it's not as if they could pack up the clock tower."

  "My Lord, the podium is ready," said the man called Matthiel, returning with a sheaf of papers.

  "Already? Where, where is the day going?" Lord Fennington took the papers and fanned his face with them. "My young friends, I must rush. Do, do enjoy yourselves."

  He was striding off as he spoke, and there was no more time for leading questions. They'd lost their chance, at least for now.

  Eluned turned to the man called Matthiel: "Can we help you with the other mannequins?"

  "Thank you, but there's no need," the man said. "Don't miss My Lord's speech, damini."