by Geonn Cannon
It took a lot out of her, and she paused frequently to catch her breath and dab the sweat from her brow and upper lip. After she had the house completely covered she would eat and drink, lie down for a bit, and replenish her energies. She knew she would have plenty of time to recuperate when they were en route to the Mediterranean so she wasn’t overly concerned about the energies she was expending. She did pause once to make sure her tattoo ink wasn’t glowing, just to be positive she wasn’t pushing herself too far.
When every door and window on the ground floor had been protected by a web of energy, she moved up to the second floor. The energy wouldn’t kill anyone who tried to gain access to the house. First there would be a mild sense of unease that would set any solicitor or milkman back on their heels. Anyone who persisted would experience mild discomfort. If there was a sincere, concerted effort to enter the home without permission, all the energy would converge on that spot with enough force to push whoever it was back out into the street.
“And hopefully into the path of an oncoming tramcar,” she muttered.
She knocked lightly on Dorothy’s bedroom door before entering. Dorothy had changed into her pajamas and lay half-curled in bed, one leg stretched out behind her and both hands under the pillow. She wore an eye mask to block out any ambient light. She was absolutely and completely unconscious. Beatrice smiled and moved on tiptoe to the bedside. The blankets were pushed down enough that she could lift them without disturbing Dorothy. She drew them up over her body, tucked it tight around her, and bent down to press a kiss to Dorothy’s cheek.
Dorothy could go days on just cat naps and quick dozes, but once she finally crashed she could sleep through anything. Beatrice rested two fingers on Dorothy’s temple and expended a little magic to ensure the next few hours would be restful and populated by only the sweetest of dreams. She let her touch linger for a moment before she went to the window and added protection to it as well.
Beatrice allowed herself a final lingering look at the woman lying asleep on the bed before she left to finish her work, shutting the door softly behind her.
#
They left London just after sundown. Dorothy’s reasoning was that Virago would most likely expect them to begin a trip in the morning. Leaving later also meant they could sleep for the first part of the journey and wake upon arrival in Spain. Dorothy wanted to match her grandmother’s travel as much as possible considering it was her roadmap they would be following. She dressed in a leather jacket and a skirt over knee-high boots, her hair French-braided underneath a tweed beret. Trafalgar wore a belted gray dress under her usual coat and a pair of gloves, while Beatrice dressed in her standard uniform of gray vest, black tie and matching jacket with a bowler hat.
Cora wished them luck and departed for Wraysbury once again. Dorothy hadn’t told the others, but her secondary concern on this trip was finding some way to soothe her friend’s addled mind. Be it finding the creature who took her team or only discovering where it had come from, she wanted to return to London with some kind of news that might return the strength and vivacity she remembered.
Desmond accompanied them to the train station, which they would take to the ferry docks in Portsmouth. From there, a sea voyage through the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay before arriving in Bilbao, Spain. They would make arrangements there for an overland trip to Barcelona. And that, after nearly traveling two thousand kilometers, would be the true beginning of their trip. Trafalgar expressed surprise they weren’t using the Skylarker, but Dorothy explained she didn’t want to abuse Captain Crook’s generosity. Besides, using a slower sea route would further confuse Virago and hopefully slow any pursuit she might engage in. The journey would take a little longer, but it would give them time to prepare.
“It will also give Virago an opportunity to catch up with us once she figures out what we’re doing,” Trafalgar said from across the aisle. She was sitting by the window, while Dorothy and Beatrice were sharing the bench opposite her. Beatrice had the window seat but was sat far enough back that she didn’t obscure Dorothy’s view.
“We have a secret weapon.” Dorothy held up the books and papers she had brought with her. There were more in the trunk Beatrice had muscled onto the baggage compartment. “We will not travel idly. While we are making our way to the southern shore of Spain, we will be seeking the most likely place to begin our search. Even if Virago somehow beats us to the sea, she will be frozen in place with no clue where to go next.”
Trafalgar said, “I am sure she will have some clue. I believe we should have taken the airship and dealt with whatever consequences arose. Slowing our own arrival can only benefit Virago.”
“Or she will be curious about why we chose such a meandering route. She’ll wonder if there is something we know that she doesn’t. She’ll assume we came this way because we had no other choice.”
“You’re making a great many assumptions about someone you’ve only met once.”
“Twice,” Dorothy said, “once when she beat me up and again when she was bathing. Those are two times when one’s personality is laid bare.”
Beatrice said, “Among other things. You saw her bathing...?”
Dorothy smiled. “Jealous, Trix?”
Beatrice harrumphed and looked out the window, hands folded in her lap. Dorothy laughed and rearranged the books on her lap.
Trafalgar said, “Well, whether this is the wisest course of action or not, it is already underway. We’ll simply have to deal with whatever comes next when it comes. How long shall it take us to reach Barcelona?”
“All told,” Dorothy said, “it will be four days before we’re in Bilbao. Then we shall see about the quickest route to Barcelona. Perhaps a week.”
Trafalgar nodded and settled in. “Then I shall not feel bad about stealing an hour of sleep on the way to Portsmouth.”
“I’ll try to read quietly,” Dorothy promised.
As Trafalgar dozed, Dorothy looked out the window at the city speeding past them. Portions of the track rose above the streets so as not to disturb traffic or pedestrians, and on this stretch it felt as if they were taking to the air. She could imagine them flying just a few dozen meters above the ground, weaving between rooftops and rustling trees with their passage. Not long ago, motorcars and airplanes were fantastic ideas, and now she could see at least five or six of the former tooling along the industrial lanes of Vauxhall. Who knew what the future held? Perhaps one day soon they would be able to skip across the Channel to Barcelona in the space of a day or a few hours.
The thought made her dizzy. To live at such a speed would cause people to become hurried and lazy. She was fine with the slow and measured pace the world currently had. When change came, as it inevitably would, she would make the necessary adjustments. That didn’t mean she would have to like or anticipate them.
She glanced at Beatrice to see she had fallen asleep, and she smiled. She didn’t know what Beatrice had done to protect the house, but whatever it was left a very noticeable frisson in the air. Dorothy almost felt sorry for anyone who tried to break in while they were away. Then again, Beatrice had entered her life as a thief. She looked again at her sleeping companion. If she hadn’t been uncharacteristically sloppy with her artifacts, or if Beatrice had the foresight not to handle it without gloves, their relationship would have been far different.
I would have hunted her down, Dorothy admitted. I would have brought the full force of the Met down upon her, saw to it that she was an example to others. My foe, turned to my friend and lover and confidante.
She looked across the aisle at Trafalgar, who was also asleep at that point. Another foe, an enemy she’d actually exchanged blows with before their partnership got off on its first shaky legs. There had been days when she’d fantasized about humiliating the woman who now shared her train car. They had been more than enemies. She’d considered Trafalgar to be her nemesis. “Foolhardy, slapdash. Hardly worthy of the title ‘explorer’.”
And now friend.
Now partner and coconspirator. Her equal.
She shook her head and sighed. As she’d thought earlier, the future was unknowable. Best to let it happen on its own and deal with the changes as they presented themselves.
Chapter Thirteen
Trafalgar didn’t much care for the sea. She first saw a vast body of water when she was a girl, taken from her home by men with nefarious plans for her and the other girls from her village. The men put her on a boat and tried to use her as a host for some undersea monstrosity they worshipped. She managed to escape them and their intentions, but even decades later she found herself uneasy when out on the open water. Travel to Spain would take an entire day, and she was wary about spending so much time on a ship. But the route kept them within sight of land at all times so she would often go out on the garden lounge so she could reassure herself by watching the shoreline.
She was also throw by the opulence of their transport. The ship was massive, an ocean liner which was merely stopping at Bilbao before heading across the Atlantic to America. It was as if the most spectacular hotel in London had been lain on its side and then had a ship’s hull built around it. She was worried about getting lost, but she kept her wandering to a specific area and quickly found herself familiar with that particular part of the ship.
During the day, they would meet in Dorothy’s stateroom to go over what was coming next. Trafalgar sat on one side of the bed with Beatrice across from her, and Dorothy perched on the pillows with her legs crossed in front of her. In front of her were maps hand-drawn by Eula Boone and the journals of her many trips to the shores of Greece, Italy, Egypt, and points between. Dorothy had drawn her own map so she wouldn’t have to deface the original with her markings and Trafalgar took a moment to admire Dorothy’s skill. Cartography was a means to an end for Lady Boone, not even something she considered a hobby, but her drawings were exquisite.
“We know where to find two creatures who have existed beneath the earth for thousands, perhaps millions of years. The Minotaur and the beast Cora escaped.” She had marked those points on her map. “In that regard, we have more information that my grandmother had. But she was so close when she died. She spent decades planning the trip we’re on now. She laid all the groundwork for us.”
Trafalgar said, “If you’d asking us to take this on in her honor, I would be glad to agree.”
“Thank you. I hate that she left this undone. All of her work enabled me to forge my own way in life. If it wasn’t for the inheritance or the interest she took in me... well. This is the very least I can do for her.” She looked at Trafalgar. “We. The least we can do.”
“Where do we begin?” Trafalgar asked.
She put her finger on the Cyclades. “We’re going to begin at Delos. Hardly revolutionary, I know, but there’s a reason every culture has fixated upon it. The island was originally home to a culture called the Carians. They were a wealthy, seafaring people at the very beginning of recorded history. No one knows where they originated, where their wealth came from... they were just simply there. ‘In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. The Earth was without form, and void, and also the Carians were there.’”
Trafalgar said, “You think these people were remnants of the race wiped out by the great Flood?”
“I believe they might be. Unfortunately Delos is not the place to find much about them. The Athenians purified the island for their own purposes and relocated the bodies buried on Delos to other islands throughout the Cyclades. Grandmother believed this archipelago was the key to understanding what came before the Flood. She believed the Carians relocated the Delos after their original home was destroyed by the creation of the Mediterranean.
“She traced where the Carians showed up throughout pre-history and made a note of every reference, every anecdotal appearance, and she tried to pinpoint where they might have originally come from. She researched references to the giants of old, those evil men that God sought to wipe out in the Bible. She was of the belief that these evil men were the Nephilim. Offspring of women who lay with the ‘children of god.’”
Beatrice said, “Angels?”
“Angels or something a primitive recorder might consider to be angelic. It could simply have been more advanced civilizations. It could have been the earliest purveyors of magic.” She rearranged the maps. “According to basically every myth she found, the Nephilim were larger than the average man.”
“Goliath,” Trafalgar said.
Dorothy nodded but then she waved. “Yes and no. Goliath was not considered giant. He was just... tall. Taller than most. So she started looking for evidence of burial sites for people who were taller than average. Eight, nine feet. She found a few sites in Turkey, Jordan, Greece, Lebanon, et cetera.” Dorothy smiled, gleeful at her grandmother’s ingenuity. “Then she began looking deeper.”
Trafalgar said, “How do you mean?”
“Underwater. She was looking for cemeteries that would have been covered by the Flood.”
Trafalgar’s eyes widened. “And she found one?”
“She found what she called a necropolis. Just here, north of Mykonos.” She drew a circle on her map. “There are undersea cliffs here where the water is barely one hundred meters deep, but then it plummets to six, seven, eight hundred meters. Grandmother found a spot that was one thousand meters deep. She was positive there was something down there. She sent down probes and she found a cave system. The probes were unmanned, so she couldn’t investigate as thoroughly as she would have wanted, but it was enough to pique her interest.”
Beatrice said, “That’s where we’re going? A thousand leagues under the sea?”
“I believe that’s a book,” Trafalgar said, “and it was talking about distance, not depth.” She focused on Dorothy. “A thousand meters is impossible. No human could travel that deep and survive, not without...” She straightened. “That’s what you intend to acquire in Barcelona. The means to descend as far as we need to go.”
“To the very bottom of the Mediterranean,” Dorothy said. “Deeper than anyone else ever has before. There is a certain amount of risk involved...”
Trafalgar scoffed. “I suppose ‘infinite’ does count as a certain amount, yes.”
“As I said. But I have faith that the reward will be more than worth the risk.”
Trafalgar chewed her bottom lip and looked at Beatrice. She could tell the other woman was waiting for her opinion, but she also knew where the girl’s true loyalty was. She sighed and nodded slowly. It went against her better judgment, but Eula Boone was a legend. If she believed there was something there worth finding, then Trafalgar was willing to risk it. Even though the idea of feeling all that water above her was terrifying, she knew she had to see it through to the end.
“Wherever this leads, I shall follow.”
Dorothy said, “Thank you.”
They had dinner together in the dining saloon before retiring to bed. They would arrive at Bilbao before lunchtime tomorrow, and then begin their trek across Spain. Trafalgar wished Dorothy and Beatrice a good evening and retired to her stateroom early. She left the lights off so she could see the onyx bay outside her window. The moonlight and the stars reflected off its surface and she suppressed a chill before it could take hold of her. A night so long ago, one of her earliest and strongest memories: a stone in her mouth, at the mercy of men from a world she couldn’t even begin to understand at that point, and a whirlpool that heralded the arrival of some eldritch beast that she was meant to host.
Her stateroom shared a wall with Dorothy’s, so she heard when her traveling companions finally returned from dinner. Dorothy’s voice seemed to drum softly against the wall while Beatrice’s was slightly more than a murmur and barely audible over the sound of the engines. Dorothy laughed, and then there was the sound of a weight dropping onto one of the beds. Trafalgar moved closer to the wall even as she told herself she wasn’t intruding; she was simply preparing for bed. She changed into pajamas since she wasn’t comforta
ble sleeping in the nude aboard the ship.
To their credit, Dorothy and Beatrice seemed to be trying to keep it down. A soft murmur, a rhythmic shifting of cloth against cloth at a rhythm that could have been attributed to the rocking of the ship. Trafalgar gave up the pretense and closed her eyes. To achieve that rhythm, Beatrice - or whoever was in the dominant position - would have to be moving extremely slowly. She could picture Dorothy on top of Beatrice now, shoulders hunched, Beatrice’s fingers curled into claws in the small of her lover’s back. She saw Dorothy’s pale skin and the freckles she was certain spread across her back and upper arms. Her hair would be loose and...
She pushed away from the wall and shook her head, pressing her fingers to her temples as she retreated to her bed. She wasn’t going to take advantage of the fact she could hear what was happening next door. She wasn’t even certain she was intrigued by the idea of two women making love. Adeline had been of that persuasion, but she was always shy about bringing her lovers home or spending the night with them. Trafalgar once assured her she was welcome to have guests, but Adeline had merely shook her head and told her she was anxious enough because of her skin color. “Don’t want to give people another reason to look down on me.”
Trafalgar put the pillow over her head and hoped she would drift off quickly.
#
The grounds of King’s College were quiet and abandoned when Desmond finally left his office. He had his books bundled under one arm, his satchel hanging heavy on the opposite shoulder. It banged against his hip when he walked. London felt odd without Dorothy Boone in it, he mused, as if a small piece of its soul had been siphoned off and released elsewhere. He would put her absence out of his mind and focus on the smaller problems at hand. Whether to catch a tram or walk, whether he would find a restaurant or eat at home. If Carter Marsh was available for a game of dominoes or to listen to the radio.
