by Phil Foglio
Lucrezia closed her eyes and sighed heavily. She gently reached out and touched Tarvek’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry for the loss of your father.” Her eyes opened and they were as cold as space. “And now I really must kill your sister. Do bring her to me.”
Tarvek shrugged. “I have already ordered some of your priestesses to do just that.” He turned towards Vrin, who looked as if she would burst with barely suppressed rage. “That was the correct thing to do, wasn’t it, Lady Vrin?”
Vrin stared at Tarvek and opened her mouth. Her gaze shifted towards the hand that Lucrezia had delicately laid upon young Sturmvarous’ shoulder. She closed her mouth. “Yes,” she responded through clenched teeth. “Yes of course it was, Master Tarvek.”
Tarvek raised a finger imperiously. “Prince Tarvek,” he corrected her chidingly, “It is Prince Tarvek now, Lady Vrin. Do try to remember that.” Vrin stared at him for several moments, and then nodded with a jerk.
“I would suggest,” Tarvek said, turning his back to Vrin and addressing Lucrezia, “That the Lady Vrin and her retainers go and inform the rest of your priestesses that you have returned.”
Lucrezia smiled. “They’re here?”
Tarvek nodded. “A substantial number of them. When they first arrived, my father turned a cavern in the basement over to them. That is the Lady Vrin’s domain.”
Vrin reluctantly acknowledged this. “It is... a very comfortable place.” She shook herself and addressed Lucrezia. “We are divided into three shifts, My Lady, two of which were always traveling the Shadow World searching for the Holy Child, while the remaining third rested and guarded your machines.” A thought struck her. “We... we won’t have to search anymore. I don’t know where we’ll put everyone—”
She gasped as another thought struck her. She turned to Lucrezia and dropped to her knees. “My Lady,” she said, her voice quavering with emotion, “My Lady, our task has been fulfilled. May we... may we be allowed to return to The City of Silver Light?”
This question caught Lucrezia by surprise. She considered it. “Well, I don’t see why not,” she conceded.
The three Geisterdamen shrieked with joy. Eotain and Shurdlu hugged each other with almost bone-cracking force. Vrin stared up at Lucrezia with tears streaming from her eyes. Lucrezia held up an admonishing finger. “But not immediately, of course. I must repair the gateway and assemble other assistants as loyal as you have been.”
“Impossible!” Vrin swore. “There will never be anyone who loves and needs you as much as we do, Mistress!”
Lucrezia smiled. “I shall just have to make do.”
Tarvek leaned in. “Perhaps the Lady Vrin and her retainers should go to the caverns and let the others know the good news that you’ve returned, not to mention that they will be returning home.” Vrin looked at him. Tarvek continued, “plus I imagine, you’d like to smarten the place up a bit for when The Lady comes to inspect it?”
Vrin shot to her feet. “Of course! We will prepare a feast for my Lady!” She paused. “Most of the food of the Shadow World is rather disgusting, My Lady, but we make do.”
Tarvek nodded. “They’ve actually learned how to make a rather tasty cheese. We didn’t even know they’d brought cows down there—”
Vrin stuck out her tongue in disgust. “Moo-cows? Those stupid fat things? Ew. We make our ‘cheese’ from the juice of our own cob spiders.”
“Really?” Tarvek, who had eaten a lot of “cheese,” looked ill. “How fascinating.”
Lucrezia gave a snort of laughter and then looked startled.
Tarvek noticed. “Are you all right, my Lady?”
“There is so much that I have forgotten about this place,” Lucrezia murmured. “There is always so much happening, and so much of it is so delightfully ridiculous.”
The Geisterdamen formally bowed, and then darted off. Lucrezia looked after them fondly. She turned to Tarvek. “Vrin does not like you.”
Tarvek shrugged and started to walk. “She has been touchy and suspicious about everyone ever since your machinery was sabotaged. Rather unfairly, I feel, since none of our people were involved.” Lucrezia remained silent. Tarvek continued. “I shall have a suite set up for your use—”
At this point, Tarvek realized that Lucrezia was no longer by his side. He wheeled about and discovered a now naked Lucrezia delightedly examining herself in front of a large mirror. His strangled “glurk!” caught Lucrezia’s attention.
“Oh do forgive me,” she sang out as she turned and looked at herself over her shoulder. “It’s been so long since I...” she paused, and gave a peculiar laugh that sent a small chill up Tarvek’s spine, “Since I was really human, I suppose, that I have to get used to it all over again.” She ran her hands down her sides and nodded approvingly. “Yes, I can work with this.”
She turned back to Tarvek, who was resolutely facing away. Lucrezia smiled. This sort of thing was always fun. She sashayed over to him. “Now you were saying?”
Tarvek nodded. He turned, saw her lack of clothing and spun back, his face flushed. “Yes. Well. There are hidden parts of the castle. I’m afraid that you’ll have to stay out of sight for the next few days. Until after my father’s funeral. We can’t risk having the Baron’s people seeing you yet.”
Lucrezia frowned with mock severity as she oh-so-casually took his arm. She noted that he was sweating slightly. “But surely these are your lands.” She thought about this and continued more seriously. “What do you care about some Baron?”
That stopped Tarvek dead. He turned to look at her and to Lucrezia’s surprise, stayed focused on her face. “You really have been out of touch for a while. Interesting. Baron Wulfenbach means nothing to you?”
Lucrezia stared at him. She tried to stall for time and regain the upper hand by going back and picking up the clothing she had dropped. However, despite the view she provided, she saw that Tarvek was no longer flustered. The young Prince was more formidable than she had first thought.
“A Baron Wulfenbach you say? My, that does take me back. His father meant quite a lot to me, but that was such a long time ago.” She frowned in genuine annoyance now. “I wonder where dear Klaus was keeping his mother? I had thought him the last of his family.”
Tarvek looked confused. “Well, there is a son, yes, but the one we’re talking about—this is in fact the same Klaus Wulfenbach of whom I speak.”
Lucrezia’s jaw dropped. “HE CAME BACK?”
In Tarvek’s opinion, the fear and astonishment he saw in her face was the first honest emotion she had displayed. He nodded slowly. “Yes Lady. A few years after he disappeared.”
Lucrezia reeled. “Only a few—!”
She saw Tarvek studying her and caught herself. She allowed herself a small wistful smile and sighed affectionately. “That man.”
With that she pulled herself back together instantly. Tarvek was impressed. She raised her chin and smiled. “Very well. Klaus is here. How droll. He is but a Baron, how much trouble can he be?”
Tarvek stared at her. He slowly removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Please have a seat, my Lady. This... this may take awhile.”
Meanwhile, aboard the flagship of the Wulfenbach airship fleet, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach faced his current opponent.
The last three months had seen a startling change in the young man. He was unshaven. His clothes had obviously been lived in for days, if not weeks. They were tighter as well. While he had never been out of shape, he had obviously been working hard in the interim, and his chest and arms had begun to resemble the proportions of his father. His hands had acquired new bruises and scars. More importantly, there was a grim and increasingly distant quality to his eyes that was worrying to his man servant, Ardsley Wooster, as he stood safely up out of the way on an overhead catwalk and watched the fight.
Below, in a large, empty machinist’s bay, a chunky, crab-style clank clattered forward. It had obviously seen better days, its shell was battered and coated with a patina of rust. Sev
eral of its multi-jointed arms were already out of commission, and the armor plating had been peeled back in several spots.
However it still moved with a vicious speed and purpose, and the remaining knife-edged arms wove through the air with a determined malice.
Gil easily avoided several attacks, and then darted forward and thrust a long steel spike directly into a mass of exposed tubing. There was a bright blue flash, a gout of green fluid, and the clank collapsed to the deck, spraying a shower of gears across the floor.
Gil turned away. Wooster dropped gracefully from the catwalk and hurried over to a large metal dome, which when lifted, revealed an enormous stone tea pot as well as various condiments.
Wooster prepared a large mug for Gil and then turned with it in his hand. His smile faltered, and then gamely returned. Gil hadn’t moved from where he’d stepped after delivering the coup de grace to the attacking clank.
Ardsley peered into his face. Gil looked lost. Ardsley gently but firmly insinuated the mug into Gil’s hand. After a moment, Gil registered its presence with a slight raising of his brows, and took a long, slow sip before he dropped into a chair.
Wooster leaned in. “Impressive, sir. Although I believe that one actually had time to look worried.”
Gil shrugged. “It was too slow. Even after I reworked it.” Wooster shivered. Gil’s voice was even more disturbing than his appearance. Over the months, it had deepened and the disturbing, infrasound harmonics that warned listeners that its owner was enmeshed within the grip of the Spark were almost always present. He tried again. “Indeed, I don’t know why you bothered.”
This actually provoked a response. Gil looked at Wooster and frowned. “It’s one less killer loose in the Wastelands. Grantz brought another one in yesterday, yes? I’ll take a look at it tonight.”
Now, Wooster couldn’t argue with the concept behind Gilgamesh’s actions. The younger Wulfenbach had returned from his expedition to find the Heterodyne girl, determined to “clean up the Wastelands.” He had even received the blessing of the Baron, who had seen the wisdom of letting his son work off some of the rage boiling away inside him by tackling a task large enough to absorb a Spark’s sustained fury. Thus, he had allowed Gilgamesh to retain several of the extraordinary figures that Klaus kept on the Wulfenbach payroll.
In a world filled with monsters, there inevitably were people who enjoyed the challenge of taking them down. The ones who learned how to do this effectively without having to be taken down themselves, found that the Baron was an excellent provider of weapons, transport, ammunition, intelligence and health insurance. Grantz was a fine example. While Gil had never met him, he always managed to drag back a steady supply of feisty monsters and rogue clanks who suffered from a minimum of damage.
What bothered the Englishman was Gilgamesh’s follow up. “Taking a look at” the things retrieved from the Wastelands usually meant examining them, patching them up, repairing them and them beating them to their knees in single combat. The creatures that survived certainly became much more tractable, but Wooster could see that Gil’s finer qualities were being burned away at an alarming rate. He had gone so far as to try to talk to the Baron, but the Master of Castle Wulfenbach had himself been locked away in one of his laboratories for the last several months, and had been incommunicado to someone of Ardsley’s pay grade.
Wooster had seriously considered adding knock out drops to the young master’s next cup of tea, but the last time he had tried that, he’d awoken two days later with a headache and a red rubber clown nose stuck to his face. The students aboard the Castle took their pranking seriously, and incompetence was harshly mocked.
Wooster sighed. “Very good, sir. Perhaps you’ll actually manage to damage yourself this time.”
He was startled when Gil looked directly at him and growled. “And who would care if I did?”
The act of speaking seemed to unlock something within him, and he slumped forward in his chair.
“All of the other students have either run off or got shipped back home. My father’s been locked in his lab for the last few months.” He looked up, and Wooster saw how despondent the young man before him was.
“I can’t leave, of course. I’ve got no one to talk to. I can’t do anything.” He looked at the sparking heap of clank. “Can’t do anything important, anyway.”
Ardsley was at a loss. He had never seen Gilgamesh like this. Even when he had first been revealed to the Fifty Families and the world at large, he had seemed to regard the rash of subsequent assassination attempts as an exciting challenge, and had confided to Ardsley that, “He didn’t take it personally.”
“You still have me, sir,” he ventured.
Gil glared at him fiercely enough that Wooster stepped back in alarm. “You? You’re only here—” With a jerk, Gil stopped himself. He dropped his head and a small chuckle escaped him. Wooster was extremely nervous now. This was one of those situations where prolonged laughter would be a reasonable cause to evacuate the dirigible. But when Gil looked back up, Ardsley relaxed. Gil looked calmer than he had in days.
“I’m sorry, Wooster.” He took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. Ardsley could see the muscles on his arms start to relax. “I know I must make your work difficult for you.” Ardsley gave a noncommittal shrug.
Gil took a deep pull from his mug and rotated his neck, producing a disquieting series of pops and crackles. “And I do appreciate having you here. Having someone I can trust...”
This was getting embarrassing, for a variety of reasons. Ardsley briskly picked up the pot and refilled Gilgamesh’s mug. “Of course you do, sir.” From long experience, Gil knew to hold his mug motionless as Ardsley efficiently topped it off with just the right amount of cream and sugar to maintain his preferred taste. “I know how you take your tea.”
Gil rolled his eyes at this, but said nothing as he sipped. Wooster took a few extra seconds to neatly wipe down his spoons. He spoke carefully. “And I am concerned for you, sir. Ever since... Miss Agatha died...” Gil had closed his eyes now. “I had not realized that the two of you were so... close.”
This was the first time he’d felt comfortable enough to broach the subject. The servants aboard the castle had been buzzing about it for weeks, of course. Even while in the infirmary, Captain DuPree had laughed about it within everyone’s hearing. Wooster had been unsure about what aspect of it the Captain had found funnier, the idea that Gil had been knocked out by his fiancée, or that he had thought he’d had a fiancée in the first place.
Ardsley had met Gilgamesh while they were both students in Paris. Thus, he was aware of the unusual history that the Captain and Gilgamesh shared[55].
It was only after a rather brutal sparring session (where Gil had taken her down in two out of three falls), that the Captain had agreed to stop talking about it altogether.
Gil looked sad. “We weren’t,” he admitted. “But we would have been.” He looked over at Wooster and impatiently waved him over to another chair. Ardsley knew better to argue when Gil was in one of these moods. He sat, and because it was expected, poured himself a mug of tea. While he did this, Gil idly balanced his full mug on his index finger. As he talked, he absent-mindedly bounced it from finger to finger. Wooster was almost certain that this was just something Gil did to keep his hands busy, and not in fact, meant to terrify him. This didn’t help.
“Do you know,” Gil volunteered, “I had resigned myself to bachelorhood?”
Wooster almost choked on his tea at this. The dynastic implications of this simple statement could shake Europa. He was also concerned as a friend. “Don’t be absurd. You’re still young.”
Gil looked down from the great height of his twenty-two years and rolled his eyes.
Wooster frowned, “And, if you’ll forgive me, sir—in Paris, you had quite the reputation for being able to secure the company of...” Wooster tried to smile innocently, “any number of young ladies[56].”
Gil looked at him evenly. “Yes, I
’ll never hear the end of that.” He paused. “Ardsley, do you know how boring it is to be with someone who doesn’t understand a thing you’re talking about?”
Ardsley flashed back to a rather one-sided conversation he’d had with the newest scullery maid, fresh from the countryside, about the proper placement of various forks. It had not ended well. “I believe I do, sir.”
Gil looked him in the eye. “That’s how I feel all the time.” He paused. “I’d always hoped I’d find—not just someone to marry—but a real partner. I’d read about female Sparks all my life, but even in Paris—” he shook his head in disgust, “Paris, for pity’s sake, forget about finding a female Spark, or any girl I could just really talk to. About things I was working on, or ideas, or—”
Gil ran down at this point and sat slumped forward for several moments. Then he slowly sat back, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. “But Miss Clay—” he grimaced, “Or Heterodyne, or whatever... she had The Spark.” He looked at Wooster a touch defensively. “And she liked me. She did.” He closed his eyes. “And I liked her.”
Wooster felt that he should state the obvious. “She ran away, after giving you a slight concussion.”
Gil shrugged. “I’m not saying it would have been an easy courtship. But I believe—”
They were interrupted by the far door being slammed open. A high-pitched squeal announced the arrival of Zoing. The miniscule construct waved its blue claws frantically from within its concealing coat.
From long practice, Ardsley could sometimes actually understand parts of what the excitable creature said, but not this time. It was hooting and piping so quickly that he was completely at sea.
Gil however, listened intently and nodded in satisfaction. “Excellent, Zoing, well done.” He turned to Ardsley and a genuine grin crossed his face. “Time to work!”
Without pause, he followed Zoing out the door. Hurriedly, a concerned Wooster followed. “Seriously?” he demanded as he tried to keep up with Gil’s long strides. “Between marathon sessions in your lab, and your excessive dueling with assorted monstrosities, you’re already driving yourself to an early grave!”
