Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  “Where do we go? Do you think—”

  “There was a Vee on one’a the balconies overlookin’ the ballroom. Watchin’ Reece, likely as not. It’ll know where Soph and your da are.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Hayden’s voice cracked as it rose hysterically. He had never been in this wing of the mansion before. Being here now, when it was dark and eerie and there were Vees to face, made him feel like there was a rock bobbing at the bottom of his stomach.”Is that supposed to—”

  “Burn it, Aitch!” Gideon hissed, slapping a hand over his mouth. “If you can’t stay calm, you’re gonna have to stay here!”

  Po circled around them and looked anxiously into Hayden’s face. “Close your eyes, Hayden,” she said with a tremor in her voice. Without knowing what for, Hayden obeyed. “You just gotta think about…about puttin’ all your thoughts into one tiny seed in your head. Focus really hard on not thinkin’ at all. Take a deep breath.”

  The dark clouds Hayden could feel cluttering his brain receded slightly, and he gave a small shiver as he pushed out his breath and opened his eyes. Gideon watchfully peeled back his hand.

  “We get to the Vee on the balcony. I say where there’s one, there’ll be two,” he continued as he stripped off his undersized jacket with some difficulty. He pulled his revolver out from behind his belt and began neatly loading it. “I’m gonna try not to have to shoot them. A shot would be loud. Might draw unwelcome attention.”

  “How big is this place?” Po wondered as they turned down a hall lit by the frail blue moonlight falling in through its row of oval windows. The light turned their faces blue, made it seem as though they were underwater.

  “Four stories, a dozen and some suites, two kitchens, a half a dozen offices and music rooms…” The numbers helped Hayden focus. He rambled them off and felt the dark clouds scroll even further back, till his panic was a quiet buzz in the back of his head. “…then there’s the library, with well over twenty thousand titles, the sunroom, the—”

  Gideon suddenly threw out his arms to stop Po and Hayden and backed them up into a stretch of wall between two windows with a shushing sound. On the ground at their feet, the shadow of a tree swayed and convulsed in the wind. And then three shadows, lean and human, glided across the moonlight, as silent as the tree.

  Hayden heard Po gulp as she ducked her face into Gideon’s back. His own throat felt like it was sticking when he tried to gulp away the lump that had risen in it.

  They waited for some time like that, but there was no more sign of The Veritas than that quick march of shadows. Hayden supposed it might not even have been Vees…but he doubted it. He’d never known a normal human to bring that pins and needles feeling into a room with them.

  “Let’s move,” Gideon said, and started walking again so abruptly, Hayden and Po fell against the space where he had been.

  They climbed a set of winding stairs, doubled back down a hall on the third story, and then cut through two sitting rooms to reach the collection of curtained doors hiding the balcony box seats. There were a dozen on this floor alone, their black curtains furling and unfurling in the breeze flowing in through the open window at the end of the hall. Hayden clutched his arms around himself, his teeth chattering. It was getting colder outside.

  Gideon signaled for him and Po to stay put as he checked the box seats one at a time, using the barrel of his revolver to nudge each curtain aside. His footsteps sank into the mansion’s thick carpets; the only sound was the muffled echo of the orchestra drifting up from the ballroom.

  There was a flash of darkness at the edge of Hayden’s vision, where his bifocals stopped and the blurriness began. He swung to the left and blinked down the dim corridor.

  “What is it?” Po asked, seizing his hand so suddenly he jumped.

  “I thought—I thought I saw—” The curtains shifted in the breeze again, and he relaxed. “Never mind. It was nothing. Just the curtains.”

  “There’s nothin’ here,” Gideon called as he thrashed the last curtain aside and disappeared into the box stall. He made an impatient noise. “Wonder where it got to.”

  Po, still clutching Hayden’s hand with both of hers, suddenly jerked, yanking his arm hard enough to make his bifocals bounce off the bridge of his nose. Her fingers slid out from his, raking the back of his hand on their way out.

  Fumbling to right his bifocals, Hayden turned and found himself alone in the hallway. Gideon was in the box stall. Po was simply, inexplicably, gone.

  “Gideon!” he called in a hoarse whisper. “Gideon!”

  Something bumped at the other end of the hallway, so softly, it shouldn’t have been frightening at all—but Hayden found the quietness of it terrible, because it left so much to the imagination. His heart hammering, he groped inside his jacket and pulled a small photon wand out of its inside pocket. He aimed with a shaking hand, flicked on the wand, and gasped as the beam grazed a gaunt white face and a pair of black eyes.

  With a yelp, Hayden dropped the photon wand. The light swept across Po in its downward spiral. The Vee had her from behind, his spidery fingers over her mouth, his pale lips close to her ear.

  Several things happened at once. Moonlight seeped between the cloud coverage and struck the corridor window, turning the hallway blue. Gideon emerged from the box stall, started as he saw the Vee and Po, and snapped his revolver into position. And a nervous-sounding voice called from somewhere nearby, “Is somebody there?”

  A second later, a sentry with a shockgun tucked in his shoulder stepped from one of the sitting rooms into the corridor, halfway between Gideon and his revolver and the Vee and Po. He spotted Gideon first.

  “Lower your weapon!” he shouted quaveringly, hefting his gun. “I said lower it!”

  “Behind you!” Hayden tried to say, but the lump in his throat seemed to be stopping up his voice.

  The Vee was pulling Po backward into shadow; her feet were kicking, dragging, but her hands were pinned against her sides.

  “Stay where you are!” the sentry barked as Hayden took a reflexive step after Po. “Just—just stay there!”

  “There’s a Vee—”

  “I said stay there!”

  Po gave one last kick and a stifled scream through the Vee’s hand. The sentry turned towards the sound…Gideon tilted the revolver resignedly…and Hayden leaped forward with one hand taut and outstretched—

  As the knife edge of his hand chopped across the cluster of nerves under the sentry’s chin, the man’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped forward like a puppet cut from his strings, landing facedown with a dull thud. His shockgun went off with a deafening bang as it fell beneath his hand. Po screamed.

  It might have been the only time in Hayden’s life he ran as fast as Gideon, tearing down the hall, his bifocals jumping on his nose. Po’s supine shape materialized through the darkness, curled into a ball with her arms wrapped around her head.

  “I’m—I’m alright,” Po said without uncovering her face as Hayden knelt and touched her shoulder. “I’m fine—the shot hit his leg—h-he went through there—” She pointed her little finger at the cupboard door at waist height on the wall above her.

  Gideon bumped the door open with his knee, frowning. “You recognize this, Aitch?”

  Gently prizing Po’s arms apart, Hayden said distractedly, “It’s the chute that goes down to the stream, isn’t it? For the servants to send laundry to the washers? Po, are you sure you’re alright?” he added as Po emerged from behind her guard with quivering eyes and a dazed expression. She nodded unconvincingly.

  “Aitch,” Gideon suddenly said, “don’t ever do that again.”

  “Do what?”

  “Jump out like that when I’m gettin’ ready to take a shot. Could’a hit you. You think’a that?”

  Swallowing dryly, Hayden tried to sound as if he had. “I’m sure you wouldn’t have.”

  A reverberating crack cut through the silence. Hayden’s ears rang dully as
he yelpingly ducked down next to Po, who was covering her face again, this time with good reason. As shockgun pellets splattered the wall above them, plaster and dust puffed out into their air, blinding, choking.

  As he crouched against the baseboard, Gideon shouted angrily, “You didn’t kill him?”

  The “him” was pointed at the sentry down the hall, who was wrestling with his shockgun, trying to reload with shaking hands while shouting into his wireless. The sound of his approaching reinforcements rumbled down a nearby hallway like thunder.

  “Of all the ludicrous—of course I didn’t kill him! Why would I kill him?”

  “Maybe,” Gideon yelled as he dove, picked the unmoving Po up around the waist, and stuffed her unceremoniously into the chute, “so somethin’ like this wouldn’t happen!” As Po leaned her head out of the chute, mouth open, he snapped at her, “What are you waiting for, burn it? Get down there!”

  White faced and startled, Po disappeared again, her clunky boots clanking against the sides of the dark tunnel.

  “You there! Halt!”

  Uniformed sentries were pouring into the corridor, organizing themselves into two rows, the front most on its knees. It reminded Hayden of a firing squad, but…oh.

  Gideon roughly grabbed the back of his neck, doubled him over, and pushed him into the chute. His knees smashing against the floor of the tunnel, he rolled once, holding his bifocals against his face, and then shouted as the floor fell out from under him. His heart flew into the region of his adam’s apple as he slid down the steep chute, his jacket occasionally squeaking over the tin flooring. He could hear Gideon crashing down behind him, curse words interspersed with thuds, but he daren’t open his eyes. His stomach was rebelling as it was.

  The tunnel spat him out abruptly. It was a moment before Hayden’s head stopped spinning and he trusted it enough to look around. The night was cold and black, its starlight blotted out by scudding silver clouds. Tufts of snow peppered the air, made prisms out of the distant lights of the mansion, and laid a fuzzy carpet on the frozen stream beneath his back.

  Po, nearly to the river bank where there was a line of stout stools for the washers, twisted her neck to look at him. She was sprawled on her stomach, dragging herself along by her elbows.

  “Hurry, Hayden,” she whispered as if her voice alone was enough to shatter the ice. “It’s real thin…you can see the water runnin’ underneath…”

  Hayden’s stomach flip-flopped as if he’d missed a step. He couldn’t swim.

  He had just touched one tentative hand to the stinging ice when Gideon shot out of the chute. There was a sound like a muffled gunshot—a shudder ran through the ice, he felt it in his legs—and then he was sinking, and Po was screaming, and the water was so cold that his brain went utterly blank.

  His feet dragged against the bottom of the stream as it pulled him downriver, and he tried to plant them and push up, to get back to the surface, but his muscles were oddly unresponsive. That’ll be the early onsets of hypothermia, he told himself, like that was any reassurance. He started to panic; his throat worked compulsively, trying to gulp air. His heart was plodding very quickly in his ears, like the fast, wet footsteps of someone running.

  Something caught him under the armpit; it felt like he’d collided with a steel bar. He tried to use it to pull himself towards the ice, towards air, to find it was the bar that was doing the pulling, not him.

  His head scraped over the top of the water, and he sucked in a breath that tried to fill his lungs with frost. Coughing, he let himself be dragged out of the water and dropped, sodden and shivering, onto the crunchy grass.

  He opened his blurry eyes. His bifocals had managed to cling to the very tip of his nose during his underwater tumble.

  “G-G-Gid—” he stammered in time with his shivers.

  “He’s alright,” Po said from somewhere beside him, sounding uneasy. “They pulled you both out.”

  Hayden tried to ask, “They?” but he’d begun shaking so wildly, he didn’t trust himself not to accidentally bite off his tongue if he unclenched his teeth. Lifting a hand, he shoved his bifocals up his nose. The scene slid into focus, and despite his shivering, he managed a sort of tremulous groan.

  An unaccounted-for silver and blue glow was giving everything a curious backlight. He’d drifted maybe fifty feet downriver—he could see the mouth of the chute in the hillock behind Po, the two Veritas holding either of her arms, and the dark mound on the grass at their feet. The mound seemed to coughing up a pint or so of water. Gideon.

  There were four other Vees. Two had sleeves that were wet up to their shoulders, but for all the care they showed, you would have thought the air quickly crusting Hayden’s clothes felt tepid to them.

  “We recognize them,” one of the Vees said to the others, voice flat and unfeeling.

  “Reece Sheppard’s companions,” supplied the Vee who had Gideon’s revolver dangling on his hooked finger.

  “How curious.”

  “Shall we question them?”

  “Time. There isn’t enough time. Reece Sheppard has not taken the bait as expected. He must not be allowed to interfere.”

  One of the Vees made a thoughtful noise as he stalked in a circle around Hayden. “Even now, he speaks with Thaddeus Sheppard. Our plan goes awry.” He glanced towards the grey garden hedges made small by the short walk across the grounds.

  “Charles Eldritch knows this. He has plans to deal with Reece Sheppard accordingly. But what of these?”

  Behind Po, who was sagging between her captors as if her knees had gone slack, Gideon raised his head. Hayden caught his eye and tried begging silently, Please don’t try anything, please…

  “Take them to the rest. We shall speak to Charles Eldritch, see what he doesn’t want done with them.”

  Gideon must have understood Hayden’s pleading stare, because when a Vee tried pulling him to his feet, he shrugged off the Vee’s white, spidery hands with a snarl, but otherwise came quietly. He didn’t seem to be shaking as much as Hayden, despite the fact his hair had frozen into tiny curlicue icicles on his forehead.

  Though it was true Hayden didn’t like being touched by the Vees, he couldn’t have stood without their help—the joints in his knees felt like they had rusted into place.

  “Take my jacket,” Po said quietly as she pulled her arms out of her sleeves. She laid it across his back as they walked, three Vees before them, three behind. Hayden didn’t say so, but if the jacket added any warmth, he couldn’t feel the difference.

  The source of the mysterious blue and silver glow came into sight as they circumnavigated a copse of evergreens and stepped into a band of white light. The Kraken-class heliocraft loomed like a huge wooden monster rearing over the tops of the trees. Its balloon alone was as big as the mansion, straining lazily against the chains tethering it to the wooden mass of the round-bellied ship. The wintry light beaming from the ship’s every porthole, every open door, made Hayden feel, if anything, colder.

  The Vees led them around the back of the silhouetted ship to avoid the crowds streaming from the estate gardens to the wide gangplank being lowered down onto the snow-dashed lawn. Hayden, his numb hands balled under his armpits, tried lagging behind, wanting desperately to be noticed by even one of the ladies complaining that their fur stoles weren’t thick enough.

  No such luck. The Vees frog-marched Gideon and pushed Po and Hayden around the hull of the ship and in through a steel hatch without even the nearby lantern-bearing servants glancing their way.

  One of the Vees punched a sequence of numbers into a panel on the dirty metal wall next to a bolted door. The steam and noise and smell of metallic heat made Hayden think they were close to the engine room. Sure enough, when he glanced at Po, she was staring straight up, her eyes narrowed in study. He followed her gaze and through his foggy lenses perceived a room-sized block of metal with squiggling wires and gaping funnels pointing off it in all directions. It was suspended above them in an extensive spider
web of brass tubes that now and again spewed jets of steam at the junctions where two or more tubes met.

  “The Quadrant 7. Pretty, ain’t it?” Po said under her breath with a nervous smile.

  She jumped as one of the Vees seized her arm and guided her and Hayden through the now-open door and into some kind of furnace or boiler room. Pot-bellied stoves crowded the corners while cylindrical tanks topped with gauges lined their walk into the heart of the room, where a low fireplace provided flickering orange light. The two people seated on the ragged blanket before the hearth looked up.

  “Hayden!” Hugh let out a gasping sigh of relief, and Sophie hopped up, her feet twisting the blanket awry.

  Hayden felt a swooping rush of relief at the sight of his family. Forgetting where he was for a moment, he clumsily squeezed between a Vee and a rusted boiler and rushed Sophie with his arms out.

  “You’re drenched—and you’re freezing!” Sophie said, pulling back hurriedly. “What happened? What did those monsters do to you?”

  “Silence, little girl,” one of the Vees ordered coldly. His arm flashing out like a snake, he caught Sophie’s cheeks in his bony hand and touched her top lip with one long fingernail. “We have ways of sealing your pretty little lips.”

  Gideon lurched against his captor’s hold, growling murderously as Hayden wrapped his stinging arms around Sophie, pried her from the Vee’s grip, and backed into his father, who had jumped to his feet. The Vee left his hand outstretched, his unsightly fingers still positioned for cupping Sophie’s face.

  “They are a prime selection, are they not?” the Vee crooned, his thin lips curling. “A perfect sample of humankind at its most endearing.” There was a pinging noise as one of Gideon’s thrashing feet nicked an iron stove. Looking suddenly bored, the Vee dropped his hand, peered over his shoulder, and frowned. “We should put that one in irons.”

  “And station a pair of watchers on both sides of the door,” contributed another Vee.