The Miocene Arrow

by Sean McMullen

  The movement that caught Brantic’s eye was within the palace grounds. A figure was walking briskly, diagonal to the Call’s direction and allure. One of the ornamental birds, the warden told himself as it vanished behind a bush; then the figure was in sight again. Through his field glasses he could see arms swinging, and the bright blue of a merchant carbineer uniform. A man! The figure vanished into a doorway.

  The warden lowered his field glasses and rubbed his eyes. An illusion, he told himself. A shadow, a machine, a trick of the light. He hesitated, then made a note in his log. “Figure walking across direction of Call/ palace administrative wing/ ornamental rhea bird may be loose there.”

  He was circling for another look when he noticed a gunwing over the city, approaching the palace wingfield with its wheels cranked out. Brantic pushed his sailwing’s throttle forward to full power and stood the aircraft on its wingtip as he came around to warn it off. The red double wedge grew until he could see that it was painted with the East Region’s colors. He flew right across its path, but its warden ignored him.

  “Idiot, can’t you see the flags?” exclaimed Brantic aloud as he released his siren and came around again.

  The red gunwing trainer was dropping fast as he caught up, and although the airscrew was spinning, he suspected that it had been feathered. Brantic dipped his wings and pointed east of the city to where the Call had already passed. The other warden stared grimly ahead at the palace wingfield. Now Brantic noticed two other heads through the glass of the narrow cockpit. All that weight, no wonder he’s in trouble, the warden thought. He must have ascended with a bare minimum of compression spirit to get off the ground at all.

  At fifty feet the Call’s effect cut in, even though the aircraft was flying free. The warden had done the alignment well, he was on course to land smoothly and roll to a stop on the flightstrip, even if insensible with the Call. The Bartolican heralds would declare another triumph of Bartolican wardens’ skill at flying.

  The gust of wind that caught the gunwing trainer would have been nothing to a warden free of the Call, but the red aircraft was gliding deadstick. It tipped, then righted, but it was now parallel to the flightstrip as it continued its descent. It flew over the tents, gunwings, and stores of the assembled wardens, and a wheel passed only inches above the insensible Serjon Feydamor’s head as he mindlessly strove against his Call tether to wander west. Finally the gunwing slammed into the compression spirit barrels of the Pangaver wardens. The resulting explosion was all billowing black smoke and arcing fragments, yet nobody on the ground reacted.

  Brantic climbed, his head spinning with shock and dismay. A Bartolican warden had crashed during his Call patrol. There would be hell to pay, the Airlord Designate himself would be shouting for blood, and the wardens would all be clamoring for an inquisition when he landed.

  “Fool!” Brantic shouted at the column of smoke that was slanting up into the sky; then he turned his sailwing to sweep the airspace over the city for other gunwings. There was none. For the briefest of moments Brantic contemplated a vertical dive at full power into the distant waters of Saltlake, but his training and sense of honor would not allow it. He circled until the Call was past, and although the two remaining hours dragged, they were not slow enough for Brantic. Call flags were being lowered throughout the capital as he began his descent to the palace wingfield.

  The Governor of East Region, his wife, and Warden Darris of Pocatello had crammed themselves aboard the red gunwing, intent on making a grand entrance at the coronation. Even with the extra three hundred pounds of passengers and their luggage there should have been fuel to spare, yet there had apparently been headwinds that ate away the margin for safety during the brief ninety-mile flight. Perhaps pride had dictated that they try to land at the capital, rather than coming down on some cart track where the Call had passed already. Whatever the reason, all aboard had died. Fortunately nobody on the ground had been killed, and apart from the fuel dump there had been no other damage. Pangaver was a small and unimportant Dominion, and merely being the center of attention was a matter of satisfaction to its nobles. To Brantic’s surprise, nobody had realized exactly what had happened until he had landed. Serjon had helped to fight the last of the flames once the Call had passed and freed him, yet the Yarronese flyer had thought he was attending the crash site of Warden Brantic’s gunwing—doomed by the 13 of its designator.

  The duty warden was suspended from all further Call patrol flights pending a full inquisition, but preparations for the coronation went on without interruption. The investiture of a new governor for East Region was scheduled as the new airlord’s first official duty, however.

  Some miles to the south a steam tram chuffed across the pastures and farmlands that were still under the Call. The driver was in the grip of the Call and had released his deadhand brake and firebox quench, yet another man was gripping the deadhand lever with his left hand while holding a small telescope to his eye with his right. While not totally oblivious of the allure of the Call, he was still in full control of both his mind and body.

  Juan Glasken was far less in awe of the distant outline of Condelor than the vast majority of the Bartolican capital’s visitors, but unlike that vast majority he had traveled far, far further. Sometimes the big, middle-aged man had been in search of fortune and sometimes city constables had been hot on his heels. On one occasion he had even been in command of the squad of musketeers whose flintlocks were all that stood between the Southern Alliance Mayorates and an overwhelming army of Southmoors.

  But there were no musketeers in the four American Callhavens, and not a single army or militia still used flintlocks. Neither were there any Southmoors, and the American nations were called dominions rather than mayorates. Glasken was good at learning new languages, was used to travel, and could handle himself well in a fight. This made him a good choice for a long and dangerous mission to the other side of the world from which there could be no return, but there was something else which made him a truly ideal choice: he was under a sentence of death in his very distant homeland. A friend had once described Glasken as not completely human in some ways, yet far more human than any human had a right to be.

  Glasken released the deadhand lever, and automatic mechanisms began to slow the tram. He walked back to the passenger compartment where a woman sat reading while two others strained mindlessly against their Call tethers to follow the allure west into a nearby salt lake.

  “The tram is slowing, Fras Glasken,” said the middle-aged but still strikingly beautiful woman, looking up from her book.

  “There is a Call upon us and we are approaching Condelor, Frelle Theresla,” he replied.

  “So?”

  “So these people have wardens who fly above the Call’s influence. I can see a wing-machine patrolling above the city with my telescope, and if he saw this tram moving he would be suspicious about why the deadhand lever had not been released.”

  Theresla closed her book and looked out over the flat pastures where rheas and emus grazed, as oblivious of the Call as she.

  “It is such a bore to have humans who can defy the Call,” she said as the tram shuddered to a halt. Steam began hissing through a valve in the boiler.

  “The driver will be surprised to be within sight of Condelor and with a hot boiler too—but then we know nothing of that, do we?”

  “Of course not, Fras Glasken. As always, I am pleased to have you in charge of such details. Speaking of details, they say that the current Bartolican fashion is for the women to display a great deal of breast.”

  Glasken twirled the points of his waxed mustache and wiggled his fingers.

  “Perhaps I was unduly hasty in releasing the deadhand,” he replied, but he sat down and clipped on his Call tether nevertheless. “So, do you still think we will find the aviad radicals in Condelor?”

  “Fras Glasken, this coronation is one of the biggest gatherings of Mounthaven leaders that is possible. If they wish to buy allies and hatch plots
they will do it here.”

  “There may be hundreds of them, and they will not be pleased to see us.”

  “So they may reveal themselves by trying to kill us,” Theresla concluded with an open flourish of her arms.

  “Frelle Theresla, I have ideas about dying asleep, in bed, as a very old man, and in the company of someone else’s wife,” Glasken grumbled.

  “You will probably die soon, in great pain, and with your body riddled with bullet holes, Fras Glasken, just like the rest of us. In the meantime, are you ready to play the part of a suave lecher with no more moral restraint than a pig in a cakeshop?”

  “Oink, oink,” replied Glasken. “And will you be spying, stealing, lying, and killing people?”

  “Oh yes. Ah, the driver is stirring. Best to speak only Old Anglian from now on.”

  Serjon Feydamor stood with his father, watching the Inspector General’s staff sifting through the still smoking wreckage of the Bartolican gunwing and Pangaver fuel barrels. Serjon was now wearing his cap and guild crest, the gold radial compression engine of the engineers’ guild. His crest was dull and grimy, yet every few minutes he took a handkerchief to polish the silver wings on his collar that marked him as a registered flyer.

  “Of course this is only to be expected,” Serjon pronounced solemnly, wiping at the silver wings yet again.

  “What do you mean?” asked guildmaster Jeb Feydamor, wondering what his stepson had seen that everyone else had missed.

  “This is thirteen weeks and thirteen years since Warden Darris made his first solo flight, I checked in the adjunct’s register. Now he should have—”

  “Serjon, give it a rest! We’re guildsmen, not astrologers.”

  With that Feydamor turned away in exasperation, and began to slowly circle around the crash site. Serjon glanced across to Brantic’s distant sailwing then went after his father.

  “Warden Brantic’s sailwing has 13 in its flock designator code,” Serjon continued as they paced together. “I tried to warn him yesterday but he called me an ignorant Yarronese peon.”

  “You are an ignorant Yarronese peon,” replied Feydamor testily. “You give the rest of us a bad name with your superstitions—and that badge!”

  Jeb snatched the cap from Serjon, rubbed the gold radial engine crest on his sleeve until it shone out against the dark cloth, then jammed the cap back on his son’s head. They passed an officer of the Bartolican merchant carbineers who was standing with his arms folded, also watching the investigation. Once the guildmaster and his stepson had their backs to him he smiled and nodded imperceptibly.

  Warden-heir Alion Damaric of Yarron also stood at the crash site, paying his respects to the dead nobles. Thoughts and associations passed through his mind as he searched for a reason for the tragedy. Gunwings were kept in the air by fuel barrels and guildsmen’s tents, yet how inglorious it was for a warden to end his life by smashing into a pile of barrels. He became aware of a girl nearby, a Bartolican noble with a loose plait of red hair that reached down to her knees. She had her mouth covered with her hands, and there were tears streaming from her eyes. The tiny pennons sewn onto the shoulders of her sleeves declared that she was of the royal house of the Airlord Designate. Alion walked across to her.

  “A tragedy of the very worst kind,” he said in Bartolican. “Did you know them?”

  “Hardly at all,” she replied, staring unfocused into the litter of black char. “I weep for the tragedy, but I weep with joy that they died honorably, in a gunwing. Others say they were fools, dying for the sake of a better view in the coronation, but …”

  “They died honoring their new airlord, Semme. What better way could they have died? In bed? In a training flight?”

  “Oh sair, you do understand—”

  She turned, then caught sight of the gold Yarronese lacework on Alion’s flight jacket. She backed away a step.

  “Warden-heir Alion Damaric, at your service, Semme,” he said, bowing from the waist. “I may be Yarronese, but I am not evil.”

  The girl recovered her composure, stepped forward again, and took his hand, bowing in turn.

  “Please, your pardon, sair. I am Samondel of the Leovor estate. You, you startled me, I do apologize, again. Just now some ignorant Yarronese guildsman was saying that they died because of thirteen in a flock designator or some such rubbish.”

  “They died through chance, but chance also let them die honorably,” Alion said solemnly. “There is nothing more to say.”

  They wandered away together. Alion gave the Bartolican princess a tour of the gunwings of his father’s estate before escorting her back to the palace. As they passed the tents and wings of the Jannian estate a guildsman tapped Serjon’s shoulder as he worked with his head beneath an engine cowling, hoping to get grease on his engineer’s badge again.

  “Always happens,” said Pel Jemarial, guildmaster of Jannian’s airframe guild. “Whenever there’s a gathering of the flocks some young fools from the wrong side of a feud decide to fall in love.”

  Serjon looked out from the open cowling of the sailwing and glanced at the couple.

  “Lucky fools,” was all that he had to say to his warden’s airframe guildmaster.

  In spite of the hundreds of towns and cities that Rosenne Rodriguez had traveled to, she was still astounded by the magnificence of the capital of Greater Bartolica. The interdominion tramway led through the most imposing parts of the city: across wide canals, over boulevards teeming with people, under mighty arches, through tunnels, and finally over a huge stone bridge looking down along the processional avenue to the airlord’s palace. The angular Sky Tower of the palace reached up above its other spires, as if standing guard over the ancient throne room’s red-tile and stone arch roof, and parklands encircled the palace like a ruff of green lace.

  Across the steam tram’s cabin the envoy’s three servants were observing the city as well. Theresla and Darien were the same age as the envoy, and all three women had their ’hair bound tightly and wrapped in scarves. Glasken wore a scarlet hat on which an ostrich feather bobbed.

  “This is wonderful!” exclaimed Rosenne, clapping her hands as they passed within the flying buttresses of an ornate bridge whose extensions met above the trackway. “Unbelievable, fantastic, enchanting!”

  “Wonderful,” Theresla replied mechanically, attentive but less enthusiastic than her mistress.

  Glasken was attentive too, but in the way that a bodyguard is attentive. The tramways had been laid to a plan, and that was to impress visitors arriving from other dominions. Two thousand years and six dozen generations of masons had made the city what it was, and nothing had been lost for a long time. Mounthaven’s wars were not the type that laid cities waste.

  The steam tram slowed as it approached the waystation and was switched into the Airlord’s platform. The chuffing of the steam engine faded to hissing as the tram stopped amid acrid exhaust fumes and the sweet aroma of alcohol and seed oil. Wood-fired steam trams were banned from Condelor, as their exhausts soiled the stonework. Glasken opened the door and stepped out, then nodded to the envoy that it was safe. Inspector General Roric Hannan was waiting for the envoy, resplendent in the boulevard coat and gold chains that he was wearing for the viewing of the flypast later that day.

  “The Airlord Designate’s welcome to you, Semme Envoy Rosenne Rodriguez of Veraguay,” he said in Old Anglian, with a manner that managed a mix of grace, dignity, deference, and superiority. “I am Inspector General Roric Hannan.”

  Rosenne bowed slightly, then looked Roric directly in the eyes.

  “In all my travels from Veraguay, I have never seen such a beautiful city,” she declared.

  Hannan bowed again, the trace of a smile on his lips. She had said beautiful rather than magnificent, but she was nonetheless in awe of the capital. Greater Bartolica was indeed magnificent, beautiful, and more. Theresla and Darien stepped onto the stone platform and an official beside Hannan snapped his fingers. Two guards and a liaison clerk came
forward.

  “Your servants will be sent to prepare your new residence,” Hannan told the envoy.

  “I advise against it, Ladyship,” Glasken rumbled warily. “My place is with you.”

  “Oh Juan, there is no danger,” Rosenne replied. “I have all these Bartolican guards, but Theresla and Darien have only you.”

  “I was not hired to protect servants,” Glasken replied firmly.

  Hannan noted that Glasken had preserved his fitness against the years and wondered about the studded leather collar that encircled his neck. He was clean-shaven except for a heavily waxed and dyed mustache that sat like a spindle on his upper lip, and a pointed goatee beard. Theresla was obviously Rosenne’s chief servant: she held her head up proudly and had authority in her every gesture. Darien stayed back and kept her eyes down, not saying a word.

  Hannan took a deep breath. “Aureate, make sure that the servants of Envoy Rodriguez are taken to their quarters in the Enclave of Dominions. Give them whatever help they need to settle Semme Rodriguez and make her feel at home.”

  He gestured to a promenade barge that was tied up in the canal that flowed beside the tram station platform. The gilt-painted barge was about twenty-five feet long, and the soft, whispery chuffing of a four-cycle compression engine was coming from somewhere beneath the decking. It was open on the sides, but the sun was held off by a red canopy fringed with green and gold tassels. There was no sign of any crew as the party stepped aboard and clipped their Call tethers to the retaining ring in the middle. One of the guards cast off the ropes and Hannan said simply, “The palace wingfield.”