by Andy Havens
Nevertheless… dead he was. Any threads they’d been following disappeared or became tangled. Regular meetings and deliveries got cancelled when Rain didn’t show up. Underlings went to ground, bank accounts were closed, locks were changed. And there was nothing an agent of Increase could do. Not without drawing attention.
Except watch Rain’s known businesses and estates. Follow the tags, like this Lyonne person. Some of Rain’s businesses, like his network of gardens and farms, went right on functioning without him. Charlous had spied on the junior House gardeners at work and the Mundane farmers on their tractors and in their trucks. There were deliveries and bills and rental clients and entertainment venues and logistics and lists to track. Lots of work for Ezer’s Mundane accountants and spies.
Something is bound to turn up, Charlous had thought when Ezer first told him of Rain’s death. While his loss makes our job more difficult, I hardly lament the creature’s passing.
Now? Here he was, across the street from this somewhat silly, vain Mundane doctor… now sitting and having salad with an Earth Master they’d been trying to get a bead on for years.
To her, he looks like a nice professor with a bit of a hippie vibe, he thought, examining the Way that Mohz had wrapped around himself. A nice if somewhat “earthy crunchy” middle-aged man with broad shoulders and a touch of a paunch. If she saw his true aspect, she would probably run screaming.
Charlous took a seat at a different café, up the street half a block, facing the other way. Where he could keep an eye on them in the reflections from two different windows.
Had it been a lesser member of the plot, he’d simply have put a tracking device of some kind on the target. Ezer was very good at using Ways to enhance Mundane technology. A small pin, about the size of a staple, could be used to track someone almost anywhere in the world for at least a few days.
But Damon Mohz? No. He’d feel that. Even older and, in some Ways, more powerful than Rain Vernon, Mohz had to be treated with much more subtlety.
I’ll keep an eye on him personally, and call in a team once I find out where he’s headed, Charlous thought. He had “full writ” from the Warden to order any team or department from Increase to provide what he needed, when and where specified.
He’d begun to do just that, texting some initial orders on his smartphone when he saw, in the storefront reflection, that another person had approached Lyonne’s table. The third person pulled up a chair and sat down.
The glare on the window made it hard for Charlous to catch more than a quick shape and the hint of a sturdy, poised female.
He turned his head just enough to see the trio directly. As recognition struck, he realized he had a much more complicated situation on his hands.
That’s a Stone Tribe Clan Chief.
The markings were unmistakable. Even clothed, the Ways of Blood seeped out and into the surrounding air. Nobody could mistake the posture and gait of Blood, the way they moved and even sat. Beyond vanity, their self-assurance came from a deep and perfect knowledge of what they were and how they related to the worlds they cared about: family and tribe and honor.
The Blood sat down and helped herself to a handful of whatever appetizer Mohz and Lyonne had ordered. They seemed to be chatting amicably. No stress, no drama. Although, with his training as a scout and tracker, Charlous could see that Mohz had shifted to a better defensive position where he couldn’t easily be boxed in by the Clan Chief.
Now that I look, he thought, Mohz actually seems a little pissed. Not angry or scared. Just slightly… put out… by the appearance of the Blood. Peeved.
Ezer had given him a lot of leeway in how to handle his pursuit of possible traitors. But this was a bit over his head.
I’m not sure if I should follow the Earth Lord or the Blood Chief, he thought. Or if I should try to take them both down and deliver them directly to Ezer.
That was an action of last resort, of course. It didn’t just skirt the line of the Law… it jumped right over it and did a dance. To attack and detain a Reckoner of another House on order of the Warden… not a step to be taken lightly.
I’m not even sure I could take Mohz on his own. With a Clan Chief on his side?
Glancing around and seeing that he was essentially “alone in the crowd” and not being observed, Charlous tapped his speed-dial app and waited for Ezer to pick up. This was a special number reserved for absolute emergencies. The only other time Charlous had ever used it, Gareth had picked up on the second ring.
One ring. Two.
Three. Four. Five… Six. Then a short click. No voicemail, no message.
Charlous tried again. Same thing. Six rings, a click, then nothing.
He made a decision.
The doctor can wait. We know her haunts, her schedule. I’ll try to put a tracker on this Blood Chief, he thought, beginning to type a message on his phone. But the Earth Lord is a priority. I’ll get a team on the Blood and maybe we’ll be able to…
The two Reckoners had come to some kind of conclusion pretty quickly. The waiter was obviously asking the Clan Chief if she’d like anything and the Blood was waving him off politely, already standing up and making her farewells to the other two.
No risk, no reward, Charlous thought. Dropping all of the Ways that might alert a Reckoner to his presence, he jogged across the street with a group of ten or so tourists, all of whom were trying to take selfies while walking and pointing. They made good cover.
He turned left at the corner just in time to brush past the Blood Chief as she passed by, depositing a tiny, inactive tracking device into her coat pocket with a subtle bit of spy craft. He could turn it on later with a Way or, better yet, leave it to the Increase technicians who had special skills in that area. Unless she managed to dislodge it or leave the jacket somewhere, they’d find her.
He walked down the middle of the pedestrian mall, within a few yards of Lyonne and Mohz. They were still eating and chatting and didn’t even look at him. No reason they would.
Moving to a position where he could continue watching the two, Charlous remembered a conversation with Morgan White a year or so after he’d converted to Increase.
Another benefit of your conversion is that you will be, essentially, invisible to those of your former Domain. Every trace of Earth has been bled out of you, my friend.
He’d joked, at the time, I guess I’d make a good spy, if this construction and transportation work ends up not being a good fit.
Waiting for the Earth Lord and Mundane doctor to finish their meal he reflected on how, over the span of centuries, it was impossible to live without irony.
* * * * *
Thomas Brownfield Edgington was confused and bored. Mostly bored.
Two hours after getting settled, he and his friend Ken were still sitting on a board in the attic above the Farm’s main conference room. And while the beginning of the meeting below had been in English, it had quickly shifted to at least two other languages.
Or so Tom thought. He’d looked at Ken when they first started talking in something else and Ken had shrugged.
None of them sounded familiar. But then again, Tom only spoke one language and wasn’t sure what others sounded like, except, well… different. He vaguely remembered that he’d heard other people speaking other languages at some point. But it was in his distant, murky past. Maybe even further back than his time at the First Farm.
Some of the discussion was in English, though. Random seeming statements amid the other, more conversational back-and-forth. Though even the English comments were entirely mysterious to Tom and Ken:
“It doesn’t matter! The Master foretold us of this day. It was bound to arrive sooner or later.”
“The protocol is in The Taxonomy. There is no need for discussion.”
“No, I have not cancelled anything. It may still be years.”
“This is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. It is another step forward.”
“The plan is intact.”
<
br /> “We have replaced them! Stop whining that you didn’t get your share!”
“I would like tea. There is only coffee. And more of those jam donuts.”
That last statement made the most sense to Tom and Ken. But it also made them hungry and thirsty. They’d missed lunch and had eaten the last of the snack bars more than an hour ago.
Ken gestured at his stomach, at his mouth, and made an I’m so hungry! face.
Tom almost laughed out loud, but remembered that they were being naughty. Though that word seemed a bit immature. Maybe more like “disobedient” or “badly behaved.”
He wasn’t very good at vocabulary.
Tom wasn’t that hungry and was enjoying this more than, well… anything that had happened recently. It was fun to have a friend and go on an adventure and have a secret.
He pointed at his wrist and held up five fingers.
Ken nodded, OK, OK… and went back to miming a painful death from hunger pangs.
To distract himself from Ken’s antics and keep from laughing, Tom looked around at the attic again. The light was angling in a bit differently, making formerly shaded portions a bit brighter. He could see more of the shelves and the glassware now. They’d been more transparent in the dimmer light. Now they kind of glowed a bit with the yellow sun driving straight down onto them.
Which reminded him of the circle of glass in his pocket.
He took it out to look at and it seemed to vibrate a bit. But that might have been the brighter light, too.
He turned it around and held it up by the ribbon attached to one side.
Is it a bookmark? he wondered. You could put the ribbon in a book and then this glass part would kind of hang out and you could grab it to find your place.
That made sense. He’d seen other bookmarks like that. With ribbons and stuff.
He was about to put it back in his pocket when a bit of dust or a bug dancing in a beam of sunlight caught his eye. Turning his head to glance at the sparkly dust, he noticed a set of hooks on the wall, empty except for a single top hat. That jogged another memory. Something floated up from beyond the wall of mist that separated most of his current thoughts from anything like a coherent past.
Monopoly.
That’s right! The old Monopoly guy! He was rich and had a top hat and a fancy suit and maybe a cane (Tom wasn’t sure about the cane) and a glass thing that he put in one eye.
A monocle. That’s the word. Like glasses, but just one. That’s dumb.
He vaguely remembered that the piece of glass had sung to him earlier. That was part-and-parcel with a lot of the odd things that he thought happened around him, though. Things that seemed different than what other people saw and heard. He mostly ignored the odd things. Better to concentrate on counting and ice-cream.
Singing monocles. Whatever.
Just for kicks, though, he put the piece of glass up against his eye and found that with a bit of effort he could pinch it in place without using his fingers. That was an odd feeling in itself.
He closed his other eye and looked around the attic. Things were a bit fuzzy and out-of-focus. That kind of made his head hurt, and the squeezing-with-cheek-and-eyebrow business didn’t help.
Not a great monocle that just makes everything kind of fuzzy and weird looking.
He tried looking at Ken, who was grinning at him and twirling an invisible moustache, making a, look at me, I’m so fancy and hoity-toity! face.
Ken is good at those faces, Tom thought. But he worried, again, about laughing out loud and being discovered.
Looking around just a bit more, about to take the thing out and go get something to eat, Tom wondered, what the heck this thing is supposed to do?
In that instant:
the fog and dullness and slow, dull mist that seemed to coat everything fell away and Tom was standing on the edge of the dream cliff and he was afraid and he looked down but instead of everything in his soul falling out and over the edge and into the pit and dragging him with it everything came back up and into his eyes and his heart and he took a breath and it was cool and precise and he knew the temperature of the air in the attic and his position on the planet to the degree-second and how high he was above sea-level and the number of beams in the attic that he’d passed and how many times he’d worn this bathrobe and what kind of toothpaste each and every one of the men in the room below him used and the exact height of the fence that surrounded the Farm and all the names of all the visible stars and all the different overlapping zodiacs from many different eras and cultures and myths and how much fun he’d had learning them as a kid and making up stories with Papa about how they must have fought amongst themselves and against the powers that named them and how much Papa had loved those stories and laughed as they’d navigate on the sea in their small fishing boat and pretend to trick and mock the constellations and…
“My name is not Thomas Brownfield Edgington,” he said quietly.
Ken was still making the ooh, fancy-man face. “What?” he whispered back.
Tom-now-maybe-not-Tom was so full of ideas and memories and sounds and measurements and feelings that he felt like he might collapse or explode or simply pop like a bubble. He tried to speak, but all that came out was:
“My name is not Thomas Brownfield Edgington.”
Ken looked worried and glanced down at the room below them. He put a finger to his lips and Tom-not-Tom, even in the throes of this… fit… nodded, understanding their situation.
The next time, he repeated it only inside his own head. It was loud and strong and echoed with his other thoughts and memories like a great, iron bell clanging above a bustling town:
My name is NOT Thomas Brownfield Edgington!!!
He knew he had to say it out loud. Had to speak the discovery in order to make it real. Even if it was only to one other person, and one who would not understand. To complete the spell, the words must be heard by another. He felt as if that were a law, even though he didn’t know where the knowledge came from.
“Mijn naam is Bastiaan Huber,” he said in the softest of whispers.
Saying those words aloud, he realized he was fluent in all the languages being spoken below.
* * * * *
It wasn’t an orgy. Not in the sense that Mundanes used the word. It wasn’t about sex. There might be sex for some, but that was just one effect—not the purpose—of a Blood Dance.
You’d forgive a tag, though, for thinking of it in the same way. By the time the Dance was at its peak, everyone would have lost all inhibition. In Mundanes, that usually amounted to sexual promiscuity. For most Blood Reckoners it meant a release of physical energy through the Dance itself, improvised music, rants, poetry, feats of strength and athletic prowess. Some could channel that power into more sedate arts like sculpture or painting. Usually, though, the experience was about the experience itself and had nothing to do with recording or describing it as such.
In that way, it was almost the opposite of Sight and, as such, made Hieretha deeply uncomfortable.
But not enough to keep her away.
Like many Blood Rites, it was held in a natural space. She’d been to the Dances several times before. Once on a remote island, at the base of a volcano. Once in a deep, dark woods where, even at noon, the sun barely reached the forest floor. The last time had been in a cave the size of a stadium beneath the ocean where the pounding of the surf all around drove the Bloods to heroic lengths that she, for one, was glad she’d been able to chronicle for the ages. While many of the Houses – and most especially Blood – thought of only those from their own Domain as “us,” Sight took a more inclusive view.
We are seven equal, seven done, poised, balanced… one, she thought to herself, quoting the Song of the Houses. I believe that.
This Dance was being held in a deep valley between steep, forested hills. From any distance in the surrounding countryside you’d simply see a set of rounded peaks bristling with snow-dusted trees. You had to be almost to the top of them to
know that there was an open space with a shallow lake at the center. A lake fed and heated by underground springs such that even in winter, like tonight, the water steamed and simmered.
No one represented themselves as an individual or as part of a specific group at a Blood Dance. It was not a place to meet up with friends or connect with a specific person. The intricate rituals and rules that described Blood Clans and Tribes were not allowed to interfere at the Dance, and guests were expected to honor that stance. It was a place to slough off labels and hierarchies. Everyone was equal here, no bargains or commitments mentioned, no outside hopes or fears. All those things would have interfered with the purpose of the gathering. It was forbidden to the point of taboo to strike up a specific conversation unrelated to the Dance. It was anathema to bring business into the Circle.
But there are Ways, Hieretha thought, and there are ways…
Walking over the crest of one of the hills, she Seemed similar to how she’d appeared during her excursion with Wallace. Same long, complicated braids. Same younger, stronger body than when she wore the countenance of Mrs. McKey.
That older-seeming woman had become more and more her “natural” state, she realized. I’ve grown too comfortable indoors.
This was an earlier incarnation. Very close to how she’d appeared when Monday—Sayem, when they’d first met—had asked her to work directly for him.
She’d refused, of course. Over the centuries they’d crossed paths several times and at each juncture he’d made the same case: you should bring your talents together with ours; there is great power in discourse and collaboration.
At the time, she’d disagreed. She didn’t see the pooling of stories and lore as “power” but as a diffusion. She had risen as a legendary bard in the time before the written word. A time when Aasher, the first Master of Sight, had walked the world, singing songs and telling tales. The funniest, wisest man she’d ever known, he could move a crowd to joy or tears with a single verse. For him, the seeing and the learning wasn’t for the future… it was for now. For the people. Not just in his House, but everywhere.
