Subtle things about the way she moved backed up his initial impression. With every step, she remained perfectly balanced on her feet, ready and likely able to move quickly in any direction. Her eyes never remained fixed on one spot for more than a moment, but whenever they fell across him, Gideon felt like the intellect behind them laid him open to the soul.
Underneath it all was the same current of mental electricity he felt from Corinthus. The connection between her and the story-slash-warning from Ruben was obvious, but Gideon was not one to jump to conclusions. Rather, he preferred to skip briskly to conclusions one step at a time.
“May I sit?”
Catherine nodded, waving at hand in the direction of the richly decorated lounge area of her suite. Gideon dropped lightly onto a couch whose dark wood and royal purple accents spoke of England or France, but whose twisting, alien pattern never came from any Earth he knew. Still, eldritch and slightly four-dimensional as it was, the couch was certainly comfortable enough for his tastes.
“Tea?” Catherine asked.
“That would be lovely, thank you.”
Gideon watched her leave, moving with the same grace she had shown since his arrival. When she returned mere moments later, she carried a gleaming silver tray with two small cups, an assortment of bowls, and a samovar. She placed it on the table in front of Gideon's seat, sitting herself opposite him and crossing her bare leg over the skirted one.
His attention fell on the samovar where it sat, all gleaming silver and enamel, in the middle of everything. The sides of the pot had been decorated in a stellar motif that reflected constellations he could not name. The top sported lettering the color of polished gunmetal, but only the first two faced him.
Gideon reached out and turned the pot toward him, revealing the entire word. “UMBRAS,” it read in ornate, gothic blocks. Gideon carefully concealed his reaction, but felt sure that even the minute raise of his eyebrows did not escape Catherine’s scrutiny. He stopped believing in coincidence three lifetimes ago, and Gideon knew for a fact that the scar-faced man calling himself Umbras did not loan his possessions to random rooms.
So, he thought, that was to be the game.
When he settled back into his seat, Gideon realized Catherine's brown eyes had fixed him with a deep intensity that was different from moments before. The first moments felt like a dissection, the same way Corinthus took apart his thoughts but less unpleasant. This was an evaluation.
He knew it showed on his face, but Gideon decided to leave the jump to that particular conclusion unsaid for the moment. He could mention it later, when it was appropriate. For the moment, there was tea to drink.
“Impressive workmanship,” he quipped instead. “It's barely even warm on the outside.”
“I assure you, Mister Wallace, the inside is much different from the exterior.”
“There's not much here that you couldn't say that about.”
“So I've noticed,” she replied. Her lips quirked into a smile made all the more alluring by her nearly black lipstick. She shifted in place, putting both feet on the floor and leaning forward. “The tea should be ready. Shall I?”
He nodded. “Please.” In his head, Gideon felt secure in the assumption that the tea inside that particular samovar had been ready since she brought it out. Whether she prepared it ahead of time or simply conjured it out of thin air, he could not say. In the Inn, either possibility could result in equally well-made drink.
Catherine turned the pot toward her, pulling the ornate UMBRAS out of his vision, and placed a cup under the spout. She twisted the knob and an aroma that all branches of humanity throughout time and space regarded as pleasant filled the air.
She filled the second before standing and crossing the small space to hand the cup to Gideon. Rather than return to her seat across the table, she sat instead in the chair immediately to Gideon's right.
He took a sip of the tea and, at least for a moment, all thoughts of the alluring woman in the next chair, along with the cloud of thoughts relating her to what Ruben told him earlier, vanished. A taste like woodsmoke filled his nostrils first, followed by saffron and rose intermingling. On their tails came bergamot and the unmistakable earthy anchor of the slow-roasted black tea itself.
“You approve?” Catherine asked, and Gideon was again aware that her dark eyes seemed to be judging everything he did.
He pointedly took another long sip, this time while keeping eye contact with her. That particular task proved harder than expected as her intense stare sent his heart racing, only not in the pleasant way he would have preferred.
Finally, Gideon did reply with a nod and a simple, “very much, yes.”
She smiled. “Excellent.”
Catherine took a long sip of her own tea before replacing the cup on the silver platter. Gideon did the same, draining his first. He sat back again, spreading his arms wide and draping one over the back of his chair. The shift in posture seemed to have its desired effect as Catherine's posture relaxed as well, though her maddeningly vague smile made it hard to pin down whether that change was deliberate or not.
“When did you arrive?” Gideon asked, then quickly added, “subjective time, of course.”
“Of course.” Her lips quirked into that smile again. “By the Inn's clock, early yesterday. I took the first empty room, which turned out to be already furnished, and styled my clothes to match. How convenient that it adjoined your own suite, Mister Wallace.”
Convenient, yes, he thought. The Inn did not do ‘convenient’ things. Aloud: “call me Gideon.”
Her smile brightened, becoming something truly mesmerizing for a moment. “Gideon, then.”
Gideon reached for his cup with one hand, the samovar with the other. He turned it and worked the knob for a refill. Taking those few seconds to look closer at the designs on the side did not reveal any more useful information. If some message was hidden in those particular stars, it was lost on him.
Taking the cup in his hands, but not taking a drink, he said, “I have to admit, this is some of the best tea I've had in some time.”
“Better than what they serve downstairs?”
He nodded, finally taking a drink of this second cup now that it had cooled some. The flavors were all still there, but this time his senses seized on the hints of rose. The bergamot and smoke faded into the background, replaced with a flavor that Gideon simultaneously swore was jasmine, and also swore had not been present in his last cup.
Gideon finished that cup in silence as Catherine refilled her own drink. A flash of curiosity passed over her features as she tasted the tea, but she said nothing even as her dark, analytical eyes found Gideon's again. That settled one mystery, he realized; the tea was changing flavor, and either Catherine had not expected that or the change in flavors somehow communicated something to her.
If not for the name at the top, he would have chalked that up to an ever-growing list of “mysteries of the Inn.” Instead, it was time for another small conclusional leap.
With his empty hand, he pointed to the samovar. “That didn't come with the room, did it?”
She smiled. “No. It did not. It's mine, actually.”
“Ah,” he replied, trying to match her radiant smile with his own. “But it wasn't always?”
Catherine laughed, a sharp, sudden sound. “And he was worried you'd not remember him!”
Gideon chuckled. “Forget Umbras? How? If ever a human being could be called 'larger than life,' it's him.”
“I'll be sure to never tell him that,” Catherine said. “But yes, the entire set was a gift from the good General, oh, a thousand years ago now.”
Gideon hummed. “So he is immortal, and,” he paused, “General?”
“Oh, yes, General Umbras on the days he's feeling nostalgic for that particular part of his life. In fact, it was he who suggested I meet with you.”
Gideon raised an eyebrow, hoping to conceal the fact that he nearly dropped his tea. He assumed Ruben Santiago told her
about him and that his cryptic warning was the Kelt's idea of a mysterious reveal. If he knew Umbras was involved, Ruben's sudden desire to deploy on a mission, even one of Seven’s Impossibilities, made a lot more sense.
Carefully, he set his tea down on the serving platter and folded his hands in front of his torso. “Well. You have my attention.”
“I didn't before?”
“You have my full attention. Umbras doesn’t so much as pick out his socks without a good reason, and if he told you to come find me, then I want to know why. Respectfully, I also want to know why now and dispense with further pleasantries.”
Catherine smiled, a flash of enigmatic warmth. “Of course. Tell me something, Gideon, do you remember a man named Vox?”
Gideon hoped the sudden chill he felt did not show on his face. There could be plenty of people in the multiverse named Vox. The vast majority of them were not white-haired, albino psychopaths with a fetish for chains. But if Umbras recommended him specifically...
He made himself nod. “Vox,” Gideon said around a grimace. “The Lightning Reaper. Speaker for the Damned. He’s a murderer, driven mad by amnesia and the ability to hear the laments of the dead. I thought him killed when Corinthus's planet was consumed by the Cascade.”
Catherine frowned, a very obvious and not deliberate gesture. Not at Vox's name, Gideon realized, but at the mention of Corinthus. A shared history was obvious and later Gideon would have to ask about it. In the short term, he had a sudden rash of more immediate concerns.
Chief among them, as he said aloud, “but he didn't did he?”
“It would seem not.”
“Alright,” Gideon replied, then let out the rest of the air in his lungs. A deep breath later, he added, “if I may, I'm going to again cut to the chase. How long do I have? Why me? What are the stakes? Who can go with me? And what am I being paid?”
Catherine's demure smile returned and she held up a hand, ticking things off on her fingers as she replied. “First, very little time at all. Vox is now in the employ of another man like Corinthus, only perhaps worse because Taimethis believes that his goals are just.”
Gideon snorted a laugh, remembering an aphorism which he paraphrased aloud. “Evil sleeps, but the tyranny of 'for your own good' never rests.”
“Precisely.”
“That answers the next question, I think.”
Catherine nodded. “Yes. For the third, I cannot say right now, other than to tell you that Taimethis is a very dangerous man and, while the stakes are not so high as they were against Corinthus, they are certainly of the same caliber.”
Gideon fought to slow his racing heartbeat. Apocalyptic asteroids and murderous militias he could handle, but Corinthus violated the very laws of the universe themselves and brought down the wrath of the star gods.
His pay would have to be very high indeed.
“Next, I will go with you.”
“You?”
She nodded. “I'm not surprised Umbras never mentioned me.”
“Umbras didn't mention very many people.”
Catherine frowned. “Yes, I imagine so. When you met him, some,” she paused, “very bad things had happened to him.”
“Your doing?”
Now, she turned that frown on him, and Gideon felt very small indeed. After a moment, it relented, and she said, “in part. Some time ago, I pushed him to take a deal that he did not fully understand.”
Gideon arched an eyebrow. “That's not a good thing to admit when you're trying to get me to make a deal to fight against this Taimethis character.”
“I can promise you,” she said as a sudden wave of very obvious guilt washed over her. She repeated herself, “I can promise you that anything I tell you will be the truth and that I will tell you all I know as I learn it.
“That,” she added, “is your pay.”
His eyebrows went up. “'The truth' is my pay?”
“Haven't you ever wondered how this place works? Why it works?”
Gideon watched her for several seconds, frowning in thought. A great many things went through his mind, including the fact that he had only defeated Corinthus with the help of Ruben, Sid, John, Salazar, Helena, and a very lucky encounter with an angry star god. Still, if she was the same sort of being as Corinthus and Taimethis, and willing to help, that would do a lot to turn the tide of the fight.
Those concerns were irrelevant, however, as it seemed Catherine had done her proverbial homework after all and again presented Gideon the one thing he could not resist.
He sat back in his chair. “When do we leave?”
Catherine stood and offered her hand. “After dinner. Come.”
Gideon stood and offered his arm. Catherine laid her hand in the crook of his elbow and again Gideon felt the impossible strength in her grip. Finding out what she was, whatever Corinthus and Taimethis were, might just be worth the danger he knew she was about to drop him into.
Gideon laughed, eliciting an inquisitive glance from Catherine, but said nothing. If danger could outweigh his sense of curiosity, he never would have touched that mysterious light all those years ago.
On the way out, Gideon surveyed her room in more detail. She claimed it was one assigned by the Inn, but now he seriously doubted that. Likely, as she was what Corinthus had been, even Gideon did not know what power she might have over the Inn. Her door shut automatically, and he spared an amused smile. Her choice of attire and décor, then, were appropriate. “Steampunk,” as it was called, was just enough like the aesthetic of his home time, but different in enough ways, that in a moment's observation, Catherine encapsulated everything about his experience traveling through the Inn.
They stopped a moment at Gideon’s room to allow him to lock the door, a process he relished given that his was one of the few permanent installations. Because of that permanence, having a locked door actually did something. He also retrieved his hat, tucking it under one arm.
The wooden walls on Gideon's floor told a story of ages long past. Running his fingers along the surface, he felt not the marks of a saw, but those of axes.
“Catherine,” he said, “tell me something. An advance, if you will.”
Beside him, she turned a quizzical eyebrow in his direction. She held that expression just long enough to elicit a nervous twitch at the corner of Gideon's own eye, then nodded. “What do you want to know?”
He stopped and again ran his fingers across the ax-hewn walls. “This. I've seen enough to know that 'real' can be subjective, but, is it real?”
Catherine laughed softly. “I'm going to need you to define real first.”
“I was afraid you'd say that.”
“I can tell you that this place is 'real' in the literal sense of the word. Your surroundings are made of matter.”
“That's something. I’d hate to hallucinate something so,” he eyed her and a smile cross his lips, “magnificent. But I meant,” now Gideon touched a rough spot on the wall, or what looked like a rough spot. In reality, it was even smoother than the rest of the surface. “Did this wall ever exist somewhere else?”
Catherine's eyes twinkled and the corners of her mouth turned upward with what Gideon swore had to be amusement. “That's the right sort of question, my friend.”
With his hand still on the wall, Gideon traced out the line where an ax had cut into it deeper than the other markings. He squinted, bringing his face level with the wounded wood. The cut ran deep, possibly all the way through the piece of wood, but was mostly filled in with something he assumed to be clay.
Gideon did not ever recall examining anything in the Inn so closely, but now that he was doing so, he found endless little details he might have walked past in anyone else's company. Catherine was fascinating, but in a way that turned his attention outward, not inward.
She joined him a moment later, touching the plank with the ax scar. “This piece came from a post-Viking people who called themselves Hälsafolk. In their world, Christendom never took hold in what you woul
d call Europe.”
“Sounds like Ruben's world,” Gideon mused aloud.
Catherine nodded. “Similar circumstances, but when the vikingar of this world swept through, they stayed. This board,” Gideon only now noticed a faint vibration in the wood, gone if he took his hand away, and only just barely perceptible otherwise, “came from a longhouse that was attacked in the night. A storm came and washed the invaders away, but not before lightning struck the hall.”
“And this piece?”
“Gone,” Catherine said, with a curious sadness.
Gideon raised an eyebrow. “Gone?”
“Surely you're not going to tell me that things do not simply disappear from time to time.”
“I would have said that once,” he admitted, then stopped. “Before.”
“This board,” she moved her hand one plank lower, “came from the interior wall of a ship sunk in battle against what you might recognize as the Spanish during the Battle of Cartagena.”
“We had that in my world,” Gideon said.
“Yes.” Catherine smiled mischievously. “But did your version include the unexpected arrival of a well-outfitted Colonial Navy sailing from an America whose good welfare ensured constant allegiance to the Crown?”
“It did not,” Gideon replied. He laughed, then suddenly sobered. “Do each one of these pieces have a story like that?”
“Everything and everyone here has been Lost.” Something in her voice made the capital letter on “Lost” very clear to Gideon's mind. Before he could say anything however, she continued, “there's a candlestick downstairs, visually identical to twenty-two others, that fell from Odysseus's boat as it fell into the maw of Charybdis.”
“Charybdis was just a whirlpool.”
Again she flashed a mysterious smile. “In your world, perhaps.”
“At any rate,” Gideon said, straightening. “You mentioned dinner and, despite all else, I remain a slave to food.”
“Of course.”
Arm-in-arm, they descended to what today was the main floor. Axe-hewn wood gave way to marble walls and slate flagstones. The rooms all occupied the level above, and possibly the one above that. Gideon glanced upward and for a moment saw floor upon floor stacked so high that his mind started to swim with the immensity of it all, then a ceiling abruptly fixed itself three floors up.
Inn Between Worlds: Volume 1 Page 3
