"Senator, what do you plan to do about this attack—"
He turned halfway up the steps leading to his office and faced the cameras, allowing his reddened eyes to water. "I intend to find my daughter," he said raggedly. "And I intend to find the bastards responsible for her disappearance, and for murdering poor Cassie... If it turns out these down-timer terrorists were responsible for Cassie's murder, if they've kidnapped my only child, then I will do whatever it takes to get every time terminal on this planet shut down! I've warned Congress for years, the down-timers flooding into the stations are a grave threat to the stability of our up-time world. And now this... I'm sorry, that's all I can say, I'm too upset to say anything else."
He fled up the steps and into his office.
And deep in his heart, smiled.
Phase Two, successfully launched...
* * *
Ianira Cassondra regained consciousness while Jenna and Noah were still packing. The faint sound from the hotel bed where she rested brought Jenna around, hands filled with the Victorian notion of ladies' underwear, which she'd purchased specifically for Ianira with Aunt Cassie's money. Jenna would be going through to London in disguise as a young man, something that left her shaking with stage fright worse than any she'd ever experienced. Seeing Ianira stir, Jenna dumped corsets and woolen drawers into an open steamer trunk and hurried over to join Marcus. Noah glanced up from the telephone, where the detective was busy scheduling an appointment with the station's cosmetologist. Armstrong wanted Jenna to go in for some quick facial alterations before the gate opened, to add Victorian-style whiskers to Jenna's too-famous, feminine face. Noah frowned, more reflectively than in irritation, then finished making the appointment and joined them.
Ianira stirred against the pillow. Dark lashes fluttered. Jenna discovered she was clenching her hands around her new costume's trousers belt. The leather felt slippery under the sweat. She realized with a sinking sensation in her gut that it was one thing to carry the prophetess on earth unconscious through the station's basement. It was quite another to gaze eye-to-eye with the embodiment of all that Jenna had come to believe about life and how it ought to be lived. Then Ianira's eyelids fluttered open and Ianira, Cassondra of Ephesus, lay gazing up at her. For a breathless moment, no intelligence flickered in those dark eyes. Then an indrawn breath and a lightning flicker of terror lashed at Jenna. Ianira flinched back, as though Jenna had struck her. Marcus, who knew Ianira better than anyone, surely, pressed the tips of his fingers across her lips.
"Hush, beloved. We are in danger. Cry out and you warn them."
Ianira's gaze ripped away from Jenna's, met her husband's. "Marcus..." It was the sound of a drowning soul clinging to a storm-battered, rocky shore. His arms went around her. The former Roman slave lifted her trembling figure, held her close. Jenna had to turn aside. The sight of such intimacy tore through her, a bitter reminder of the emptiness of her own life before Carl, an emptiness which had brought her, shaking and sick in her heart, into the Temple in the first place. The Temple, where she'd found real friendship for the first time in her life, friendship and Carl... The loss tore through her, still too new and raw to endure. Across the hotel room, Marcus was speaking, voice low, the words in some language other than English or the Latin he'd used earlier. Greek, probably, since Ianira had come to the station from Athens.
Someone touched Jenna's arm. She glanced up and found Noah watching her. "Yeah?" she asked, voice roughened, uncertain.
"She's asked for you."
Jenna's pulse banged unpleasantly in the back of her throat as she crouched down at the edge of the hotel bed. Ianira's dark, unearthly gaze shook her so deeply she couldn't even dredge up a greeting. When the prophetess lifted a hand, Jenna very nearly flinched back. Then Ianira touched Jenna's brow, slowly. "Why do you Seek," she murmured, "when you already know the answers in your heart?"
The room closed in around Jenna, dizzy and strange, as though voices whispered to her from out of a shimmering haze, voices whose whispered words she could not quite hear. From the depths of the blackness which filled her mind, a blackness which had swallowed nearly all of her childhood—which was far better forgotten than relived in aching emptiness again and again—a single image blazed in Jenna's mind. A woman's smiling face... arms held out to her... closing around her with a sense of safety and shelter she had not felt since her mother's death, so many years ago, now, it was blurred in her memory. What this sudden memory meant, Jenna wasn't sure, but it left her gasping and sick on her knees, so violently shaken she couldn't even wipe her burning eyes.
Someone crouched beside her, braced Jenna all along one side, wiped her face with a warm, damp cloth. When the stinging, salty blindness had passed, she found Noah gazing worriedly at her. "You okay, kid?"
"Yeah." The fact that it was true shocked her. She was okay. Then it hit her why: she wasn't quite alone any longer. She knew almost nothing about Noah Armstrong, not even the most basic thing one person can know about another—their gender—but she wasn't alone, facing this nightmare. Noah might not be going with her when Jenna stepped through the Britannia Gate a couple of hours from now, but Noah cared. Somehow, it was enough. She managed to meet the enigmatic detective's eyes. "Thanks."
"Sure." Noah gave her a hand up, steadied her.
Jenna turned slowly to face the woman whose presence, whose touch and single question had triggered... whatever it had been. "Did—" Jenna had to clear her throat roughly. "Did Marcus tell you what's happened?"
She studied Jenna gravely. "He has told me all that he knows."
Jenna drew breath, trying to find the words to make sense of this. "My father..." She stopped, started again, coming at this mess from a different direction, trying to find the words to explain to a woman who had never seen the up-time world and would never be permitted to visit it. "You see, lots of people don't like the Temples. The Lady of Heaven Temples. They've got different reasons, but the prejudice is growing. Some people think Templars are immoral. Dangerous to society. Perverting children, that kind of garbage.
"There's this one group, though... down-timers, mostly, coming up-time from the remains of TT-66. They formed a cult to destroy us. The Ansar Majlis hate us, say it's blasphemous to worship a goddess. Rather than their idea of a god." It came out bitter, shaky. The expression in Ianira's eyes left Jenna gulping, terrified to her bones. She got the rest out in a rush, trying to hold onto her nerve. "As long as the Ansar Majlis were kept bottled up in the Middle East, where they started coming through the down-time gates, they were pretty much harmless. But a lot of people would like to see the Temples destroyed, or at least hurt badly enough they're not a political threat, anymore. Some of the lunatics who live up time have been helping that murdering pack of terrorists..."
"Your father," she said quietly. "He is among them."
Jenna didn't have to answer; Ianira knew. Jenna bit one lip, ashamed of the blood in her own veins and furious that she couldn't do anything besides smash Ianira's world to pieces. "He gave the orders, yes. To a death squad. They murdered my mother's sister. And my... my best friend from college..." Jenna's voice went ragged.
Ianira reached across, touched Jenna's hand. "They have taken him from you," she whispered, the sympathy in her voice almost too much to bear, "but you have his final gift to you. Surely this must bring some consolation, some hope for the future?"
Jenna blinked, almost too afraid of this woman to meet those dark, too-wise eyes. "What... what do you mean?"
Ianira brushed fingergips across Jenna's abdomen, across the queasiness which had plagued her for nearly a full week, now. "You carry his child," Ianira said softly.
When the room greyed out and Jenna clutched at the edge of the bed in stupid shock, the prophetess spoke again, very gently. "Didn't you know?"
Someone had Jenna by the shoulders, kept her her from falling straight to the floor. Dear God... it's not fear sickness, it's morning sickness... and I am late, oh, God, I'm going to Victor
ian London with Daddy's killers trying to find me and I'm carrying Carl's baby... . How long would they have to hide in London? Weeks? Months? Years? I can't go disguised as a man, if I'm pregnant! But she had no real choice and she knew it. Her father's hired killers would be searching for a frightened girl in the company of a detective, not a lone young man travelling with several large steamer trunks. When she looked up, she found Ianira's dark gaze fastened on her and, more surprisingly, Noah Armstrong's grey-eyed gaze, filled with worry and compassion.
"You're... sure... ?" Jenna choked out.
Ianira brushed hair back from Jenna's brow. "I am not infallible, child. But about this, yes, I am certain."
Jenna wanted to break down and cry, wanted to curl up someplace and hide for the next several decades, wanted to be held and rocked and reassured that everything would be all right. But she couldn't. She met Ianira's gaze again. "They'll kill us all, if they can." She wrapped protective arms around her middle, around the miracle of Carl's baby, growing somewhere inside her. A fierce determination to protect that tiny life kindled deep within. "I'd be in a morgue someplace, already, undergoing an autopsy, if Noah hadn't dragged me out of that trap where Aunt Cassie died. I'm not going to let them win. Not if I have to spend the next forty years on the run, until we can find a way to stop them."
"And they have come here," Ianira whispered, fingers tightening around Jenna's arm, "to destroy the world we have built for ourselves."
Jenna wanted to look away from those too-knowing eyes, wanted to crawl away and hide, rather than confirm it. But she couldn't lie to the prophetess, even to spare her pain. "Yes. I'm sorry..." She had to stop for a moment, regain her composure. "We can get you off station, make a run for it down time. I don't give a damn about the laws forbidding down-timers to emigrate through a gate."
Ianira's gaze went to her children. Mute grief touched those dark eyes. "They cannot come with me?"
Noah answered, voice firm. "No. We don't dare risk it. They'll find a way to follow us through every gate that opens this week. If we put your children in the same trunk we smuggle you out of the station in, and their assassins get to Jenna..."
Ianira Cassondra shuddered. "Yes. It is too dangerous. Marcus..."
He gripped her hands hard. "I will guard them. With my life, Ianira. And Julius has pledged to help us escape. No one else must know. Not even our friends, not even the Council of Seven. Julius only knows because he was using the tunnels to run a message from one end of Commons to the other. He found us."
At the look that came into her eyes, a shudder touched its cold finger to Jenna's spine. Ianira's eyelids came clenching down. "The death that stalks us is worse than we know... two faces... two faces beyond the gates... and bricks enclose the tree where the flame burns and blood runs black... be wary of the one with grey eyes, death lives behind the smile... the letters are the key, the letters bring terror and destruction... the one who lives behind the silent gun will strike in the night... seeks to destroy the soul unborn... will strike where the newborn bells burn bright with the sound of screams..." She sagged against her husband, limp and trembling.
Jenna, too, was trembling, so violently she could scarcely keep her feet where she crouched beside the bed.
Marcus glanced up, eyes dark and frightened. "I have never seen the visions come to her so powerfully. Please, I beg of you, be careful with her."
Jenna found herself lifting Ianira's cold hands to warm them. They shook in Jenna's grasp. "Lady," she whispered, "I'm not much good at killing. But they've already destroyed the two people I cared about more than anything in the world. I swear, I will kill anything or anyone who tries to hurt you."
Ianira's gaze lifted slowly. Tears had reddened her eyes. "I know," she choked out. "It is why I grieve."
To that, Jenna had no answer whatever.
* * *
Dr. John Lachley had a problem.
A very serious problem.
Polly Nichols possessed half of Eddy's eight letters, written to the now-deceased orphan from Cardiff. Unlike Morgan, however, whom nobody would miss, Polly Nichols had lived in the East End all her life. When she turned up rather seriously dead, those who knew her were going to talk. And what they knew, or recalled having seen, they would tell the constables of the Metropolitan Police Department's H Division. While the police were neither well liked nor respected in Whitechapel, Polly Nichols was, despite her infamous profession. Those who liked and respected her would help the police catch whoever did to her what John Lachley intended to do to anyone who came into possession of Eddy's miserable little letters.
God, but he had enjoyed carving up that little bastard, Morgan...
The very memory made his private and unique anatomy ache.
So... he must find Polly Nichols, obtain her letters, then cut her up the same delightful way he had cut Morgan, as a message to all blackmailing whores walking these filthy streets, and he must do it without being remarked upon or caught. He would disguise himself, of course, but John Lachley's was a difficult face to disguise. He looked too foreign, always had, from earliest childhood in these mean streets, a gift from his immigrant mother. Lachley knew enough theatrical people, through his illustrious clientele, to know which shops to visit to obtain false beards and so on, but even that was risky. Acquiring such things meant people would recall him as the foreigner who had bought an actor's bag of makeup and accouterments. That was nearly as bad as being recalled as the last man seen with a murdered woman. Might well prove worse, since being remembered for buying disguises indicated someone with a guilty secret to hide. How the devil did one approach the woman close enough to obtain the letters and murder her, afterwards, without being seen?
He might throw suspicion on other foreigners, perhaps, if he disguised himself as one of the East End's thousands of Jews. A long false beard, perhaps, or a prayer shawl knotted under his overcoat... Ever since that Jew, what was his name, Lipski, had murdered that little girl in the East End last year, angry Cockneys had been hurtling insults at foreigners in the eastern reaches of London. In the docklands, so many refugees were pouring in from the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, the very word "foreigner" had come to mean "Jew." Lachley would have to give that serious consideration, throwing blame somehow onto the community of foreigners. If some foreign Jew hanged for Lachley's deeds, so much the better.
But his problem was more complicated than simply tracing Polly Nichols, recovering her letters, and silencing her. There was His Highness' tutor to consider, as well. The man knew too much, far too much for safety. Mr. James K. Stephen would have to die. Which was the reason John Lachley had left London for the nearby village of Greenwich, this morning: to murder Mr. James K. Stephen.
He had made a point of striking up an acquaintance with the man on the riding paths surrounding Greenwich just the morning previously. Lachley, studying the layout of the land Stephen preferred for his morning rides, had casually trailed Stephen while looking for a place to stage a fatal accident. The path Eddy's tutor habitually took carried the riders out into fields where farm workers labored to bring in the harvest despite the appalling rain squalls, then wandered within a few feet of a large windmill near the railway line. Lachley gazed at that windmill with a faint smile. If he could engineer it so that Stephen rode past the windmill at the same time as a passing train...
So he followed Stephen further along the trail and cantered his horse up alongside, smiling in greeting, and introduced himself. "Good morning, sir. John Lachley, physician."
"Good morning, Dr. Lachley," Eddy's unsuspecting tutor smiled in return. "James Stephen."
He feigned surprise. "Surely not James K. Stephen?"
The prince's former tutor stared in astonishment. "Yes, in fact, I am."
"Why, I am delighted, sir! Delighted! Eddy has spoken so fondly of you! Oh, I ought to explain," he added at the man's look of total astonishment. "His Highness Prince Albert Victor is one of my patients, nothing serious, of course, I assure you.
We've become rather good friends over the last few months. He has spoken often of you, sir. Constantly assigns to you the lion's share of the credit for his success at Cambridge."
Stephen flushed with pleasure. "How kind of His Highness! It was my priviledge to have tutored him at university. You say Eddy is quite well, then?"
"Oh, yes. Quite so. I use certain mesmeric techniques in my practice, you see, and Eddy had heard that the use of mesmeric therapy can improve one's memory."
Stephen smiled in genuine delight. "So naturally Eddy was interested! Of course. I hope you have been able to assist him?"
"Indeed," John Lachley laughed easily. "His memory will never be the same."
Stephen shared his chuckle without understanding Lachley's private reasons for amusement. As they rode on in companionable conversation, Lachley let fall a seemingly casual remark. "You know, I've enjoyed this ride more than any I can recall in an age. So much more refreshing than Hyde Park or Rotten Row, where one only appears to be in the countryside, whereas this is the genuine article. Do you ride this way often?"
"Indeed, sir, I do. Every morning."
"Oh, splendid! I say, do you suppose we might ride out together again tomorrow? I should enjoy the company and we might chat about Eddy, share a few amusing anecdotes, perhaps?"
"I should enjoy it tremendously. At eight o'clock, if that isn't too early?"
"Not at all." He made a mental note to check the train schedules to time their ride past that so-convenient windmill. "Eight o'clock it shall be." And so they rode on, chatting pleasantly while John Lachley laid his plans to murder the amiable young man who had helped Eddy with one too many translations.
Early morning light, watery and weak, tried vainly to break through rainclouds as Lachley stepped off Greenwich pier from the waterman's taxi he'd taken down from London. The clock of the world-famous Greenwich observatory struck eight chimes as Lachley rented a nag from a dockside livery stable and met James Stephen, as agreed. The unsuspecting Stephen greeted him warmly. "Dr. Lachley! Well met, old chap! I say, it's rather a dismal morning, but we'll put a good face on it, eh? Company makes the gloomiest day brighter, what?"
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