Time of Breath

by Paul Mannering

  Arthur shrugged Drakeforth’s shoulders. “The Godden Corporation killed a few people, it’s nothing personnel.”

  “You mean, nothing personal,” Eade replied.

  “Nothing personnel. They used their RABITS as assassins. No animals were harmed in the harming of the enemies of Godden.”

  “Well, we are talking about a dirty sheet,” I reminded the conversation.

  “It’s more of a dirty secret,” Drakeforth replied in his usual voice. It seemed that Arthur had hung up on us. “This—” he jerked a thumb at the cloth “—is not the Shroud of Tureen, it is a fake.”

  I waited for Eade to retort; instead, she shrugged and then looked at me. “What? He’s not wrong.”

  Chapter 23

  “How long has The Shroud been missing?” Drakeforth asked.

  “Since Professor Bombilate disappeared,” Eade said.

  “Could he have taken it with him?” I asked.

  “Yes, perhaps he thought it needed cleaning,” Eade said, with acid in her tone.

  “And how long has he been missing?” I asked. Surely at least one of us could act like an adult.

  “That would depend on your perception of time,” Drakeforth interrupted.

  “No,” I said firmly. “It wouldn’t.”

  “A couple of weeks,” Eade said.

  “Have the authorities been informed?” I could hear myself asking reasonable questions like a proper adult. I wondered how long I could keep it going.

  “Yes,” Eade replied.

  “And?”

  “They said that Professor Bombilate was quite capable of mak­ing his own decisions and maybe I should give him his space.”

  “Really?” my left eyebrow sprang into its customary position of surprise.

  “Of course not. They gave me a form to complete and said they would look into it.”

  “And did they?”

  Eade gave me a concerned look. “Charlotte, are all our conver­sations going to be this tedious?”

  “Uhm, no? Forget I mentioned it…” I mumbled.

  Drakeforth cleared his throat. “The authorities, in any situation, will do as little as possible. Not, I would add, due to any lack of will on their part. It’s usually something like budget cuts, or resources, or an impossible caseload.”

  “Wait,” I said, seizing the opportunity to interrupt. “How do you know the perils of police work?”

  “I’ve had my share of involvement with the lawn.”

  “You obfuscated your way out of a traffic ticket!”

  Drakeforth snorted. “Only because if they had investigated further, certain allegations and cases that remain technically open, would have added to the complexity of the situation. In short, once accused of murder and technically not acquitted, one tends to avoid the lawn.”

  “What?” I managed.

  “Technically open,” Drakeforth repeated.

  “You make it sound like you got off on a technicality,” I frowned.

  “Yes, let’s say that’s what happened.” Drakeforth nodded with enthusiasm. “We have more pressing matters. Specifically, a fraud­ulent sheet and a missing informist.”

  “Well…we could ask his friends and family where he might have gone.”

  “Did Bombilate have friends and family?” Drakeforth asked.

  “I never asked,” Eade shrugged.

  “You worked with the man,” Drakeforth reminded her.

  “I couldn’t pick my colleagues’ friends and families out of a police line-up,” I said.

  “Exactly. I worked with Professor Bombilate. I didn’t have to get to know him to do that.”

  “You could have been married to him,” Drakeforth muttered.

  “We could start with where he lived?” Keeping these two on track was harder than herding cotton balls in a wind tunnel.

  “Why not?” Eade smiled coldly at Drakeforth. “I’ll check the records office for his home address.” Eade walked stiffly out of the room, leaving Drakeforth and myself in a chilled silence.

  “Would you tell me if you had murdered someone?” I asked

  “Probably,” Drakeforth replied. His attention focused on folding the Shroud and returning it to its box.

  “You didn’t mention that you were married,” I continued.

  “It was annulled.” Drakeforth raised his head and thought for a moment. “At least, I think it was annulled.”

  “You’re not sure?” I felt an unpleasant sense of familiarity.

  “Well, I did have Eade declared legally dead. It seemed cheaper than hiring a hitman to do it for real.”

  “Drakeforth, you can’t go around having people declared legally dead. Especially when they’re not actually dead.”

  “Makes you think.” Drakeforth closed the lid on the shroud. “If you are legally dead, and are in fact still alive, are you living illegally?”

  “It would depend on what you were doing while alive,” I replied. “For example, if you were committing murder, then yes, you would definitely be living illegally.”

  “I didn’t murder anyone,” Drakeforth announced gravely.

  “Oh, good.”

  A crash of glass and splintering of wood broke the silence. We looked towards the hanging weight of the round vault door we had passed through. Out there, the museum waited, empty and still. Except for a rhythmic thudding, that came closer with each thud.

  “School group?” I ventured.

  “I usually slip away at this point,” Drakeforth said, casting about for an alternative exit.

  “It does avoid awkward questions. What about Eade?”

  “I’m sure she will be fine and if I’m wrong, then she will have more pressing concerns than being abandoned by us.”

  With a scream of metal, the vault door was wrenched off its hinges and tossed into the room.

  “Skating skeletons!” Drakeforth cried. We ran for the back of the room. A wall stood as a silent reminder that there was no escape that way.

  A murrai ducked through the open doorway. Its massive stone shoulders caught on the steel frame and ripped it out as easily as walking through a spider web.

  “Is it malfunctioning!?” I yelled as the walking statue stood up and straightened.

  “It shouldn’t be functioning at all!” Drakeforth yelled back.

  I ran around the edge of the room, dodging around tables and trying to avoid the lumbering statue that stomped further into the room. The murrai swung an articulated arm and a fist, larger than my head, cracked the stone floor.

  “Follow me!” I yelled, and ran for the only exit. I high-stepped over the rubble and glanced back. Drakeforth was not as close behind as I’d expected.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The Shroud is the key to all of this. Forged or not. We can’t leave it behind.”

  The murrai’s head snapped towards Drakeforth as he flipped the lid off the wooden box.

  “Look out!” I grabbed a throwable chunk of masonry and proved it. My missile bounced off the murrai’s back with all the devastating impact of a butterfly’s boop.

  Drakeforth had the folded cloth under his arm. He jumped aside as the murrai smashed the wooden case and the table with a single blow.

  The machine studied the remnants for a second while Drake­forth ran to meet me.

  “Why did you stop?” he gasped.

  “Oh, you know. I wanted to see what would happen.”

  “Thud, splat, most likely,” Drakeforth replied. “Oh look, it’s worked out that the shroud isn’t there anymore.”

  The murrai had finished tossing the fragments and had worked its way through the long arc until it faced us again.

  We ran through an exhibition hall and skidded into a hard-right turn. I took the lead and raced towards the archway that would t
ake us to the gift shop and exit.

  Drakeforth grabbed my arm. “Two!”

  “Three!” I replied automatically, and lunged forward.

  “There were two murrai,” Drakeforth reminded me. I recoiled from the archway as if it was the stage door to an open mic night.

  “What are the chances of both of them coming to life and being homicidal?”

  “It’s probably just a coincidence,” Drakeforth suggested and took a careful step towards the archway between the merchandise and us.

  “A case of mistaken identity,” I nodded, almost tiptoeing.

  “There will be an investigation, of course.”

  “A lengthy report will be written,” I replied.

  “Public apologies will be issued.”

  “Media statements, carefully worded to express regret.”

  “Without actually accepting responsibility,” Drakeforth said. He flatted against the wall of the arch and peeped into the foyer beyond.

  “Okay, its clea—” Drakeforth scrambled backwards as the second murrai rammed through the wall in a cloud of dust and refrigerator magnets. “Belay that!”

  “Just what I was thinking!” Squeezing between two display cabinets with my back pressed against the nearest wall, I tried to appear like an exhibit.

  Drakeforth danced around looking for somewhere to hide. The murrai plodded forward, its stone head grinding as it followed him.

  I squealed and ran towards the ruins of the gift shop when the murrai stomped past. “Drakeforth, come on!”

  Drakeforth stepped to the right, and the murrai mirrored his movement. He hopped left, and the murrai followed him again.

  “You dance divinely,” Drakeforth told it. “But I am afraid I must be going now.” He ducked under a swinging arm and bolted into the foyer.

  “What the Hibernian is going on!?” Eade emerged from behind a non-descript office door.

  “Murrai. Attempting to redecorate,” Drakeforth replied. The noise of the two stone men trying to turn around in the confined space sounded like they were blocking each other worse than the rocks that built this place.

  “Vole, what did you do?” Eade folded her arms and glared.

  “I didn’t do anything!” Drakeforth affected a shocked expression.

  Eade rolled her eyes. “Of course you did. You’re just too conceited to recognise whatever it was.”

  “We should go, before someone turns up and blames us for the mess,” I said.

  Eade hesitated, and then nodded. “Fine. Out the front door.”

  Chapter 24

  Outside, night, much like half of Exhibit Hall A, had fallen.

  “Do you have a car?” I asked Eade.

  “I normally call a litter, using the phone inside.”

  “A spare pair of sandshoes?” Drakeforth asked.

  “Oh, for figurine’s sake. We should start walking.” Eade marched down the ziggurat-zag of the narrow switchback stairs towards the world’s most monotonous beach.

  “Which way did Goat go?” I asked Drakeforth, as we followed Eade towards the sand.

  “Considering the prevailing winds, that way I should think.”

  “He can’t have gone far.”

  Drakeforth scanned the night sky. “A lesser man would be embarrassed by the shortcomings of his chosen form of transport.”

  “You’re not embarrassed?” I’d spoken before I could congrat­ulate myself on my wit.

  “What? Oh yes, you should hashtag that one.”

  The grand entrance of the museum was no match for the combined momentum of a tonne of animated stone. The murrai ignored the stairs and slid down the balustrade that formed a decorative rail between the slab steps. Cats scattered and then regrouped to watch the proceedings from a better vantage point.

  “Well, that escalated quickly,” Drakeforth announced. We ran faster. The murrai executed a graceful dismount and landed in synch up to their hips in the sand. We used the moment while they pulled themselves out of the soft grains to increase our lead.

  A long, rolling, and entirely unacceptable sound bubbled through the air.

  “Really, Drakeforth? You could say ‘excuse me’.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Drakeforth replied. The wind passed again and a shadow blocked the stars.

  The murrai clambered up the dune, arms outstretched and their carved expressions stony as we scrambled up the knotted leather ladder and onto the deck of Goat’s airship.

  Chapter 25

  “We were supposed to find The Tree,” I groaned.

  “The tree that can’t be found?” Drakeforth muttered from the deck to my right.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not finding it is just as important as finding it.”

  I sat up. “We found Goat and the map by not looking for them. We found the museum by not looking for it.”

  “It’s the Trouble Theory,” Eade said. She had found my hamm­ock and was excavating a persimmon with a spoon as she rocked gently in time with the ship’s motion. “I won’t bore you with the math. Basically it states that the likelihood of finding trouble has a measurable value that is inverse to the amount of energy expended avoiding trouble.”

  “And yet if you go looking for trouble, you are bound to find it,” I said.

  Drakeforth stood up and brushed himself off. “She’s making it up, Pudding. It’s an attempt to make her sound more educated.”

  Eade shrugged and tossed the husk of her freshly excavated pers­immon over the side. Goat yelped and ran across the deck, tying a knotted cord of leather around his waist as he went. We watched as he dived over the rail and vanished.

  “We should probably see if the fall killed him,” Drakeforth said after a few seconds.

  I plucked at the taut cord. It twanged with a deep note that went down the scale until the rope creaked. With a grunt of effort, Goat climbed over the rail.

  “Persimmon,” he panted. He carefully set the rind aside and unhitched the rope.

  “Are you okay?” I moved closer to Goat until the smell of him stopped me.

  “Do they validate parking?” Goat asked.

  “I’m glad you’re okay and the persimmon was rescued.” I smiled and nodded, a blush rising on my cheeks. Why was I embarrassed? I wasn’t the crazy one. Was I?

  “Drakeforth, care for a recap?”

  “It’s certainly the time of night for it,” Drakeforth agreed.

  “Eade, if you could try your absolute hardest to stay quiet until I have finished, that would be appreciated,” I said, before she could finish drawing breath.

  “Professor Bombilate. Informist and archaeologist, is missing. The Knotstick Order think he was on to something at the dig in Errm. They also have a vested interest in the Shroud of Tureen, which we have discovered is a forgery. Eade, in her position as librarian at the Museum, was aware that the Shroud was fake. Someone else knows about the Shroud too. I heard Eade arguing with the curator of the museum. They were concerned about their secret being revealed. Shortly afterwards, we were attacked by two murrai. Which, according to my Pathian guidebook, are not known for attacking people. All this after we escaped not one but three angry mobs, yes Drakeforth, I include the entire motorist population back home in that number. We met Goat, who is on a quest for a mythological tree. The only way we can find it, is to not look for it. We didn’t find it, because it is all around us. Empathic energy. Everything is connected. The Tree is Living Oak, and Living Oak is empathic energy condensed, just like everything else. Except, I don’t know, vibrating at a different frequency?” I ran out of things to say. No one laughed, so I waited a few seconds. Still nothing.

  “Well that’s it. I mean, everything that I can think of right now.”

  Drakeforth pushed his hat back on his head. “Succinct. Wouldn’t fit on a T-shirt. But not bad for
a recap.”

  “The story so far. Who cares? We know what has happened. It’s what happens next that I want to know about,” Eade said from her—my hammock.

  “Right, I mean we all do. Except, how do we know what happens next?” I looked around, half expecting a sign to point from the sky to the answer. Maybe a flashing light.

  “We should have a cup of tea,” Drakeforth said. “Pudding, can you find somewhere safe to store this?” He handed me the folded Shroud.

  “Tea, excellent, I’ll help.” Eade flipped easily out of the hammock.

  “Great. Tea. Yes. I’ll give it some more thought, while you make tea.” I held the fake Shroud of Tureen in my arms as they walked away. I tried to ignore that I could really use a cup of tea right now. I needed to find a solution. Then to celebrate with a cup of tea.

  It was tempting to climb into the hammock, wrap myself up in the ancient sheet, and hope that fate would take care of things while I slept through the next decade.

  Fate is a nice excuse. It wraps things up in a sweet-roll of fatalism. Nothing we do has any impact on what is already going to happen. The really smug answer to any challenge is that we have no way of knowing what destiny or fate hold for us. Destiny, of course is simply fate in sweats and no makeup, jogging with us on the journey towards the inevitable.

  The inevitable journey, I thought. Well, we’re never going to get where we are going at this speed. A murrai could walk fas—. I stopped that train of thought with the emergency brake of panic. Racing to the side of the deck, I peered over. Nothing but empty sand going about its business of making silicon valleys and dunes. Regretting my burst of adrenaline-fuelled enthusiasm, I tucked the grey sheet into a shelf, then ran to the other side and looked down. This area of desert was so similar to the other side they could have been mirror images of each other. Jogging and ducking under the complex macramé of Goat’s rigging, I headed to the rear of the ship. There they were: stone faces turned up to us, massive feet working as sandshoes as they strode purposefully along in time with the slow meandering of Goat’s skyship.

  Fatalism has two children: Futility and Fatality. They are what fills the void when Hope bails.