Disenchanted & Co.

by Lynn Viehl

  “I beg your pardon.” I stared at him. “Your what?”

  “Your what?” Harry strode forward without looking, banged into an end table, and caught it before it toppled. When he took his hand from it he left an icy print of his palm and fingers. “Your father may have wanted recompense for being taken. Like the others, Jack deserved it. But his battle was never yours. You can bloody well do as you like, but you won’t drag my granddaughter into it.”

  “She’s in it to her ears.” Dredmore was sneering now. “You had your chance to do right by her, Ehrich. More than a thousand of them, I should think. But you sacrificed her, and her mother, and her grandmother on the altar of Queen and country and your own pathetic schemes.”

  “So now you’ll cut her throat?” Harry’s eyes took on a strange purple glow. “I will end you first, boy.”

  The mention of murder made it high time for me to intervene. “Whatever quarrel you two have with each other, it’s nothing to do with me. Lucien, I can look after myself, so stuff your protection. Harry, I’m not interested in carrying on whatever feud you have with Dredmore or his father.” I remembered Hedger’s strange reaction to learning that Harry was my grandfather. “Is there anyone who likes you?”

  “His name isn’t—” that was all my grandfather got out before Lucien stepped between us. His broad back kept me from seeing what he did, but his back muscles shifted, and then Harry abruptly vanished.

  “What did you do?” I asked, shuffling back a few steps.

  “I banished him back to the netherside.” Dredmore turned to face me. “As long as you are with me, he cannot manifest or meddle with you.”

  “Harry’s never meddled.” When he would have come closer I went round behind the chair. “You, on the other hand, have inflicted an excessive amount of damage to my reputation, my person, and my life.”

  He didn’t like that. “How have I harmed you, Charmian? By wanting you? By taking what you freely offered me? Or by trying to shield you from Walsh and dark forces that you cannot even begin to fathom?” He extended his arms in a helpless fashion. “Please, enlighten me as to which it was.”

  I did. “You abducted me and held me prisoner against my will. You raced about assassinating snuffmages, never mind that I might be blamed for the murders. Oh, and you also agreed to kill me for twenty thousand pounds.”

  “I took that fool’s money to give to you,” he shouted. “It was to help you settle into a new life—”

  “After I left Toriana with you for some secluded lovers’ nest overseas,” I tacked on, “where I could nightly entertain you until you tired of me? I’d rather work for Rina.”

  “You might as well.” He turned away. “I’ve tired of you already.”

  That stung, more than I cared to admit. “Problem solved, then.”

  I came round and sat in the armchair. “Before I’m forced to leave the country and flee for my life, perhaps you should tell me about this thing between you and Harry. Start with how you’re able to see his specter, and exactly how you sent him off.” I was particularly interested in the latter so that I might do the same if Harry became troublesome.

  Dredmore went to the overly large secretary and opened the upper cabinet, sliding aside a panel. “He’s not a specter. He’s a manifesting spirit.”

  “There’s a difference?” I frowned as he shifted and I saw the rows of switches that the panel had hidden. “What’s that for?”

  Dredmore put his thumb beneath one switch and glanced back at me. “You.” He flipped the switch.

  Two velvet-covered bars shot out from the ends of my chair’s arms, bending at hidden joints and locking together at the ends. Before I could get to my feet, they retracted, shoving me back against the cushions. A smaller pair of bars swung out beneath my skirts and did the same, trapping my ankles in place. When I pushed at the bars locked across my waist, two cuffs popped out of them and snapped round my wrists.

  “Don’t bother struggling,” Dredmore told me. “You haven’t the strength.”

  I tried but I couldn’t budge the chair’s automatic manacles. I’d never heard of such mech, but Dredmore could afford things other mortals could only have nightmares about.

  I looked up at him. “When you’re finished,” I said pleasantly, “you’d better plan to sleep with one eye open for the rest of your bleeding life.”

  “That I do already, Charmian.” He turned his attention to the panel, and I heard doors being bolted and window latches fastening, and then a white-painted board descended from the ceiling.

  I had nothing to do but wait and plot his slow, painful death, but still I jumped when the table beside me sprouted a complicated pile of gears, pulleys, and lenses.

  “Is it a torture device?” I asked, wondering if he meant to feed my hands to it.

  “It is called an illuminator. Let’s hope it lives up to its name.” He left the secretary, going round to all the lamps and turning them down until the room became shrouded in darkness. He pulled the chair to the other side of the table machine, and popped a matchit.

  The bizarre rituals confused me, but the matchit didn’t. Surely he wouldn’t set me on fire, trapped as I was. “Lucien, perhaps I’ve been too harsh. You and I should talk more—”

  “Do shut up, Charmian.” He used the flame to light a small row of candles inserted in the back of the device. As soon as their wicks caught, he adjusted a row of small mirrors, and several shafts of light merged and formed a glowing circle on the hanging board.

  “There is a difference between spirits and specters,” Dredmore said as he placed a cylinder lined with tiny, silverblack-etched glasses in front of the rows of candles. “We didn’t know what it was, not until after the war.” He switched on the machine.

  My eyes widened as a flickering picture appeared on the white board. In it tiny figures of soldiers marched across a field toward a forest, and they moved just as if I were standing there behind them, watching.

  “The illuminator uses a zoopraxiscope to show many images in succession,” I heard Dredmore say.

  “Then it needs a shorter name.” Angry as I was, I couldn’t stop watching the moving pictures. “Who are they?”

  “A regiment in the North country.” Dredmore left the machine running, picked up a fire iron, and poked at the logs in the hearth, creating an updraft of orange and yellow sparks. “Your grandfather and my father were among them. They were friends once.”

  “Lucien, your father is titled,” I said. “I know he’s exempt from service. Think of a better lie.”

  “Lady Travallian was my mother, and her husband recognized me as his heir, but Jack, the man who sired me, was a commoner.” Dredmore came to sit on the floor beside me. “He was also a tintest, attached to your grandfather’s regiment.”

  Having such a large, dignified figure at my feet seemed ridiculous, especially when I couldn’t kick him in the head, but it wasn’t as if I could change seats. “Is that why Lord Travallian disowned you and left the title to his nephew? Because you’re a bastard in truth?”

  “No.” He curled a hand round my calf. “After I discovered that Jack was my father, and what he could do, I told my mother’s husband to disown me, and I cut all ties to my family.”

  The rub of his thumb against the bare back of my knee made me grit my teeth. It also made my shoulders turn to pudding. “How noble of you.”

  “Before I reached my majority, Jack came to see me. He told me how he and my mother had met, and why she married Travallian. He explained what had happened to him during the war.” He glanced up at me. “My father was a Lost Timer. So was your grandfather.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  For all his obsession with sciences and mech, my father had dearly loved history. Each night, when he came to tuck me in, he’d tell me a story about strange people and their forgotten worlds, as if they were faeriestales. He particularly loved the mysterious and unexplained, like how the Nile people had built such enormous pyramids, or why four hundred Norders ha
d vanished overnight from their first Torian settlement.

  Da had mentioned the Lost Timers to me once, too, and now I searched my memory until I recalled something of what he had said. “That was what they called those soldiers who went missing in Britanny during the war. They got lost in some forest and weren’t seen for months.”

  “That is how it began.” Little prisms, cast off by the glass cylinder as it turned, slid down Dredmore’s face and chest. “Ordinarily the regiment’s tintest remained behind the lines to protect their equipment, so my father wasn’t even supposed to be with them. The depth and breadth of the Bréchéliant made it impossible for Jack to capture the fighting from a safe distance, and he was obliged to follow the regiment into the forest. He thought he would be safe if he stayed in the trees.” His voice went hollow. “He didn’t know what was waiting for him . . . for all of them.”

  A deep suspicion began to gather inside me as I looked at the moving picture again. It had started over from the beginning and was showing the men crossing the field. “Is this your father’s work, then?” I asked, nodding toward the board.

  “The original ambrotints were his. I had copies made smaller to fit the device.” He glanced at it and then got up to change out the glass cylinder, replacing it with another.

  This time, the moving picture showed the soldiers creeping through the trees, sometimes looking back as if they sensed we were following them.

  “Jack told me that from the moment he crossed over into the forest, he felt as if something was watching them,” Dredmore said. “When it grew dark, he began packing up his tinter to wait to shoot until he had morning light, but then there was light. Strange light that came out of nowhere.”

  Strange indeed. On the board I watched bizarre glowing streaks darting behind the trees, and while the silverblack on the glass ambrotints rendered all of the light gray, the faster the streaks moved, the brighter they seemed to flash.

  “Lampflies,” I murmured to myself as the soldiers came upon a dense grove of old oaks and more lights began filling the moving picture. “A swarm might look like that.”

  “I thought the same,” Dredmore said, “until Jack told me the frost a month before the battle had already killed off all the insects.”

  I felt impatient. “Then what were they? More specters? Leg-sprouting candles? Dancing Yuletide trees?”

  The moving picture stopped as Dredmore changed cylinders again. New images appeared that showed the soldiers taking firing positions behind the oaks’ immense trunks.

  “Your grandfather assumed, not entirely incorrectly, that the lights were torches being waved by the Talian forces. As you see, he ordered his men to take up defensive positions in an old oak grove. He had no way of knowing that the lieutenant leading the enemy troops toward the grove from the other side thought the English were doing the exact same thing, and had put his men in identical positions. Which is all they wanted.”

  The moving picture started again from the beginning, showing the soldiers following the lights and then taking cover from them. Dredmore said nothing until I prompted, “They?”

  “The trees.” He switched off the machine and blew out the candles. “They took them.”

  “The trees took them.” I was right; he was mad.

  “They seized every soldier on both sides of that grove. They pulled their bodies into their trunks. They swallowed them whole.” Dredmore went to the mantel, bracing one arm against the carved, polished wood to look down into the merrily crackling flames. “The men had to become part of the trees so that the Aramanthan trapped inside could possess them and escape.”

  And for this he had trussed me to an armchair? He couldn’t be drunk; he’d barely touched the gin at Rina’s. Harry’s sudden appearance certainly hadn’t frightened him out of his wits. No, whatever had addled his brain must be more serious than grumpy ghosts and the blue ruin. “Lucien, I’m sure your father saw some terrible things during the war, but really. Man-eating trees?”

  “The oaks had been bespelled long ago. No,” he added when I looked away, and came to loom over me. “You will listen to me this time.”

  “Very well.” I was annoyed, but he was an unbalanced deathmage, and if regaining my freedom and preserving my ability to breathe meant catering to his insanity, then I’d make a decent show of it. I glanced up. “I’m listening. Tell me the rest of this faeriestale.”

  “Faeries didn’t build the Bréchéliant,” he said. “It was the haven of the Druuds, the old high priests who protected humanity. A thousand years ago, they saved the world by putting an end to a civil war being fought by the Aramanthan. They combined their powers to lure all of the warring immortals and their minions into the forest, where they bound their spirits to enchanted stones and cast their bodies into the oaks. They then warded the forest itself to prevent anyone from entering it.”

  “Using magic that, oh, didn’t work.” I controlled an impulse to begin tapping my slipper by nudging the edge of the Turkish rug with one toe. “How awful for them.”

  “The spells didn’t fail.” He walked over to an antique standing globe displayed beside the heavy tapestry window curtains, and with a nudge of his thumb set the little sphere to spinning. “The world changed. Over the centuries, weather, floods, and earthquakes created new paths round the old wards into the Bréchéliant. The soldiers on both sides simply stumbled onto them.”

  I again marveled at how magic always seemed to evaporate at the most convenient moments. “Tragic.”

  Dredmore stopped the globe. “Time had changed the immortal prisoners of the grove as well. Nothing remained of their bodies except dust. Their immortal spirits endured, however, trapped as they were in stones used by the Druuds to imprison them. By that time they had learned what they needed to escape.” He came to me, and absently tucked a stray piece of my hair behind my ear. “Can you guess what it was?”

  “A woodman’s ax?” I guessed. “Lightning? Termites?”

  “Hosts, Charmian.” He popped a matchit and lit the lamp nearest my chair. The frosted glass diffused the flame into a soft amber glow that gilded every edge in the room. “Living bodies that could house and transport their spirits.”

  “So when the soldiers came, these imprisoned spirits dragged them into the trees so they might use them like carris.” Did he even realize how ridiculous he sounded? “Is this when the white rabbit makes an appearance and leads them and a little gel into a garden of talking flowers?”

  Instead of growing angry again, he smiled a little. “I said almost the very same thing to Jack. He told me that at first none of the soldiers who came out of the forest truly believed what had happened to them. It seemed like nothing but a long, bad dream, until they discovered exactly how much time had passed, and how greatly they had been changed.”

  Dredmore setting me on fire suddenly didn’t seem as bad as before, and once I convinced him to release me from the chair I’d have to make a run for it. The window latches were the heavy, solid sort that were inclined to stick; it would have to be the door. “I suppose their feet had been turned into roots, their arms into branches, and their hair into bird’s nests.”

  “The men found they could move objects, start fires, even see into the future,” he said, and touched a center spot on his brow. “From here, simply by thinking it.”

  “Mind power.” I sighed. “Of course it would be that. Couldn’t exactly walk about with roots for feet, could they? Imagine the dirt they’d track everywhere. And the cobbler’s bills.”

  “You agreed to listen,” he reminded me. “Some of the spirits—indeed, most of them—wanted to atone for the great damage they had inflicted on the mortal world during the mage war. They guided the soldiers they had taken to take up their normal lives again, and to use their mind powers discreetly and wisely. They formed a secret association so they might help and govern each other. The less benign spirits were not so benevolent, and wanted to kill the spirits of the men they had possessed so the bodies would be theirs
alone. To avoid another war, the two groups agreed to go their separate ways.”

  “After which they all lived blissfully ever onward,” I guessed, eyeing the high shine of the waxed cherrywood flooring. When I ran for it, I’d have to be careful to keep to the rugs or my slippers would have me skidding straight into a collection of botany books.

  “The group of men who hosted the benevolent spirits went back to England and called themselves the Tillers,” he told me. “The others withdrew to Talia, and became known as the Reapers. Little is known about the Reapers except some rumors. It’s said that they still desire to settle old scores.”

  It was incredible how much detail he’d worked into his delusion . . . or perhaps there was nothing wrong with his mind, and he’d employed this complicated farce in hopes of bringing me under his sway. I began to suspect the latter. “So which was it? Harry became a Tiller, and your father a Reaper? Is that why you despise each other so much?”

  “Jack was a Tiller,” he said softly. “Harry’s spirit never did choose a side.”

  I decided I’d indulged him long enough. “I must say, that was an excellent story, Lucien. Quite imaginative, having the moving pictures to add such a dramatic feel. You could perform this show daily in the park. I think you’d really clean up.”

  “What you are disregarding is that the Tillers and the Reapers did go back to live normal lives,” he said. “They became men of business, politics, and importance. They all succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. And they married and had families, because they never suspected hosting the Aramanthan spirits would change their physical bodies. Not until they realized that their offspring were not like other children.”

  My nose itched and I couldn’t scratch it, and it was driving me insane. Just as he was. “Please, Lucien, stop. Just stop now. It was a good joke, a very good joke, but you’re taking it too far. It isn’t funny anymore.”

  “The Tillers managed to hide what they were, but their children were born with abilities not so easily disguised.” His voice dropped low, as if he were confiding in me. “Some superstitious fools began calling their progeny names. Shade-born. Demonites.”