Immortal at the Edge of the World (36 page)

We had one room in the castle devoted to tactical maps and site photos that we’d been taking of different parts of the base for the past four months. One may well ask how we managed to get photos from
inside
the base, and the answer is, it turns out when I think like a god for a while I remember that more than a couple of people on this planet consider me one, and that one of those people has an army at her disposal.

Her name is Ariadne, and she’s publicly employed as a technical advisor to the Greek government. Privately, she’s the head of a secret religious sect that thinks I’m the god Dionysos. And while I’m not in possession of any real godlike powers, having a secret army of paramilitary satyrs at my disposal is pretty close. And having a castle to hide all of them in is, if not godlike, at least pretty cool.

All right, I’m exaggerating. It was only ten satyrs and not an army, but a satyr is worth ten or twenty men in a battle, so it was the equivalent of an army of a hundred and fifty. Which was great, because they only ate as much food as ten.

Speaking of food, Mirella and I decided early on that the best way to get at this base was through its stomach. It had a small army inside—a real one, not ten satyrs and a lot of hyperbole—and that army needed to eat. But the base was way out in the middle of nowhere, certainly too far for the island to support it without some help from the mainland. So food was shipped in.
 

The base had been there long enough for the food arrangements to have already been made, so I had to find the current supplier and buy them. This was less of a hassle than you might imagine, because I had no concern whatsoever with offering a competitive price or negotiating a reasonable deal. I just made the owners incredibly rich by suggesting an outrageous sum, and then I replaced the people doing the deliveries with my satyrs.

One of the things I had learned in my time as a very rich man is that nobody really notices the help. Whether they’re security guards, truck drivers, maintenance men, or the folks flying your private plane, if you don’t need something from one of these people you’re going to take them for granted. This is true even if you’re in a high security location. The hard part is always making it past the security checkpoints, but once on the other side all anyone needs is a badge that says they belong and they are free to go all sorts of places. It helped that in this instance we were sneaking onto a base that was not located in the middle of a hostile region, and being run by a private conglomerate, so not only was there little suspicion of the locals, there was a lack of full-on military attitude.

This was not a formal government operation. Mr. Smith may have been CIA at one time, and it was very likely he was working with government monies, but this thing he had built on the Isle of Mull was an independent entity and the people manning the fences were private mercenaries. They made a show of looking military-official the closer they were to the gates, but inside the compound it was obvious this crew fell short of the kind of discipline expected from coordinated formal military training. Not to say some of them didn’t have military backgrounds. Probably all of them did. But those backgrounds were all clearly different.

Unfortunately, there were still a lot of them and they had large guns, and nobody doubted that they all knew how to use those guns. Even if they were undisciplined enough to mow each other down in a firefight, they would also hit us, and that was no good.

Any plan had to begin with finding a way to neutralize the guards. When I was in this situation a few years back I had only one weapon at my disposal—an indiscriminate killing machine in the form of a very old and out-of-her-mind-hungry vampire. This worked, if you can call the deaths of fifty people a success. Since I couldn’t use a vampire—I was still in touch with Eloise, but the sun lamps Smith bragged about were legit and they were attached to redundant power systems—I had to rely on something a little bit less scorched-earth. To that end I took advantage of the fact that we were supplying the food, and the single-source water supply being pumped into the base. I was told the food and water were tested for contaminants, but I was pretty sure what we were slipping into both wasn’t going to be detected, only because nobody on the planet had ever tested for something like this. Because it wasn’t technically from this planet.

*
 
*
 
*

I don’t have a lot of history with the UK. I spent some time in England, and I’ve been to both Scotland and Ireland before, but not until after the Reformation. The first time I heard of the islands was back when they were Roman outposts and represented the westernmost reach of the Empire. Then the western half of the Empire fell apart and I lost track of what happened until after the entire region went through the chaos of kings and castles that resulted in the place I was renting being built.

I was standing outside that place and about a half mile down the hill, facing the water and thinking about what was going to be happening in another day. Our plan was launching in sixteen hours, and it was about as complete as we could make it. I was expecting to be dead in seventeen or eighteen hours, because although complete, the plan was also legitimately insane. The smart thing to do was to call the whole thing off and run away. But I didn’t feel like being smart and I couldn’t think of anything better to do. And Mirella wasn’t going to let me walk away.

So instead, I walked outside the castle and down the hill and cycled through the plan in my head for the thousandth time and thought about how pretty the hills of Scotland were at night. Old maps showed this lovely place as a little blob on the edge of the Empire’s longest arm. Just on the other side of where I was standing the legend HIC SVNT LEONES would have been written on those maps. It meant,
Here are lions
, which was cartographer shorthand for “We don’t know what there is after this.”

I was standing at the edge of the world.

I pulled the astrolabe from my pocket. I had done this a hundred times before, at first to fiddle, later just because it was something to have in my hands.

Walk toward the star that isn’t there and step off the edge of the world.
That was what Hsu had told me. But the directions made no sense. I knew a dozen different uses for an astrolabe and none of them involved locating stars that weren’t there. It didn’t work that way.

Most of the features of an astrolabe involve identifying an object in the sky first and then using that to learn other things. It took advantage of the fact that the sun and stars rose and set, and the angles between the surface of the Earth and the celestial objects changed depending on the season. If you could identify a star, knew what the day was, and knew where that day was on the zodiac, you could figure out a lot of things. But I couldn’t learn anything by pointing it at a star that wasn’t there. Basically, that was the definition of the night sky: a black space occasionally broken up by a star here and there. Which part of that sky should I use to calibrate the rest of the astrolabe? The answer was not to pick a space and try it, as I had done that many times already, to no effect. I also tried it during the daytime when the sun was the only visible star.

There were a couple of things that kept me from giving up entirely. One was the way it felt. It was rough to the touch, as I’d first observed when I held it, but the weird thing was that it looked smooth. The wheels glided smoothly, too, and there was no visible indication that the surface was uneven or grooved. Yet that’s how it felt. It was a little like looking at a three-dimensional picture while wearing 3-D glasses, then reaching out and finding the surface of the uneven object you were looking at was, in fact, a smooth surface.

Physically there
was
something different about it. I just couldn’t understand what it was.

There was a full moon so visibility was pretty good, and a low ground fog actually improved the lighting a little bit since the fog glowed in the moonlight. I would have probably been in trouble if a predator had been hiding under the fog, but there were hardly any predators left in the world. I held the astrolabe up again and rather than choosing a star that wasn’t there I picked a familiar one, calibrated the astrolabe by pointing the rule at it and turning the plates to line up with my current latitude and zodiacal period. Then I lined all of those up with the dot on the top-most ring of the astrolabe—it was called a
rate
—that corresponded to the star I had started with.

Having done all of that, I concluded that it was nearly midnight. Which was also what my watch said. Neither device summoned a faery.

“Walk toward the star that isn’t there,” I said aloud. My voice resonated with the countryside and also failed to summon a faery. Hsu didn’t actually say to point the astrolabe at this star-that-wasn’t-there, he just said to walk toward it. And while keeping in mind that Hsu had never actually tried to use the astrolabe to accomplish this, it was a notable distinction.

I started spinning the plates around. Each plate corresponded to a latitude and a zodiac sign, and up to this point I had only been using it properly, as in, I had stopped when I found the correct latitude and the appropriate zodiac symbol.

But there was something fundamentally impossible about these plates, which was another reason I hadn’t given up on the astrolabe yet. One of the first things I noticed on close examination was that it had too many latitude hash marks. My efforts a moment earlier in identifying the time could have instead been used to determine what my latitude was by turning the plate that matched up with the current time and seeing what that time with those star positions told me about my current latitude. But while it was true that latitudes could be broken up into as many small numbers as one cared to—most people stopped at 360—it was usually an even number, and there were an odd number of hashes on this wheel.

Much more obviously, there were thirteen zodiac symbols, with the thirteenth not represented by any symbol at all.

This was fundamentally impossible because the astrolabe should not have worked. Thirteen zodiac signs meant the plate was inaccurate for all of the other twelve signs, because it was supposed to be a circle divided equally into twelve spaces, not thirteen. The latitude plate’s uneven hash marks would have also resulted in an inaccurate reading, but it would have only made it slightly less accurate—a circle divided by one hundred twenty is only marginally different than one divided by one hundred twenty-one.

But it was clear that the quarterly marks—for degrees 90, 180, 270 and 360—were correct. The extra mark was somewhere between 90 and 180, and after a little closer examination I had decided on the one that constituted the extra mark, as it was slightly longer than the others.

So I had a degree that shouldn’t have been there and a zodiac sign that didn’t exist on an astrolabe that shouldn’t have worked but did.

I just didn’t know what to do with this information.

Something about this particular evening, out in the rocky field among ground fog and the ghosts of long-dead Scots, made me take another look at the outer plate again.

The last plate on most astrolabes was where the stars were located. In more modern renditions of the device, the plate contained a decent star chart and was transparent so one could see the other plate readings beneath it. Transparency wasn’t really possible with an outer plate made out of metal, so the older astrolabes had ornate plates that looked decorative—sweeping curves of metal extending out from the center wheel in elegant S-shapes—but had a functional purpose.
 

Every dot corresponded to a prominent star. Some had dozens, but for basic functions there only needed to be ten or twenty. This one had fifteen.

A consequence of having so few stars was that it wasn’t really possible to tell which star was being represented because there were no other stars next to it on the plate to fill out a constellation. A lot of astrolabes had the names of the stars written on them, but this did not. So the only way to determine which dots were for which stars was to reverse-calibrate it. That is, if you knew the common stars and you knew what the current time was, you could point the astrolabe at the sky and determine which of those stars gave you the correct time reading.

I hadn’t done any of that calibrating because Abraham had, and he’d put it in his notes to his son when he’d sent the astrolabe home. But he only identified fourteen of the stars. I hadn’t given it any thought before—the obvious explanation was that it was calibrated for a star that hadn’t been identified yet, and there were thousands to choose from. But maybe I had that wrong. Maybe this was
the star that isn’t there
.

I calibrated the astrolabe, lining up the rule with the midpoint of the thirteenth sign and the 121
^st
hash mark, and turning the rate to line up the fifteenth star. Since the rate wasn’t pointing toward any particular actual star this left me with the problem of not knowing which direction I was supposed to be aiming the thing, so I just held it out in front of me and started walking.

And of course, nothing happened. The Scottish hillside looked no different than it had before. I was standing in the same field in the same fog.

But for the first time, the astrolabe felt smooth in my hands. Something
had
changed after all, but it was hardly an Earth-shattering change. It was just that the odd grooved sensation in the gold had gone away, which was a long way from Hsu’s promise of magic.

Down at the base of the hill I saw movement in the fog. Someone was coming toward me.