Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (35 page)

“That’s a little petty, Reece,” Scarlet said sagely.

“And you’re a little nosy,” he snapped. “Seems we all have our little faults.”

“Come now, Reece old boy,” Lucius chuckled good-naturedly. “Scarlet does have a point! It’s time to bury the hatchet! Why, I used to resent
you
, if you can believe it—thought you had everything. Well, now I see how miserable you are, I can’t find it in me to resent you in the least!” He half choked on his drink and sat up straighter, looking over their heads. “I say, I think that’s Hogarth Boyle over there, I simply must say hello. Please excuse me.”

As Reece, Nivy, and Scarlet watched him walk a little crookedly to a neighboring table, Reece said, “Wow. I’m really warming up to him.”

Nivy laughed silently into her hand, but Scarlet scowled reproachfully.

“Be nice. He means well, and he’s right. The duke’s your father, Reece…you only get so much time to enjoy him.” Her look added,
I would know
.

“Enjoy him,” Reece repeated dryly, watching the duke as he scanned the dessert menu on a wide datascope a servant was holding before him. “It’s hard to enjoy someone from a distance.”

Lucius returned, bubbling with gossip fresh from the mouth of Hogarth. They all selected their desserts, except for Reece, who despite never having felt emptier, couldn’t make himself eat one more bite. Nivy still picked one for him, clearly with the intention of eating it herself.

“Orpha, I don’t think I’ve heard you say one word,” Lucius said thickly, through a mouth of cheese and red fudge.

Reece very unsmoothly intercepted the attempt at conversation. “She has to save her voice for the theatre.” He lifted up off his seat slightly as a waiter blocked his view of the duke. What was he going to do if someone pulled a gun? He couldn’t outrun a bullet.

He was just considering moving closer to the duke’s table when Lucius gave a dramatic gasp and exclaimed in a hoarse sort of whisper, “Stars above, is that a Vee?”

Reece spun so quickly, his back cracked twice. He, Scarlet, and Nivy followed Lucius’s startled stare to its target and saw a thin, sallow figure observing the ballroom from one of the box seats in a balcony above. Its bald head and dark eyes were visible even from this distance.

“They are a work of modern man, aren’t they?” Lucius said in awe. “Here to keep a special eye on things, no doubt.”

No doubt.

Face grave, Nivy started digging in her handbag; Reece caught her wrist before she could draw her gun.

“Not—yet,” he said through his teeth, wary of Scarlet, who at the moment was staring at the Vee with cold, stiff composure. A few other tables had noticed the Vee, but the general consensus seemed to be in agreement with Lucius’s thought that the Vee was here for everyone’s protection.

Reece had subtly gestured for Nivy to join him in trying to get closer to the duke and was starting to stand when a hand appeared on his shoulder and shoved him back into his chair. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a servant’s dark green sleeve, but it seemed strangely matched to the hand attached, a hand both callused and dirty. He about had a seizure when he twisted his head and found his mysterious waiter was Gideon.

Gid was dressed in the servants’ livery right down to the napkin draped neatly over his forearm, but his jacket was tight in the shoulders, and his sleeves showed too much wrist. It said something that it was seeing him dressed like this that had Reece gaping like a fish out of water, not the fact that one of his cheeks was turning the royal purple of a bruise and his bottom lip bore a fresh red cut.

“Splendid timing!” Lucius declared, very pink in the face. He held up his empty goblet. “I was just about to go get another! Good help here tonight, what?”

Gideon shot Lucius a look of the deepest contempt before kneeling beside Reece’s chair.

“What the bleeding bogrosh are you doing here?” Reece hissed, not dumb to the fact that Scarlet was staring at the both of them with puzzled interest. She knew Gideon well enough to know that his hobbies didn’t exactly include volunteering for servant duty.

“We’ve got a situation,” Gideon mumbled.

Nivy leaned forward to hear better, her second helping of dessert pushed aside. Lucius also leaned forward, and in full view of all, dragged Reece’s mostly full drink
towards himself and knocked it back.

“What kind of situation?”

Hesitating, Gideon opened his mouth, but it was Lucius who spoke. Or, more accurately, sprayed his drink (which was actually Reece’s) everywhere.

“Bleeding bogrosh!” he exclaimed in a slur. “There’s s-something in my drink!”

As his tablemates stared, Lucius used his fork to dig in the dregs of his glass and fish out a small red trinket. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and went cross-eyed holding it before his nose and mumbling, “It’s some sort of pin...dropped by a servant, I suppose…
hic
…I shall most a-assuredly be having a word with—”

Feeling as if someone large had just trodden on his lungs, Reece snatched the red lion head pin out of Lucius’s hand and held it up to the light. It was Mr. Rice’s pin. The one he always,
always
wore, had worn as long as Reece had known him…it had been his wife’s…

He instinctively glanced upward and froze as if caught in a spotlight. The lone Vee remained seated in his lofty box, staring down at Reece with that sinister emotionlessness. As anger seared Reece’s insides and turned his look of shock into a glare of hate, the Vee’s lips parted in a smile.

“That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you,” Gideon said, his voice low beneath the babble of busyness all around them. “Eldritch is onto you. He’s got a hold’a Mr. Rice and Sophie and is likely gonna—”

Reece tried to stand only to find himself being slammed roughly into his seat again.

“That’s what we’re here for.” Gideon sounded half irritated, half amused. “Eldritch is gonna try to distract you from doin’ what you came to do. You keep your mind where it’s been and let us deal with the rest.”

Then tonight
was
the night, if Eldritch wanted to distract him. Well, the plan was working. Reece felt as though a seam down the middle of his chest was being pulled from either side, ripped painfully in two.

“Reece, what’s going on?” Scarlet leaned around Gideon. She was having another rare wringing-of-the-hands moment, looking anxious behind her mask.

Nivy had her own questions. Forgetting or maybe not caring any longer about their charade, she gestured at Gideon, pointing at him and then at the empty spot beside him, wondering—

“Who is
we
?” Reece asked aloud for her.

“Aitch, me. Er…Po.”

Reece choked as if he’d gotten a lungful of bad air. Now wasn’t really the time to lecture Gideon on getting Po involved, but he felt like a parent who’d just found out their child had been sneaked into a raucous party.

“You’d better go, we’re drawing looks,” he told Gideon as he glanced around and met a few too many curious eyes.

Peevishly straightening his napkin, Gideon nodded and turned to go. Then Reece was struck by a sudden inspiration.

“Waiter? Excuse me,
Waiter
?” he said a little loudly, in a voice he hoped was sufficiently pompous.

Gideon paused and turned very slowly, giving Reece a look that promised physical harm should he ever call him that again.

“Would you see these are put in my carriage? I hadn’t realized I’d brought them in.” Reaching into his jacket, Reece pulled out the netted bag of burstpowder marbles, first making sure to tip a few loose in his pocket. “Do take care, won’t you? They’re my uncle’s.”

Gideon bowed deeply, hiding his dark smirk, and accepted the marbles smoothly. They disappeared into his jacket as he crossed to one of the corridor mouths attached to the ballroom, where Reece could see Po daubing Hayden’s bleeding nose with a handkerchief as they waited in matching green uniforms.

Po just had time to wave and smile before she was sucked out of sight by an impatient Gideon yanking on her hand.

“You know,” Lucius mused dazedly, “I don’t think that man is really a waiter at all!”

X
XI

Gid Makes a Promise

Hayden had decided. Of all the things in the galaxy he could hate, the thing he knew for certain he hated the most was feeling helpless. Knowing that Sophie and Father had been taken by The Veritas, knowing how powerless he was on his own to do anything for them…that’s what he hated.

He, Gideon, and Po made it to Emathia in record time. Po hadn’t been exaggerating about the modifications she had made to The Tutor Taxi, or about how rough a ride it would be. They’d been rattled so badly putting down on Emathia’s back meadow, Hayden had bitten down on his sleeve to keep his teeth from chipping together, and Gideon had had a case of emergency medical supplies fall on him.

Somehow, in all the hubbub of servants rushing in and out of the side gate with candlesticks and fresh flowers and replacement strings for the cellist, Gideon, Po, and Hayden managed to slide in unnoticed, just another cluster of servants on their way to work, thanks to the uniforms Gideon had appropriated from The Owl’s Masquerade Committee. They had a brief scare when an alarm started peeling shrilly, but then a red-haired servant hurrying in the opposite direction impatiently waved them on, shouting for the alarm to be shut off.

“I thought we had that fixed! Someone get Watkins!
Get Watkins
!”

They entered the mansion through the back door Reece was in the habit of using whenever he brought Hayden and Gideon home, followed a line of servants pushing dessert trolleys to the ballroom, and then ducked into a dark sitting room to catch their breath. Then Gideon left to warn Reece.

Hayden’s feeling of uselessness was climaxing.

“What now?” he asked when Gideon rejoined him and Po. Gideon hauled them through the sitting room and out into the corridor intersecting it, which was dark and marked off-limits by a thick velvet rope that he stepped over without a second glance.

“Where do we go? Do you think—”

“There was a Vee on one’a the balconies overlookin’ the ballroom. Watchin’ Reece, likely as not. It’ll know where Soph and your da are.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Hayden’s voice cracked as it rose hysterically. He had never been in this wing of the mansion before. Being here now, when it was dark and eerie and there were Vees to face, made him feel like there was a rock bobbing at the bottom of his stomach.”Is that supposed to—”

“Burn it, Aitch!” Gideon hissed, slapping a hand over his mouth. “If you can’t stay calm, you’re gonna have to stay here!”

Po circled around them and looked anxiously into Hayden’s face. “Close your eyes, Hayden,” she said with a tremor in her voice. Without knowing what for, Hayden obeyed. “You just gotta think about…about puttin’ all your thoughts into one tiny seed in your head. Focus really hard on not thinkin’ at all. Take a deep breath.”

The dark clouds Hayden could feel cluttering his brain receded slightly, and he gave a small shiver as he pushed out his breath and opened his eyes. Gideon watchfully peeled back his hand.

“We get to the Vee on the balcony. I say where there’s one, there’ll be two,” he continued as he stripped off his undersized jacket with some difficulty. He pulled his revolver out from behind his belt and began neatly loading it. “I’m gonna try not to have to shoot them. A shot would be loud. Might draw unwelcome attention.”

“How big is this place?” Po wondered as they turned down a hall lit by the frail blue moonlight falling in through its row of oval windows. The light turned their faces blue, made it seem as though they were underwater.

“Four stories, a dozen and some suites, two kitchens, a half a dozen offices and music rooms…” The numbers helped Hayden focus. He rambled them off and felt the dark clouds scroll even further back, till his panic was a quiet buzz in the back of his head. “…then there’s the library, with well over twenty thousand titles, the sunroom, the—”

Gideon suddenly threw out his arms to stop Po and Hayden and backed them up into a stretch of wall between two windows with a shushing sound. On the ground at their feet, the shadow of a tree swayed and convulsed in the wind. And then three shadows, lean and human, glided across the moonlight, as silent as the tree.

Hayden heard Po gulp as she ducked her face into Gideon’s back. His own throat felt like it was sticking when he tried to gulp away the lump that had risen in it.

They waited for some time like that, but there was no more sign of The Veritas than that quick march of shadows. Hayden supposed it might not even have been Vees…but he doubted it. He’d never known a normal human to bring that pins and needles feeling into a room with them.

“Let’s move,” Gideon said, and started walking again so abruptly, Hayden and Po fell against the space where he had been.

They climbed a set of winding stairs, doubled back down a hall on the third story, and then cut through two sitting rooms to reach the collection of curtained doors hiding the balcony box seats. There were a dozen on this floor alone, their black curtains furling and unfurling in the breeze flowing in through the open window at the end of the hall. Hayden clutched his arms around himself, his teeth chattering. It was getting colder outside.

Gideon signaled for him and Po to stay put as he checked the box seats one at a time, using the barrel of his revolver to nudge each curtain aside. His footsteps sank into the mansion’s thick carpets; the only sound was the muffled echo of the orchestra drifting up from the ballroom.

There was a flash of darkness at the edge of Hayden’s vision, where his bifocals stopped and the blurriness began. He swung to the left and blinked down the dim corridor.

“What is it?” Po asked, seizing his hand so suddenly he jumped.

“I thought—I thought I saw—” The curtains shifted in the breeze again, and he relaxed. “Never mind. It was nothing. Just the curtains.”

“There’s nothin’ here,” Gideon called as he thrashed the last curtain aside and disappeared into the box stall. He made an impatient noise. “Wonder where it got to.”

Po, still clutching Hayden’s hand with both of hers, suddenly jerked, yanking his arm hard enough to make his bifocals bounce off the bridge
of his nose. Her fingers slid out from his, raking the back of his hand on their way out.

Fumbling to right his bifocals, Hayden turned and found himself alone in the hallway. Gideon was in the box stall. Po was simply, inexplicably, gone.

“Gideon!” he called in a hoarse whisper. “
Gideon
!”

Something bumped at the other end of the hallway, so softly, it shouldn’t have been frightening at all—but Hayden found the quietness of it terrible, because it left so much to the imagination. His heart hammering, he groped inside his jacket and pulled a small photon wand out of its inside pocket. He aimed with a shaking hand, flicked on the wand, and gasped as the beam grazed a gaunt white face and a pair of black eyes.

With a yelp, Hayden dropped the photon wand. The light swept across Po in its downward spiral. The Vee had her from behind, his spidery fingers over her mouth, his pale lips close to her ear.

Several things happened at once. Moonlight seeped between the cloud coverage and struck the corridor window, turning the hallway blue. Gideon emerged from the box stall, started as he saw the Vee and Po, and snapped his revolver into position. And a nervous-sounding voice called from somewhere nearby, “Is somebody there?”

A second later, a sentry with a shockgun tucked in his shoulder stepped from one of the sitting rooms into the corridor, halfway between Gideon and his revolver and the Vee and Po. He spotted Gideon first.

“Lower your weapon!” he shouted quaveringly, hefting his gun. “I said lower it!”

“Behind you!” Hayden tried to say, but the lump in his throat seemed to be stopping up his voice.

The Vee was pulling Po
backward into shadow; her feet were kicking, dragging, but her hands were pinned against her sides.

“Stay where you are!” the sentry barked as Hayden took a reflexive step after Po. “Just—just stay there!”

“There’s a Vee—”

“I said
stay
there
!”

Po gave one last kick and a stifled scream through the Vee’s hand. The sentry turned
towards the sound…Gideon tilted the revolver resignedly…and Hayden leaped forward with one hand taut and outstretched—

As the knife edge of his hand chopped across the cluster of nerves under the sentry’s chin, the man’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped forward like a puppet cut from his strings, landing facedown with a dull thud. His shockgun went off with a deafening bang as it fell beneath his hand. Po screamed.

It might have been the only time in Hayden’s life he ran as fast as Gideon, tearing down the hall, his bifocals jumping on his nose. Po’s supine shape materialized through the darkness, curled into a ball with her arms wrapped around her head.

“I’m—I’m alright,” Po said without uncovering her face as Hayden knelt and touched her shoulder. “I’m fine—the shot hit his leg—h-he went through there—” She pointed her little finger at the cupboard door at waist height on the wall above her.

Gideon bumped the door open with his knee, frowning. “You recognize this, Aitch?”

Gently prizing Po’s arms apart, Hayden said distractedly, “It’s the chute that goes down to the stream, isn’t it? For the servants to send laundry to the washers? Po, are you sure you’re alright?” he added as Po emerged from behind her guard with quivering eyes and a dazed expression. She nodded unconvincingly.

“Aitch,” Gideon suddenly said, “don’t ever do that again.”

“Do what?”

“Jump out like that when I’m gettin’ ready to take a shot. Could’a hit you. You think’a that?”

Swallowing dryly, Hayden tried to sound as if he had. “I’m sure you wouldn’t have.”

A reverberating
crack
cut through the silence. Hayden’s ears rang dully as he yelpingly ducked down next to Po, who was covering her face again, this time with good reason. As shockgun pellets splattered the wall above them, plaster and dust puffed out into their air, blinding, choking.

As he crouched against the baseboard, Gideon shouted angrily, “You didn’t kill him?”

The “him” was pointed at the sentry down the hall, who was wrestling with his shockgun, trying to reload with shaking hands while shouting into his wireless. The sound of his approaching reinforcements rumbled down a nearby hallway like thunder.

“Of all the ludicrous—of course I didn’t kill him! Why would I kill him?”

“Maybe,” Gideon yelled as he dove, picked the unmoving Po up around the waist, and stuffed her unceremoniously into the chute, “so somethin’ like
this
wouldn’t happen!” As Po leaned her head out of the chute, mouth open, he snapped at her, “What are you waiting for, burn it?
Get down there
!”

White faced and startled, Po disappeared again, her clunky boots clanking against the sides of the dark tunnel.

“You there! Halt!”

Uniformed sentries were pouring into the corridor, organizing themselves into two rows, the front most on its knees. It reminded Hayden of a firing squad, but…oh.

Gideon roughly grabbed the back of his neck, doubled him over, and pushed him into the chute. His knees smashing against the floor of the tunnel, he rolled once, holding his bifocals against his face, and then shouted as the floor fell out from under him. His heart flew into the region of his adam’s apple as he slid down the steep chute, his jacket occasionally squeaking over the tin flooring. He could hear Gideon crashing down behind him, curse words interspersed with thuds, but he daren’t open his eyes. His stomach was rebelling as it was.

The tunnel spat him out abruptly. It was a moment before Hayden’s head stopped spinning and he trusted it enough to look around. The night was cold and black, its starlight blotted out by scudding silver clouds. Tufts of snow peppered the air, made prisms out of the distant lights of the mansion, and laid a fuzzy carpet on the frozen stream beneath his back.

Po, nearly to the river bank where there was a line of stout stools for the washers, twisted her neck to look at him. She was sprawled on her stomach, dragging herself along by her elbows.

“Hurry, Hayden,” she whispered as if her voice alone was enough to shatter the ice. “It’s real thin…you can see the water runnin’ underneath…”

Hayden’s stomach flip-flopped as if he’d missed a step. He couldn’t swim.

He had just touched one tentative hand to the stinging ice when Gideon shot out of the chute. There was a sound like a muffled gunshot—a shudder ran through the ice, he felt it in his legs—and then he was sinking, and Po was screaming, and the water was so cold that his brain went utterly blank.

His feet dragged against the bottom of the stream as it pulled him downriver, and he tried to plant them and push up, to get back to the surface, but his muscles were oddly unresponsive.
That’ll be the early onsets of hypothermia
, he told himself, like that was any reassurance. He started to panic; his throat worked compulsively, trying to gulp air. His heart was plodding very quickly in his ears, like the fast, wet footsteps of someone running.

Something caught him under the armpit; it felt like he’d collided with a steel bar. He tried to use it to pull himself
towards the ice, towards air, to find it was the bar that was doing the pulling, not him.

His head scraped over the top of the water, and he sucked in a breath that tried to fill his lungs with frost. Coughing, he let himself be dragged out of the water and dropped, sodden and shivering, onto the crunchy grass.

He opened his blurry eyes. His bifocals had managed to cling to the very tip of his nose during his underwater tumble.

“G-G-Gid—” he stammered in time with his shivers.

“He’s alright,” Po said from somewhere beside him, sounding uneasy. “They pulled you both out.”

Hayden tried to ask, “They?” but he’d begun shaking so wildly, he didn’t trust himself not to accidentally bite off his tongue if he unclenched his teeth. Lifting a hand, he shoved his bifocals up his nose. The scene slid into focus, and despite his shivering, he managed a sort of tremulous groan.

An unaccounted-for silver and blue glow was giving everything a curious backlight. He’d drifted maybe fifty feet downriver—he could see the mouth of the chute in the hillock behind Po, the two Veritas holding either of her arms, and the dark mound on the grass at their feet. The mound seemed to coughing up a pint or so of water. Gideon.

There were four other Vees. Two had sleeves that were wet up to their shoulders, but for all the care they showed, you would have thought the air quickly crusting Hayden’s clothes felt tepid to them.

“We recognize them,” one of the Vees said to the others, voice flat and unfeeling.

“Reece Sheppard’s companions,” supplied the Vee who had Gideon’s revolver dangling on his hooked finger.

“How curious.”

“Shall we question them?”

“Time. There isn’t enough time. Reece Sheppard has not taken the bait as expected. He must not be allowed to interfere.”

One of the Vees made a thoughtful noise as he stalked in a circle around Hayden. “Even now, he speaks with Thaddeus Sheppard. Our plan goes awry.” He glanced
towards the grey garden hedges made small by the short walk across the grounds.

“Charles Eldritch knows this. He has plans to deal with Reece Sheppard accordingly. But what of these?”

Behind Po, who was sagging between her captors as if her knees had gone slack, Gideon raised his head. Hayden caught his eye and tried begging silently,
Please don’t try anything, please
…

“Take them to the rest. We shall speak to Charles Eldritch, see what he doesn’t want done with them.”