The Illusionists (15 page)

He came out of it fighting.

He kicked, and the pressure on his arm eased. A thump and a rattle of metal on metal in his ears.

‘He's awake!' called a voice.

‘Oh, really?' said a second voice from the floor, with a wheezy note. ‘I couldn't tell.'

The trunk of someone came into his sightline, but at a strange angle.

I'm lying down,
he thought.
Why?

He made to get up, but it was a struggle. Everything felt weak and pliant, as if he'd been drugged.

Kidnapping?

‘Mussyer de Forde?' said the first voice, above him. He managed to lever himself up to sitting. His hands gripped smooth, thick sheets.

It was a hospital room.

Unadorned, spartan. But expensive. The furnishings were heavy, well made. A man in a blue doctor's robe peered at him, looking anxious. Frith didn't know his face.

A second doctor appeared from the direction of the floor. He had a thin hand pressed to his side.

‘I kicked you. I'm sorry.'

‘It's quite all right,' the second doctor replied, his voice still a little frayed. ‘Reflexes.'

‘Where am I, please?'

‘You're in Laennec Medicale, in Vaucresson.'

‘Which Vaucresson?'

The doctors exchanged glances. ‘Sorry,' said the first. ‘I'm not sure what you –?'

‘Am I in Angle Tar?'

‘Well  …  of course. Vaucresson. Just outside Parisette.'

He felt a very peculiar sensation begin to pick its way delicately through every bit of him. It danced as it went, leaving in its wake nothing but an awful, empty blank.

Parisette meant something. Parisette rearranged itself to Capital City in his mind. Vaucresson, too – vaguely, though he didn't think he'd ever been there.

But he didn't know what to think of next.

What would place things for him? Remembering what had happened to land him in a hospital. But he didn't remember. Okay, so before that. What did he do?

He was a  …  he worked for a company. Some sort of company that went overseas a lot.

Wasn't it?

Where did he live?

Somewhere. Somewhere  …  in Capital. Or  …  outside it?

What was his name?

‘Syer?' said the doctor, his voice a careful, balanced note. ‘How do you feel?'

‘What happened?' he said. A peculiar sensation trickled down the crease in his back. He tried to ignore its spread.

‘We're not entirely sure. You've been  …  unconscious for three days, almost. You were found in your rooms on campus.'

The sensation reached his thighs, blossoming. He felt a surging in his veins.

Panic,
he thought.
This is panic.

‘I don't remember,' he said. His voice was beautifully calm.

‘Perhaps it will come back to you in time. For now we need –'

‘No. You don't understand.'

He looked at the doctor.

‘I don't remember anything,' he said. ‘I don't know who I am.'

The panic blossomed like a fire, covering him.

‘You can't,' said the Spymaster.

‘Can't I?'

‘It's all nonsense. I can have you detained, and you know it. You have amnesia, Frith. You're ill.'

The Spymaster regarded him. He always seemed as though he was looking at you with his moustache. It bristled with the slightest movement of his face, alive.

Frith remembered him, but not well. He knew, now, that he worked for the Spymaster. He knew that he lived in Capital. He knew his own name. He knew certain things. But there was no detail, no whole. It was like trying to see through fog. He strained and peered, but glimpsed only the ghosts of memories, vague shapes. And there were still whole chunks of his life, of
himself
, that were missing, as if hidden behind a locked door.

He needed a key.

He thought, perhaps, he had a key.

‘Penhallow,' he said. ‘It's a name. One of the few things I can remember clearly. Did you find anything?'

‘It's rather hard to simply conjure up information from so little to go on.'

But Frith hadn't lost everything of himself, it seemed. Some things were like muscle reflex, close to the surface and automatic. He knew the Spymaster was lying.

‘Just tell me,' he said, sharp. ‘My reports. You said that I'm a meticulous notekeeper. Did you find the name Penhallow in them?'

The Spymaster looked at him. The look said that normal Frith wasn't so expressive, so emotional. That he was behaving unusually. It maddened him. Everyone around him knew more about Frith than Frith did.

‘Yes,' he said shortly.

‘Well?' said Frith, after a pause.

‘You really don't remember, do you?'

Frith wanted to scream.

Do you think I'm making this up, you ridiculous idiot? Do you think this is fun for me? What possible motive could I have?

‘
As my doctors have already attested to you,' he said out loud, his voice clipped with anger.

‘It was only a few months ago.'

‘Time apparently means nothing in my case. There are whole swathes of my childhood that have gone. Neither can I remember anything that happened just a week ago. So, please, enlighten me.'

The Spymaster shifted on his chair, and took a look around the room. His distaste for hospitals was clear. In another life where he was a whole person, Frith might have wondered why. In another life, he might have
known
why.

‘Very well,' said the Spymaster. ‘Penhallow is the name of a hedgewitch you recruited a girl from. Her apprentice, Rue – she came up here with you a few months ago for the Talent programme.'

‘Recruited?'

‘Good gods, Frith. Your programme. Your obsession, I might add,' he said, with a puckering of the lips. He clearly didn't like Frith's programme, whatever it was. ‘The Talent. You can't have forgotten the Talent.'

That was it. The last straw.

‘Well, I have, haven't I?' Frith said, his voice rising. ‘I obviously have, otherwise I wouldn't have to keep asking you what the hell you're talking about. Will you please just assume that I've forgotten everything pertinent and get to the damn point?'

The Spymaster's expression was one of pure shock.

I don't normally lose my temper,
thought Frith.

‘Calm down, or I'll have the doctor back in here with a sedative,' said the Spymaster.

Frith closed his eyes.

Just hang on. Press down on the constant waves of fear that you ride, up and down and up and down until you feel permanently sick, your stomach full of poison balls.

Press down on that voice that screams at you, tells you you'll never get your memories back. That this half-person is all you can ever be now.

Ignore that feeling of vertigo like you're falling over, again and again, even though you're perfectly still. Press it all down. Press it away.

He opened his eyes.

‘I apologise,' he said. His voice was even. ‘This situation has been a bit of a strain. I just  …  I need to know. I think you can understand that. Some piece of the mystery. A lead to follow. I just need something. Anything.'

He watched the moustache in front of him twitch and huff.

‘Penhallow,' the Spymaster repeated eventually, and Frith silently rejoiced. ‘It's the only thing you remember?'

‘No, not the only thing,' said Frith. ‘But the name is very clear to me, when everything else feels grey. The name  …  and a forest. A forest by a riverbank.'

And a horrible, sick feeling when he thought about that riverbank. Something had happened there.

‘Well, she does live in a rather rural area. The two might be connected.'

Frith leaned forward. ‘Where?'

‘Why? So you can go there?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you think I'd let you?'

Frith looked at him for a long moment. He may have had the appearance of a benevolent walrus, but he hadn't got to Spymaster without being extraordinarily clever and determinedly ruthless.

‘I think you'd let me have a sabbatical,' said Frith at last. ‘For my health. Considering what state I'm currently in, I can hardly go back to work at the moment. I think you'd want me to try any means necessary to restore my full faculties.'

‘In which case, I think the best course of action would be to keep you here and let the doctors have a good look at you, Frith.'

‘The doctors don't even know what happened to get me in this state. They can't even tell me why I was unconscious. The doctors haven't a clue and you know it, because undoubtedly that is the exact same thing they've reported to you, albeit probably in somewhat less truthful language.'

‘That doesn't mean they won't.'

‘Then give me two weeks. Two weeks to get there and see what I can unlock. If I come up with nothing, you can send whomever you like after me. You can come yourself to drag me all the way back.'

It was an interesting way to test just how important an asset he was. Evidently very, because the Spymaster seemed to be contemplating his offer quite seriously.

‘Fine,' he said abruptly. ‘I don't have the time or the energy to argue with you. I have to get back to Capital before it all falls apart without me.'

He levered himself off the chair and stood, looking over Frith. ‘But if anything goes wrong down there, just know that no one will be coming to rescue you. A hedgewitch is not a doctor. You'll get no proper medical care. When the two weeks is up, if I haven't heard from you, I'll start sending people, Frith.'

‘Fine,' said Frith. ‘The address?'

The Spymaster's moustache twitched sluggishly. ‘A village called Tregenna, on the west coast of Bretagnine. Ask anyone you like for the hedgewitch Penhallow once you get there. They'll all know their local hedgewitch. You can get down to the Bretagnine border by public train, then hire a private carriage to Tregenna.'

‘Do I have money?' said Frith.

The Spymaster seemed about to laugh, but checked himself. ‘Do you have money?' he repeated. ‘Yes. You do. But you won't even need that. Just tell the public train staff your name. You're a de Forde. They'll fall over themselves to give you credit.'

He nodded stiffly, then moved to the door.

‘You weren't unconscious, you know,' he said.

‘What?'

The Spymaster lingered in the doorway. ‘When they found you. I don't know what they've been telling you, but you haven't been unconscious this entire time. You've been awake. But gone. Vacant. The way people look when they're daydreaming, only it was impossible to snap you out of yours. They tried everything.'

Frith felt a feather touch of sickness in the pit of his belly.

‘I'm telling you this because I don't believe it's a medical condition. I believe it's something else. And my advice to you is to brush up on the Talent on your way down there. It's something to do with that godsdamned Talent. Read your notes. You have extensive research on it from your prized possession, White.'

The Spymaster regarded him carefully, as if expecting to see his face change.

Frith just looked back at him.

‘White,' the Spymaster repeated, raising a brow. ‘Who mysteriously vanished around the time this happened to you. No one's been able to find him yet.'

‘I don't know what you want me to say,' Frith replied, annoyed. ‘I don't remember who that is. Why is he so important?'

‘It doesn't matter. Let me worry about that. I have people out on the hunt.'

The Spymaster watched him for a moment more, his gaze calculating something. But what?

Then he left, mercifully closing the door behind him.

Frith settled back against his pillows, his mind working furiously.

The Talent.

Penhallow.

A key.

Tregenna looked positively dreary in the rain.

Vaucresson had been bad enough. This was backwater hell. The roads weren't even gravelled properly. The private coach was a ramshackle thing, its horses plodding and bowed. Still, his name had got him all the way down here without a hitch, and the bank in Vaucresson had been only too happy to loan him enough to live on like a king for a month or more. Because if he didn't have the answers he needed in two weeks' time, he wasn't coming back. As long as it took.

The private coach dropped him off in the village square, and the driver, who was local, had given him directions to the river. He had no idea which spot of the river it would be, but it made sense to head for the nearest bank to the village and go from there until the picture in his head matched the view in his eyes.

His bags stored safely at the best room in the local inn, he set off, walking briskly under his shade while the rain tried to batter him into submission.

It only took about half an hour to find it, a little way down from an obviously popular spot where the grass was worn thin. It was a scrubby bit of the bank, well hidden with wild tangles of vegetation and tall sentry trees. It looked lost and forgotten. This was it. The place he could remember so well when all else was locked away.

Frith stood on the bank, hugging the handle of his shade to his chest, watching the rain chop at the surface of the river. He turned in a slow circle, taking everything in. Each part of the scenery he let his eyes rest on for a few moments. He didn't force anything, allowing it to sink into him. Releasing him.

But it didn't come.

The fog didn't lift. Not even a little bit.

Desperation reared its head. He felt it crash through him. He screamed in pure frustration and threw his shade at the nearest tree. It bounced off and fell onto the mulching leaves, and he let himself stand in the rain, welcoming the way it soaked him and made his shoulders shiver miserably.

‘What in seven hells are you doing here?' came a voice.