Unbound (16 page)

He expected shock, or even outrage. What he saw instead was something like fascination. The prospect of a riddle about to be solved.

Seated on a blanket beneath a cathedral-like tree, the Sleemans told him what they knew.

Mona Pendisio had indeed arrived almost six months earlier. Though Sleeman had been surprised at her appearance, he had been in contact with Goddard for almost a year and so he did not question this. She had, after all, a hand-written letter from the man as means of introduction. "I have many letters from Goddard. The writing is a perfect match, I assure you."

"I believe it. Please, go on," Crimson said.

There wasn't much else to say. She'd truly shadowed Sleeman for two months. Observing his investigations, even sitting in on interrogations. She'd been so silent Sleeman had all but forgotten she was there. "A fine woman in polite conversation, but when it came to the work she was nothing more than a fly on the wall. She took her notes without comment, never offered her opinion on anything she saw here, and left with little fanfare."

A month later, when a garrison officer arrived from Bombay with supplies, it became apparent that Mona had not arrived in the city. The Sleemans had been investigating the disappearance ever since, suspecting another Thugee attack as this was the method by which the cult operated.

"And what have you learned?" Crimson asked.

"Not much, I'm afraid," Sleeman admitted.

Crimson glanced around the clearing in the forest. "This will sound strange, but is it possible she fell into a well?"

Sleeman considered this for a moment, then shrugged. "Possible, I suppose. There are enough around. But that does not explain the rest of her caravan."

Crimson nodded. "What brings you out here, then? It's far from the road, or any trail I've seen."

Amélie answered. Despite being raised outside her mother country, she still spoke with a thick French accent. "A villager found footprints in the soil," she gestured where the fallen tree bisected the space, "there. Long washed away, unfortunately."

"Footprints don't seem so odd," Crimson observed.

She shook her head. "This villager helps in our gardens. He thought the prints mine, for he'd seen them before in our flower bed many times. These prints were made by my own boots, which I'd given to Mona as a gift."

Major Sleeman nodded, contemplative. "She was certainly ill-equipped for this place. An odd choice for Goddard to send. Quite dull, really."

"Goddard didn't send her," Crimson said flatly. Then he told them all he knew, deciding to leave nothing out despite the strangeness of the story. The Sleemans hung on every word, exchanging the occasional baffled glance. "And so Goddard sent me in his place via the fastest possible route. I should have beaten her here by weeks, but she arrived months ago."

"So she has a twin," Amélie said.

"My thought exactly."

Sleeman grimaced. "This is a lot to consider, and the day grows short. Come back to the house with us and we'll ponder this over supper."

"If you don't mind," Crimson said, "I'd like to look around a bit."

"It's not safe after dark."

"Because of the Thugs?"

Sleeman gestured to the forest. "They do not work that way. They'll befriend you in town or on the road and offer to travel with you, then strike when you least expect."

Like Malena
, Crimson thought.

"No," Sleeman said, "it is the wildlife you need to fear."

"I'll be all right," Crimson replied. "You found only the footprints here?"

"We never saw them ourselves, but the gardener said they were in a line parallel to this fallen tree. None before, none beyond. I don't understand how that's possible, but I have no reason to doubt the man. Still, embellishment driven by superstition is part of their culture, so who can be sure?"

With that they said their farewells, gathered their gear, and walked back toward town.

John Crimson stood in the now silent glade and just observed. It was possible, he thought, that someone had tried to cover footprints here, but missed Malena's due to a shadow cast by the log. After so many months it would be impossible to prove that, however.

What if, instead, the footprints had been left deliberately? Another hidden message, perhaps even directly to him, like the globe turned to Crimea. He studied the log for several minutes, keenly aware that the Major and his wife had been doing the same thing when he'd found them. The renowned investigator had a similar intuition, and that gave Crimson a touch of hope. Yet he found nothing.

The log pointed south toward town and north toward ever-denser jungle. Crimson then noticed something he should have seen instantly. Where had the log come from? There was no stump from which it had been cut. No broken branch above. It had been placed here, and based on the moss growing atop it, the length of wood had been here for some time. This in and of itself was not remarkable, but when combined with the footprints . . .

Crimson began to walk north, in a line parallel to the tree. At the edge of the clearing he stopped and studied the thick foliage. Sweat soaked his clothes now. Insects made the air around him buzz. He rubbed his eyes, willing more light to spill in as the sun crept lower in the sky. Weak golden beams lanced through a thousand tiny gaps in the canopy.

Nothing out of place. Crimson frowned, growing frustrated. He pushed into the undergrowth and began to walk, as best he could, in a line congruous to the direction the log seemed to point.

Half a mile later he'd all but decided to give up when something ahead caught his eye. A patch of gray amid the greens. Instinctively he slowed to a silent creep, pushing leaves and branches aside, ignoring the sting on his hands from some plant that irritated the skin. The gray began to take the shape of a small pile of rocks.

Not a pile, he realized, but a wall. Man-made, of that he had no doubt. Ancient, from the mold and the black grime between the stones.

He circled it and realized it was not a wall, but a well. A very old abandoned well.

Satisfied he was alone, Crimson swallowed hard and approached the circular structure. Holding his breath and feeling so much the fool for his sudden fear, he peered over the rim.

She fell into a well
, the beggar had said.

Despite that, Crimson expected darkness, or perhaps stagnant water. Only a dark corner of his mind expected the curled body of a woman, dead six months.

What he saw instead was a stone floor, just six or seven feet below the ground. Despite the surroundings there were no leaves or even dirt marring the surface. No sign of water, either. It looked as if recently swept by a broom. A chill ran up John Crimson's spine and as it spread across his scalp he heard a voice. Not a real voice, but one remembered. Malena's, when he'd first spoken to her on Old Kent Road.

I feel as if a child rescued after falling in an abandoned well.
She'd said that. The word “abandoned” such an odd extra detail. At the time he'd found it a bit strange, but mostly endearing. A woman struggling with a learned language, still a bit off.

And now here, in the middle of a jungle in India, he'd been guided to an abandoned well by footprints she'd left. What sort of well only descended six feet and held no water?

On a whim he reached into his bag for the blue scarf. The length of cloth he pulled from its depths was blue no longer, though. Nor had it shifted to black. The fabric was an impossibly brilliant crimson red.

Teeth gritted against a sudden, rising anger, John Crimson sat on the edge of the well and then pushed himself down to the floor.

His feet found only air, though, and then he was falling into absolute darkness.

* * * * *

John Crimson woke to a blinding white light. He lay on a thin mattress that felt like gelatin covered in silk. Tight bindings made of something like porcelain held his wrists, ankles, and torso to the surface.

Malena stood nearby. She had slicked her hair back and wore an outfit like nothing Crimson had seen before. Pale blue in color, it looked almost like a second skin, so tight around her body. She had her arms folded across her chest, and a look of simple curiosity on her face. Wound around one fist was the scarf, and every time she moved her hand a new coloration rippled across its surface. Red, blue, green, yellow, black, white, then clear as glass.

"Where . . . where am I?" Crimson managed.

Malena's mouth tightened into a thin line. "We have much to learn from each other, John Crimson. But first I must give you a new life. Sleep now."

Something tickled the back of his neck, followed by a sharp sting of pain. The world melted into nothingness.

* * * * *

That very evening she broadcast her findings on the system-wide channel, plus a narrow-beam lanced out to the waiting skip drone at the Conduit's entrance.

We are discovered, or nearly so. A riddle carefully laid out has led an Earthling directly to me, rather than earning a claim of witchcraft or something similar as has happened so many times before.

Due to this, and other information I have recently gathered (see attached), I am forced to conclude that Earth has reached the divergent moment. It is my estimation that within several decades Earth's forensic sciences will be sufficient to detect us with no possibility for continued attribution to the supernatural.

Therefore I am ordering a full evacuation from the Zero World, effective immediately (with the exception of the Linguistics Operatives, who may remain for no more than six days in order to ensure final implantation of the guided lexicon, or as much as is possible at any rate).

We will observe from orbit until such time as even that is impossible (my estimate: fifty years local standard), at which time only myself and a core team will remain in system for continued intellectual harvest, to continue the search for our missing Wardens, and of course to protect the Conduit itself.

Thank you for your cooperation. A harvest conclave will begin in sixty-two months, Prime standard. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Monivar Pendo Tonaris

Warden

World 0

In the days and weeks that followed, they left. Silent vessels, inky blotches against the night sky, rising up toward the stars by the dozens.

Terry Brooks

On that late spring morning it wasn’t the weather that ended up ruining Ben Holiday’s day, although the air was gray and coolish and uncomfortably slimy. It wasn’t his teenage daughter Mistaya either, who of late had proved typically troublesome in that teenage sort of way. She was back in school in the Old World, having talked her way into being reinstated after being booted out the year before for behavior unbecoming a student of Carrington Women’s Preparatory. Nor was it the larger world of Landover, which it sometimes seemed was bent on intruding on Ben Holiday’s peace of mind for the express purpose of disrupting it. It wasn’t even Questor Thews making an ill-advised attempt at summoning yet another peculiar form of magic that was well beyond his somewhat limited abilities—although that would contribute to the overall problem later on, when it was too late to turn back the clock.

No, on this morning, it was a simple visit.

“High Lord?” a tinny voice called out from the other side of his closed bedroom door.

His eyes opened, and he lifted his head from the pillow. He had been awake earlier, up before the sun. But after deciding he had few demands on his time that day, he had chosen to stay in bed. So seldom did he get such an opportunity these days. As King of Landover, he ruled over an entire world of very strange creatures. As such, much of what he did involved protecting them, frequently from each other or, rather sadly, him from them, and when momentarily freed from this effort he tried to keep the wheels and cogs of his makeshift government chugging away.

So, a day of just lounging in bed would have been a gloriously pleasant indulgence! Joy, happy happy joy! There he was, drowsing, undisturbed and without a care in the world—which maybe should have been a warning—when the voice called out a second time: “High Lord?”

The voice sounded familiar. And not in a good way. No, instead it nudged to life rather aggressively a recognizable clutch of dark memories that had been buried, if never quite eradicated, by the passing of the days.

“Is he in there?” a second voice whispered, similar in tone but just different enough to be distinguishable.

“He must be. He sleeps in there, doesn’t he?”

“He might have gone out.”

“Where would he go?”

“Anywhere he chooses. He is High Lord.”

Ah, Ben thought in dismay. The light dawned. “Go away!” he shouted at the door. “Far away!”

Gasps sounded. Breath exhaled in a mix of distress and awe. A jumbled muttering of indistinguishable words ensued. A shuffling of feet preceded the sound of bodies crowding up against the door in an effort to get closer.

“Great High Lord!” cried one voice.

“Mighty High Lord!” cried the other.

Filip and Sot. If not his worst nightmare, then something close.