“What’s the water?”
Frankie Fossoyeur stops and looks at her sharply. “I beg your pardon?”
“In your example. What replaces the water, in the case of the mind?”
“That,” Frankie Fossoyeur says, “is the first intelligent question I have been asked in twelve months. But you see, this is exactly the point. The water is the basic stuff of the universe. It is what matter and energy are made of. Hah! Tell the little Swiss I have overreached him!”
“Miss Fossoyeur …”
“Doctor.”
“Doctor Fossoyeur. What does it do?”
“It doesn’t do anything yet. It is a science, not a technology.”
“But in theory?”
“In theory it allows us to see the truth of things. The absolute truth. And perhaps later … well. The absolute truth is good enough to begin with, no?” She looks at Edie.
Edie looks at her a bit blankly. “I don’t understand.”
“How many wars will be averted? How many lives spared, if the truth cannot be obscured? If any statement can be tested for verity? Imagine the advances in understanding. In science. To know … Suppose you could look at the world, Miss Banister, and recognise lies and deception when you heard them. Would that not improve the lot of mankind? The death of falsehood. A new age constructed on the foundation of truth, Banister.”
“Commander Banister.”
Frankie Fossoyeur smiles suddenly. It’s like an English summer; a rare, rich blessing, warm on the skin. “Of course: Commander,” she says impishly. Her eyes travel the length of Edie’s body and she grins rather wickedly.
Edie Banister actually blushes. Lions and tigers and bears … oh, my …
“We really, really need to go,” she says.
“Non. I cannot escape. I must finish my work. You must come back another day. Or perhaps after, it will not be necessary. Hein?”
Dotty Catty huffs. “Frankie, no. Absolutely no. She cannot come back, she cannot wait, the whole thing must be tonight. The timing is precise.”
Frankie Fossoyeur waves this away. “Consider … by how much might the lot of man be improved, in a world where truth was ubiquitous? One per cent? Five? How much positive adjustment is necessary to pass the tipping point and enable the spontaneous formation of a utopia?” Frankie beams. Then her face falls. “Oh. Although too much truth could create problems on a physical level. And one most definitely would not wish to create a determining cascade …” She scribbles frantically.
Dotty Catty throws her bony hands into the air. “Frankie! Commander Banister! You must leave, now!”
“I cannot, I am working—”
“Now! It must be now!”
“We could possibly wait a few hours,” Edie suggests, still looking at Frankie Fossoyeur’s smudged cheek.
“No, you couldn’t. It has started.”
This is true, but Edie catches in Dotty Catty’s voice some hint of more, and she wrenches her eyes away from the bemused Frankie Fossoyeur and looks at her guide.
“What’s started?”
Dotty Catty shrugs, a fine, unapologetic old-lady shrug, and half-turns her back.
“My plan.”
“Your plan.”
“My diversion.”
“What diversion?”
“I have created a diversion, in the finest military tradition, so that you may carry out your mission.”
“What diversion?”
“The gas taps in the kitchens,” Dotty Catty says. “I have arranged that they should catch fire.” She beams. Somewhere to one side, one of the Ruskinites makes a horrified choking noise. Brother Denis the Ruskinite stares at her, aghast.
“But this palace is constructed over a natural-gas reservoir,” he says in horror. “The entire citadel … You’ll blow the whole place like a bomb!”
“Yes,” Dotty Catty says. “It will be very distracting.”
And just like that, Edie Banister is having a really bad day.
Still swearing in terms fit to curdle whisky, Edie Banister hurtles through the burning palace with a wooden crate on wheels.
“My treasure!” the dratted old woman said, after Edie had screamed at her and put Frankie Fossoyeur in a fireman’s lift to short-circuit the escape discussion. “The last of all of them from Mansura, that is no more! In all the world, there is no greater virtue, no more splendid thing. The crate in the west chamber of my apartments—for God’s sake, take it to George in London! There are others here, but they are old, they cannot go with you. This will be their grave, one way or another. But this one … promise me!”
Edie has never been one to turn down a friend—never mind the grey-haired old tub has blown this operation to six kinds of shit with one finely judged insanity (Rig a gas explosion, you potty old trout? You’re out of your bloody head!) and never mind there may be utility in it, too, for good King George. This is a personal matter between Women of Consequence, and hell if whatever is in the crate will come to harm, even get a flake of ash on it.
She gave Dotty Catty a piece of her mind, though, while through the corridors she staggered, carrying that damned squealing scientist on her back and feeling the while a wash of sympathy for the abductors from the seraglio, and why in all the world was she running away with this bony genius without the sense God gave a hedgehog when she could be legging it out the back door with At Your Service and a couple of close friends for an entirely more agreeable adventure?
Girls wishing to serve their country … Aiee, what a mess. Although it was almost worth it to see a dozen monks hike up their habits and run for the hills with only what they could carry and Frankie’s blessed compressor—whatever that may be—on a trolley.
At her room, Edie handed the outraged Frankie to Songbird and told him to get her to the river, get help, get it now, signal Cuparah, get us the Hell out! Let’s have the marines and never mind who knows it!
Then she barged out into the corridor, demanding directions and bloody quick, smelling smoke and thinking about how many kilos of gas at how much pressure per square inch exploding with how much force? Which was about when the first explosion erupted and the whole place shook and seemed to heel over like a ship in a beam sea, and when she got to her feet again the fire was really under way and a lot of bits of palace were looking alarmingly diagonal where they should have been perpendicular.
Dotty Catty embraced her and wrapped a purple sash from her frocks around Edie’s upper arm, which was for some reason terribly significant, and hugged her again and cried “Women of Consequence!” which was very nice except Edie had a strong desire to belt her.
So here she is now making the return trip, hauling the crate along—and bloody Nora, it’s heavy, whatever it is, and something in it rattling around fair to capsize the box. No time to complain, though: get to the boat, and worry about it later. Though how she will explain herself to captain and crew in her present state, as far from covert as is easily imaginable, she has no idea.
Bugger it.
A carpet flops flaming off the wall, tries to snag her. Hah! Missed me … But oops, that was a near one for the fragile crate, oh, yes—the floating ash spreads spectral fingers. Edie wrenches the crate into motion, and this time the thing or things within are cooperating—they rebound off the inside back wall. The crate flexes, damnit, and creaks and wheezes. That’s another concern: pull too hard and it will apparently break open, slew its contents across the steaming floor and then where will we be? Fine reet’n’harsefuckered, as Songbird would have it. Edie lets the crate surge ahead of her on its lanyard, finds herself, ludicrously, admiring her own forearm against the ruddy firelight.
Focus.
Another colossal boom shakes the palace. An arch collapses to one side, great chunks of solid stone crumbling and cracking in the heat, popping as air bubbles rip them open from the inside. Edie growls sulphurously—a spark has scored her shoulder through the jacket—and gets her mind on business. This isn’t nearly the mother lode going up
, this is just the appetiser, plus who knows what appalling muck lurks in Fossoyeur’s cavern, or what will happen when it is burned or crushed or otherwise perturbed? Frankie seemed to think—between bounces on Edie’s shoulder—that this was a thing to be viewed from a great distance or not at all … At this rate the place will explode long before she can get clear, and that is absolutely not on the menu for today. No immolation, so she needs inspiration … Oh ho! Induction, Compression, Combustion, Exhaust. Four stages of the internal combustion engine (which Edie learned for the purposes of sabotage) but here’s the key: locomotion. The horseless carriage. And there it is, no motor but lots of momentum and didn’t the boys back home all have one of these? A go-cart, a tray with wheels. Yes, they did, and no girls allowed to play. Hah!
Edie grabs the lanyard and braces her feet against the back of the crate, lets the thing’s weight carry them both, kicks off the ground from time to time to steer and add velocity. Escape by go-cart, not bad at all. She sniffs. There’s a strange smell, peppery and agricultural. The contents of the crate are apparently padded with river mud.
Focus.
Aye, indeed, for there’s a way to go yet, here’s the bad part starting: dead men, burning, in heaps. Cuparah’s marines at work there, or Songbird and the lads. Edie’s stomach lurches at the sweet, appetising smell, then revolts as her mind catches up with the notion, and she nearly brings up. Some friendly (if thank God not well-known to her) others not (well, mercifully neutral now) but all men and not kabob, no matter what the nose believes. She kicks hard to take the go-cart around the edge of the slaughter, don’t slow down, don’t stop, not for anything.
Ah! Good decision: there’s a live one, armed, the bastard, and swirling his cleaver about the place and gnashing furious teeth. Fine reet’n’harsefuckered … Edie skates towards him, thinking fast. Speed and heft are their own advantage, and this unconventional conveyance has confused him slightly. The man is a brigand in the pay of the Opium Khan; it’s not every day he is assailed by a willowy white lunatic in forest green, borne along on a wave of fire by a box on wheels. Indeed, there probably aren’t many people who have great familiarity with this situation.
He regains his composure and comes towards her. Edie grounds her heel abruptly, sends her carriage into a spin, then lets the heavy crate swing her around like a child at the village fete. Maypole budo! Her right foot catches him in the noggin, and down he goes like a sack of taters. Blast it, though, he has a friend in the corridor, a few paces away, and that’s a really nasty-looking knife, so it is, more a sword. Under Mrs. Sekuni’s tutelage, she has learned to identify weapons; this is a bastard crossbreed, of course, not a wakizashi or a cutlass or even a bowie knife, but the offspring of a machete and a cleaver. Damn, he’s big. Hypersomnia big.
The man raises his weapon, and roars.
Bugger.
Edie scoots out of the way, abandoning the precious crate, and has to duck very fast as Hypersomnia Boy comes charging in much faster than she anticipated. Just her luck: he’s got brains and skill to match his brawn. Surely that’s not allowed?
First thing: don’t die. Edie scoots left and he chops the other way, misses her.
Cla-boiiing! That sword’s a decent piece of work, too, throwing up sparks and vibrating, but not a chip nor crack as he drives it solidly into the mosaic floor and hauls it out. Hauls it out very close to Edie’s hips, and that would have cut her in half … she rolls away, regains her feet. Yama Arashi … a woman would have to be very skilled or very desperate, and in either case very brave … Edie wonders briefly whether the big lad would listen to a discussion on the relative merits of Asiatic Despotism versus planned economy and a dictatorship of the proletariat, culminating in a suggestion that he change sides, and concludes that Yama Arashi has the edge—but only just.
He comes again. She moves forward instead of back, and commits the cardinal sin of anticipating the attack, beginning the technique before he has given the opportunity. Fortunately, he misses the mistake, or doesn’t know what her movement portends. Edie’s arms slide between his, her hips come between him and the sword. Merge the ki. Or as Frankie Fossoyeur would no doubt say: let your centre of gravity and rotation displace your opponent’s … The movement continues, and she feels a feather pressure on her back, hears him land and swirls on. In the dojo, you finish with the sword against uke’s neck. In real life, the sword is heavier and Yama Arashi and mortal combat have their own logic … tchuck.
Scratch one giant.
Don’t look too closely. Don’t think about it too much. Collect the crate, and find the good guys.
Edie rattles away down the passageway, surfing the crate, scared out of her mind and appalled at what she has done and loving every primal second.
At the throne room, it all comes apart on her.
“Well, Commander Banister, goodness me. There seems to have been some tragic misunderstanding. Your men here are very eager to release you from some dungeon or other—I couldn’t persuade them you were an honoured guest. And in the meantime, my soldiers here are most anxious to protect me from any violence, and some unhappy soul has set my great palace on fire. Why, Commander Banister, whatever is that remarkable box?”
“A gift from your mother, Khan,” Edie says in James Banister’s voice, pats her face to make sure of her moustache, though God knows what difference it makes now … yes. She’s still a boy. “Wants me to take it to the King, apparently. Tell me, is this place full o’ bandits or did one of your fellows just try to cut my head off?” She gives it an extra sting, says awf rather than off. “Dashed poor form, if so, Khan, me being an ambassador and all.”
The palace guard of Shem Shem Tsien are not armed in the full modern style—the Opium Khan likes the feel of antiquity, or doesn’t trust his lads with serious automatic weapons—but there are a few pistols, and a crossbow will kill you just as readily as a bullet—or more so, if you happen to have taken shelter behind something. In training, Edie saw a crossbow bolt pass through a metal plate. There are comfortably two hundred of the Khan’s warriors in this room, all around their master. Standing opposite them are the thirty-odd marines from Cuparah, led by Songbird and Flagpole, looking very determined and very doomed. No sign of Frankie or Dotty Catty, which pray God means they’re aboard already, and the mission is all but complete. Now … just a question of everyone not dying here. Stand-off, but not the good kind.
The Opium Khan surveys his situation, and seems about to speak. Then he looks at Edie, and for the first time she sees the truth of him. The hectoring matinée villain fades away, the cheery roguish smile vanishes, and in its place is the thing which locked a family in a room and incinerated them. It’s like watching a snake emerge from the corpse of a wolf. Another explosion rattles the room, closer this time.
“This no longer interests me,” Shem Shem Tsien says flatly. “Kill them all. Put out the fire. I will want their heads, of course.”
The soldiers of the Opium Khan roll forward in a wave, and Edie’s boys go to meet them. It is the time-honoured tradition of the sons of England’s North: when all is lost, advance to give the enemy his scars. They are making a fight of it, too, impossible though that seems, and then Shem Shem Tsien unsheathes his sword and joins the fray, and Edie learns what butchery is.
Shem Shem Tsien is perfect. It comes from his feet, she’s fairly sure. His feet take him where he wants to go and you least wish him to be. He comes at your bad side, your wounded leg, your blackened eye. He is lithe and strong, but it’s not his arm and shoulder which power the narrow blade he carries, but his heels and hips. He moves through the battle like the shuttle on a loom, trailing threads of human extinction. Edie wonders, honestly, whether even the Sekunis were ever so graceful.
She moves towards him as he skewers a man whose name she has forgotten, one of Amanda Baines’s marines, and even the weight of the corpse adds to his momentum and his rhythm. He steps to one side and brings his wrists together as another soldier surges at him,
then rolls his blade in a gesture she has always assumed is pure swordsman’s swank. The edge rolls around his opponent’s neck in a perfect circle, the man twisting as if trying to follow the hilt with his lips, his blood pouring from a massive wound.
Edie watches Shem Shem Tsien and knows she cannot beat him or even survive him unless God provides a miracle. She goes forward anyway. Her vision narrows to Shem Shem Tsien and him alone, and he sees her, and—to her fury—barely notices her intent. He draws a pistol from his belt and fires left-handed as if to swat her away, and only the broad back of Flagpole saves her from death.
Flagpole stares at her, genially lascivious. “Ey, Countess,” he says quietly. “Tha’s a shame.” And then he falls forward into her arms and she can see the hole in his spine.
Shem Shem Tsien smiles, and Edie can feel his satisfaction. She can hear him in her head. Alas for the limitations of budo, Commander Banister. I find it is a particular pleasure, to the sophisticated mind, to force an officer to watch the death of the soldiers in his care. It has piquancy. Wouldn’t you say?
She realises that she has lost. Frankie will get away, it’s true. Edie will have completed her mission. But she will have died a secret agent’s death in a far land, and no one will ever know. She wonders if Abel Jasmine will cry, or Clarissa Foxglove. She wonders how many sweethearts of her soldiers will weep into ragged pillows, back home, and whether they will blame Commander James Banister personally, or just curse the fortunes of war. She raises her hands into the most cautious of guard positions, and gets ready to die.