The Providence Rider

Twenty-One

BERRY awakened in the light of the candle at her bedside. She lay still, listening. A dog was barking out in the town. Another answered from a different direction. She wasn’t sure it was the noise that had roused her from her troubled sleep. No, there was something else…

An object clinked against one of the windows that overlooked the courtyard. She sat up. A second object hit the glass. There was no doubt. Someone was throwing pebbles from below. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and got out of the comfortable goose-down bed, with its rose-colored canopy. She pulled her dark blue sleeping-gown a little closer about herself, and taking the candle in its pewter holder she walked toward the door that opened onto her balcony.

It had been a day she would never forget. For that matter, what day lately—since being taken from the Great Dock pier by the East Indian giant with diamonds in his front teeth—had been forgettable? But at least the ordeal in the Nightflyer’s brig was far behind her, though not very far from her memory. She and Zed had been removed from the ship after nightfall, put into a closed carriage and driven to this inn, where again under cover of the night they were brought in through the dark green gate. Once inside they were separated, and Berry ushered to this room by a heavy-set Scotsman with a red tuft of hair atop his dome and a red tuft of hair on his chin while two husky men with muskets took Zed away. A meal of baked fish, corncakes, some kind of green melon and black tea had arrived at her room on a tray borne by a young woman with long ebony hair and coffee-colored skin. The door had been locked from the outside when the young woman departed. Later on, she had returned with the sleeping-gown, which she lay upon the bed for Berry. Again, upon leaving she locked the door. Berry had stepped outside onto the balcony and seen by torchlight the two tough-looking men with muskets talking in the courtyard below. Another movement had caught her attention and she’d seen Zed standing on a balcony one room over from hers. Zed had not paid her a penny of attention, but had been focused on watching the musket-men.

Though her mind was concerned with thoughts of what might be happening to Matthew—and her fears, she realized, were likely much more treacherous than the reality, since Matthew was a sort of guest here—she found sleep easily enough when she donned the nightgown and slipped into bed, simply because she was exhausted. But now, with the clinking of pebbles against the glass, Berry was fully awake as she followed the candle’s glow to the balcony door.

The night was still and warm, and down in the courtyard the torches were still burning. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. Two or three hours, possibly? But something was missing. She leaned carefully over the railing. Where were the armed guards, who looked as if they’d never skipped a meal of hog’s fat, horse meat and baby’s bones?

A shadow moved. It became a huge bearded black man, bald-headed, with massive shoulders jammed into a clean yellow shirt. He wore his baggy brown breeches and had on scuffed black boots. His tribal-scarred face peered up at Berry and he made a motion with his arms that Berry could read as if he were speaking to her.

He said, Jump.

“I can’t!” she whispered, before she realized he couldn’t understand. Yet it was clear he understood her facial expression, because he repeated the motion and then held his arms out.

I’ll catch you, he promised.

“Where are the guards?” she asked, again more to herself rather than to him. Zed stared up at her for a few seconds more in the orange torchlight, and then he shook his hands back and forth at chest-level seemingly to get the blood flowing.

She thought she understood what that meant. I took care of them.

It was about a twelve-foot drop. Could he catch her, if she jumped? Of course. “My shoes,” she said, and started to go back for them. Zed quickly popped his palms together.

No time, he said.

She understood that completely. But if they left the Templeton Inn, where would they go? And if they did get away, would that put Matthew in more danger, or less? She thought that Zed wasn’t as concerned with Matthew as he was with finding a boat to cast off from this island and continue on his own personal journey. She had to worry about Matthew’s safety, first and foremost, and maybe she should remain here in this velvet cage, but still…

She did not like cages, velvet or otherwise.

Zed was waiting, and the seconds were going past.

Berry thought he wished to escape this night, and in so doing escape from the confinement of the past into the freedom of the future. If he could find the local fisherman’s harbor, secure a small sailboat and possibly a net or some fishing equipment…but, how far might he get? It seemed to her that even if Zed perished at sea, without provisions or plan other than setting his face toward Africa, it was how he wanted to leave this earth. And he, too, could no longer abide the cage.

She decided she would help him find a boat and see him off, and then she would return here to wait for word from Matthew.

She climbed over the railing, careful not to snag her nightgown on the wrought iron, and she jumped.

Zed easily caught her. He set her down like a feather. Then he nodded—Yes, we’re in this together—and he held up a ring of four keys. He strode to the padlock on the gate and began to test it with first one key and then another. As Zed sought to unlock the gate, Berry looked left and right and found the bodies of the guards stacked up in some shrubbery just beyond the torchlight to the left. Their muskets appeared to be broken. One of the bodies was missing its boots. Suddenly one of the bodies shuddered and a hand lifted as if to seize the air before it fell back again, indicating that they were not dead but rather in a state of enforced sleep.

It was the last key. The gate swung open. Zed plucked a torch from its place in a wooden holder. Then they were walking into the road, Berry mindful of the small shells and pebbles that made up the surface. They had a choice to make concerning direction. They had come from the left, therefore they knew the harbor for large ships that lay over that way. Zed turned to the right and started off, seeking the local harbor, and Berry followed at his bootheels.

They seemed to be the only souls stirring at this hour. Dogs barked, but none were seen. The sky was ablaze with stars and a moon nearly full. The road left the last quiet houses of Templeton and was soon taking them through wilderness tinged blue by the moonlight. From the thicket the insects of the dark sang their songs of whirs and chitters, and Zed and Berry followed the flickering torchlight deeper into the night.

Berry wished she could ask Zed a question, but she wouldn’t know how to ask it. While she’d been eating her dinner, there’d been just the slightest movement of the room. A passing tremor, there one second and gone the next. She wished she could ask Zed if he’d also felt that. But in the aftermath of the tremor, she’d realized that the walls of her room were spiderwebbed with tiny cracks. She’d meant to ask the Scotsman about it in the morning, for evidently Pendulum Island was true to its name.

The road went on, and so did the journeyers. Zed walked fast, striding forward with a purpose, and though the shells and stones were not kind to her feet Berry kept up with him. More than once she wondered what her Grandda thought of her disappearance, along with Matthew’s. Were they still being searched for, after all this time? Or had her and Matthew’s whereabouts become a mystery that could not be answered? Surely Hudson Greathouse hadn’t given up the search! Yet…still…if there was nothing to be found of them, after so many days, then…a mystery, unanswerable.

Zed suddenly stopped so quickly Berry bumped into him. It was like hitting a stone wall. She staggered back. He didn’t even seem to feel it.

“What is it?” she asked him rather sharply, for her feet were cut and now she’d bitten her lower lip when she’d plowed into his immovable mountain.

He lifted the torch higher, and she saw what the light had already revealed to him. Hanging by leather straps from two poles on either side of the road were a pair of human skulls painted with brightly-colored stripes.

Zed moved the light from one side to the other, taking stock of not only the skulls but also of the situation.

“I think we shouldn’t go any—” Further, Berry was about to say, but Zed was already going further ahead for this road was his choice of direction and no skulls would stop his progress.

“Wait!” she called to him. And a little louder: “Wait!” But he was on the move, the mountain in motion. If Berry desired the comfort of the torchlight she would have to keep up. She also got herself moving, and though she imagined her feet must be leaving bloodmarks on the road she caught up with Zed and walked just behind him but within the circle of light.

Berry thought that the wilderness on either side was as thick as Matthew’s stubborn nature, and equally impenetrable. But where was the local harbor? Surely it couldn’t be very much further! She intended to see Zed off in whatever boat he might find, with whatever fishing tackle or net, and then get herself back to the Templeton Inn. There would be some explaining to do. And would she be punished for this transgression? Would Matthew in some way be punished? She was in this soup now and she was going to have to swim through it. Zed’s freedom was worth it…she hoped.

They hadn’t gone but a few minutes more when Zed stopped again. This time Berry avoided a collision. Zed stood motionlessly in the middle of the road, his torch upraised. Off to the left a bird suddenly called stridently from the dark. Zed angled his light in that direction. His head cocked back and forth. He was listening, Berry thought. But listening for what?

Another bird called from the right. It was a higher-pitched sound, but equally as strident. Two notes, similar to the cawing of a crow. Zed abruptly spun around, facing Berry, and offered the torchlight past her; his eyes were centers of flame, likewise trying to pierce the dark. She turned to see what he was seeing, her spine and arms having erupted into goosebumps, but all she saw was flickering firelight, an empty road and nothing more.

In the woods on the right, a small spark jumped. A torch burst into fire.

In the woods on the left, a small spark jumped. A second torch came to life.

On the road before them, a third torch exploded into flame, and behind them a fourth awakened its scarlet eye.

Four figures approached Zed and Berry, moving in silence. Firelight jumped off at least two drawn swords. Berry felt Zed’s body coiling, the muscles bunching up in his shoulders. His black-bearded face looked from one point of the compass to another, and he reached out to pull Berry closer to him but she realized even he must know four men with torches and swords would be too many for one Ga to fight.

Not, however, that he wouldn’t try.

“Hold still,” said the one on the right as he came through the thicket. “Don’t try to run, it’ll go worse for you.”

Zed gave a quiet grunt. Berry heard it as: And worse for you, that I don’t run.

The four figures converged upon them. They were heavy-set, broadshouldered white men with faces as hard as chunks of granite. A couple of them had faint smiles on their twisted mouths, as if they knew what was coming and looked forward greatly to the experience.

“Who the hell are you?” one of them, a man with a hooked nose and a wicked cutlass, asked Berry as he got nearer.

“Who the hell are you?” she answered back, standing her ground as if her bare feet were rooted there. She lifted her chin in defiance and hoped they wouldn’t see all the fear swimming in her eyes.

“We’ll sort this out later,” said the man standing behind Zed and Berry. “Take ’em, boys!”

“This is a damned big’un,” said one of the boys, a mite nervously. “What’re them scars on his face?”

“Damned if I know or care. Just take ’em!”

The order having been given by the man who was apparently in charge, the other three came forward with torches outthrust and swords ready to slash. Zed didn’t wait for them to arrive. He sprang at them with unexpected speed, and with teeth gritted at the center of his beard he stabbed his torch into the face of the nearest man and swung flames across the head of the next, setting the unfortunate’s hair on fire. At that, the proverbial hell broke loose. Two swords came at Zed from front and back, and as Zed twisted to parry the blows with his own blazing weapon he gave Berry a mighty shove toward the woods and past the man who was trying to slap out the bonfire in his hair. She staggered into the brush and almost went down before she grabbed hold of a hanging vine. There she watched Zed battling torch against swords, doing his gallant best, but then the man with the scorched face swung a leather cudgel against the back of Zed’s skull. One swing wasn’t enough, for Zed turned to apply torch-to-face once more but a second cudgel blow hit him squarely on the left temple. Berry saw his knees sag.

It took a third blow right in the center of his forehead to drop the torch from Zed’s hand. As Zed went to his knees on the ground, one of the swordsmen started to run him through at the neck, but the other—the leader—said, “Hold that! I think he’s done!”

But not quite. Zed started to get to his feet again. The leader struck him across the base of the skull with the sword’s grip, and the eager swordsman hit Zed in the face with a balled-up fist. Berry heard the sound of Zed’s nose bursting blood. Then the man who had half a headful of ashes came at Berry, grabbing hold of her gown with one hand and putting a sword’s tip under her chin with the other.

Berry saw Zed fall. There was nothing she could do for him. It was beyond her ability to stop them if they stabbed him to death in the next few seconds. Now she had to think about herself, and about the fact that the sword’s tip was just about to pierce flesh. With a harsh cry that startled her assailant into a frozen instant, she tore free from him and ran into the thicket.

“Get her, Austin!” came the shouted command, but it was already well to Berry’s back. She was going through the underbrush as if her own hair was aflame. A stumble over a pod of cactus plants was not a pleasant experience, but she sucked in her breath and swallowed the pain and kept running for all she was worth, which felt at the moment like a wooden shilling. When she dared to look back she saw in the silver moonlight Austin—half-haired and sweat-faced—still after her, his torch having been lost to hand in the initial skirmish. As he lunged forward to grab at her Berry changed direction like a skittering rabbit. She heard a grunt as his feet slid one way and his body careened in another, and there was a solid and satisfying thud as Austin hit the ground.

Berry ran for her life, or at least her freedom. She tore through vines and thorns and disturbed beams of moonlight with her running shadow. A look behind showed her no one following…yet. She didn’t slow down. God help Zed, she thought, for she could not.

She came out of the woods onto another road. To her right, a torch was visible with a man underneath it, running in her direction. The light glinted off a sword. She ran along the road, her breath coming hard and fast and the sweat standing out on her cheeks. In another few yards a cart trail led off to the right through the brush, and this she took without hesitation, feeling she was safer amid the trees. She followed the trail further on, and saw by the moonlight several houses of white stone standing ahead.

A shout caught her attention. Two torches were coming from behind. Berry ran to the first house and banged furiously at the front door. There was no response or lamplight from within. The torches were getting closer. She had a few seconds to decide whether to run for the woods again or try the door of the second house. It was a near thing, but she went to the door. A hammering this time awakened a light that moved past a window. There was not much time; the two men approaching were almost within sight. Then a bolt was drawn, the door opened a crack and a lamp was thrust into Berry’s face.

“Help me,” she gasped. “Please!”

There was a pause that seemed to stretch for a hundred years. “What’re you doing out here?”

That voice. She recognized its deep, commanding resonance.

The door opened wider and the lamplight revealed the ebony, white-goateed face of Captain Jerrell Falco. The amber eyes were ablaze in the yellow light. They moved to take in the two torches coming along the trail.

“Please,” Berry said. “They’re after me.”

“So they are,” Falco replied, without a shred of emotion. He stared at her as if to ask why he should help. But then his mouth crimped, he blinked as if someone had slapped sense into his soul, and he said, “Get in here.”

Berry entered the house like a sliding shadow. Falco reached past her, closed the door and bolted it. A movement to her left startled Berry, and when she looked in that direction she saw a young cream-colored woman in a yellow gown holding a baby in her arms.

“Saffron,” Falco said, “take the child into the bedroom.” The girl instantly obeyed. Another small candle was burning in the room she had entered. Falco positioned himself between Berry and the front door. “Go back in there and stand in a corner out of sight,” he told her. “Go on. Now.”

The voice was made to give orders. Berry went into the bedroom, a small but tidy place with pale blue walls, a clean bed, a crib for the baby, a writing desk and a couple of cheap but sturdy chairs. Berry took a position with her back in a corner, while Saffron rocked the baby and stared at her with huge chocolate-colored eyes.

Falco’s candlelight was blown out. Berry knew he must be standing in the dark, waiting for the insistent knock upon the door. A half-minute stretched, and then a full minute. The baby began to cry, a soft mewling sound, but Saffron crooned quietly to it and the crying ceased. Saffron’s eyes never stopped examining Berry Grigsby.

Another thirty seconds passed. Saffron whispered, “You runnin’ from them men?”

“Yes,” Berry answered, supposing ‘them men’ were the same who chased her.

“Go in them woods? Where they be?”

“Yes.”

“Quiet,” said Falco, in a low murmur.

“Them woods is death,” Saffron told her. “That road, too. You go in there, you doan come out.”

“Why?” Berry asked, recalling how the men had converged on Zed. “What’s in there?”

“Somethin’ ain’t healthy to know,” Saffron answered, and that was all.

Falco came into the room. In this low light he looked very old, and very weary. “I believe they’ve passed by,” he said. “But they might yet start knocking on doors. Did anyone else see you?” Berry shook her head. “Good. Where’s the Ga? They take him?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. You wouldn’t have come out here alone. Miss, you should have stayed in the village. Are you so eager to be…” He stopped, measuring his words against his tongue and teeth.

“To be what?” she prompted.

“Made to vanish?” he asked, with a lift of his unruly gray brows. “As some curious cats have vanished before you?”

Berry swallowed. She had to ask the next question. “What will they do with Zed?”

“Whatever they wish. That’s no longer your concern, if you care to keep your skin.” Falco took one of the two pillows from the bed and tossed it to the floor. “Sleep there,” he said. “The men might come back with their dogs. If so…we shall see.” He stretched out upon the bed, his hands folded back behind his head. Saffron lay the baby in the crib and curled herself up alongside the Nightflyer’s captain.

Berry lay down on the floor and rested her head on the pillow. Sleep would be impossible, but this was the best place to hide. Lying on her back, she stared up at the ceiling and saw in it the small cracks that meant Pendulum’s movements were felt here as well.

“Thank you,” she offered, in a voice strained from the night’s events.

Someone blew out the candle, and from the dark there was no answer.

Twenty-Two

MATTHEW was ready and waiting, dressed in his charcoal-gray suit with thin stripes in a lighter gray hue. The suit was a bit tighter than it had been before being immersed in salt water, but Matthew still wore it well. When the knock came at the door this bright and sunny hour, Matthew was quick to open it for he knew who was behind the fist.

“Good morning,” said Sirki, with a slight nod of his turbanned head. Today the East Indian giant wore his white robes, spotless as new snow. A glimpse of diamond-studded front teeth sparkled. “You are well, I presume?”

“Very well,” said Matthew, attempting lightness but finding it a heavy effort. “And you?” As well as can be expected, Matthew thought, for someone who delights in severing heads from their bodies.

“I am instructed,” the giant replied, “to pay you.” He offered a brown leather pouch tied with a cord. “Three hundred pounds in gold coins, I am told. A very sizeable sum, and one you may keep whatever your decision may be regarding the professor’s problem.”

“Hm,” Matthew answered. He took the pouch; it was richly heavy. He noted the red wax seal that secured the cord, and the octopus symbol of the professor’s ambition embossed upon it. He moved the pouch back and forth next to his right ear to hear the coins clink together. “I have questions for you before I decide,” he said firmly. “Will you answer them?”

“I will do my best.”

Matthew decided not to tell Sirki about his dream last night, in the midst of his troubled sleep. In the dream, which was fogged at the edges with phantasmagoria, the gasping head of Jonathan Gentry had rolled along the bloody table and fallen into his lap, and there the twisted mouth had rasped three words that Matthew now repeated to Sirki.

“Finances. Weapons. Spain.” Matthew had gotten out of his bed and walked back and forth upon the balcony in the cool hour before dawn until his perception of the matter had cleared. “Those are the realms of the three men involved. I am assuming, then, that the Royal Navy intercepted a cargo of weapons meant to be handed over to the Spanish, in return for a large sum of finances to the professor?”

“Your assumption may be correct,” said the giant, with an expressionless face and voice that likewise revealed nothing. “I think,” he added, “I might enter your room instead of having this discussion in the hallway.” When Sirki came into the room, Matthew backed cautiously away from him, reasoning that the evil sawtoothed knife was somewhere near at hand. Sirki closed the door and planted himself like an Indian ironwood tree. “Now,” he said, “I will entertain more of your assumptions.”

“Thank you.” A small bow completed the charade of manners. “I’m thinking, then, that Professor Fell is supplying some kind of new weapon to the Spanish? And he plans to sell the same weapon to Britain as soon as Spain puts it into full production? And there are other countries he plans to see this weapon to?”

“Possibly correct,” said Sirki.

“But someone informed the authorities, and the first shipment was waylaid on the high seas? What’s the weapon, Sirki?”

“I am not allowed,” came the reply.

“All right, then.” Matthew nodded calmly; he’d been prepared for this. “The professor believes one man of three is the traitor. Is it possible there could be two traitors among the three, working together?”

“A point well taken. The professor has already considered this possibility and wished you to reach it at your own opportunity.”

“So the evidence Professor Fell is looking for may be some signal or message exchanged between the two, if indeed there are two?”

“That may be so.”

Matthew placed the pouch of gold coins upon the writing desk. He was loathe to turn his back upon Sirki, even though he trusted that today he might keep his head. Through the louvered doors that led to the balcony he could hear the shrill cries of gulls and the hammerbeat of the waves below the castle’s cliff. It was going to be a warm day, a world away from New York. He devoutly wished he were walking on snowclad streets, his hand in Berry’s to guide her away from trouble.

“Professor Fell,” Matthew said after some consideration, “puts me in the position of being a traitor myself. A traitor to my country,” he said, with a quick glance at the giant. “As I understand this, the professor is selling weaponry to England’s enemies, with the expectation that England will also have to buy the devices to keep their armories current. The so-called traitor…or traitors, perhaps…are actually working, whether they intend to or not, for the good of England. Therefore to expose them, I also become a traitor to my country. Is that not so?” Now Matthew directed a cold stare at Sirki, awaiting a response.

Sirki didn’t answer for a time. Then he said, with a shrug of his shoulders, “Money is money. Sometimes it buys patriots, and sometimes it buys traitors. Do not mislead yourself, Matthew. Both breeds of men walk the halls of Parliament. They sit in luxury and sip their wine while underneath their English wigs the worms of greed eat into their brains. But let us not use the word greed. Let us say…opportunity. That is the grease of all the great wheels that turn this world, Matthew. And I shall tell you that here you face the greatest opportunity of your life, if you take it with both hands.”

“My hands should not be so covered with English blood,” Matthew countered.

“But someone’s hands shall be,” said Sirki, in his silky way. “The professor is offering you many…incentives, I understand. He also wishes to see how you react under pressure.”

“I float,” Matthew said.

“He hopes that is so. He wishes you to float to a good conclusion here. One that benefits himself and yourself. You have no idea what he can do for you, if he perceives you are worthy.”

“Worthy to him, and unworthy to myself?”

Sirki smiled thinly, and almost sadly. “Oh, Matthew. What you don’t know of this world might fill the professor’s library ten times over.”

“Does he write all the books himself? And sign his name as ‘God’?”

Sirki for a time stared at the chessboard floor without speaking. When his voice came, it was no longer silky but edged with sawteeth like his blade. “Shall I tell the professor you are accepting or rejecting the problem to be solved?”

Now came time for Matthew’s move. He saw no way to get his knight to safety; it was going to be a hard sacrifice, but one that might yet win the game for him if he had further stomach for the playing.

“Accepting,” Matthew said.

“Very good. He will be pleased to know.” Sirki put his hand on the door’s knob, engulfing it with his grip. Matthew thought the giant could pull the door from its hinges with that one hand, if he pleased. Sirki opened the door, however, with a gentle touch. “I trust you will enjoy this day to its fullest,” he said.

The meaning of that was get to work, Matthew thought.

“Speaking of the professor’s library,” Sirki said, pausing on the threshold. “It’s on the third floor. You might be interested in visiting it, since it holds volumes you might find intriguing, and especially since I saw Edgar Smythe going up the stairs.”

“Your direction is appreciated,” said Matthew.

Sirki closed the door, and their discussion for the moment was finished.

Matthew reasoned that there was no time to lose. He had no idea how he was going to approach Edgar Smythe, the scowling weapons expert, but he decided to let that take care of itself. He left his room, locked the door, went to the main staircase and climbed it to the upper floor.

A pair of polished doors made from pale oakwood opened onto a room that nearly made Matthew’s knees buckle. It was filled with shelves of books almost from the smoothly-planked floor to the vaulted ceiling. Above his head, as per the banquet room, were painted clouds and watchful cherubs. The smell of the room was, to Matthew, the delicious and fragrantly yeasty aroma of volumes of ideas, considerations and commentary. There would be enough in here to keep his candle lit for years. He actually felt his heartbeat quickening, in the presence of so much treasure. Three hundred pounds be damned; this abundance of knowledge was the gold he truly sought. He saw across the room louvered doors that must lead to a balcony, and on either side of the doors heavy wine-red drapes with yellow tie cords were drawn across windows overlooking the sea. The library held several black leather chairs and a sofa, a table bearing bottles of what appeared to be wine and spirits for the further delight of the bibliophile, and an expansive white writing desk with a green blotter. Sitting at the desk, evidently copying something down from a slim volume onto yellow parchment with a quill pen, was Edgar Smythe, his gray-bearded and heavily-lined face absorbed in his task. He was once more wearing his ebony-black suit and white shirt—perhaps he owned a half-dozen of the exact same suit, Matthew mused—and between Smythe’s teeth was a clay pipe that showed a thin curl of smoke the color of the sea’s waves at first light.

Matthew approached the man, stopped and cleared his throat. Smythe kept right on copying something from tome to parchment. From time to time the quill went into an ink bottle, and then returned to its industrious work.

“Are you wanting something, Mr. Spade?” Smythe asked suddenly around his pipe, without interruption of his labor. The voice was as harsh as yesterday’s murder.

“Not particularly.” Matthew stepped nearer. “I wanted to have a look at the library.”

“Look all you please,” Smythe instructed. Whatever he was copying, there was no attempt to hide the effort. “But…refrain from peering over my shoulder, would you?”

“Certainly, sir.” Having said this, however, Matthew made no move to back away. “I was wondering, though, about something I hoped you might help me with.”

“I can’t help you with anything.”

“That might not be exactly true.” Matthew took one more step closer, which put him nearly at Smythe’s elbow. In for a penny, in for a pound, Matthew thought. He said, “I was hoping you might explain to me about the Cymbeline.”

The quill ceased its scratching. Matthew noted that the parchment was almost full of small but neat lines of writing, and that there were several other blank pages ready for use in the same way. Smythe’s face turned and the somber gray eyes fixed on Matthew with some force. “Pardon me?”

“Cymbeline,” Matthew repeated. “I’d like to hear about it.”

Smythe sat stock-still for what seemed a full minute. Presently he slid his quill onto its rest and removed the pipe from its clenched-teeth grip. “Cymbeline,” he said quietly, “is a play.” He held up the volume, and stamped there upon its dark brown binding were the gold letters The Tragedie Of Cymbeline, Five Acts By William Shakespeare. “Shall I read you a scrap of what I’ve written here?” He went on without waiting. “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter rages; Thou thy worldly task has done, Home art gone and ta’en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” Smythe looked up from his parchment. “Would you care for more?”

“A recitation upon death? No, thank you.”

“Not just any recitation, Mr. Spade, but a grand affirmation of death. I am a great admirer of Shakespeare’s plays, sir. I am a great admirer of his mind and his voice, which unfortunately I only hear in my imagination.” He placed the volume down upon the desk again and drew a pull from his pipe. “This is how I’ve been keeping myself sane on this bloody island, sir. I have been dutifully copying passages from Shakespeare’s plays, of which the professor thankfully has a full set. Waiting for you to arrive has been a strain on all of us. Therefore…this little diversion of mine, which serves to heighten my appreciation of the master’s work. Do you have any complaint you’d care to commit to the air?”

“None.” Matthew was desperately trying to mask his confusion. Of course Cymbeline was a play, about the trials and tribulations of a British king—Cymbeline—possibly based on legends of the real-life British king Cunobelinus. But what this had to do with the professor’s problem, or the matter of the new weapon, Matthew had no clue. He decided he had better quit cutting bait and start to fish. “I’m presuming that’s the code name for the new device the professor has created?”

“Device? What are you talking about?”

“The new weapon,” Matthew said. “Which he is intent upon selling to Spain, and which was seized at sea by the British Navy.” He decided to add, “Due to Gentry’s influence.”

The pipe’s bowl spiralled its fumes. “Young man,” said the gravel-bottomed voice, “you are wandering into dangerous territory. You know that our businesses should be kept separate, by his order. I don’t wish to know anything about your use of whores to spear state secrets, and your desire to know about the Cymbeline is ill-met.”

Matthew shrugged but held his ground. “I’m curious by nature. And my curiosity has been sharpened after that pretty scene last night. I’m just wishing to know why it’s called Cymbeline.”

“Really? And who told you that Cymbeline is a weapon?”

“Sirki did,” Matthew said. “In response to my questions.”

“He also told you the first shipment to Spain was captured at sea?”

“He did.” Matthew thought that Nathan Spade was a very accomplished liar.

“What’s his game, then?” Smythe frowned; he had once been a handsome man in his youth, but now he was just harsh and ugly.

“Did he tell me untruths?”

“No,” Smythe said. “But he’s violating the professor’s decree. Why is that?”

“You might ask him yourself,” Matthew suggested, ever the gentleman.

Edgar Smythe smoked his pipe in contemplation of that remark, and when he was wreathed by the blue fumes he seemed to diminish in size and let any idea of confronting the East Indian killer slip away like the very essence of tobacco now floating toward the louvered doors. “You are incorrect,” he finally said, in a doomsday voice.

“How so?”

“Incorrect…in your statement that Professor Fell created Cymbeline. He did not. It was my idea. My creation. My unremitting labor of mind and resources. And I am very good at what I do, Mr. Spade. So that is your first error, which I am glad to adjust.” He blew a small spout of smoke in Matthew’s direction. “Your second error,” he went on, “is that Cymbeline is a device. Oh, did you believe it was some kind of multiple-barrelled cannon dreamt up by an eccentric inventor?”

“Not exactly.” Though the idea had crossed Matthew’s mind. He had experience with multiple-barrelled guns and eccentric inventors.

“Cymbeline,” said the weapons expert, “is the foundation upon which future devices shall be constructed. Whoever possesses it has a distinct advantage on any battlefield, and thus its immense worth to many countries.”

“I see that, but if many countries have it…wouldn’t that mean Cymbeline has become obsolete?”

“The nature of the beast,” Smythe granted, with a snort of smoke through the pinched nostrils. “There will always be something beyond Cymbeline, and something beyond that, until the end of time.”

Matthew brought up a thin smile. “It seems to me, sir, that your business ultimately hastens the end of time.”

“That will happen after I am long gone.” Smythe tapped a finger against the bowl of his pipe, whose flame had deceased. “Therefore it is not my concern. But I will inform you that it is the professor’s business, not mine. I am the hand, he is the brain.”

A simple way to seek escape from blame, Matthew thought. He wondered if indeed Edgar Smythe’s brain had not begun to believe treachery against England was not worth money in the hand. “The Cymbeline,” Matthew persisted bullheadedly, as was his wont. “Whatever it is…why is it called that?”

Smythe began to turn through the pages of Cymbeline. “Professor Fell titled it. After a line from the play. Just a moment, I’ll find it. Ah…here it is. Actually a stage direction: Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle; he throws a thunderbolt.” Smythe looked up from the page with an expression that could only be bemusement, though on that sour face it was hard to tell. “The professor enjoys his drama.”

“Yes,” Matthew agreed. “Undoubtedly.”

Smythe stood up. He gathered his sheets of parchment, took the volume and slid it back into its place on one of the shelves. “I will say good morning to you, then. And I hope your day is pleasant. I have a report to give to the professor this afternoon. When are you giving yours?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You’re an odd sort,” Smythe said, his head tilted slightly to one side as if seeing Nathan Spade in a different light. “Are you sure you belong here?”

“I must. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“So you are.” Smythe started for the doors.

“Let me ask you one more question,” Matthew persisted, and Smythe paused. “Who is Brazio Valeriani?”

“Someone the professor seeks. That’s all I know.”

“Is he connected to the Cymbeline?”

Smythe frowned; it was, in truth, a horrible sight. “I have heard things,” he said, quietly. “And no, Valeriani is not connected to the Cymbeline. It’s another matter altogether. But I have heard…” He hesitated, staring at the floor. “Unsettling things,” he continued, as with an effort. The face lifted and the gray eyes were darkly-hollowed. “This is not something you should be concerned with, young man. If what I have heard is true…if any part of it is true…you will wish you never heard that name.”

“Why does the professor seek him?”

“No.” Smythe shook his head. “You will get none of it from me, nor from anyone else here. That is as far as I go. Good day.”

“Good day,” Matthew answered, for Edgar Smythe the weapons expert was already going through the doors and gone.

Matthew was left alone in the library. Hundreds of books—large and small, thick and thin—were there before him on the shelves. Ordinarily this would have been a dream come true for him, but some element of evil lay coiled in this room and therefore it was an oppressive place, an atmosphere of dark brooding. But the books called to him nevertheless, and in another moment he was walking past the shelves looking at the titles stamped upon leather. He reached out a hand to accept Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, but his hand then moved to touch the red spine of Homer’s Odyssey. Next to it beckoned three thick volumes of English sea voyages and navigational studies, and next to that one…

Odd, Matthew thought.

He took the book from its place. It was a battered brown leather edition titled The Lesser Key Of Solomon. Matthew recalled seeing an edition of this book before, in the ruins of Simon Chapel’s library just before his involvement with Tyranthus Slaughter. In a way, this book had caused him quite a lot of misery, for that copy he’d found in Chapel’s library had been hollowed out and literally held a key to unlock a book—The History of Locks As Regards The Craft of Ancient Egypt and Rome—that had concealed a bagful of Professor Fell’s money. Which had put him nearly on the road to ruin, regarding his future fate and the health of Hudson Greathouse. But now…finding a second copy of this book, here in the professor’s own library…

Odd.

This book appeared to be only a book, not a depository. Matthew opened it and began to turn through the yellowed pages, and at once he realized that the God Professor Fell was playing to be might have another side altogether.

The Lesser Key Of Solomon was a book describing the demons of Hell.

In Latin script and prints of woodcut drawings, the descriptions of these dark dwellers were quite vivid. The demonic entities appeared as such things as animalish creatures with blade-like claws, spidery denizens of nightmare worlds and shadowy combinations of man, beast and insect. They were given titles, as befitted the nobility of the netherworld.

Matthew came upon a page depicting the stork-like Earl Malthus. The text reported this monstrosity as an expert in building towers filled with ammunition and weapons, and who was noted for speaking in a disturbingly rough voice.

He turned the pages. There was Prince Sitri and Marquis Phenex, Duke Vepar and King Belial. There was Count Renove, Prince Vassago, King Zagan and Duke Sallos. More pages were turned, and more demons revealed in all their ghastly inhuman but human-like shades: King Baal, Duke Barbatos, Prince Seere, Marquis Andras, Count Murmur, Duke Ashtaroth, President Caim, Duke Dantalion, Marquis Shax and on and on. It took a steady hand and a steely nerve to view these woodcut impressions and read this text of otherworldly horrors. Each demon had a specialty…king of liars, activator of corpses, deliverer of madness, creator of storms, destroyer of cities and the dignity of men, power over the spirits of the dead, the sowing of the bitter seeds of jealousy and discord, the transformation of men into wolves and crows and creatures of the night, the power to burn anything on earth to utter ash.

And, as he turned the pages, Matthew realized with a start of further horror that not only did this book depict the demons of Hell, but it also contained spells and rituals to call them from their caverns at the end of time to do the bidding of men.

This room suddenly seemed much too small and too terribly dark. Matthew wished to put the book away, to get it out of his hands lest it blister the flesh, and yet…

…and yet…

It had caught him. He, who had seen through the artifice of an evil man in positioning an innocent woman as a witch in a town called Fount Royal. He, who had no belief in witches and demons and things that went bump in the night. He, who viewed facts as facts and superstitions as the coinage of a past century. He, who would champion himself for that woman named Rachel Howarth but would not give a cup of warm piss to the idea of demons riding the currents of the whirlwinds. He, who did not believe in such fantasy.

But…perhaps the owner of this book did?

And he believed so strongly that he had shared another copy with his associate Simon Chapel, who had—perhaps in his own revulsion or sense of irony—turned it into a key-box?

Matthew had to get out of this room. He needed light and air. He took the Lesser Key with him, through the louvered doors onto the balcony. Sunlight and warm air hit him in the face. He smelled the salt of the sea and saw the bright glittering shine of morning light upon the waves below. The balcony had a white stone railing and balustrade. At both corners, just beyond the railing, were ledges upon which was situated a white stone seahorse standing up nearly as large as a real stallion, a remarkable job of sculpture. Matthew held the book at his side and drew in long draughts of the sea air to clear his head. He wasn’t sure what he had stumbled upon, but he felt quite sure he had stumbled upon something.

And then he saw her, down below, sitting cross-legged upon her rock.

Fancy, they called her. Her body nude and brown and glistening, her long hair black as a raven’s wing, her face turned toward the far horizon where the waves broke upon an unknown shore. To them, Fancy. To him…possibly Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone. And to him, another one to champion. To save. To free, if he could. It was in his nature to do so, and calling himself Nathan Spade in this vile gathering of greedy men and women did not change that. Could not change that. Would not change that.

“Mornin’,” came the voice behind him.

And a second voice, following: “…boyo.”

Matthew turned quickly toward the two brothers, as they came onto the balcony from shadow into sunlight that seemed suddenly blighted in its wet and sultry heat.

“Spadey himself,” said Mack, with a cold grin on a face that appeared red-eyed and bloated, the same as his twin’s. Both men were carrying bottles they’d picked up from the drink table in the library, and Matthew judged them to have been downing the liquor since the breaking of dawn a couple of hours ago. That, or they’d been drunk all night and had emerged to replenish their supply. Both men wore the breeches of their red suits, and both had spilled upon their wrinkled gray shirts copious amounts of liquid danger. Their sleeves were rolled up to display the thick forearms of tavern brawlers, ready to strike.

“…all by himself,” Jack added. He stood in the doorway as Mack got up nearly chin to chin with Matthew. Yes, the breath could have knocked over one of the stone seahorses, and Matthew steeled himself not to retreat from its sour flames.

“Where’s your knife-thrower now?” Mack asked.

“Ain’t here,” said Jack.

“’Tis a pity,” said Mack.

“Solid shame,” Jack lamented.

“Oh the agony of it, to be young and handsome, and so mannered and smart to boot…and yet be forgot about, up here alone.”

“Way up here,” Jack said, and now he drank from his uncorked bottle and came upon the balcony with his eyes narrowed into slits. “All alone.”

Matthew’s heart was beating hard. The sweat pulsed at his temples. By the greatest effort he kept fear out of his face, even as the Thackers positioned themselves on either side of him, shoulders pressed against his body and pinioning him in. “I was just on my way to breakfast,” he said. “If you’ll pardon me?”

“Mack,” said Jack, and another drink went down his pipe, “I don’t think Spadey likes us.”

“Don’t like us worth a shitty shillin’,” said Mack, who also swigged from his own bottle. “And him such a worldly gentleman. Makes me feel like he thinks he’s better than most.”

“Better’n us, you’re sayin’,” Jack prodded.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m sayin’.”

“Said correctly, brother.”

“So sad to say.”

“Sad,” said Jack.

“Awful most,” said Mack, with his grin still in place and his green eyes showing a dull glare.

“Oh, mercy me.” Jack had taken note of the figure on the rock. “Looky what Spadey’s been lookin’ at.”

Mack saw, and nodded gravely. “Looky, looky. But don’t touch the nooky.”

“Think he’d like to touch it,” said Jack.

“Think he’d like to roll in it,” said Mack.

“Agreed, brother,” they said, almost as one.

“Gentlemen,” said Matthew, and perhaps now was the time to get out while he could, for he sensed violence about to rear its ugly head, “I admire your taste in women. I would ask where you found such a lovely specimen.”

“Specimen,” said Jack, with a snort that blew bits of snot from his nostrils. “Makes our Fancy sound like a fuckin’ worm, don’t he?”

“Like a bug, crawled from under a rock,” Mack observed.

“No disrespect meant.” Matthew realized it was a lost cause; these bully boys were wanting to thrash him, come what may, and Matthew’s plan was to get their minds on Fancy and then—ignominiously or not—bolt from the balcony as soon as he could. “I was wondering where I might find a woman of that breed?”

“You can buy ’em, boyo, on the pussy market.” Jack leaned in, leering, his breath smelling of whiskey sharpened by snakeheads. “I thought that was your fuckin’ business.”

“’Cept we didn’t buy Fancy,” Mack confided, and now he put an arm around Matthew’s shoulders in a way that made Matthew’s spine crawl. “We come across her owned by a gentleman gambler in Dublin. He’d won her at the faro table last year…”

“Year before that,” Jack corrected.

“Whenever.” Mack’s grip tightened on Matthew’s shoulders. “We decided we’d have her. You listenin’ here? It’s a good story. Wanted to teach him he couldn’t play faro in that tavern without our permission or a piece of the pie, and him riggin’ the box against those other poor punters. We left him crawlin’, didn’t we?”

“Crawlin’ and pukin’ blood,” said Jack.

“Man with no knees left,” said Mack, “has got to crawl.”

“Sure as fuck can’t walk,” Jack added, and then he pressed the mouth of his bottle against Matthew’s lips. “Have a drink with me, Spadey.”

Matthew averted his face. He caught a movement, and saw that this little drama was being observed by Fancy, who had stood up upon her rock to watch.

“No, thank you,” Matthew said. And he saw the Indian girl turn her back and dive from her perch into the sea, where the waves closed over her brown body and rippled white in her descent.

“You didn’t hear me, boyo.” Jack’s voice was very quiet. “I said I want you to have a drink with me.”

“And then with me.” Mack’s bottle also pressed against Matthew’s mouth. “Wet your whistle while ya can.”

“No,” Matthew repeated, for his boundary had been reached. “Thank you.” He started to move away from them, even as they pressed in harder on either side. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to—”

Mack suddenly whipped The Lesser Key Of Solomon from Matthew’s hand. He used it to smack Matthew hard on the nose, which caused a fierce and staggering pain and made Matthew’s eyes blur with tears. In the next instant, before Matthew could right himself, Jack gripped the back of his neck and headbutted him on the forehead, sending jagged spears of light and flaming stars through Matthew’s brain. His arms and legs at once became heavy dead limbs, without feeling or purpose.

“Hold him up,” he heard one of them say, as if an echo in a long cavernous corridor.

“Little fucker don’t weigh nothin’.”

“Got me an idea. Don’t let him drop.”

“Want me to knee him in the balls?”

“No. Let’s send him swimmin’. But first…drag him over here. Lemme get them curtain cords.”

“What’re ya thinkin’, brother?”

“I’m thinkin’ Spadey got hisself drunk, climbed up on that thing, it fell, and…over the side he went.”

“You mean to kill him?”

“I mean to wash our hands of his shitty little self, that’s what I mean. And damned to the depths for him, where he’ll never be found. Come on, drag him over.”

In the fog of his dazed brain and throbbing brainpan, Matthew realized this was not good for his future. In fact, it was horribly bad. He felt himself being dragged. His eyes were blinded by sunlight and black shadows that shifted in and out of his befouled vision. He tried to get his feet under himself, tried to get a hand up to protest this rough treatment.

“He’s comin’ round.”

“Smack him again.”

Another headbutt slammed into Matthew’s forehead. Bright balls of light exploded behind his eyes. He felt his legs dance of their own volition for a few seconds. He thought Gilliam Vincent might commend him. Wasn’t he at a dance at Sally Almond’s tavern? Didn’t he hear fiddle music—though terribly off-key—and the banging of a drum close to his ear?

The echoing voices returned.

“…up on that thing with him. Tie his hands behind him.”

“Ain’t somebody gonna miss the cords?”

“Not my concern, brother. Maybe they’ll think he made himself some reins for his horse, and got tangled up in ’em.”

Horse? Matthew thought, in his deep dark cave. What horse?

He felt pain at his shoulders. His arms had been pulled back. Tying his hands?

“Now get the other cord tied around him and the horse. Come on, hurry it!”

Horse? Matthew thought once more. It seemed very important that he figure this out, but his brain was not working too well. He felt himself being wrapped around with a rope of some kind. Lemme get them curtain cords, he remembered hearing.

“They’ll know it was us.”

“No, brother, they won’t. Leave your bottle on the ledge. Help me push this bastard over. You ready?”

“Always ready.”

“Push.”

Matthew felt himself falling. He tried to blink his light-smeared vision clear. He had a scream locked behind his lips, but his mouth would not open.

Horse, he thought.

As in…seahorse.

He hit the water on his side. The chill of the sea shocked some of the sense back into him. He had time to gasp a lungful of air before he went under.

I float, Matthew recalled saying to Sirki.

But he realized at once that no man tied to several hundred pounds of stone seahorse was going to float, and so with the desperate air locked in his lungs and his hands bound behind him he rode his horse beneath the waves and down and down into the blue silence below.

Twenty-Three

UNDERWATER, Matthew was turning as he sank. The seahorse was above him one instant, and then the next he was riding it to his death. His ears crackled with pain. He heard the air bubbles bursting from his mouth. His vision was clouded with blue. He roused himself to fight against the cords that bound his wrists together, yet his strength was already much abused and used-up. He was a dry vessel, surrounded and suffocated by the sea.

Panic set in and caused him to thrash wildly and with no purpose. More air escaped lungs and mouth. The pressure upon his ears was inescapable, as was his predicament. The roar in his head was the sound of a watery grave opening to forever hide his corpse from the sun, and yet it might be the voice of a demon from The Lesser Key Of Solomon, exulting in the demise of a good man.

Matthew’s stone mount suddenly hit something with a sea-muffled thud, landing upright on its base. Its descent ceased.

He could see only smears and shadows, strange forms around him that might be angular rocks sculpted by time and currents. His heart pounded, and with the next loss of air he knew his stuttering lungs would lose their grip on life and the sea would come rushing in to complete the job the Thackers had begun.

He couldn’t get free. He couldn’t wrench himself loose from the seahorse. He was done, he realized. What gunpowder bombs had not stolen, the cool blue depths would take.

Finished, he thought. But dear God…I am not ready to—

A mouth clamped onto his. A breath of air forced itself into his lungs. Black hair swirled into his face. Something began sawing at the cord binding his wrists. A sharp edge grazed him. A piece of glass or a broken shell? He had to hold on a moment longer…just a moment, if he could…

His body shivered and jerked in involuntary battle against the oncoming dark. One moment more…just one…

He felt the cord give way, and the Indian girl had freed his hands.

There was still the rope binding body to seahorse. Wrapped around his waist. He grasped at it and pulled. Tighter than a swollen tick. Where was the knot? Somewhere underneath the horse? The girl’s mouth was suddenly on his again, feeding him more breath. He felt her sharp edge at work on the cord at his left side. Sawing frantically, it seemed; as frantically as he fought the pounding and the pain and the darkness reaching for him. He looked up, silver bubbles bursting from his mouth and nostrils because he just couldn’t hold the air in any longer. Sunlight shone on the surface above. How far? Thirty or forty feet? He could never make that.

She pulled at him. The cord had come loose enough for him to get free of it. He started desperately for the surface, but she yet pulled at him in another direction. Deeper, it seemed. He thought she must be insane, and he was not a merman to her mermaid; yet her pull was insistent and now she had her arm around him and was urging him to swim with her.

I am not finished, he thought in his anguished blue haze. I have much to do. I am not finished…but I must trust this girl.

And so he kicked forward with her as the silver bubbles bloomed from his mouth and nose, and three more kicks and the Indian girl was leading him downward still. She took him into a dark place, through some kind of opening. A cave? he thought, near letting his lungs either empty themselves or explode. But no, not a cave…

They swam a few seconds longer, and then she abruptly led him up and his head broke the surface and he tasted salty sweet air. He inhaled mightily with a shudder that racked his body and in the next instant was punished by spasms of retching. She held him up while he filled his lungs and emptied his belly. In the dark blue gloom he saw the stones of a wall to his right and two feet above his head the stones and rafters of a ceiling. He reached up with both hands to grasp hold of a rafter, finding the wood spongy but still able to bear his weight, and he hung there breathing hard, coughing viciously, and shivering with not the chill but the idea that death had been so very, very close.

“Oh my God,” Matthew rasped. And again, for he knew not what else to say: “Oh my God.”

“Don’t let go,” Fancy told him, her body pressed against his side and her own hands up to hold onto the near-rotted rafter. “Do you hear me?” Her English was perfect, not a trace of an accent.

“I hear,” Matthew said; more of a frog’s croak than human speech.

“Just breathe,” she said.

“No instruction…necessary,” he managed to answer, though he had to breathe through his mouth for his injured nostrils were nearly swollen shut. His head was still pounding, his heart about to beat through his chest, and his stomach roiling. He closed his eyes, for now a sick weakness was threatening to make his fingers open. If he slid back in just yet he was done for.

“You’re going to live,” she said.

He nodded, but he was thinking he would not bet on such a statement. His eyes opened and he again surveyed their surroundings. Not a cave, but…a building of some kind? “Where are we?”

“The town under the sea,” Fancy answered, her black hair pushed back from her forehead and her face a blue-daubed darkness. “I found it, nearly the first day I was here.”

Matthew thought his brain must still be fogged and burdened. “Town? Under the sea?”

“Yes. Many buildings. Some with air still caught in them. I swim here, many times.”

“A town?” Matthew still couldn’t make heads-or-tails of it. Possibly Fancy had seen him go over the balcony and had used broken glass from a window to cut him free. “Did they know?” He tried to clarify that: “The brothers. Did they know?”

“About this place? No. It fell away from the island in the earthquake, long years ago.”

“Earthquake,” he repeated, lapsing back into his parrotty pattern. That would go along with the tremors still being felt on Pendulum. He felt as if his head was full of mush. “Who told you this?”

“One of the servants. She was a child when it happened.”

Matthew nodded. He still felt numb and bewildered. It occurred to him quite suddenly, as if he hadn’t realized it before, that this beautiful creature pressed against him was quite naked.

“Who are you?” she asked. “You’re not like the others. You’re not part of them. So…who are you, really?”

“I can’t explain that,” he decided to say. “But I can tell you that I knew an Iroquois brave who was called He Runs Fast Too. He—”

“Came over on the ship with me,” Fancy interrupted. “And with Nimble Climber. How did you know him? And what happened to him?”

“He went back to your land. Back to the tribe. He…helped me do something important.”

“He’s dead now,” she said. “I can hear it in your voice.”

“Yes, he’s dead. And you were called—”

“I know what I was called. That was a long time ago.”

“Those two who have you. They—”

“I don’t wish to speak of them,” she said. “But I will say they do not have all of me. I always find a place to go. As here. In the silence, I can think. I can be.” She adjusted her grip on the beam because her fingers were sinking into the black rot. Her voice was quiet and distant when she next spoke. “I love this. This ocean. This blue world. It speaks to me. It hides me. It makes me feel safe.”

Matthew thought this was the only girl in the world who would feel safe forty-something feet underwater, with her head in a small breathing space in the ruins of a collapsed town. But he understood exactly what she meant.

“I can never go back,” Fancy told him. “Not to my land. Not to my people.”

“Why not? If I could get you out of here—and away from them—then why not?”

“You could never get me away from them.” It was said with a fair amount of smouldering anger. “They would kill you if you tried.”

Matthew said with a weak grin, “They’d have to do better than this, wouldn’t they?”

“They would do far better. I have seen them do…terrible things. And to me, also. I used to fight them, but I suffered for it. Now I don’t fight, but I still suffer. They enjoy that. It is their great pleasure in living.”

“I’m going to get you away from them.”

“No,” she answered, with the hardness of a stone that could not be moved, “you will not. Because even if you could—which you cannot—I have no place to go. Except another bed, in another room, in another house owned by another man. I am…how would you say…an item to be sought. Not so much now, as there are many others like me brought across the ocean. But I am still rare enough.”

Matthew couldn’t fully see her face in the blue gloom, but he had the impression of looking at someone who had long ago lost all ability to smile, and whose happiness was silence and peace taken at every possible moment. He didn’t wish to think what those rough hands and biting teeth had done to her. He didn’t wish to think what her eyes had seen.

“I can help you,” he offered.

“I can never go back,” she repeated. “Not who I am now.”

It was said, Matthew noted, the Indian way: all statement of fact, all hard true reality, and not a sliver of self-pity or pretense.

“All right,” Matthew said, but he knew himself. And, for better or for worse, he never surrendered.

“We should start up,” Fancy told him. “Take in some breaths. Get ready. It is easy for me, but it may be difficult for you. I will hold your hand all the way.”

“Thank you.” Matthew thought this sounded like a casual stroll along the Great Dock, but he knew one usually did not perish on such a stroll, whereas in this instance perishing was a prominent possibility.

“Are you ready?” she asked in another moment.

The dreaded question, he thought. And the answer?

“As I’ll ever be,” he said, though the racing of his heart spoke otherwise.

She reached out for him and he gave her his left hand. “Stay close to me,” she directed. “We will pass through a doorway and a broken window and we will be out. Mind the glass at the bottom of the window.”

“I will.” If it hadn’t snagged him on the way in, he wasn’t concerned about it on the way out. And he was determined to be her second skin, within reason.

“Take a breath and let it go,” she said. He imagined he could see the gleam of her eyes as she stared at him. “Then take another breath and hold it. When you do that, we will start.”

Matthew nodded. Damn, this was some deep hell he’d gotten himself into. He was scared nearly beyond his wits from the memory of his lungs spasming on the edge of drowning. He wasn’t sure he had the strength or willpower to make this swim. His head still pounded and his nose sat on his face like a lump of hot tar. Was the damned thing broken? No time to fret about that now. He took the breath and let it go. He was afraid. But then he felt her hand squeeze his and he took the next breath—a deep breath, as deep as possible—and held it and instantly Fancy went under and pulled him with her. He let go his one-handed grip on the beam, and he was swimming alongside the Indian girl with terror thrumming through his veins.

He didn’t know when they went through the doorway, except his right shoulder hit a hard surface that shot fresh pain through him. God blast it! he thought as he held onto his air. Fancy pulled him onward with remarkable strength. She was indeed in her element, a daughter of the blue world. Did they pass through a broken window? Matthew wasn’t sure, for he could see nothing but blurs and smears. Maybe something caught at his stockings, though he wasn’t sure about that either. Then the light from above brightened and they were rising. Matthew had a blurred glimpse of what might have been the white stone seahorse, perched on a crooked roof. All around were the shapes of stone buildings, with alleys and streets between them. It appeared to Matthew in this blue haze that some were intact and others fallen to ruin either by the action of the sea or the violence of the earthquake. Then he could gather no more impressions for his lungs were aching and the surface was still thirty feet above.

She took him up, their hands locked together.

Perhaps it was a swift ascent. To Matthew, as he fought to control both his spasming lungs and the terror that chewed at him, it was the journey of night into day. Never had such a distance, which could easily be walked on land, seemed so far and so horrible. Ten feet below the surface, he lost nearly all his air in an explosion of bubbles that swept past his face in silver mockery. Then his lungs desired to pull in the seawater, and yet Matthew by force of will and fear of death kept the Atlantic from invading him, and two more kicks and the surface was right there in his face and his head was breaking the surface and the foamy slop of a wave almost drowned him in his moment of victory but he opened his mouth and drew in breath after breath and felt Fancy’s arms around him holding him up.

He pushed the hair back from his forehead and treaded water, his chest heaving. He looked up at the professor’s castle on the cliff above, and could clearly see the third floor library’s balcony and the ledge where one of the two stone seahorses had lately rested. The Thackers were long gone. If anyone else but Fancy had seen this assault, they had kept their lips sealed for there appeared to be no activity anywhere. It was just another sunny day in Fell’s paradise.

Here the waves were rough, as they surged toward the base of the cliffs. Matthew could see from this vantage point where part of the island had been sheared off. He recalled the professor saying My father was the governor here. It was likely that his father was indeed governor when the town—whatever its name had been—had collapsed into the sea.

“Follow me,” said Fancy, and she began to swim toward the cliffs not directly but at a forty-degree angle. Though weakened and certainly no champion in the water, Matthew followed as best he could. Fancy’s taut bottom breaking the surface and the glistening shine of her legs made following nearly a delightful obsession.

In time they reached a cove shielded from the breakers by a series of large rocks, and Fancy could stand in hip-high water. Matthew felt more rocks under his feet and walked carefully lest a surge of waves trapped and snapped an ankle; Fancy, however, knew the territory and forged onward like a true providence rider. A beach pebbled with black stones was ahead. On a rock in the shadows lay her clothing, neatly folded, and her shoes. As Fancy hurriedly dressed herself, Matthew staggered from the sea and fell to his knees in the grainy gray sand.

“You’re all right now,” she told him, as she buttoned the front of her rather tight-fitting lilac-colored gown.

“I know,” he answered, his face lowered. His head seemed to be full of crazy churchbells. “I’m just trying to…” He had to start again, for he was out of breath. “I’m just trying to make sure of it.”

She finished dressing and smoothed her gown before she spoke again, her black hair swept back and her face beautiful and austere. “You’re very brave.”

“Am I?”

“Certainly you are.”

“I think I’m mostly lucky.”

“I think,” she said, “you have earned the right to live another day.”

“At least,” he agreed, and he pulled himself up and got to his feet.

Her ebony eyes, full of pain and secrets, examined him from wet bottom to drenched top. “You won’t tell me who you are?”

“I can’t.”

“But you’re not one of them. Not really.”

“No,” he said, deciding she knew anyway. “Not one of them.”

“Then you’re here for a different reason than the others. I don’t understand why. Perhaps it would be best not to know?”

“Yes,” he answered, “that would be best.”

“Ah,” she said, and nodded; it was an expression that spoke volumes. Still she held him with her solemn gaze, as if reading not only his face but his soul. Then she motioned toward a rocky pathway several yards distant that led up the cliff to the highland. “It’s steep and a little dangerous, but that’s the only way.”

Steep and dangerous, Matthew thought. Was there any other way? He followed her when she started up, the water squishing in his belabored boots.

At the top, he realized the castle was hidden from view by a patch of forest. The road to Templeton surely wasn’t very far through the woods. He thought the sensible thing to do was go back to his room, collapse into bed, rest his aching noggin and possibly put a compress on his swollen nose.

But then, again, he wasn’t always sensible, and the sensible thing often did not make for advancement. Templeton was a few miles along the road. Berry was being held in the Templeton Inn. It was time for Nathan Spade to walk into town and see what might be seen. Possibly his clothes would be dry, in this heat, by the time he got there. If not, not. There probably was a physician in Templeton who might look at his beak. And who also might answer some questions about Professor Fell and the underwater town.

“The house is this way,” said Fancy.

“I’m not going there yet,” Matthew told her. “I trust there’ll be no mention of this to the brothers? As far as they know, I’m dead. I’d like to keep it that way for a while.”

“I never saw you,” she said. “Not even your ghost.” And then she turned away from him, walked her usual path through the forest and was gone.

Matthew walked away from the cliff. The road had to be just ahead, in the direction he was going. Birds called in exotic voices and the sun shone down through green fronds and vines.

It was a good day, he decided, to not be a ghost.

Twenty-Four

I HAD an accident on the road,” Matthew said to the doctor who inspected his swollen and by now purpling nose. The purple was spreading out on both sides of his face. Also, there were two frightful lumps on his forehead. “Clumsy,” Matthew explained. “Tripped over my own feet.”

“Happens to the best of us, Mr. Spade.” The physician was a portly man with long flowing white hair and dressed in a cream-colored suit as befitted his tropical position. His name, he’d told Matthew, was Benson Britt and he and his wife had been living on Pendulum Island since the summer of 1695. Britt’s hand moved to touch the whipstrike on Matthew’s neck. “This was also an accident?” The doctor’s dark brown eyes in the sun-wrinkled face held the question.

“Yes, that also,” Matthew answered firmly. “I was hoping you might apply some ointment?”

“Certainly. I have some lemon ointment. As for your proboscis…does this hurt?” Britt gave the bridge a quick little tap with a wooden spoon. Tears came to Matthew’s eyes, but the pain was not so much as to make him cry out. “Not broken,” Britt observed. “Only badly bruised. And the injuries to your forehead…not very pleasant, I’m sure, but nothing serious. Unless you have a ringing in your ears and a constant headache?”

Matthew could hardly hear him for the ringing in his ears, but at least the headache had subsided. “No,” he said.

“Very good, then. I’ll apply a bee’s-wax lotion to your nose to draw out the sting, and then we’ll bind on a poultice of seaweed and sea salt—my own remedy—to keep the swelling down and the passages open.”

“Hm,” said Matthew, unimpressed. There was no way to keep the passages open; his nose was blocked shut. But some sort of medical attention was needed, and this was the best—and perhaps only—Pendulum had to offer.

“Lie back on the table,” Britt directed. He had a handful of grease from a small yellow jar. “Let me do my best.”

“Certainly, sir.” Matthew obeyed, and while he was lying on the table he noted all the crisscrossing of small cracks in the white ceiling above his head.

His journey through the forest to the road had been uneventful, except for the wobbling of his knees as he still found himself in a weakened condition. Less than a mile on his way, though, he’d gotten a ride on a passing wagon full of melons bound for the farmer’s market in Templeton, and so at least for a little while he could rest and gather his strength. The wagon’s driver was an elderly man who knew nothing of Professor Fell except to call him “the professor,” and he had been thirty years old when the earthquake hit Pendulum and dropped the thriving community of Somers Town into the sea. At that time, the farmer recollected, Somers Town had been populated by about three thousand people and its primary business was the export of cedar boxes to England.

“Son of the governor,” said the aged informant when Matthew had inquired about the professor’s heritage. “Name of…hmmm…can’t quite place that name no more. Forgive me, sir.”

“Absolutely forgiven,” Matthew had said, as his clothing dried in the bright sun and his mind formulated more questions to ask when he reached Templeton.

The good doctor Britt applied the bee’s-wax lotion and then bandaged his seaweed and sea salt poultice in a thin piece of cheesecloth across the bridge of Matthew’s nose, which certainly would go far in gaining Matthew attention he did not seek. Nevertheless, it was done and appreciated, and Britt informed Matthew that any guest of the professor’s need not pay for treatment, as the professor had supplied himself and his wife with the house and a yearly salary.

“I’m presuming Dr. Gentry is among the guests?” Britt asked as Matthew was starting to leave. “If so, would you tell him to head my way?”

“Dr. Gentry’s headings are difficult to tell,” Matthew confided, “but I’ll relay the message to someone.”

On the street, Matthew followed his bandaged snoot toward the Templeton Inn. The green gate was open and the place appeared welcoming. Of a certain red-haired girl or a massive Ga there was no sign, nor did the inn seem to be guarded. Matthew crossed the tiled courtyard and opened the front door, which caused a bell above it to tinkle merrily. Matthew entered the inn’s main hall, a room constructed of dark wood with a blue and yellow rug upon the floorboards and over his head a circular iron chandelier with six wicks. Past a writing desk where the guests were admitted was a narrow staircase that curved to the left. Matthew was trying to determine what to do next when a broad-shouldered and heavy-set man wearing brown breeches and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up descended the stairs.

“Mornin’, sir,” said the man, with a distinct Scottish brogue. He had a red tuft of hair on his otherwise bald head and a small, neatly trimmed red tuft on his chin. “Help you?”

“My name is Nathan Spade,” Matthew answered with hesitation. He realized the power of his voice was less than optimal, since his nose was so stopped up. If this place had smelled either of perfume or the chamberpot he wouldn’t have been able to detect a difference. “I’m a guest of Professor Fell’s, staying at the castle.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Scotsman, as if he heard this declaration everyday.

“I’d like to see the red-haired girl who was brought here yesterday,” Matthew said. “What room is she in, please?”

“Oh…sir. There’s a problem, I fear.” The Scotsman frowned. “Miss Grigsby is no longer—”

The bell tinkled. The Scotsman looked toward the door, as did Matthew. Sirki came in, dressed in his white robes as he’d been earlier. The East Indian giant drew up a smile that made his front teeth sparkle.

“Nathan!” he said, coming to Matthew’s side like the onrush of an ocean wave. He clasped one hand to Matthew’s left elbow. His smile remained radiant. “I was looking for you! And here you are!”

“Exactly as you knew I might be?”

“Exactly,” said Sirki. “We missed you at breakfast. When I discovered you weren’t to be found, I decided this would be the place.”

The Scotsman said, “I was about to tell Mr. Spade that Miss Grigsby and the colored man are no—”

“I thank you for your efforts here, Mr. McKellan,” Sirki interrupted. “I have this situation in hand now, you may go about your business.”

“Yes, sir.” McKellan actually gave a small bow of deference. “I am busy upstairs,” he offered, and with that he turned away and went up the steps again.

Sirki stared coldly at Matthew. His eyes examined Matthew’s face. “What in the name of mighty Shiva has happened to you?”

“I had an accident on the road. Tripped over myself.”

“That’s a lie,” said the giant.

“Where are Berry and Zed?” Matthew fired back.

“Upstairs, I presume.”

“That’s a lie,” said Matthew.

The two liars stared at each other, neither one willing to move their lie one inch.

Matthew went first. “I’m presuming that McKellan started to tell me that Berry and Zed are no longer here. Where are they?”

“I have a coach outside, ready to take you back.” Sirki increased the pressure a fraction on Matthew’s elbow. “Come on, shall we? You have much work to do.”

Matthew had no choice but to be taken along, though he removed his elbow from the giant’s grip as soon as they were crossing the courtyard. Ahead on the street, a black berline with the harried driver of yesterday awaited its passengers. Sirki waited for Matthew to climb in, then he pulled himself up, closed the door and settled his bottom. He tapped on the roof with a fist and they were off.

“On your desk you’ll find a key and a map of who occupies which room along the corridor,” Sirki said as they left Templeton. “The key will allow you entry into the rooms that Smythe, Sabroso and Wilson occupy. Smythe is giving his report to the professor at two o’clock. Sabroso is reporting tomorrow at two. Wilson tomorrow at four. You should make plans to enter those rooms and—”

“Search for what?” Matthew interrupted. “I don’t have any idea what I’m looking for. Besides, if it involves some kind of information passed between two of those men, why would someone be stupid enough to write it down? Why not just whisper the information in passing and be done with it?”

“There’s the matter of the authorities getting firm evidence of the next shipment of Cymbeline,” Sirki replied, as he watched the countryside glide past. “They may have asked for written notification, instead of secondhand hearsay. So you might consider that you’re searching for some kind of coded message.”

“Hidden where? Under a pillow? Rolled up in a stocking?”

“Both good places to look, I’m sure.”

“The professor didn’t need me to do this,” said Matthew. “Any of his thugs might’ve done it. Just ransacked the rooms and gone through the debris.”

“Ransacking is not part of the plan. And that’s exactly why the professor’s thugs, as you put it, are inadequate for this task.”

“No, there’s some other reason he wanted me here. Isn’t there?” Matthew prompted, but Sirki remained silent. “Especially me. Why? Because I impressed him by besting Tyranthus Slaughter and killing Lyra Sutch? And he wished to see me, in the flesh? To take stock of me?” Matthew nodded at the thought that was being born. “Because he wishes to test me, to see if I’m capable of finding Brazio Valeriani for him?”

“He wishes at present,” Sirki replied quietly, “only to discover the name or names of a traitor or two.”

Matthew was silent for a time, watching the lush green forest pass by his window. “I suppose you won’t tell me where Berry and Zed are?” he asked at last. “Will you at least tell me why they were taken from the inn?”

“I will tell you that they decided to leave the inn last night. Without permission, I might add. Zed was captured and taken to a more secure place for safekeeping. The young woman…is unfortunately still missing.”

“Still missing?” That word had caused Matthew’s heart to jump into his throat.

“The island is not that large. She’s being searched for, and she’ll be found.”

“Christ!” Matthew said forcefully. And then more quietly and mostly to himself: “Why didn’t she just stay where she was? Where she was safe?”

“I’m sure you’ll have the chance to ask her those questions yourself on the return voyage to New York.”

Matthew was thinking of McKellan’s deferential bow, and the subservient expression on the innkeeper’s face. “This island is a prison, isn’t it? No one comes or goes without the professor’s approval?”

“It’s a bit hard to call Pendulum Island a prison, as its citizens live very happy and productive lives. The second part of your statement, however, is certainly true.” Sirki regarded Matthew with a baleful glare. “The professor likes balance, young man. He wishes to be undisturbed here. As he owns the island as an outright possession, he may limit the ships coming in and going out, to his pleasure.”

“What’s his first name?” Matthew decided to ask.

“The castle is within view,” Sirki answered. “We should be there in just a few minutes. I trust you’ll tend to your business and not go wandering on the road again? By the way, the stablemaster has been instructed to refuse your request for a horse.”

“So the castle is also a prison?” Even as he presented this question, Matthew knew there would be no response and he was correct.

The coach pulled up to the entry, Matthew and Sirki disembarked, and Sirki walked with Matthew to the foot of the stairs. “You look ridiculous with that thing on your nose,” was Sirki’s final comment before he took his leave. Then Matthew went directly to his room, where he unlocked his door with the key that had been in his pocket in another room forty feet underwater. On the writing desk was, indeed, a second key and a piece of paper that, unfolded, showed the corridor and the names of who slept where. It was drawn precisely and written neatly, in small tight lettering, and Matthew wondered if the professor himself had done this. Smythe was far down the corridor, the very last room. Beside the key was a plate of three muffins: cornbread, cinnamon and orange. Or as best as Matthew could tell without tasting, for his nose was so much dead matter. He poured himself a glass of water from the provided pitcher and ate the presumed orange muffin, which tasted to him—lacking a sense of smell—like so much gluey wool. The cornbread was likewise tasteless and the cinnamon muffin might have been artificial for all its flavor. Yet at least he had something in his stomach. He drank down a second glass of water, and then he stretched himself out on the bed for a few minutes to rest and organize his thoughts.

Matthew mused that from the death-condemned back to the living in the matter of a few gut-wrenching minutes was not a bad way to start a day off, if one had to be condemned to death by a pair of orange-haired shits. He wished to stay out of their sight until he was ready to reveal that his watery grave had opened. The damnable thing on his mind now was Berry’s fate. That girl had a habit of tearing him up. Out on the island by herself somewhere? He dreaded to consider what might have happened to her. And now add that weight to his ton of troubles, and try to balance along the professor’s beam.

“Impossible,” he said to the black bed canopy over his head. No god answered, not even Professor Fell.

He slept, and had some half-recalled dream about falling through the water toward a town that, while submerged in its blue aura, held the filmy spirits of citizens who walked upon the lowered lanes and streets, and drove their ghostly wagons toward a harbor swallowed by the sea. When Matthew awakened it was close enough to two o’clock to rouse himself to action. He went to the waterbasin and washed his face, musing that one pitcherful of the liquid made him the master, yet in quantity this could snuff out one’s life as easily as the fire from the gunpowder bombs that had blasted New York.

He waited ten more minutes. Then he took the key and eased into the hallway, watchful for two thick-bodied redhaired shits, and he went to Smythe’s door at the far end of the hall and knocked quietly and respectfully just in case. When there was no response he slid the key home and let himself in.

He was interested—and gratified, in a way—that Smythe’s room was neither as spacious as his own nor did it have a balcony overlooking the ocean. Smythe’s balcony faced the gardens. Perhaps Smythe had requested so, because of his late discomfort of the sea. In any case, it wasn’t as fine a room as Matthew’s. The problem-solver got to work, trying to solve a problem to which there were no clues. He saw the many sheets of parchment on the desktop, covered with lines not only from Cymbeline but other of the Bard’s plays. Smythe had been a busy scribbler these last few weeks. Matthew went through the desk drawers and found nothing of interest. The chest of drawers, the same. A small collection of clay pipes drew his hand, but in their bowls and stems were no rolled-up secret messages, as far as he could tell. He went through Smythe’s clothes, a delicate matter. Smythe did not wash as much as Matthew might have liked, and the clothing was stiff with sweat and the shirt collars ringed with grime. But again, nothing there but the bad habits of a dirty man.

He checked the shoes and the stockings, more items of distaste. He looked under the bed, under the mattress, and drew a chair over to peer on top of the bed canopy. He searched behind the chest of drawers and beneath the iron-legged stand that held the waterbasin. He exhausted all possible hiding places in the room, and then he took stock of the sheets of parchment.

Lying in plain sight, he thought. If a code was indeed written somewhere in those sheets, then why bother to hide them?

He picked up a few of the sheets and scanned them. Nothing remarkable that he could decipher. Just someone with time on his hands, scribing for the sake of something to do. He found the line of stage-direction from Cymbeline that Smythe had read to him from the play: Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle; he throws a thunderbolt.

That was the line that had prompted the professor’s titling of the new weapon? How had Smythe described it? Oh, yes…Cymbeline is the foundation upon which future devices shall be constructed.

The foundation, Matthew thought. Something basic. Something…ordinary that now was extraordinary?

Thunder and lightning, Matthew mused. The throwing of a thunderbolt by Jupiter, king of the gods. The professor would surely identify with Jupiter. And what happens when a thunderbolt hits the earth? Matthew asked himself.

Fire, of course. No, no…wait…first, before the fire…there is…

…the explosion.

Matthew walked out upon the balcony. From this vantage point he could see, far in the distance, a thin smudge of smoke that must be rising from the fort at the far end of Pendulum. The forbidden fort, where intrusion meant death. That, Matthew surmised, must be where the Cymbeline was being created.

Because he realized what Cymbeline must be. In fact, he’d already had a taste of it. A very hot and searing taste, in fact.

The foundation of future weapons was gunpowder. Professor Fell was creating a new and more potent—certainly more powerful—kind of gunpowder. The kind that could in a fairly small quantity tear a building to pieces and hurl a roof back into Jupiter’s realm. Oh yes, they were using the Cymbeline to good effect in New York, all right. Matthew nodded, watching the smoke smudge. Of course the chemicals had to be cooked. The fire kept away from the finished product. But what made it different? What ingredient made it more powerful or better in any way from the gunpowder normally created?

Matthew knew.

He recalled a certain Solomon Tully, wailing for his losses on the Great Dock.

…there’s something wicked afoot with this constant stealing of sugar.

“Indeed there is,” said Matthew Corbett, his eyes steel-gray and his voice grim.

For sugar was the new ingredient in the professor’s formula for death. Some chemical component of sugar, cooked and introduced into the process. Professor Fell was making his Cymbeline with sugar, and it was the foundation of what the professor hoped was not only new weapons using that powder, but a source of revenue that perhaps was the greatest he’d yet known.

And here stood Matthew, seeking a traitor or two who had decided England’s security was more important than Fell’s power or money. Truly, for Matthew, it was the world turned upside down. He decided it was time to vacate these premises. He put everything back upon the desktop exactly as it had been, for he thought Smythe would have a sharp eye for such irregularities. The chair he’d used to perch upon also was returned to its exact position. Everything else looked right. But no evidence of a traitor was to be found in here today, and probably not any day. Matthew left the room, closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. “Here!” said someone down the hallway. “What are you doing?” The voice made Matthew jump. As he turned toward it, he put the key in his pocket. Adam Wilson, the invisible man, was striding toward him.

“Spade? I asked you what you’re doing.” The voice was as slight and vapid as its owner, yet insistent in its own way. The watery blue eyes stared at Matthew behind the square-lensed spectacles. “Were you trying to get into Edgar’s room?”

Matthew recognized that the man of finances had not seen him leave Smythe’s room, but had only seen him standing at the door. Possibly it looked as if Matthew was working the doorknob. “I knocked at Smythe’s door, yes,” he said.

“It looked to me as if you were trying to get in, sir.” Wilson had small teeth that showed between the bloodless lips and came together as he spoke, as if taking small vicious bites from the air.

“I…suppose I did try the knob.” Matthew shrugged, as if to say it was his nature. “Smythe and I were having a discussion in the library earlier. I’d hoped to continue it.”

“Really?” It was spoken with either droll unconcern or a lingering touch of suspicion.

“Yes,” Matthew answered. “Really.”

“Edgar is meeting with the professor at this moment,” came the reply. The eyes narrowed. “What happened to you, sir? You are much the worse for wear.”

“You should have seen the horse after I beat it up.”

“You were thrown from a horse?”

“Regrettably, yes. Early this morning.”

“Hm.” Wilson took two backward steps to look Matthew over from head to toe. “Nothing is broken, I presume?”

“My pride,” said Matthew, with a tight smile that made his nose ache.

“Your sense of humor seems undamaged,” said Wilson, humorlessly. “I should think you would take to bed rather than seeking companionship.”

“In my line of work, those two things go together.”

“Ah.” A slight smile disturbed the small ugly mouth. “As you say.” Wilson gave a small nod of his head and shoulder-stoop to pass for a bow of respect and started to turn away.

But the problem-solver had at last detected something, and meant to hone in upon it. “Pardon me, Mr. Wilson, but…why do you refer to Mr. Smythe by his first name?”

“Because that is his name,” was the stone-faced reply.

“Of course it is, but…it indicates a certain familiarity. A friendship, I suppose. Or, as you put it…a companionship. I noted that at dinner last night there was a very strict air of formality in how everyone addressed everyone else. I suppose it’s an indicator of the distance we must keep from each other regarding our businesses. So why do you call him Edgar and not Mr. Smythe? Is it because…oh…you and he communicate with each other outside the realm of the professor’s view?”

“You know that would be forbidden.”

“I do know. But I also know you’re very comfortable calling him by his first name. Are you two friends in London?”

“No, we are not. But we have become friends here. Because as you must know, this is not the first of our conferences.” The eyes took on a wicked gleam behind the square lenses. “And if we’re speaking of noticing such things, Mr. Spade, I should say I heard Madam Cutter calling you Nathan. Does that mean, then, that you and she are…hmmmm…an item in London?”

“I’ve never met her before.”

“Obviously, then, you’ve made an impression. Or should I say, a new friend.” The upper lip curled. “Sometimes, Mr. Spade, a name…is only a name, and it conveys no darker meaning.”

“Darker meaning? Why do you put it that way?”

“Neither Edgar—Mr. Smythe, if you please—nor I are in violation of the professor’s code of conduct. Now it is true I have received some messages from Mr. Smythe, regarding the Cymbeline and money needed to store it in its London warehouse. I likewise have sent messages to him, but only through a courier designated by Professor Fell. Everything, you see, is aboveboard.”

That statement nearly caused Matthew to guffaw, but he swallowed it down. He said, “I’d hate to think of anyone here being dishonest.”

“And you would be responsive to that in some way? You would make sure Edgar and I were penalized, if indeed we were enjoying a social relationship beyond the call of our professions?”

“What are you doing together?” Matthew asked. “Going to the…” He picked up the recollection of an item from one issue of his cherished London Gazette. “Rakehell clubs?” Where, it was written in the broadsheet, a man might have a sumptuous eight-course dinner and enjoy fine rare wines before his bottom was blistered by a woman in riding boots and spurs and whirling a bullwhip. Matthew could imagine Smythe and Wilson at these festivities, linked possibly by their purient interests. One would be bellowing as if he had a lungful of burning coals while the other smirked in the admiration of applied pain.

“Young man,” said Wilson coldly, “it would be best for you to restrain your obvious penchant for fantasy. Save such suggestions for your whores and clients, won’t you?” He started to turn away, his face screwed up with something that was supposed to convey either anger or disgust, and then he paused.

“You look laughable with that thing on your nose,” he sniped, before he turned and stalked away to his room further along the hallway. Matthew let Wilson unlock his door and enter before he too returned to his own abode.

Twenty-Five

AFTER the dinner bell had been rung up and down the hallway, Matthew gave the candle clock an extra fifteen minutes of burning before he put on the somewhat shrunken jacket of his gray-striped suit and prepared to join the party.

With any luck, the Thackers had remained drunk or been—and the thought was repugnant to him—ravishing Fancy all day in their double brotherhood and thus had no idea Nathan Spade had risen from his grave.

It was time now to display himself, in all his abundant life.

He had scrubbed himself and shaved. He had combed his hair. He was presentable. Except for one thing. When he peered into the mirror he thought he looked ridiculous with that thing on his nose, so he peeled off the poultice to reveal the swollen blue-black-and-tinged-with-green artistry of Jack and Mack. He still couldn’t smell anything through this heated lump of clay, but so be it. The darkness had spread under his eyes and the two lumps on his forehead had turned dark purple. He was a real peacock, he was. And ready to strut, too.

He left his room, went down the stairs and to the banquet room where last night Jonathan Gentry had lost his head.

They were all there, minus the headless doctor. They were seated in their exact same places. They were eating from bowls of what appeared to be some kind of thick red seafood stew. Toy was feeding Augustus Pons, and giggling happily. Smythe was drinking his wine from a glass and Sabroso was drinking his from a bottle, and the nearly-invisible Wilson had his face poised over his bowl as if to inhale it up his nostrils. Minx Cutter was there, sitting rigidly in her chair. Aria Chillany looked pale and wan, as if the island’s sunlight was stealing her power. Fancy’s expression was blank, as she was jammed shoulder-to-shoulder between the two brothers, who were wearing orange suits to match their hair and jamming hunks of bread into their mouths. Mother Deare was eating delicately, her red lace gloves concealing the large hands of a workwoman.

Matthew came down the stairs as if he owned every riser.

Fancy looked up at him first. Her expression did not change, though her eyes may have widened only enough for him to note. Then the others saw him, and with pieces of bread stuffed in their mouths Jack and Mack Thacker made gagging noises and their green glinting eyes in the foxlike faces became huge. Jack jumped up from the table, his chair going over to the floor behind him, while Mack only half-rose before he grasped the neck of a wine bottle either to steady himself or use as a weapon.

“What the hell is wrong with you two?” Mother Deare rasped, a rough plaid of coarseness showing through her studied lace.

“Forgive me for being late.” Matthew came around the table to his place across from Minx and next to Aria. He was gratified to see that not a trace of last night’s murder remained. He sat down and sent a smile around the table. “Good evening to all.”

The Thackers had gone as gray as wet paper. They looked at each other in wonderment, and then at Matthew with something close to fear.

“Settle yourselves, gentlemen,” said Matthew. “I won’t bite.”

“Your face,” Minx said. “What happened to you?”

“Small accident. I took a fall.” He reached for the steaming pot of stew that sat upon the table and spooned some into his bowl. “This looks delicious.” It would taste nearly of nothing, however, since he could not smell a single peppercorn nor fish fin, both of which were exposed as his spoon went to work.

“On the stairs?” Mother Deare asked. “Didn’t you seek attention?”

“No, I rested in my room.” He aimed his smile at the two scowling brothers. “Please, don’t stand on my account.”

Mack recovered first. He drew up a half-grin that had nothing to do with either humor nor his eyes. “Pick up your chair, Jack. Clumsy of you.” Mack sank back into his seat, his teeth slightly bared. From the wine bottle he took a swallow that must have emptied it by half.

“Clumsy,” Jack repeated. He sounded stunned, as if he’d been headbutted. “Damn clumsy.” He righted his chair and as he sat down offered a thin and insincere smile to Mother Deare. “Pardon the fuss. I don’t know what come over me.”

Matthew spread his napkin across his lap. “Good manners are worth gold,” he said, and regarded Mother Deare. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I surely would. Good manners gets a person into a lot of rooms…and out of a lot of scrapes,” she answered, and she gave him a nod as if she knew exactly what he meant.

“You were in your room all day?” Aria asked. She looked bleary-eyed. Though Gentry hadn’t been her shining knight and hero, his death must have unnerved her at least enough to disturb her beauty-sleep.

“Not quite all day,” Wilson spoke up, in his irritating near-whisper. “He was out and about for a short while. Wasn’t he, Mr. Smythe?”

“That he was, Mr. Wilson,” answered the barrel of gravel.

“Interested in things,” said Wilson.

“Books,” said Smythe. “He’s a very learned fellow.”

“Are these riddles?” Sabroso asked. His voice was slightly slurred. Wine spots had appeared on the jacket of his cream-colored suit.

Matthew thought that Smythe and Wilson—two brothers, perhaps, in their quest for the dirtiest hole in London to squat in and spend a few pounds for pain—were emulating the communication style of the Thackers. He said, “No riddles, I think. Just roundabouts.”

“You look like ya come into some trouble, boyo,” said Mack as he reached over to play his greasy fingers through Fancy’s hair. Almost as if they were connected by the same nerve endings, Jack reached over to do the same on the opposite side. Fancy stared at Matthew for a few seconds more, and then she continued silently—and with as much dignity as possible—eating her stew.

“Trouble,” said Jack, with a hissy giggle.

“And ya look like shit, too,” Mack provided.

“A turd on legs,” Jack said.

“Gentlemen?” Augustus Pons had turned his face away from Toy’s spoon. The young man kept trying to slide the spoon into Pons’s mouth, but his efforts were waved away. “At least,” Pons said with an air of superiority, “Mr. Spade’s current hues are somewhat restrained. He wears no orange.”

That brought a drunken laugh from Cesar Sabroso and a fleeting smile across Minx Cutter’s face. But no joy from the land of the Thackers.

“Shut your hole, ya fat-assed buck!” growled Jack, who leaned toward Pons with the seething glare of murder in his eyes. Matthew was quite familiar with it.

“Mind yourself!” The voice of Mother Deare was indeed motherly, if one’s mother could hammer a spike through your forehead with two words. “We are a civilized gathering, sirs! And madams,” she added, for the sake of inclusion. “We are all brethren here, and we should act in accord with that. Understood?” She glared at the Thackers with eyes that might cut steel. And repeated the word to their silence: “Understood?”

Jack was the elder if one counted minutes and gray hairs, but the younger Mack seemed to be the more intelligent and diplomatic for it was he who nodded and said, “We do understand, Mother Deare.”

“Is my ass so very fat?” Pons asked Toy, with a stricken expression.

The young man frowned and offered the spoon and said, “Oh, no! It’s just perfect!” To which Pons gave a satisfied smile and accepted the offering.

Those at the table quietened down. Indeed, some sort of rough semblance of civility came upon the gathering. Most were silent, but for Pons and Toy who whispered to each other and an occasional winey laugh or exclamation directed into the air by Cesar Sabroso.

“But you’re feeling all right now?” Aria Chillany had come back to life. She placed her hand upon Matthew’s arm. She stared imploringly at him, the sapphire eyes wide with the just-asked question and her fingers squeezing his flesh.

“I am, yes.”

“Such a fall you must’ve taken!” She made it sound like a hero’s journey.

“Fortunately,” Matthew said with a quick tight smile, “I was able to save myself from serious injury.”

“Very fortunate.” Minx was regarding him over the rim of her glass. “Nathan, you seem to have somewhat of a charmed life, don’t you?”

Matthew heard Adam Wilson clear his throat down the table at the sound of the name, but he paid no heed. “Charmed? Not sure of that. But I suppose I am lucky.”

“The Devil’s luck,” said Mack, into his stewbowl.

“Hell wouldn’t have him,” said Jack.

“Spat him out,” Mack offered.

“Shat him out,” was Jack’s correction.

“You two,” said Madam Chillany, “make not an ounce of fucking sense.” She kept her hand on Matthew’s arm, and now began to do a little rubbing. Matthew noted that both Minx and Fancy took note of this action, before they pretended not to.

The dinner went on through platters of steamed clams and grilled swordfish to its conclusion of rice pudding, sugar cookies in the shapes of various sea creatures, and offerings of sweet sherry and golden port. During this procession of edibles and potables, Aria Chillany drew herself nearer and nearer to Matthew, at one point rubbing his leg with her own while she drank her weight in wine and began to burble about that bastard Jonathan Gentry. It seemed to Matthew that Jonathan Gentry, for all his faults, might be missed by at least one person at this table, and the sudden sadness that leaped into the sapphire eyes was a pity to behold. But it didn’t stay very long, for Aria was surely a woman of the moment, and Gentry’s moment—even if it was brief and lackluster—had passed in a long sigh between bottles. Then her fingers found Matthew’s arm again and her foot taunted his ankle beneath the table, and her laughter at Pons’s gallant little attempts at joking was forced and strident and carried the note of a woman terrified of sleeping alone for fear her bedtime companion might awaken with a scream behind her teeth.

Matthew had trouble looking her in the face; in fact, he had difficulty looking at any of them, but all through the dinner he felt the eyes of Minx Cutter and Fancy upon him, one set of eyes perhaps carving him up into small pieces the easier to digest, the other set wondering what freedom would taste like in the brave new world he might present to her. At last Matthew finished a final seahorse, which he crunched noisily for the benefit of those who knew, and then excused himself from the table with a word of goodnight to Mother Deare, who seemed to rule this particular roost. It was a difficult chore getting out of Aria’s claws, and she looked at him despondently over her umpteenth glass of wine. He turned his back on her and walked away from the gathering and up the stairs.

To be joined within seconds by Minx, who grasped his arm and pressed to his side and asked quietly, “What really happened to you?”

“Stairs,” he answered. “Fall. Unfortunate.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

“If you lean on me any harder, I may fall down these stairs as well.” He continued his ascent and she kept beside him.

“I need you,” she said.

His eyes widened. “Pardon?”

“To go with me in the morning. I want to show you something. Back where the whales play. It’s important. Will you meet me at the stable? Say…eight o’clock?”

“Fuckin’ impossible!” hollered Jack Thacker, and a wine glass died a shattered death upon the floor.

Matthew kept going without a backward glance, and Minx with him. They went through the corridor of sea-skeletons toward the main staircase. “I’m not sure I can get a horse,” he told her.

“Why not?”

“I’ve been a bad boy.”

She frowned. “What’re you talking about?”

“Only that I’ve offended someone here, and I may not be able to get a horse.”

“That’s more bullshit. If you need a horse, I’ll get one for you.”

“All right, then.” He stopped at the foot of the central stairs and regarded her with a neutral expression. “Yes, I’ll meet you at the stable at eight. What’s this about?”

“It’s about…” She glanced left and right, to make sure no one was near. Then she suddenly leaned into him and kissed him on the mouth. It was a long, lingering kiss, and though Matthew was amazed by this unexpected action he did not draw away.

“Well,” said Matthew when the kiss had ended and Minx was staring at him with her slightly dewy golden eyes. “May I guess it’s about…us?”

“Eight o’clock,” she said, and she started up the stairs without waiting for him. A few risers up, she paused and turned toward him once more. “Unless,” she added.

“Unless?” he asked.

“Unless I see you before then,” Minx held his gaze for a few seconds longer, and then she continued on her way and out of his sight into the second-floor hallway.

Matthew’s lips were burning. Now this was the damnedest thing! he thought. Who could have seen this coming? The princess of blades, attracted to him? He was a dull knife in this company. Still…he did have youth, and manners. He was quite simply stunned. Therefore he was doubly pole-axed when he started up the stairs and a soft feminine voice behind him said, “Nathan?”

He turned to face Fancy, who came up to stand beside him.

“I have only a minute,” she said, but calmly as was her hidden spirit. “They’ll be after me. I want you to know…when I saw you go into the water today…I knew I had to help you. I don’t know why. I just…had to. I don’t know who you are, or why you are here, but…I want to thank you for thinking you could help me.”

“I can help you,” he said. “If you allow it.”

The dark eyes were fixed upon him. The beautiful face—the beautiful creature from a different world—was his, for the moment. He felt it. While she gave him every iota of her attention, she belonged to him. This would change in the next few seconds; when the sound of boots clunking through the hallway came to them, it would change, but for now…

“Perhaps you can,” she said, and then they heard the boots.

Matthew had no stomach for jousting with those bastards tonight. He turned away from Fancy even as she lowered her face and turned to meet her masters, and Matthew went up the stairs two at a time sick to his heart and aching in his nose. He fished for his key to open his door but as he slid the key in, the door came ajar and that was how he knew he had a visitor this evening.

He opened the door to the ruddy light of the triple wicks atop the dresser.

From the white high-backed chair with the black abstract design, Professor Fell said, “Close the door and lock it, Matthew.”

Matthew stood still for a few seconds too long.

“Go ahead,” the professor urged. “It’s the sensible thing.”

Matthew had to agree with that. He closed the door and locked it. Then he stood with his back pressed rigidly against it, and the figure with the flesh-colored mask and flesh-colored gloves sat comfortably with legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. The professor tonight wore a conservative dark blue suit, a white shirt with a cascade of ruffles down the front, and a dark blue tricorn with a black band.

There was a silence. Professor Fell seemed to be studying the ceiling. Regarding the small cracks there, Matthew thought. Then Professor Fell’s featureless face angled toward the New York problem-solver.

“You had some trouble today.” It was a statement of fact, as dry as the fish bones in the skeleton collection.

“A mite,” Matthew allowed.

“Hm. One of my stone seahorses is missing from the library balcony. Also the curtain cords are gone. There is—was—a wine bottle on the ledge. What can you tell me about that?”

“Nothing.” Matthew shrugged. His heart was a furious drummer. “Much.”

“You shield your enemies. Why?”

“I take care of my own business.”

“That’s admirable. Stupid, possibly…but admirable. Please sit down, you’re putting a crick in my neck.”

Matthew seated himself in the chair at the writing-desk, the same as the evening before. He turned himself so as to have full view of the emperor of crime. A question came to him that had to be thrust into the air, like a fiery sword. “May I ask…why you never reveal your face?”

Did the mouth laugh, just a shade, behind the cowl? “I am so beautiful,” said the professor, “that I might stop time itself, so the angels could adore me longer. Or I am so ugly I might stop the hearts of any beasts that lay their jaundiced eyes upon me. Or…most likely…I am simply a man who enjoys being faceless.”

“Oh,” said Matthew.

“Anything else you’d care to know?”

“Many things. But I don’t think you’d tell me.”

“You speak with certainty, though it’s doubtful you understand.”

“I’m ready,” said Matthew, as the candles cast equal amounts of illumination and shadows, “to be enlightened.”

The head nodded, ever so slightly. The gloved fingers steepled. “First, what have you learned?”

“Not much.” But it occurred to him that Professor Fell valued his opinion, so he reversed himself. “A little. Concerning Adam Wilson and Edgar Smythe.”

“Go on,” the professor urged.

“My opinion only, of course.”

“Yes. Your opinion has been paid for. Go on.”

“That the former has a streak of cruelty and the latter does not wash enough.” Matthew paused, his own fingers steepled, to consider his next offering. He decided to give the professor the benefit of his suspicion, and a taste of what Fell was looking to find. “I believe they have had some…association outside the realm of business. I believe they’ve discovered they are kindred spirits in some activity in London.”

“And you say this based on what?”

“Based on my instincts. On my feeling that they are familiar in a way that has formed a bond between them. What that bond might be, I don’t know, but it’s in the way Wilson speaks of Smythe using his Christian name. And, also, the fact that they seem to be looking out for each other. Guarding their interests, possibly. Or sharing a secret.” His horses were galloping now, and Matthew decided to give them free rein. “I think they have violated your decree of no association between members of your…” What was the proper word? Oh yes. “Parliament,” he concluded.

Professor Fell was silent, and did not move. For a time he appeared to be what he pretended to be, an automaton dependent upon a key. Then he sat up straighter in his chair, with a motion that made Matthew think of the smooth gliding of a snake.

“I enforce that decree,” said the professor, “for reasons of security. If one member of my ‘Parliament,’ as you so colorfully phrase it, is…shall we say…put out of business by an overzealous puppet of the law, then I do not wish that consequence to spread through my other affairs. My associates know their positions, and what is required of them. That is all they need to know. I take care of the…” He hesitated, seeking the word.

Matthew supplied it. “Octopus?”

“As you please.” The tricorned head bowed, with the eerie flesh-colored cowl beneath it.

“I have no proof Smythe and Wilson are meeting in violation of your decree,” Matthew said. “Only a…”

“Guess?” Fell asked.

“Only that, yes.”

“But you found nothing of interest in Smythe’s room today?”

“Nothing.” He frowned. “Again, I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“I think you may have an idea. And…I think you may know it when you find it.”

“If I find it,” Matthew corrected. “Which may be impossible, given the situation and lack of time.”

“The situation is what it is. And you may be responsible yourself for the lack of time, as you were too stubborn to attend my command in a prompt fashion.”

Matthew lifted his chin. He stared into the faceless void. He brought up every ounce of courage he possessed, and he said, “I don’t care to be commanded. Not by you or anyone else.”

“Oh! Bravely spoken, sir. Surely then, before Mr. Matthew Corbett I must restrain the very power that has brought me from my humble beginnings to where I sit today.”

“A man in a cowl,” Matthew said. “His face hidden, his steps guarded, his path uncertain.”

“An uncertain path? Why would that be?”

“One traitor or two,” came the reply. “Double flies in the ointment, possibly. And your path so uncertain in picking them out that you have to enlist me? The very same man you sent a blood card to back in the summer? What if one of your thugs had killed me? Where might you be sitting today?”

“Downstairs, in my own quarters.”

“And you might be walking in circles on your floor, trying to decide whose head to cut off next. It seems to me that you should be very glad I slipped the blood card. For with your providence rider, you have hope. Without me…an uncertain path.”

The professor did not speak for a time. When he did, it was one word spoken with near-admiration for a point sufficiently made: “Ah.”

“What do you do during the day, anyway?” Matthew continued, daring fate. “Do you hide away down in your quarters? Do you work on something? Surely you just don’t live for these little dramas and then sleep all day.”

“I rarely sleep,” was the reply, spoken with no expression.

“All this treasure at your disposal, and you can’t sleep?” Matthew realized he was nearing the dangerous cliff’s edge of his own sharp tongue, yet he felt the need to press forward a little bit more. “You’re a lurker in your own house? You must wear a mask to go out and about? Professor…I fear you’re not as wealthy nor as privileged as you might believe, because even though I live in a dairyhouse half the size of this room I do sleep well—most nights—and I feel no need for a mask.”

Fell grunted quietly. “You do,” he said, “have a set of balls on you.”

“I think they’ve grown since I’ve had this occupation.”

“I could have Sirki saw them off for you, if they’ve grown too large to be comfortable.”

“Do what you please,” said Matthew, and he meant it. His heart was calming and the small beads of sweat that had risen at his temples had begun to dry. “It’s your world, isn’t it?”

With that, the professor leaned slightly forward. “May I tell you a little about my world, young man?”

Matthew didn’t respond. Something in the soft, genteel voice had sent a cold shiver down his spine.

“I shall,” Fell decided. “I told you I had a son, didn’t I? Templeton, as I said. A very fine lad. Very intelligent. Curious about the world. Almost as curious as his father. Well, you do remind me of Temple. As I said…of who he might have been, had he lived. He died when he was twelve years old, you see. Twelve years old.” The words had been repeated with a sad sort of passion that held restrained fury at its center. “Beaten to death by a gang of rowdies on his way to school. He wasn’t a fighter, you see. He was a gentle soul. He was a very fine boy.” Here the professor paused and sat in silence for a time, until Matthew nervously cleared his throat and shifted his position in the chair.

“His image,” said the professor, “is the portrait in stained-glass on the staircase. My Templeton, lost to me. By the bloody fists of a gang of six. They chased him through the streets like a dog and beat him for their amusement, I understand. Oh, he was always dressed very well. Always very clean. No one tried to help him, in that London mob. No one cared. He was another show on the streets, another display of what human beings can do—and will do—for the pleasure of it. And the awful thing, Matthew…the awful, terrible thing…is that Temple had a premonition of his death the night before, and he asked me to walk with him to school that morning…but I, being busy in my own affairs…could not be bothered to do so. I had my research before me. My academics. So I said, Temple…you’re a big boy now. You have nothing to fear. Your mother and I trust in God, and so should you. So…go along, Temple, for the school is not very far away. Not very far. Go right along, I said. Because you’re a big boy now.”

To the heavy silence that followed, Matthew offered, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t speak,” said the professor, with a soft but cutting hiss, and Matthew dared not utter another word.

They sat without speaking for a while, the professor and the problem-solver. Matthew could hear waves breaking against the rocks below, slowly beating Pendulum Island to pieces.

“I…had to do something,” came the terrible and quiet voice. “Something, to ease my pain. I couldn’t live like that, could I? And neither could Teressa. She was such a mild and sensitive woman. Like Temple, really. He took most of his personality from her, and he resembled her too. When I looked at her, I could see him looking back. But she cried all the time, and I couldn’t sleep…and I knew…I must do something, to ease this pain.”

One gloved hand came up, almost touched the forehead, and slowly fluttered down again like the death of an arrow-shot bird.

“I had money. My father left me wealthy. He was the governor here. Have I told you that?” He waited for Matthew to nod. “The governor of Pendulum Island and its seaport, Somers Town. Yes, I remember telling you. Well…I had money. And money is a tool, you know? It can do whatever pleases you. What pleased me then…was to find out the names of the six creatures who had beaten my son to death. After that…to go upon the streets after nightfall, out into the dark dens where the animals gather, and pushing any fear I felt down into myself I walked into places a year before would have never seen. I had money enough—and the skills of persuasion enough—to buy a gang of ruffians of my own. And pay them handsomely to kill the six boys on my death list. The youngest creature fourteen, the eldest seventeen. They never lived another month. But you know…still…it didn’t suffice.

“No,” the professor continued, the word like the tolling of a distant funeral bell. “The pain was still there. So…I gave the order to my gang of ruffians to kill the parents of those dead creatures, their brothers and sisters, and anyone who lived in their squalid little rooms. It cost me quite a lot of money, Matthew. But…it was worth it, because I wanted it done and it was done. And quite suddenly…I had power and a reputation. Quite suddenly I was known on the streets to be ruthless in my regard to life, and quite suddenly I had an interested following. And me…a lowly, bookish and reclusive academic, suddenly with a gang of…thugs, did you say?…thugs who wanted to work for me. And several in particular who stepped forward and gave me education and good advice. That money was to be made enforcing tribute from the carters and higglers who set up their wares on the streets. In other words, to create a territory. My territory, Matthew. At first a small area, then larger. And larger still, encompassing businesses that had existed long before Temple’s death.” The cowled head nodded. “It seems I was very good at persuasion. At…creating plans for further expansion. My thirst for knowledge grew. Only now it was beyond books. It was the desire for knowledge of how to control people, and thus control my destiny. And all that you see—and all you do not see—was brought about because of the savage murder of my son on a London street, when you would have been but a child.

“And now,” said the professor in his smooth, quiet and terrifying voice, “here you are, before me.”

Matthew feared to speak.

But the silence stretched, and at last Matthew cleared his throat to urge up the words lodged there like thorns.

“Your wife. What became of Teressa?” he dared ask.

“Ah, sweet Teressa. My gentle angel, whom I pledged to for life at the altar of a beautiful church. She could not go where I was going.” Fell was silent for a moment, as if trying to control the one thing he could not: the whirlwinds within his own soul. “After the deaths of the families, I told her we were done. My love for her was gone. I saw too much of Temple in her. When I saw him looking out at me, it speared my heart. I could not abide such disturbance. Thus…I cast her away. And I recall…I recall this very vividly. When I told her we were done, that I wished never to see her face in this life again…that I was a changed man and walked a changed path she could not follow…she did not begin to cry, Matthew, but she began to bleed. From that stricken face I used to love…two tendrils of blood began to drip from her nostrils…slowly, very slowly. And I, being a changed man, watched that blood ooze forth, and all I wondered was…which tendril of blood would reach her upper lip first.”

The last words lingered in Matthew’s mind. The professor folded his hands in his lap, fingers twined.

“As I say, you do remind me of my son. I mean…of what he might have been. The thoughtful young man, who believes he has the world in his pocket. How delightful that must be. Listen to me now: tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock, Cesar Sabroso gives his report,” Fell said. “At four o’clock, Adam Wilson speaks. I trust you will use the key well and wisely.”

“I’ll get into their rooms,” Matthew replied, his voice tight.

“Very good, then.” The professor rose smoothly to his feet. “Oh,” he said, with an upraised finger. “I’d like you to see clearly what I am now, Matthew. I am curious about all forms of life, of course, but one of my interests is in marine life, in all its varied shapes and forms. It is the specialized lifeform that most intrigues me. The creature, you might say, from another world. One may say…the nightmare, formed in flesh? If you desire a further insight, you might meet one of the servants at six o’clock in the morning at the foot of the main stairs. Don’t be late, please. With that, I will say goodnight.”

Matthew stood up. Not necessarily out of respect, but because this was after all the man’s domain. He nodded, still finding language difficult.

Professor Fell unlocked the door, opened it a crack and peered into the corridor. He waited for a moment, because perhaps someone was nearby. Before the professor slipped out, he said without looking at Matthew, “Don’t fail me,” and then he was gone.

Matthew relocked the door. He hadn’t realized that his hands had begun to tremble. He splashed some water into his face from the basin. For a few minutes he stood outside on the balcony staring at the stars in the black sky and hearing the waves rumble.

He was himself a creature from another world, he thought. He did not belong in this one. His heart yearned for New York, his regular life and his friends. But before he, Berry and Zed could get back to that solid earth…

…he would have to present evidence of treachery to Professor Fell, the master of treason.

It was nearly too much for his mind to comprehend and his soul to bear. He drew in deep lungfuls of the salt air, but it didn’t help. Then, tired to the point of desperation, he turned away from the sea that had almost claimed his life and went to bed to seek the ethereal solace of sleep.

Twenty-Six

A TAPPING at the door brought Matthew up from the pit of a fitful sleep. He hesitated, listening. And yes, there it was again. Someone definitely at the door. And what time was it? A squint at the candle clock: nearly two in the morning. Now what the hell was this? Matthew wondered. He sat up on the bed’s edge. “Who is it?” he asked, but of an answer there was none. A third time: tap tap tap. Someone definitely wanting him to open that door. Matthew started to call again, but he knew it would be no use. If they had wanted to reply, a reply would have been given. Still…perhaps it was someone who didn’t wish their voice to carry in the hallway. Or…more ominously…it could be one or more Thackers, wishing to finish the job they’d started yesterday. That thought made him mad. He’d had a damned gutful of those orange-haired nubbers. If they wanted some of him, they’d get it…in the form of a candle clock smashed across their skulls. He got out of bed, plucked up the candle clock and, oblivious to the wax dripping onto his right hand, went to the door, unlatched it and opened it a fraction. A caped and hooded figure was standing there, touched by the golden glow of its own candlelight. “Who are—” Matthew began, but he could not finish the question because in the next second the figure blew its candle out, pushed the door open, blew Matthew’s candle out before light could reveal the face, and pressed her lips against his own. And very definitely, from the shape of the body beneath the cape, it was a her. He pulled back and started to speak again, to ask the same unasked question, and now in the velvet dark the figure fairly flew upon him and, dropping her own candlestick to the floor, clasped his arms to his sides and kissed him again. Whoever she was, she was strong. Lithe and nimble, he thought. Her body strained against his, a powerhouse of earthy passion.

It had to be Fancy.

He started to speak her name, and yet her mouth upon his was unrelenting in its quest to consume every word he might try to utter. She backed him across the room to the bed, proving that an Indian could see, catlike, in the dark. He fell back before her, upon that selfsame bed, and she proved also that an Indian maiden could be far from maidenly.

She began a campaign to disrobe him, if it meant tearing the nightclothes from his body. And they were not even his nightclothes, but provided to him from Sirki, and Matthew thought that if the East Indian giant wanted them back after this misadventure he would have to settle for the rags the West Indian girl had rent them into with fingers and teeth. Her haste was ridiculous, but also flattering.

“Wait!” he said, stunned by the speed of this disclosure of desire. He couldn’t get out the second wait, for she clamped a hand over his mouth and bit his belly just south of the navel. With his nightclothes torn into tatters and himself nearly naked, Matthew found the girl hellbent on pinning him to the bed and having her way with him.

She kissed his mouth, grasped his tongue with her lips, and nibbled his throat. What could he do, but lie back before this onslaught? He returned her kisses and would be remiss—actually insane—if his body did not respond. And so it did.

She wore no clothing under the cape. She had no time for formalities nor foreplay; she got astride Matthew and mounted him with the dampened ease of wanton and needful urgency. He did not protest this action, but when he tried to reach up to touch her face and hair beneath the hood she gripped his arms all the harder and held them fast to the bed.

If any member of her tribe had attempted to mark time to the thrusting of her hips with a drum, his hands would’ve been beaten bloody within the first minute. “My God!” Matthew said, or thought he said; he wasn’t sure, since his senses were beginning to fly in mad circles round the room. He thought he wouldn’t be able to walk tomorrow, but what a hell of a run he intended to have tonight.

She leaned forward then and harshly bit his lips. Very harshly, in fact, and most painfully, and Matthew realized from the roughness of her toothy attention this was not Fancy at all.

It was Aria Chillany.

Of course it was. She of the cold soul and brutal demands. She was demanding of him right now and he intended to deliver. Her intention was strictly to enjoy his flesh, and all else be damned. He could bear that hardship. In fact, her soul might be cold but something else was quite hot. Quite.

He decided to give as good as he got, and so he met her halfway on each stroke and their banging together might have broken bones if it had been any more violent a wallop. His teeth cracked together in his head and he feared his eyeballs would jump from his skull. The woman was wild. She ground down on him and moved her hips around and around and Matthew who had not experienced anything like this since the episode with the sex-crazed nymph Charity LeClaire could only hang on for the pounding and try to keep the impending explosion from knocking Madam Chillany through the ceiling.

But no, no…he had to withstand this assault as long as he could. Therefore he sent his mind out on an errand of imaging himself a man swimming under the cold sea, whereas in this room the pulsing heat and violence of their frenzied encounter promised the seaman must in a short time certainly rise from the depths.

He tried to reach up for her again and was again promptly arm-pinned. Then her rhythm changed to a softer beat and she leaned forward and kissed him gently on the mouth, the touch of her lips stirring a not-so-distant and very pleasing memory.

It was not Aria Chillany. He realized it must be Minx Cutter.

Yes. He was sure of it. Though not entirely certain, in that he would not have bet his life upon it. Now they were meeting more gently but still with a powerful thrust, and her mouth was upon his and her tongue questing within. Minx, he almost said, but his mouth was no longer his own. She kissed him and bit him playfully, as her hips circled around and around and she held him tightly within. Yes. Certainly Minx Cutter, he thought. Maybe.

The problem was, he could not touch her hair or her face nor could he smell. His bashed and swollen nose prevented all aromas from entering. He could not tell if the woman astride him smelled of earth, of fire, or of seafoam. He tried to inhale her scent and found nothing. As the woman began to thrust down upon him harder and harder still, as she began to moan softly in a voice that could belong in its passionate strain to any one of his three suspects, Matthew was at a loss to know who it truly was. And then he met her one thrust too many, their heat blending and melding, and he could hold back no longer. He was lit up as if by a white-hot blaze, his mind was filled with a spinning of colorful wheels, and he emptied himself into her as she clutched him tighter and deeper and made noises of both passion and satisfaction that served to inflame him to a hotter candle. When Matthew was all served out, the mystery paramour gave him one slow and final grind that was pain mixed with pleasure, as love must be. Then she dismounted, grasped his most valued instrument and kissed its ticklish tip, and without a word departed from the bedside. He heard the door open and close, and that was the end of the affair.

“Damn,” he managed to say, to the dark.

The dark answered, in its own way, for there was suddenly the slightest tremor of Pendulum Island shifting like a beast in its sleep, and in the castle there came a beggar’s symphony of creaks, cracks and pops issuing from the walls.

Matthew got out of bed. On shaky legs he went to the door, opened it and peered into the hallway. It was, as he’d suspected, empty. Fancy…Aria Chillany…Minx Cutter. Who? He somehow doubted he might ever know. Therefore he closed and latched the door, he relit the candle clock estimating to his best judgment the amount of time that had passed, and he returned to his bed ready for sleep and whatever the next morning might bring in this strange new world he found himself a part of.

At as near to six o’clock as he could manage Matthew was dressed and waiting at the bottom of the stairs. The sun was rising over the sea, the air was still and the day vowed to be warm indeed. In a few minutes a middle-aged black servant arrived in the high powdered wig and the sea-blue uniform that seemed to suit Professor Fell’s taste for drama and color. The servant held a black leather bag and wore leather gloves the same hue.

“Good mornin’, sir,” he said to Matthew, his face impassive. “If you’ll follow me?”

Matthew followed the man out another door beyond the staircase. They walked through a manicured garden where early birds sang from the trees. Purple and yellow flowers lined the walkway, which led to a series of stone stairs going down the cliff face to the sea.

“Careful with your step,” said the servant, as they started their descent.

Suddenly a voice called, “Daniel!” A second servant who’d been standing among the trees approached them as Daniel and Matthew paused. “I’ll take the young man down,” this second man offered.

“I was told to do it,” Daniel said.

“I know you don’t like it,” was the reply. The recent arrival—or had he been waiting for them? Matthew wondered—was dressed in the usual fashion and looked to be a few years older than the first man, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes that held both sadness and determination. “I’ll do it for you.”

“You don’t like it neither,” said Daniel.

“Who does?” asked the second servant, with a lift of his eyebrows. He reached out for the bag.

Daniel removed the leather gloves and the second man put them on. Then the bag changed hands. Daniel gave a very audible sigh of relief. “Thank you, George,” he said, and he nodded at Matthew, turned away and retraced his steps to the castle.

“This way, sir,” said George, who started down the long and—to Matthew’s eye—extremely dangerous and sea-damp stairs.

At the bottom of the cliff was a wooden platform jutting out over the sea, and low enough that some of the harder waves were smashing against it. A wide plank extended from the platform another ten or so feet over the turbulent water, and at the end of that plank was a highly-unsettling metal spike coated with what could only be dried gore. Matthew noted what appeared to be the top of a wire fence, exposed in the trough between waves, that made a circle about a hundred or more feet around. Keeping something caged, he thought. But what? The sweat had begun to rise under his shirt.

“If you’ll stand where you are, sir,” cautioned George, who set the leather bag down and opened its ram’s-horn clasps. Matthew was perfectly glad to obey, as the wind and the sea spray hit him full in the face.

George reached carefully into the bag and drew out by the unruly hair the severed head of Jonathan Gentry. Matthew caught his breath and drew back another few feet. The face was gray with a touch of green on the sunken cheeks. George held the head at arm’s length and walked out to the spike, where he did what Matthew feared he was going to do: he impaled the head on the spike, and then he walked back along the plank and stood looking out to sea. He removed the gloves and dropped them with the briefest shiver of revulsion into the bag, which he promptly closed once more.

They waited.

“What’s in there?” Matthew dared ask, his voice pitched nearly an octave higher than normal.

“The professor’s prized possession,” said George. “It will show itself soon. Please don’t move when it does.”

“No concern there,” Matthew answered, watching the blue waves and the white swirling foam within the wire enclosure, which had to be secured by chains many feet underwater.

Still they waited.

And then George lifted his chin and said, “It’s coming now. Time for its breakfast.”

Something was indeed rising from the depths. Matthew could see a brown shape coming up, a thing that looked to be blotched with barnacles and stained with seaweed. George stood his ground about midway on the platform, and though Matthew’s brain begged him to turn tail from this ascending nightmare he was profoundly curious. His curiosity always won over his sense of impending danger, which he reasoned would someday be his undoing.

The shape hung suspended just below the churning surface. Matthew had the sense of looking at a huge mass of moving jelly. Then a tentacle as big as a treetrunk came up through a green-foamed wave and reached upward, questing for the head of Jonathan Gentry.

Matthew did not have to be cautioned to stand perfectly still, for his blood seemed to have frozen in his veins on this warm sunny morning and his muscles turned to lumps of heavy clay.

The tentacle rubbed itself across the hair on the severed head. A second tentacle rose up, blighted with mollusks and ringed with pinkish-green suckers that pulsed and moved seemingly of their own accord. This, too, went to the head and began to caress the face with hideous anticipation.

“It is very intelligent,” said George, in a hushed voice. “It’s exploring its meal.”

A third tentacle rose from the water, snapped like a whip toward the platform and then submerged again. The two others began to work in concert at lifting the head off its spike. Matthew thought he was a stagger and shriek away from Bedlam.

With a noise of sliding flesh the tentacles wrapped themselves around Gentry’s gaping face and pulled the head upward from its mount on the plank. Then, quickly and greedily, the head was brought to the shifting mass that hung just under the waves, and as it went down Matthew could imagine he heard the crack of a skull and the crunch of facial bones under the biting beak of Professor Fell’s huge and nightmarish octopus.

The creature withdrew to its lair below. There was a brown shimmer and a flail of tentacles, and it was gone.

“It usually eats horsemeat, lamb or beef,” George explained, altogether too helpfully. “It does seem to like entrails and brains.” He stared across the platform at Matthew, who had retreated to its far edge. “You’re very pale, sir,” he observed.

Matthew nodded, dazed; he was thinking that never in his worst fever-dream had Doctor Gentry ever thought that not only would his head be sawed off, but that his brain would be a sea-monster’s delicacy.

George picked up the leather bag as if it carried a disease. “I need to tell you, sir,” he said, “that your lady friend is currently in hiding at the house of Jerrell Falco.”

Matthew blinked. “What?”

“Your lady friend,” the servant repeated. “Her name is Berry, I believe?”

“Berry. Yes.” Matthew wondered if he were still asleep and dreaming this by way of a bad oyster; yes, of course, it had to be that.

“At Captain Falco’s house. His wife, Saffron, is my daughter. I was told to tell you, and as I learned you were coming here this morning I waited for you.”

Matthew rubbed the lumps on his forehead with the fingers of his right hand. Surely he’d been injured more severely than he’d first imagined.

“I have a map for you.” George reached into his jacket and brought out a folded piece of rough-edged paper. He offered it to Matthew, who stood dumbly staring at it. “Please, sir,” said the servant. “Take it and put it away. If anyone finds that and learns I’ve brought it for you, I hate to think what would happen to poor George.” He cast a disturbed glance over the octopus enclosure. “It shows you how to reach Falco’s house from here. Please, sir…put it away, and show no one.”

Matthew put the paper into his own jacket. “Thank you,” he managed to say.

“I hope it will help you,” George answered, with a dignified half-bow. He picked up the leather bag, now headless. “If you’ll follow me up the steps, then?”

Behind the locked door of his room, Matthew studied the map and consigned it to memory before he burned it over a candle and then scattered the ashes from his balcony into the sea. Falco’s house was not far from the forbidden road that led to the fort. What in the name of all the demons of Solomon’s Key was Berry doing over there? He had to find a way to get to her, and that was the problem. And finding Zed, too, would be a problem. The largest problem looming upon him now, however, was that he was running out of time.

Don’t fail me, Professor Fell had said.

This whole affair seemed to Matthew like an exercise in failure. He still had the rooms of Cesar Sabroso and Adam Wilson to search through, but the conference of criminals was nearing its end and all he had to show for his explorations so far was an inkling—a instinctual guess, as the professor might put it—that Smythe and Wilson were companions in some form of communication beyond Fell’s knowledge. Likely, Matthew surmised, of debauchery and garbage-pit mischief. But there was nothing to indicate that either one was a traitor.

So where to go from here?

Minx Cutter would be waiting for him at eight o’clock at the stable. Something to show him, where the whales played. If she could get him a horse, fine. If not, he was certainly not walking that distance. Not in the daylight, at least. But when night came, perhaps that would be the time to go Berry-hunting. If he could get out of this castle without being seen by anyone.

Promptly at eight o’clock, Matthew approached the stable and found Minx standing outside on the road there with two horses—Esmerelda and Athena once more—saddled and ready. She was dressed in her brown breeches, her riding boots and a black waistcoat over a pale blue blouse. He didn’t quite know what to say to her—may I ask if you happened to visit my room last night past midnight?—so he said nothing. If he expected her to suddenly gush forth about the encounter, he was sadly disappointed. She swung herself up astride Esmeralda and watched him approach with a blank stare as she held Athena’s reins.

“Good morning,” he told her. Was his voice a shade shaky? Yes, it was. Her stare was formidable, and there was something accusing in it. “How did you get me the horse?”

“I said I needed two horses. One for myself and one for my riding companion. I wasn’t asked whom, and I didn’t volunteer the information. Are you ready?”

He answered by taking the reins and getting up into Athena’s saddle.

“Your nose is better today?” she asked as they started off.

“It’s not quite as swollen. I can breathe a little more through it.”

“And you had a restful sleep?”

Matthew wasn’t sure what he’d heard in that question. “I did sleep, yes,” he said.

“Good. I want you to be sharp this morning.”

Sharp was not exactly what he was feeling, but he decided not to contest the statement. He followed Minx away from the stable and the castle and out onto the road that led to Templeton, as the sun grew warmer and the sky more blue and brightly-colored birds flew in circles over Fell’s paradise.

When they reached the cliffs where Minx had brought him on the first day, the whales were already surfacing amid the waves, spouting white foam into the air and jostling each other with playful but gentle abandon.

Minx dismounted and walked to the edge, where she stood watching the parade of leviathans. Matthew also got off his horse and joined her, and together they stood under the hot glaring sun as the beasts dove and surfaced again, flapping their tails like the banners of huge gray ships.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Minx remarked, with no emotion.

“Yes, they are,” Matthew answered, warily.

She turned toward him. Her gold-touched eyes in the strong and beautiful face seemed to be on fire.

“Kiss me,” she said.

He did not wait for a second invitation. Truly, then, this was who had visited him last night. He stepped forward and kissed her, and she held his kiss and pushed her body against his, and then he felt the knife under his chin pressing into his throat and when she drew her face away the fire in her eyes had grown into a blaze.

“You’re a very good kisser, Matthew,” she told him, “but you’re no Nathan Spade.”

He might have stammered something. For sure he swallowed hard, though the blade was right there ready to carve his Adam’s apple. He felt the sweat fairly leap from his pores.

“No Nathan Spade,” she repeated. “And exactly why are you here, pretending to be him?”

Did he dare to clear his throat, with that sticker so poised? No, he did not. “I think,” he said with a Herculean effort that might have impressed even Hudson Greathouse, “that you’re mistaken. I am—”

“Matthew Corbett,” Minx interrupted. “You see, I knew Nathan Spade. I was in love with Nathan Spade. And, as I say…you are no Nathan Spade.”

Somehow, from his deepest recesses, he found the courage to compose himself against the blade. I want you to be sharp this morning, she’d told him. Indeed he sharpened himself, in that instant. With a faint smile he said, “Not even a little bit?”

“Not even,” she replied, “the littlest bit of your littlest finger.”

“Ow,” he answered. “That hurts.”

“The knife?”

“No. The sentiment.” He was aware of the sheer drop to the playground of the whales. “Did you bring me here to show me how efficiently you might kill me and dispose of the body?”

“I brought you here to make sure no one followed or overheard. You are Matthew Corbett, are you not?”

“You…put me in a predicament.”

“I’ll answer for you, then.” The pressure of the blade against Matthew’s neck did not lessen a fraction. “Of course I knew at once you weren’t Nathan. He and I were lovers in London. Against the professor’s rules, as you might know. I wasn’t sure who you were until I saw how you reacted when Adam Wilson mentioned killing Matthew Corbett at the table that night. You almost spilled your wine. Probably no one noticed but me. Then I knew who you must be. And I knew also why you must be here.”

“An interesting fiction,” Matthew said, clinging to his misguided hope.

“You were brought to this island by Professor Fell to find out who told the authorities that a shipment of Cymbeline was en route for a meeting with a Spanish warship on the high seas.” Minx’s face was close to Matthew’s, her eyes still ablaze and her breath smelling faintly of lemons. The knife was still pressed firmly against his throat. “You are a problem-solver, are you not? In the employ of Katherine Herrald? And you were brought here under the charge of Aria Chillany.” The knife prodded. “Answer.”

Matthew sighed heavily. The game was up. But, strangely, he felt another game was just beginning. “True,” he said. “All of it.”

“The professor has suspects? Who are they?”

“Three. Cesar Sabroso, Adam Wilson and Edgar Smythe.”

Minx smiled grimly. “Oh my God,” she said. The knife went away from Matthew’s throat. She held it loosely at her side. “What are you looking for? Evidence that one of them is a traitor?”

Matthew decided there was no point in lying. He feared the point of Minx Cutter’s knife. “The professor thinks two may be involved. And that there is some evidence to be discovered, yes.” From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a whale surfacing. It spouted from its blowhole spray that seemed to form a question mark in the air before it shimmered away.

“Two traitors?” Her blonde brows lifted. “How astute of him.”

“Oh? Meaning what?”

“Meaning,” she said, her lips very near his own, “that there were two traitors. You are looking at one of them. Can you reason out who the second might have been?”

He didn’t have to reason it out. He plainly saw the answer in her face, and he felt as if the uneasy earth of Pendulum Island shook a little bit more under his boots.

“Nathan Spade,” he replied.

“Bravo,” she said, and her blade came up to give him a congratulatory tap on the chin.