At Trevi we saw our first true signs of battle. I smelled it first, the bitterness of smoke lacing an evening mist as we rode along the Julana Way, weary and feeling the miles where we sat. The scent of Vermillion’s burning still haunted my nostrils but that had been an inferno billowing out hot clouds that quenched the stars. This was the stink of old fires hiding among ruins, smouldering, chewing slowly through the very last of their fuel beneath thick blankets of ash.
The sun descended toward the western hills, throwing our shadows before us and tingeing the mists with crimson before we saw the ruined fort. The mound it stood upon was too small and isolated to make it a convincing foothill, too large for me to easily believe that men had heaped up so much earth. A small town had grown at the foot of the mound to service the fort’s needs. Little of those homes remained: most lay in ashes; here and there a standing spar. The fort itself had lost a large part of its gatehouse in some devastating explosion, masonry scattered the slope, reaching down to the blackened ribs of the closest buildings. What magics or alchemy the Red Queen had employed I couldn’t guess but she had obviously not been minded to mount a long siege or to leave the garrison secure to threaten her supply line.
“Impressive.” Snorri sat tall in his saddle, eyes on the scene ahead of us.
“Hmmm.” I’d be glad when it was all behind us. The road led on into a tangle of forest a quarter of a mile or so past the fort. It looked like the sort of place survivors might gather and plot revenge. “We’ll steer well clear of it. Stay alert. I don’t like this place.”
The words were scarcely off my lips before Squire started beeping. It wasn’t something she’d done before. The noise was like no sound any horse could make, or any human or instrument for that matter. It held an unnatural quality, too precise, too clean. Hennan looked around in surprise, trying to locate the source. As far as I could tell what he was sitting on was making the sound.
“It’s coming from the saddlebags,” Kara said, nudging her mount closer to the boy’s.
“Ah.” I guessed then what was making the beeps and all at once the day seemed colder than it had a moment before. “Hell.”
Snorri gave me that two-part look of his, the first part being: tell me what you know, and the second part being: or I’ll break your arms. I dismounted and started to undo the straps on Squire’s left saddlebag. It took a bit of digging to get the package out, and then some wrestling with twine and rags to unwrap it. The beeps came every four seconds or so, the gap long enough so you might imagine the last one was the end of it. A few moments later I pulled away the last of the wrapping and held Luntar’s box of ghosts in my hands. In the light of day it looked every bit as unnatural as it had back in the throne room. It seemed as if it were a piece of winter viewed through a box-shaped hole, and it weighed far too little for what I knew it to contain. It beeped again and I nearly dropped it.
“What is it?” Kara and Hennan almost in unison, the boy a fraction ahead.
“A funeral urn,” I said. “Containing the ashes of ten million dead Builders. I opened the lid. A fan of light spread out above the open mouth and coalesced into a pale human figure. A gaunt man. I realized two things simultaneously. Firstly, that I recognized the man. Secondly, that the shock of the first realization had made me drop the box.
Hennan moved as fast as I’ve ever seen another human react. He’d been fleet-footed when I’d tried to catch him the first time we met in Osheim, but half a year had quickened him. He dived forward and, at full stretch, caught the box an inch above the ground. The air left his lungs in a sharp “oooof.”
“Thank you.” I scooped the box from his outstretched hands and set it on a marker stone beside the road. Snorri leant down to help the boy up. I crouched to stare at the ten-inch ghost standing in the air above the box. The phantom wore a long white tunic, buttoned at the front and coming down past his knees, a lean, one might say scrawny man of about my age, a narrow, owlish face beneath an unruly mop of light-coloured hair, a frame hooking over his ears and holding two glass lenses, one immediately before each eye. He looked far too young but I knew him.
“Taproot?”
“Elias Taproot, PhD, at your service.” The figure executed a bow.
“Do you know me, Taproot?”
“Local data suggests you are Prince Jalan Kendeth.”
“And him?” I held the box so he would get a good view of Snorri, now standing in the road, hands resting on Hennan’s shoulders just before him, both of them staring our way.
“Big fellow. Name unknown.” Dr. Taproot frowned, one hand coming up to stroke his chin, fingers sliding toward an absent goatee.
“You don’t remember, Snorri?” I asked.
“I am simply a library record, dear boy. This unit has not been connected to the deepnet for . . . oh my, nearly a thousand years.”
“Why do you look like Dr. Taproot?”
“Who else would I look like? I am Elias Taproot’s data-echo.”
I frowned and considered shaking the box to see if it held more intelligible answers.
“Why have you popped up out of all the ghosts in this box? And—” *beep* “And why is it beeping?”
Taproot frowned for a moment, flexing his hands rapidly in the space between us as if trying to wring out a reply. “A narrow bandwidth emergency signal, broadcast using residual satellite power, has activated all devices in this immediate area.”
“Say that again in words that have meaning or I’m closing this box, digging a hole, and leaving it here under five foot of soil.” I meant it too, except for the digging part.
Taproot’s eyes widened at that. “This is a level 5 sanctioned emergency broadcast. You can’t just walk away from that—it contravenes any number of regulations. You wouldn’t dare!”
“Watch me!” I turned away.
“Wait!” The thing had Taproot’s voice down pat, I had to give it that. He’d had the same mix of outrage and nervousness when dressing me down for bringing an unborn into his circus. “Wait! You wanted to know why I was projected rather than any other record?”
I glanced back. “Well?”
“It’s me that’s in trouble. My flesh. Somewhere close by. The location system is corrupt, orbits have decayed—” He caught my deepening frown and amended his language. “The box will beep more rapidly as you get closer, but it’s only a rough guide.”
I reached over and snapped the box shut. I don’t like ghosts. “So, let’s go.” I picked it up, straightened and turned toward Murder. “While we still have the light.”
“He said Dr. Taproot is in danger.” I could tell without looking that Snorri wasn’t moving.
“The circus man?” Hennan piped up. I must have told him stories at some point.
“There might be more wonders with him . . .” Kara sounded like a starving woman describing a hot roast with gravy. I glanced her way but the box in my hands held her gaze. It beeped again. “That was truly his likeness?”
I shrugged. “Like him, but thirty years younger.” In Grandmother’s childhood memories Taproot had been there at the palace, a man in his forties, head of Gholloth the First’s security. What in hell’s name he was, or what gets a man like that in trouble, I had no interest in discovering.
“Which direction shall we try?” Snorri asked.
I sighed and pointed up the hill without looking at it. “It’s pretty obvious. Where else would it be? A fortress full of corpses, laced with the remnants of some horrendous magic or Builder weapon . . . it’s got to be there, doesn’t it?”
None of them bothered to deny it.
TWENTY-FOUR
The sun set, leaving us to climb up to the fort in the day’s afterglow. We beat the rising mists up the slopes, and glancing back I could see nothing of the burned village, just a white sea, all a-swirl, flowing into the woods, coiling around each trunk before reaching up to drown the trees.
In the west the sky glowed red; in the east darkness threatened, and somewhere a screech-owl lifted its voice to greet the night. Just great.