“St. Francis, is it?” Gráinne smiled.
“Hardly,” he said, in much the same tone. “Although I am the proprietor of this fine establishment. And as Miss Shirley here knows, when courtesan services are being established, I not only get a cut, but I get to sample the wares.” He turned a leering eye to the two of us, and, determining at once which was more leer-worthy, he winked at Gráinne. I confess a certain relief. If he were not handsome, his demeanor would be utterly repugnant. But he was a man in the prime of life, fine looking, his face intelligent. A portrait of him would suggest a man of integrity and dignity. So the leer was more disorienting than disgusting.
Gráinne was already giving him an inviting smile. “After supper?” she suggested. “I’ve some errand to run before that.”
“My dance card is otherwise empty.” He smiled back.
“Oh good,” I said, nudging Gráinne slightly, as I realized that expression would mean nothing to her.
“Oh good,” she echoed. “Invite a friend,” she added, pushing me slightly toward him.
He looked nonplussed: further confirmation I was the less delectable morsel.
Francis Overstreet trotted back down the stairs to oversee his glamorous den of iniquity, as Xiu Li led us a short way down the corridor to a small room made all round of sanded wooden planks, with admirably clean windows, that looked out over the square.
“Your business?” she asked coolly.
“Magic’s dying off,” said Gráinne matter-of-factly. “I’m sure you’ve felt it.”
After a sober, studied pause, Xiu Li nodded once. “I have. I wondered if it was to do with being in this new world that has no history or civilization.”
“It has plenty of history,” I corrected her. “The native people have had witches and magic all along. But they are feeling the loss as well. Everyone is.”
“In fact,” continued Gráinne, “we are about to lose magic entirely.”
Xiu Li’s eyes opened wide. She did not speak.
“But that is temporary,” I amended. “Many years from now, in the future, magic is restored and used in a very different way in society. We are here to encourage you to come forward with us to a time when magic will be strong again. There are some caveats, but it will be far better than being stuck here in this time and place, especially as a Chinese woman.”
She was ignoring me, her intense black eyes studying Gráinne’s face. “Why does it end? What stops it?”
“Photography,” said Gráinne confidingly.
Xiu Li received this and mused upon it for a moment. “I see,” she said at last—as if she really did see, although she obviously lacked the education to grasp it in the manner that we at DODO did. “How long do we have before it is gone?”
“July next year,” said Gráinne sympathetically. “There’s a solar eclipse, witnessed by everyone in Europe, and someone takes a photograph of it, and that’s that.” She snapped her fingers. “It’s over. So you’d best consider our offer and come forward with us.”
I stared at Gráinne. She was strikingly well-informed for an Anachron. Who would have told her something that specific? It must have been Erszebet.
Xiu Li’s pale skin had paled even further hearing this. She sank onto a stool, her heavy silk dress shifting gracefully around her legs so that she appeared almost a mermaid. “This is dreadful news.”
“Yes,” said Gráinne, with no sense of dread at all. “You take some time to think it over. Melisande, let’s be seeing the city, and we’ll return by teatime.”
She took me by the hand in her casually familiar way and led me out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, and back out into the square.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Sure I’d love to see the city,” said Gráinne. “But in truth there’s a gentleman here to introduce ourselves to.”
“What gentleman?” I demanded. “I don’t recall that being part of the DEDE.”
“Not that DEDE as written,” agreed Gráinne. “But there is more going on than meets the eye here. Blevins set me on to him, and explained he could not put it down into the official assignment because it is, what was that phrase he was using now? Deep cover? Black cops?”
“Black ops,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Black operations. Covert activity.”
“Covert, aye, there you go,” said Gráinne, without a shred of the sober demeanor one associates with such discussions. “One reason he wanted us to come here together was so that you could be witness to it all, but off the record, like. In fact, this whole DEDE is a different beast than you are currently thinking.”
I felt a wave of alarm but pushed it aside. This was irregular, but not dangerous. “Will you explain yourself?” I said.
“Surely,” said Gráinne. “There’s a Fugger here, a direct male descendant of the one I know in my generation. He knows to expect us, and he’ll help us with the DEDE.”
The more she revealed the more confounding it seemed. “How?” I demanded. “How on earth can he possibly know to expect us? Nobody has ever been close to this DTAP before.”
“Melisande,” she said in a confiding, delighted voice. “What is the one thing you can carry through time with you?”
“Information,” I said.
“Indeed,” she said. “And it’s a wide varieties of ways, so it is, that information can be carried through time. If it’s going back in time, the information’s got to move magically. But if it’s coming forward, it can be planted and moved through generations.”
“Do you mean you told this fellow’s ancestor to meet you in San Francisco in 1850? And they’ve passed the information along, accurately and without embellishment, for two and a half centuries?” I was incredulous—this was an extremely dangerous way to work with historical agents.
“It’s not nearly that specific,” said Gráinne blithely. “Think of it more as a mythology. The Fuggers know—all of them—that there’s an immortal red-haired Irish witch named Gráinne who is an ally of the family, in any generation, and the family knows this and keeps it close to themselves. And ’tis true enough that this witch, in 1602, did recommend to the family patriarch of the time to keep an eye westward, ever westward, over the generations. It has served them well, and this is as westward as it gets. So I was not surprised, when I did my Internet research, to be confirmed in my belief that there would be a Fugger already here, opening a bank and prepared to make ungodly profits. And he is already an ally though he has never met me, nor has his sire, grandsire, great-grandsire going back many generations . . . but they know about me. It’s delighted he’ll be by our presence, and he’ll help us, no questions asked. ’Tis a remarkable boon for our needs.”
“What will he do?” I asked, struggling to keep up with all this. Did Tristan know any of this? Surely Frank Oda or Mortimer must, as they oversaw the Chronotron data and none of this could be managed without tremendous Chronotron oversight. Why had I not been told?