"So this guy Blackletter kidnaps Gaby because she's sort of a mystical anomaly," Zeb said.
Harris grinned. "Hey, you know the word `anomaly.' Cool."
"Yeah, and I'm about to teach you the meaning of the word `defenestration.' "
They sat in the lab room of the Sidhe Foundation headquarters. This was the ninety-first floor of the black-as-night Monarch Building—or "up ninety," as Zeb had learned the fairworlders called it. This room alone was as large as some sporting halls, and full of tables piled high with laboratory gear, bottles, boxes, tools, machines, and bookcases.
"Once he cuts the ties between the grim world and the fair world," Zeb continued, "and kills Gaby, he can set up a new filter between them. Make 'em both more the way he wants 'em."
"Right," Harris said. He returned his attention to the newspapers before him.
"But the Sidhe Foundation rescued Gaby and stopped Blackletter."
"Killed him deader than disco."
"Disco's back from the dead, man."
Harris grimaced. "Yeah, I guess that was a bad analogy."
"There's something I don't get."
"What?"
"Light, dark, dusky. I'm not clear on what these distinctions mean. Ixyail calls me a `dusky'—why am I not a `dark'?"
"Oh, boy. Zeb, you're just asking to open up a whole can of worms."
"I like worms. Out with it, Harris."
Harris sighed. "Okay. `Light' and `dark' both refer to what we'd call white people. `Light' means fairer than fair, ancestry mostly from northern and western Europe. Blond, red-headed, even some white-haired guys like Doc."
"The Aryan ideal."
"Something like that. `Darks' are white folk who tend to have dark eyes, dark hair. More Mediterranean. I'm classed as a dark. In Europe, the New World, and anywhere European countries have colonies, the lights and darks are in charge . . . and the lights always have the majority of top jobs."
"Why?"
"Tradition, conspiracy, stubbornness, that sort of thing. Way back when, the lights had the power in a very real sense. Their devisements kicked everybody else's devisements around the block."
"You're talking about magic now."
"Yeah, but nobody much uses that word here. Too primitive. Devisement is the science of mysticism; magic is the superstition."
Zeb snorted. "Like there's a difference."
"Anyway, the duskies are everyone else who isn't a light or a dark. You. Noriko. Alastair. Gaby and Ixyail are technically duskies, but since they're light-complected, and run around in the company of lights and darks, and have the mannerisms of the fairer folk—"
"You're telling me they pass for darks."
"Basically, yes. Anyway, `dusky' is the proper term for them. When you hear `dusker,' it's more like, well—" He looked uncomfortable.
Zeb didn't let him off the hook. "Like what?"
"Like nigger."
Zeb glowered at his friend. "Well, I can't say you didn't try to warn me."
"I did. Ready to go home now?"
"No. So, you comfortable with the status quo?"
It was Harris's turn to glare. "What do you think?"
"Well, I don't see you marching in the streets with signs in your hand. I see you hooked up with the whitest white guy I've ever seen, living in a nice place, hanging out in a skyscraper office—"
"Listen, Doc gives less of a damn about color than anyone I've met on either world. Look at who he's surrounded himself with. He sets an example. Some people appreciate what he's doing. Some people just call him a dusker-lover. I get called that, too."
"Aw, poor thing. My heart breaks for you."
Doc said, "Status?"
Both men jumped.
"Jesus, Doc," said Harris. "Don't sneak up on me like that."
"What you call sneaking, I call walking." Doc stood beside the table. He wore a sea-green robe. He looked hung over and blinked unhappily into the glare of morning sunlight. "What's our status?"
Harris said, "Well, we're in the news." He gestured to the stack of folded newspapers on the tabletop. "Big explosion. Sidhe Foundation involved. Kobolde. One of the more rabid papers is talking about a new Kobolde threat and suggesting that the little guys will be breaking into every good light's house to bust up furniture and poop on the rugs."
Doc snorted, amused. "The associates?"
"Alastair is subjecting Mr. Rubber Man to some tests, trying to figure out how it was animated. Gaby's on the talk-box, looking into the front that rented the Fairwings factory from the town, and trying to find out how those Kobolde entered Novimagos, what part of the Old Country they're from, and so on. Ish is just back from tracking down some sort of shaman; she was hoping he could tell her more about those skin-crawling sensations she felt last night, but no luck. Noriko's waiting for me down in the gymnasium; we're going to take off and talk to craftsmen who might have built that dart-gun." A little frown crossed Harris's brow.
"What is it?"
"Doc, I have a bad feeling that the dart-gun is really important. Not because of what it is—because of what it represents."
"What does it represent?"
"Well, it could be that someone here on the fair world has just invented dart-guns out of the blue. It could happen. But I haven't heard of it, and I spent all morning on the talk-box with experts who've never heard of such a thing. Which could mean, since your captors were probably tied in with the guys who crashed my wedding, that they brought the idea of the dart-gun back from the grim world and built it using fairworld technology."
Doc considered. "Meaning they could have brought back more ideas."
"Right."
"I've thought of doing such a thing myself, from knowledge I gained during the brief time I spent on your world. I now know that rocket-propelled airwings are indeed possible. I've been longing to design one."
Harris sighed. "Today, rocket planes. Tomorrow, junk-food franchises. Anyway, I'm just about done with today's mail." He gave Doc a significant look. "We did get the official invitation from the Crown to send athletes to the Sonneheim Games."
"You and Gaby are awfully insistent about those games."
"We think they'll be important."
"Some of your future knowledge?"
Harris took on an expression Zeb construed to be deliberately blank.
"All right, Harris. We'll either get someone there to observe or ask someone from the Crown's espionage corps to do so."
"Thanks."
Doc turned his attention to Zeb. "Last evening, I did not properly thank you for participating in my rescue. I am in your debt."
"Don't worry about it."
"I won't worry. But if you have a need arise, don't hesitate to come to me." He turned away. "I'll be with Alastair in the lab, should you need me."
On the elevator, Zeb asked, "What did he mean about `future knowledge'?"
"Elementary, my dear Watson—"
"Don't you ever say that again. You know what it's like to put up with that line all your life?"
Harris grinned. "Stop bitching. With me, it was `It ain't easy being Greene.' Anyway, unless you've been hit in the head a lot since the last time I saw you, you've probably noticed that everything in the fair world looks a little antiquated."
"I got that."
"There's a reason for it. Part of the tie between the fair world and the grim world. The clock on the fair world runs a little behind the grim world. Like about sixty or seventy years."
"And?"
"And their history does, too. It sort of mirrors ours. Lots of details different, but the overall structure the same. Gaby's been trying to figure out when it started—that might be a pointer as to when the split between the worlds happened. She's homing in on a date sometime in the Dark Ages. Anyway, the fair world had its own weird versions of the European colonization of the New World, the American revolution, World War One, lots of stuff."
Zeb considered that as floors slid past the elevator cage. "And if their present is like ours was sixty or seventy years ago—they're about to get to the Depression?"
"Been there, done that. They call it the Fall. Big economic collapse, happened a few years ago, still not fixed yet. No, we think they're looking at the Second World War. There's a guy in Europe, King Aevar of Weseria. His National Purification Party staged a coup d'etat a few years ago and put him on the throne. The Party is gaining power all through western and central Europe and the talk is that Aevar has imperial ambitions. And the big plank on his platform is kicking all the duskies out of Europe."
"Racial purity."
"Bingo."
"Je-zus. You're talking about Hitler."
Harris shook his head. "No, and that's the problem. He's an asshole, certainly, and he's going to cause trouble. But as loosely as the fair world follows grimworld history, we can't be sure that he's the kind of genocidal maniac Hitler was. There isn't a Jewish race on the fair world, as far as we can find, though there are what we think are gypsies, and the National Purificationists haven't singled out any specific races to vent against the way the Nazis did. So we don't know what precisely is going to happen."
"You've told Doc all this."
"Not exactly."
"Why not? I'd think you'd want him to know."
Harris glared. "Oh, thanks for stepping in with all the answers, Zeb. I hadn't considered any of this."
"Stuff the sarcasm."
"Stuff the advice. At least until you have some perspective on what Gaby and I have to deal with. What if we went to Doc and said, `King Aevar is going to unite the people of Central Europe and start a war to take over the world, and the people of Wo will side with them, and millions of people will die—' "
"So what if you do?"
"What if it's not the truth? Aevar might not be the one; Weseria might not be the place where it starts; Wo might not come into it. Zeb, our preconceptions, if they're acted on, might screw things up completely. What Gaby and I have been doing is telling Doc to look at certain things, monitor specific situations. Like the expansion of Wo's military occupation throughout Asia, like events going on in Weseria. He can put two and two together."
"A lot of folks who could put two and two together in the Thirties still couldn't predict the Holocaust."
Harris's tone became exasperated. "Maybe when you've paid your dues on the fair world you can set up shop as Mr. Answer Man. Until then, just watch and learn, okay?"
"In your dreams."
The city streets and sidewalks were busy but not crowded. Zeb watched the parade of humanity, if that was the correct word in the fair world, in their bright antiquated clothes and massive, new-yet-old automobiles.
There was a wider range to the sizes and shapes of people here than on the grim world, he saw. Some people could have passed for grimworlders without trouble, though the average person was a little shorter, a little leaner than his grimworld counterpart.
But there were a lot of folk who just looked strange. People with pointed ears, with noses that looked as though they'd been curved specifically to pop the tops off soda bottles, with spindly builds that would have suggested wasting illnesses had the people not been so energetic. There were men and women standing half Zeb's height who had barrel-shaped torsos. And he thought, though he caught only a glimpse of her, that he saw a woman whose backless dress revealed a hollow place where her back should be, a skin-lined depression large enough to fit a small backpack into.
He saw plenty of duskies that looked like Alastair—Caucasian features under nut-brown or earth-brown skin—but had only spotted a couple he thought were of African descent.
He saw men and women carrying rifles. These folk were not uniformed, though several were dressed for more rugged terrain, wearing heavy boots and durable clothes. He caught sight of several of them as they were going down into subway stations and wondered if they would be heading off to the country for hunting or some strange fairworld sport. No one paid them any attention.
Harris was in the center, Zeb and Noriko to either side; Zeb wondered if Noriko had chosen the arrangement to keep some distance between her and the unknown quantity Zeb represented.
"Here's the drill," Harris said. "We're going to Wrightway—"
Zeb snorted. "I'm glad, I don't want to go the wrong way."
"Wrightway is a street where a lot of wrights, metal craftsmen, including some of the world's best gunsmiths, have their shops set up. If I have it paced off right, it's approximately where New York's diamond district would be. I'm going to concentrate on the businesses where the proprietors are lights and darks, and Noriko on the duskies."
"And what am I supposed to do?"
"Accompany Noriko. Play the part of her bodyguard. See what goes on."
Noriko's expression didn't change, but Zeb thought he detected a new tension in her body language. She didn't like the idea.
"So I'm not good enough to go into the shops of the lights and darks?"
"Dammit, Zeb." Harris sighed and appeared to be collecting his thoughts. "We have a specific assignment. Find out what we can about this dart-gun. See if someone in the wrights' district made it. We can do it efficiently, or we can do it in such a way as to express our own political agendas. We don't know for sure, but lives may be at stake. So you call it."
Zeb walked in silence for a while. "Seems that during the last few months you've gotten better at making your point."
"Saves wear and tear on my fists."
"I don't have to like it."
"No, you don't."
One westward turn and a few blocks later, Harris left them to enter the first of Wrightway's guncraft establishments. Zeb followed Noriko onward. They walked in a silence Zeb found uncomfortable.
Finally he asked, "Do we have a problem?"
It was several seconds before she answered. "Perhaps."
"What is it?"
"You must understand, I am not ungrateful. Last night, you were the first of us to get free. Lives hung on ticks of the clock, and you were fast enough to save those lives. I owe you my life."
"But?"
"But there is something wrong with you."
Zeb laughed. "You do go straight to the point. Something wrong with me? First I've heard of it."
"You gave yourself up to a war-bringer."
"That's a god, right? You were talking about priests last night."
"That's a god. A bringer of war. There are many, but like all the gods, they live on in drowsy slumber. The priests, and devisers like Doc, can sometimes bend their ears. Can sometimes give themselves up to one of the gods, to be imbued with some of the god's power."
"Noriko, where I come from, the gods are more than just drowsy. They're nothing more than legends. If they existed at all, which most people don't believe, they're probably dead now. But I sometimes fight that way there, too. What does that tell you?"
"That you brought your own demon with you from the grim world to the fair."
Zeb sighed. "It's not a demon. It's, uh, I don't know, a fugue state. A different state of mind. Very efficient for fighting, especially in the ring. When you're in that state, there's very little going on in your head that isn't fighting."
"It's fueled by anger. Hatred."
"Yeah, some of it, maybe."
She was silent long enough for them to cross another street and pass a cluster of wooden carts laden with fruit for sale. "When you're in the ring," she said, "there are no friends with you."
"True."
"Last night, when your gaze fell on Alastair, if his barrel had been oriented toward you, what would you have done?"
"Nothing." Zeb frowned, trying to recapture his mental state during last night's ambush. He was suddenly no longer so sure of his answer. "Besides, Alastair obviously knows what he's doing with firearms. He's not going to let his aim fall on a friend."
"He was hurt last night. Dazed. He might have. Zeb, you didn't see your face. The rage in it. The, I don't know, appreciation you showed when you destroyed one of those Kobolde."
"That's just my war-face, Noriko."
"Never mind," she said. "Ah—here is our first shop."
The sign read EAMON'S BALLISTERIUM and a piece of posterboard in the window said, LIGHT, DARK, DUSKY WELCOME.
They spent their morning and afternoon progressing down Wrightway, moving from shop to shop, sometimes doubling back to check out leads and recommendations given them by shop owners and craftsmen. Zeb and Noriko passed Harris several times as their research carried them along the craftsmen's district.
Most of the people they talked to admitted to no knowledge of dart-guns, though some described crossbows used by scientists on Dark Continent safaris that carried large, ungainly hypodermics.
"So the fair world already has a device that would do the same thing," Zeb said. "But these people had a gun made special for the purpose. Why?"
"I can only guess," said Noriko. "But it is probably for purposes of concealment. It is legal and common to carry rifles."
"I've noticed. It's kind of unsettling."
"My point is that no one notices rifles, but a crossbow would attract attention and be remembered. Long blades are also memorable, which is why I have my pistol and not my sword with me today."
"I am obviously not going to get used to fairworld logic anytime soon."
They stood near a vendor's wagon, having lunch. Zeb watched the traffic—youthful-looking fair folk in their garish, antiquated clothes and the brightly-painted cars for which he was quickly developing an appreciation—and dubiously ate at a tasteless, greasy mass wrapped in paper. It seemed to have been created from a potato-and-beef hash formed into a dense ball and refried. He decided that it would never replace the hot dog. He threw the last of it away.
Noriko, already finished with her sweet cakes, said, "Harris says our worlds are alike in an important way. You eat `street cuisine' at your own risk."
"He's right." He turned with her and they began their return to the street of wrights. He ignored the frequent suspicious looks of lights and darks. "Mind if I ask you something?"
"No, you may ask."
"Last night they said you were a princess. Is that right?"
"In a manner of speaking. My husband was Jean-Pierre Lamignac, prince of Acadia. He used to do for Doc what Harris now does—arrange, coordinate. He died early this year. One of the friends Harris spoke of burying."
"I'm sorry."
"Thank you. But since his royal parents never cared for me, since I never bore Jean-Pierre a royal heir, since his estate is very valuable and they want me to have none of it, since circumstances demanded—"
Zeb heard a little catch in her voice, the first emotion he'd detected in her.
"—that I miss even his funeral, they are prevailing on the judge who wed us to annul the marriage. When that happens, not only will I no longer be a princess, I will never have been one. Or a citizen of Acadia."
It was startling to Zeb how that faint display of emotion humanized Noriko. He'd wondered, the previous night, if she were as dispassionate as she appeared; now, the pain in her words cut through the image she obviously worked hard to project. "That's a raw deal."
She managed a faint smile. "Another grimworld phrase that must mean something other than what it sounds like. I am not sad about losing the title, Zeb. I was never welcome there, never lived there. Doc is arranging for me to have citizenship in Novimagos; I will not be set adrift. I am only sad that the law chooses to pretend that I was never Jean-Pierre's wife."
"Why are you in Amer— I mean, in the New World instead of back in, uh, was it Wo?"
She nodded. "Wo."
"If that's too personal a question you can tell me to just go to hell."
She stared at the sidewalk and managed a slight frown. "Not too personal. Just rare. I am unaccustomed to speaking about it." She walked in silence for a long while. "Do you know the story of Cinder Ella? The girl with the fur slippers?"
"Glass slippers."
"No, fur."
"I'm sure it's glass."
"Perhaps on the grim world. Is that not a grim detail? Wearing slippers of hard, unforgiving glass instead of soft, comfortable fur? That seems like something grim folk would imagine. But you know the story."
"Sure."
"In the land of Wo, it is a somewhat different story than here in the west. There, Cinder Ella is a spoiled, selfish girl. Only when she begins to demonstrate proper gratitude to her stepmother and proper manners to her stepsisters does her guardian spirit come to help her become happy again, and to convince her stepmother to provide for harmony in the household."
"That's a pretty weird version."
"From a western perspective, perhaps. So. I was Cinder Ella. My father was very modern, very western. He was once an aide to our ambassador to the League of Ardree and was very well-travelled. As were we all; I learned the language of Lower Cretanis when he was posted in Verway."
From what Harris had insisted he learn of the maps of the League of Ardree, roughly the U.S., Zeb knew Verway to be a state-sized region including the city that was the counterpart of Washington, D.C. Like the U.S. capital, Verway was an important center of international politics. Zeb nodded.
Noriko continued, "I was indulged in most ways. When my brothers took up the study of the Sword of Wo, what we call kenjutsu, I begged and insisted until I was allowed to, as well. Wrestling. Driving. I was allowed to see film plays from the League of Ardree, which we could see in the Foreign Sector after we returned to Wo. I was very spoiled.
"Until my parents and brothers died. Murdered by an anarchist from Shanga; Wo had just invaded one of their territories." She was silent a long moment. "I went to live with my aunt and uncle."
"And had to abandon everything you'd done before? All your interests and studies?"
She shook her head, eyes still downcast. "No. I had to do them all more than before."
"That's not very Cinderella-ish. I don't get it."
Noriko managed a slight smile; Zeb could barely see the curve of her lip. "My uncle was in the Foreign Office, too. He clearly saw advantages in having a niece who could speak Lower Cretanis, had lived among the people of Ardree, who could fight . . ."
"You were trained to be a spy."
"Yes. All that had been enjoyable before became work. Like Cinder Ella, I was selfish and resented this. But I did it to retain my father's respect. Though he was dead, I knew he would smile on a loyal daughter of the Empire. But then, when they began to teach me to assassinate rather than kill in honorable fashion, to use poisons and cutting garrotes and tiny, sharp knives meant only for the throat, I knew I would lose my father's respect. So I fled. Unlike Cinder Ella, I remained selfish, and never met my guardian spirit. I accepted help from diplomats my father had known and I went back to Verway, where I met Doc and Jean-Pierre."
"And the rest, as they say, is history."
She smiled again. "I have heard Harris say that, too. It is a common phrase among the grimworlders?"
"Too common, maybe." He took a deep breath. "It must be tough for you, being separated from your whole nation."
"I am not simply separated from it, Zeb. I am loathed by it. I am a traitor to all of Wo who know of me . . . except my father and my mother. I would not have it the other way around." She finally looked up and around, then abruptly turned and headed back the other way. "We have passed by our destination."
In the craftsmen's shops, Zeb saw an even wider variety of fairworld humanity than he had on the street. Some of these wrights were tiny, the size of midgets; some had skin that was as rough as tree bark and limbs as gnarled as branches. In some of these shops, the ones that displayed jewelry in glass cases, thick-bodied men stood as guards and traded flat, unfriendly stares with Zeb while Noriko did the talking.
One shop had a guard dog instead, an enormous brown beast that looked, Zeb decided, like a cross between a mastiff and the First National Bank. It lay stretched out beside the main counter as though it had lowered itself to be saddled. It kept friendly but close attention on all the customers. Zeb stayed on the far side of the shop from it, beside the windows, while Noriko talked to the proprietor.
Zeb saw a trio of black men talking out on the sidewalk. They were dressed in pinstriped suits and merry-hats, and they weren't just the European duskies he'd seen so often; their features were African, or the fairworld equivalent.
He glanced back at Noriko, who was still in deep conversation with the head craftsman. She didn't look like she'd need any help here. He headed out to the street.
The three men stopped their conversation and turned as he approached them. "Hallibo," said one.
Zeb blinked. "Sorry, I don't get you."
The three looked at one another. Zeb saw both amusement and suspicion in their eyes. The one who'd spoken said, "Can't down to trail?"
"Look, I'm from kind of a long way away. Could I get you to—"
The speaker smiled. "Lapbo of light 'n dark, can't down to trail." His accent seemed half-English, half-Caribbean lilt; pretty, but unfamiliar. "Sadbo, go back to lap." The others laughed. The speaker jerked his head and the three turned to walk away, still chuckling among themselves.
Zeb stood there feeling stupid. He was still there minutes later when Noriko emerged from the shop.
"I think we have something with this one," she said.
"Good."
"You sound angry."
"I am. Just with myself. What did you get?"
"Rospo, the owner, was asked by a light gunsmith to put together a set of four barrels. This gunsmith had too much work and had to spread some of it around, though he wasn't supposed to. Rospo was to make big, heavy-caliber barrels to very precise specifications. Unrifled. And not so heavily devised that they'd need to withstand the pressure of a normal hunting round of the same scale."
"So you're talking about a rifle that fires big rounds slowly and not too accurately. Meaning it's probably built for short-distance targets."
"Yes."
"That could be it."
"Let's find Harris."
Across town, the Bergmonk Boys assembled in the stairwell between up thirteen and up fourteen. Otmar wore a bandage across the bridge of his nose.
"Kerchiefs and gloves," said Albin.
All five took oversized red handkerchiefs from their pockets and tied them around their faces, then donned gloves.
"I suggest we not do this," Rudi said. "It's stupid."
Albin glared at him but did not reply. "Fire," he said.
The five men produced six handguns—four big revolvers and Rudi's twin semiautomatic pistols.
"I mean, we could just call him from a public talk-box. That's all it takes."
"No," Albin said, his voice rich with forced patience. "The whole city has to look to him for salvation, and he has to fail before all their eyes."
"How is he going to fail? We can't actually do what we're talking about, can we?"
Albin ignored him. "Script."
Otmar fumbled around in a coat pocket, then produced a folded and crumpled piece of paper. It was rough with tiny holes where the typewriter letters, especially punctuation symbols, had struck it too hard. He handed it to Rudi, who pocketed it.
"And why even bother with the kerchiefs?" Rudi asked. "They're going to know it was us. We might as well go out there with faces bare, singing and dancing."
"Shut up," Albin said, and drew back his gun hand as if to hammer Rudi with his revolver butt.
Rudi pressed the barrel of his own gun into Albin's cheek, beside his nose.
The other three tensed, looked at one another, and decided to stay out of it; they kept their weapons out of line.
Albin's face flushed red. Then his eyes crinkled and the cheeks beneath his kerchief rose. Rudi knew he was smiling. He knew which smile, too—the false one, the glad-handing political one. "There, now," Albin said. "You wouldn't be shooting your own brother, would you?"
"No more than me own brother would be hitting me," Rudi said, keeping his voice level. He took his barrel away from his brother's cheek and waved it toward the door out of the stairwell. "Albin, let's walk away from this. This isn't us, isn't the Bergmonk Boys. It's not about money and good living."
Albin lost his smile but nodded. "That's right. But we have a higher calling now—"
"What calling? You never say who this is for—"
"Can't, yet. But trust me. There'll be plenty of money and good living, and we're making the world a better place as we earn it. And never forget . . ." Albin leaned in close, his eyes brighter than Rudi could remember ever having seen them. "I run the Bergmonk Boys. As long as you wear the name Bergmonk, you stick with us and do as I say." He looked at Rudi's pistol. "I'll forget about that . . . because I was a wee bit out of line, too. Now you get back in line. We're on Bergmonk business. That's it, lads. Let's go." He pulled the door open and charged through.
Rudi swore to himself and brought up the end of the line.
They emerged onto the floor up fourteen. There were people in the hall, moving between offices; seeing the band of armed men, most threw up their hands and shrank away.
The Bergmonks ignored them and charged past to the doorway marked AETHER GOLD. Jorg charged through, gun at the ready, covering the secretary in the outer office, shouting over her shrieks, telling her to quiet down. The brothers moved past, through the side door, down the business' long corridor. Workers flattened against the hallway walls to let them pass and were kept in place by the unwavering attention of Egon, who remained behind.
Big glass windows let them see into some of the station's offices. In one, a man with a thin mustache, his coat off and sleeves rolled up, sat with a bulky headset on. He looked alarmed as he spotted the bearded men in the corridor, but continued talking into his microphone. The lit sign over his door read AETHERBOUND.
"That one," said Albin.
Jorg kicked that door in. He could have just turned the knob and opened it, but that would not have been as impressive. He stayed outside while the other three men swept in. Otmar yanked the headset from the announcer's head, then gave the man a push; the announcer slid to the floor and scrambled back, away from the gunmen. Albin kept his own gun trained on the thickset technician in the next chamber—who was protected from stray sounds, but not from bullets, by the big window between the rooms.
Rudi donned the headset, sat, and unfolded his paper, trying to quell his sense of unease. "We interrupt this broadcast for a special announcement," he read, adjusting his voice to sound like an upper-class light. That was one of his gifts, but this time he took no pleasure in it. "In precisely two hundred beats, we will have an announcement for Doctor Desmond MaqqRee and the Sidhe Foundation. Lives are in the balance. Please inform the Sidhe Foundation immediately." He kept his voice crisp. "In precisely one hundred and eighty beats, we will have an announcement for Doctor Desmond MaqqRee and the Sidhe Foundation. Please inform the Sidhe Foundation immediately. In precisely one hundred and sixty beats . . ."
The room's overhead lights were out, but Doc put on a set of smoked-glass goggles before joining Alastair at the table.
Set into the tabletop was a crystal disk nearly Alastair's height in diameter. Nor was it ordinary crystal; it glowed with bright, wavering light. Alastair also wore goggles against the glare.
Atop the crystal was the rubber man the grimworlders had brought from California. It still yammered mindlessly. Occasionally it would twitch. Though the material it was made of should have been thick enough to stop all light, the glow from the crystal disk shone through it. Tendrils of yellow, blue and red light played about on its surface.
"Anything new?" Doc asked.
"Yes. It's a puppet."
"In what sense?"
"It has strings." Alastair struck at the moving tendrils of color, mashing them into the rubber man's chest. Just for a moment, much finer tendrils of color, connected to the thing's limbs and head and stretching up into the sky, were illuminated. "It literally is a puppet. A very simple one, too. No sensory attachments, no self-will, and no outgoing flow of energy to the controller—thus he can't know what it's doing at a distance."
"So it's only for use in the presence of the controller."
"That's what I'm trying to find out now. Am I recording?"
Doc looked at the adjacent table, where a large box sat waiting. "No." He reached over to switch it on. "Yes."
Alastair looked at the clock on the wall. "Time, about a chime short of three bells. Subject, Milord Airtube. In this test, we'll detach some of the control tendrils and reattach them to organ samples." He indicated a jar in which floated a pair of eyes attached to what looked like a brain stem.
They heard a mechanical pop and crackle from behind them. They turned to see the talk-box in the corner of the room activate itself. Gaby's face quickly swam into focus. "Doc," she said, "something's up. The broadcast from the Aether Gold station keeps mentioning you."
"Go ahead."
Her face did not disappear, but there was another crackle over the speaker, and words spoken by someone unknown, a man with a pleasant Old World accent: "Please inform the Sidhe Foundation immediately."
A silence of several beats followed, then the voice returned. "This message is for Doctor Desmond MaqqRee and the Sidhe Foundation. Yesterday we took the criminal Doctor MaqqRee into our custody, but he escaped the punishment to which he had been condemned. To retaliate for this gross transgression, we will destroy the Danaan Heights Office Building and everything in its vicinity at precisely four bells today. We invite Doctor MaqqRee to try to stop us. Should he die in the attempt, the rest of Neckerdam will no longer have to fear any further justice on our part."
There was a faint clatter from the speaker, then a long moment of silence.
"This is not good," said Alastair.
Another voice began speaking: "This is Red MacOam returning to the air." His voice sounded hushed. "The men who seized control of the Aether Gold offices have left. There were three of them—four? Four of them, with fire in their hands and fire in their eyes. I think that—I'm getting reports that they're gone. Five? Five men, all lights in ordinary street dress with red kerchiefs over their faces, they— I'm being told that our offices are now trying to get in touch with the Sidhe Foundation to get their reaction to this challenge—"
Alastair asked, "Garage, Doc?"
Doc didn't answer.
"Doc? Garage?"
He finally shook his head. "People will be fleeing the Danaan Heights Building by the time we get there. We might not be able to get in at ground level. We'll direct the Neckerdam Guard to try. As for us . . . Gaby, meet us in the hangar. We're taking the Outrigger."
"Oh, no," she said.
"Oh, no," said Alastair.