17
Prospero, Inc
“Tell me he was not about to say ‘Hell,’” begged Mab. He leapt to his feet, darted around the slate patio of the café, and peered down the hill toward Charlotte Amalie port, as if to make absolutely certain Mephisto and the chimera had not departed in that direction.
Despite its being December, the weather on St. Thomas was sunny and beautiful, with a salty breeze blowing off the sea. As our waiter approached, the aroma of fried fish, garlic sauce, and coconut supplanted the other scents, even as the clink of dishes drowned out the distant ships’ horns and cries of seagulls from the harbor.
I started to rise, to tell the waiter that there was a change of plans and we had to go, but the food smelled so good. I sat down again. I had eaten nothing since last night at Logistilla’s, and there would be no opportunity to eat on our plane. Whatever was wrong at Prospero, Inc. could hold another fifteen minutes, while I had my lunch.
“Wish I could,” I said to Mab as soon as the waiter had departed. I took a bite of my conch in garlic. It was delicious. “What could he have been thinking? He hasn’t seemed all that crazy, except for the thing with the lute. How could he suddenly have forgotten he was not Mephistopheles the demon?”
“Maybe he wasn’t going to say Hell,” Mab drawled. “Maybe he planned to say ‘Harlem’ or ‘Hollywood,’ but I kinda doubt it. None of those places have princes nowadays. Prince Mephistopheles sounds suspiciously like Hell to me. . . . Maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe he is the demon Mephistopheles.”
“What?” I spit conch across the table.
“It’s just I don’t remember a demon named Mephistopheles back when I was wreaking havoc as the Northeast Wind. When was that Faust play written, anyway?”
As he spoke, Mab approached the place where Mephisto and the chimera had stood. Slowly, he inched his way around the chimera’s tracks, leaning over and sniffing the air. When he had circled the place, he scowled. “No otherworldly scent. That’s good for him—means he’s still on Earth—but, it makes things harder for me. Earthly scents are harder to pin down.”
Mab pulled a sextant, a slide rule, and a handful of brown rice from his pocket. Kneeling, he took a reading off the sun with the sextant, tossed a handful of rice in the air, and took a reading again as the grains pattered to the dusty earth. He stood silently for a time, calculating his results with the slide rule. Then, scratching his stubble, he repeated the whole process again.
I watched him work and sipped my tannia soup, savoring the creamy texture and mild, nutty, potato-like flavor. After five hundred years, it often amazed me there were still foods I had never tasted.
“It’s no good,” Mab growled finally. “The doorway dissolved too quickly. There’s no spatial drift.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he hasn’t been taken from this world. Even a short dimensional hop would have allowed some unearthly air to escape through the cracks between worlds. And if there’s one thing I can detect, it’s unearthly air. The brief whiff I got smells more like Rome or Chicago.”
“That’s good enough, I guess. I’d ask you to do more, but by the time we found him, either it would be too late, or he’d have his staff again—in which case, he’ll be fine. Since I agreed to send him off on his own anyway, I’ll leave it like this.”
“Ma’am . . . what did he mean about the chameleon cloak? Was it his? How could it have been?”
I recalled our visit to The Elephant’s Trunk thrift shop. The clerk had smiled and headed for Mephisto immediately. I had dismissed her interest as romantic. Could she have been smiling because she was already acquainted with Mephisto?
A cold chill ran down the back of my spine. As soon as Mephisto departed, she brought his companion, me, to the chameleon cloak!
“Do you remember how he thought that gas station and The Elephant’s Trunk looked familiar?” I asked Mab. “They were familiar! He’d been there before!”
“Your brother was acting weird at the thrift shop. The only excuse I can offer for not having noticed is that he always acts weird.”
“But why?” My voice rose. “How could Mephisto own a chameleon cloak? He knows their vicious nature! He helped destroy the originals.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Mab offered. “Maybe he squirreled one away and had it all this time.”
I shook my head. “No, I was there when Mephisto, Theo, and Erasmus destroyed the originals. I watched as each one was unmade. Mephisto must have gotten this one more recently. But where? And why?”
And how long ago? All this time, I had been assuming Mephisto’s interest in ponchos over the last century or so was based on nostalgia for his old royal tabards, but might it not have the sinister purpose of hiding his chameleon cloak? I tried to remember when Mephisto first started wearing a poncho. It had been many, many decades, at the very least.
Mab shrugged. “Who knows why Harebrain does anything? Maybe he’s actually a demon-haunted horror, or perhaps he wanted it for the reason he gave us, camouflage. Where’d he get that big demon body, anyway? That’s what I’d like to know!”
“Me, too, Mab. There are a lot of things I’d like to know including . . . ” I ticked my questions off on my fingers, starting back at my thumb again when I reached my pinky. “What is up with Mephisto? What’s up with Logistilla and her cavern of naked Italians? Is my sister trafficking with the Devil? Is my brother? Is my father? Why did Cornelius use his staff on a brother, and what can be done to disenchant Theo? What was my father doing when he released the Three Shadowed Ones? How do we rescue Father from Hell? What is going to happen on Twelfth Night?”
I took a breath and continued, “Where did Father get his books? Could the virtue of his tomes—their magic—have been in the paper, rather than in the words written upon the pages? Is that why Father could not cast the spells again, once he made our staffs? What really happened to Ferdinand? Where’s Gregor’s body?” And silently, I added: What is this secret Baelor spoke of that is destroying my family?
Mab flipped through his notebook, looking for additional loose ends. “Dang lucky Mr. Theo showed up when he did at the gas station. I wonder what Harebrain meant about him being prompted by an angel. And . . . Oh!” He tapped his finger on the page before him. “You left out whether Prospero has you under a spell, ma’am.”
“I’m not concerned about that. But, I’ll tell you another thing I’d like to know! How did that knife end up at Logistilla’s?”
“Knife? What knife? The one Harebrain was playing with?”
“I just remembered why that knife was important. It was on Gregor’s body when he died!”
“So, maybe his sister kept it as a keepsake . . . to remember her brother by. Weren’t they twins?”
I rubbed my temples, which were beginning to ache. “You don’t understand, Mab. It was on his body when he was shot. By the time my family got there, the knife was gone. According to the police report, the killer took it. Now, if the last known person to own this knife was the man who killed Gregor . . . how did Logistilla get it?”
“Maybe she hunted down his murderer and turned him into a newt?” suggested Mab. “Dang! I had meant to ask your sister if we could interrogate the men she mentioned recently adding to her retinue. What an idiot I am! Guess I was distracted by the scent of devils and empty Italians.”
Pulling out his notebook, he added our questions to the list he was keeping.
At the airport, I phoned headquarters and learned that the shipment of phoenix ash promised to the salamanders of Mount St. Helens had never reached its destination. Our truck had crashed somewhere in Arizona, spilling barrels of the precious deadly substance across the road.
Returning to the Lear, we flew directly to Prospero, Inc.’s corporate headquarters in Seattle. I immediately dispatched Mab with a team of experts to clean up the crash. Afterwards, he was to continue on to Elgin, Illinois, to see if Gregor’s grave held any clues. Meanwhile, I dealt with the problem of locating another six drums of phoenix ash before the Mount St. Helens salamanders blew their top, literally.
According to modern lingo, Prospero, Inc. was a multinational corporation; however, as it was originally founded in the same era as the East India Company—with a similar royal charter—I still referred to it by the older nomenclature of “company.” Early in the twentieth century, we incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware, leading to our current appellation of Prospero, Incorporated—or as most of us called it, Prospero, Inc. As our supernatural clientele have become familiar with this name, I have kept it, even though the folks at marketing press me, from time to time, to modernize. Mr. Charles Chapman, the vice president of marketing, jokes that our name is so out-of-date, some of the younger employees believe they are working for a printing firm known as Prospero Ink.
Upon arriving, I passed Charles Chapman in the bustling hallway. Father had hired him when he was just out of college, and he had now been with the company thirty-five years. He believed me to be Father’s granddaughter, the daughter of the Miranda he had known in his youth. He often paused to tell me how I was the spitting image of my mother, which was more pleasant than Philip Burke, the oldest of our salesmen, who liked to tell risqué stories of his exploits with “my mother” back in the fifties and sixties, none of which even remotely reflected the truth.
After commenting that he remembered my mother wearing that very green dress, Mr. Chapman asked after my father. I smiled and nodded and murmured something unintelligible. As I walked on, I wondered how he would have responded if I had told him Father was in Hell. “Befuddle the mortals” was not a game I cared to play, but it had once been a favorite pastime of Mephisto’s and Erasmus’s. They had taught it to Ulysses, who took to it like a seal to the sea. For a time, he got a kick out of blurting irrelevant bits of supernatural lore to unsuspecting mortals and then tapping on his staff and disappearing in a burst of light. My father eventually made him stop, ordering him not to make things difficult for the Orbis Suleimani after pictures of him using his staff appeared in a British tabloid.
I took an elevator to the tenth floor, nodded kindly to the ladies manning the phones in the upstairs foyer, and pressed my hand against the white rectangle to the left of the locked doors marked “Priority Wing.” What looked like a security device was actually a magical talisman that did exactly what a security device would have done—but we had been using ours for nearly four hundred years. The doors swung open and then, with an audible click, locked again behind me. I breathed a sigh of relief.
The company was divided into two major divisions: the Mundane Branch, run by normal humans, and the Priority Branch, staffed by incarnated Aerie Ones. The first handled mundane business concerns: factories, chains of retail stores, and other business ventures of the ordinary sort. The second supported our supernatural customers.
Long ago, King Solomon charged the Orbis Suleimani with the task of conquering the supernatural entities whose struggles and strife caused what humans called natural disasters. The great innovation of our company, which was fundamentally a branch, or perhaps an offshoot, of the Circle of Solomon, was the discovery that if we provided wares that spirit creatures wanted—usually some commodity owned or produced by a different kind of supernatural being—they would cooperate willingly, with a minimum of oathbinding and fuss, saving both tremendous effort and countless lives.
Prospero Incorporated carries out this charge by facilitating the exchanges between these entities. We provide phoenix dust to salamanders who otherwise caused volcanoes; cinnamon sticks from the nests of Cinnamologus to the phoenixes; pearls from the nereids to the oreads of the earth, who could make every gem but these; and the black blood of the oreads to hungry djinn. It had taken years, centuries, to negotiate the agreements we currently maintained, and their success was based on a delicate balance between our various clienteles. This balance helps to stabilize the supernatural community. Were even a single link in the chain lost, it would herald untold disaster!
As I swept into my office, I called to my assistant. “Presto, Windflower! I need everything you can get me on phoenix ash depositories!”
Windflower rose from her desk, glanced at the filing cabinet, looked down the hallway toward the library—most of which had been scanned into our database—and sat down at her desk again, where she began typing furiously. She had been a swift westerly breeze before her incarnation, and still retained her innate quickness.
I sat down at my own desk and pulled up the notes that Mustardseed, our vice president of Priority Contracts and the de facto head of the company when I was unavailable, had written thus far. Of all the Aerie Ones, Mustardseed was the most competent at interacting with the human world, and his sharp tongue could keep our supernatural employees in line. He was invaluable; Prospero, Inc. would be lost without him.
Mustardseed reported, among other things, that our current inventory included only a few ounces of phoenix ash. I was not surprised. The stuff was volatile, liable to burst into flame, not the sort of substance we kept stocked in our warehouses.
Without warning, Windflower was standing at my elbow, a disconcerting habit of hers. She was clad in a poppy red Grecian dress with a high golden waist and gold trim along the V-shaped neckline. Her pale blond hair was piled up in the same Grecian style I often wore. Windflower had been my assistant in company matters well before she took on a fleshly body. Apparently, she had picked up her fashion sense from me.
Windflower handed me a steaming mug from which issued the heavenly rich aroma of my favorite Peruvian coffee. I accepted it gratefully and held it in both hands, inhaling.
Her voice rang out cheerfully, “This is what I have so far, Miss Prospero: upon rising from the ashes, the young phoenix embalms the ashes of its parent/former self in myrrh and brings them to one of three sacred depositories: the ancient city of Heliopolis, a hidden valley in the Kunlun Mountains, or a cavern deep beneath the city hall in Tempe, Arizona. For obvious reasons, we usually retrieved our phoenix ash from Arizona. However, that supply now lies scattered across Interstate 10.”
“Is there any left at the depository?” I asked, taking a sip of my coffee. It was hot, but not too hot, with the perfect amount of sugar and cream. “Can we gather more from the Tempe location?”
Windflower shook her head vigorously, causing the violet pasqueflower-shaped bells on her hair comb to jiggle and ring. “Not enough to fill one drum, much less six.”
“Six drums! That’s quite a bit of ash!”
“That was the renegotiated amount after the disaster of 1980. Most of the other volcanoes only receive a few ounces.”
“So, what’s our next best choice, Heliopolis?” I leaned back in my chair. “The new one or the old one?”
“The old. It is now the Tell-Hisn district, just outside of Cairo.”
Glancing at my screen, I paged up until I found the reference to Tell-Hisn I had just scanned. “According to Mustardseed’s report, it’s the largest depository of phoenix ash in the world, and we have operatives in the area. He says that we provide ash from the Heliopolis depository to Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, Mount Fuji, Mount Paricutin, and Krakatoa. I wonder why we haven’t used it for St. Helens before?”
“I can answer that, Miss Prospero,” Windflower said quickly. She was a veritable encyclopedia when it came to Prospero, Inc. matters, which was, of course, why I had chosen her for my assistant. She had worked for the goddess Rumour before Father captured her people. “The Tell-Hisn cache is frequented mainly by Bennu. The Egyptian Bennu produces a higher quality ash than the American Phoenix.”
“Ah! I remember. Father feared that if we ever provided the salamanders of Mount St. Helens with Bennu ash, they would come to expect a similar quality of ash in the future.”
“Do you wish to discontinue that policy, Miss Prospero?”
I considered. The Egyptian ash was much more expensive to retrieve than its American variety, and, considering the amount of ash the St. Helens salamanders had demanded after the last fiasco, the cost would be exorbitant. On top of that, there were the dangers of trying to transport six barrels of volatile ash across the Atlantic on a regular basis.
“Not unless it turns out to be absolutely necessary,” I concluded. “Where was the last site? The Kunlun Mountains. In Northern China?”
“South of the Gobi Desert. Phoenixes live in deserts, of course. Their ash caches are near the world’s great deserts.”
“Is there one in the Australian Outback?” I asked hopefully. Australia was much easier to do business with than Mainland China.
Windflower shook her head, jingling. “Phoenixes are not native to Australia, though there are reports that Xi Wang-Mu has tried to introduce them.”
“Xi Wang-Mu? Was that the Chinese fellow who slew the flood dragon?”
“No, that was Lu Yan. Xi Wang-Mu is a woman.”
“Oh! Of course, the woman with the phoenix! One of the Chinese Immortals. I had tea with her during the Centennial Masquerade that was held in Cathay. The beginning of the eighteenth century, I think it was.” I thought for a moment. “Doesn’t she live in a cave in the mountains, somewhere in China?”
“In the Kunluns,” Windflower replied with a smile.
“Well that’s helpful,” I mused. “Now, we just have to figure out how to get the ash out of China.”
“And to discover what she wants,” Windflower added.
I shook my head. “No. She is a compassionate soul. If she asks for anything at all, it will be for someone else.”
“Shall I dispatch one of my people to speak with her?”
“Yes. Wait, no. It will take three days for an Aerie One to get there. Have a pilot fly the messenger to Siberia or South Korea. It will be quicker from there.”
Windflower toyed with the anemone-shaped brooch fastened at her right shoulder, her eyes lowered. “That’s embarrassing.”
“It’s an emergency. The ash arrived merely hours over the deadline back in 1980, and the salamanders blew up nearly half the mountain. We can’t take any chances.”
“If you insist,” she sighed. She whisked to her desk to give the order. I took advantage of her departure to drink my coffee, but she was back, comb bells chiming, before I finished swallowing my first sip.
“Done, Miss Prospero,” she declared. “Now, once we contact Xi Wang-Mu, assuming she’s willing to help us, how are we going to get the ash out? No lone Aerie One is going to be strong enough to fly six barrels across mainland China. Even a group of us could not do it. You would need a major storm for that.”
“Ah, now there’s the rub,” I pressed my fingertips together.
There were a number of methods of extracting the ash. We could ship it, but to get it through customs, we would need the help of Cornelius, who would have to travel to China in person. The Staff of Persuasion only worked within the sound of his natural voice. Under the circumstances, he would go if I asked him to, but China was a tricky place to visit, even for us. I was worried that by the time I reached him and he arranged for a flight, it might be too late.
Ulysses could get there and back in nearly no time, assuming he had Cornelius’s help to make it from the city of Datong, where the Staff of Transportation had previously touched the earth, to the Kunlun Mountains. But I had no idea how to reach Ulysses.
All other methods at my disposal were too slow, which meant there was only one option left. I was going to have to deal with the Black Market.
“Lady Miranda, what a pleasure,” purred Alberich of the Nibelungs from the other side of the phone line. “We are always eager to do favors for Handmaidens of Eurynome.”
Silently, I cursed myself for not requesting that Mustardseed make this call. Mustardseed was a wizard at negotiations, but even more important, he could have offered a variety of enticements. As soon as the King of the Nibelungs heard the word “Handmaiden,” the options collapsed to a single currency, one I was extremely loath to spend.
“Alberich, a pleasure as always,” I replied crisply. “How is your kingdom under the earth?”
“Not as rich as it once was when I had my ring, my lovely ring. Have you seen it?”
“No. Is it lost again? I am sorry to hear that.”
“A thief crept into the heart of my palace and made off with it,” grumbled the sovereign of the dwarves. “I blame Mime. I’ve had him clapped in irons for the last half-dozen decades, but he will not confess. But, enough of me. What may I do for you, Lady Miranda?”
“Nothing large, a trifle really.” I kept my voice light. Though I needed the ash as soon as possible, the last thing I wanted was for the Nibelung king to discern that this was an urgent matter. He would instantly quadruple the price. Better to offer an incentive to have the matter expedited once an initial price had been settled upon. “I need some goods moved and I was wondering what you would charge to have your boys do it.”
“Prospero Transport Company wishes us to move goods for them?” Alberich chuckled. “What is the world coming to? You run one of the best transportation systems on the planet. Why not move it yourself?”
The question stumped me, but I recovered quickly.
“We had a little . . . mishap with one of our trucks. I wish to replace the lost goods without my brothers learning about it.”
“Of course,” Alberich replied smoothly. “You know we live to serve in such delicate situations.”
“Wonderful,” I replied airily. “I need six drums of phoenix ash moved from the Kunlun Mountains in Cathay to our headquarters, here in the New World.”
“Six drums of . . . ” he sputtered. “Six drums?” Regaining his composure, he continued. “You do know that stuff is liable to burst into flames if shaken or dropped?”
“I do.”
“Moving hazardous materials will increase the price, of course,” the dwarf king said glibly. “And then there are the added handling fees for engaging the services of the Cheng-huang, our representatives in that area. They are efficient and thorough, mind you, but too many years of service to the Jade Emperor have made them sticklers for paperwork. Many forms to fill out, a nuisance, you understand.”
“Of course,” I replied blithely. “What will the charge be?”
Alberich muttered, as if engaged in some massive calculation. Eventually, he cleared his throat.
“Three ounces of Water of Life seems like a fair price, doesn’t it?”
“Three ounces!” I cried, outraged. I had expected him to open by asking for Water, but this was ridiculous! I could save a hundred and twenty lives or summon as many deities for such a price. “A fair price if I were asking you to deliver me the moon!”
And so the dickering began. I offered all sorts of treasures, from rubies from the river nymphs of the Ganges to a box of stardust I once brought back from the World’s End, but while he lowered the amount he was asking for, Alberich held fast to his request for Water of Life.
Eventually, he lowered his demand to six drops, one for each barrel. I pursed my lips and considered. I could afford to part with six drops. It would mean that I had to return to the Well at the World’s End one year sooner, but more than six people might be killed if we did not receive the phoenix dust on time. So, on the surface, the bargain seemed worthwhile.
What troubled me was the precedent. Were it to get out that Prospero, Inc. was willing to pay for services in Water of Life, even once, our careful network, through which supernatural entities helped supply each other’s needs, would evaporate. No longer willing to settle for dryad bark, fairy dust, and black blood of the earth, every deva, sylph, and djinn would demand Water of Life. Instead of facilitating trade and good relations between magical creatures, we would find ourselves in the business of bribing them from our own pocket.
Even this might not be the worst thing, were I a Sibyl and able to create Water of Life at will. But I was still a Handmaiden, and now that I was running Prospero, Inc., it was getting harder and harder for me to take off the year and a day necessary to make the journey to the World’s End. It would be harder still, I realized with a pang, if Father were not around to keep an eye on the company while I was away.
It sat ill upon my shoulders to trust the fate of the company to the discretion of the King of the Nibelungs. No, I needed to find another way.