Cybermage, page 22
In his armchair, Tesla roused. “Have it. How do you mean, have it?”
“Your other self knows,” Ben said. “You were… he was… right there.”
Tesla was gazing at the pigeons in the cage. “Air…and Earth,” he said. “That’s what you have there. I could barely believe that they still existed. That you would find them. That they would come to you, and that they never, in forty long years, came back to me at all. Not even to glimpse them. That which I did must have been ill done indeed, if pieces of my own soul chose to stay away from me for so long… and come to you, when you went to seek them.”
“You’re wrong,” Ben said. “They came to you. They all came to you. When we were in the park you were covered with the birds, as though they were celebrating your return. And when these came… it was you who took them, it was your hand that they came to. They did not desert you, in the end.”
“Forty lonely years,” Tesla murmured, reaching out to the cage and pushing a couple of long fingers through the wire. One of the pigeons sidled closer, cooing louder, and rubbed his head on Tesla’s hand.
“Yes,” he said to it, his voice suddenly very soft and gentle, his index finger ruffling the feathers at the back of the bird’s neck, “I am very happy to see you too.”
Thea suddenly flashed back to Tesla’s last lullaby to another bird, lying still in his hands; she met Magpie’s eyes, briefly, and could see the same thought reflected there. She cleared her throat, but before she could speak Terry stirred.
“Humphrey won’t be happy,” he said. “Have you been in touch with him, Thea? He wants to know what’s going on. He’s been bugging me several times a day–email, phone, once even a personal visit.”
“He phoned us in New York. Twice. And I know he had a FBM shadow on us. It wasn’t just the Alphiri that were following us around,” said Ben. “For all I know he might already know about the results of the New York expedition.”
“This Humphrey May,” Tesla said. “What exactly is his own role in all of this? In my own experience with the Federal Bureau of Magic, back in my own time, whenever they did something it was for their own reasons, not anyone’s well-being. I am a little disturbed that he is involved so deeply in all of this.”
“He thought that it might be possible to get you back,” Thea said. “To give back what you’d lost. To reclaim you. I know he was doing it for his own reasons. When I said I would help find those pigeons of yours, I told him I was doing it for you, not for him. All I wanted to do was try and set you free. I don’t know what he wanted, exactly, or what he would take instead of that if he didn’t get it.”
“He would have taken you,” Tesla said shrewdly. “He was betting on one of us. I would be very careful around the FBM, my dear.”
“I wouldn’t say you were far wrong,” Terry said, “even though my uncle runs the place. But Thea, whatever you do, do something. He’s been a confounded nuisance, and I can’t tell him to bug off, he’s technically my boss.”
“What would the Alphiri want with that pigeon which they stole?” Tess asked.
“Hold it for ransom, maybe–hold it over our heads as a threat. They will find a way to make a profit on the situation,” Terry said grimly. “Threaten to wring its neck if we don’t produce its fellows, or Tesla.”
“I thought they did not steal,” Kristin said, clutching her cage as though her mere touch would protect the precious birds inside it. “But Corey…”
“Exactly. Corey.” Thea tossed her hair back in a small, frustrated gesture. “They stole nothing. They bought the pigeon from Corey. And Corey had no compunction about stealing. None at all. Well, two can play at that game.”
“Oh?” Ben said sharply.
“Who knows someone who’s got Tersii in the house?” Thea said, turning to her friends.
She was greeted with five sets of blank stares.
“The Faele Cleaner Clan?” Tess echoed. “The imps that do the housework when nobody’s looking, and as long as everybody pretends not to notice?”
“Those,” Thea said, beginning to grin.
“But they’re the lowest Faele rank there is. They have no power at all. What do you want with the Tersii?”
“Uh,” Ben said, hesitating. “I don’t know, not for sure, but my father’s lab is always… kind of… immaculate. I never see him tidying up, and I know for a fact that it would be a tip if his assistant was in charge of it. It could be one of the Tersii, but I don’t know for sure.”
“Worth a try,” Thea said. “I hope it’s the helpful kind and not the malicious tribe. Getting tangled up with those would be all we need right now.”
“Tersii, for Heaven’s sake? Why do you want to get tangled up with the Faele anyway? Don’t we have enough trouble on our plate?” Tess said.
But Tesla was wearing a wolfish smile. “I think I understand,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Wait for me here,” Thea said. “Ben, can you describe your father’s lab for me?”
“I can do better than that. Take me with you, and I’ll get you there directly,” Ben said.
“All right, then. The sooner we…”
“Wait.”
They turned to where Magpie stood a little apart from them all, laying down the small silk-wrapped bundle she still cradled in her arms.
“Take me with you, too,” she said.
Thea stared at her for a long moment, and then nodded, just once, sharply.
“Okay,” she said. “The rest of you, wait here. Hopefully we won’t be too long about this. Come on, Ben.”
She typed something on her wrist pad, showed it to Ben who murmured assent, and hit ENTER.
The three of them found themselves in an empty laboratory, just at the instant that someone had switched off the overhead lights and was softly closing the door behind them. They heard the snick of a lock, and then they were alone in a large room with a couple of safety lights over two of the benches and the muted glow of the light in the fume cupboard which had been left on. It glinted on glassware on one of the benches, some rinsed and left out to dry, the rest piled into the scarred and pitted sink.
“Looks promising,” Ben said. “It never looks like this in the morning.”
“Shhh,” Thea said, straining forward to see.
They waited in silence, without moving, until Thea suddenly lifted up a hand. There was sound, very faint, of glass clinking against glass. She hid a smile as she typed something else into the wrist pad, hiding the small screen’s glow under her sleeve; in the next instant, she was standing beside the piled sink without ever having betrayed her presence by actually moving, and a smothered squawk from her closed hand betrayed the presence of an astonished and furious little man less than a foot tall. Ben and Magpie hurried over, and at first all they could see were two angrily waving arms below a peaked brown hat which seemed three sizes too large for its owner.
“Put me down! Put me down this instant! Put me down you great human elephant! We had a deal! You weren’t even supposed to know I was here!”
“It’s hard not to know, when you do what you do,” Ben said, unable to help himself.
The Tersii gnome’s hat turned around, and a small pointed face with dark eyes and broad, bulbous nose was turned up to Ben’s face. The gnome stared at Ben, his lips pursed in an annoyed grimace of recognition.
“You,” he said peevishly. “I should’ve known. It was an inside job.”
“Hush,” Thea said. “But I have another deal for you–you, or someone else of your kindred. I mean you no harm, and will not reveal your presence to anybody. Nor will anyone else here. Your secret is safe with us if you will lead us to those we need to speak to.”
“What do you want?” the Tersii said suspiciously, squinting up at Thea.
“I need a changeling.”
The Tersii stared at her. “That will cost you.”
“That’s my problem. Mine, and whoever it is I bargain with. Do we have a deal with you?”
“Uh. Sure. But I can’t get you a changeling. You’d need to go much further up the hierarchy for that. The Court, even.”
“How do I get there?”
“They don’t let just anyone…” the Tersii said, outraged.
“Yes but it was the Faele themselves who labelled me a seeker in my cradle,” Thea said. “I’m not just anyone. How do I get there?”
“Let me get my boss,” the Tersii said, after a pause. “I can’t do any of this. I’m just clean-up crew. I earn my keep, I’m a working-class body, not like some mucky mucks up above me.”
“Like your boss?” Magpie said, unable to help herself.
The Tersii blinked. “Tricksy. I didn’t say that. Let me go, and I’ll get…”
Thea shook her head. “Nuh-uh. You can call them. I’ll let you go when he gets here. The boss.”
The Tersii looked sulky, reaching out to straighten its hat with both hands, scowling up at Thea, who simply raised an eyebrow in response, without relinquishing her grasp on him.
“Fine,” the Tersii said sullenly. “Oh, fine.”
He tilted his head and closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again. “Coming,” he said. “Can I get on with my work now? You sure nobody will know?”
“Oh, everybody knows,” Ben said. “But nobody will have seen you. Cross my heart.”
Thea opened her hand and the little man stepped smartly out of her reach, straightening his clothes as he did so. “Caught like a nipper,” he muttered to himself. “Like a nipper. As though I haven’t been doing this for a hundred and fifty years.”
“Do they really live that long?” Magpie said, astonished, turning to Thea.
“How do you know how long their year is?” Thea said, grinning.
A small, theatrical flash of white light announced the arrival of the Tersii worker’s boss. He stood just a smidge taller than his underling, and his hat was a shade that was more gold than brown, but other than that, he didn’t look much different from the original Tersii who had vanished somewhere into the pile of dirty glassware and, by the sounds of things, was hard at work.
“Well, who wants me?” the boss Tersii asked with some asperity.
“Lay off my father’s phosphorus,” Ben muttered. “I recognise that flash.”
“I come bargaining,” Thea said, ignoring the interruption. “I need a changeling.”
Boss Tersii stood up a little straighter. “A changeling,” he said. “You don’t say. And what might this changeling be for?”
“That’s for the one who can provide me one to know,” Thea said.
“Well, I can’t,” the little man said, throwing his arms wide. “Did that doofus over there tell you this was something I could accomplish? I’ll flay him…”
“No,” Thea said. “What he said, I believe, is that you can give us access to a higher level. To the Court.”
“The Court isn’t in session,” Boss Tersii said, crossing his arms.
“They will be,” Thea said. “For this. Get the message out.”
“You would summon the Court here? To this filthy place?”
“I’m working as fast as I can!” the original Tersii grumbled from the (admittedly suddenly smaller) pile of glassware in the sink.
Thea shrugged. “Here, or wherever they choose.”
“A changeling. What would a human want with a changeling?”
“Not a human changeling. A pigeon changeling.”
Ben whipped his head around to stare at Thea, his mouth hanging open. He looked like he was about to say something, but Magpie reached out behind Thea’s back and touched his arm gently, giving him a light shake of her head.
Boss Tersii didn’t entirely miss all of that, but he was far too busy trying to make sense of Thea’s words to pay all that much attention.
“A pigeon changeling?” he echoed, astonished. “What possible use would there be in a Faele pigeon changeling?”
“Court,” Thea said sweetly. “Call them and find out.”
The Boss Tersii looked the three of them up and down. “Great galumphing humans,” he muttered. “You’d stomp on the Court with those clodhoppers and that would be the end of that. I will get the Queen’s Chancellor.”
“The Queen,” Thea said, gently but insistently. “Else the Chancellor will just have to go and get her himself, What I ask is, apparently, not for the common official.”
“The Chancellor is a Royal Paladin, I will have you know,” Boss Tersii said.
“The Queen,” Thea said.
“Oh, fine,” Boss Tersii said. “On your own head be it. I can tell you now she is not used to being summoned like this by the likes of you. She will not be happy.”
He winked out. Ben shook off Magpie’s hand and turned to Thea.
“Are you sure you know what you are doing?” he whispered.
Thea smiled and shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “I’m kind of figuring things out as I go along. I’ve got the Feds behind me–for now–and Humphrey’s still backing me.”
“But he doesn’t know what you’re doing, either,” Ben said doggedly.
“He never did,” Thea said. “But even if all that fails, I have Tesla. I have me.”
“You might be putting too much in that basket. Even Elemental magic can’t take on two other polities at once. And you’re batting to do that.”
Further conversation was prevented by an odd distortion of the air above one of the benches, which slowly resolved into a window looking into what appeared to be a forest glade wreathed in amethyst twilight. Lanterns filled with fireflies hung from twigs and branches, most of them in an arch above a bower thick with rose petals on which reclined the tiny, delicate form of an exquisite silver-haired woman wearing a filet which held a single white gem on her brow. She held what looked like a large, jewelled hatpin as a sceptre; her arms were weighed down with silver bracelets from wrist to elbow, and her gown appeared to be a layer of fragile-looking silver webbing glittering with tiny crystals over an undergarment of a shimmering royal purple.
“This,” said the Queen of the Faele Court, “had better be good.”
Thea, minding her manners, bobbed a small curtsey. “Your Majesty,” she said. “I come for help only you can give.”
“Sounds promising already,” the Queen said, with just a touch of irony. “What did you have in mind?”
“Something important to me has been stolen. I wish for it to be replaced with a Faele changeling–only for long enough for its removal from the thief’s hands to pass unnoticed, this does not have to be a permanent thing at all–and the original restored to me.”
“A living something. Else you would not be asking for a changeling at all.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. A bird.”
“It sounds elaborate,” the Queen said, after a pause. “Perhaps a shade too elaborate. If stolen, why cannot it be recovered by more straightforward means? And perhaps more to the point… who holds it?”
“Well, this is why I need your people and their skills,” Thea murmured. “It is being held by the Alphiri.”
The Queen sat up, throwing her scepter down on her bower. “Then it wasn’t stolen,” she said. “The Alphiri do not steal. This is known. They make a bargain, and they hold to it.”
“It was stolen from one of the Human Polity… by one whom your polity knows well, and has done many deals with. The Trickster. If the Alphiri bargained with him, then that is between them and the Trickster. But the bird of which I speak was stolen, from us.”
“You seriously expect my people to bring the wrath of the Alphiri on our heads?” the Queen asked. “Why would I do such a thing? And if you are right and the Trickster is involved, he is not part of this Court, but he is an Elder Spirit of a fellow polity ratified by formal law, his word easily carries the weight of my own within the hierarchy. I have no say over what he does or does not do. I owe you nothing. Nothing that I want to get the Alphiri angry at me over, anyway.”
“What if there is nothing they can do to you?”
“They would know it was me,” the Queen said. “A Faele changeling pigeon? Who else would sanction or make possible such a thing?”
“But you yourself said it, the Alphiri understand a bargain,” Thea said. “And you would be making one, with us. We, the Human Polity, would stand surety for this one. If they wish to challenge that, it’s a bargain they will have to take to the Polity Court for arbitration. And our lawyers are just as well versed in Polity Law as the Alphiri are.”
“You are a younger polity,” the Faele Queen said slowly. “You haven’t felt Alphiri fury. Not yet. Not completely.”
“Neither would you. Immunity.”
“No,” the Queen said, shaking her head slowly. “It goes a long way, but it doesn’t go far enough. I will not risk…”
“Wait,” Magpie said, stepping forward.
Thea turned, astonished.
Magpie already held, cupped in one hand, all the earrings from both her ears and half a dozen rings, and she was in the process of undoing, single-handed, the clasp of a chain bearing a large prismatic crystal that was hung around her neck. It came loose even as she spoke and she let it spool into her hand, and then poured it into the other, with the rest of the loot. She held it out to the Queen.
“There is more,” she said, “where these came from. It may be more or less valuable than the chance to actually pull one over on the Alphiri with absolute impunity. These, and all else I own that is shiny and that sparkles. I can see that there is a love of such things in your Court, Your Majesty. I pledge it all.”
“Magpie,” Thea began, strangely moved.
But the Queen leaned forward. “Bring it closer,” she instructed, waving Magpie to approach with one imperious hand. “I wish to see.”
“Magpie, wait,” Thea said, putting out a hand to restrain her friend, but Magpie shook her off.
“I owe it,” she said. “For the other life I couldn’t touch.”
“Bring it,” the Queen said. “Now.”
Magpie held Thea’s eyes for a fraction of a second longer and then broke off her gaze and stepped forward, holding out her hand.
The Queen reached out with both her own exquisite hands and rummaged around in the stash in Magpie’s palm. She lifted her head, and a winged minion stepped up to her from the shadows beyond the firefly lights; she said something into its pointed ear, too softly for any of the three humans to hear, and the minion nodded and vanished in a bright spark of light. The Queen appeared to be waiting for his return, and nobody chose to break the silence; when the messenger did return, a few minutes later, he made his report–quite a lengthy one–into the Queen’s ear, again out of earshot. When he was done, the Queen dismissed him with another wave of her hand.
