Evastany

24 IV

24 IV

The first thing that didn’t happen was kidnapping.

I confess to feeling a trifle disappointed. Half the rest of the partial Lokant population of the Darklands has managed to get themselves kidnapped lately; why not me? Do I present so poor a prospect? Am I so unappealing? It is difficult not to take it personally.

Our new applicant was supposedly called Fostiger DeMarte-Tregoriann, and “he” informed me that he was a resident of Glour City, making his abode in one of our good city’s less populous suburbs.

Fostiger DeMarte-Tregoriann. Honestly. I have had a little bit of experience at coming up with likely-sounding pseudonyms, and I ask you. Can anybody with such a name be taken seriously? Could there be a moment’s doubt in anybody’s mind that there can be no such person? I think not.

Out to the farthest reaches of Glour City went Tren and I, at our most official — because we were still representative of our fledgling bureau, even if we were knowingly in pursuit of a den of filthy kidnappers. It would never do to make a poor impression.

Mr. DeMarte-Tregoriann was an engineer by trade, and lived in exactly the kind of neat, featureless, scrupulously well-kept house one might expect an engineer to live in.

‘How thoroughly predictable,’ I said to Tren as we approached the building. It was a detached property, not too sizeable, and painted an unimaginative white.

‘Deplorably,’ Tren agreed.

‘As if we would be so dull-witted as to fall for such an obvious ploy.’

‘It’s unthinkable.’

It appeared to me (impossible as it might seem) that Tren was laughing at me. Something to do with the curve of his lip and the faint twinkle in his eyes as he obligingly supplied just the answers I wanted.

‘You’re laughing at me,’ I observed.

‘Never.’

‘At least tell me why.’

‘Maybe later.’

We had arrived at Mr. DeMarte-Tregoriann’s front door by then, so I had to allow him to enjoy the advantage of having the last word. I can assure you, I was suitably ungracious about it.

Tren rang the bell.

Now, considering that I just told you we were expecting to be attacked, it might seem extraordinarily reckless of us to walk nonchalantly up to the door and ring the bell as if naught but a tedious social call with tea and small talk were expected. But it would not do to make our prospective attackers wary, and accidentally scupper their convenient plans. Sometimes one simply has to be dauntless, and take a few risks for the sake of the greater good.

The door opened. We received our first view of our prospective kidnapper: a youngish, white-haired man dressed… well, dressed exactly like an engineer ought to be. He looked at me, and then at Tren, and gave us a nice, slightly shy smile.

‘Lady Glostrum,’ he said. ‘This is quite the honour. I did not expect you to come in person. I have been watching the post for a reply by letter.’

A likely speech, though I wondered why he (or she) bothered. I looked at him closely, trying to catch a glimpse of some detail out of place, anything that might reveal the real person behind the facade. But there was nothing. The vision was thorough, and entirely convincing. We were obviously dealing with a very powerful Lokant.

I did not trouble myself to concoct a reply, for what would be the point? I stood alert, waiting for something to happen.

Tren, though, stepped smoothly into my silence, stuck out his hand to shake DeMarte-Tregoriann’s and said: ‘How do you do? We’re here to talk to you about your application to the Bureau.’

‘Great,’ said the engineer, and with a puzzled look at me (still silent and imposingly statuesque), he opened the door further and invited us inside.

Into the trap we went.

The house looked surprisingly lived-in, not too scrupulously well-arranged or too improbably dusted. A nice touch, I thought. Good attention to detail. But how long were we all going to maintain the charade?

Far enough to have the tea and the small talk, it rapidly appeared, for DeMarte-Tregoriann seated us in his comfortable parlour and disappeared off to the kitchen. He soon returned with rather good rosuis tea, a refined blend with a little gloren fruit mixed in unless I miss my guess (and with tea, I never do). He also had biscuits. Good ones, nice and short, with plenty of butter.

I was suspicious.

Tren seemed content to continue the charade while he enjoyed his tea and biscuits, and I was happy enough to let him while I pretended to relish my own.

(All right, I wasn’t entirely pretending. It was good tea.)

They discussed Fostiger’s background and education (moderately privileged, highly academic); current place of work (some Darklands company, I wasn’t really listening); experience of Lokant abilities (minimal) and other such matters until I, finally bored, interrupted with:

‘This is a fine waste of time, Mr. DeMarte-Tregoriann. I do not know what kind of a value you place upon your time but mine is precious, so permit me to ask you plainly: Who are you really, and what do you want with us?’

I was fairly proud of this speech, it being clear, forthright and well phrased. It did not have the effect I was hoping for, however, for Fostiger blinked at me in a befuddled way and said: ‘What?’

‘I believe you heard me.’ I set my tea cup back into its saucer and fixed him with my most severe, no-nonsense stare.

Fostiger began to look nervous. ‘I am Fostiger DeMarte-Tregoriann,’ he protested. ‘Did you not… um, you did receive my letter?’

Insupportable. I opened my mouth to inform him of my total lack of tolerance for any further dissembling, when I noticed that Tren was trying to catch my eye. I permitted him to do so, and he immediately shook his head at me.

What? I asked him with my eyes.

He widened his. I wanted to interpret that as a sign of something exciting and above all, useful about to happen; something that would finally help us to understand who we were dealing with and what they wanted. An attack. An intrusion. Something.

But I know Tren well by now, and I could not read anything in his face or his body language to suggest that he was trying to communicate anything so promising. It was a warning all right, but not of that kind.

And I sighed inside, for I had to admit that we had spent almost half an hour with Fostiger DeMarte-Tregoriann without anything untoward happening at all.

I looked at the predictable engineer before me and rapidly revised my opinion of his improbability. ‘Your name is Fostiger DeMarte-Tregoriann.’

He nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Truly?’

He smiled faintly. ‘I’m afraid so.’

I closed my eyes briefly. ‘So you are a real person.’

He blinked at that, and looked at his own hands, as though he were momentarily afraid of turning incorporeal on the spot. ‘I… thought I was?’

I hope you appreciate my honesty in recounting this incident. It is no pleasant thing to acknowledge oneself so utterly, unquestionably, shatteringly wrong, and my immediate inclination was to leave it out of my account altogether, thereby preserving my reputation for cleverness and infallibility.

But I did promise to write a true account of my doings. If I do not deal honestly with you in this, how shall I expect you to give credence to the rest of my assertions?

So: enjoy this spectacle that I made of myself, but be kind enough to forgive me if you can.

At least it explained why Tren was laughing at me before.

I did my best to sweep aside the odd questions I had just put to the unbelievably named Fostiger and hastened on, hoping that my cheeks were not too red. ‘Have you received any unexpected letters recently?’ I enquired.

‘Or even any expected ones, purporting to be from us or the Bureau.’ Tren could have capitalised on his triumph of discernment by laughing heartily at me, but he chose instead to help me gloss over my mistake, and to distract Fostiger’s attention from my odd behaviour.

When your man still has your back no matter how stupid you’ve just been, ladies, this is when you know that he’s truly a keeper.

Fostiger, happily, proved willing to be diverted. ‘Nothing of that kind, though I did not expect to hear anything for a day or two yet anyway.’

I wondered if he still would, but I had to doubt it by then. For whatever reason, our interfering opponents hadn’t bothered with Fostiger. They had permitted his letter to reach us and had not made any attempt to make off with him. That made him another Heliandor, and by the by, what kind of considerate, neighbourly opponents are these? People that cheerfully abscond with orphaned children, while simultaneously ensuring that we continue to receive unimpeded access to those of our recruits that they don’t seem to want?

I was, by this time, most puzzled.

I debated imparting some of this to Fostiger, by way of warning him. If anybody else showed up at his door purporting to be me, he ought to be left with some way of discovering the lie. I could leave him with some kind of pass phrase, perhaps, some cunning question he could ask of some-other-Eva that she would not know how to correctly answer.

I decided against it. Our shadowy adversaries could have interfered with this one if they had wanted to. They hadn’t. It seemed unlikely they would change their mind, and why worry Fostiger in that case?

So we invited him to join us in Glour City within a few days, gave him directions to our little headquarters, and left him to prepare for his journey. He was happy to accept the place, to my secret relief, for he would be leaving a fine career in order to do so and I had to wonder how attractive a proposition our school might appear to somebody in his position.

This is an approximation of the conversation Tren and I had on the way home:

Me: Do we have to tell people about this?

Tren: Any particular people? (with that damned twinkle in his eyes)

Me: Any of them. All of them.

Tren eyed my bosom, which interested me a fair bit until I realised his attention was fixed upon the place where I keep my journal tucked away. ‘Aren’t you going to record it in there?’

(An Aside. Yes, I keep this journal in my bodice. It is a small book, perfectly sized for such a hideaway, and I find it more convenient than putting it into some kind of bag which I then have to remember to carry around. No, I do not have pockets. They ruin the lines of my gowns. Somewhere inside a corseted bodice is exactly the place for such an object, and that is all I am going to say upon the matter.)

Me: Yes, I suppose I am, but all that means is that my nearest and dearest will learn of my folly eventually. There can be no reason to be in a hurry about it.

Tren: (gravely) I suppose I don’t have to tell all the people.

Me: You are a hero amongst men.

Tren: I think you’ve said that before.

Me: It’s still true.

After which exchange, Tren was kind enough to soothe my ruffled feelings by way of a considerable dose of love and affection and all those kinds of things, and I felt better.

Don’t disapprove. We were in a private carriage. It isn’t nearly so scandalous as it sounds.

As it turned out, when we got back to Glour City nobody was remotely interested in where we had been or what we had been doing anyway.

This was because headquarters had been broken into, everything had been ransacked and Heliandor was missing.

‘I don’t know,’ said Adonia upon appeal, brushing a strand of grass off her green-trimmed cerise velvet coat. ‘I went out for lunch. When I came back, this had happened.’

When I said “everything” had been ransacked, I mostly meant the records room. “This”, in Adonia’s interpretation, was the litter of papers which covered the floor, in the midst of which we both stood at that moment.

I do not honestly know why people are so messy with such endeavours. If they had been neater about it, we might never have known they’d been there at all. Were they rushed? Perhaps, if they had to find whatever it was they wanted and flee before Adonia came back. But Adonia isn’t all that… I mean, it wouldn’t have been difficult to distract her, delay her return, and thereby accomplish the business more tidily.

Anyway, who conducts a search for anything by tearing things apart and throwing things around? Whoever did this went through my office, Adonia’s office and Gio’s schoolroom in similar fashion, in addition of course to their kind attentions to the records room.

Maybe they got tired of waiting for us to share our information by way of the post, but even so, it seemed to me as though a great show of disruption had been made in order to ensure we knew they’d been here. But that’s absurd. Why would anybody do that?

As for Heliandor, who knows? Why overlook her to begin with, and then come back and snabble her later? I no longer pretend to have the faintest idea what’s going on. None of it makes any sense.

It did occur to me that Fostiger might not be as safe as I had been happy to assume, not long before. I immediately pinched one of Angstrun’s more competent sorcerers and dispatched her to pick the poor man up. He might need a bodyguard after all.

But then why did his letter get through to us? We know that someone has been meddling with the post, and general interception is the only reasonable explanation for the lack of applications we’ve been getting. I could just about bring myself to believe that no one’s interested in our school if I tried, but it is genuinely unlikely. We’re offering generous bursaries with guaranteed employment thereafter. Partial Lokants are rare, but not that rare.

I don’t know anymore. I admit this freely.

I did hope for a little while that Heliandor had simply gone out somewhere, and would soon return. No such luck, for a day has passed without any sign of her. I know I mentioned giving her time off from her studies while Gio and the rest of us were busy conducting espionage, but I hadn’t yet given her leave to go, so there is no explanation for her absence save that she, too, has been absconded with.

All right, so. When is it going to be my turn?