The place where we call home.
—“The Mechanicsburg Tourism Song,” Tom Smith
Arella Heliotrope climbed the stairs to her family apartment, her mind buzzing with news. She opened the hidden locks on the front door and peered inside. “Poppa?” she called. The sitting room had been tidied in a rather haphazard manner. Couch cushions were lined up wrong side out, the great salvaged clank head that had been repurposed as a fire-front had been left with jaws agape, books had been stuffed onto bookshelves with no regard to order. Arella sighed. The old man did try to stay useful. She wished he would go out but more and more, he just stayed in the apartment. He was not taking retirement well.
She walked past walls lined with family mementos: portraits of old Heterodynes, monsters, ancestors, and nervous-looking dignitaries.
The apartment itself was more spacious than its exterior would suggest. It actually occupied the top floor of what, observed from the street, would appear to be three conjoined yet separate buildings. Even from the beginning, the family had sought to keep a low profile.
“Poppa?” she called again. He wasn’t in the library, a room lined with meticulously oiled leather-bound volumes containing everything one could wish to know about Mechanicsburg and its former rulers.
He wasn’t napping in his room. With a small pang of guilt, Arella saw that the votive candle before the portraits of her husband and his mother had melted down. She replaced it with a new votive, setting it securely into the cut-glass safety lantern.
“Poppa?” Arella continued on to the kitchen where she set her purchases down on the counter, trying to avoid a scattering of dirty bowls and small drifts of flour. She scowled. “Poppa?”
“I’m on the balcony,” the old man’s voice called out.
And indeed he was. Carson Heliotrope rested, ensconced in a large comfortable chair. The cat, Electrode, so named for its ability to store up static electricity, lay sprawled in his lap. The old man put down the book he was reading and smiled at her as she stepped out the back door.
“I got us a pork pie for supper, and some fresh onions.”
Carson looked pleased. “Wonderful! I have some bread rising.”
Arella had noticed the covered loaf pans arranged upon the balcony railing. “You shouldn’t have!” She remembered the disarray she’d seen in the kitchen. “Really.”
The old man waved a hand in dismissal. “Ha! Did it anyway.” He cast an eye over the side of the balcony. Below, on the normally sedate Avenue of Schemers, there was an excessive amount of traffic and a suspicious number of people clustered together, conferring. His voice was deliberately casual. “Any news?”
Of course, Arella realized, he knows something is up.
“Yes, indeed,” she reported. “They say a new Heterodyne heir has—”
But Carson had lost interest, waving at her to stop. “Ah. Enough.” He sighed as he picked up his book.
Arella hesitated and then spoke slowly. “I don’t know, Poppa… this one sounds different.” The old man noisily turned a page. “It’s a girl, for starters.”
Carson grunted in surprise. “That is different.”
Arella nodded and leaned back against the doorframe. “And she beat Baron Wulfenbach.”
Carson frowned. “What, with a stick?”
“With an army.” Now she had his full attention. “She appeared in Balan’s Gap. Blew up half of Sturmhalten Castle.” Involuntarily, both of them glanced up at the ruined castle that loomed over their own town. “After that, it gets…confusing. But the town was destroyed, or at least overrun with assorted monsters, and during the fighting, the Baron was hurt.” She pointed a finger towards the large white structure crowning a hill in the distance. “He’s here—in the Great Hospital. And…she had Jägers with her”
Carson had been staring at the distant hospital, but this information jerked his attention back to her. “Jägers?” His brain, which had spent too many sleepy days in the sun, was laboriously spinning back up to speed. “A nice touch, that. The generals will come down hard on them when they catch them.” He snorted. “She should’ve just had the Masters along as well.”
Arella nodded in satisfaction as she delivered her coup de grâce. “She did. Along with the Lady Lucrezia, Punch and Judy and even the High Priestess—you know, from the street plays.”
The old man absorbed this—his mouth twitching and the corners of his eyes crinkling with remembered humor. “Master Barry would be furious.”
“He didn’t look furious,” Arella replied tartly. “Of course, they were all three meters tall, glowed, and had wings—”
Carson just stared at her now. “Wings.”
Arella shrugged. “Well, there is some argument about that, but otherwise, everyone who saw them was convinced that it was them.” Arella fluttered her fingers upwards. “And then they all flew away into the sky. Presumably, to come here.”
Carson nodded slowly. “And where is my grandson?”
“He was out all night,” Arella informed him. “Probably because of the excitement.”
To her slight surprise, the old man nodded in approval. “Yes. He’ll be busy, I expect. Very good. Still…”
With a small grunt, he levered himself out of his chair, dumping the cat to the floor. “Arella, my dear, I am going out.”
Arella handed the old man his jacket and cap. “You’re going to the gate?”
Carson nodded as he carefully adjusted his cap to hide the terrible scars upon his bald head. Arella dutifully brushed the back of his coat. “I’ll send down some lunch.” She paused. “Do you really think she’ll come, Poppa?”
Carson heard the faint whisper of longing within Arella’s voice and sighed. Even after all this time, even after we all know better, we still hope. Best take care of this one quickly.
He patted her arm as he turned to go. “I’m sure she will. All the others have.”
He descended the stairs to the street, drew in a deep lungful of the morning air, and took a look around. What he saw brought him up short. For a moment, he panicked, but then he remembered that the Masters were gone. With the familiar pang of loss mixed with reassurance swirling through his head, he took another look, taking mental notes.
It was worse. Worse than he remembered. He tried to think back. How long had it been since he had last inspected the town? Not just walked like a tourist, but looked, really looked, like a man who was responsible for things and would have to explain them to the Masters?
Obviously far too long.
There was litter in the streets. Not great drifts of it, to be sure, but that there was any at all would have caused his father to have a stroke. The façades of the shops were weathered. He saw a cracked window, and with a genuine shot of fear, he noticed that one of the small public fountains was no longer running, the bowl dry, filled with old leaves and a few cracked snail shells. What was his grandson thinking?
He meandered down through the closely packed streets, eyes half-closed…listening.
There was a rising tide of excitement bubbling through the citizenry. They always reacted to rumors of a Heterodyne, but this time it was sharper, fuller. Fanned, no doubt, by the large number of Wulfenbach troops and obvious out-of-towners who were holding forth on various street corners.
He paused outside a busy pastry shop. A few seconds later, a shop girl hurried out with a wicker basket of warm cinnamon butter snail buns, which she handed over with a small curtsy before darting back inside.
The proprietor of a Turkish teashop spied Carson as he turned onto the lane. He filled a blue ceramic mug with the thick campaign tea that he knew the old man favored, closed the decorative copper lid, and placed it into his hand as he passed. Carson, preoccupied, took it with a slight nod and continued on.