In front of the hearth the aardman Fossa yawned, long pink tongue unfurling, and covered his mouth with one great misshapen hand. Giles finished his brandy and set the empty glass on a table. Turning to his partner, he said, “Margalis Tast’annin. The one she calls the Aviator. It must be the same man.”
Trevor nodded, still silent. Fossa growled softly. The man leaned forward, replacing the enhancer and turning its blank gaze upon me.
“Well. This is all very interesting. You see, I have also had some experience in HEL.”
He laughed at my expression. “Oh yes! Other people besides you have escaped and lived to tell the tale. I was a neurosurgeon there for many years—their finest surgeon, if I may say so. As a matter of fact, I am quite familiar with what you refer to as the Harrow Effect. I was one of the researchers involved with the earliest stages of the project. This was many, many years before your time.”
“But—how could you?” I stammered. Trevor shook a finger at me and smiled.
“The world is smaller than you think, Wendy. Over the centuries so many people have died, and those of us who remain—well, if you achieve a certain level of proficiency, a certain radiance, if you will—why then, you will meet the others like yourself. Everything that rises must converge.”
He paused, his mouth twitching into an odd smile. “Oh, yes, I knew all about your project. Even before Emma Harrow and the other NASNA people were brought into it. I had left the facility, but they recalled me, to help screen possible subjects during the selection process. Then Emma and I had a falling out over her methodology.
“Good god! They were sending janissaries into the wilderness searching for likely children to kidnap. Buying them from prostitutes in the capital. Dragging infants from their mothers, dragging the mothers along too, when they could.” He scowled, and I sank a little deeper into my chair. “Like with the geneslaves—this horrible notion that everything in the world exists solely for the Autocracy’s pleasure. People and animals mere toys for them to take apart and reassemble at will! I’ve never gotten used to their research methods, and I’m too old now to change my ideas about things like that. I prefer trying to reverse the surgical efforts of the Ascendancy, or working with the brains of those who are peacefully deceased. So I— retired, for good—and returned here. My family home: over six hundred years worth of Mallorys have lived at Seven Chimneys.”
I shook my head. “But—that’s incredible! When were you at HEL?”
“A long time ago. Before you were born. I met Giles shortly after I left.”
“They let you go?”
Trevor smiled grimly. “Oh, they weren’t very happy about it. Researchers for the Autocracy are like military personnel; one doesn’t just quit.”
“They were afraid of him,” Giles broke in. “They didn’t dare try to make him stay—”
I glanced over at Jane and Miss Scarlet. The chimpanzee had crawled from her chair and into her old Keeper’s lap, and huddled there in her tartan like a child’s toy. “Why—why were they afraid of you?” she asked.
Trevor smiled at the quaver in Miss Scarlet’s voice. “I daresay some people were afraid of your friend Wendy here when she left,” he said lightly. As he turned toward me, a cobalt gleam escaped from beneath his enhancer’s silvery rim. It gave him the look of some ancient cycladic statue, with his eyeless face and smooth skin. “But I held a certain amount of—well, you might call it seniority—and I had contacts with the Prime Ascendancy in Wichita, and the peons at HEL didn’t really want to cross them. And you know, of course, that there was trouble at HEL—?”
I shrugged uneasily. “I knew the Ascendants took over for Dr. Harrow.”
“That’s right—but not for very long. The NASNA force brought geneslaves with them—some energumens, the usual contingent of sexslaves and aardmen. This started rumors at the facility, that the energumens were going to be used instead of human subjects, and that the remaining human subjects would be killed. The energumens rioted. Several empaths and even some of the staff fled, but many of them sided with the geneslaves. They were all executed when Ascendant troops were called in. Only a skeleton staff remains there now, under protection of a janissary guard.
“But you understand, this is merely a single indicator of the changes that are happening everywhere now. There have been other rebellions, in other facilities around the world. The Ascendants are losing control of their territories. Those who remain at places like the Human Engineering Laboratory are desperate to keep some semblance of order. At HEL I know they work to redeem the work begun by Emma Harrow and her associates.”
He fell silent. A brooding expression clouded his face. I leaned back, stunned. Energumens and geneslaves at HEL? I remembered my friend Anna, one of the other empaths who had fled into the City with Gligor and Dr. Silverthorn. Had she known of this rebellion? Is that why she had risked leaving HEL? I shifted in my chair and pulled my blanket close to me. The room was starting to take on the contours of a place in a nightmare. The backdrop of smoke and leaping flames; Trevor’s impassive face beneath its enhancer; the faces of my friends pinched with exhaustion. There was a strange dreamlike clarity to all of this; and to Giles’s peculiar calm, and the snow beating relentlessly at the windows, and Fossa crouched on his haunches like the effigy of some half-human god.
Miss Scarlet broke the silence, turning to Trevor and smiling anxiously. “And so you retired from medicine and started an inn,” she exclaimed. “How nice!”
Trevor looked surprised, then nodded. “Well, er, yes. Of course, that’s exactly what I did.”
Giles gazed fondly at his partner. “This place has been an inn forever,” he said. “It’s almost as though the Mallorys just pass through so there’ll be someone to keep it company. Sometimes I think the house would go on even if we weren’t here to mind things.”
“But who comes here?” Jane shook her head, pointing at the fireplace, the ancient but well-kept video monitor, the chairs and tables beneath their linen shrouds. “It just—well, it all seems out of place. You can’t get much traffic—even in the City we seldom saw visitors.”
Giles shrugged, but his mouth seemed drawn as he replied, “Oh, you would be surprised. Ascendants pass through here more often than you’d think—business with HEL, and there was some trade with the City.”
“Those soldiers, then,” said Jane. “The ones we saw as we were leaving the City. Did they—did they come from here?”
Trevor shook his head. “We don’t accommodate troops. Commanders stay here. Special Agents, Imperators. Ascendant Governors, if they have the need to.”
I shuddered. Had we walked into a trap, then—a house whose owners were in collusion with the very people we were trying to flee? Ascendant Governors. Commanders…
People like the Mad Aviator.
But then why had Trevor told us about the geneslave rebellion at HEL? If Trevor and Giles didn’t share our terror of the Ascendants, neither did they show any support for them. Trevor had worked at HEL, but he had disapproved of its methods and left. And I couldn’t believe that a Paphian—particularly a Saint-Alaban—would ever be in collusion with the Ascendants.
And then I remembered rumors I had heard about the Mad Aviator. It was my first day in the City of Trees. Justice and I were at the house of Lalagé Saint-Alaban; he was begging her for gossip, any news of what had befallen those in the City while he had been an Aide at HEL—
“There was trouble, Justice. A new Governor was sent here — but the Governors will never hear from him again… .”