John Hawks - The GoldenCity

“Alice!” the nun shouted. “I’m not pleased with you. Not pleased at all. You didn’t finish diagramming your sentences and Sister Ruth said you didn’t peel the carrots. Back to the hut. No dawdling. You know the rule-no play until work is done.”

Alice took a few more steps back and concentrated on a patch of red lichen on the other side of the gap. There must have been something in the way she held her body that told Sister Maura what was going to happen.

“Stop!” the nun screamed. “You’ll kill yourself! You’ll-”

But the rest of the words were absorbed by the wind as the Warrior Princess ran toward the edge.

And jumped.

Hollis Wilson carried his new weapon in a guitar case stuffed with wadded-up newspaper. A few weeks ago, he had asked Winston Abosa to supply him with a bolt-action rifle capable of hitting a target at least a hundred yards away. Winston owned a drum shop in Camden Market and he used his contacts there to purchase a stolen Lee-Enfield with a hunting scope. The original Lee-Enfield rifle was used in World War I; this Mark 4-T version had been developed in World War II for snipers. After Hollis had fired the rifle, he planned to leave it on the rooftop and walk away.

London police officers usually noticed Hollis when he strolled down the sidewalk or sat in an underground train. Even when he wore a business suit and necktie, there was something in the way he carried himself that seemed a bit too confident-almost defiant. The guitar case was the perfect camouflage. When Hollis encountered a police officer near the entrance of the Camden Town tube station, the young woman glanced at him for only a second and then turned away. He was a musician-that’s all-a black man in a shabby overcoat who was going to play on a street corner.

The rifle shifted inside the case as he passed through the turnstile. For Hollis, the London underground always felt less intense than the New York City subway. The cars were smaller, almost cozy, and the train made a soft whooshing sound when it entered the station.

Hollis took the Northern Line to Embankment and then switched over to the Circle Line. He got off at Blackfriars Station and walked briskly up New Bridge Street, away from the river. It was about eight o’clock in the evening; most of the suburban commuters had already left their jobs and hurried home to the warm light of their televisions. As usual, the drones were still working-sweeping the street, painting women’s toenails, delivering take-out food. Their faces showed hunger and exhaustion, a grinding desire to lie down and sleep. A billboard hanging on the side of a building showed a young blonde woman looking ecstatic as she spooned a new kind of custard out of a carton. Happy Today? asked the billboard, and Hollis smiled to himself. Not happy , he thought. But I might get some satisfaction .

During the last few months, his life had been transformed. He had left New York, traveled to West Ireland and buried Vicki Fraser on Skellig Columba. A week after that, he was in Berlin, scooping up Mother Blessing and carrying her out of the Tabula’s underground computer center as alarm bells rang and smoke flowed up the stairwells. Before the police arrived, he had just enough to time to walk two blocks and hide the body of the dead Harlequin behind a trash dumpster. Then he stripped off his blood-stained jacket and went to find the car they had left near the dance hall on Auguststrasse.

It took him several hours to get back to the body and dump it into the trunk of the Mercedes Benz. The Berlin police had blocked off the area around the computer center and he saw the flashing lights of fire engines and ambulances. Eventually, a reporter would show up and receive the official story: MADMAN KILLS SIX-POLICE SEARCH FOR VENGEFUL EMPLOYEE .

Hollis was out of Berlin before sunrise and stopped at a motorway service center near Magdeburg. At a little shop in the area, he bought a road map, a fleece blanket and a camper’s shovel. Sitting in the service center restaurant, he drank black coffee and ate bread with jam while the waitress kept yawning. He wanted to fall asleep in the back of the car, but he had to get out of Germany. The Tabula search engines were gliding through the Internet comparing his photograph to the images picked up by the surveillance cameras. He needed to get rid of the car and find someplace that was off the grid.

But the burial was his first objective. Hollis followed the map to a place called Steinhuder Meer, a nature park just west of Hanover. A descriptive plaque in four languages showed a pathway that led to Dead Moor, a low, boggy area of heather and brown grass. It was a weekday, not quite noon, and there were only a few cars in the area. Hollis drove down a dirt road a few kilometers, wrapped Mother Blessing in the blanket and carried her across the moor to a cluster of bushes and dwarf willow trees.

When she was alive, Mother Blessing had radiated a constant rage that people sensed the moment they encountered her. Lying on her side in the shallow grave, the Irish Harlequin appeared smaller than he remembered, less powerful. Her face was covered with the blanket, and Hollis didn’t want to look at her eyes. When he shoveled in the wet dirt, he could see two small white hands still clenched into fists.

Hollis abandoned the car near the Dutch border, took the ferry to Harwich and a train to London. When he reached the apartment hidden behind Wilson Abosa’s drum shop, he found Linden, the French Harlequin, sitting at the kitchen table, reading a stolen bank manual about money transfers.

“The Traveler has returned.”

“Gabriel? He’s back? What happened?”

“He was captured in the First Realm.” Linden pulled the cork from a half-filled bottle of Burgundy and poured some wine into a glass. “Maya rescued him, but she could not return to this world.”

“What are you talking about? Is she okay?”

“Maya is not a Traveler. An ordinary person can only cross over through one of the few access points around the world. The Ancients knew where they were. Now most of them are lost.”

“So what happened to her?”

“No one knows. Simon Lumbroso is still at the Mary of Zion church in Ethiopia.”

Hollis nodded. “That’s where she crossed over.”

“C’est correct . Six days have passed, but Maya has not reappeared in the sanctuary.”

“Is there a plan to save her?”

“All we can do is wait.” Linden took a sip of wine. “I got your email about what happened in Berlin. Did you leave Mother Blessing’s body in the computer center?”

“I drove north and buried her in the countryside. But I didn’t put up a headstone or any kind of marker. “

“Mother Blessing would not care about that. Did she have a Proud Death?”

Hollis was startled for a second. He remembered Maya using the phrase. “She killed six men and then someone shot her. You decide if that was a Proud Death.” He opened the metal carrying tube, took out Mother Blessing’s sword, and placed it on the kitchen table. “At the last moment, she handed me this.”

“Please be precise, Mr. Wilson. Mother Blessing gave you her sword or you took it from her body?”

“She gave it to me, I guess. So I’m returning it.”

“Perhaps she wanted you to accept her obligation.”

“That’s not going to happen. I didn’t grow up in a Harlequin family.”

“Nor did I,” Linden said. “I was a soldier with the First Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment until I had a disagreement with a senior officer. For two years, I worked as a bodyguard in Moscow and then Thorn hired me as a mercenary. Right away, I knew this was what I was meant to do. We Harlequins do not defend the rich and the powerful. We protect the prophets and visionaries, those Travelers that push history in a new direction.”