Harry Turtledove - In High Places

After using their deadly toys against the locals, the guards went out to clean them up. Some of the men in mottled clothes were on foot, others on horseback. Jacques wouldn't have wanted to try to stand against them, and his countrymen knew a lot more—a lot more—about the art of war than these people did.

Because the fighting was going on, he needed a while to realize the guards and the masters had other worries, too. He found out the hard way. A guard came up to him, pointed a musket at his belly, and said, "You—come along with me."

"I didn't do anything!" Jacques squeaked—a slave's automatic protest when he got in trouble with the people in charge.

"Ha!" the guard said, and then, "You were friends with that Khadija, weren't you?"

That told Jacques what kind of trouble he was in. He wished it told him how to get out of trouble, too. No such luck there. "What if I was?" he said—he couldn't very well deny it, not when they knew better.

"That's what we're going to find out." The guard's words held a grim promise Jacques didn't like. He couldn't do anything about it, though. The guard gestured with the musket. "Come on. Get moving." Jacques went. He was sure the guard would shoot him if he tried anything else.

The man took him to a room near the masters' quarters. He'd never been there before. It had no windows, which worried him. One of the lamps that gave light without fire or smoke glowed in the ceiling. Three other guards waited there. They didn't have any torturer's tools that he could see, but he didn't think they'd invited him over to share a roast chicken and a pitcher of wine.

"Tell me everything you know about Khadija," said the guard who'd brought him there.

He told everything he knew about Khadija as a merchant's daughter from Marseille. She'd made it plain she didn't want the guards knowing she was from wherever they came from. In the telling, Jacques also told a good deal about himself.

"So you're not even a Muslim, then?" a guard said.

"Jesus and Henri, no!" Jacques said indignantly. He made the sign of the wheel. "I am a good Christian, or I try to be."

They went back and forth in the language that sounded like English—the language Khadija said was English. One of them returned to Arabic: "So how did she get away, then?"

"Why ask me?" So she had got away, then! Jacques didn't laugh in the guards' faces. Heaven only knew what they would have done to him if he had. He did add, "If she got away, I didn't have anything to do with it. You know where I was all the time. You must be the ones who let her go."

Sometimes the worst thing you could do to somebody was tell him the truth. The guards all started shouting. A couple of them shouted at Jacques. The rest yelled at one another. Then one of them outshouted the others. He told Jacques, "I am going to poke you in the arm with a needle. It won't hurt much, so hold still while I do it. If you try anything stupid, you'll be sorry. Understand?"

"Yes," Jacques said, though he didn't really. If they wanted to torture him, they could do much worse than that. He'd seen worse done when men from his kingdom captured Muslim prisoners. The Muslims weren't gentle to Christians they caught, either. Were the guards trying to see how brave he was? He'd show them!

The man in mottled clothes wasn't even lying. Jacques had known fleabites that troubled him more than the needle. He sat there as if carved from stone. Then the strangest thing happened. Within a few minutes, he began to feel woozy, almost dizzy. It reminded him of the way he felt when he drank too much wine. But he hadn't drunk anything at all. He didn't understand it. Before long, he was too woozy even to want to try to understand it.

"What is Khadija's real name?" a guard asked him.

"It's Khadija, as far as I know," he answered. The guard swore, first in Arabic—which sounded like ripping cloth—then in what Jacques supposed was English, and then in a language that sounded like German. How many tongues did the guards speak? Jacques was too woozy to worry about that, too.

"Have you ever heard of a transposition chamber?" another guard asked.

He wanted to say no, but what came out of his mouth was, "Yes."

"Ha!" the guard said. "Now we're getting somewhere. Who told you about one?"

"Khadija did." Again, Jacques wanted to lie, but found he couldn't. Did it have something to do with the needle? He didn't see how it could, but he didn't see what else could make him stick to the truth, either.

"What did she tell you about transposition chambers?"

"That they were how we got from Madrid to this place. That funny room that didn't move, but when it opened we were somewhere else."

"How did Khadija know about transposition chambers?"

"She said she was from the same place you people were, wherever that is."

"She told you that? Somebody fouled up somewhere." "She told me." Jacques answered the question. He ignored the comment. He couldn't do anything else, not the way he felt. "How could she? Wasn't she a slave like Birigida?" "No. She thought Birigida was disgusting for wanting to be a slave. She came here because she got caught and made a slave, just like I did."

They didn't ask him any more questions after that. They started shouting at one another again, in languages he didn't understand. He was too woozy to care. Later on, when he could think straight, that made him sad.

"—and that's how I got back," Annette finished. She'd been talking for hours, telling as much as she could remember about the manor and everything that went on there. Several cans of Coke stood in front of her. The Crosstime Traffic people had wet her whistle while she talked. Since she hadn't had any caffeine for months, the soda hit her much harder than it would have if she'd been drinking it every day.

Pedro Olivo's face showed nothing as he turned to Luisa Javier. "What do you think?" he asked.

"I think this office has a big problem," the head of security answered. "I think Crosstime Traffic has a big problem."

Were they going to try to sweep it under the rug? They couldn't get away with that, not when Dad and Mom had a recording of everything she said. A couple of commands and it would be on the way to every news outfit in the United States. If that wasn't a recipe for stirring up a scandal, Annette couldn't think what would be.

But she'd underestimated the Spaniards. "I think you're right," Olivo said. "And I think we'd better get to the bottom of it as fast as we can, before it gets worse."

"Where exactly was the building you left, the building with the transposition chamber?" Luisa Javier asked.

"It was on Calle Rodas," Annette answered. "That's all I can tell you. I've never been in Madrid—this Madrid before. No, wait. The building across the street belonged to Petrokhem." The Russian company had offices all over Europe—and several in the eastern states in America, too.

"That's enough to go on." Luisa Javier pulled out her cell phone and made a call. As she dialed, she told Annette, "The chief of police." Then she started talking into the phone: "Antonio? Luisa. We have some troubles here. . . . Yes, I'm using English so the person who ran into the trouble can follow me. . . . No, worse than smuggling. . . . No, worse than terrorism, too. . . . Slaves, that's what could be worse."

Annette heard the howl the police chief let out. She would have felt the same way even if she hadn't just escaped herself. Since she had . . .

"On Calle Rodas, across from the Petrokhem building," the Crosstime Traffic security head was saying. "Yes, an outlaw chamber . . . No, I don't know how they got it. That's one of the things we'll have to run down. ... A lot of time, a lot of computing power. . . We'll get to the bottom of it. ... Gracias. Hasta luego."

"Thank you," Annette said.