John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

"You know something about the card?"

I said, "I recognize the man. He is your father. That's Morpheus. The beautiful woman lowering the cradle into the water must be your mother. I don't know her name. The baby is you. This is your family.

This is what it looked like when your parents lost you. They were forced under threat of death to turn you over. That landscape in the background is your homeland, where you were supposed to grow up and be happy. That white spiral tower is your home."

Colin took out the card and stared deeply into it. A haunted, lost look came into his eyes. The look of a baby who lost his mother, a toddler whose parents never saw his first step, the child who spoke his first words to strangers, the youth who was robbed of his life and his loved ones, the man who was robbed of his true identity. And then the expression stiffened, and it became the look of the prince who was robbed of his kingdom, his fatherland, his people.

Tears came next.

The tears flowed down his stiff cheeks like water trickling over iron. He did not bother raising a hand to wipe them away. It was strange and horrible to look on Colin and see him as a man so grim and fell.

Now that I had done it, I was sorry I waited to tell him. I would have preferred that this scene be blotted from my memory after all.

"What's happened to you, Colin?" I said softly.

"I am still the same Colin," he said in a voice like ice. "But now I'm… inspired."

I did not want to ask him, Inspired with what ?

He must have sensed the unspoken question, because he answered anyway. "I feel like I'm turning into your crystal window, Quentin. My real self is on the other side. He is fire and the firelight is shining through him. He has a question for the group. When is the enemy going to show up next?"

It was Vanity who spoke next: "They are going to try to kill us, the next group that finds us."

We all turned to look, some with surprise, some slowly. There she sat on the chair with her eyes open.

"How'd it go?" asked Quentin.

She said, "I had to travel back a million years to find my memories. Boggin hid them a long way away.

He let something slip in front of me, and I figured it out."

Victor said, 'Tell us."

"Boggin wants to find out which group sent the Lamia. So we are being left to dangle out here in the wide outside world until the Lamia feels safe to strike again. We have our powers now, so she is going to have to get someone very strong—in other words, her boss—to come kill us. Boggin wants to find out who that boss is. Boggin has some way of finding us again, or driving us back to him. We are not free. We were let go. We're bait."

1.

Vanity told us her tale.

She had been sitting in Boggin's office while the Headmaster, peering down at her from behind his huge desk, with jovial threats and smiling intimidations, was trying to get her to agree to promise not to attempt escape again. Vanity sat and nodded, agreeing to nothing, and saying, "Go on," each time he came to a full stop.

Mr. Sprat had called on the intercom, an urgent voice warning Boggin that he had a guest, who could neither be delayed nor denied.

Boggin had evidently not wanted Vanity to be seen by the guest. A switch in his desk had opened a panel behind the portrait of Odysseus.

Boggin took Vanity by the elbow and roughly hustled her in through the secret panel. In she went. The door slammed shut behind her and locked with a click.

Inside was a narrow room lit by an even narrower window. There was a cot, a washbasin, several locked cabinets, a locked rolltop desk.

If this was the inner sanctum of the Headmaster, he certainly did not coddle himself. The room was spartan. There was no fireplace, no heat; the cot was hard.

The only ornament in the room was a cabinet containing a miniature shrine. Behind the cabinet doors was a nine-inch-high statue of a stern and kingly figure on a throne, an eagle on his shoulder and a crooked lightning bolt made of brass in his marble hand. There was a cutting board and knife rack before it. The cutting board was bloodstained, and there were tiny bits of down and feather littering the surface.

Vanity was certain that an evil mastermind like Boggin must have an escape exit from his inner lair, but the only thing she found was a hidden hatch leading to a defunct dumbwaiter shaft. She stuck her head into the hatch. There was a skylight high above, and the shaft below fell sheer into darkness. No one without wings would be able to use this route.

She also was curious about the conversation she was not able to overhear, and wondered at the identity of the guest Mr. Sprat dared not to stop nor delay. Evil masterminds simply had to have methods of listening in on what happened in rooms adjacent to them. They had to! It was an article of faith with her.

Sure enough, when she looked for a peephole hidden in the panel behind the Odysseus portrait, there one was. There was a mechanism for listening, basically a bell with an earpiece, sort of a crude stethoscope.

2.

The visitor was standing. Boggin was kneeling on one knee before it, with his mortarboard in his hand, his long red braid of hair, normally hidden, now trailing down his back.

The visitor was thin and tall, like a leopard or a jaguar might look if standing on hind legs. Parts of its skin were made of bronze, or perhaps metal plates had been fused to its chest and back, metal scales along its upper arms and metal greaves on its lower legs. Because its neck was long and flexible, its head looked small. It had long hair like a woman, but its teeth were sharp like a lion's teeth. Its lips and cheeks were so plastic that it could flex its mouth from a tiny pink rosebud to a white grin whose corners touched the spot where, on a human, there were visible ears.

It wore a scarlet cloak. In one hand it gripped a short stabbing-spear with a metal head and a wooden shaft, a weighted spike at the butt end; in the opposite elbow it held a narrow-cheeked bronze helmet with a drooping red plume. As a gratuitous anachronism, the warrior-creature also carried a stub-nosed submachine gun of squat design at its hip, a bandolier of magazines looped over its shoulder.

Vanity did not hear the beginning of the conversation.

The creature was saying, "… Uranians have demonstrated that they could escape your confinement. A second escape is likely to be believed. The Lamia will no doubt make a second attempt at that time. Our military intelligence department estimates the chance of Lamia making a second attempt while the Uranians are still in custody to be a small one."

Boggin spoke in his normally hearty and self-interrupting fashion. He did not speak as a kneeling man should. "Ah… ! I am certain, my dear Centurion Infantophage (and a fine name you have chosen for yourself!), that the military intelligence department of the Laestrygonians—are you familiar with the word

'oxymoron'? No? I thought not—a department that enjoys such fame, or, one is tempted to say, such notoriety for the accuracy and timeliness of its predictions and warnings, well, such an august institution is one with which it is certainly, ah, futile, if not to say, pointless, to remonstrate."

The creature's eyes glittered with hate. "You are mocking us, air-blower?"

Boggin lowered his head, but his voice was still rich with good humor: "Oh, my dear Centurion Infantophage (a most excellent name, have I said how well it fits you?), certainly I would not wish to be understood by you if I were mocking you to your, ah, shall we call it a face? To your face. No, indeed. I hold the Laestrygonians in the greatest possible respect! The greatest, indeed, possible to grant to Laestrygonians. Your fine military intelligence department was charged, I believe, with the duty of bodyguarding the Lord Terminus, was it not? During the battle of Phlegra. The late Lord Terminus, I should say. The late, departed, once-alive but now-dead, which is to say, no-longer-alive, Lord Terminus. No doubt the sincere grief of your master, the Lord Mavors, at the departure of his father Lord Terminus was modified, if not ameliorated, by his joy on discovering (no doubt, to his complete surprise) that he stood to inherit the throne of heaven. The rulership of the entire sidereal universe must be a heavy burden."