Splintered Path (Shattered World Book 4), page 18
“Come in, Miss Viv! I’ll open the door!”
She had taken two steps toward the space in the balustrade before Gilbert appeared at the door, flinging it open. Two steps before she realised the absolute madness of what she was doing again.
“How did you get up there?” she called to Gilbert.
He laughed as though she was joking. “The stairs! Come up!”
Viv took one step toward the bottom of the stairs, and made herself stop. “I don’t think I can come up there,” she told him. “I’m very human, and I’m not the right kind of human to use those stairs, either.”
“So am I, and neither me!” he said irrepressibly. “We’re peas in a pod! But I’m up here and you can come in, too.”
She found herself laughing, and her laughter made the air hum and brighten. “Are you trying to kill me, Gilbert?”
“It’s worth it to get in here,” he said, grinning. He added, invitingly, “I have lots of pretty things in here!”
Viv gazed at him for quite some time. She was well enough acquainted with Luca by now to know that not strictly everything that seemed unhinged actually was unhinged, but she did wonder exactly how much of Gilbert’s nature was still there under the exterior of adrift but kindly older man. Jasper had told her enough of him to make her inclined to mistrust Gilbert, and she had the feeling that she should be most inclined to mistrust him when he was at his most innocent and coy.
And yet Viv couldn’t seem to feel afraid; she simply felt wary. She didn’t think that Gilbert would purposely hurt her, but he lived in a version of reality that wasn’t the same one she inhabited. It touched and intersected at points, and it ran parallel in others, but it wasn’t the same.
She could just as easily die by mistake as by intent in this place.
“How long would I fall if I fell off the gallery?” Viv asked him.
“That depends,” Gilbert said. “Are you Seelie or Unseelie?”
“Neither,” she said wryly. “I suppose that means I’d fall and die within a few seconds.”
“I don’t think you can die,” he said seriously, hanging on the door and swinging thoughtlessly, dangerously over the drop beyond it. “You’re not allowed to; it would be like trying to kill me.”
“I suppose that’s a relief,” she said, smiling in spite of herself.
A hollow gonging rolled out in sonorous sound behind her, making her jump and say “Sugar!” Viv turned with one hand still on the balustrade in instinctive care to avoid falling backwards through the space there, and for the first time, she saw the state of the gallery behind her. The gallery stretched to her left and right, open and bare now that she was above the darkness line, and with nothing to differentiate any part of it from another—apart from the corridor that now broke the wall that had had no break in it as she walked along it with her hand trailing its surface. There was only that one corridor in sight.
And as she gazed at it, another gonging sound billowed out from that corridor. She could see only the first few feet of it; there was no way to see if anyone was coming—or who was coming if they were. She left the balustrade and jogged to the mouth of the corridor, her heart fluttering with fear, and peeked around the edge carefully.
The carpet, in repeating motifs, sped away into a seamless continuation of corridor that stretched so far that Viv couldn’t discern an ending point, or any suggestion of movement. But now that she was so close to the corridor, she could hear more—and what she heard was the distant, grey tones of the Forex agents.
Viv felt all of the colour and life drain from her face. She backed away from the corridor, and glanced up and down the gallery instead, but there was nowhere to go. No matter how quickly she moved up or down, she would still be in sight if she stayed in the gallery.
“Miss Viv!” called Gilbert, his voice anxious. “Miss Viv, you’d better come in. That’s the second warning; they’ll be here any minute!”
She ran back to the insubstantial stairs that were marked out by lights and air, but couldn’t bring herself to put a foot on them. So she hesitated, breathless, her foot lifted slightly but unable to move forward by more than a hair, until she heard one of the Forex agents say with grey, flat satisfaction, “Ah! We’ve found it this time!”
Gilbert had heard them, too; his face became ashy grey, and his beckoning imperious.
“They’ll think they’re safe to do whatever they want here!” he hissed. “Please, Miss Viv! It’s the best place to hide!”
In a moment of what she knew coldly to be pure madness, Viv put her left foot on the first sparkling stair, and stepped…up. With her breath caught in her chest and her eyes fixed unwaveringly on Gilbert and the door of the treehouse, she kept stepping up and up until her jaw ached and she was stepping over the threshold of the treehouse.
The surrounding perilous emptiness, scattered with lights, was swallowed up by a cosy, warm, and breathing safety. A door shut behind Viv, and she stood exactly where she was, trying to make herself take in the world around her again.
The treehouse itself seemed to breathe around her in slow, steady breaths that somehow loosened her shoulders and jaw, and settled her into the same slow, steady breathing within a few moments. Viv looked around at last, and saw a fire crackling implausibly in a stone fireplace, with a basket of bread and cheese sitting next to it, ready to be toasted on the fork that was propped up against the stones.
There were crystal clear windows in the treehouse walls, all of them round and bright with sparkling lights, through which lights and crystal clarity Viv could see what was perhaps the kitchen, where Gorman moved around in a smooth, certain way, a corridor or two around the manor, the library, and a glimpse of what was really outside—the gallery. Since Viv was used to windows that showed things other than what was actually there, this impressed her less than the fact that the circular windows at the front displayed an entirely outdoor area that was likely the manor grounds—which meant, potentially, that even if the agents made it up the stairs, they wouldn’t be able to see into the interior of the treehouse.
“It’s all right,” Gilbert told her, correctly guessing what that swift, conscious glance over her shoulder was for. “They can’t see in here. They might be able to hear, though; we’ll have to be quiet.”
Viv let herself breathe a little bit and moved further into the treehouse. There was very little inside: two fat little armchairs were near the fire, and a simple, beautiful table of living wood seemed to have grown up over in one of the corners where twin windows gave an uninterrupted view of the vastness of the galleries and the light-speckled space. A small, fat bedroll had been tidied away beside a curtain—that hid, Viv was rather certain, the toilet and bath—but apart from some knick-knacks on built-in shelves, there wasn’t too much else.
Gorman, she imagined, making herself sit down in one of the armchairs, had often brought a tray of food up to the break in the balustrade; she couldn’t quite imagine him loftily ascending the stairs she had just breathlessly travelled, however.
Gilbert sat down across from her, then startled just as violently as Viv when a sharp voice called out, “Gilbert! Open the door!”
Their eyes met, and Viv was suddenly filled with the desire to giggle. They were like a couple of kids hiding from Dad.
Gilbert’s eyes danced, too; but he put a finger over his lips. “They can’t get in here,” he whispered. “I made sure of it: I put a spell on it. Only dead men can get in here.”
Viv, who hadn’t felt so alive in quite a long time—so light, so bright, so pain-free—couldn’t help laughing, though she stifled it as much as she could. “Then the Forex agents ought to be in here and we ought to be out there.”
Gilbert giggled, too. He said, “I haven’t got magic. I can’t put spells on anything.”
“Me either,” she whispered back.
She waited for the agents to walk through the door—for them to find her sitting with Gilbert, and perhaps report her to Jasper or take her off to their courts to be charged with interfering in an investigation again—but they didn’t.
They called out to Gilbert for nearly half an hour, with increasingly threatening pleadings to open the door; but they seemed to do so from the break in the balustrade rather than directly outside the door. It really was as though they couldn’t get in. They tried for a very long time, and some of the things they tried, although Viv couldn’t hear them, made the air inside the tree-house feel decidedly explosive.
She couldn’t help smiling. Gilbert might not have magic, but Jonno had evidently made sure his treehouse was safe for himself and his father as a child. The smile faded rather quickly when there was a scratching, and then an outright thumping on the door itself, because if the Agents had made it up those terrifying stairs, she didn’t see why they couldn’t get inside.
And yet, they didn’t.
Viv breathed again, although shakily, and met Gilbert’s eyes again. He was scared too, she realised, and that worried her.
“He’s not in there,” said a voice, penetrating the wooden door and growing flatter from the compression. “Whatever game he’s playing, he would have answered us here. That gives us time to figure out how to get in and look the place over. But if we’re wrong about this, agent, we’ll have wasted the entire night.”
“We were wrong about the boy, but we’re not wrong about the treehouse,” said the other agent flatly. “He must have attacked his father just before Gilbert had a chance to test the process—and if the boy found the process, he would have had to put it somewhere safe.”
“Yes, but Gilbert’s memories are gone, too,” the first agent said exasperatedly. The breath of irritation didn’t sound like a proper breath; it sounded like the flapping edges of a balloon being let out, and Viv didn’t have to see the skin around the agent’s mouth to know that it wasn’t sitting like it should. “Why would the boy bother to hide anything with the process on it if he was also going to take Gilbert’s memories away?”
“Insurance,” said a third voice that made Viv’s skin chill to ice. Jasper was also here. He was here, and collaborating with the Forex agents. Was that why he had been making sure neither Viv nor BoRa stayed at the manor too long? “Gilbert was stronger than Jonno was prepared for; even now, without his memories, he’s come here again and again. Why else would he keep coming back here, to the treehouse where Jonno spent all his childhood? He must have enough of his old faculties left to know that his research is hidden here, somewhere. It’s the only place in the manor that Jonno built with his own hands; Gilbert wouldn’t have been able to put any surveillance here, even if he still had the ability.”
Viv crouched down on her haunches, breathing too quickly and suddenly horribly dizzy. Everything was beginning to fit together with horrible clarity. The Sponsor and her habit of sourcing and stealing useful items and information; the way Forex had been furious to be denied access to the Sponsor; the way they had been certain that Viv, Luca, or Jasper had taken (or kept back) something that the Sponsor had hidden. The way that Gilbert had deteriorated so very quickly—as though something had been taken from him rather than lost.
“That fits,” said one of the agents. “Disable his father as much as possible, hide away the research, then poison his father when the surprise of it all dies down and everything looks normal.
“If the selkies hadn’t taken the Sponsor—”
“A real shame,” said Jasper. Then, uncannily echoing Viv’s thoughts, he said, “She was already one step ahead of everyone; who could have known that she had gathered so much information on so many people!”
“Yes,” said one of the agents, in a very pointed way. “It was a real shame. We might have prevented all of this if we had been able to get to the Sponsor before your staff muddied the waters and the memory stick vanished—”
That’s it, thought Viv, her mind bright and cold. I was right. It’s that memory stick that Luca was playing with. It’s got Gilbert’s memories on it.
“I will remind you that my staff and the Sponsor were alike taken by surprise by the Selkie Elders,” said Jasper mildly. “They were in a great deal of danger, and I consider that my staff showed considerable presence of mind to escape the situation without being harmed.”
“Yes,” said an agent, in what seemed like dangerous agreement. “And while we’re on the subject, we’re still curious about why the Selkie Elders allowed an outsider—”
“Two outsiders, I believe,” murmured Jasper.
“An outsider and a feral dog,” said the other agent, surprising Viv with the extreme humanness of his voice. “All right, we take your point.”
“This isn’t about the feral dog,” said the other agent. “It’s about the human (question mark) woman that you’ve added to your staff.”
“I take on staff for many reasons,” Jasper said, his voice weary. “Get to the point.”
“We consider that one inconvenience is unfortunate, albeit understandable. Two is incompetence, and three starts to verge on deliberate subversive activities,” said a fourth voice that sounded almost, but not quite, like the first agent’s grey voice. If Viv had had to guess what the difference was, she would have said that perhaps it was the vaguely mechanical quality that suddenly layered it.
Jasper said, “Is that you, Chris? You could have come here directly if you wanted to speak to me,” and it took Viv nearly a full minute to realise exactly what he meant.
So the Forex agents didn’t just have a common information hub; they were also connected with that hub in such a way that the head of Forex himself could speak through them?
Viv shuddered again. How could these people claim to be standing for humans and human causes when they weren’t content to remain human themselves—when they had altered, and squeezed, and mutilated their bodies and souls to the point that they were no longer human?
“I agree,” said the man named Chris, through the Forex Agent’s mouth. “It seems as though this situation is something that I should have come to oversee directly rather than delegating to agents. I wouldn’t have expected to need to oversee you, Jasper; I’m very disappointed. If you’d spent a little bit less time playing with your staff and more time taking in the situation before jumping into it, we might not have this difficulty.”
“Really?” said Jasper, very coldly. “Because it seems to me that you’ve been micro-managing the entire business! If you’d had the common courtesy to inform me that you were already monitoring the situation, I could have refused the job when Jonno asked me to look into it—and then you wouldn’t have had to pay what I can only assume was a very large fee to take him out of the picture before he took over Gilbert’s money and effects.”
His voice receded as he spoke, and Viv could only imagine that he and the agents had retreated from the door. She rose and crossed the floor to listen at the door, but now that the agents were no longer yelling, it was much harder to hear.
“They won’t leave,” Gilbert said, still softly. “They’re just going to stand there and argue. They do that a lot. We’ll have to go out the window.”
Viv might have asked him why they were only leaving just now, if they could have left earlier, but she was still puzzling over everything she had heard, and then distinctly worried about climbing out of any window in this perilously positioned house, to say anything of the sort.
She was so busy with her own thoughts, in fact, that she wasn’t aware that Gilbert had pushed on the lower edge of one of the windows closest to floor level and tilted out the entire circular windowpane, until a rush of cool, healthy, buoyant air teased her curls.
“Here we go, here we go, here we go!” said Gilbert, climbing through the window one leg at a time like a young boy.
Viv might have been a great deal more worried if that particular window hadn’t been the one she had distantly seen the downstairs kitchen through a little while ago, with Gorman moving about in it. She followed Gilbert with alacrity, swinging one leg and then the other over the rounded sill and putting each foot down on the chequered floor of the kitchen.
Gorman was no longer in the kitchen, but she didn’t think he had long left: there was still a sensation of warmth around the stovetop, where a kettle had recently been boiled, and a cutting board and knife stood in the draining tray, still wet. So Gorman liked an early morning snack, did he?
Gilbert danced toward her, following the path that the moonlight made along the tiled floor.
“Time for sneaky eats!” he whispered to Viv exultantly. “Come on! Gorman leaves little baskets for me in the pantry for when I get hungry.”
He darted past her and into the pantry, and Viv saw from over his shoulder that there was indeed a small basket in there, covered with a red cloth. Gilbert pounced on it and emerged from the pantry triumphant, his eyes alight.
“You make the tea,” he said to Viv, rather imperiously. “I’m going to find out where Gorman hid the sweets.”
Viv did as she was told, smiling faintly, but by the time the kettle was starting to boil, she had sunk into a thoughtful lean against the kitchen bench, the smile long gone from her face. She felt rather grim.
She hadn’t expected that Jasper was being completely honest about trying to make sure she was safe by keeping her away from the manor as often as he could. She hadn’t even expected her safety to be the only thing that he was achieving by making sure she was more often out of the manor than within it, but she had expected that it was at least one of the reasons.
It was a nasty shock to find out that BoRa was completely right, and that Jasper was keeping them both out of the way to work more efficiently with the Forex agents—especially when he knew—or thought—that Forex was responsible for Jonno’s death! If Jasper could happily work with an agency that hired assassins and paid to get people taken out of the way, what couldn’t he do?
And why had he bothered to get an autopsy done of Jonno’s body? Viv’s brain seemed to skip a groove, and settled on the track again in a slightly different place. Yes, that was a good question. Why get the autopsy done, and why make sure that the Coroner gave him two different reports? What had he been trying to find that he didn’t want the Forex agents to know about?
