His Lordship Possessed

Page 11

My eyes widened as a flickering picture appeared on the white board. In it tiny figures of soldiers marched across a field toward a forest, and they moved just as if I were standing there behind them, watching.
“The illuminator uses a zoopraxiscope to show many images in succession,” I heard Dredmore say.
“Then it needs a shorter name.” Angry as I was, I couldn’t stop watching the moving pictures. “Who are they?”
“A regiment in the North country.” Dredmore left the machine running, picked up a fire iron, and poked at the logs in the hearth, creating an updraft of orange and yellow sparks. “Your grandfather and my father were among them. They were friends once.”
“Lucien, your father is titled,” I said. “I know he’s exempt from service. Think of a better lie.”
“Lady Travallian was my mother, and her husband recognized me as his heir, but Jack, the man who sired me, was a commoner.” Dredmore came to sit on the floor beside me. “He was also a tintest, attached to your grandfather’s regiment.”
Having such a large, dignified figure at my feet seemed ridiculous, especially when I couldn’t kick him in the head, but it wasn’t as if I could change seats. “Is that why Lord Travallian disowned you and left the title to his nephew? Because you’re a bastard in truth?”
“No.” He curled a hand round my calf. “After I discovered that Jack was my father, and what he could do, I told my mother’s husband to disown me, and I cut all ties to my family.”
The rub of his thumb against the bare back of my knee made me grit my teeth. It also made my shoulders turn to pudding. “How noble of you.”
“Before I reached my majority, Jack came to see me. He told me how he and my mother had met, and why she married Travallian. He explained what had happened to him during the war.” He glanced up at me. “My father was a Lost Timer. So was your grandfather.”
Chapter Six
For all his obsession with sciences and mech, my father had dearly loved history. Each night, when he came to tuck me in, he’d tell me a story about strange people and their forgotten worlds, as if they were faeriestales. He particularly loved the mysterious and unexplained, like how the Nile people had built such enormous pyramids, or why four hundred Norders had vanished overnight from their first Torian settlement.
Da had mentioned the Lost Timers to me once, too, and now I searched my memory until I recalled something of what he had said. “That was what they called those soldiers who went missing in Britanny during the war. They got lost in some forest and weren’t seen for months.”
“That is how it began.” Little prisms, cast off by the glass cylinder as it turned, slid down Dredmore’s face and chest. “Ordinarily the regiment’s tintest remained behind the lines to protect their equipment, so my father wasn’t even supposed to be with them. The depth and breadth of the Bréchéliant made it impossible for Jack to capture the fighting from a safe distance, and he was obliged to follow the regiment into the forest. He thought he would be safe if he stayed in the trees.” His voice went hollow. “He didn’t know what was waiting for him . . . for all of them.”
A deep suspicion began to gather inside me as I looked at the moving picture again. It had started over from the beginning and was showing the men crossing the field. “Is this your father’s work, then?” I asked, nodding toward the board.
“The original ambrotints were his. I had copies made smaller to fit the device.” He glanced at it and then got up to change out the glass cylinder, replacing it with another.
This time, the moving picture showed the soldiers creeping through the trees, sometimes looking back as if they sensed we were following them.
“Jack told me that from the moment he crossed over into the forest, he felt as if something was watching them,” Dredmore said. “When it grew dark, he began packing up his tinter to wait to shoot until he had morning light, but then there was light. Strange light that came out of nowhere.”
Strange indeed. On the board I watched bizarre glowing streaks darting behind the trees, and while the silverblack on the glass ambrotints rendered all of the light gray, the faster the streaks moved, the brighter they seemed to flash.
“Lampflies,” I murmured to myself as the soldiers came upon a dense grove of old oaks and more lights began filling the moving picture. “A swarm might look like that.”
“I thought the same,” Dredmore said, “until Jack told me the frost a month before the battle had already killed off all the insects.”
I felt impatient. “Then what were they? More specters? Leg-sprouting candles? Dancing Yuletide trees?”
The moving picture stopped as Dredmore changed cylinders again. New images appeared that showed the soldiers taking firing positions behind the oaks’ immense trunks.
“Your grandfather assumed, not entirely incorrectly, that the lights were torches being waved by the Talian forces. As you see, he ordered his men to take up defensive positions in an old oak grove. He had no way of knowing that the lieutenant leading the enemy troops toward the grove from the other side thought the English were doing the exact same thing, and had put his men in identical positions. Which is all they wanted.”
The moving picture started again from the beginning, showing the soldiers following the lights and then taking cover from them. Dredmore said nothing until I prompted, “They?”
“The trees.” He switched off the machine and blew out the candles. “They took them.”
“The trees took them.” I was right; he was mad.
“They seized every soldier on both sides of that grove. They pulled their bodies into their trunks. They swallowed them whole.” Dredmore went to the mantel, bracing one arm against the carved, polished wood to look down into the merrily crackling flames. “The men had to become part of the trees so that the Aramanthan trapped inside could possess them and escape.”
And for this he had trussed me to an armchair? He couldn’t be drunk; he’d barely touched the gin at Rina’s. Harry’s sudden appearance certainly hadn’t frightened him out of his wits. No, whatever had addled his brain must be more serious than grumpy ghosts and the blue ruin. “Lucien, I’m sure your father saw some terrible things during the war, but really. Man-eating trees?”
“The oaks had been bespelled long ago. No,” he added when I looked away, and came to loom over me. “You will listen to me this time.”
“Very well.” I was annoyed, but he was an unbalanced deathmage, and if regaining my freedom and preserving my ability to breathe meant catering to his insanity, then I’d make a decent show of it. I glanced up. “I’m listening. Tell me the rest of this faeriestale.”
“Faeries didn’t build the Bréchéliant,” he said. “It was the haven of the Druuds, the old high priests who protected humanity. A thousand years ago, they saved the world by putting an end to a civil war being fought by the Aramanthan. They combined their powers to lure all of the warring immortals and their minions into the forest, where they bound their spirits to enchanted stones and cast their bodies into the oaks. They then warded the forest itself to prevent anyone from entering it.”
“Using magic that, oh, didn’t work.” I controlled an impulse to begin tapping my slipper by nudging the edge of the Turkish rug with one toe. “How awful for them.”
“The spells didn’t fail.” He walked over to an antique standing globe displayed beside the heavy tapestry window curtains, and with a nudge of his thumb set the little sphere to spinning. “The world changed. Over the centuries, weather, floods, and earthquakes created new paths round the old wards into the Bréchéliant. The soldiers on both sides simply stumbled onto them.”
I again marveled at how magic always seemed to evaporate at the most convenient moments. “Tragic.”
Dredmore stopped the globe. “Time had changed the immortal prisoners of the grove as well. Nothing remained of their bodies except dust. Their immortal spirits endured, however, trapped as they were in stones used by the Druuds to imprison them. By that time they had learned what they needed to escape.” He came to me, and absently tucked a stray piece of my hair behind my ear. “Can you guess what it was?”
“A woodman’s ax?” I guessed. “Lightning? Termites?”
“Hosts, Charmian.” He popped a matchit and lit the lamp nearest my chair. The frosted glass diffused the flame into a soft amber glow that gilded every edge in the room. “Living bodies that could house and transport their spirits.”
“So when the soldiers came, these imprisoned spirits dragged them into the trees so they might use them like carris.” Did he even realize how ridiculous he sounded? “Is this when the white rabbit makes an appearance and leads them and a little gel into a garden of talking flowers?”
Instead of growing angry again, he smiled a little. “I said almost the very same thing to Jack. He told me that at first none of the soldiers who came out of the forest truly believed what had happened to them. It seemed like nothing but a long, bad dream, until they discovered exactly how much time had passed, and how greatly they had been changed.”
Dredmore setting me on fire suddenly didn’t seem as bad as before, and once I convinced him to release me from the chair I’d have to make a run for it. The window latches were the heavy, solid sort that were inclined to stick; it would have to be the door. “I suppose their feet had been turned into roots, their arms into branches, and their hair into bird’s nests.”
“The men found they could move objects, start fires, even see into the future,” he said, and touched a center spot on his brow. “From here, simply by thinking it.”
“Mind power.” I sighed. “Of course it would be that. Couldn’t exactly walk about with roots for feet, could they? Imagine the dirt they’d track everywhere. And the cobbler’s bills.”