Chapter 28 - The Kraken Gate
The whole of the team met at dinner in the hunting lodge. James and Inigo seemed in good spirits after their walk round their half of the perimeter. Inigo’s agoraphobia seemed to have been entirely forgotten. He and James were teasing Ankush and Mahkran, who they accused of dawdling because of where they’d eventually met up. Mahkran listened in silence, a faint smile on his lips while his younger brother defended them both in good humour.
‘It is a good thing my brother and I did not treat it like some childish race,’ he was saying, in between mouthfuls of venison stew and buttered potatoes. ‘There was a great deal to take in.’
‘Yeah,’ drawled James, ‘most of it through closed eyelids while you stopped for a nap.’
‘Hah!’ Ankush exclaimed. ‘Let us examine the evidence. For all your apparent efforts, you claim only to have found “a long wall” and “a tree, fallen on it”. My brother and I have noted five times as many problems.’
The boys looked set to continue needling each other in that vein. It made me smile to see them in good spirits, but I was forced to interrupt.
‘Sorry, but may we have a brief report?’
‘Sure, boss,’ said Ankush, and went on to describe what they had found. The estate’s red brick wall was a full sixteen hands high along most of its length. It was in good repair on the south side, but it was older and in need of attention in some places along the eastern edge. Notably, there was a wide entrance set with imposing, ornate, wrought iron gates that had been used by hunting parties in times gone by. There were two, person-sized entrances approximately five leagues apart, fixed with rusting iron gates and ancient padlocks that were unlikely to survive a sharp tap with a hammer. There was a culvert, protected by a stout grill, through which a stream flowed out of the estate, and Ankush also reported one section of the wall that had crumbled due to subsidence.
Inigo let James describe the perimeter that they’d scouted. Apparently, the western and northern sections of the wall were older and stouter than the rest, made with heavy stone from a local quarry. In spite of the lichen and moss that covered much of it, it was all sound, except for in one place where a large oak had fallen across it and broken through the top third.
‘Should we try to plug the gaps?’ Asked James when he finished.
‘It’s not worth the effort,’ I said. ‘Anyone who wants to get in badly enough will find a way. It’s better if there are some obvious places for them to try. It’ll be easier for us to catch them in the act.’
Na-Su was eating her meal with gusto, only slightly inconvenienced by having one arm in a sling. I let her know that the amendments had been sent to Harland and Coates. Naturally, this made the team curious to know what Na-Su had ordered, but she refused to be drawn.
‘You see when it arrive.’
The lack of detail didn’t bother James. He clenched his fist triumphantly and then tried to shake Na-Su by the hand. She just scowled at him and continued to clear her plate.
Ellen wasn’t so cheerful though.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to help with the vetting process, Ellen. Things took a bit longer than expected in town.’ She shrugged and pushed the remains of her stew and potatoes to the edge of her plate.
‘Is there much still to do?’
‘The butler hired eighteen more members of staff in the last few days.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll take over this evening. You have a break.’
‘No, no, that’s fine,’ Ellen replied, sounding mollified. ‘We have to get these done. There’ll be more over the coming weeks, and then we still have to setup the failsafe. Also, have we made any progress on securing the touchdown site?’
I told everyone of the conversation with Mr. Morten. ‘So, that means we’ll have a simple defensive structure and pine resin torches. Thanks to Na-Su, we will also have some weapons, but it’s not enough, so keep thinking.’
‘Dynamite!’ said Ankush. ‘We talked about dynamite before, and it’s your speciality, yes?’
‘You’re right, Ankush. We did. It is safe to take explosives through, but I’ll have to clear it with Professor Maddison.’
One of the serving girls came around with dessert; orange chealberries topped with ice-cream. Apparently, the estate’s ice house still had reserves left over from winterxil. I ate mine slowly, allowing it to melt, and thought about how easily we’d been tracked to Lannerville. There was no room for complacency, so I waited for a gap in the conversation and asked for volunteers to keep watch through the night.
‘Just the hunting lodge though…we don’t have the numbers to keep an eye on anything else. This place is just too large. I’ll speak with Lieutenant Scott later about patrolling a wider area, but securing this building will have to do for now.’
Aware that Ellen and I had the vetting to work through, James, Inigo, Ankush and Mahkran sorted out a rota between them for the first night. I finished up with a strong coffee and then went to the smoking room that Ellen had commandeered for our office. The theme was as predictable as everywhere else in the hunting lodge. There were maps of the Forest of Yesper on the walls and a grand, if somewhat gaudy, oil-painting of a rearing horse and rider, lance out towards a charging boar with angry eyes. The bookshelves were packed with books on animal husbandry, horse medicine, hunting techniques, and the flora and fauna of the surrounding forests. There was even a mounted skeleton of a clawed, giant ground sloth, rearing as though making its last stand. These extinct beasts had once been common in these parts.
Ellen wasn’t there yet, but it was easy to identify the pile of untouched folios to go through. I picked a couple up and settled myself at one of the writing desks. Both of them were for kitchen porters who had been hired in the last two days and were light on detail. They contained the resumé of the individuals concerned, a daguerreotype and a couple of pages of handwritten notes on their backgrounds, a reference from a previous employer, where they were born, parents, who their parents worked for, political leanings, where known, and sometimes, newspaper clippings. Either the local recruitment agency had little experience of this sort of clearing process, or the candidates had led relatively blameless lives. In Emberly, a folio for a level ‘A’ cleared candidate would have run to forty or fifty pages for anyone of working age.
I examined the files for half a bell before annotating the cover sheet for each with ‘Low Risk : Approved’ and then placed the bound papers in Ellen’s ‘done’ pile. I picked two more up as Ellen entered. She was chatting with James, but stopped when she saw me. She patted him on the arm in a way that I decided said ‘I’ll see you later tonight.’ I felt a flash of jealousy. It can be lonely at the top. Building a deep, personal relationship with an employee felt conflicted to me, so I was forced to avoid it. I knew I wouldn’t handle it well.
‘Not much content in these, is there?’ I said.
‘No.’ Ellen collected a folio to review and sat at the card table. She was wearing a white dress with lace collar and a blue silk ribbon stitched into the waistband. Her blond hair was fashionably parted in the middle, tied up neatly into a bun at the back, while at the sides it cascaded into a festival of perfect ringlets. I felt lumpen and unlovely in my britches and suddenly my hair felt greasy and unkempt. Come on Connie, we can’t all be the same.
‘You look beautiful,’ I managed, pleased with myself for rising above my own insecurities. Ellen looked up at me. I held her gaze for a moment. I smiled and then turned my attention to the paperwork in front of me, but dusk had fallen so I had to rise to light the gas lamps.
Ellen had set aside some files for a further review. I had seen them too, but these were of particular interest, so I went through them again. The first was Benjamin Scott’s file. He was an only child. His parents were factory workers. His mother had died in a cotton flashover at a mill in Emberly while he was just twelve. His father remarried, but turned to alcohol and silent anger until his second wife abandoned him, and he was eventually sent to a workhouse. I had learned all of this when Benjamin and I had been lovers. I tossed the file aside, angry that my mind had turned once more to our failed relationship.
The second file was for Captain Andrew Banks of the S.I.S. He was from solid Emberland stock. His parents, Lord and Lady Banks, owned several shipping companies and hosted the annual Chocktap Race on their estate near Fuldron, to which all of Emberland’s finest attended; landed gentry, wealthy industrialists, artists and politicians. The young Banks had studied at Fuldron College, followed by a scholarship to The University of Ripolis studying Foreign Affairs and Politics. Large tranches of his file had been redacted by the S.I.S., and what was left gave me little to go on.
Chancellor Gordon’s file was stuffed full, but much of it was junk, reading like a political relations brochure. He’d been raised on a farmstead halfway between Emberly and Ripolis. There were a few notes about his rise to prominence during the Revolution, most of which was public knowledge. There was a long list of the offices he’d held during his time on the Council, and brief notes on the three wives he’d acquired and discarded.
A bell or so later, I’d also reviewed three new employees. One of them, a footman, who’d been taken on four days ago would need some additional checks. He’d been born in Lannerville but had moved away after school for some time. There was nothing in the notes on the five years until he returned. I marked it for return to the agency. They would have to pay for additional investigations to be carried out in Emberly and elsewhere. I also made a note that I would interview him tomorrow or the next day.
‘I can’t do anymore this evening, Ellen,’ I admitted. ‘I’m starting to stare at the same sentences again and again without actually reading them.’
‘That’s alright, Connie. I’ll finish the one I’m working on and then head to bed. See you tomorrow.’
The bedroom I’d taken in the hunting lodge was less sumptuous than the one in the main house. It lacked a bathroom of its own, so I collected a towel and wash bag and headed for the shared bathroom which was three doors down. It was free, so I locked the door and spent some time over my ablutions, brain whirring about the job. After the attacks, I’d hoped that Harman’s country estate would be a place of refuge where we could concentrate on the Koulomb Gate and what lay on the other side. Instead, reviewing the new joiners and prospective staff had done the opposite. There was a tangible feeling that this place was both beset with enemy forces outside the walls, and was being infiltrated by malign agents. The arrival of Lieutenant Scott’s platoon should have given me some peace of mind, but there was no way to be certain about their intent. Even if their presence here, at the chancellor’s request, was for the good, there was no way to be certain about the loyalty of all the individuals. Ellen, Inigo and I still had to go through their files which were yet to arrive.
‘Siege conditions, Connie,’ I said to my image in the mirror. I wiped my face carefully with a flannel, but as usual the crow’s feet remained stubbornly in place. As I loosened more clothing and cleaned away the rest of the day’s grime, I reflected on the phrase ‘siege conditions’, which reminded me of a book on modern warfare that I’d read at military academy. One section of the book had covered sieges; how to survive them, and how to break them. The standout story had been Martyrs’ Ridge, the tale of how two-hundred and fifty Gulreimian’s had held a mountain pass against thirty-thousand Nallian troops during the Hardback War.
It was a gripping tale, and one that I referred to often when I needed strength, but I had no intention of letting my own crew go the same way. I padded thoughtfully back to my room and closed the door behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I turned and saw someone lying on my bed. It was Dr. Jenniver Betz. Her long auburn hair cascaded over one shoulder and across my pillows. Her lean but comely frame was draped in a black, silk nightgown, one leg casually, but provocatively escaping from the side slit. Her eyes were dark and told of a deep need. When she spoke, her voice was husky.
‘I need you.’
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