The Native Star Read online

  “Dreadnought!” the big man boomed.

  Stanton winced, then turned slowly, his hands clasped behind his back. His face was set in an odd kind of sneer, like a boy resigned to be beaten for doing something admirable.

  “Hello, Senator,” Stanton said, and then, inclining his head toward the women: “Mother.”

  The sneer on Stanton’s face became blank astonishment when his father stormed forward, clasping him in a bear hug and slapping him on the back.

  “Wonderful, wonderful!” the senator roared. “Dreadnought, my dear boy! You saved his life! You saved the life of the President of these United States!”

  “What?” Stanton winced away from his father’s embrace, outrage overcoming agony. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “You brought down that backwoods nutcracker! That half-baked hick! I hear that Cockatrice was filled with enough bombs and ammunition and hell knows what else to blow up the President, the first lady, and every other fine Republican servant of the people on that platform! That goddamn atheist wanted the life of our duly elected leader, and you kept him from fulfilling that fatal intent—”

  “I did no such thing!” Stanton bellowed. “Hembry’s a harmless Illinois moonshiner … He wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

  “Everyone’s been howling about how corrupt our boys are … Well, I guess this gives those atheists and bomb-throwing anarchists a black eye right back!” The senator positively glimmered with glee. “There’ll be a big trial. You’ll testify of course … and meanwhile there’s so many places I can take you around …” The senator smoothed a big hand through the air, as if painting the headlines on the sky: “Dreadnought Stanton, Son of the Senior Senator from New York, Spirit of the Next Hundred Years of the Republic!”

  “I don’t want to be the spirit of the next hundred years of the republic!”

  “Goddamn it, boy, if I say you’re going to be the spirit of the next hundred years of the republic, then you’ll be the spirit of the next hundred years of the republic!” The senator balled a fist, looking for something he could pound for emphasis. Finding nothing, he chopped the air brusquely. “You’re a protector of the common American, an upholder of justice! Do you know what this means to me?”

  “In an election year.” The words came from Stanton’s mother, low and intense. They seemed to be spoken through clenched teeth, and they made everything in the room seem very quiet by comparison. Emily had a sudden terror that the woman would speak again, and was thankful when it became apparent that the words would be her only offering. She drew back among her daughters, who wrapped around her like a brocaded asbestos shawl.

  “Now listen, you can’t stay holed up in here with this pack of mumbo jumbo men.” Senator Stanton began shoving his son toward the door. “The police need to speak with you, and there are more newspapermen outside than you can shake a stick at! Come on with me and we’ll—”

  “Impossible,” Stanton sidestepped his father’s shovings. “There are things I need to attend to here.”

  Senator Stanton’s eyes swept over Mirabilis and Emily as if they were paper cutouts; his look indicated clearly that no conceivable dealings with either of them could be worth keeping newspapermen waiting.

  “By God, boy, the presses won’t wait!” the senator bellowed. “They want this in the morning editions!”

  “Go on, Mr. Stanton,” Mirabilis interrupted him mildly. “I will see to the business you have brought me.”

  Stanton stared at Mirabilis, stunned.

  “You can’t be serious!” Stanton pointed at Emily. “She has possibly the greatest magical discovery of the past millennium in the palm of her hand, and you want me to leave? Do you know how much I went through to bring her … to bring this matter to your attention?”

  “Of course I do,” Mirabilis said. “But I am serious. Go out and give the press a full recounting. Tell them how you rescued the life of our beloved President from the hands of this … bomb-throwing anarchist, whoever he is.”

  “I didn’t come three thousand miles to electioneer.” Stanton spat out the final word as if it tasted bad.

  “Nonetheless, you are still a Jefferson Chair. I am still your employer. Unless you choose to resign your position, you will do as I request.” His voice dropped an octave, his tone becoming quite disapproving. “And for heaven’s sake, find a doctor! Have that shoulder seen to.”

  A look of surprise came over the senator’s face. He looked at Stanton, as if just at that moment noticing that his son was paper-pale and covered with blood.

  “Shoulder?” he barked, as if shouting might make the injury rethink its impudence. “Something wrong with your shoulder, boy?”

  “Professor Mirabilis.” Stanton’s voice was low and imploring. Mirabilis gestured to him and spoke harsh, quiet words in his ear. When Stanton straightened, there was a look of resignation on his face. He set his jaw, inflated himself with a deep breath.

  “All right, then.” Stanton straightened his collar and brushed an insignificant speck of dirt from his frayed and blood-soaked sleeve. He nodded to Emily, dipping his head low by her ear as he passed.

  “I’ll send someone to help you,” he murmured.

  Then he lifted his chin, followed his father out the door, and was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Otherwhere Marble

  After the senator left, it took a few moments for the thundering to subside. It was as if a freight train were receding into the distance, pulling all sound and energy after it, leaving a vacuum of disorienting silence in its wake. Into this vacuum Tarnham peeked gingerly; Mirabilis gestured him to enter.

  “We’ll have to cancel the opening ceremony.” Mirabilis spoke with the brusque offhandedness of one used to command. “Have the railcar readied for our departure. Miss Edwards and I are returning to the Institute at once.”

  “Opening ceremony is canceled at any rate,” Tarnham pouted, glaring at Emily for some reason known only to himself. “The President has canceled all the openings due to the so-called ‘assassination attempt’ that Stanton thwarted.”

  “Good. Finish things up here. I want you back on the four o’clock train. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

  Tarnham sighed his way out, and Mirabilis took Emily’s hand in his. He brought his eye down close to it, scrutinizing the black blob in its center.

  “No one’s ever actually seen the process by which the Mantic Anastomosis segregates Exunge,” Mirabilis said. “You say there was a color shift? Correlated to the amount of magic it absorbed?”

  Emily nodded. “It went from a dark cobalt blue, through a milky yellowish, and then … this.”

  “Very intriguing,” Mirabilis said, tapping the stone with a fingernail.

  “And you can study it to your heart’s content once it’s out.” Emily pulled her hand away.

  “Of course,” Mirabilis said, watching her hand as she tucked it behind herself. “Your troubles are at an end, Miss Edwards. Come with me, and we’ll get you taken care of immediately.”

  Mirabilis opened the office door and gestured her through.

  The interior of the Mantic Pavilion was no longer the echoing empty space she’d entered earlier. The place was now packed with hundreds of exposition attendees, apparently drawn by Stanton’s fresh notoriety. Word must have spread that it was a Warlock who’d thwarted the assassination attempt (Emily frowned at herself—even she was thinking of poor Hembry as an assassin now?) and suddenly the Mantic Pavilion had become an exceptionally popular attraction.

  “Well, well.” Mirabilis appraised the crowd with the canniness of a cardsharp. “This is quite promising.”

  Tarnham oozed out from somewhere unseen, his pencil hovering over his leather pad.

  “Your carriage is outside,” he began. “I’ve sent word to the station to have the railcar hooked up. With all the commotion, there might be some trouble getting out, but—”

  Mirabilis waved him silent, his eyes narrow with calcul
ation. “Listen, Tarnham … keep track of the reporters who are writing up this story. I want their names forwarded over to Mystic Truth. Tell the editors—tell Barclay, he’s got a flair for the melodramatic—tell him to work this up into a serial. I want a draft on my desk in two days.”

  Tarnham’s face disarranged unpleasantly.

  “A serial, sir?” he said. “About Dreadnought Stanton?”

  “Can’t you feel the power in the room?” Mirabilis closed his eyes and breathed deep, as if he were standing in a field of springtime flowers. “It’s invigorating!”

  “Professor, Mr. Stanton won’t want a serial written about him,” Emily said, as Tarnham muttered off.

  “Oh, he’ll loathe the idea.” Mirabilis led her past a cluster of women who were oohing and aahing over three neatly shrunken heads arrayed on red velvet under glass. “But I don’t care what Dreadnought Stanton loathes or does not loathe. It’s the interests of credomancy that I’m concerned with.”

  They came to a grand-looking door in the center of the hall; it seemed to have been beaten of solid gold. Mirabilis pulled a large ring of keys out of his pocket and began sorting through them.

  “Mystic Truth needs stories like this to build the power of credomancers all over the country.” Mirabilis opened the door to reveal a large room, lit by softly glowing orbs of blown glass. He stretched out a polite arm. “After you.”

  Emily peered into the room, holding her hand behind her back as if hiding crossed fingers. The glowing orbs sat in circlets of worked gold, each circlet hanging from the ceiling by three slender chains. They certainly looked as if they might be powered by magic, and she didn’t want to test it empirically. Seeing her hesitation, Mirabilis chuckled.

  “I assure you, there is no free magic in the room. There are quite a few objects in here that would interact badly with it.”

  Stepping into the room, Emily found that it was unexpectedly large. Displays ringed the room, each one lit by its own cluster of glowing orbs.

  “This room is not open to the public. It contains exhibits the Institute reserves for its most honored and distinguished guests,” Mirabilis said. “These are advancements that must not be widely promoted … at least, not yet.”

  But Emily had no time to see any of the advancements, for Mirabilis led her directly to a carved mahogany pillar on which stood a medium-size ivory statue of a headless Venus, lit by a glowing shaft of light. The Venus had something clasped around her throat—some kind of silver collar—and really, she wasn’t entirely headless. While the statue was completely solid beneath the collar, above the collar the statue’s head was vague and semitransparent—ectoplasmic.

  Mirabilis picked up a black marble, about the size of a robin’s egg, from where it sat on a blue silk cushion at Venus’ pretty little feet. He held it up against the light.

  “Look inside.”

  Emily squinted into the black marble. The light shining through it revealed the head of the statue, floating in a void, clear and distinct.

  “It’s called an Otherwhere Marble,” Mirabilis said. He closed his hand around the marble and made a flourish; unfolding his fingers, the marble was gone. Emily half expected him to pull it out of her ear. “It contains an entire collapsed dimension. The Boundary Cuff around Venus’ neck is a transporting device. It sends whatever it clasps into the dimension inside the marble.”

  Emily blinked once or twice, trying to wrap her head around the concept.

  “What do you mean, ‘another dimension’? Like another country? Like … Belgium?”

  “Another dimension is nowhere on this earth, or even in this universe,” Mirabilis said breezily. “It’s a place outside of this reality and inside another.”

  Emily touched a tentative finger to the ghostlike head of the statue, then passed her hand back and forth through it. There was nothing there.

  “Now watch.” Mirabilis rolled his fingers to make the marble reappear. Using it, he tapped a precise rhythm against the metal of the Boundary Cuff. Then he unclamped it from around the statue’s throat. Abruptly, Venus’ head resolidified. Emily reached up and flicked a fingernail against the solid ivory.

  “The Boundary Cuff is the most compact portational device ever devised. More important, it is a product of science, not magic, which should be of additional reassurance to you.” Mirabilis eyed her wrist, judging it for size. “Now, let’s have your hand, my dear …”

  Emily pulled back, hugging her arm against her chest. “Now, hold on just a second!” This Mirabilis person certainly had a way of moving quickly. “Another dimension?”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Mirabilis soothed. “We cannot remove the stone until we get back to the Institute. This will keep you safe in the meantime. If the stone does excrete the black bolus, the foulness will be contained away from where it can do you harm. I’m putting a whole reality between you and death.”

  Emily looked at him, but did not move her hand toward him.

  A note of impatience crept into Mirabilis’ tone. “Miss Edwards, it’s really the best I can do at the moment.”

  Emily took the old man’s measure through narrowed eyes. Stanton trusted him absolutely, and indeed, he seemed the picture of integrity and wisdom. All right, then. She let out a long breath and extended her hand. “Will it hurt?”

  “Not in the least.” Mirabilis snapped the Boundary Cuff around her wrist. Her hand faded to smokelike insubstantiality.

  And indeed, her hand didn’t feel any different. She looked at the place where the Boundary Cuff separated her living flesh from the ectoplasm of her ghost hand. She could see her blood and muscles and bone in vivid cross section, as clearly as if they’d been pressed against glass. The gruesome view made her shudder, and she let her hand drop quickly.

  Mirabilis held the marble up to the light, and Emily could see her hand floating within it. She wiggled her fingers, and the hand wiggled in response.

  “You say this isn’t magic?” Emily breathed. “My goodness, if science can do this, why do we need magic at all?”

  Mirabilis rubbed the marble delicately between two palms. He spread his hands, and suddenly a white dove was perched on his finger, looking rather dazed and disoriented. Emily knew how it felt. Another small movement, a wave and a pinch, and the dove was gone, replaced by a fragrant red orchid that Mirabilis tucked behind Emily’s ear.

  “Science still can’t do that,” he said. “Come along. The carriage is waiting.”

  Emily had thought the Pullman car with which she’d had such a brief acquaintance was luxurious, but it was nothing compared to the Mirabilis Institute’s private railcar. It was carpeted in thick soft wool, paneled in polished rosewood, and fitted everywhere with gilt ornamentation.

  Settling himself in a comfortable wing chair of sorrel-colored leather, Mirabilis snapped his fingers at a porter in a white jacket who was poised at steel-spring attention.

  “A brandy for me. And for Miss Edwards …?” He looked at her expectantly. Well, she certainly wasn’t expected to order a brandy, though she wouldn’t mind one right about now. What on earth would they have on hand? An imp of the perverse overtook her.

  “I’ll take a nice cold glass of pineapple juice. No ice.” She narrowed her eyes at the porter, daring him to clear his throat regretfully. But the man just gave a tiny bow, and when he returned a moment later, he placed a glass of thin, sweet yellow juice at her elbow. Beads of condensation affirmed that it was perfectly chilled.

  Warlocks.

  There was a lurch and a clatter of iron wheels as the train got under way. Not the train, Emily corrected herself, for that word implied a multiplicity of cars following an engine. In this case, the engine existed solely for their benefit. Stanton hadn’t been kidding when he’d said the Institute was well funded.

  “Now that we have averted the worst, I want to hear your story again … and leave nothing out.” Mirabilis settled himself deeper in the deep leather chair, swirling his brandy in its large bubble-shaped glas
s. He was obviously expecting the story to be a long one.

  It was. Over the next two hours, Emily recounted every detail, from their encounters at the Miwok camp to the duplicity of Mrs. Quincy to the battle in which she’d Sundered Captain Caul. She described their struggles with the bounty hunter, the strange arrival of the Sini Mira, and their ride in the Cockatrice. Then she stopped.

  “And you know the rest.” She let out a long breath. Mirabilis nodded gravely.

  “Quite an adventure for a timber-camp Witch,” he said. His eyes once again became distant with thought. There was a long silence.

  “What did you say to Mr. Stanton, anyway?” Emily said finally.

  “Eh?” Mirabilis’ eyes focused, and his face took on a look of extreme irritation. “What?”

  “Why did you make him go away?”

  “Well, for one thing, he was the victim of what sounds like an extremely nasty compulsion,” Mirabilis said. “Compulsions remain in the body and can reemerge—or be reactivated.”

  “But he cleansed himself,” Emily said. “I saw him do it.”

  “So you explained. It sounds like it was quite a display.” Mirabilis’ mouth twisted with distaste. “But no man can cleanse himself dependably, no matter what kind of magic he uses. There is an excellent Witch Doctor of my acquaintance in Philadelphia. I told Mr. Stanton he should visit the man immediately.”

  “Couldn’t you help him?”

  “Of course I could,” Mirabilis said, “but even I must choose my battles. And you, Miss Edwards, are the battle I choose. You have the Maelstroms and the Sini Mira after you. Keeping you safe from them will be more than work enough, without inviting a Warlock of questionable dependability into the mix.”