Thresholder

Perry spent most of the day at the fair. He stuck around Wesley’s tent, where Wesley demonstrated the lightning glove three more times, always with nearly-identical patter. The wireless telegraphy was demonstrated a few times, to much less applause, perhaps because it was less visually stunning, or because the beeping was just noise to most of the crowd, this world’s version of Morse code.

There was no sign of Cosme. Perry was left wondering about the ruby, and was given no particular answers from the repeated demonstrations. Cosme’s staff had been incredibly powerful, capable of instantly and near-perfectly parrying bullets, allowing him to fly, and with powerful strikes that had brought Perry to his limits. Cosme’s gauntlet had a much less clear function, except that it increased power somehow. A single ruby was enough to throw lightning when properly induced to do so. Cosme hadn’t done that during the fight though, for no clear reason.

Perry had planned to tail Wesley, but when the final demonstration concluded, Wesley got into what appeared to be an automobile — started by hand crank, sputtering black smoke and steam, the only of its kind anywhere in the city, at least that Perry had seen — and drove through the streets at speed. The automobile went faster than Perry could run, and possibly faster than the sword could fly him, not that he wanted to make a scene and break the Custom.

He was starting to understand why the vampires were so worried.

Perry spent the rest of the day moving around the city, mostly walking but at times stopping in different places. He was trying to get a feel for Teaguewater, to really see it as a coherent whole, and while he felt faintly ridiculous walking around with his wrapped up sword, that was better than walking around without it. He wished that the power armor could be summoned somehow, or carried around in a suitcase, or that it could otherwise have its weaknesses shored up somehow. A resupply of ammunition was definitely one of the things holding him back, but he was doubtful that the man he’d hired and the tools of the era were up for the task. Unfortunately, a proper test fire would require risking the shoulder-gun, and a single test fire wouldn’t be enough to ensure that it could stand up to repeat use. That was a problem for another day.

The police in the city dressed like Flora, and there were far more of them than Perry had expected to see. They were, according to her, a branch of the military tasked with enforcing civilian law, but they weren’t supplemental — there was no competing police force in the city, none that reported to the mayor or city council or anything like that.

King Edmund was disliked, his police given a wide berth. Flora aside, or possibly included, they were jack-booted thugs, their fine blue uniforms in deliberate contrast to the clothes that most of the common people were wearing. It marked them as police of the nobility rather than of the commoners, which no one could mistake for a good sign.

City-watching wasn’t just for future tactical advantage, it was soothing to Perry in a way that he hadn’t expected. He’d been a soldier for too long, fighting tactically for his own sake and the sake of the men he’d led, and while he’s been more of a blunt instrument crashing against the enemy ranks than an actual commander, he’d felt the weight of it settle on his shoulders. It had been a long three months, broken up only by returns to court, something the sword had afforded him. Perry wasn’t much of an intellectual, at least in comparison with most of his peers, who had also been grad students, but he liked puzzling things out, and liked to make observations.

Teaguewater wasn’t Victorian London, it was Boston, a place with its own history but nothing that matched one of Earth’s Old World cities. It had been a colony until the king had sailed to its shores and declared that the kingdom itself was relocating, a territory no longer. That had been two sovereigns prior, and King Edmund was the first king to have been born in the newly-reforged kingdom.

There had been hard times leading into the Century of Progress. Perry saw signs of the fire before he found a plaque commemorating it. There were too many buildings in the same place that were built in the same style, the roads there straighter, all brickwork and slate roofs. Fires had once been the scourge of cities, not only because of the construction materials used, but the complete lack of public safety measures. For that same reason, many of the major cities had been horrible pits of disease and pestilence with no workable sewer systems and no public health measures, not that an understanding of health had been all that good. Two separate pandemics had swept through the city too, one of them killing almost everyone over the age of seventy, the other claiming half a generation of children.

There was no evidence of the supernatural, not until Perry started looking closely.

He had his own glamour on, and people seemed to ignore any strangeness, like the long wrapped up package that happened to contain a magical sword, and to a lesser extent, he suspected, his height. He tried to focus on the people his eyes skated over, picking out details, really pushing his mind on them, and over the course of wandering the city, this eventually paid off, though only once. There was a woman with purple eyes whose ears were carefully concealed by her hair, too-pale skin and too-sharp teeth. She glanced at him, eyes moving over him, then she gave him a second glance, this one more pointed, nodding for him to move on.

He wondered whether the vampires had grown fat during the times of troubles, when the dead were in ready supply, the living more accustomed to losing loved ones. He wondered whether they were vulnerable to the same diseases the normal people succumbed to, whether a plague among people meant a plague among vampires.

Becoming a vampire would be a mixed bag. The biggest thing that Perry was worried about was the next world, where there’d be no ready supply of bodies unless he made quick enemies. A loss of his humanity was also a concern, but Flora seemed plenty human to him, wherever her loyalties lay. She was resistant to the idea, not even willing to discuss the pros and cons, and he would need her help if he was going to do it. She seemed to see herself as less than, for all that she had loyalties to vampire kind.

When he returned to her apartment, she was still out, and the armor was still safely in place, having verifiably not moved an inch. Perry hadn’t wandered out of range of communication with Marchand, but it was still good to be reunited, and Perry spent some of the remaining time with the helmet on, connected by a long cord to the armor’s torso for power, mostly looking through Gratbook, the equivalent to Wikipedia, before finally watching some anime.

The media loadout in the power armor had once felt vast and overwhelming, especially in the context of a machine that was supposed to have a permanent connection to the internet. After two months in a land with dragons and wizards, he understood the limits of the library, which ran to Richter’s tastes. There was a bit too much anime for his tastes, or the version of anime from Richter’s world, and not enough classically good cinema. Richter had thought that the best thing about another world was that you’d get a whole alternate history of media, the output of multiple generations of the most brilliant filmmakers, musicians and artists. She'd wanted to share everything with him, all the music he'd never encountered before, all the different styles and genres that had never arisen on his Earth, or the ones that were somewhat the same but differed in key ways.

Perry mostly longed for some of the familiarity of home.

When Flora returned, that was where she found him, laying in bed with the power armor’s skintight undersuit on, helmet on his head, watching television from another world. He’d heard her coming — Marchand had, anyway, since the suit could hear everything in the entire building and track all the residents — but hadn’t moved much. He’d taken a moment to show her the moving images on the inside of his helmet, but the helmet wasn’t sized for her, and she was confused more than anything.

“It’s factionalism,” said Flora, reporting on her own, more exciting day. “The different clans have different needs and different dispositions when it comes to the Reveal. The osten can have bones that are days or even weeks old, months if properly kept, and the varcoli think they’ll be safe because they don’t need to kill at all, they can take from the living. Since the first of our kind moved here, we’ve had an alliance, one founded on mutual trust and respect, but also complementary needs. Now that’s breaking down.”

“And some of them want to kill me,” said Perry.

“I think that first attack was because they wanted to see if you could be killed,” said Flora. “If they had been able to sneak up and drive a stake through your heart, the whole thing would have ended. I don’t think they had expected to sacrifice three men in the process, they’d probably been hoping you would retreat, but someone needed to probe. Both sides would prefer you dead though. For the Openers, they want you dead because they want the Reveal to happen on their own terms. For the Cloister, they want you dead because they don’t want the Reveal to happen at all.”

“They have names now,” said Perry. “That’s not great.”

“We have our own broadsheets,” said Flora. “They cloak the language, never reveal much, it’s a neighborhood rag by any measure, but they keep a good watch on the pulse of opinion.”

“Of the sides, I’m most favored by the Cloister?” asked Perry.

“In the sense that they’re more inclined to believe that you don’t want a city-destroying fight that blows everything open,” said Flora. “They want you to leave, to go away, silently and without harm. Failing that, they’ll kill you, or try to, and some people think it’s better to end you sooner rather than later. You’re an acknowledged threat to the Custom.”

Perry let out a breath. “I’m going to be laying low then. It’s a shame that Cosme isn’t.”

“He’s not?” asked Flora.

That led Perry to telling her about what he’d been up to that day, the repeated demonstrations from Cormorant Wesley and the concept of ‘uplift’, which was apparently less obvious than Perry had thought it was.

“That’s not what he’s doing though, Wesley,” said Flora. “You said that he was using a ruby, a piece of a magic item, something of witches rather than science.”

“Magic can be amenable to science,” said Perry, as though he didn't need to include five asterisks and caveats to that statement. “Wesley was claiming that this was the future of energy, that it would replace coal, so either he was trying to drum up funding so he could cut and run, or he has some way to replicate them, grow more or something.” Rubies could be made or grown, Perry knew, mostly from consulting Gratbook earlier in the day. Of course, rubies couldn’t output enough energy to run a steamship, but to know more he’d have to speak with Wesley or examine the ruby himself.

“And you’re saying that the man your adversary was with, the man who now has knowledge of thresholders and who knows what else, is Cormorant Wesley?” asked Flora.

“Yes,” said Perry. “And apparently he’s a pretty big deal.”

“He’s the face of the Century of Progress,” said Flora. “Arguably the most recognizable man on the continent aside from King Edmund.” She let out a frustrated sigh. “And he knows." It was practically a hiss. "He’s seen you fight?”

“Yes,” said Perry. “Magic sword, magic staff, magic bracer, and armor that must have seemed like magic but is actually technology so far beyond him that he could spend the rest of his life studying it and still not understand it. He's seen all those things. I don't know what Cosme has told him, but I'm certain Cosme has been to worlds with magic in them, magic that's more out in the open than here.”

“How many of those rubies did the gauntlet have?” asked Flora.

“I was too busy fighting to count,” said Perry. “A dozen, maybe. Two dozen.” He paused. “March, how many rubies on the gauntlet?”

“Twenty-three at the start of the fight, sir,” replied Marchand.

Perry frowned at that. “And at the end of the fight?”

“Twenty-two,” replied Marchand. “One of the rubies disappeared shortly after the shirt-sleeve caught fire.”

That corresponded with an increase in raw power. He was feeling upset with Marchand for not having said something earlier, but it was difficult to get the AI to understand that magic was a real thing that existed in the world, let alone to do some detailed analysis that Perry himself hadn’t thought to do.

Perry relayed that to Flora. “If they’re a part of the gauntlet’s power, then Cosme is weakened when they’re out, or should be. It wasn’t clear to me whether Wesley was using a new ruby for each demonstration, but my guess is that he wasn’t.”

He was virtually certain that the next time he faced Cosme, Cosme would have one of those gloves on, ready to launch lightning in addition to his other attacks. The scary thing was that Cosme might not have even been at full power in that first fight, which meant there might be more tools at his disposal. Perry had caught him unaware, and didn’t think that he’d be able to do it again, not if Cosme was smart.

“I’m going to follow Wesley,” said Perry. “Go to where he works, whatever laboratory he has in the city, go to his home if he’s got one that’s not the manor I visited. That’s how I’ll find Cosme again.” He hesitated. There was a time to ask again about becoming a vampire — to only ask — but it didn’t seem like this was it.

“You heard me say he’s one of the most famous men in the world, didn’t you?” asked Flora. “If something happens to him, it has to be deniable. No glamour is strong enough to keep the newspapers from snooping around him.”

“No photographs though, right?” asked Perry. “That’s a plus.”

“Photograph?” asked Flora. She had a frown on her face. “What’s that?”

“Um,” said Perry. “A chemical — mostly chemical — recording of a scene? Like a painting taken in an instant. Then chemically developed.”

“A picture, taken in an instant, would be extremely bad news for the Custom,” she said slowly.

“Yes,” said Perry. “My guess is that the glamours don’t work when people are looking at a painting of someone wearing them. I haven’t really had a chance to check, but my guess is that since my armor delivers video to me, I’m immune to glamour when I’m wearing it.”

Flora moved to the door to the balcony and looked out at the small park for a moment. The balcony was only large enough for a single person to stand on it, and a single rusted metal chair sat out there. He imagined she looked at the park often. “Of all the things you know, or could be told by your armor, there are many that would help speed the end of the Custom.”

“Cosme knows many of the same things I do,” said Perry. “He’s also paired up with someone who’s capable of turning that technical knowledge into material reality, and so far as I’m aware, doesn’t even know the Custom exists.”

“Then tonight we go find Wesley,” said Flora, nodding.