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Lost Stories
For someone who didn’t like to travel, Robert Dunbar had packed his suitcase far too many times these past months. Lectures in Bengal, Nihon, and now Tasmania. He doubted it made any sense to be lecturing Albian history in a land where at least half the people were force-shipped convicts. But Dunbar had accepted the invitation in the hope he’d find a place here, at the end of the world, where his father could live out the rest of his days in peace, without being harassed and beaten for his Fir Darrig tail.
But his first days here had already made Dunbar doubtful whether Tasmania was that place. They didn’t even treat their own Aboriginal people with much respect. He liked the weather (the fur he’d inherited from his father’s side bristled most uncomfortably in Albion’s damp climate), and it was good to be away from all the things that were taken so seriously in Londra and Pendragon. But he missed his books, Pendragon’s libraries, the countless sources of knowledge left there over the centuries for thirsty minds like his. Jacob’s telegram had been a most painful reminder of that.
Alderelves. Even in Pendragon, Dunbar wouldn’t have been sure where to start looking for their long-lost trails. Most of his fellow historians would have ridiculed him for even trying. It was like looking in earnest for forgotten gods: Zeus, Apollo, Odin, and Freya... Had they actually existed? Dunbar’s answer was yes, most definitely, but he’d long stopped voicing such opinions. The odds of finding something about the Mirrorlings were certainly better. Jacob’s description sounded as though Isambard Brunel had gotten the idea to create humans, and that he’d joined forces with the Alderelves to achieve that goal. That they called themselves Sixteen and Seventeen was encouraging. After all, that could mean there were at least fifteen more of them who may have left traces somewhere.
Back in Albion, Dunbar would’ve started his search for traces of the vanished Alderelves in Tintagel and Camelot. Those places housed the most comprehensive collection of literature on Arthur of Albion and the legends surrounding his life. Those stories were the only sources Dunbar knew of that mentioned Alderelves. Still, every historian who publicly believed the legendary King of Albion had actually been the son of a Fairy and an Elf made himself impossible among his peers. Most of them didn’t even know Alderelves had been a very special kind of Elf. And as far as the mirror creatures were concerned, the librarian at the history department in Pen
dragon, who looked as though it had been decades since he’d last seen a ray of sunlight, would’ve pointed him toward the travel journal of a writer who had, almost a century ago, seen a silver woman in a field in Austry. And Dunbar could’ve recruited one of his botanical colleagues to examine the Alder that grew not far from the city wall and that was hung with centuries’ worth of jewelry and trinkets. But…he was not in Albion. He was in Tasmania, and the library of the very new university of Parramatta was a thin and feeble offshoot of the repositories of printed treasures in Pendragon.
If only Jacob’s latest telegram hadn’t sounded so worried. Not like Jacob at all. Some of that worry must’ve shown on Dunbar’s face as he stood among the sparsely stocked shelves of the university library.
“May I ask what you’re looking for? You seem not to have found it.” The librarian in front of him was holding an enormous pile of books between her arms and her chin. Her hair was gray (and looked as though she’d pinned it up rather hastily), but the smile she managed despite her heavy load would’ve been perfectly at home on the face of a twelve-year-old.
“No, but I admit the information I’m looking for would be hard to find even in the libraries back home. From your accent, I’m guessing you’re also from Albion? Robert Dunbar.”
She unloaded the books on a table to shake his hand, even though it was covered in gray fur.
“Jocelyn Bagenal. And, yes, I was born in Albion. I was brought here years ago by a ship. May I ask what you’re looking for?”
“Reports of creatures made of mirrored glass, silver animals and people... Alderelves?” Dunbar added the last word very hesitantly. Most humans thought of Elves only as the finger-sized Grass Elves and Sand Elves, and his list already sounded silly enough.
“Ah-ha. Lost stories.” Jocelyn Bagenal began sorting the pile of books onto nearby shelves: Albian colonial policy, the history of the Koori and Anangy, the mines of New-Cymru. A librarian. Or, as Dunbar liked to call members of her profession, a book priestess. Miss Bagenal—Dunbar saw no wedding band on her finger—pushed the last book onto a shelf. “Fir Darrig?”
She’d even pronounced it right.
“Indeed.”
“A distant relative of mine has some drops of Fir Darrig blood, but only enough to make his beard more pronounced.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. The pearl on her earring was, if Dunbar wasn’t mistaken, a Caledonian naiad tear. “Maybe I can help. I collect lost stories. Lost, forgotten, misplaced…whichever. Whether from Albion or Immrama, from Nam Viet, Aotearoa, or Alberica. Everyone in Parramatta knows about Jocelyn Bagenal’s strange books. And people keep bringing me more. Soon I’ll have to limit myself to Dwarf editions. I have barely enough space left for my bed.”
She scribbled an address on a piece of paper and offered it to Dunbar.
“After five and before ten.”
Then she disappeared between the shelves, as though she’d only emerged from one of the books to offer him help.
She even moved like a twelve-year-old girl. Maybe even younger than that.
Dunbar looked at the paper.
Jocelyn Topanga Bagenal.
Maybe Parramatta was the right place after all.
A New Hand
Chanute was in heaven. Age, death, all forgotten. He sat on Aleksei Baryatinsky’s leather sofa practicing loading a pistol. With an arm and hand moved by sinews and joints of steel.
When Fox asked Sylvain how Chanute had paid for the new arm, he grinned like a child who’d executed a well-planned prank. “Sold my wristwatch. You should have seen the watchmaker’s face. Tabarnak, I thought he was going to drop dead! And it was nothing but a cheap Rolex rip-off, but over here nobody would know that.”
Jacob was going to kill him. No, he was going to quarter him first. Fox asked whether all his senses had gone the way of Baryatinsky’s liquor. Sylvain replied with an injured frown and whispered that Albert Chanute needed a new hand, and to him, Sylvain Caleb Fowler, friendship was more important than any talk of two worlds that were best kept apart.
Maybe he was right.
Chanute laughed like a child when his new fingers managed to put the pistol back in its holster. It had been eight years since the Ogre had taken his arm.
“Look, ma puce.” Sylvain pulled a gilded medallion from his pocket. “The shop owner swore I just had to put a lock of my ex-wife’s hair in it.”
