Thresholder

In the end, they dumped the bodies in the Primrose River, which took some doing. Flora took one while Perry took the other two, the armor making the weight of the bodies easy. They moved silently, above the rooftops, and Perry kept a close eye on the power armor’s battery. In his experience, travel was always the biggest drain, especially if it was large leaps from place to place. Combat was a series of quick motions and exertion, amplified by the suit, but it was usually over quickly, one way or another, and even extended time on the battlefield didn’t last that long between bouts of action. Movement, by contrast, was a constant expenditure of the power armor’s energy, and while the microfusion reactor could endlessly recharge the battery, fast movement over long distances could deplete it in a hurry.

Flora checked Perry over, then had him wash himself off, which they used a rain barrel for. Because of the varcoli, having leftover blood on you was a hazard. It was also plausible that a person could be tracked with only a single drop of blood, which was one of the ways that varcoli hunted.

“You should have told me,” said Perry.

“I don’t think it’s how they found you,” said Flora. “I would have smelled it if they had placed blood on your person. We can check your clothes, but it’s more likely they followed at a distance and came at you only once they knew that I was away.”

Washing the suit took some time, and once it was done, Perry gathered up all his worldly goods into a small sack.

“You’re going to have to stay with me,” said Flora, once the bodies had been dumped. The bodies had been stripped of any valuables or identifying information, then weighted down as much as they could be, which would hopefully prevent them from rising to the surface until after some decomposition had taken place.

“Alright,” said Perry. “I hope you’ve got a balcony.”

Flora nodded, then took off, leaving him to follow. He tried to use the sword to fly more than he used the armor to run and leap, the better to conserve power while the battery was charging. He’d run out only once, during a protracted engagement, and had nearly died among the mud and blades.

They hadn’t spoken much when she’d arrived. He’d given her a brief overview of how the battle had gone, along with the names he’d gotten, then they had gotten to work dealing with it as much as they could. There was evidence, and it would have to stay there until it was washed away by the rain. She had reacted with cold calculation, not surprise.

It was very late into the night when they arrived at a five-story building with tiny balconies and dead silence. Flora waited and watched, and Perry offered to send up a drone, which she declined. Marchand heard nothing but the meowing of stray cats and the occasional cough. It was late enough that most of the city had gone to bed, and because they didn’t have incandescent light bulbs, at least not in ready supply, the darkness was stark. Eventually, Flora was satisfied that they wouldn’t be ambushed, and she leapt straight up, flapping her wings twice, and landed on a fourth-floor balcony. Perry followed, pulled up by the sword.

The apartment was larger than Perry had expected it to be, and it looked out on a small park, the one they’d sat in while waiting to see whether her place was safe. It had a kitchenette and a living room, with a single small bedroom and a bathroom, but it had indoor plumbing, which so far had seemed to be a rarity.

“You should be safe here,” said Flora. “You can take the armor off.”

“I’ll leave it on,” said Perry. “I’m sleeping in it tonight.”

Flora regarded him. “Because you don’t trust me, or because you’ve had too close of a call?”

“The latter,” said Perry. Mostly the latter.

“You handled the bodies well,” said Flora. “The fighting.”

It was late enough that Perry mostly felt like crawling into bed and going to sleep. The meeting with the council had been late, then it had been a late dinner, a late fight, and even later cleanup. Sleep was one thing he couldn’t afford to sacrifice. Still, this was his only ally, possibly his Ally, a part of the pattern.

“I was a soldier,” said Perry.

“Not a scholar, as you said?” she asked.

“No, I was a scholar before all this,” said Perry. “But in the last world, I was a soldier, a knight in cobalt armor. I spent a lot of time on the battlefield. Without me, the kingdom would have been overrun.” He had killed hundreds. They had mostly not been human, which made it much easier, but they hadn’t all been orcs, bugbears, and goblins. There were humans among the opposing forces, and the armor let him move with overwhelming force. He'd sunk into the role.

“War is still difficult,” said Flora. “I know enough people who came back from the Reclamation War with their minds frayed.”

She didn’t talk about the ones who hadn’t come back at all. Perry had seen allies drop. His squire had been killed in an early battle as the young boy tried to follow behind Perry’s reckless blitz.

“I’m fine,” said Perry. “You think this will happen again?”

“I don’t know,” said Flora. “I don’t know what they expected to happen. Three on one and you still murdered them. That might send a message. Or they might try to get you when you’re more vulnerable. I don’t think they expected to find you ready and waiting, in full armor.” There was a mild question in her voice, a 'what were you doing in armor' question, but she didn't seem like she meant to press.

“Probably not what they were expecting, no,” said Perry. He had, in some sense, gotten lucky that he'd been planning to go back to the manor. If he'd stood down and laid low, he wouldn't have been as combat-ready. He was now tired enough that he would have been unsteady on his feet if the armor wasn’t keeping him stone solid. The adrenaline had left him and his heartrate had long since come down. The manor would have to wait.

“Take the bed,” said Flora. “I’ll keep guard.”

“You don’t need to sleep?” asked Perry.

“Not as much as you do,” said Flora.

“I’m going to be in the armor,” said Perry. “The ground is just as comfortable as the bed, when you’re encased in metal.”

“Go,” said Flora, gesturing to the room. “Easier to hide you if someone comes in.”

Perry went. He wasn’t sure that he would trust the bed, but he laid down in the armor, staring at the ceiling for a moment.

“March, set up an alarm system, wake me up as quickly as possible if someone other than Flora enters the apartment,” said Perry.

“Very well, sir,” replied Marchand.

“And wake me up if it looks like Flora is going to attack,” said Perry.

“Of course, sir,” replied Marchand.

“Record any conversations that seem relevant, those that mention the varcoli, the strix, or anything else,” said Perry.

“By default I record most conversations within earshot, sir,” replied Marchand. “Get some sleep, sir.”

“Right,” said Perry. “Shut off the visuals, play some white noise, do a lullaby protocol.” He was pretty sure that wasn’t a thing unless Richter had the same sense of humor as him, and had spent an afternoon on it.

The display went dark and the sound of ocean waves came in, quiet and soft. Perry couldn’t help but replay the long day he’d had, but his thoughts lost coherence early on, and he was asleep soon afterward.

He woke up with a start what felt like moments later, and the display flickered on an instant, showing him the same room, but during the daytime. The sheets were simple and white, and the dresser was battered. He needed to pee, so made his way out of the room and found the bathroom, where he detached part of the armor so he could relieve himself.

Flora was nowhere to be seen, but there was a note pinned to the door in delicate cursive that Perry had a little trouble reading because of all the loops and whorls. It was a relatively short message, letting him know the location of the key, giving him some instructions, and saying, in brief, that he was free to stay as long as he liked so long as he was careful with coming and going.

“Did anything happen while I was out?” Perry asked.

“No, sir,” replied Marchand. “Florence didn’t sleep. She was in front of the door to your room, facing out, for most of the night, then changed clothes, freshened up, and left. There were no conversations of note, at least not that I heard.”

Perry let out a sigh. “Thank you. Unfortunately, I think I’m going to have to take the suit off to go around the city.” He was stiff and sore, as expected when spending the night in armor, and he wished that he’d done some stretches before falling asleep.

The armor came off piece by piece, and when that was done, he looked at the pile of pieces, grimacing. There was no good place to leave the armor, but it just wasn’t comfortable or practical to have it on long term. This was Flora’s apartment, and she could come home at any moment, or direct someone to her house if she turned on him, which might lose him the most valuable single object in this entire world. Still, there was nothing for it, and he had at least locked the armor so that it would respond to only him. Also, with the ear piece, Marchand would tell him right away if there was a problem.

Perry left the apartment with his sword in hand, though wrapped up, his suit in place but slightly rumpled, and a single round from the suit’s gun in his pocket. He was skeptical about the ability to make more ammunition, but he had to try.

Three hours later, he’d visited a number of different places and gotten his answer, which was that it could be done, but that it would take so long that he’d probably be gone by the time the first round was produced. This world had percussion cap rounds in the same way that Richter’s did, it was only a matter of how precise the machining was, how uniform the propellant was, and how low the cost. Perry had seen presses and tumblers that could do most of the work, but the worry was that they’d be beyond an acceptable tolerance for the suit’s gun. It wasn’t just a risk that the gun wouldn’t be able to load or fire the rounds, it was a risk that the gun would become damaged, unusable.

Still, he found someone who was willing to give it a go for the right price, which seemed quite high compared with the cost of meals, and which could only be done in bulk, five hundred rounds in total. The gunsmith had taken the bullet, one of Perry’s special three, and had examined it like it was a fine Swiss watch rather than a mass-produced round.

From there, Perry had no other grand plans for his day. There was still no hint of radio transmission from Cosme or otherwise, which meant that even if Perry had been up for a fight, he wouldn’t have known where to go to start one.

He made his way to the second-tallest structure in Teaguewater, visible from anywhere in the city, the spire that he’d seen on his first night. It was in a large park toward the center of the city, which appealed to Perry since it meant some greenery and a slight reprieve from the dirty air. He carried his sword, which no one had commented on, and went to go see what was going on.

It turned out to be a World’s Fair, marking the first decade of the Century of Progress, and there were pavilions open and marvels on display. Most of it was embarrassingly basic for someone from 21st century Earth, crude devices that used voltaic piles to generate electricity that briefly lit light bulbs, or steam engines with ‘astounding’ breakthroughs in efficiency. Perry looked at it all though, trying to make sense of all this in the context of the Custom and how close everyone feared it was to being entirely broken.

Cosme had been attempting to invent radio, to uplift, in his own words, and Perry wasn’t certain how seriously to take that, but they did have a working radio transmitter, even if it couldn’t transmit audio. If Cosme didn’t know about the vampires and the other creatures that went bump in the night, perhaps he thought that this was the world’s power, something having to do with electrical generators or steam engines. Aside from the marvels of engineering, there were vivariums and jars of preserved animal parts, the other prong of scientific advancement, some of these things having come from far-off places. This world was still in a colonial era, though Perry hadn’t seen any evidence of slavery or indigenous people. Teaguewater itself had been a colony before the monarchy had fled the homeland and set itself up on these distant shores.

Perry was making his way to the spire — something like the Eiffel tower or the Space Needle, and it was even taller than it had looked from a distance — when he spotted a familiar man in a suit and top hat.

It was Wesley, the man who’d been building the radio with Cosme. That piqued Perry’s interest, and he turned to follow Wesley, who was walking through the park, deep in conversation with another man. Cosme was nowhere to be seen.

Neither Cosme nor Wesley had actually seen Perry, they had only seen the suit of armor. In fact, they hadn’t even exchanged names. So far as Cosme knew, Perry was just a man with a sword and armor, and without either of those things, he would be unidentifiable. Perry had the sword with him, wrapped up, but he was hoping that so long as he kept back, the glamour would be enough. There was some useful lie he could tell, he was sure. He could pretend to be delivering a strut or a piece of measuring equipment, or something equally prosaic. The magic of the glamour was such that he shouldn’t have to make excuses or tell lies at all, but he wanted to be ready.

Wesley was reserved, speaking without gesturing. The conversation appeared to be one of investment and the securing of funds, though the actual subject of what was to be invested in wasn’t clear at first blush. Radio was a good guess, of course.

Perry followed behind. Wesley would lead to Cosme, and then Perry could retreat to Flora’s apartment, put the armor on, and make his move with the element of surprise, ideally while Cosme was sleeping. The suit had excellent hearing, and he could wait on the other side of a wall until the perfect time to strike.

The conversation that Wesley had been in the middle of concluded with a handshake, funding apparently secured, and Wesley turned around so quickly that Perry was momentarily dumbstruck. Wesley walked on though, going back the way he came, paying no mind to the man with a wrapped up sword who’d been following him. It was entirely possible that he’d have done the same even if the glamour hadn’t been doing its work.

Again, Perry followed. He was watching Wesley. The man was a lord, or something like that, and the manor had been his, almost certainly. Perry had found an urban fantasy policewoman, and Cosme had found what, an inventor? An engineer?

It made Perry think of Richter, naturally.

When Wesley reached a large red and white striped tent, he slipped inside through a flap, and Perry pulled up short. There was a sign above the closed entrance, ‘Wesley Wonders’, which answered a few questions and raised a few more. It was tempting to go in, but if it was a private place, the glamour wouldn’t protect him quite so much. As Flora put it, the glamour would keep people from asking questions if you were waiting in line at the bank, but it wouldn’t help if you broke into someone’s house.

Perry found a bench nearby and waited for Wesley to reemerge.

“Radio signal, sir,” said Marchand. “Quite strong, close to you.”

“Ah,” said Perry, eyeing the tent. He tried to work that out. The fight had been the day before. Had Wesley moved the equipment to the fair with a horse-drawn carriage in that time? Most of it seemed quite bulky. “Still nothing coherent?”

“The Fibonacci sequence is quite coherent, sir,” replied Marchand. The AI could seem offended sometimes, affronted even, which had been one of Richter’s small touches. “But in this case I believe it’s a message of some kind. I’m not familiar with the specifics. It’s possible a code book is being used.”

“Like Morse code?” asked Perry.

“Morse code encodes text characters,” replied Marchand. “A code book could have entire messages assigned to the brief bursts of radio that are being used for this transmission. I’ll record everything and run some analysis on it, but so far I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

Perry frowned. It was possible, if only barely, that Wesley was sending a message to Cosme. That would require the receiver to be set up, but receivers were far easier than transmitters, at least as far as Perry knew. He gripped the sword. It was possible that Wesley was communicating the good news of more funding, he supposed, but it was also possible that in spite of the glamour he’d been clocked.

Perry moved toward the tent and opened the flap, just barely, so he could see inside. There was all kinds of equipment, including some thick cords going from machine to machine. It did seem to be the same sort of machine from the day before, but there were others set up as well, some of them with small displays on them that Perry was too far away to read.

It was only Wesley in the tent. Cosme was nowhere to be seen.

Perry backed out again. He looked at the sword in his hand, frowned, then made a short jog over to some sickly bushes and slipped it in there after looking to make sure that no one was watching him. Unlike the suit, Perry wasn’t at all worried about anyone stealing the sword, since it was nearly invulnerable and would come when called. If the sword was thrown into a safe, it might be in trouble, but it could cut through virtually any metal, and Perry didn’t think it was likely that it would get to that point.

He was on his way back to the tent when he spotted a pamphlet on the ground, printed with crude lettering and images, a map of the fair. It was the first time he’d seen such a thing, and when he looked at it for a moment, his frown deepened. The spire in the middle of the park was apparently Wesley Spire. The fair itself was funded in part by the Wesley Corporation in cooperation with the Kingdom of Maresland. Wesley had the only portrait on the pamphlet, and his extensive accomplishments were listed there: the man had a great many things named after him, it seemed.

Perry wondered how Cosme had gotten the attention of such a man, but he supposed that a book of future science history would do it.

It brought Richter to mind again, for obvious reasons.

She’d been a brilliant engineer, though assisted by artificial intelligence and standing on the shoulders of giants. She hadn’t actually invented microfusion, nor made the basic power armor, nor even the frame that Marchand was built from. Instead, she had spent millions of dollars on a home lab that could make one of those suits from very expensive parts, and from there, she’d spent enormous amounts of time laser-focused on making the power armor everything she’d thought that it should be. She had laughed when Perry had asked her how it was possible that she’d invented all those things, and explained that there was an era when lone polymaths could found entire fields and write seminal works that would be used as reference for centuries, but that they were long past that.

Wesley, at least from the self-aggrandizing pamphlet that it seemed his company had helped to print, was exactly that sort of polymath. He was also allied with Cosme, or had been, and seemed relatively unsurprised that Perry had shown up. As Perry’s father would say, they were in cahoots.

When Perry went into the tent, he made enough noise that Wesley looked up. He had cool blue eyes and a close shave, his suit perfectly fitted to him.

“We don’t open until ten,” said Wesley. He was looking at Perry’s suit, an expression of mild disfavor on his face.

“Are you him?” asked Perry, holding up the pamphlet. “You’re Wesley?”

“Cormorant Wesley,” he replied. “The exhibit opens at ten,” he repeated. “If you come by then, I’ll have demonstrations of astounding importance prepared. I’ll be here for two hours. If you’ll excuse me, there are still preparations left to do.” He was curt, but had reason to be, because Perry was barging in.

“I’m an inventor myself,” said Perry. “I’ve traveled a great distance to see you.” He hoped his accent, which distinguished him from anyone else in the city, would help to sell that. “I’d like to meet with you, and didn’t know of another way to introduce myself. You have your fingers in a lot of pies, and I was hoping I could pick your brain.”

The expression of disfavor deepened. “Unless you hold a revolution in the palm of your hand, I don’t have the time,” said Wesley. “Now please, I need to prepare.”

“I have designs for a heavier-than-air flying machine,” said Perry. “A prototype has been built, it works, but I need funding, and more than that, someone who can get the things built so they can be sold.” He was uncertain how he’d pull that off, though Marchand had all kinds of things tucked away in his file storage, and beyond that, Marchand was a halfway capable engineer when properly directed.

This gave Wesley pause. “Following Sir Ernholdt’s principle?” he asked.

Perry nodded, hoping that wasn’t a test. In his world, it had been Bernoulli's principle. “There are some challenges, but I’m well on my way to overcoming them.”

“That is the sound of a man who hopes money will solve his problems,” said Wesley. “Money can’t help you to escape a bind that physics has put you in.” He turned back to his worktable. “Under ordinary circumstances, I would look at a draft of your design, but I’ve had many offers of late, and won’t be able to find the time, not unless you have a working prototype to demonstrate. If you had such a thing, you wouldn’t be coming to me like this, you would be flying overhead, making a show of your technological triumph.”

Wesley did not, to Perry’s ears, sound like someone who was dealing with people who crossed between worlds. He was too unflappable. If Perry had known that there were people like himself, alternate worlds with magic and vampires and science fictional technologies, he wouldn’t be able to shut up about it. Wesley had a book full of future science, must have known that sustained human flight was possible, probably knew that people could land on the Moon, and was simply at the fair, showing off technology that was incredibly stale by the standards of what was in Cosme’s book.

Perry hesitated, wanting to push further, to say that he had the secret to sending voices over radio, but he resisted. Wesley didn’t know who he was. Cosme didn’t know what Perry looked like, and could only guess that Perry was somewhere in the city. It was too good an opportunity to blow.

“I’ll submit my plans to your office then,” said Perry. “And I’ll come back in an hour or so to see these demonstrations. Your inventions are known around the world, and I’m eager to see them in person.”

Wesley seemed to like that, though his face didn’t betray much expression.

Perry spent the next hour seeing the rest of the fair, having retrieved his sword from the bushes where it had lain, unmolested. He went to the Wesley Tower, rode an elevator powered by a steam engine to the top, and looked out over the city of Teaguewater, though the view was marred by the pollution of heavy industry. It wasn’t a terribly pretty city unless you liked copious amounts of brickwork and crowded buildings whose chimneys seemed to be fighting each other for space. The tower itself did resemble the Eiffel Tower, but when he quietly asked Marchand about it, Marchand had never heard of Eiffel, nor his tower, another victim of the alternate history of Richter’s world.

If only Eiffel had never built his tower, we could have had fusion reactors and power armor. That was a joke he’d made with Richter often enough that it had been on the edge of growing stale. There were many large differences between their worlds, starting around the time of Napoleon, but blaming all the divergence on minor historical details tickled them both.

At ten, Perry made his way back to Wesley’s large tent, which was already crowded with people. He was slightly late, and the demonstration was in full swing, with Wesley standing on a small stage in the center of the tent. Perry wouldn’t have taken him for a performer, but the man’s demeanor had changed entirely, his stance wider, a wide smile plastered on his face, absolutely artificial but enough to fool someone from a distance — which most of the audience was.

“We are days away from a breakthrough in radio,” said Wesley. “Already, wireless telegraphy has been solved, and wires running between stations will be a thing of the past, but radio can carry more than the beeping of a telegraph, it can carry voice as well, and within a month, a conversation with someone on the Eastern Shore will take place, capping off the fair — so long as a ship can make the journey. Progress, so fast that it outpaces the steamships.”

There was brief applause from the crowd, but these were only claims of things yet to come, and Perry was feeling some skepticism himself, even though he knew that everything Wesley said was possible in theory. A handful of days to solve all the technical problems of transmitting voice over radio, a month to have trans-oceanic radio conversations? That seemed unlikely. Even with Wesley’s reputation as an inventor and businessman, even with everything that had Wesley’s name attached to it, the Wesley battery, the Wesley telegraph, seeing someone up on stage making grand claims inspired doubts.

The crowd murmured when Wesley picked a leather glove up from the table set behind him. It was thick, like something a falconer or metalworker would wear. He had assistants with him now, but they were standing well back, and moved further when he slipped the glove on. There were wires going down the fingers and a thick lump of metal at the cuff.

“There are, in the history of the sciences, those things which can be predicted, and those which can not,” said Wesley. “Radio has been understood to be possible for more than a decade, wireless telegraphy an evolution of the wired telegraph, voice an evolution of simple resonance.” He was holding the glove away from him, deepening the comparison to a falconer. The eyes of the audience were on it. Perry’s eyes were on it. “Those advancements which seem to come from nowhere, which appear before us like a miracle, are much rarer.”

He flicked his gloved hand and lightning burst forth from it, arcing over the heads of the audience, coming perilously close to them, and ultimately striking a metal ball hung from a crossbeam of the tent, near the entrance. Perry hadn’t noticed it before, but it was clear that it was there for just that reason, and wires ran from the ball down into the ground, for unknown purposes.

“I am here today to tell you that steam power is on its way out,” said Wesley. “The future of rail, of steamships, of factories, lies not with the burning of coal or gas, not the stink we’ve grown accustomed to, but with this.” He pulled the glove from his hand in dramatic fashion, apparently no longer worried about electrocuting himself, and pulled something from the lump of metal. He held it up, and it was so small that it was difficult to see. “I hold the future between my thumb and forefinger.”

Perry tried to move closer, to see, and caught a glimpse of it just before Wesley put it away. It was red, translucent, and familiar. Once it was gone, Wesley wasn’t long for the stage either, disappearing to applause and shouted questions that went unanswered. Perry was left watching the stage and thinking about the arc of lightning, and the trouble it spelled for the future.

Wesley had been using one of the rubies from Cosme’s gauntlet.