Joachim Piccard (madwatchmaker) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2008-11-21 00:29:00 |
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Current mood: | shaken |
Very early morning, 17 September 1942, at the Department of Mysteries in Londinium...
Joachim Piccard walked glumly down the hall, conscious of the stares of his lover’s colleagues. He did not much like any of them, particularly Gareth Rosier and his friend Tatsuko Kurita, but Rosier had needed a reminder that Viresh Ayyar had a protector, so Joachim had walked with him into the building and glowered at all of them, then kissed Viresh soundly and deeply in front of his office door before letting him go. And now it was time to leave.
“Good morning, Mr Piccard,” said Mrs Wilkes, as he passed the front office. He knew her name, although he had never spoken to her before. To the best of his knowledge, she wasn’t one of Viresh’s tormentors; she was much too busy to waste her time being cruel for no purpose.
“Good morning, Mrs Wilkes.” Joachim tried to smile at her, ignoring Evans, who was doing battle with the coffee pot. Then he realised that she had called him by his real name; but she didn’t look like she was angry. Which might not mean anything, because she was after all a professional. He tried to sink into the floor, the trick he’d picked up from the man who had tried to kill Teresa Silveira—but it didn’t work.
Mrs Wilkes smiled knowingly. “You have an appointment with Dr Taverner,” she said, and opened a door he had never seen standing open—or even noticed—before. “Will you come with me? Don’t be afraid, Mr Piccard. We do know who you are, but we want to help you out.”
Joachim wondered what exactly her definition of ‘help’ was liable to entail. “If you’re going to offer me a job I can’t refuse,” he said, “you should be aware that I will not tolerate the sort of treatment Viresh is made to endure, nor will I stand by while he is harassed.”
“We’ll talk about that upstairs,” said Mrs Wilkes, sweeping past Bran Evans’ desk as though there were not the slightest chance that Joachim would not follow her. And, after a moment, he did.
“Good morning, Dr Taverner,” Mrs Wilkes said brightly. “He was easier to find than I’d expected.”
Dr Taverner—a hard-faced woman, slim and wiry, in graceless, expensive clothing—just shrugged. She was sitting behind a massive dark desk in a huge leather chair. The desk was piled high with papers and books of all kinds, and the blotter was covered with diagrams, what he could see of it; there was a pattern of bullet holes in one of the walls that spelled out DR, and a gun lying casually on top of a file, but not within easy reach. “Sit down, Piccard,” she said, and poured herself a cup of tea. She did not offer him any, but when he sat down, Mrs Wilkes gave him a cup she had just poured from another pot.
Joachim frowned. “I’ll have what Dr Taverner’s having.”
“No, you won’t.” Taverner laughed and tipped her cup at him. A dark lotus blossom was unfurling in the tea. “Even if you could afford to pick up the habit, I don’t think you would.”
Joachim tried to school his face, but he couldn’t help staring. The lotus—was it red, or black? was a dangerous drug. Unless it was blue, but a blue one would have been pale.
“It helps me think,” said Taverner with a smile.
“That’s not what it does for most people,” said Joachim, frowning a little.
“I’m not most people,” said Taverner with a shrug. “But then, neither are you. You may go, Gwenllian.”
Mrs Wilkes nodded, and left the room, closing the door behind her. He didn’t hear the sounds of the lock tumbling, or of wards activating, but he knew that didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t trapped.
“I know who you are,” said Taverner softly. “Both of you.” She waved her hand in the air and said a few phrases in Latin, things that sounded familiar but weren’t, and followed it up with three words in Enochian. Joachim found himself coughing, hard; a cloud of thick, black smoke that tasted like pepper and ammonia shot out of his mouth and into a vent in the ceiling. “There’s only one of you I want in my office.” She glanced out the window. “You want to work for Edward Kyteler. Well, what you want is to work with Eliot Gardiner. It is to everyone’s advantage to allow you to work with Eliot Gardiner, at least insofar as this Empire is concerned. But it is very definitely not to my advantage to allow you to do it under Kyteler, so you will have to do it under me. Which Kyteler will hate, but that cannot be helped.”
“I don’t understand,” said Joachim cautiously. He was very dazed, and the world seemed somehow brighter than it had a few minutes ago, and he was afraid to stand up; his legs felt unsteady, and somehow gelatinous; the rest of his muscles were burning, and there was a cold ache in his joints.
Taverner shrugged. For her this was clearly just a day’s work. “Even if he promises not to have your mind read, Kyteler is a mesmerist, and he will find a way to learn what you know. And I can’t have that, because you used to work with Niccolò Ficino, any more than I could have Viresh working for Kyteler, with all of the information Vikram Ayyar gathered. It is not to be considered. He needs to concentrate on winning that war, and we will make sure that he knows what he needs to know in order to win it, but we can’t afford to let him get mixed up in things that he can’t hope to understand. It will just prove a distraction. And I have no intention of ever bowing my head to Gregor von Thorwald, because I know that man, and he and Hitler are twin sons of different mothers.” She shook her head, and gave a sharp little laugh. “I’m impressing you into my service. But the pay will be more than adequate, and you’ll be under my protection. Also, I’m taking Viresh off Victoria, and moving his office—and yours—up here with my own.”
Joachim considered her, and finally sipped his tea; it was soothing in the back of his throat, and he needed the warmth. “Why do you want to hire someone like me?” he asked, mentally turning the situation around in his mind. “Haven’t you heard? I’m a murderer. I was Ficino’s bogeyman.”
Taverner snorted. “You’ve killed a few people,” she said. “You killed Ayyar. And Viresh knows it, which is also interesting. We’ll need to make sure that Surya doesn’t find some of this out, of course, but there’s not much she can do, I can attest to demonic possession. Ayyar wrote a book that I can’t make disappear, and believe me, I’ve tried. Ayyar had every intention of exposing to the public information that will cause disorder and unrest the like of which has not been seen in the arcane world since Withdrawal. I’ve managed to discredit him, but you made it a whole lot easier for me by killing him in neutral territory shortly after he is known to have met with Axis authorities.” She smiled at him wryly. “Delilah Ayyar doesn’t give me too much trouble because she knows I could have her thrown out of the country…or thrown into gaol for the next hundred years. I owe you for that, Piccard.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said Joachim, and he even allowed himself to smile a little, before he considered that having the Devil owe you a favour was not perhaps the most enviable position a man could be in. And she was a Devil. She wasn’t like Ficino—who had given him the demon, and lied about it—but she knew how to handle a demon.
“I should imagine not,” said Taverner. “But because of that I don’t really care about Mr Trevelyan. I’ll have to construct a better identity for you than that, but we can do that. Piccard, of course, was your cover identity. And Trevelyan must have been working against us somehow, I’m sure we can sort something out.” She glanced out the window again. “You’ll be watched, of course. He’ll probably have Prewett watching you. Prewett is his pet monster.”
“And do you think I’m yours?” Joachim asked in a soft voice.
“No,” said Taverner, smiling broadly at him. “You’re much too dangerous.” She was flattering him now, and he knew it, even though he couldn’t help feeling the response that he knew she wanted him to. “Too special, as well. No, Piccard, Rosier’s my pet monster. Perhaps with you around he won’t outlive his usefulness too soon.”
Joachim couldn’t help laughing at the notion of Rosier as a pet monster. “If he ever lays his hands on Viresh again.” Not all of the blood-thirst inside him had come from the demon. Neither the lust. He found that curiously comforting.
Taverner raised an eyebrow. “Did he.” She sighed. “Oh, Gareth.” She shook her head for a moment. “Welcome to the Department of Mysteries,” she said. “You’ll share Ayyar’s new office up here, but you’ll be detached to Gardiner’s laboratory at least four days a week; I will, of course, be wanting to pick your brain about your work with Ficino.”
Joachim took a deep breath, and thought guiltily of Halász Sharolt, whom he had failed. “You won’t be repeating all his experiments…?”
“No,” said Taverner firmly, and to make it clear she knew what he meant, she continued: “I’ve no real interest in putting a talent through the process. It always has disastrous results.” She shrugged. “It has disastrous results often enough on people who aren’t talents. I no longer use it, I believe it’s very much a dead end.”
Joachim hoped she was telling the truth. But if she wasn’t, he’d be in a much better position to deal with her from inside. Not that he thought it would ever be easy. “I accept,” he said softly. “Not that you’d give me a choice.”
Taverner smiled at him again, and this time it was almost a shy thing, a genuine smile. “No. But I appreciate your making this easy for both of us, and for Viresh, as well.”
bran_bach, septenary (Gwenllian Rosier-Wilkes), doctortaverner and madwatchmaker